This week's cooking

In today's cooking class we made a selection of dishes. The main recipe was "Bakewell Tart". This is an English cake dating from 1839. It is also known as Bakewell Pudding. It has a pastry base covered with a layer of fruit, then a nut-based cake mixture topped with whole nuts. We made it with strawberries and almonds, which is the most traditional style, but it is also sometimes made with peanuts and blackcurrants, apples or peaches.

To go with the pudding we made custard. This is very difficult to make and both groups did very well, although one type became a little lumpy, but this is quite common. Custard uses only the yolk of the egg, so with the whites we made impromptu macaroons. A students brought an English cooking apple, which are rare to see in Japan, so we cooked that into apple sauce for everyone to try. Cooking apples are very bitter and don't taste nice raw, but when cooked make a lovely sauce to go with meat, or with a little more sugar, a tasty dessert.

Kids' Festival

Today was the annual kids' festival at Zenrinkan. At 1.30, everyone gathered to be entertained by the students of 15 children's classes.

The program opened with the youngest students rendition of the "hello song" and the members of the Wednesday kid's class doing a very cute recital of "the wheels on the bus".

The older students mostly entertained us with some skits and we even had three poems and a selection of jokes.

"The Hare and the Tortoise" and a presentation about how to save the environment gave us pause for thought.

Not only were the performances wonderful, but the art work was also incredible, much of it made by the class teachers. お疲れ様でした！

Cooking

Today we made two different dishes in cooking class; cheese & onion pasty, and shortbread.

Pasties have been popular in England since 1200. They were first eaten in Cornwall by men who worked in the mines. They were a semi-circular shape and quite big. Inside there was a meat, a vegetable and a jam section each separated by a pastry wall. On the outside the miners' wives wrote their husbands' initials in pastry so they could find their own pie. The special shape meant that there was a thick crust that the miners could hold and then throw away when they had eaten it. This was useful so they didn't have to wash their hands and they could give some food to the gods in the mine. The original pasties were made from short crust pastry, but today we made them with puff-pastry.


The second recipe was a sweet biscuit called shortbread. These were first eaten in Scotland in 1500. The word "short" is old English meaning crumbly or easily broken.