Yesterday, our Uesugi ‘ohana cooked roughly 100 pounds of sweet rice to make our yearly stash of mochi to celebrate New Year’s. It seems that as the years pass, more and more of the responsibilities are starting to be passed down to my generation. I think that’s good but at the same time, the child in me says “NO!”
For example, the pounders and machinists (teen boys) hardly had any supervision yesterday from Uncle Stan. He peeked in once or twice at the start and then let the boys take over at that point. It was hilarious to hear the boys tell each other what not to do and Micah took great pride in explaining how you mist the cooked rice with the water spray bottle!
We set a record this year by finishing around 11-ish and that was due to having two burners going at the same time. Huge time saver! I also finally got around to developing an order sheet so we know exactly what kind and how many mochi each family requires. Of course, there were immediate comments about how to improve the order sheet and I think we settled on something electronic that can be projected on a big monitor so the cutters can see the order. Hmm…sounds a bit complicated.
Uncle Walter, master cutter (the guy who cuts the hot mochi dough for the shapers), also made a change. He announced that every family must provide their own cutter. This year, my nephew Jack, my husband Barry and my cousin Todd made their debut at the cutting board. Our family has no mercy for these rookies. We were yelling at them to “cut faster,” “make the cuts bigger,” “throw it down to the end of the table.” Sheesh! So my engineer husband said we need to make templates for the cutting board so they know exactly where to cut.
All in all, it was a great day. The cousins have decided to get together on New Year’s Day and write down these various “process improvements” so we can create a mochi instruction book. Even my brother, who is missing the OCD gene, got organized this year and had an order form for next year’s t-shirts.
Here are some pictures from yesterday. Wishing you a Happy New Year and don’t forget to eat your mochi!
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Good tradition! I’m sure glad I got out of the family sushi business, that was hell.
i remember mchang’s blog abt that, how new year’s sushi time was hell for u and fun for her when she stepped in to help. she STILL talks abt ur MIL’s nishime, btw.
wow, i thot my family had it down w/ 2 mochi machines going
all evening, but u guys make us look like amateurs! we just keep
making until my uncle says, looks like we have enough, and then we
divide them into piles and stuff them in ziplocs. like i said,
we’re amateurs :>
We keep improving on our process every year. I keep telling Melissa to join us but she’s always in Vegas!