Weekend of Food

This weekend was filled with tons of delicious food and various "end of the year" parties. I had a great two days spending time with some people that I'd like to get to know a lot better. I have been taking aikido classes once a week for the past couple of months and I joined some of the other members to eat nabe for lunch on Saturday. Nabe is a hotpot dish that is commonly cooked in Japanese households in the winter. Each table had a separate broth and a pile of vegetables and meat. As space allowed, we put the uncooked food into the broth and let it stew. Once it was cooked, we used our own chopsticks to serve ourselves the food.

The nabe that we ate on Saturday is a special type that sumo wrestlers eat to gain weight. Although it's a healthy dish (or so I'm told), this specific type contains a lot of high protein ingredients such as meat and fish. These are also higher in calories than some other nabe dishes, which contain more vegetables and low calorie noodle substitutes. 

The awesome-est Nabe Table of them all

Later that night, I also attended my finally Japanese class party. Talk about a lot of food. I made a pie from persimmons that I wanted to use before Australia (!). I'm so glad I didn't go empty handed! 

It was a good time, and I got to talk more to the teachers and students in my class. Pretty much the reason why I am motivated to learn to speak Japanese better: to make friends like this! 

And today... I made Christmas cookies! I hope to give them to my co-workers tomorrow. Making this many cookies in my apartment was an adventure in itself. They turned out all right, and I decorated them with chocolate icing. They're nothing fancy, and my co-workers might think I'm a little bizarre for bringing them in, but I figure it can't hurt to try.

(Pictures will be added once my computer stops being dumb.) [...and it has!]