May your New Year be lovely

Having a quiet New Year's Eve with Rob and homemade sushi.Rob and I stayed in and had a quiet New Year’s Eve. When we got married, we wound up combining our various cultural traditions into an odd conglomeration of Hawaii and Tennessee. So on New Year’s Eve, we clean from the back of the house to the front, in order to sweep the bad luck out the door.

Then we make sushi.

And on New Year’s Day we have black-eyed peas, collards, cornbread, and ozoni.

When we moved to Chicago, we had to suspend parts of that because we couldn’t find sushi grade fish in the markets. Now there’s a new fishmonger in our neighborhood and, yes, they have fish for sushi. We still need to source fresh mochi for the ozoni, but I’m trying my hand at making it for the first time (rice flour, not doing the whole pounding thing) so we’re getting closer to having our platonic ideal of New Year’s back.

We have friends coming over to join us today, so the New Year looks like it is starting out right. May yours be lovely and bright.

P.S. Turns out Thai rice flour behaves very differently from Japanese rice flour.

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11 thoughts on “May your New Year be lovely”

  1. Happy New Year, Mary!

    Can I ask you about the differences between Thai rice flour and Japanese rice flour? I haven’t worked much with rice flour, so this would have never occurred to me.

    1. I’m not sure why they are different, but in the video that went with the recipe, adding the liquid to the flour made a stiff dough. Adding it to this turned it into a batter the thickness of heavy cream. Things went downhill from there.

      1. Thai rice flour is made from made from long grain sticky rice. Japanese sweet rice flour is made from short grain sweet rice.

        My local Safeway in Arizona carries Koda Farms Mochiko Sweet Rice flour in the gluten-free flour section.

        If your local supermarket or asian market does not carry Japanese sweet rice flour, go to a health food store as it is very popular for gluten-free baking.

  2. Happy New Year!! I have yet to try to make Mochi myself. I have a Japanese cook book my mother had, of course, its in Japanese so it doesn’t help HA! Good Luck in your quest to find the flour. Find the best Japanese restaurant. Sometimes there would be a Japanese grocery store next door!

  3. Oh dear, sorry about the mochi. Well, I’m sure you can cook it into something edible unless it’s only worth tossing out.

    We stayed in too; we eat hors d’oeuvres (frozen, not homemade) and drink bubbly. Today we’re having more h d’o, bubbly, and black eyed peas. I have some mochi ice cream in the freezer so I will eat that in Rob’s honor.

    I hope everyone has a better year this year than last.

  4. My wife Shannon and I were supposed to go ring in the New Year with our neighbors, but they decided to go to a different party, so Shannon and I watched Blu Rays on our new living room Blu Ray player and watched some movies streaming on Amazon Prime. Some wine at the stroke of midnight. It made for a wonderful night.

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