Various varieties of carbohydrates.

A busy several days as you get not one, not two, but three different foods with this one post.  The value!

First, Dom made a batch of fresh pasta using our pasta maker, a snazzy drying rack that we'd gotten as a wedding present, and the Joy of Cooking recipe.  (I was busy being all professional with Adobe Illustrator which is why I wasn't helping at all.)  We'd only made fresh pasta once before, but just comparing the drying rack to having sheets and sheets of waxed paper with pasta all over the countertops and dining table, I'd say the drying rack wins by a lot.  The pasta was dry after 24 hours, though that may also be influenced by making pasta on a dry winter evening versus making pasta on a humid May evening.

The pasta turned out delicious, but much lighter than we had expected it to be.  Perhaps something to do with the drying process, or the use of the new stand mixer to mix the ingredients together...it looks like we need a larger sample size and a more rigorous experimental design.

Direct from Italy.

Second, we made pancakes using Greek yogurt because the carton of Chobani I'd picked up at the store had a recipe on the side (and, perhaps more importantly, a photo of a stack of pancakes).  The batter was intensely think and made pancakes roughly 3/8" high.  Flavor was good especially with the addition of a few blueberries, but as both of us prefer thinner pancakes made with milk rather than thicker pancakes made with buttermilk or yogurt, we will most likely not be using this recipe in the future.  Not to mention that these leftovers were not as delicious for subsequent breakfasts as compared to those made with milk-only recipes.

The griddle was an excellent registry item.

Lastly, and representing the largest time commitment of all three of these projects, I decided to make sakura mochi: red bean paste, sticky rice, an association (in my mind, at least) with cherries, and a lovely pink colour?  Sold.

No Japanese ancestry?  No problem for Google.  I loosely adapted a recipe I'd found after multiple searches and ended up using one that required making your own bean paste.  I found that, while soaking beans for 18 hours is less than ideal (see the red beans and rice experiment below), soaking them for 5 hours is also less than ideal; I ended up cooking with a ratio of 1 cup of beans to 3 1/2 cups of water (about 1 1/2 cups more water than called for in the recipe), and the paste turned out fine.

The rice traditionally has no actual cherry flavouring in it, though it can be coloured pink.  Because I wanted both, I cooked the rice with half a cup of tart cherry juice along with the sugar and water.  It worked like a charm.  I used plastic wrap to shape these so that the rice wouldn't just end up on me and managed to make nine more-or-less rounded sakura mochi, minus the pickled cherry leaf.

Red bean paste on the left and pink, cherry-flavoured rice on the right.  I'm so Asian.

The lovely pink colour seems to have come out best in this photo.  That's probably too much red bean paste for the amount of rice, at least for how I had been making them, but I think this was the first one I assembled.

They were delicious fresh, but they were even better after a day in a Ziploc container (no joke).

So, while these were not what you'd get if you were in Japan for Hinamatsuri, it was still a fun experiment.  Oddly, these seem to have gotten better with a few days' age; peak awesomeness was reached the second day after making these, after which the rice finally became a little dried out (though still edible).  Packing these four to a Ziploc container separated with waxed paper may have helped keep them moist for the few days after making them.  Definitely a keeper of a recipe.


Pasta recipe: Joy of Cooking (2006), p. 324