Emiko Davies
Serves: Makes 6
Prep time: 20 mins
Cook time: 40 mins
Ingredients:
140 g (5 oz) Japanese rice
250 ml (1 cup) water
WALNUT MISO
60 g (½ cup) shelled walnut pieces
2 tablespoons miso
2 tablespoons brown sugar or honey
½ teaspoon sesame seeds
Recipe donated by Emiko Davies from The Japanese Pantry GOHEIMOCHI
Mochi simply means ‘rice cake’ – and beyond the sweet, chewy versions you might know, it can also be made from sticky rice lightly pounded by hand, as it is in the mountains of central Japan. This rustic style, traditionally grilled over charcoal after the autumn harvest, is brushed with a sweet-salty miso sauce; I especially love it with walnuts, toasted until the rice is crisp and nutty at the edges.
You’ll likely have a little walnut miso left over – a very good thing, as it’s wonderful spooned onto just about anything.
Method:
Put the rice in a sieve and wash a few times to remove the excess starch. Drain and tip into a saucepan. Add the water and bring to a simmer. Cover, reduce the heat to the lowest setting and simmer for 15–17 minutes until the rice is tender. Keep covered and leave to steam off the heat for a further 10 minutes. You can also use a rice cooker for this.
Lightly pound the rice a few times using a suribachi or mortar and pestle (or get creative if you don’t have one – the end of a rolling pin and a bowl, for example). It should be a sort of sticky mass but with still visible rice grains.
With wet hands, roll the rice into 6 balls, then push bamboo skewers or popsicle sticks into the balls and shape into flattened ovals around the sticks (they are meant to look like waraji sandals).
To make the walnut miso, grind the walnuts – a suribachi does this perfectly, or use a mortar and pestle. Make this as chunky or smooth as you like.
Add the miso and brown sugar and about 1 tablespoon water to loosen the mixture so it is easily spreadable. Taste: it should be delicious but you can adjust the sweetness (sugar) and saltiness (water or miso).
Grill both sides of the rice cakes until nicely toasted. Spread with a layer of walnut miso, sprinkle with sesame seeds and serve immediately.
Engaging Kids
Kids who engage regularly with veg through veg-themed activities, such as arts and crafts, sensory experiences, growing and cooking are shown to be more likely to eat the veg they engage with. Encouraging kids to engage and play with veg is the handy first step to them developing a good relationship with veg and life-long healthy eating.
Kids in the kitchen
The eventual aim, if possible, is to get kids in the kitchen. Don’t worry, this doesn’t have to mean they are with you from start-to-end creating mess and rising stress levels! It can be as simple as giving them one small job (stirring, measuring, pouring, grating, chopping…) ideally involving veg. They can come in to do their little bit, and have fun with you for a few minutes. Getting them involved, making it playful and praising them plenty for their involvement, perhaps even serving it as dinner they “made”, makes it much more likely they will eat the food offered, not to mention teaching them important life skills. Find ideas, safety tips, videos and even a free chart in our Kids in the Kitchen section here.
Activities
While getting kids to interact with veggies for real and using their senses to explore them is best, encouraging hands off activities like arts & crafts, puzzles & games or at-home science experiments can be a great start, particularly for those who are fussier eaters or struggle with anything too sensory. Use these veg-themed activities as a stepping stone to interacting with the veg themselves. We have loads of crafty downloads here, puzzles here, and quirky science with veg here.
Sensory
Once you feel your child is ready to engage a little more, you can show them how to explore the veg you have on hand with their senses, coming up with playful silly descriptions of how a veg smells, feels, looks, sounds and perhaps even tastes. Find ideas, videos and some simple sensory education session ideas to get you started here.
Serving
The moments before food is offered can be a perfect opportunity for engagement that can help make it more likely a child will eat it! Giving children a sense of ownership in the meal can make a big difference to their feelings going into it and the pride they take in it. You know your child best, but if you aren’t sure where to start, we have some fun and simple ideas for easy roles you can give them in the serving process over here.
Emiko Davies
Emiko is an Australian-Japanese food writer and cookbook author, based in Tuscany for the past 20 years, where she teaches cooking classes and culinary workshops with her husband, sommelier Marco Lami. In the spring of 2023, they opened Enoteca Marilu, a natural wine bar and space for hosting cooking classes and food and wine workshops in San Miniato, between Florence and Pisa.
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