Making Mochi

Ever heard of Mochi? I hadn't until we took the kids to a Mochi pounding party at Jarom's school on Friday (an event put on by the school's Japanese club). Although it looked like sand covered slugs and tasted like oddly sweet blobs of paste, I'm told that Mochi is a Japanese rice cake made of glutinous rice pounded into paste and molded into shape. Jack and Olivia both helped Jarom pound the Mochi with wooden mallets (kine) in a traditional mortar (usu) while the onlooking Japanese students chanted something in Japanese. Now that I'm thinking about it, perhaps they were shouting KINE and USU alternately. . . it was fun all the same.