Daikon Brings Peace to Troubled Women

For a couple of months, I've been giving private weekly English conversation lessons to my landlord's daughter. These lessons have been somewhat unexciting, seeing as I hadn't really had experience doing this sort of thing and she didn't really know what she was interested to learn. Each week I'd wonder what we ought to do, or talk about, without any real sense of what was appropriate, and recently I gave up trying to do anything with too much structure.

So Saturday, on a whim, I brought a big daikon radish to her house, thinking that since she enjoys cooking she could show me how to cook it, and we could speak English during that time.

To my surprise, our lesson came alive as we spoke English and cooked together. She discovered that I wanted to learn how to cook Japanese food, and we both could see that holding our English conversations while cooking together was fun.

At the end of the hour, I suggested I drop the fee for the lessons if she would teach me Japanese cooking each week. She agreed, and harmony was restored.

This week's lesson was 'kinpira'(n.b., this recipe is different from the one we used--traditionally, gobo, or burdock, is used, but we used daikon instead).

You can see a picture of a big daikon here if you're not sure what they look like, along with a very interesting site on Japanese health and nutrition.