Paella in Japan

Today the International Culture Association cooked paella. This is the same group that cooked won ton soup and mabo tofu, and had the Christmas party. Mr. Yamagi is the president of this group.

Mr. Yamagi had introduced me to Sr. Bravo few weeks ago. He is a Spaniard living in Karasuyama, as a potter.
I tried to use my rusty Spanish, but my brain can only do one foreign language at a time, apparently. I was trying not to combine Japanese and Spanish vocabulary, and trying to remember which grammar set to use! Yikes!

The sentence I wanted was, "this meal was delicious." In English and Spanish, the past tense is contained in the copula (was). In Japanese, it's tacked onto the adjective. So, my poor brain was trying to add a Japanese past tense ending to "delicioso" (delicioshikatta?), and not even thinking about the gender of "cocina". And I started out using the Japanese word for "this".

Back to the cooking!

Mr. Yamagi










Mr. Bravo.











Here are our ingredients. Seafood, veggie and rice.













We divided into six groups to cook our paella. Here is part of my group.













Olive oil, chicken, onion, peppers and squid.







Soup and rice were added, and simmered to cooke the rice. Here, shrimp and clams are added at the end. The clams were previously soaked in wine.























A room of hungry cooks!










Mr Yamagi and Sam, another ALT in Nasukarasuyama. Sam is from Kenya.

Here is the end result!

Delicioso or oishii, it was yummy!