A Luminous Halo

"Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end." --Virginia Woolf

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Location: Springfield, Massachusetts, United States

Smith ’69, Purdue ’75. Anarchist; agnostic. Writer. Steward of the Pascal Emory house, an 1871 Second-Empire Victorian; of Sylvie, a 1974 Mercedes-Benz 450SL; and of Taz, a purebred Cockador who sets the standard for her breed. Happy enough for the present in Massachusetts, but always looking East.

Monday, February 24, 2014

Rose Mochi

So, I've been fooling around with some Asian recipes recently, and yesterday I made mochi. I started with the recipe from tworedbowls.com, which I found at Food52, a cooking site I trust. I would've made green tea-flavored mochi if I had had plain green tea powder on hand, but I didn't, so I opted for rose-flavored instead. I was thinking of masghati, a Persian sweet also made of starch, but flavored with rosewater, cardamom, saffron and pistachio nuts.

I mixed up a cup of mochiko (sweet rice flour), a cup of sugar, a half-teaspoon of baking powder, a cup of water, and half a can of coconut milk. That was the recipe as given. To color the mochi, I grated a little fresh beet into the water and then strained it out. To flavor it, I added a teaspoon of rosewater. I poured the whole business into a Pyrex greased with coconut oil, covered it with foil, and baked it for an hour at 275 degrees. After it was out of the oven and cool, I cut it into squares and tossed them in a bit of cornstarch so they wouldn't stick together.

When the mochi went into the oven, it looked like Pepto-Bismol and smelled overpoweringly of rosewater. I was worried that I had overdone both the flavoring and the coloring. But when I uncovered the baked mochi, all the pink was gone; instead, it was exactly the color and texture of raw boneless chicken breast. The flavor, on the other hand, was perfect. I don't like using artificial food colorings, so I guess I'm stuck with a vegan treat that tastes amazing but looks like raw meat.

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