food is like flower arranging for my grandmother

my grandmother’s meticulous cooking notes–curiously written in Japanese

rolling the egg! my favorite part!

the set-up

My grandmother is a stunning human being.  What will it take for me to acquire these sort of cooking skills??!  I thought I was fairly detail oriented when it came to food but my grandmother is just of another caliber.

Ever since her arrival she’s been promising  to teach me how to make futomaki, which I believe translates to “fat rolls”.  haha. fat rolls.

We went to the Japanese market today to buy ingredients for my tutorial where we quite literally wrestled at the cashier trying to both pay for the groceries.  She is frighteningly strong for an 80 year old.  There was hair pulling and I have scratches on my arms.  It was embarrassing and hilarious and totally typical of our family.  She later said that she only let me pay because she was scared she was going to pull my hair out if we continued any longer.

I’m going to warn you now, I am going to sentimentalize the hell out of this experience–learning how to roll futomaki with my grandmother will likely be one of my favorite food experiences ever.  I was photo documenting as I always do and she kept asking if I didn’t need to write down notes.  I responded that the photos were like my cooking notes and that my blog was like her incredibly detailed cooking notebooks (pictured above) and I became pleasurably aware of our generational differences.

Everything that my grandmother cooks has such a great deal of precision to it.  The cucumber has to be brined until it bends without breaking.  The egg has to be sieved twice to avoid unattractive white lines running through it (she calls this the “ear of the egg”).   The mushrooms have to be boiled until perfectly glossy and the liquid completely absorbed.  The greener side of the avocado has to be facing inwards towards the center of the roll. The radish sprouts have to be fuller at both ends so that they look like flowers when the rolls are cut.

I always considered futomaki to be a lesser variety of sushi because it contains no raw fish but I will never make that mistake again! So much work goes into each roll!  We also made what my grandmother called a Western style salad-a roll, which was basically an inside out California roll.

Cooking with my grandmother confirms my firm belief that food should be beautiful–that the eye eats as much as the mouth.  She makes me feel romantic about food.  Details matter to me.  It’s nice to learn from someone who feels the same.  As we were doing the final plate arrangement she turned the plate from every angle and said to me that well made food has to look good from every side and we put our faces right up to the plate and studied our work almost scientifically.  Amazing.  I want everything in life to be done with that much careful precision and consideration.