Tomorrow will mark 4 weeks to the day that I left for my Japan trip, so it's past time I finish the wrap-up with the most noteworthy things Keizo and I made in his kitchen: a zillion gyoza (potstickers) and a delicious, not too sweet apple pie.
I suppose a zillion is a bit of an exaggeration, but since I was the one responsible for filling all of the wrappers and folding them into dumpling shapes, it seemed like many more than the 50 that came in the package. I asked Keizo for a refresher course in gyoza shaping, and then got to work while he made the chahan (fried rice) to accompany them. Keizo has mastered the art of fried rice; even following his instructions, mine never tastes as good.
This was the day that we rode bicycles all over town, so we easily put away about 35 of the gyoza between the two of us, and froze the remaining few uncooked ones for lunch the next day.
When Keizo was arranging with my calligraphy teacher to attend class on Wednesday, I told him to tell her we would bring dessert. We had a large number of apples to use up from our apple picking adventure, and "hokey pokey" (which I mistakenly thought was apple pie a la mode) is one of Keizo's favorite desserts so making an apple pie was the obvious choice. I had seen the recipe for Apple Slab Pie on Smitten Kitchen a few days before, and it looked to me like it had the perfect ratio of lots of crust to the right amount of not too soggy filling so Keizo and I squeezed into his gallery style kitchen together after dinner on Tuesday to make it.
A few notes about the pie:
- As far as I can recall, this was my first time making a pie crust from scratch. It wasn't nearly as onerous as I expected it to be, but Keizo generously cleaned up all the flour from the counter where we rolled it out, so I really only got half of the experience (the fun part! Jeeze, that Keizo guy is pretty great!)
- The filling came together in a snap, no pre-cooking required. I think we used 5? apples and went easy on the sugar.
- After assembling the pie, there was a difference in opinion about which part of the egg should be used to give the pie a nice glossy sheen. I had never heard of using the yolk, but since he did clean up the big flour mess, I let Keizo do it his way.
On Wednesday evening, we enjoyed a delicious curry dinner with salad and kabocha with Naoko-sensei and Hirosuke-san before the other calligraphy students arrived for dessert. Naoko-sensei also made her famous apple crumble in honor of my visit, so we had the pleasure of tasting two very different styles of apple dessert side by side. Our pie was sweeter and kept its shape better, while the crumble had a little tang to it and melted right into the accompanying vanilla ice cream.
Thus concludes the highlights of my fall trip to Japan. The timing of my trip worked out really well in relation to my responsibilities at work and my need for a change of scenery. It was also really nice to have such great weather instead of it being cold and blustery, but it will be really different not being there for New Year's for the first time in four (!!!) years.
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