My Blog Has Moved!

After just a few days and fewer posts, I have decided to move my blog to WordPress. I have found that WordPress has more features and is more user-friendly when it comes to authoring a post and adding photos. From now on, please visit http://environmentalfoodie.wordpress.com.

Making Mochi... from scratch

Our story begins in Whole Foods, a store I both love and hate. Things I love: free samples, organic and local foods, grass-fed beef. Things I hate: over-priced foods that make sustainable eating inaccessible to the masses and only for the elite. Which is why when I go to Whole Foods, I weave my way through the store, snagging free samples at every corner, but never stopping until I reach the bulk food section, a haven of cost-effective yumminess within a sea of unaffordable snobbery.

I discovered the joys of bulk foods only about a year ago, but since then I've tried a number of new treats and returned for some of my favorites. I'm a big fan of the whole dried bananas that taste sweet as candy, and the vanilla almond granola, as well as the organic quinoa, whole grain cous cous, and various trail mixes. But this week I was looking for rice to go with the stir fry I was making for dinner. Noting the 5 or so types of rice available I grabbed the Whole Foods booklet of bulk foods information that describes every item they have and how to prepare it and flipped to page 44: Rice. I ended up with an organic short-grained brown sticky rice for the stir fry, but what really caught my eye was the "Brown Rice - Sweet," which the booklet noted as "Very sticky. It is what mochi and amazaki are made from." I have no idea what amazaki is, but I love mochi in both the fresh and ice-cream-filled states. So without further ado I filled a bag with a small amount of the rice and added it to my basket.

For those of you who aren't familiar with Mochi, it is a Japanese desert made from rice (or rice flour) that is slightly sweet, but becomes sweeter when filled with red bean paste, ice cream, or other goodies. It can also be pan friend to crisp the outsides, or added to more savory dishes. The texture is sticky and soft, but not too stretchy.

When I arrived home I immediately began looking for mochi recipes on google. It quickly became apparent I had made a big mistake in trying to make mochi from rice. All of the recipes I found called for Japanese rice flour, not plain rice. Oops. But I was relentless; I already had my rice and I was going to make mochi. I found a couple videos showing Japanese men pounding large wooden bowls of the sticky rice with a large wooden pestel until all the rice grains were broken and what remained was a mochi dough. Finally, I found a recipe (2 actually) that explained how to make mochi straight from rice. Here's the recipe: http://au.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080510053903AAYSkJB

I followed the recipe approximately, simmering 1 cup dry rice in <2 cups water for 2 hours. But I do not own a mortar and pestel, or anything remotely similar. What I do have, is an ancient Cuisinart food processor with a plastic blade for mixing things. I figured that mushing the rice in the cuisinart would be faster and obtain the same effect as pounding by hand. So I plopped the rice in and let the machine do its work for a minute or two.

Now there are plenty of places I could have screwed this up. It might have been the way I cooked the rice, or the type of rice I was using, but it's also entirely plausible that I would have gotten mochi if I patiently pounded that rice. What I got, was not a form of mochi I was interested in eating. It was very sticky, but also somewhat too fluid to use as a dough. And the husks of the grains of rice were still suspended in the mixture, adding a strange texture to what should have been a smooth treat. I tried to lay some on wax paper and sprinkle it with corn starch to make the outside less sticky, but even after drying on the counter overnight it is still a sticky mess.

I have to call this a failed experiment, but I am not disheartened. Next time, I'll just start with rice flour.

The Introduction

Post number 1. The time to answer those nagging questions, who I am, why I'm writing this blog, and what it's about. Don't worry, I'll get to all that stuff. But first off, a special thanks to my sister Becky who inspired me with her own food blog, The Intellectual Eater. She introduced me to the world of food blogging (and what an interesting world it is!), but abandoned her blog after only a couple months. As one of her most dedicated followers I was left in the dark, longing for more foodie blog posts. Let's hope this blog doesn't suffer the same fate.

Over the past year or so I have been increasingly experimenting with food and cooking and am passionate about changing the way I eat. I'm not talking about going on a diet or anything like that; I'm talking about changing the cultural context of my consumption. I was first enlightened by Michael Pollan's book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, a captivating look at American food culture. Pollan, my new favorite writer, opened the door to further reading on food culture such as Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle - her personal tale of the first year after moving from a city-slicker life to semi-subsistence farming - and Pollan's second must-read, In Defense of Food.

I am making an effort to eat less artificially-fortified freezer foods and such, and thus finding myself making more and more food from scratch. I had to have some important training for this to work, which leads me to second thank you in this post which goes to my mother (yes, Mom, you were/are always right, especially when it comes to cooking). She provided me with the necessary background for my endeavors into the culinary world. From an early age I knew the basics of both cooking and baking. I could follow most recipes without a problem, but I am always eager to add my own flare to the food I make. My roommates will vouch for this sometimes foolish urge as I am never content to follow a recipe, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.

While a sizable portion of the posts to follow will be on food, this blog isn't just a foodie's diary. I reserve the right to put whatever I want in this blog, but the second-largest category for my posts will almost certainly be the environment. From a young age I loved the outdoors and the natural world. As a student today I enjoy taking environmental studies courses and learning all I can about human impacts on the planet. I consider the environmental effects of just about everything I do and I encourage others to do the same. Every lightswitch we flip, every bite we eat, and everything else we do during an average day has a cost to the environment. This blog will allow me to present some of my own experiments in environmentalism and offer insights to my readers.

While I've given a few hints so far, I haven't quite answered the question as to who I am. I'll keep this part short since I imagine most of my readers will probably be friends and family, and if you don't fall into one of those categories you probably don't care to hear a lot about who I am. My name is Josh Meisels, and I'm currently a senior at Washington University in St. Louis in the Olin Business School. I'm originally from Glenview, IL, a suburb of Chicago, where I grew up with my two older sisters, Becky and Rachel. I now live in a decent-sized apartment with a couple roommates, the setting for most of my culinary adventures and eco-experiments. Following this year, I'm taking the summer off to do something exciting (not sure what yet), and then moving to Seattle, the city where I spent last summer.

That's about all there is to say for now. Welcome to the blog!