Otsukimi

The Otsukimi Festival is a time of year when the moon becomes full, and people gather to take part in the harvest and marvel at the moon's natural wonder. The tradition stands that people make and eat foods the resemble the moon somehow. Eggs work, bread works, but in most cases the snack of choice is mochi.

A group here at AIU put on an Otsukimi festival last sunday, and Jessi and I both attended. Granted when I had signed the both of us up for it, I didn't know what Otsukimi meant, but I knew it was a thing. We went and everyone helped make mochi.



For those who don't know what Mochi is, it is a traditional japanese treat. Mochi is made from glutonous rice flour, which makes for a very fine, very gooey dough. The dough is then formed into little balls, and boiled.



The process requires using your hands which become very very sticky and covered in dough. We had a lot of people attend and so there was a lot of Mochi to go around.





The resulting boiled balls can then be eaten, or flattened and wrapped around something delicious like ice cream. We had ice cream, black sugar syrup, and powdered soybean.



If you'd like a recomendation, it was so good I couldn't really get a good picture before it was all gone. They returned us the cooked mochi and it was like shark week on the discovery channel. Absolute carnage.



-Mack