East meets west

Because the twins' school has a large Japanese population, they celebrated Setsuben- Japanese bean throwing festival last week and all the mommies had to bring food for the kids' lunch. Once again, because of the large Japanese population, much of the pot lucked food, apart from my chicken wings, were Japanese. There was sushi, inari, soba, onigiri and strangely enough, Japanese pasta.

Anyway, the twins had a field day experimenting with the different foods and it turned out that Evan really liked sushi, taking two big pieces of it on top of onigiri and a bite of my inari. This led Ee-Por to comment that Evan needed to find himself a Japanese bride which of course led me to roll my eyes.

Of course, Packrat was thrilled, not about the Japanese bride bit but about the Japanese food bit since one of the greatest loves of his life is Japanese food. This, together with being at home more and wondering if they were bored with their porridge-soup meals led me to think about making Japanese food for some of their meals.

So first, there was the buying of the Australian Calrose rice which is a cheaper alternative to real Japanese rice. Then there was the buying of the salmon from a Japanese supermarket to ensure that it would be a full Japanese experience for them. And then there was me taking a deep breath so that I could come face to face with the salmon. The smell of the grilled salmon evokes a slightly nostalgic and slightly nauseous at the same time. While carrying the twins, I was constantly reminded of the importance of salmon and it's Omega-3 properties. At the same time, I hated fish with a passion with salmon leading the charge. Packrat, being the sweetie he was, tried different ways to get me to eat it, ways that would stay down. What we found worked and I actually developed a liking for was salmon flaked into sushi rice and fashioned in onigiri; rice balls.

Making it for the twins seems to have brought that entire memory full circle, although I never really made the onigiri myself and had to conjure up the memory of Packrat fashioning the rice balls with warm rice and a bowl of water. Thankfully it's quite an idiot proof meal to make as long as the rice and salmon are done right and one played with play dough as a child.

The result was 12 snooker ball sized balls of rice with the salmon flakes adding a pretty peach tinge to it.

















I haven't been staying home long enough to tire of the thrill of doing little things like that for the kids instead of leaving it up to the twins. So, I hung around to see if they would eat my attempt of Japanese cuisine for them. As usual, their reactions was of the night-day, black-white variety.

Evan proved that his dalliance with sushi at school wasn't really a dalliance. The boy popped the entire rice ball into his mouth in his excitement, only to have to spit it out because it was too much for his little mouth.



















Jordan on the other hand, took one whiff at the rice ball and turned away, burying her face into Ee-Por's shoulder, refusing to even look up at what Mommy made for her. When we finally coaxed her to take a mouthful, she made like she was going to gag; the true sign of her displeasure at whatever food was offending her sensitivities, of which she has many. There wasn't much else for her to eat if she wasn't going to eat her onigiri so I had to figure out what I could whip up for her in a hurry which had equivalent nutrition. Since we, adults were having pasta and meat sauce for dinner, that seemed like the likely replacement. I just needed to complete the following ... Rice is to pasta as Salmon is to _____? And the closest I could come up with was cheese.

Now, that, Baby J had no problems with, literally breathing it down in 5 minutes when coaxing her to take the mouthful of rice had taken us a good 20 minutes- further fortifying the difference between brother and sister.

I suspect as they get older and their taste more diverse, it's going to be impossible to make meals a simple affair where everyone eats the same thing. Time to start being creative.


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