This year's class ended with a pleasant visit by a Tokyo resident and his mother visiting from UK. We did a supermarket tour followed by a cooking class for beginners. Since the start of my cooking class in September, I've had many lovely moments with all of my wonderful guests. I hope to meet more people in the year 2015!

Yes, it's the time of the year of mochi-tsuki (rice pounding). A special rice, mochi-gome (sweet rice) is steamed and pounded to be made into the traditional rice cakes. These rice cakes are essential to the New Year tradition. During this season, you may encounter mochi-tsuki at any neighborhood or school, or community centers. 

Rice cakes will be used to make Kagami-mochi a set of round shaped rice cakes resembling a Kagami (Mirror) - a symbol of a sacred treasure for god with an orange on top. This is an offering to the god on New Years Day. On January 11th, we will take down the Kagami-mochi and eat it. This is called "Kagami-biraki" (Opening of the Mirror).

So on Sunday, we had our own Mochi Tsuki in our neighborhood and my two sons along with the other children helped with the mochi pounding.

Today was my first Kids baking class. It was conducted at my client's home with 5 little angels ready to do some baking. I decided to do a Christmas tree using cookies cut out in various sizes of stars and stacked. This recipe uses vegetable oil instead of butter, so it will not go soft while the kids are rolling it out and cutting it.  I was impressed how the girls are determined do the job right and yes indeed, the outcome was fabulous! 

In today's class we did a supermarket tour and I explained the ingredients we will use in the class as well as answer any questions on what to buy. I didn't realize how shopping in the Japanese supermarket can be so challenging to the non-Japanese residents. Most things are only written in Japanese! In the near future I would like to make a webpage dedicated to how to shop in the Japanese Supermarket.

In the class I explained how to wash and cook rice properly as well as how to make the dash (soup stock) and couple of dishes using the dashi.