Pink Peppercorn Lemonade Macarons

My maternal grandfather passed away a year and a half ago.

He was the one person in my family that had never criticized or questioned where I was going in life, besides my paternal grandfather. 

Through every drama-queen fit of histrionics, normal teenage angst--oh hell, even when I shat my pants when I was around four and started bawling, he would figuratively kick my ass and then pick me back up.

When I got diagnosed with severe clinical depression at only twelve years old, he was there for me. When I dropped out of college, he was there for me.

Even though he provided the money for my college education and my withdrawal wasted a great deal of his hard-earned money, he said nothing besides reassuring me he knew I was going to go on to do great things, no matter what, and he'd always be in my corner.

His quiet, unassuming confidence in me is something I find unbearable when I'm depressed. How could I ever live up to his expectations of me? I can't even put the right words to paper (or in this less romantic digital age--fingers to keyboard) to properly describe this man, let alone accomplish anything worthwhile or lasting.

My paternal grandfather passed away a couple of months ago.

Adventures in Japan: 2014

In 2014, I took an epic trip to Japan during the cherry blossom season, and I haven't had a chance to write about it. I wanted to make sure I did the trip justice, and I fell into a funk of nothing but business, career, and job. Now that I've got my priorities more settled, it's time to share my amazing Japan trip with you!

It was a whirlwind fifteen days. I visited cousins, gave my respects to my ancestors at our temple, visited our ancestral house, and trekked up a cliff to visit our family grave surrounded by citrus trees. I dressed up as a geisha (maiko to be specific) in Kyoto, hugged deer near Hiroshima, got lost on the Tokyo train system more than once, and explored the enchanting Ghibli Museum. Most of all, I ate tons of amazing Japanese cuisine, and I can't wait to share it with you.

Yawatahama's many graves on the hillside

I thought a bit about how I wanted to present all the information and pictures without turning this blog into a travel blog, but also not leaving you with the impression all I did was stuff my face (to be fair, it was a main feature). So for each city or province I visited, I will have a short post with some history, pictures of what I did besides eat. This regional post will be followed by a review of a restaurant if possible, or perhaps an overview of the regional food will be worked into the first post if not. Lastly, I will have a recipe for each place inspired by my visit. I hope you enjoy sharing my adventures, and I hope that my recipes will allow you to experience a little bit of what I enjoyed on my travels!

This post will stay on top until I complete my Adventures in Japan series so that you can skip to places at your leisure! Each region page will have a list of all the ingredients and recipes associated with it linked at the bottom!

Miss Mochi at Miwajima Island

Fukuoka, Fukuoka prefecture, Kyushu region

Yawatahama, Ehime prefecture, Shikoku region

Beppu and Yuifin, Oita prefecture, Kyushu region

Hiroshima and Miyajima, Hiroshima prefecture, Chogoku region

Kyoto, Kyoto prefecture, Kansai region

Tokyo, Tokyo prefecture, Kanto region

Adventures in Japan: Yawatahama!

Do me a favor and google some travel blogs for visits to Yawatahama. Okay, how about Shikoku in general? Not finding a plethora of pictures?

Not a lot of westerners make it to Shikoku island at all, let alone Yawatahama, but that is where we went next on our adventure through Japan. Our wonderful relatives drove us all the way from Fukuoka to Beppu, where we caught a ferry to Yawatahama to see our ancestral home and our family's grave site.

Shikoku is the smallest and least populous of the four main islands of Japan, and the JR railway express only has one rail line on the entire island that runs along the perimeter, to give you some scope of how rural it is compared to the massive Tokyo metropolis. Shikoku is famous for its Shikoku Henro, a Buddhist pilgrimage that goes along 88 shrines around the four provinces of Shikoku.

Of course, there's no pilgrimage stop in Yawatahama. Yawatahama is a port city, with the largest fish market in Shikoku with a natural harbor. The main agricultural export is the mikan, or the satsuma mandarin. This reminded me a lot of my home here in Orange County, California as I grew up playing in an orange orchard.

Yawatahama Champon (八幡浜 ちゃんぽん)

It was really hard to decide what to make for Yawatahama. I wanted to bring you something not just uniquely from Shikoku in origin, but Yawatahama itself. However, I was a bit stumped. A lot of what makes Shikoku cuisine unique is the island itself. For instance, the most famous local food of Shikoku is sanuki udon because the island has the best wheat production in Japan. However, that dish hails from Kagawa prefecture, not Ehime prefecture where Yawatahama is located.

Citrus is a huge part of Ehime's agriculture, however I don't have access to the more unique citrus that Japan has. I could do a citrus recipe, even though it's summer and citrus is at its peak in winter, and call it good. But there's not a lot of recipes for citrus that are unique to Ehime because the citrus is normally just eaten simply and the fruit is savored in its original form, and I've already blogged about that. I'd basically be slapping together a marmalade and making a flimsy connection to Yawatahama, something I didn't want to do. I could do a recipe of a nearby city, like Imabari or Uwajima, instead of Yawatahama. I found some awesome regional foods when I researched, however they still weren't strictly from Yawatahama.

I guess I stressed over this so much because I felt so connected to Yawatahama when I visited. My family is buried there. My family lived and died, and continues to live, there. Our creaky old ancestral house stands firmly on its soil. A tiny portion of my soul, my very essence, I think was left on that hilltop surrounded by graves and citrus and the smell of the ocean. A bigger portion was left in that house where I shared tea and smiles with family. It's only natural I wanted to share some of Yawatahama's soul with you.

I'm not normally this cheesy, but truly it was a special experience.

So really, the choice was made for me. If I was going to share a bit of Yawatahama's soul, I was going to have to get serious about creating a dish I've never actually eaten: Yawatahama-style Champon.

Adventures in Japan: Fukuoka!

After taking a long plane flight from Los Angeles to Tokyo, we took a teeny plane from Narita, Tokyo to Fukuoka, Kyushu where most of my relatives call home.

Fukuoka is the capital of Fukuoka prefecture, and it's one of the biggest cities in Japan. What I liked the best about Fukuoka is even though it's the 6th most populous city in Japan, it has a lot of open spaces, greenery, and little shrines even in the heart of it.

We were led through Fukuoka at a blazing pace by my relatives. Coming from Orange County, which has virtually no public transportation, we were amazed when we took a plane, private car, taxi, ferry boat, bus, train, and subway all within a 24 hour period. Not only was I jet-lagged, I was overwhelmed.

Fukuoka had two of my favorite shrines. I fell in love because they weren't tourist attractions, like I would experience later in Tokyo and Kyoto, crowded with people of all walks of life.

Fruit Sando (フルーツサンド)

Today is the second anniversary of my very first blog post here at Miss Mochi's Adventures. I'm still wrapping my head around that fact. Do me a favor and don't look back too far, some of the pictures definitely need updating! I'm still not very confident in my photography skills, but anyone can see I've made a big improvement.

The very first recipe I posted for this blog was ichigo daifuku mochi, so in celebration I decided to post another recipe involving strawberries. This one garnered a lot of interest when I mentioned it in my katsu sando post, after all, who here in the states has heard of a fruit and cream-filled sandwich?

The Japanese definitely treat bread and sandwiches differently than we do. They don't balk at strange sweet sandwich fillings, because they don't have a long standing history of savory sandwiches like we do. Fruit and cream sandwiches as well as other sweet sandwiches like chestnut cream are on the convenience store shelf right along with ham and cheese. And if you think about it, we certainly have sweet sandwiches that are immensely popular: PB+J anyone? Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are so ubiquitous that they have an acronym in popular use! No one would think twice if you made a peanut butter and banana sandwich, or a peanut butter sandwich with some strawberry slices thrown in.

The New Year: Toshikoshi Soba (年越しそば)

I seriously cannot believe it's New Year's Eve. Can I please go back to being a kid again?

Maybe I'm not cut out for the world of food blogging, alongside the multitude of smiling happy women writing their upbeat prose; prose that makes you want to whip out an apron and spatula just to capture some of that bliss, some of that contentment with life that seems to emanate from their words.

I can't do it.


On a good day, I'm endearingly neurotic, making godzilla-worthy messes out of my kitchen, introspective and analytical to a fault. On other days, I'm fickle, wrathful, and dangerously unstable, capable of destroying people in a single spiteful sentence.

I am human, I am imperfect, I am flawed.

Right now, I'm Alice, falling down the rabbit hole. When did the years start to fly by so fast?

There's so much left undone.

I guess, given my mood, that it's ironic that some translate "Toshikoshi" as meaning "killing off the year."

Toshikoshi soba is traditionally eaten on New Year's Eve in Japanese culture as a way of ending the old year and beginning the new year. The long noodles are a prayer for longevity, and traditionally soba is used because it is easier to bite through cleanly than udon, representing a clean cut leaving behind the bad of the last year and going fresh into the new year.

The Donut Man

Shun (旬), or seasonality, is paramount to Japanese cuisine. Not just gourmands who are constantly in and out of kaiseki restaurants, but everyone knows when the first crop of rice will hit the supermarkets and will snap up bags. Now imagine if you went to your nearest Kroger supermarket and your Wonderbread advertised that it was made from the first wheat crop of the year. That's what it's like to live in Japan, seasonality is just a part of life.

The same goes for the Donut Man. If you live in the greater Los Angeles area, you probably already know about the Donut Man, originally established as a Foster's franchise location in 1972. But for those of you not familiar with the Donut Man, it's a pretty unassuming place. A stand-alone shack on a quiet stretch of the historic Route 66, it looks like every other shop peddling sugary dough in the wee hours of the morning.

Jim Nakano (photo from DM's FB)

Except the crowd around it... and it's open 24/7, so that crowd is present at 10 pm.

So you approach, and the giant hand painted signs on the windows let you know there's more to these donuts than glazed or jelly-filled. Depending on when you make your trek, you might be lucky to score a strawberry or peach-filled donut. These beauties don't resemble doughnuts so much as a treasure chests stuffed with fresh fruit; glazed donuts are sliced and propped open like a clamshell with glazed strawberries or peach slices.

The fervor surround these doughnuts are brought to a higher pitch because they are only available seasonally. Craving a strawberry doughnut in December? Tough luck. The Donut Man will only make these fruit creations during the fruit's peak season here in Southern California. Right now, they have pumpkin doughnuts and blueberry stuffed creme puffs as well as donuts sprinkled red and green for Christmas.

Of course, being a hapa Japanese American food blogger, it is a totally fair argument that my personal worldview biases me on this, but I believe that it's no coincidence that the man behind the Strawberry and Peach Donuts, Jim Nakano, happens to be a fellow Japanese American.

Baked Brie with Figs

Certain foods can take your brain on a trip down memory lane. Your grandmother's chocolate chip cookies, your mom's pot roast, everyone has some meal that triggers a happy nostalgic time in your life.

A lot of my happy nostalgic foods are straight from the earth. My grandparents have always had a garden filled with fresh veggies: sweet peas and their beautiful flowers, giant heirloom tomatoes, and peppery radishes with dirt still clinging to the roots. My parents have citrus, avocados, and even cherimoyas hanging from trees throughout the year. Biting into a fresh summer peach, still warm from the sun as it ripened on the tree, takes me back to running around in my parent's orchard where my brother and I used to throw oranges that had been knocked down by the Santa Ana winds at each other.

One fruit that I almost never eat nowadays is figs. They have a short season, don't ripen well off the tree, spoil relatively easy, and I work on the weekends which makes the local farmer's market off-limits. So when I visited my grandparent's house, it was a delight to have a bag full of ridiculously ripe figs to enjoy. My grandmother has a fig tree in her front yard for as long as I could remember, but as a kid I was wary of figs. They were weird, in my youthful opinion, too many contrasting textures and too honey-sweet. I liked sour plums and zesty kumquats; I was one of those weird kids that liked grapefruit with no brown sugar or broiling needed.

It's a funny thing, to take a bite of this dish and wax nostalgic about a fruit you didn't like as a kid.

One thing I can confidently say is that I have always liked brie, rind and all.

Modern Choctaw Cornsticks

None of the women in my family are pushovers. They are firebrands, fighters both feisty and ferocious. They are engineers, businesswomen, nurses. Above all: they are, without exception, beautiful and intelligent women who know what they want in life. Naysayers could try and call them headstrong, but no one ever doubts their strength.

It's a big legacy to live up to.

My paternal grandmother is no exception. She's half Choctaw and Caucasian and hails originally from Southeastern Oklahoma in the heart of the Choctaw Nation before moving to New Mexico. Her American Indian mother died when she was young, and when her father remarried she was sent away to Indian boarding school.

A normal little girl would have probably raised less hell, but you probably know where this story was going. I don't have an exact number for the amount of times she ran away from the Goodland Indian Orphanage, but enough that it became obvious she wasn't going to stay at a place if she didn't want to. She was going to carve her own existence the way she viewed it, even as a child.

Thanksgiving

In elementary school, the way we learned about Thanksgiving was that people in loincloths and feathers sat down with people with funny buckle shoes and dowdy hats, and had this awesome feast. They were so buddy-buddy, you wanted to be at that first Thanksgiving table! We all made hats out of construction paper in class and sat down as "Indians" and "Pilgrims."

They didn't teach you until later about the genocide of the American Indians. No teacher told us about the idea of Manifest Destiny causing the death of so many that Holocaust expert David Cesarani stated that more were killed during the white settling of this country than the Holocaust. The Trail of Tears led the Choctaw, Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, and Chickasaw on a death march in the middle of freezing cold and famine.

Nothing was mentioned in elementary school that the first Pilgrims would have not survived their first year here if it weren't for the Wampanoag tribe, and that the Pilgrims later fell to cannibalism to survive. That the graves of the Wampanoag were robbed by the pilgrims, their crops were stolen, and the Wampanoag themselves were sold into slavery wouldn't have made for a good national holiday. Thanksgiving would be an untainted holiday if the schools had left American Indian/Pilgrim "friendship" out altogether. Why it became such a part of the curriculum of public schools still makes no sense to me, and miffs me a bit how sugarcoated history can be.

I love my grandma

I'm part Choctaw. What do I do with this holiday, that glosses over most of the nasty parts of our history yet presents it to little kids as such? Do I shun it, like many American Indians? Do I embrace it, like some do? I'm not Christian nor does my family celebrate this as a religious holiday, so I am certainly not thanking a god with this holiday.

I guess I am truly an adult now, when this sort of soul searching occurs.

I do, and will continue to, celebrate Thanksgiving. You will never find any caricatures of smiley feather-wearing natives decorating our table.  I view it simply as a day of thanks and giving gratitude back for family, friends, and health, which is one holiday that makes sense in every culture. No lavish gifts, no rampant spending and commercialization, just comfort food and the comfort of family.

I was especially thankful that almost everyone was able to make it this year. I wish I could freeze time to when I was a kid and everyone was healthy and younger, but my family and loved ones are getting older and older.

And don't worry, recipes will follow. Right now, it's time to reflect and digest.

New Mexican Style Enchiladas

The funny thing about food and culture, is that unlike religion and language, I think food is the last thing someone gives up when moving to America. Most Japanese American kids who have never spoken Japanese or been exposed to Shintoism or Buddhism will happily dig into donburi bowls without realizing that it is something uniquely Japanese. Recently, I realized I have been doing this with traditional New Mexican food.

So while I cook a lot of Japanese, I am also aware that I have been influenced by other cultures as well. My father's side of the family is Native American and Caucasian and originally hail from the state of New Mexico and Oklahoma.