Tuesday 2 March 2010

Okaasan cooked!

Okaasan cooked fish!
Amazing! Wonderful! Is it a trend? Will she start cooking for us?
We can only hope....

She has been here in this house with a kitchen for almost 1 year and has never done more than heat up soup or curry, pour hot water on instant noodles, press the microwave button many times to cook rice.

But yesterday after hula dance class she bought fish downtown. Came home. Got out the pan. Got out the soy sauce, rice wine and sugar which is the basic stock for cooking EVERYTHING in Japan - and poached the fish.

We were upstairs about 5.30 pm and Yujiro was on the telephone.
A strange smell filled the house and I rushed downstairs thinking Okaasan was burning something...or Yujiro had forgotten something.
I whisked off the pan lid and there were 3 pieces of fish cooking away in a brown soup. Okaasan staggered over to tell me that I'd just let all the steam escape....but I was so delighted to see her cooking that I didn't feel bad about the reprimand.

And the fish was good!
I had to go out again for an evening class, but ate it when I came home. Delicious (much better than the bad cooking smell in fact).

Will she start cooking? It would save US so much hassle if she would....
Or was this just a fish in the pan?

2 comments:

  1. That's excellent! I remember in your earlier posts about when Okaasan tried to cook and you had to be there to remind her what she had and hadn't added to the mix yet, so it seems like she has certainly made progress. Although it's a pretty basic mix of ingedients, the fact that she did it by herself is pretty good. :)

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  2. That's what I thought too - it is such a simple thing in fact...but she hasn't done it at all.
    She buys stuff and brings it home, but by the time she puts it on the kithen table she's kind of lost the impetus to DO anything with it...
    This time she bought it, came home, 5 minutes later she was looking for the pan and the soy sauce to cook it...so the whole string of decisions was intact.

    But...she left BOTH windows open and the room heater blazing...

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