A Haiku or two...courtesy of Satan's cookbook

As many of you may or may not know, I am a bit of a cooking enthusiast. While I won't be appearing on Iron Chef any time soon, I'd like to think that I get by pretty well with my cuisines. It is natural, then, that one of the first sections I planned revolved around cooking. In particular, one lesson involved students translating Japanese recipes into English. This served two instrumental purposes. First, the students got some very good practice using cooking verbs and common nouns like oil, salt, sugar, pot...They were busy with dictionaries and simple English recipes that I had given them as models. Second, I got a free English translation of a Japanese cookbook! One oversight on my part, however, was not checking with my JTE (Japanese Teacher of English who team teaches all my classes with me) the recipes that they chose. Some students chose incredibly difficult and involved recipes, with actions I didn't even know were done in a kitchen. (What the hell is flambee?)

Some students, to my surprise and delight, did quite well. (I am giving them grades based on how tasty I thought the dish was) Others, however, turned in finished products that much more resembled esoteric poems than recipes. Here are three of my favorite poems.

I serve soup in the container which I cooled
and save the light blue that I made slicing

...

The potato barks and makes it light
Ginko limits and exposes itself to water
The onion barks and slices it thin
to fiber in the right angle direction

Melt butter in a pan and fry it
not to burn till I soften
I drain land
As well as I fly lightly

...

While is warm, write four in the mixer; re mud whole;
it is similar, and become it
With the small strainer of eyes, go carefully


Honestly, I have changed nothing but the spacing. They really used semi colons (there are no semicolons in Japanese) and "till" and "small strainer of eyes." Honestly, I think you could throw that last one in with a few Poe poems and no one would be the wiser.