Hina Matsuri

Hina Matsuri is GIRLS DAY in Japan, and we got to celebrate with our girl in Japan. Eloise fills our lives with light and laughter. What a great reason to celebrate. Hina Matsuri is March third, following the tradition of having holidays on lucky days like 3/3, 5/5 (Boys/Children’s Day), 7/7 (Tanabata).

To celebrate, we had sweet rice puffs in pastel pink, green, and white; little Girls Day cakes; and Eloise’s favorite Japanese food for dinner: yakisoba! Eloise declined an offer for clam soup, which would have been more traditional.

My friend Danielle and I took a sushi class the morning of the third to learn to make another traditional Hina Matsuri dish: chirashi sushi. Yoko-san turned out to be not only our teacher, but also a neighbor, living just a block over in the neighborhood we moved into last month.

Chirashi sushi is an open-face sushi roll, or a deconstructed sushi bowl maybe, made with sushi rice, veggies, and toppings. We used carrots and mushrooms cooked in dashi (fish broth) and soy sauce to mix into the rice, then topped with shrimp, seaweed and green beans.

We simmered more dashi with veggies and pork to make a pork miso soup, and practiced an egg-cooking technique for the type of egg you roll into sushi rolls. That was fun and made me want to get an egg pan.

It was also great learning about the different Japanese condiments and what to use when it says oil or vinegar (canola or sesame oil, rice vinegar). Also, adding a little drizzle of this or that made a huge difference, but what were things drizzles and where could I get them? I made a list.

That afternoon, I was already scheduled for a Food in Japan class. I signed up within a week of arriving and got postponed a couple times, but the timing couldn’t have been better. The instructor gave an hour-long power point presentation on different types of Japanese condiments! It was not what I expected from a Food in Japan course, but exactly what I needed in order to cook Japanese food. Then she took us to the closest grocery store and showed us which aisles stocked each ingredient. Fantastic! I bought too many bottles of everything and had a hard time lugging them all back. But now I’m set to make udon, Japanese pickles, marinated chicken, and lots of other stuff. She also showed us where to get Hina Matsuri cakes, which I promptly took home to the kids for a celebratory dinner honoring our girl.

I’ve never celebrated Hina Matsuri before because I’ve never had a daughter in Japan before! Happy Girls Day, Elo!

How to make Chirashi Sushi for Hina Matsuri:

Ingredients

• 4 cups rice
• half cup rice vinegar
• 4 tablespoons sugar
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 4 dried mushrooms, soaked in one cup of water then cut into small pieces
• Aburaage (deep fried tofu), cut into small pieces
• 1 carrot, cut into small peices
• 1 cup mushroom broth (from soaking the mushrooms)
• 3 tablespoons sugar
• 3 tablespoons soy sauce
• 2 eggs
• 1 teaspoon sugar with a little salt
• 8 boiled shrimps
• 2 seaweeds, cut into long slips
• 12 snow peas or green beans

Instructions

Put dried mushrooms, aburaage and carrot in deep pan. Boil with soup, sugar and soy sauce for 20 minutes.

Mix vinegar, sugar and salt. Cook rice. Spread rice in a wooden bowl (for making sushi). Sprinkle mixed vinegar over rice. Fold rice with wooden spoon, fanning constantly until rice becomes cool. NOTE: don’t stir or mix it or it will become mushy! Mix rice and cooked vegetables. Sprinkle with sesame seeds if desired.

Beat eggs. Mix sugar and salt into eggs. Heat oil in flat pan, spread eggs thinly. Turn over quickly. Slice eggs into long slips. Garnish eggs, arrange shrimps, sea weed and snow peas over sushi rice.

Itadakimasu! Bon appetit!