Mochi's Namesake

New Years seems like a perfect time talk about Mochi. Mochi happens to be our dog's name and whenever I tell people his name they say, "Oh, like the ice cream." Since I don't really want to go into a long explanation of why they are technically wrong, I say, "Yeah, pretty much." I guess I'm contributing to the ignorance of mankind, but it really doesn't seem like a big deal. And I guess I'm also pleased that they even know what Mochi Ice Cream is in the first place.

Ok, so what is Mochi Ice Cream? Well, you can get it at Trader Joes and it's basically ice cream inside of mochi. It comes in different flavors like vanilla, green tea, strawberry and azuki bean (the azuki bean may be the subject of another post, so for now, just go with it).

But what is mochi? It's a Japanese rice cake. In it's simplest form, it doesn't really taste like much - plain white rice. In the olden days, you made it by pounding glutinous rice into a paste/dough and then molded it into little balls with a flat bottom. Thanks to the genius of modern technology, you can now load up your mochi machine with rice and it comes out in a lovely lump of goo. Sounds delicious, I know.

Then you dump it out on a Mochiko sprinkled surface. Mochiko is like flour. It's like when you make cookies and sprinkle flour on the surface to keep the dough from sticking.

Then someone breaks off mini pieces of mochi and everyone crowds around and shapes the mini pieces into little round lumps. You have to go very fast because it's super hot and gets a little crusty as it cools.

The fruits of our labor - batch #1.

It's so good warm and right out of the machine. It's literally just a big ball of carbs. We made mochi at my aunts house last Monday in preparation for New Years. Which leads me to part 2 of this blog post.

New Years is to the Japanese like Super Bowl is to America. You make a ton of food and sit around all day and eat it. The difference, is that the Japanese food recipes are way more involved - in my opinion - and a little less heavy - no twice baked potatoes or pigs in a blanket at New Years.

The quintessential new years dish - at least it was while I was growing up - was Ozoni (pronounced OZONE-Y). It's basically soup with a piece of baked mochi in it.

I've missed New Years - Japanese style - for the past couple of years because I've always been in California. But this year, my neighbors and I decided to make a "traditional" new years spread. Which meant that I was going to make ozoni.

The soup is chicken based so I asked my aunt "can I just use chicken broth" - to which she responded with a look that said something like "not if you want it to taste any good." Ok, so off I went to make chicken broth from scratch. Then you mix in all sorts of random Japanese sauces - sake, mirin, memmi, shoyu (Japanese for Soy Sauce) and dashi. Then you add kamaboko (bright pink rimmed stuff, Japanese fish cake), daikon (radish), carrots, chicken and mizuna (Japanese parsley/spinach) to the the mix, bake a piece of mochi in the oven and you're set.

And here it is, all finished. DId I mention you are suppose to cut the daikon and carrots into little flowers? Seriously part of the recipe.

Made some for Nick and I new years and he ate it and said it was good. Either way, it's good luck. So all you suckers that didn't have any ozoni, I sure hope you keep a rabbits foot or something else in your pocket :-)

We spent the rest of the day at our neighbors, gorging ourselves with sushi, Char Siu, fried chicken - asian style, tofu, soba noodles, chawan mushi....and the list goes on.

Here, Zoe is beating up uncle Nick. He seems to be taking it well.

So there you have it. A little background on mochi and ozoni. I bet you didn't realize how much random Japanese stuff I knew. But then again, I guess it makes sense. You know, me being Japanese and all :-)