learning to cook

My kitchen

Before living in Japan, I never really had any experience in the kitchen. Home Ec class in 7th grade was about it. The teachers there would comment on my "geometrically-shaped" pancakes that I would produce due to too much batter on the skillet, which would run to the sides and thus creat perfectly straight lines or arcs, depending on what shape skillet we had in our assigned kitchen areas. The fact that my father taught math just across the hall at that school didn't help the jokes at all.

In university I lived in the dorms all four years. It was a good thing because, being as busy as I was I probably would never had eaten, and avoided the dreaded "freshman fifteen" all four years perhaps due to not finding time to make mealtimes at the UC. I lived, I survived...but I left University an honors gradute, magna-cum laude, double-major and double-minor...and very boiling-water challenged.

So my first job out of college was in Japan. Living alone in a little house with a gas stove. I had never used a gas stove before, only electric. Fortunately I had the basics of water-boiling down, so I could at least make myself some instant-みそ miso soup, done by squeezing a nasty-looking orange fermented soy paste from a plastic-enrapped tube and sprinkling dehydrated pieces of green onion, tofu and わかめ wakame seaweed all over, then pouring boiling water over this mixture. Yummers. This became an integral part of my morning routine...even if my morning meal was to be pancakes, they had to be preceded by みそ汁 miso shiru miso soup.

I soon learned that one cannot live on みそ alone.

So I had to learn to (gasp!) cook.

Unfortunately, this task was much more difficult than I had ever considered it would be since all the preparation instructions on any packages I bought in the store were written in Japanese.

Octopus, anyone?
What can I say...at least I knew it wouldn't kill me.

A simple meal would easily take me two hours to figure out. I would have the directions for preparation, a pencil, paper, and three different dictionaries out for necessary cross-reference. The skill of having learned to count 漢字 kanji Chinese character strokes in my Japanese minor came in extremely handy here. I shall draw the following analogy to help you understand what reading something so tedious and mundane was for yours truly:

qwpoeirdfweqcieaaerionlif 熱 daeraiomdlig寒 dakerni.

Now you can identify and pronounce all the Roman letters. They don't particulary have meaning, but you at least know how they sound and how to read them. This is what two (the hiragana and the katakana) of the Japanese alphabets were like, somewhat, to me in these circumstances. They told me pronunciation but I couldn't necessarily comprehend that which I was reading. That is where my Japanese-English dictionary came in handy. That was the first step.

Second step (mind you, at the beginning of the process...) was to look at these 漢字 characters. Hmm...熱い. It is followed by a hiragana character, so I know they belong together, but how do I go about deciphering what the 漢字 means? I have to count how many little lines make up each character, then go to the handy-dandy character stroke dictionary to try to find that. Let's see...this one has 15...more or less...strokes. So I would go to the stroke-count pages of the character stroke dictionary and skim and scan every single character from 13-17 strokes (being a relative novice to the stroke-counting game, I gave myself a two-stroke margin of error for each character) until I found The One that I was looking for! Sometimes it would not be listed as more than a reference to another page with a more detailed explanation, so I would have to go to that page. Then I would be faced with a variety of different possible pronunciations...the Chinese pronunciation of the character in bold type, and the Japanese pronunciations following in italic type. I then had to depend on context, previous knowledge, or simply mixing-and-matching to figure out which pronunciation to follow. Then I had to go to my Japanese-English dictionary and try to figure out what the words I was making up could mean.

Are you getting the idea of how difficult and time-consuming this task was?

My Japanese friends have absolutely no idea what I went through, nor why I always JUMPED at the opportunity to be invited over either to dine or to "help" make food...I learned much better by example.

In retrospect, this complete and hellish immersion really did wonders for my reading abilities and my 漢字 comprehension, not to mention greatly increasing my speed in counting character strokes. All very important life skills I still use today, mind you.

This is what my first year in Japan was like, a huge trial-and-error effort with lots of dictionary work and what felt like constant research in order to complete the simplest of tasks. But I learned, and my second and third years were much easier thanks to a very solid base I gave myself.

Just last month I was presented with something, I don't remember exactly what, that I needed to decipher. I was able to look at it and say what it was or what it is to be used for...answer the question at hand. It feels good that, even after 10-13 years, it has not all disappeared into the void that I once called "my memory".

Oh...p.s. (speaking of memory JAJAJA): the 熱い and 寒い characters I used above mean "hot" atsui and "cold" samui, respectively. I knew you were just dying to know that.