Never, EVER again. Osechi cooking.....

PLEASE. Next time. Next year.
STOP ME.
I am a fool and I should know better. Far better.


Okaasan and I cooked for five and a half hours today. Five and a half hours.
Oh - with a short break for lunch and a quick trip to the supermarket.


It was hell. How I kept my smiley patience I can't say. Now I am drinking a nice Chardonnay and that is helping.


Here is what we made:

Seaweed rolls with radish and carrot inside, tied with gourd.

Umani - stewed root vegetables and chicken.

Sato imo - yams in half the sugar cane of a plantation.....


It was the blind leading the blind.
Okaasan couldn't remember what she was making. And I didn't know what she was making!
After over an hour of soaking and washing seaweed and cutting carrots and radish into tiny sticks, and washing and scrubbing dried gourd strips to tie ever so carefully round the slippery seaweed.....I realized she WASN'T making what I'd planned.....
So after 90 minutes I got her onto making the main event dish...and that stretched over lunch and beyond.

I really must never do this again.
Okaasan is beyond it. She can't remember what is inside the pan, so she constantly lifts the lid to look inside.
She can't remember whether she has seasoned something or not. She can't remember how long something has been cooking. She can't remember which is stock and which is water.
And on and on and on.

So much for my stupid "oh it will be so nice to have a shared cooking experience!".

And. Get this.....in the middle of the morning the delivery guy came with the...box of traditional New Year foods that I'd ordered from the supermarket!!! I'd almost thought about cancelling it 2 days ago, but told myself it would be ok because: Okaasan is only going to make one thing.
That was then. Now I have a kitchen choca-block with stewed and sweetened, drowned in soy sauce stuff.
We may not have to cook until spring.

I finally brought it all to a close about 2.30 pm - Okaasan had wandered into her room and sat down in front of the TV. I grabbed the chance to silently and quickly finish everything up in the kitchen and pack it all away in the fridge before she could come and look at it all again.

She did wander through though: um...I didn't eat lunch did I? I'm hungry!
I reminded her that 2 hours before we'd sat at the kitchen table and eaten lunch together..she had no memory of that experience. So I heated up some old pizza for her and fled upstairs to fall into a stupor on the sofa with a kitten.

Never. Ever. Again.

A dementia sufferer and cooking

This is an amazing blog!

I just casted around on the net for cooking/dementia and came across this blog.

This lady Leah HAS dementia and is writing about the experience - here writing about what effort it takes to cook something.

Wonderful writing and a great peek into the demon that is short-term memory loss.

http://www.healthcentral.com/alzheimers/c/6509/44173/hamburger-helper

Steady as she goes...

Tomorrow will be the big Osechi cook-off when I encourage Okaasan into the kitchen and see how much of what we bought she remembers how to cook...

Looking promising so far.

She is SO much better than this time last year, when I don't think she actually knew it WAS New Year until we served soba noodles for dinner and the Kohaku singing thing was on TV.

Today she went out - even took my endless advice and set out at 1 pm in actual daylight.

I finally managed to get into her room and clear out some of the laundry - return some of the cleaned stuff and generally hunt for anything disgusting, She had an accident in the toilet after we came back from shopping, but after a long time and a lot of toilet paper somehow managed to clean it up...but I couldn't find any soiled pants....

Slightly panic too tonight when I finished my final gym visit for 2010 (I can now do ALL the machines cos my leg is getting so much stronger) and I glanced at my cell phone to see EIGHT calls from Yujiro and one from Okaasan.
She'd come home from shopping, and couldn't find her front door key But after guidance from Yujiro, speaking by phone from the ski school where he'd just finished work, she found it in her bag and got into the house.

So tonight I cooked dinner for her and me and we talked about New Year's Eve and the TV singing show....and old singing stars. Okaasan is/was a feisty independent woman - she told me 6 or 8 times that there was an old enka singer she liked, but all her friends looked down enka - so she had bought a ticket and gone to the concert alone etc - and how the singer walked down the aisle just near her seat etc.

Then I brought in the pine and ornamental cabbage and red-berry plant that she'd bought and she set to cutting them and arranging them in a vase as a New Year decoration. I took down all the downstairs Xmas stuff today so Okaasan can set it all up as she likes.

So different from last year.

Anyway. Tomorrow. Gonna cook ourselves up a whole LOT of traditional New Year food!!!!!!

Okaasan and Me - Girls' Shopping Trip.......

I did it!!!!!
She did it!!!
A supermarket in south Sapporo is Y8,000 better for it......
Yujiro will have kittens when he sees what she bought. Oh, he already HAS kittens.

The box of Osechi ingredients.....Y8,000 worth of stuff!

Here it is is. What Okaasan managed to snaffle up in the 40 minutes I let her roam almost at will around the posh supermarket in the southern suburbs. Like a magician who subtly directs the audience-assistant, I actually managed to stop her wandering down all the aisle in the middle of the shop and steered her round the edges - from vegetables, to fish paste, to fish, to noodles, and out via cheap ramen and sweet sake...with a brief detour to organic garlic...oh...and spinach!

Almost thought we weren't going 20 minutes before scheduled Lift-Off when Okaasan said she thought December 28 was a bit early to be New Year food shopping...and suggested going on December 31st instead. With about 1.9 million other Sapporo residents on the last minute panic before Year End.

I strongly said: No way....it's today!!

And so we went. Just 20 minutes from the house. The big Tokou Store at Jeitai-mae, which has mounds of food from all over the world and nice helpful salespeople who apparently know the difference between this seaweed and that.

Okaasan LOVED it. As she took charge of the shopping trolley at the entrance her face lit up in a big smile and she switched into Super Housewife mode round the store. I followed carrying the box and dissuading her from a few purchases...and mentally calculating what it was all going to cost.

So we have: TWO packs of fish paste, pink and white (each costing over Y1,000 alone), then taro yams, radish, water lily tuber, carrots, herring roe, octopus, water chestnuts, soba, mushrooms, burdock root, ginkgo nuts, seaweed, sweet bean paste.....etc

Managed to stop her at lily bulbs and salmon and more fish paste.

She examined every single thing carefully, whether it was from Japan or not. Whether it was from Hokkaido or not. Whether the farmer had washed behind his ears or not...

And so. We are VERY set for the next week eating.

Mind you: I spent about Y10,000 on Christmas food and drink for me, so it's only fair that Okaasan's end of year festival is a celebration of food.

WHO is going to cook it all? Me and her tomorrow????

Anyway. Big success. We drove home and Okaasan chose ramen for lunch so I slid into a parking space at a branch of a local popular place and we sat companionably at the counter slurping noodles and pork slices together.

You don't have to talk much while eating ramen, and there are people behind you waiting - so it isn't a place to linger.

Okaasan...get THIS....even grabbed my arm twice to point out signed name boards by some famous person who'd been to the restaurant - a gesture which very surprised me, because it's the kind of thing you do to a girlfriend really...Japan isn't a touching society at all and Okaasan has never grabbed my arm before.

Amazing what a little shopping therapy will do!

Now I just have to face Yujiro will over Y8,000 worth of food. He is home tonight.....