Nihongo-a-Go-Go :: Mandy's Journal

Mochi!

Hello, all!

I hope that everyone had a happy Christmas. I am finally on winter break, ah....feels good to just sleep in. New Year's is coming and, in Japan, that means everything shuts down. Including grocery stores, shopping stores...and ATM's. Convenience stores are still open, from what I've been told, but Aimee and I decided to go stock up at the grocery store.

The store was absolutely insane today! Everyone else was shopping for New Year's as well. Traditionally, there is no cooking done for the first three days of the new year, so Japanese families prepare food in the days before. This food, called osechi, is put in beautiful multi-tiered boxes, which are called jubako, and is eaten for January 1, 2, and 3. The foods chosen and the methods used for preparing them are all symbolic, such as herring roe which is included as a wish for many children in the new year (as apparently herring ovaries contain thousands of eggs). Many people no longer prepare the osechi from scratch; they can purchase the pieces ready-made at the grocery stores...heck, even at some convenience stores.

Aimee and I did not stock up on many traditional foods...as a matter of fact, some we seriously avoided. We bought...(you can skip this if you don't care about our grocery list)...

tomato sauce
sliced meat
yaki soba noodles
scallops
sugar
tissues (not for consumption)
ice cream
bean sprouts
chocolate
bread
cheese
instant yaki soba
nachos (woot!)
mochi
those little pastry things with smooth sweet bean paste in them

I shall explain about the last four items.

The instant yaki soba is great. You basically just add boiling water to the container, let it steep for three minutes, drain the water, add the sauce and dried veggies, and there you go! That was the first part of dinner. The second part of dinner was the packaged nachos. Chips (an odd salsa-bbq flavor) and spicy salsa. Hotter than I would have eaten at home, but delightful. Yum! Now the last two.

Aimee likes the little bean paste things, so those are all her. I just can't get into them. They're shaped like maple leaves, and traditional yummies. You can just see one in the pic, and you can see the package on the right. Mochi are pressed rice goo cakes that you can bake or fry or boil. The recipe I want to try is baking the mochi, then rolling it in soy sauce, and eating it with a slice of cheese. Sounds yummy! If you're interested in mochi, here's a website with more recipes. Happy New Year!

Posted by Mandy at December 30, 2004 11:46 PM