Cherry Blossoms and Persimmons

I had a cooking class in Kawashima today so my teacher picked me up a little after 8 and we started out.
There were 2 main dishes. One was pacific saury / pike mackeral, called sanma here. It's a long thin fish, the characters for it mean 'autumn' 'sword', ' fish'. It has LOTS of bones and not too much meat and is fairly fishy tasting (although very fresh). Not my favorite fish, but I did learn how to cut and gut it, We didn't take the bones out for this dish, one doesn't usually for this fish and that's part of the reason I don't like it. We cut it into 4 smallish pieces, then rolled it in Chinese cabbage and steamed it in a broth that had some curry powder in it. I prefer ground beef stuffed cabbage! Then we made a topping for rice. Good idea, but needed more flavor - evidently people requested a weak flavored dish... it had ground pork, scallion, tofu, a little soy, sake, etc. but needed more. You saute all that together and put it on a bowl of rice. We made an unusual fruit salad by rehydrating dried daikon (Japanese radish) in the syrup from canned mandarins. Then adding the fruit. Someone brought a bunch of kiwis from their tree and we added those. That was good. We also made daikon mochi. You grate daikon and add a special kind of flour or cornstarch??? not sure what that was... and mix them. We added little dried shrimp and ao nori (powdered seaweed), let it sit, then make into little patties and saute in sesame oil. Serve with a ponzu sauce (vinegar or citrus with soy sauce). I like anything that is chewy like mochi so that was my favorite.

On the way home my teacher and I stopped at a shopping mall and we did a little tour of the supermarket. I picked up a couple of steaks and a small pork loin which are all hard to find at my markets... and had a number of questions answered - there are still so many things I don't know what to do with. I also bought some 'amazake' which is evidently the precursor to sake - not alcohol yet and sweet. So I'll try that. And some other kind of stronger alcohol that she said people who like sake really like. She also gave me some little dry fish to try. Evidently you just broil them and then eat the whole thing.

There were Valentines displays in the middle of the mall, all kinds of chocolate and liquor in pretty little bottles. And after smelling all the chocolate I couldn't resist Mr. Donuts... So we stopped for coffee and ended up with these funny donuts that were more like mochi (in this case I was really in the mood for a cake like donut, as much as I like mochi)... but it was good and so was the coffee. So now I am over full and sitting on the couch feeling stuffed.