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One of the teachers at my middle school invited me to his house for dinner last Saturday night. It was his son's first birthday, and there's a tradition here where they place a bag with some mochi in a bag (one "sho", or about 8 pounds of mochi!), sling it over the kid's back, and make him walk until he falls over and cries. He told me it's supposed to ensure the child remains healthy.

We walked around his parents' house for a bit while he showed me around. Calling it a house really isn't accurate; it was more like a complex of buildings, the oldest being a Meiji era wood structure built about 150 years ago. It even had a fire pit in the center of the main tatami room, old ceramic stoves, and an old Victrola upstairs, which must have been a hundred years old. The rest of the buildings were used for the family business; the grandfather makes a living making miso and soy sauce. In case you were wondering, you make miso by fermenting soybeans with salt and rice koji (a kind of yeast also used to make sake). The mix is left in an open box, stuck in a hyperbaric chamber for awhile, and then mashed into a paste and sold. Up in northern Japan, most of the miso produced is "red miso" (really more of an orange color), but around Kyoto they make "white miso". From what I could gather, this has to do with the fermenting temperature, and if left for a short time white miso will become red miso. Most miso in America is of the red type because even with the preservatives in commercial miso, white miso would change color and flavor before it even hit the shelves overseas. Of course, none of the handmade stuff has preservatives (and it still has active cultures in it), but with the high salt content it lasts for 6 months before it starts to go bad. I was shown some of the other buildings, where miso was stored in wooden casks; some of the barrels in the back of the storehouse were over a hundred years old.

I stayed for a few hours and had dinner and drinks with the family. I had brought over a Chilean Cabernet that I'd hoped they would like, and in addition to the excellent food and drink I also received a rather large bag of miso and a bottle of soy sauce. Now I just have to figure out how to cook with it.