Why hello there, and welcome to Kitchen Catastrophe, where one man faces a precarious balancing act of diet, amusement, and screaming agony. I’m your…tightrope walker of taste? Shit, I KNOW there’s an old word for “tightrope walker”. Funda-something. Let me look it up. Funambulist! I was close. I’m your food funambulist, Jon O’Guin, and if you want a recipe that’s deceptively simple without the details, take this link to get straight to it. For everyone else, let’s dig in.

Mochi Ado About Nothing

I hope you’re ready for more of those puns, by the way. That’s the entirety of Title Jon’s plan. Anyway, Today’s dish is homemade mochi, in a peanut-glaze! Why? Because I NEED A VACATION TOO, GODDAMN IT. Ahem. Sorry. What I meant to say there was “Because it’s fun, fast, and easy, it fills a new need in my diet, and it lets me prep for an upcoming post.”

See, as you no doubt remember, two weeks ago, I had a kidney stone, the first one I was able to catch and send off to the doctors to figure out WHY I have so many Kidney stones. They didn’t get much from the stone itself (it was, from the very cursory information I was given, the most common TYPE of stone, so there was nothing in its composition to tell us why they keep happening), so more tests will be ongoing, but in the interim, I’ve been told that if I stick to a “Kidney Stone Diet”, it will lower my odds of ending up in the ER for an agonizing hour and a half and then a slightly uncomfortable two hours. (Once you’re no longer writhing in pain, the process is really “sit here having to pee like, a teaspoon of liquid every 15 minutes in a often-slightly cold room until the doctor can look over your scans and say “yep, it’s exactly the thing he told us it was 3 hours ago. Now we know it’s not one we’d need to do surgery for, so just prescribe him some pills, and send him on his way.”)

Then again, my doctor was Peter Pettigrew, so maybe I just have bad insurance.

Looking it over, the diet suggests a bunch of pretty standard medical ideas: eat less animal protein (with a suggested goal of no animal protein for 2 days a week), eat less sodium, etc. The big one was managing/avoiding oxalates. Oxalates are a chemical that I do not have the time to fully explain, but they’re in a lot of foods, and if they’re hanging around the kidneys when the water is running low, they’ll bond with calcium and make stones.

Now, according to my research and the findings of the National Kidney Foundation (a medical organization I double-checked was legitimate, because…you know, *waves to the amount of pseudo-medicine on Youtube*) this doesn’t mean CUTTING OUT oxalates: a list of foods high in oxalates reads like a who’s who of healthy food options (Tofu, beets, miso, spinach, kale, nuts, as well as some classic non-healthy stand-bys like Beer and Peanut Butter, and Chocolate) But rather it means learning to choose other options when possible, AND to make sure to consume them with calcium when possible (because if the calcium and oxalate combine BEFORE they get to your kidney, that’s perfectly fine. So if you’re having a spinach salad, make sure there’s a little cheese on it.) And the reverse is fairly true: excess calcium should be paired with oxalates, so there’s not any just hanging around in your kidneys.

This was VERY useful information, since Sunday nights are Spiros nights for my family, Spiro’s being a local chain of Italian restaurants that we’ve been going to as long as I can remember. And as you might expect, there is a fair bit of cheese and cream in our weekly orders. So knowing that I need to integrate oxalate into that meal is valuable. And hey, will you look at that, peanuts are rich in oxalate! What great news!

Chicken Alfredo and Peanut sauce is a bold new future, but one I am pleased to pursue.

But that’s not the only reason. And this one you gotta keep secret, but, within the next couple weeks, I have to make another dish out of Rice Cakes, as one of our high-level Patrons requested it, and I wanted a test-run at the idea. Mochi is a much simply form of rice cake, so I figured “better to get a feel for the process with something a little easier, work my way up.” How’d it go? Well…there were some ups and downs.

Leaving Mochi to be Desired

So, today’s recipe comes from “The Art of Escapism Cooking”, a very intense cookbook from Mandy Lee, author of the cooking blog Lady and Pups, which is itself a very intense blog. Which I do not say as a criticism or flaw, but as a warning to any of my readers who would go there: You will see AMAZING things, and there are great recipes in it. There is also a great catalog of pain: cooking, and her blog, were an escape for her from harmful situations, and she proudly recounts the scars she’s earned. I’d say it’s worth it, but if that kind of thing (spousal neglect/emotional abuse) is an issue for you, I’d warn you against it.

These delicate green dumplings look nice, and once you learn they’re Jalapeño Popper dumplings, they become a lot more interesting to my mind.

So, this recipe for mochi is literally just “sticky rice flour, little bit of sugar, and some hot water”.  You take sticky rice flour (aka sweet rice flour, aka glutinous rice flour), and mix in a little bit of brown sugar, before pouring over ½ a cup of simmering water. The recipe is clear that the water has to be pretty hot in order for this to work, so I went up to a boil, and came down to a simmer to be on the safe side. Dump it it, and stir it up with a for, until you get “a clumpy mixture”. Mine looked like this.

Some days, I hate how my phone seems to have a fairly stellar white balance. Like, I KNOW my kitchen light is kind of orange, but I don’t NOTICE that until I’m looking at pictures I took at night, and then I’m like “Why is everything a light peach?”

Then, you take it with your hands (if it’s cool enough!) and knead it into a cohesive ball. It will come together a lot more than you might think it will, but if it feels too dry, you can knead in more water. I personally ended up adding…maybe ¼ cup more, all told? I formed the ball easily enough with what I had, but the recipe notes “if it seems too dry and tears here and there”, and mine was tearing a little at the edges, so I just dipped the ball in the water and kneaded it some more. All told, it was probably about 10 minutes.

Once kneaded, cut the dough into 5 equal pieces, which I definitely did using the pro chef move of “just fucking weigh them, I have no idea if these look right.” Once evenly sized, form them into disks (I went with kind of triangular ones, in a sort of weird nod to onigiri), and you can freeze them for later, or cover them with some plastic wrap while you work on the next part of the dish, with its very complicated 2 ingredients. Yes, this does mean this recipe technically only has 5 ingredients. Well, technically six, which we’ll touch on in a second.

I don’t eat a lot of onigiri. Is it obvious from how badly I mimicked them?

For the next bit, we need to make the peanut-glaze, which consists of finely ground peanuts and dark brown sugar. The idea is that the heat and residual moisture of the mochi (spoilers: the disks you just made have to be boiled to get them chewier) is going to dissolve the brown sugar, with the peanuts there for texture and nuttiness. Now, to do this, you just need to toss 1/3 cup peanuts in a food processor. We’re missing the blade on our smaller food processor, so I’m just going to use my dad’s old spice grinder. Now, the instructions are “go until it looks like fine, wet sand, but not too far and you make peanut butter.” So a couple pulses, hold this down…Hmm. It’s a little chunky, but the water has already started boiling, so let me see if I can get away with this. Oh, Mother! Would you take a look at these ground peanuts? Do they look processed enough? No? Alright, I guess we’ll…what do you mean the grinder isn’t going anymore? I literally JUST used it. No, I can see that it’s not responding. Well, that’s…damn it. That’s fine, we have this other grinder. It’s Nate’s coffee grinder, but he gave up on that French Press phase so quickly, I never even consciously knew he was the one doing it, so it’s not like…well, this has formed half the peanuts into what I would call “peanut butter”, and rolled the other half into two balls. I should not have put the mochi in the boiling water. Fuck. That’s fine. I have…a mortar and fucking pestle, so I guess I’ll POUND another 1/3rd cup into “fine sand.” And mix it with some dark brown sugar.

Did I get bored of pounding the peanuts and give up early? Maybe. Or maybe I was panicking that the first batch of mochi were overcooking. (Can they overcook? I have no idea)

The instructions are remarkably specific, noting that the mochi should be boiled with the lid on for 5 minutes, then flipped, then boiled with the lid on again for 3-4 minutes, then plop them in the peanut-glaze, flip them around, and either eat them as is, OR do what the actual first recipe called for, and serve them with ice cream! Yeah, apparently, “freshly boiled mochi in a nutty/sweet glaze on shaved ice” is a popular street food, so this recipe was meant to mimic that, but with ice cream instead of shaved ice.

Hey, that looks pretty damn good!

And I definitely dropped mine on some caramel ice cream, but we also tried one without ice cream, and it was pretty good. The only part of it I’m not 100% sure works is the glaze is a little gritty, which might have been because our dark brown sugar was on the older side, or it might be a textural thing that’s more popular with Chinese understandings of cuisine (which are more texture-based) than ours. Still, I actually liked it a fair bit. The mochi is chewy, sweet, and nutty, and contrast of warm mochi and ice cream is nice. I count this as a total win as long as I didn’t break both of those spice grinders.

THURSDAY: MAYBE WE TALK ABOUT FLOURS, MAYBE WE DO SOMETHING ELSE.  THINGS ARE CONFUSING

MONDAY: I THINK I’LL HAVE TO WHIP UP SOMETHING FOR THANKSGIVING, BUT WE’LL SEE WHAT IT IS.

Recipe

Peanut-Glazed Mochi

Makes 5 mochi disks

Ingredients

1.5 cups of glutinous rice flour

2 teaspoons light brown sugar

At least ½ cup simmering water

1/3 cup roasted salted peanuts

1/3 cup dark brown sugar

Ice cream for serving

Preparation

1. Mix together rice flour and light brown sugar in a medium bowl. Add simmering water (it should be hot enough that flour turns slightly goopy/translucent), and mix together with a fork until a clumpy mixture. Then work with your hands, kneading for about 5 minutes. It should end up smooth, a little shiny, and just a little bit sticky. If it’s too dry, work in some more water.

2. Form into 5 equal pieces, roll into balls, and shape as desired. You can then freeze them for later, or cover for a bit as you work on the glaze: using a food processor or mortar and pestle, process the peanuts until it looks like fine wet sand. Mix with the dark brown sugar in a bowl.

3. Cook the mochi: bring a pot of water to a boil, and add the shaped mochi. Reduce the heat to a gentle boil, and cover, cooking for 5 minutes. Then turn the mochi and recover, boiling another 3-4 minutes. Once cooked, toss them under running cold water for a couple seconds to set their shape, and then toss in the peanut glaze. Serve as is, or with the ice cream of your choice.