Zhinka dinka doo

Children's Day

First: thank you all for the birthday wishes earlier this week! It was so nice to open my email to all your wonderful notes!

Now, continuing on. This Monday was Children's Day in Japan. We had a celebration at Max's school. I dressed in a kimono that I got from a friend. We brought in a koi nobori that we received from the wonderfully generous Debbie (more on this later), along with irises both real and paper, fusen (origami paper balloons), origami kabuto (Max calls them Viking helmets, I call them samurai helmets), and rice-based treats.

Max has been practicing his origami tecniques for a week and has made about 20 kabutos. We brought in extra paper and he sat down to teach classmates how to fold the kabuto.

The rice treats were yaki onigiri and mochi crackers. The mochi crackers were made from store-bought dry mochi cakes (I used these, the Super Seed variety), sliced into thin little bits and baked at 450 for about 5-10 minutes. They're cracker-like but with an interesting chewy texture.

While these were both good, I had spent the weekend attempting a different snack, mochi (the soft, fresh kind). I tried making it with mochiko (sweet glutinous rice flour), but my mochiko was quite old and I'm not certain it was the right kind. I usually get a certain brand, but I had gone to our local (and now defunct) asian grocery where the woman there assured me that this was the same stuff. After trying it, I'm not convinced. They were inedible and so were tossed. Next I tried making mochi from actual sweet glutinous rice grains, not the flour. I soaked, drained, steamed. The next step is to pound the cooked rice with mallets, but since our mallets are all out for repair, I tried kneading it in the bread machine (something I read online, but I can't find it now). After a long time of waiting and resetting the machine to knead some more, it made a dough that is reminiscent of mochi, but is not really mochi. For the children's day party I finally gave up, but I want to try this again and see if I can get it to work better now that I have more time.

Sewing circle cake

Tonight is my night to host the weekly sewing circle, so I made cake. White vanilla cake, with a secret. It's made with tofu! The recipe is "tofu pudding cake" and it uses a box of silken tofu plus a pouch of tofu pudding mix. It's dairy-free, or would have been had I not used butter.

Desserts at sewing group are encouraged to be test desserts. You know how you would not try a recipe for the first time when you're having a bunch of work friends over? Well this group is not like that, we're all about testing and learning. This one looked like an interesting recipe, I wondered what the tofu would add.

The taste, of course, is the thing. And this one is delicious. The tofu gives it an interesting flavor layer, like there's something else there but you don't know what (in a good way). I had to taste a little piece--just to make sure it was ok, you understand--and kept on taking little slices all the way across the cake until I had eaten more than half the row! It's a hit with me, we'll see what everyone else thinks of it.

Now I must go and pick up the boatload of toys that are scattered about before people arrive.

Homemade morning

For some reason, last night I decided that this morning we would have fresh bread and fresh butter. So I mixed together a batch of No-Knead Bread 2.0 from the Cook's Illustrated February 2008 issue (it differs slightly from the NYT no-knead bread by the addition of vinegar and beer, plus a minimal 15-second kneading) and put it into the water-heater closet to do its thing last night.

This morning as I stumbled out of bed and got ready to go on my morning walk, I remembered that I was supposed to do something, something, what was it? Aha, the bread! I did the 15-second knead, put it to rise again into the skillet, then went on my too-cold walk. After an hour in the oven, I had the most beautiful loaf of bread I have ever made. It was smaller and denser than the normal no-knead bread, but after restraining myself for a LONG time (10 minutes) I cut into the loaf to find a nice, not-too-dense structure. And yes, the taste of this bread is much more complex than the original no-knead recipe. "Complex" doesn't sound too descriptive. Let's just call it yummy.

While the bread was baking, I poured a half-pint of heavy cream into a canning jar and handed it to Max, who then quickly passed it off to me, who then passed it off to dad. It took about 30 minutes among the three of us, and was easy/really hard/easy. The beginning and end stages were easy because there was enough liquid to move things around. The middle stage--the whipped cream stage--was quite difficult because all it wanted to do was to stick to the sides of the jar, so the normal shaking motions didn't achieve much. We had to shake harder, and my elbows are still recalling that stage. The resulting butter, seen in the little bowl in the first picture, is good, but not as flavorful as I had imagined it would be. Still, I have no problems in eating this slightly less flavorful butter:

Our experiences this morning taught me that (1) there is a point to a butter churn, I can only assume it is easier to use than that middle stage with the jar and (2) doing things the pioneer way is an exercise program in itself, no gym membership required.