General Happenings: 111013 Cooking Day!

In school on Thursday we didn't have regular class the first two hours of the day and instead spent it making japchae! Japchae is a sort of stirfried dish of noodles, vegetables, meat and egg meant to be a colorful dish of in-season things. My class of thirteen people was split up into two groups and we sort of competed to see who could make the best japchae.

For the start of the week we had been working on learning words to do with food... both making and eating it. So all of the instructions and ingredients were in Korean. It made it a bit more difficult, but everyone together was able to figure it out and get it done!

The two teams for my class were Team Owen (named after the Owen in our class, because Yasutoshi who was also on our team tends to like to pick on him) and Team International (because they had the most varied nationalities). Team Owen was Owen (of course), myself, Yasutoshi (who didn't show up), Mai, Asuka, Lishin and Shinyu (I don't know if that's how you spell the last two's names in English...) International Team was made up of Pengcheng, You-bin, Megan, Michelle, Miyu and Maki.

I'm not going to go into details of how we made it (unless all of you want the recipe?) but some small incidents that went on.

Basically, I suck at the 'basics' of cooking. I'm no good at chopping up vegetables, but for some reason I ended up cutting the carrots. That was an interesting experience... and the other people in my class (especially the Japanese girls) were having fun teasing me for how I cut the carrots. I was doing my best! They did end up a bit funky though. I managed to get them as thin as they needed to be, so it wasn't a problem or anything.

While Pengcheng was cooking the meat for the other team, they put it all into the frying pan and it suddenly burst into flames. We all freaked out and eventually got it to stop before laughing about it being "Chinese-style" cooking. I wish I had gotten it on video...

After both groups had finished cooking we had our teacher judge whose japchae was the best. I totally should have seen it coming, but she said they were both good... Most people in our class thought my team's japchae was better tasting, though! I avoided trying the other teams because they had put in the mushrooms and those tend to make me feel sick, so I'm taking everyone else's word on it.

Last but not least, a class photo! Can you spot me...? Hahaha. 

This is a pitifully short post compared to all of my older ones, but hopefully people will actually be able to finish reading it this time... Did you manage?