New Year's – Part 2

This is the second part of today's post. Be sure to check out the previous page!

A week and a half ago I was invited to go with a friend to their in-law's house to make mochi. Mochi is a gummy, goey cake made from pounded and kneaded rice. The traditional method of making mochi is to use a mallet and mortar. (I'm talking about a mortar and pestle kind of situation- not an explosive.) However, we used an electric mochi maker. You can mix different ingredients in during the mixing phase, including sesame seeds, powdered shrimp, or something that your host can only vaguely explain as “a sort of dried grass”. 

 (The electric mochi maker steams the rice and then mixes/breaks it up with a blade at the bottom of the bowl. This means that the mochi bounces around a little as it forms up into a large ball. It almost leaped out a couple times!)

 (A large hunk of green mochi fresh from the mixer. We then pulled off smaller pieces and rolled them up with anko, sweetened red bean paste, inside.)

 

 (We literally ground up shrimp for one of the mochi batches. There was something cathartic about pulverizing hundreds of tiny dried crustaceans.)


Anyway, we had a lot of fun making the mochi, though eating it was more of a challenge. Mochi is so difficult to chew and swallow that very young children are not allowed to eat it. The saying also goes that you know you're old when your children start to cut your mochi into small pieces for you. Supposedly a handful of elderly people die each year from choking on mochi. I don't know if this is an urban legend or not, but after eating a few balls of the stuff myself, I'm more inclined to believe.

The purpose of the evening had been to get together and have a cultural experience, but I'm afraid the entertainment of the evening was supplied by my friend's 19-month-old son and his father-in-law's elderly cat. 
 

 (The duo, asleep on the heated carpet.)

The cat's name is San-chan after the sandwiches used to gain her trust and affection in her former life as a stray. The toddler's name is Ryu, or “dragon”, based partly on the mess he makes when he rampages. San-chan generally tried to stay away from Ryu while he was up and about, as his attempts to pet her were more or less concussive in force. She was more or less out of sight for most of the evening, which didn't change when we all sat down to have dinner. Ryu was placed in his high-chair and given a bowl of luke-warm clam chowder. In good faith he was also given a spoon, but this didn't see much use. 

 (Ryu doesn't have much in the way of stranger anxiety yet. During our first meeting he trotted over to me and sat down in my lap without much ceremony.)
 
About halfway through the meal Ryu-kun suddenly let out a squeal of delight from his perch as he craned his neck over the side of his seat. His grandfather investigated and then asked for a damp towel. As my friend filled me in I learned that San-chan had taken to sitting under Ryu's high-chair in previous visits so that she could eat the tidbits that he dropped. Ryu, being obliging, then started to actively drop food for her to eat. In this particular case the cat had sat in one place just long enough for Ryu-kun to drop a toddler-handful of clam chowder smack on the top of her head.
I now know that the antics of toddlers and cats are a cross-culture experience that we can all enjoy.



-Andrew