Mochitsuki Party

I'm pretty lucky that I work with some great people.  One of them, Nomura-sensei, invited a few of us to her place to make mochi - rice cakes.  The process can be fun yet tiring, so people make an event out of it and invite friends around to help.  Thus, the "mochitsuki party" was born.

Mochi is traditionally made by putting steamed rice in a mortar (known as an usu) and pounding it into rice cake using a hammer-shaped pestle (known as a kine).

Usu and kine

Everyone takes it in turns pounding, while someone occasionally reaches in between poundings and rotates the blob of rice.  The rice gets extremely sticky at this point, so you need to regularly dip your hands (or the kine) in a bucket of water.

Yokoyama-sensei smashes the rice

Imai-sensei turns the rice over

 

Imai-sensei helps Takato, Nomura-sensei's son

Ice patterns on the car

Mochi splattered on the car

It was my first mochitsuki since Michael and I hung out in Okinawa in 2010, where some people were doing it at our hotel. So the action of smacking rice with a giant wooden hammer carried a fair bit of nostalgia for adventures past.

There have been a lot of nostalgic moments in the last year.

I soon learned why Nomura-sensei wanted so many of us around to help.  We made no less than five batches of mochi - which is no small feat.  People tend to make a year's worth of mochi in the one day, as it stores in the freezer all year.

Part of the deal was that we got to eat the first batch.  We broke it into balls, then added one of the following flavours:

Making balls

Black sesame (below),

anko (red bean paste),

kinako (roasted soybean flour, below),

and grated daikon (Japanese radish) with soy sauce.

The following four batches went through a separate process.  First, we rolled them out flat with potato starch to keep the mochi from sticking.

Imai-sensei rolls the rice out

Nomura-sensei (left), Takato (middle) and Imai-sensei (right)

Next, we cut them up into slices for freezer storage, so we all got to take plenty of mochi home.

Between pounding sessions, we chatted, played games, and at one stage I pulled out the tube of Vegemite I'd gotten for Christmas.  I was curious to see how many of my Japanese friends would like it.

I squirted some on a small plate and a couple of them dipped their fingers in.  No surprise - the Vegemite wasn't a hit.  However, I asked Nomura-sensei to make some toast with butter, then we spread some Vegemite on that.  This is the step many foreigners don't take when trying Vegemite, and it's often a condemning one.  Once my friends were eating the Vegemite in the proper way (with plenty of butter), no one could say they disliked it.  In fact, some went as far to say it tasted good.  This, to my experience, is unusual for non-Australians trying Vegemite for the first time!

I decided to take it a step further, and made Takato, Nomura-sensei's son, put some mochi on his Vegemite toast.  At first he didn't seem keen on it, but then he ate it all and didn't seem to have any problems.

Vegemite toast with mochi

One of my other colleagues, Imai-sensei, drove me home.  On the way back, we made an interesting stop.  Every winter, a flock of swans migrates to Suwa Lake.

One boy who was there was throwing pieces of bread to the swans and ducks.

For a moment I considered pulling out my tube of Vegemite and seeing how the swans would fare... but ultimately, I decided I didn't want to be a bird killer.