By Chisaki Sato
The North American Post
The community came together on January 13 to celebrate the new year with a mochitsuki event at Nisei Veteran’s Committee Memorial Hall.
About 40 volunteers from several local organizations and kenjinkai and about the same number of hungry guests came to pound mochi into delicious rice cakes.
Mochitsuki literally means pounding rice to make mochi rice cakes. In Japan, people do it to celebrate the hopeful start of a new year.
People were encouraged to give the mochi-pounding a try. And once the cakes were made, everyone tried mochi dishes such as zoni (soup witht mochi), kinako mochi (cakes dusted with nutty kinako powder), mochi and seaweed dipped in soy sauce, and mochi with anko (sweet red bean paste).
There were even two different kinds of zoni: Hiroshima style (with oysters) and Shizuoka style (with mushrooms).
My favorite dish was the mochi and seaweed with soy sauce. Oishikatta!
Chisaki Sato is an exchange student from Fukushima, She’s a graduate of Sophia University in Japan. You can find her at her current job working in the Chin Music Press store in Pike Place Market.
