For our final class of the year, we read The Mochi Makers by Sharon Fujimoto-Johnson. In the book, a child and her grandmother make the Japanese treat made from pounded glutinous rice.
In the kitchen, we made dango, which is similar to mochi but dango are made from glutinous rice flour, not from the rice itself. We used a special Japanese flour called shiratamako and flavored the dango with matcha powder. Our Japanese sundaes featured vanilla ice cream, sweet adzuki bean, black sesame seeds, kinako (toasted soybean flour), condensed milk, kuromitsu (a Japanese sugar syrup), our homemade dango, and local organic strawberries donated by our friend Lorraine Walker, the farmer at Eatwell Farm in Dixon. It was a sweet and happy ending to a wonderful 10 weeks together.
