6 festivals, 6 different dishes

One of the past issues of the Japanese Eat Magazine has an interesting article about 6 festivals from different parts of the world, including Japan, and the corresponding 6 festival dishes. All the festivals occur anywhere from late November to the New Year. Article was written by John Paul Catton, photography is courtesy of Hioki Takeharu.

Let’s start off with Japan. A traditional dish around New Year is called mochi or o-mochi, usually dipped in soy sauce. Mochi is made of rice, ground into sticky and smooth paste that can be difficult to chew and swallow for any untrained gourmet. Therefore, the Japanese tend to remind senior citizens around this time of year to be careful while eating mochi as statistically every year about a dozen people choke to death on this dish.

When you survive the dangerous mochi, you can head over to the Middle East and eat some konafa, a dough pastry with added butter, milk, sugar, cream or tapioca, water and lemon juice.

We’re still hungry. Let’s travel to China and order chiao tzu which is known in Japan under the name gyoza. The dish is oriental dumpling, filled with pork or vegetables.

From China, we take a boat to the United States, find a 24-hour supermarket and fill up the shopping cart with a magnificient cooked turkey that will be eaten for Thanksigiving.

Our food crusade takes us to Israel where we drool at the sight of the mysterious latkes which is a type of deep-fried potato pancakes.

We’re on the way to our last destination, Britain, where Prince Charles invites us to dinner with grandiose Christmas Pudding, made of dried figs, raisins, sultanas, apple, pine nuts, almonds, candied peel, honey and mixed spices that are all held together with eggs, breadcrumbs and suet.