Food From Japan

This weekend I went to the grocery store to buy some snack foods for Natalie's class to enjoy in their "restaurant" part of her presentation. I found rice crackers, Pocky (cookies), roasted sheets of seaweed for rolling sushi, instant green tea powder, black sesame seeds, bamboo shoots, Japanese brown sugar, crystallized ginger and a sugar cane baton which is the coolest thing I've ever seen! It has to be refrigerated so I have it in my fridge and I keep peeking in to look at it. It is an actual hunk of sugar cane cut right off the plant with a machete or whatever (see below). Apparently you simply stick it in your mouth and chew on it vigorously.

Tomorrow we are practicing our fish printing, our volcano eruption, and reviewing the items in the artifact box so that Natalie is not nervous for her presentation in front of the class.

For the younger children, our radish and lettuce seeds have sprouted (it was super-fast, within 48 hours) and they are happily spritzing them with water at every opportunity. They'll be in on the fish printing tomorrow. I also plan to get out all the pots and pans in the house and have us bang on them. This is a classic moment from childhood that somehow they missed... so time to rectify that!!! Maybe it's because they've been helping cook since they were so little that they knew what the things were for and so never thought of flipping over a pot and swatting it with a spoon. But I am tired of seeing it on TV commercials and thinking, we've never done that, so tomorrow we will. It will be a cold cold day here so some indoor fun is just the ticket.