Happy New Year

In the spirit of the new year, we visited a shrine in our neighborhood to make some wishes for the coming year. We were pretty overwhelmed by the masses of people visiting the shrine, but a pleasant surprise was that the shrine was serving complimentary bowls of ozouni, a Japanese soup with mochi rice cakes traditionally eaten on New Year's. It was a small and simple soup with just mochi, a fish cake, and some greens, but it was tasty.

So when we got home, I decided to make my own version of ozouni with some more ingredients: chicken, daikon, carrots, shiitake mushrooms, mitsuba greens, and ofu (wheat gluten shaped like flowers to make the soup more festive-looking). We toasted the mochi in the toaster oven, making the mochi expand to look like miniature snowmen, as you can see from the pictures. The mochi then went into the soup to complete our homemade ozouni. The mochi were crunchy out of the toaster, but once in the soup they were soft and chewy, becoming the stars of a hearty New Year's meal.