The world is my school today my classroom was at a cooking lesson in Tokyo, Japan learning to cook gyozo dumplings and sushi. Directions for how to get to a cooking lesson on time:

1. Get up 30 minutes before breakfast ends

2. Rush to breakfast but take your time in eating

3. Finish breakfast and wait in the lobby for someone in a kimono to pick you up for your cooking lesson

4. Get on public transport to get to where your cooking lesson is with the person that picked you up

5. Once arrived you should be just on time

6. START COOKING!

Well at least that's what we did and it worked out perfectly. Before you know it we are in aprons shaping rice and wrapping it in seaweed. There are two ways of doing this.

1. The traditional with a bamboo mat where you lay down the seaweed then put rice spread out along the middle then you roll it up.

2. Where you use a plastic molding to shape the rice then you wrap this up in the seaweed.

We tried both. I honestly found that doing it the traditional way was much easier, though the master chef said the other way was. That was only one kind of sushi because there are 3 kinds we made. This one, which is called Maki sushi and two others named Gunkan sushi and Nigiri sushi. My favorite to make was the Gunkan, which is also known as the battleship sushi because it looks like a battle ship. For this sushi you need to shape rice into a rectangle then wrap it up in the seaweed lengthwise and put food on top of it. There is also the Nigiri sushi which is where you simply put rice into a rectangle and you lay fish on top of it but you can do it with any kind of topping.

Next was the dumplings were I got to cut up cabbage and green onions. We squeezed all the water out then I put them into a bowl with minced pork. Last, the mushrooms went in the mixture. We mixed this all up then we got little round sheets of dough which is the outside of the dumpling. We also got water and put this around the edges to moisten it up so it would stick. Once moistened we put the filling in which we just made. Then we stuck the two edges together and put it in the pan to fry. When it was done we had a great lunch shared with our teachers plus everyone in the office. It was so nice getting to know some Japanese people here in Tokyo and how to make some of their food.

Mmmmm

<3 World Rings Bell