Takoyaki with CCC & Kittens

Every time the Kittens visit Michigan, we try to have a party together with Chit Chat Club. It is a good chance for our CCC friends to have more Americans for practicing English, and they share a little Japanese culture as well.

This year, it was a Takoyaki party, complete with fresh "tako" - octopus! Octopus isn't exactly a common food for Americans, so this was a good cultural piece to share (plus, it tasted delicious).

Junko was our head-chef, who directed us on what to do in preparing the batter. Ingredients can vary a bit, according to your taste. These below included ginger. The batter is poured into the pan (which has rounded indents in it) and then the other ingredients are added.

We laughed because one of our takoyaki pans was actually brought by a Korean friend!

In fact, it was a rather international gathering... Japanese, American, Korean, Canadian, and Mexican friends joined us that day!

But everyone pitched in to take turns cooking the takoyaki... as the batter cooks, you use something like a long toothpick to divide them into the individual "ball" sections and flip them over. We cooked a LOT of takoyaki... because we ate a lot of takoyaki!

Rinka served as our "quality control chief."

Chef Junko even suggested we try it with bacon instead of octopus - and to add corn as well. We dubbed them "bacornyaki" and they were just as "oishi" (delicious) as the original!

Micah agreed. He ate a lot that day - takoyaki and the great potluck dishes everyone brought.

Of course, even with two takoyaki pans, it took a long time to cook all that we ate. So there was plenty of opportunity for socializing. I was most proud of Setsuko. She's one of our newer CCC members and hasn't been in the US very long. Even though she is still a "beginner" with her English, she sought out Becca and spent a long time in conversation with her. Their boys even hung out a bit!

And Miki hit it off with the English-speaking kids as well. We love having these younger ladies who are such good "babysitters"!

The best part, though, was that the Kittens got to see Tomoko one more time before her move back to Japan. It was special to have this reunion of three of my bridesmaids!