When my friends and I went out for lunch today, I was asked about these 2 Japanese kanji: "炙り", "挽肉", since I'm Chinese and I'm supposed to be the "Kanji Reader" in the Gaijin group.

Hmm, but I let them down.. What I said was "I don't know because we don't have those kanji in Chinese". But I was wrong! We do have "炙" and "挽" in Chinese, it's just these kanji have highly fixed usages so I couldn't recognise them in when they combined with Japanese Hiragana.

Any here are the meanings:

• 炙り(あぶり) - grill
• 挽肉(ひきにく) - ground meat

Even though I've lived in Japan for over 5 years, I still find myself rarely know any Japanese vocabularies related to cooking or food.