a successful lunch engagement

Today i made lunch for a friend of mine, Sanae, who does occasional conversation exchange meetings with me, although the meetings are usually tilted towards the Japanese side because her English is not good enough to converse with. My Japanese is broken and poor, but i can hold a conversation. I am very proud of myself because i made the lunch by myself and properly entertained a Japanese person without any gaijin awkwardness. I made her this lunch in return for the picnic lunch she made us for our last meeting, which was so meticulously planned and appropriate that it quite startled me. I cooked the following: burdock root with carrots sauteed in sesame oil with sugar and soy sauce; daikon radish, leek, and an unnamed root vegetable resembling a flower bulb steamed with sweet sake and flavored with miso, and steamed pumpkin with curry sauce. I also made some rice. She brought two slices of expensive cheesecake as dessert. She kept exclaiming on how delicious the food was, so i can safely say that i managed to cook something resembling Japanese food that a Japanese person enjoyed. Mission accomplished! We drank brown rice tea with the cheesecake and i roasted the pumpkin seeds so she could try some: apparently, in Japan, the seeds are not usually eaten. I told her that during Halloween as a child, after carving the pumpkin, we would roast and eat the seeds. She was thoroughly amazed.
Tomorrow i shall have lunch with my friend Travis, the tall lanky ex-vegetarian who so kindly made me dinner so many times.
Well, this has been another session of cooking with Jamie. Or rather, just the descriptions of the foods. I don't care if you don't enjoy reading about it.