Cooking Craps

I have to say this has been our most successful home stay visit yet. The two girls that are staying with us now are extremely hardy travelers. They have boundless energy and seem to thrive on four hours of sleep a night. Homesickness has not been an issue at all. They always seem to be full of smiles and giggles. We have managed to communicate quite well in spite of the language barrier. I just talk to them like they are fluent, and they pick out a few words, and we hand signal, and then we get there.

The other night we took them out for cheese burgers which they loved. During dinner Akane asked us if we liked crap. We laughed but didn't have the heart to explain it. She got out her electronic translator and we discovered what she was really asking was, "Do you like Crepes?" We were puzzled because you don't normally think of Japanese kids eating crepes. I thought well, maybe there is a French food fad going on among Japanese teenagers that I don't know about. Handily, Akane takes pictures of everything she eats and then stores the pictures on her cell phone. She showed us several pictures of Japanese crepes on her phone. They looked like little bowls of fruit and ice cream. I pronounced them yummy looking. I didn't really think much about the conversation.

The next evening they asked me to take them back to the grocery store. I assumed they wanted to buy some American candy or some such to take home. I promised to take them the next day after school. So, I picked them up and carted them over to the store. In the parking lot on the way in they told me, "We are going to cook for you!" "Craps!" Okay. They had carefully translated the words for everything they needed, eggs, flour, milk, sugar, bananas, chocolate syrup, and heavy cream. We rolled around collecting everything and that was it. Now they wanted to go right home.

At home I thought they would store everything for a little cooking later but no they wanted to make craps right now. I have to admit I was dubious but I gave them bowls, spatulas, etc. They seem to measure arbitrarily and the batter was pretty lumpy so I was still just going with the flow here. I was pretending to read at the kitchen table in case I was needed for anything. They were laughing and giggling have a grand old time. The making of whipped cream involved a lot of taste testing. But I kept reading. All of a sudden I heard one girl say, "Oh My God" in a perfect Valley girl American accent. They had successfully flipped the crepe and that was their reaction. I completely cracked up. It sounded so hilarious imbeded in a perfectly good Japanese sentence.

They put their 12 inch Japanese crepe in a bowl and filled it with whip cream, bananas, and chocolate syrup. So much for diets! At first they insisted it was to be eaten with your fingers but when I showed them my hands covered with goo they let me have a fork. In fact, we all got forks and demolished it happily. Cultural exchange at its best.