Connecting through cuisine
Whoever said that no kitchen was big enough for two women?! Fully 14 women squeezed happily into the kitchen at a cooking class organized by Island Time, a forum recently launched by Lai Cing-soong, co-founder of the Ko-Tong Rice Club in Yilan County. With Lai’s wife Chu Mei-hung serving as interpreter, Shiho Fujiyabu taught the students how to do Japanese-style home cooking using local Yilan ingredients.
One of the dishes made by Ms. Fujiyabu was chicken nanbanzuke, which features fried chicken smothered in sweet and sour sauce and topped with tartar sauce. This dish, which originated in her hometown of Miyazaki, is now all the rage throughout Japan. For cold hors d’oeuvres she went with shira-ae (mashed tofu salad), using in-season bamboo shoots and her favorite Taiwanese pineapple. It was outstanding.
Fujiyabu demonstrated how to fry up a beautiful tamagoyaki (Japanese omelet), then handed a frying pan to a student so the latter could give it a try. Next she took rice produced this year by the Ko-Tong Rice Club and had the students use it to make vegetable sushi from shiso, bell peppers, shiitake mushrooms, avocado, eggplant, and edamame.
Despite the language barrier, laughter rang out continually during the cooking class. In the none-too-spacious kitchen, the students busily shaped sushi balls, taste tested, laid out sushi platters, and took photos. Their work complete, they all sat down to eat, and before starting they said in unison: “itadakimasu!”
The roots of this scintillating culinary experience trace back to Taiwan Juku, a 2015 course on Taiwanese farm cuisine which was held in Kyushu and funded by the government of Miyazaki Prefecture.
Fujiyabu, who has a distinct “girl next door” air about her, quit her job as a journalist in 2010 and switched to cooking, for which she has had a passion since childhood. “It was like I had switched to using cooking as my journalistic medium,” she says. She returned from Tokyo to her hometown and joined in the Taiwan Juku project promoted by the Miyazaki Enterprise Promotion Organization. This marked the beginning of a deeper relationship with Taiwan.
In 2018, Fujiyabu opened a cooking studio called Syoku Sekkei (“food design and coordination”), and in the summer of 2019 she approached Lai Cing-soong with a proposal to come and teach cooking classes in Taiwan. Lai, for his part, already had a dream of maintaining strong ties with farm cuisine partners in Kyushu, and so accepted the proposal with alacrity. “We’re using dreams to support our dreams,” says Lai.
The government-sponsored Taiwan Juku project was only set to run for a year, and has now come to an end, but in the meantime, its emphasis on “making friends above all else” has led to a lot more people-to-people ties than anyone ever anticipated.
The cooking classes that Shiho Fujiyabu taught in Taiwan were a huge success.