soup and mochi

At lunch today my mother made a very traditional japanese New Year's food, which nevertheless I'd never had before. Mochi is a kind of rice cake that you get either fresh or dried - and traditionally is apparently eaten in soups around New Year. The dry stuff, which is what we had, looks like an inedibly rock-hard, dry square of fudge but then you put it in the oven or grill it, and it magically softens and puffs up, becoming something like a gooey ball of cheese with air inside it in texture, but obviously nothing like it in taste, which is a comforting toasted rice taste, a bit like the lovely sticky bits at the bottom of the pan when you burn it accidentally-on-purpose.

Altogether it looks quite strange - but is really delicious in soup, when you put it, a bit like a croute, in the bottom of the bowl before the rest of the soup is poured on. It is quite sticky and apparently, every year in the papers you hear about lots of old people who choke on their mochi.

Today we had it with a sort of Japanese variant soup with the strange furry potato-like things, carrots, tofu all diced, slivers of raw leek, ginger and fennel and little bits of toasted orange zest on top as a garnish. It was thoroughly heart-warming stuff before we set out for a good walk in the snowy fields. We didn't make our own mochi, of course, although I found lots of interesting links on my google search about how to make it and all the rituals. My mother bought it at Fresh & Wild...