Mochi Maki

Yesterday I went to a mochimaki in my neighborhood. When people build a new house, it is tradition to have this thing where they throw mochi off the roof of the semi-completed house and neighborhood people, mostly kids, vie for it. Mochi, 餅, or 餠, if you prefer your characters old school, is this food that you make by taking a certain kind of rice and basically cooking it past the normal soft phase, using hot water, while you pound it. One would traditionally do that with a big wooden hammer and a special mochi holding thing, which I've gotten to do before, but now it is mass produced somehow and you can buy it in stores. What you get is a soft white substance, though it is often colored pink or green by adding other stuff like cherry or some kind of edible grass-type thing, which one might call rice cake, but cake is much lighter than this. There are a bunch of uses for it, including as an ingredient for special soups, and it's traditional to eat it at new years', but people eat it fairly regularly as a treat in various forms. Here is some that I've cooked (again, I didn't make it originally) with my toaster oven.


It puffs up like that and browns a bit when you cook it. The thing to do with mochi that you cook like this is add nori and shouyu, as such:


Nori is a kind of dry seaweed, the same kind that makizushi, literally rolled sushi, is wrapped in, though here it is just in strips because I have a bag of that for eating with rice. Shouyu is just soy sauce. You can totally taste the Japan in this and it is great. I only got this one little bag of mochi because I was not trying to catch any of it, but rather take videos of them throwing it off the roof with my cellphone, but this bag hit me in the foot, and some guy insisted I take it instead of giving it to a kindergartener. I also got some cream-filled bread which was pretty good because they just give out other kinds of food. Good times were had by all.

I just found out that the character 餅 is read bing3 in Chinese, and means biscuit. The 3 represents a tone for those wondering. Will wonders never cease?