St. Valentine's Day

St. Valentine's Day in Japan is chocolate giving day as I explained in my last post.

My daughter seems to have someone she likes in her school but she does not have a courage to confess I guess. To be honest I really understand her feeling. I was like that when I was a school girl. But she has so many persons to give chocolate, her friends, her homeroom teacher and family including me, and she had to make nearly 60 chocolate candy the day before! Of course I had to help her melting chocolate and poring it in each heart shaped aluminum cup. What she did was chopping chocolate and decorating.

I told her to take pictures of the chocolate we made but she seems to have forgotten it! What a shame!

The only picture I can show you is this one for me.

She made 3 of these to each person. I put a pencil with the chocolate so that you can guess its actual size.

By the way many Japanese boys are restless on this day, you know why?

Popular boys get many chocolate but there are some who get nothing, what a pity! This is the fact since I was a child!

To my surprise I even heard that some 5th grade boys asked female classmates to give them Giri-choco which literally means 'obligatory gift chocolate' or chocolate for mercy this year! Mum of one of the boys told me that he got 5 chocolate finally but one of them was Honmei, or love confessing chocolate!

My 3rd grade son has not received love-confessing chocolate until last year. But, this year he got one! Yeaaaaaaah! It was his classmate. I don't know how she looks like because my daughter received it instead of my son when she happened to meet her in front of our house.

On White Day which comes on March 13th my son is supposed to return sweets to her. He said he will make cookies buy himself. Ummmmh. Good luck!

For your information, students are not permitted to bring chocolate on Valentine's Day in my children's school. Generally in Japan there is no snack time and in public school, school lunch is provided so children are not allowed to bring food to school.

So my daughter visited her friends house one by one after school to deliver chocolate and I even had to drive a car to her homeroom teacher's house in neighboring town.

February 14th is a special day for our family because it's my daughter's birthday. She became 11th this year.

Unfortunately I didn't feel good all day from morning but I went shopping and wrapped presents.

Last year we were in the Netherlands and we held a big birthday party at an ice-skate rink. But in Japan it is not common to invite lot of people for birthday of school age children so we did at home this year.

Today's menu: beef stake which my husband cooked, harusame vermicelli salad which is my daughter's favorite, Campbell's Minestrone Soup and chocolate cake bought at Cozy Corner cake shop. Campbell soup for daughter's birthday dinner? Because I am lazy? Noooooh! What I made was only salad this time because I didn't feel good. I am very sorry for my daughter!

Bonus photos

This is ramen shop called "Shiodome Ramen".

Ramen is noodle soup which originated from Chinese noodle and developed in Japan.

Japanese people love ramen very much and so are my children.

The basic flavor of soup are shoyu or soy source, miso or bean paste, salt and pork. Recently there are lot more variation.

While we were living in the Netherlands the best ramen shop was Raku in Uithoorn.

This Shiodome Ramen is open for limited period until this August. I heard that it has become very popular since several years ago but I didn't have a chance to visit it until I did recently.

This is what my daughter ordered. This is Salt soup ramen with umeboshi flavor. This is what I had at the first visit and it was very good, although my daughter didn't like umeboshi very much.
The following is what I ordered at the second visit.

This is vegetable tanmen. Tanmen is made with thick noodles with salt flavor soup. This shop uses chicken broth as a basic soup stock. This time I put hot pepper paste too much which was not right. In this ramen shop small jars of garlic paste, red pepper paste, ginger paste, etc are provided for free use. Because of too much hot pepper I could not feel the taste of chicken flavor soup. Next time I come I have to keep it in my mind I thought. Noodles here are basically very thin but I found out that they have thick noodles too like Tanmen.

h

arusame:

Chinese foodstuff. Vermicelli made from green beans. For cooking we boil it for a few minutes and put it in salad or soup.

Umeboshi:

It is picked fruit. It literally means dried plum. It is very salty and sour and we often put it inside of rice balls.