Saturday burnt out.

One day delayed up load...

Yesterday I was totally burnt out. I needed a serious rest with internet surfing for all day today.

Saturday is normally the busiest day of the week. Yesterday was especially busy...from morning to night.

It was fun, though.

7am, I left house with car full of my sweets for Croydon Japanese school. It was my turn to do a librarian for a day, so I had to turn up at 9 sharply. Getting gears and turn into "the librarian"....

Transfoooooorm!!!!

   (Well, I just put on apron.)

This Japanese book library is very well organised and very popular among students.  There is also a big collection of books for parents, which was donated by people who had gone back to Japan. So, parents are looking forward to use the library more than their children, maybe.

For children, there are so many Manga books, such as Chibimaruko, Doraemon, Astro-boy, and so on. Of course, large number of children's picture books and encyclopedias are for rent, too...

In April, new students who are 6 years old entered the school and they are guided to read Japanese books from the library. They were so excited to see so many of Japanese books... well, including Manga. They borrow books and books... 

Therefore, the librarians has to work really hard to deal with the amount of books and children. Yes, we sometimes had to tell how to write their names on cards. (The system is very old and everything needs to be done manually.)  We were swimming in the sea of books and children all the morning.

After the children finished the morning session, I delivered the orders to an-an customers and drove down to Brighton. well, my husband drove, and I slept all the way. Ha ha.

Now, this Brighton and Hove Japanese Club also teach Japanese, but more in a relaxed manner. However, yesterday's cultural class was "long rope skipping". We have songs to go with skipping. We underestimated how tiring it was to sing and skip!!!!

From 3pm, the class I help as TA, they had a card activity on the floor and really hard to make children sit down quietly. On the other hand, children enjoyed the class so much.

When I got home, I was almost going down in my bed...No! It was not that easy.

Japanese mums' friends asked me to go to Chinese restaurant for no occasion. They came to pick me up at 7pm. (I will write about this in the next blog.)

When I got back home again, it was almost 12 midnight. Updating this blog, I completely burnt out and fell asleep as I opened i-Pad on my lap.

Well, I haven't got any photo from the Japanese schools, so I put the photo of my Kashiwamochi with my biting mark <3

How about Wagashi, Wimbledonners?

Yesterday, 11th May, A Cruft and Artisan Market in Wimbledon was  held yesterday.
Here is the detail. http://www.thewindmillmarket.co.uk/p/about-us.html
Some people who live in Wimbledon requested me to go there to sell some sweets....Maybe once a month or so.

When I found about this market, I thought really for an-an! Aww, I didn't pitch my stall yesterday, but I wanted to go and have a look at the market if it is really for an-an.

However, I already had an appointment to help a library at Croydon Japanese School, I had to sit at the counter all the morning. ...so, I had a miss to go to the market this time.

Here is a request from me. If someone had visited yesterday's Windmill Market, please let me know what was the market like? Do you think I can take some Japanese sweets to sell there???

Do you think Wimbledonners are ready for an-an Wagashi????

＊＊＊＊＊＊＊

Changing a subject...
A Belgian boy, who was living downstairs for a 4 months work experience in my husband's office, had gone home safely. When his father came to pick him up by car, he gave a present to each of us. 

A set of a cute mug and various Belgian chocolates for my husband (really nice!), a cute diary book (lockable! high points for my 6 years old girl) with matching pen for my daughter, and an educational card game for my son (high points for his "math" brain).
.

And.....I wonder why I was given this Belgian chocolate in the shape of......

Why?

Maybe he wanted to give me a task.
"To try to make Belgian tourist's points in my kitchen".
Here.....

and there...

In my husband's opinion, I have given him some horrible meals in his stay....

Well, some of Japanese food was not really received very well... Tofu was always left on his plate, if I recall...

.....................囧rz........................

My Anko making machine is working very hard.

I am very tired. It's because I did something very stupid and took almost half a day to put it back.

something stupid....

I sprinkled adzuki beans all over my kitchen floor. 


My kitchen is at the first floor. I rented a room in the ground floor flat and using as a storage room for an-an. Whenever I buy beans, they are always in 25kg bags, so I keep the big bag in the storage room and bring a few kgs of beans every time I cook.

So, I picked 1 kg of sugar, 1kg of glutinous rice flour, 1kg of white rice flour and 2kg of adzuki beans in a bag. I was almost at the kitchen, the bottom of adzuki beans got stuck at the door handle and beans thrown in the air to kitchen floor with very hard shower like sound.

Then, I was fell in this situation.

......................囧rz........................


There was no space to put my foot down. First I need to consider if I should throw away all the 2kg of adzuki beans (which is not cheep!) or not.

Luckily, I cleaned and disinfected the floor in the morning. I try to think when the adzuki beans were dried before packed, they must be in the worse situation....

Done. Decision made.

As I thought bloom and dust pan are not clean, so I started collecting by hand. I washed them more than usual. It should be ok. I changed water twice as usual while I was cooking. It must be ok. I put it through sieve. It IS fine!

There are many orders for Kashiwa Mochi, so I will make it a lot this weekend.
Good night. Sweet dreams...
....not a dream in a sea of adzuki beans.

Wagashi for May

Here are some sweets available this month.

May is the month of Kodomo no Hi (5th May, Childrens' Day). Kashiwa Mochi and Chimaki are famous sweets for this occasion.

an-an will deliver sweets to the following locations on this Saturday (11th May).
- Croydon Japanese School at Seldon. (8:30-12:30)
- Brighton and Hove Japanese Club at St. Peter's Primary School (2:00-4:30)

I will take some extras. However, if you do not want to disappointed, please make an order in advance.

Wagashi List for May
Kashiwa Mochi £1.25/sweets (this will finish as soon as leaves run out for this year.)
Sanshoku Dango £1.25/sweets (three sweet rice dumpling on a skwer)
Ichigo Daifuku £1.25/sweets
Daifuku (smooth or coarse anko) £1.00/each

Yes, Ichigo Daifuku is available NOW~!
I will try to make this sweets as much as possible!

Please go to the Homepage and you find a mail on the page for order.
The following information required.
name
contact number (mobile no)
Where to pick up or deliver the sweets?
What time wagashi needs to be delivered.

You also can order to my mobile if you have. If you want to have the sweets on this Saturday, please make your order by the end of Thursday.

Hello, it's the first an-an's blog!

Hi, there!
I am sooo nervous to start this blog.
I did not like the first page of a new notebook since I was a kid.
So I sometimes skipped the first page to start from the second page...

Now I need to explain why I started this blog. It is because an-an start having post everywhere online. At first, an-an started as a community on Mixi (Japanese social network). Then, I thought I want to let people know about activity of an-an as many as possible.

an-an has a group on Facebook, started tweeting now and then...and made a homepage and sent monthly newsletters. The language was a problem and I started to get confuse myself...

As a result, an-an became quiet in any media for nearly 4 months.
Big apology.

What I recognise during the period was the importance of online communication and how much I like making and let my friends and new people eat my sweets.

Finally, here is a photo I took yesterday.
Sakuramochi was last month's sweets, so I don't have the leaves to make the sweets.
This year's cherry blossom arrived after the season of Sakuramochi.
But it was too beautiful not to take photos.

Pink, blue and new green... It's the most mighty colour combinations. Just beautiful.