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All About Japan By Willamarie Moore -- Book Review

Disclosure: Tuttle Publishing gave me a copy of these products free of charge. All opinions in my review are my own and I did not receive any other compensation. As in all my reviews I am providing links for your ease, but receive no compensation.

Today I am going to review for you the wonderful book, All About Japan by Willamarie Moore. I absolutely love this series of books from Tuttle Publishing. They are packed full with so much information and they teach so much about the culture and life in the country. (I reviewed All About Indonesia by Linda Hibbs in July.) This book helps us center our exploration of Japan. It shares traditional stories, holidays, life in the city as well as the country (told by children who live there), recipes, crafts, dance, music, poetry, and so much more.

With any book that has a recipe or craft in it, Hazel wants to try it, so we did. The book has three recipes in it and we tried two. I did not try to make Onigiri since I couldn't find the ingredients and I didn't really think Hazel would like them. We did try Okonomiyaki. It is described like a pancake with fillings but reminded me more of an omelet. I do not think I cut our fillings up enough and they fell apart on us when we flipped and removed them. Steve and I both thought they were all right and Hazel liked to eat the chicken filling instead. The pancake batter had cabbage in it which is why they are green.

Oknomiyaki

The other recipe we tried was mochi cakes. We made them the day after we read "The Grateful Statues" in Japanese Children's Favorite Stories by Florence Sakade. The story is about a kind, poor couple. The old man does something kind for some statues and his kindness is rewarded with a large mochi cake. Therefore making mochi cake right afterward was perfect. Now are mochi cakes did not turn out pretty. We should have looked at pictures of them first, but Hazel was having fun making shapes out of them. We also could not find sweet rice flour or mochiko and used regular rice flour. They were not as sweet as they probably should have been. I like them though.

Mochi is often a treat for O-Shogatsu (New Year), so it seems appropriate to also show you our Nenga-jo Greeting card. Since 2015 is the year of the sheep, we used a sheep rubber stamp and Hazel wrote on the numbers. Nenga-jo are usually postcards that are sent the first three days of January.

Nenga-jo

This book also discusses some history of Japan including the samurai warriors. They have instructions to make a samurai helmet out of newspaper. Hazel of course wanted one and then modeled it with a sword.

And what exploration of Japan would be complete without some origami? The book shares a wonderful song about frogs and gives the instructions to make an origami hopping frog.

Hazel loves making origami and wanted to make lots of frogs. You can find similar frog's instructions here.

She also loved that they could hop.

She made one of every color and then pulled out her zoo mat to put them in water. She then gathered more zoo animals to go with her frogs. I love crafts that lead to her creative play!

All About Japan is the perfect book for anyone who wants to learn more about Japan, its history, culture, etc. There are so many activities throughout it from learning about haikus to writing Kanji. We would have done more of the Kanji if we hadn't had the other books. The other activity we did do was trying the Bon Dance. I however did not get any pictures since I was doing it with Hazel. I am also almost done with a kimono for her doll. She picked a fabric that reminds me of sakura (cherry blossoms), so I'll wait until it is finished and share it with our cherry exploration! Stay tuned!!

For more books and activities to learn about Japan check out:

Also check out some of our other reviews of Tuttle Publishing Books:

Around the World in 12 Dishes: Exploring Ukraine through Food and Craft

With Ukraine in the news so much, it is a perfect time to explore the country through food, books and crafts. It is also a perfect time for lessons with older children about current events and such. Since we do not let Hazel know about current events or watch the news, we looked at tradition, food and crafts.

Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe and is the largest country that is entirely in Europe. For more information, read the introduction post at Around the World in 12 Dishes. I shared the books we have read and not read about Ukraine. Have you read Jan Brett's The Mitten? I know it is really popular around here and it is the retelling of a Ukrainian folktale.

We decided to try two different Ukrainian recipes. The first we found in the Ukraine book of the Festivals of the World series. It is written by Volodymyer Bassis (or Vladimir Bassis--all the sites seem to list both spellings). The recipe is for Strawberry Kysil. Kysil can be made with different berries, but Bassis claims strawberries make the best one.

Strawberry Kysil
(from Ukraine by Volodymyer Bassis)
Ingredients:
2 quarts of fresh strawberries (I am sure you could use frozen)
2 cups cold water
3/4 cup sugar
1 tablespoon potato starch (we used tapioca starch since we could not find potato starch)

1) Wash and hull the strawberries. Put in pan with water and bring water to a boil. Boil on high for a minute then turn down to low and let simmer for 10-15 minutes. I let Hazel use the potato masher while the strawberries cooked to help get the juice out. This makes the next step a bit easier.

2) Push the strawberries through a fine mesh strainer with a wooden spoon. Put juice back in pan.

3) Stir in sugar and bring back to a boil. Boil over high heat for 2 minutes.

4) Reduce heat to medium and stir in starch and dissolve it (Hazel did not do a good job of dissolving our starch so we have chunks in it). Cook for another 2 to 3 minutes stirring until it thickens.

5) Cool to lukewarm and then put in refrigerator to get cold for a few hours. Enjoy!

Strawberry Kysil is a bit like strawberry soup or eating a liquid form of strawberry jelly. It is delicious but you will not want to much at one time.

Our second recipe came from Ukrainian Classic Kitchen and International Cuisine and it is Ukrainian Yabluchnyy Korzh. Hazel likes to call it what it tastes like--apple pie. It is a type of cookie crust with apples inside. It is delicious!

Ukrainian Yabluchnyy Korzh
Adapted from Ukrainian Classic Kitchen and International Cuisine
Ingredients
Dough:
5 cups of flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup sugar
1 cup unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
6 large egg yolks (if I made again I would use whole eggs)
1 cup sour cream

Filling:
7-8 large apples (we used Granny Smith)
1/2 cup sugar
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

Start by making the dough:
1) Stir together flour, baking powder, salt, and sugar. then add the butter and mix with your hands (Hazel loved this part) to make a coarse flaky mixture.

2) In a small bowl mix egg yolks and sour cream together. Then add it to the dry ingredients. Work it with your hands into a firm, smooth, not sticky dough. (Ours never really formed a good firm smooth dough.)

3) Divide dough into 2 pieces, making one slightly larger than the other.

4) Turn oven on to 375 and grease with butter (we used the wrappers) a 13 x 9 x 2 baking pan. Do not use baking spray to grease.

5) With the larger dough, cover bottom and sides of pan. The instructions say to roll it out, but I found ours was just too crumbly to do this. I pressed it into the pan.

6) Time to start filling. Peel and thinly slice the apples (we used our food processor). Mix with sugar and cinnamon.

7) Add apple mixture to bottom crust.

8) Roll out top crust or pat it on top. Try to seal apples in.

9) Bake for 45 to 55 minutes. It should be brown in color and the apples should be tender to a knife. Set on wire rack to cool for 20 minutes.

10) Now you can attempt to remove the pan (I did not attempt due to the crumbly nature). To remove: Run a sharp knife along the sides and then put a wire rack on top and flip it over. Remove pan and put other wire rack on bottom and flip back the correct way.

11) Serve at room temperature. You can dust it with powdered sugar (we didn't bother). Refrigerate leftovers but bring to room temperature before eating.

Since it tastes similar to apple pie (Steve's favorite dessert), we all love it!

We also have been reading Urkainian stories. We found a Cinderella tale, The Golden Slipper, which we shared last week. We also found many versions of a Christmas tale involving spiders. All the crafts I could find had to do with spiders as Christmas ornaments or pysanky (Ukrainian Easter eggs).

Pysanky Source: By Carl Fleischhauer (Library of Congress employee[1])
(http://www.loc.gov/folklife/cwc/) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Since we already posted about pysanky, we made a silver spider web and spider Christmas ornament. We found the instructions in Christmas Crafts from Around the World by Judy Ann Sadler.

In the Christmas legend, the spider on a Christmas tree spins webs of silver for a poor family who has no money for Christmas. Thus why the ornament is done in silver!

Ukraine's Flag

Now it is time for the Around the World in 12 Dishes Blog Hop! Please visit the other posts and feel free to share any Ukrainian crafts, food, etc. posts that you have done.

Minnie Mouse Party Foods and Activities -- The Details

Since the my post the other day became so long with sharing our decorations, I thought today I would share the details of what we served and what the kids played. Let's start with the cake since every birthday party needs a cake. Our cake was the strawberry cake we have made for most of Hazel's parties. The original recipe is found at Confections of a Foodie Bride. I have made changes over the past couple of years. At some point I will have to actually write down my changes and post about them. We made an eight-inch round cake and three small round cakes. I bought these pans at Joann Fabrics with a coupon for the ears. We bought a container of chocolate frosting since black frosting is hard to come by and has so many chemicals for colors.

Ok, I have to admit I had trouble getting too excited for Around the World in 12 Dishes and I had an even harder time getting Hazel interested. As a result, we are posting a week late. Sorry!! I think the reason is I had a hard time finding books and really anything on Croatia besides things on-line. Our library network literally had six books having to do with Croatia in all the Children's Departments. One of the six was a novel and one was a picture book that never mentioned Croatia and the rest were the non-fiction books about Croatia. We did not read a whole lot about the country this month. However I did write the introduction on the Around the World in 12 Dishes blog.

I think the main problem for getting materials is Croatia became independent again in the 1990's. There just is not much on Croatia out there because of its newness. I did find several sites with Croatian recipes. We decided on a recipe from Honest Cooking called Croatian Honey Pie. One of the sites explained that what we call cake they call pie in Croatia. Since the measurements are given in ounces and grams, we weighed most ingredients. I will give you my estimates however. I also could not find plum jam, so we used homemade strawberry and blueberry jams (we made it on Memorial Day, so we went for the red, white and blue theme).

Croatian Honey Pie (adapted from Honest Cooking)

Ingredients
For the Dough

Just under 3 cups of all-purpose flour
2 eggs
2 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons honey
3 tablespoons almond milk (we try to have things dairy-free for Hazel)
just under a cup of sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder (I didn't read the recipe very well and used powder instead of soda)
pinch of salt
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

For the Filling

1 1/4 cups almond milk
just under a cup of sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 tablespoons cornstarch
the rest of the stick of butter and another stick
jam

Instructions

Make the filling first, so it can cool. In a saucepan combine one cup of the milk with sugar and vanilla extract. Heat it until it boils. Combine 1/4 cup of milk with the cornstarch. Add this to the boiling milk and cook until it thickens stirring constantly. Cover the surface with plastic wrap and let cool to room temperature.
Prepare dough. Combine one egg, butter, honey, sugar and milk in a saucepan. Heat until all ingredients dissolve.
In a separate bowl, combine flour, salt, cinnamon and baking powder. Add melted mixture to flour mixture and the remaining egg. Knead it until it forms a dough.
Divide dough into two equal parts. Roll each one out on a lightly floured surface as thin as possible.
Place on a parchment lined baking sheet.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Bake for 7-10 minutes. Make sure not to over bake. Let cool completely then cut each into equal pieces.
While it is baking, beat softened butter for filling until it is fluffy. Then add to the cooled filling from step 1. Combine well (I beat them both with the mixer to combine).
To assemble, place a piece of the baked cake/biscuit and cover with half the filling. Put on second layer of cake and spread with jam (we used strawberry). Place third layer of cake. We spread this with blueberry jam and then covered with the rest of the filling. Top with final layer of cake.
Place in refrigerator for a few hours. If you want to dust with powdered sugar and enjoy!

We could not wait to try it, so we did cut into it before the final refrigeration. However this was messy. The refrigerating helps the filling solidify a bit and hold everything together. We did not dust it with powdered sugar. Steve and I both like it a lot, but Hazel doesn't really like it. I was surprised since you taste so much of the jams and cinnamon. However Steve told me he really liked it. So that is our Croatian experience. Have you made a Croatian recipe? Or do you want to learn more about Croatia? Check out all these other great blogs posts or join us in the blog hop! The Croatian placemat is available here and the passport pages are here.

Around the World in 12 Dishes is hosted by

Adventures In Mommydom, Afterschool for Smarty Pants, All Done Monkey, Crafty Moms Share, Glittering Muffins, Kid World Citizen, Mermaids' Makings, The Mommy Talks and The Usual Mayhem.

Don't forget to check out all the posts that get linked up for more great Croatian dishes and crafts!

Around the World in 12 Dishes: Portugal

This month we are exploring Portugal for Around the World in 12 Dishes. I wrote an introduction to Portugal there, so I am going to get into how we explored the country. As always we took some books out of the library. Our favorites for Hazel getting understanding are:

Portugal by Kari Schuetz - an easy to understand overview of the country and culture

A New Life in an Old Village by Hélène Tremblay - one family's story about life in a Portugal village

The Little Horse of Seven Colors and Other Portuguese Folk Tales Retold by Patricia Tracy Lowe - folk tales with a few illustrations

I also spoke to a friend who is Portuguese American. She suggested making caldo verde and Portuguese sweet bread. Of course her memories of her grandmother making them did not include an actual recipe--more of take this and that and a little of this, so I looked for some recipes. For the caldo verde (green soup) we found a recipe in Jean Anderson's The Food of Portugal. Now I knew this was taking a chance since both Steve and Hazel do not like kale. There is discussion on line whether the greens should be kale or collard greens. Since I like kale better and have had the soup in a restaurant in an area with large Portuguese American population and it said kale and potato soup, I went for kale. Sometimes Steve will eat it in things, so I figured why not. I dragged a sick Hazel out to the store and of course everyone was shopping for Easter that morning. Ugh! So much for a quick trip. An employee in the meat department helped me pick out sausage since I don't like it usually. Hazel thought it was too bland, but did not tell me this until a few days later. She just didn't eat it. I thought it could use more salt (and I do not usually cook with salt at all and never add it) and did not like the sausage and Steve just didn't like it.

Green Soup or Caldo Verde
1 large yellow onion
1 large garlic clove
4 tablespoons olive oil
6 large Eastern potatoes
2 quarts cold water
6 ounces chourico, chorizo, pepperoni

2 1/2 teaspoons salt (do not cut this down!! I did and it was a mistake)
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
1 pound collards or kale

Finely chop the onion, garlic, potatoes and kale. Thinly slice the sausage. Saute the onion in the garlic in 3 tablespoons of oil in a large heavy saucepan for 2 to 3 minutes. Add the potatoes and saute stirring constantly for 2 to 3 minutes until they begin to color. Add water and cover the pot. Boil gently over medium heat for 20 to 25 minutes until the potatoes are mushy.

Meanwhile fry the sausage in a heavy skillet over low heat for 10 to 12 minutes until most of the fat is out. Drain well and reserve.

When the potatoes are mushy, remove pan from heat and with a potato masher, mash potatoes in pan with soup mixture. Add the sausage, salt and pepper and return to heat. Cover and simmer 5 minutes. Add the greens and simmer uncovered 5 minutes until greens are tender and the color of jade. Mix in remaining tablespoon of oil and taste the soup to see if it needs more salt or pepper (I did not do this and it was a mistake).

For the Portuguese Sweet Bread, I decided to try a recipe on-line instead of the one in the book. I found many recipes on-line and many of them were the same and had lard--since I didn't have lard, I looked for a recipe without it and found this one on Cooking with Elise: Massa Sovada Traditional Portuguese Sweet Bread. I cut the recipe in half and we tried to make it with Easter eggs instead of brown eggs. I definitely did not add enough flour for the recipe. As a result our eggs slid out of the bread and we had issues.

Massa Sovada or Portuguese Sweet Bread (adapted from Cooking With Elise)
5 cups of flour

1 1/2 tablespoons of active dry yeast and 1/2 teaspoon sugar
5 large eggs at room temperature (take out at least 2 hours ahead)
1/2 cup unsalted butter
1 teaspoon canola oil
1/2 cup almond milk
1/2 teaspoon salt (just a pinch if you use salted butter)
1 1/8 cup sugar
zest of half lemon (I used more an it was very lemony)
egg wash (one egg and a splash of milk)
3 Easter eggs or brown eggs

In bowl dissolve your yeast in 1/2 cup of water with the 1/2 teaspoon of sugar. Allow your yeast to proof.

Beat the eggs until they are light and fluffy. Add your yeast mixture and just enough flour to make a batter (1 cup at most). Cover with a dish cloth until bubbles form (we added too much flour and did not really get bubbles). Meanwhile melt the butter over low heat. Add the canola oil. When all the butter is melted add the milk, salt and lemon zest.

When batter has formed bubbles add the sugar and butter mixture. Add the remaining flour one cup at a time mixing well each time. This is a sticky dough. When it becomes difficult to stir (if you are not using a mixer) add the remaining flour by kneading it in until the dough is smooth and not too sticky. (Since we used our mixer, we let the mixer do the kneading and our dough was too sticky. I should have added more flour.)

Cover your dough with waxed paper and a towel. Let rise until it doubles in size (about an hour).

Shape loaves of bread into the size you want and place them in buttered loaf pans. (Our dough was so sticky, it could not be shaped, so I put it into a buttered loaf pan). If baking with eggs add them now. Cover with buttered wax paper and a towel and let rise until it doubles in size (we did not have room for it to rise to double its size). Brush the loaf with the egg wash (we call this painting).

Bake for an hour at 275 degrees.

Now when I took ours out after an hour, it was obvious it needed to be baked more. I put it in and two of the eggs slid out. Since our dough was too liquidy it took some of the color off the eggs. I would use the brown eggs if I repeated this.

However Hazel and I loved the bread. Steve did not. I ran out of white flour and used some whole wheat, so I think it is a bit browner than usual as well.

We also found some music on the following CD's.

For those homeschooling, looking at Portugal is a great time to look at the Age of Discovery and look at the explorers. There are many from Portugal.

Also available are the Portugal Placemat and Passport Pages. And of course check out all the posts shared for new recipes and ideas of looking at Portugal. Around the World in 12 Dishes is hosted by

Adventures In Mommydom, Afterschool for Smarty Pants, All Done Monkey, Crafty Moms Share, Maroc Mama, Glittering Muffins, Kid World Citizen, Mermaids' Makings, The Mommy Talks and The Usual Mayhem

Feel free to share any Portuguese recipe, craft or post you have as well. Next month we will be visiting Croatia.

Activities for Understanding Easter

I hope you have been enjoying our exploration of Easter Around the World. Today I thought I would take a break from it and share some of the things we have been doing to remember and understand the true meaning of Easter and the events of Holy Week. First we will start with a few of the Easter books we have been reading that really share the meaning and give children a good idea of Easter and the story.

The first book is an old book that is out of print, but we found it at our library as well as our church's library. I also just ordered a used copy from Amazon. It is The Robin and the Thorn by Sara Lee Donze. The only pictures of it I found on-line do not include the jacket cover. However I did take one before we returned it to the library.

This is a wonderful tale of a brown bird who watches the events of Holy Week unfold. He sees the mysterious man on a donkey that the crowd cheers and waves palms as well as put cloaks on the ground for the donkey to walk on. He visits Jerusalem the night of Maundy Thursday to get crumbs from all the houses having their Seder Dinner and watches as Jesus washes the feet of the disciples and hears the disciples at first argue with him about doing it. Jesus sees him and feeds him some of the bread. He watches as the soldiers arrest Jesus in the garden and take him away. He watches as Jesus is tortured and he tries to help Jesus by removing a thorn that is piercing his forehead. The blood on the thorn turns the brown bird's chest red He watches as Jesus is crucified and dies. He awakens a few mornings later to find his chest is still red and watches as the women find the empty tomb. He sings a song of joy for he understands what it means. This is a legend of how the robin got his red chest.

To go along with this book we made a crown of thorns bread. I got this idea from Catholic Icing: Crown of Thorns Bread. (She also has a wonderful Good Friday lunch idea posted.) The bread is easy to make. You can use any bread recipe or a pre-made one. We went the easy method for this and used a Pillsbury French bread dough. You also need a bag of pretzel sticks and an egg. To make it you beat the egg. Divide the dough into three long strips and braid them. Then form them in to a circle. Then "paint" the dough with the egg--this was Hazel's favorite part. Bake it according to recipe. When it comes out you add the thorns by pushing the pretzels in it. When Hazel ate a pretzel out of it she told me she was removing a thorn.

Last year we made a crown of thorns from clay and toothpicks.

The next book, The Legend of the Sand Dollar: An Inspirational Story of Hope for Easter by Chris Auer, I shared on Sunday. We had not had time to do one of the activities to go with it yet, but now we have. We made sand dollar cookies. We unfortunately did not have almond slivers and tried slices. Slivers would have been much better.

The final book is from a series of books that I love. The book, God Gave Us Easter by Lisa Tawn Bergren, is a wonderful tale with the polar bears and Little Cub discovering the meaning of Easter and how God talks to her heart. Although we did not do a direct activity to go with this book, we have done some more for the meaning of Easter.

We made Resurrection Rolls like we have in the past. I did a picture tutorial for you. We also grew our Resurrection Garden. We started it late, but luckily I had gotten fast growing grass seeds and with just about a week of growth time it looks pretty good.

Our final craft is not really about the meaning of Easter but is a fun one. I saw it over at Tippytoe Crafts: Peeps Nest. Hazel has been home sick this week and I thought this would be a fun craft for her to do quickly. (Her fever is finally dropping and she has more energy.) All you need for this craft is a cupcake liner, some Easter grass, jelly beans and a Peeps chick.

Under the chick are her eggs of course.

For more ideas on sharing the Easter story and true meaning check out: