After my last attempt at Washoku (traditional Japanese cooking) I thought it was time for my next adventure. This time in Wagashi though! Wagashi is traditional Japanese confectionery. Yes you guessed it, the “wa” in both words means “traditional Japanese”.
Wanting to make Ichigo Daifuku イチゴ大福 (strawberry mochi) at this time of the year sounds pretty lunatic, doesn’t it? And well it really is a little crazy but crazy things are so much fun! Ichigo Daifuku is Mochi, a chewy and very sticky rice flour dough filled with Anko (sweet bean paste) and a whole strawberry. If your look for pictures of Mochi on the internet you will mostly find Mochi covered in potato starck because that’s the only way to handle them! Once touched the dough is really difficult to remove from your hands so the cute things need to be wrapped in a leaf, starch or soybean flour.
Personally I‘m more into the salty version of Mochi that is grilled and wrapped in a sheet of salty and roasted Nori and eaten with soy sauce. You can find it on top of soups or even in soups although the consistency then changes significantly. For some reason I don’t really enjoy the flour that is used to spread on top of Mochi so I made some glossy and wet ones and some floury ones..
The texture and feeling of the glossy ones is so much more my taste! hehe..
eee?! 
sweet Mochi with Nori? Oh yes please! I love the taste of Nori everywhere.. 
it honestly tasted so good!
sweet Mochi with Nori? Oh yes please! I love the taste of Nori everywhere.. it honestly tasted so good!Basically it‘s three things you need if you want to make simple Mochi: Mochiko (sweet rice flour), Anko (red bean paste) & water. For my Mochi I didn’t use Anko but Taromochi. The difficult thing is to handle the unbelievably sticky Mochi dough and wrapping it around the filling… but the feeling is priceless. It‘s so soft and bouncy and it feels like a living thing!
Making Ichigo Daifuku with frozen strawberries isn’t the most clever idea.. but still tasty 
To see what’s inside the other Mochi and look at some pics of the preparation, read on~
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) but yesterday was a special day nevertheless because I got to see and hear master calligraher Suishū Tomoko Klopfenstein-Arii.
The good thing is that my classes start only at noon. The East Asian history of art classes take place in the “Villa Schönberg“, a historic bakestone house build in 1886 that is located in the Rietpark, on a site of 17 acres. The Museum situated in the same park hosts the only art collection of non-European cultures in Switzerland. It’s quite nice walking to university in such a surrounding and a good change to the crowded main university building where I have my Japanese classes for example.
I’m definitely going to make Bento more often since it’s way too expensive to eat there and I’m completely broke at the moment.
