Just announced: Saturday night BaconFest music: Trisha Gene Brady & Mike McGill: Upland South & Friends! It’s going to be a big time! More info: www.knoxbaconfest.com

***Each month Mockingbird will do a post of a featured item from the Sunrise Market. Located in West Knoxville it is an expansive Asian grocery store full of live fish, duck hearts, produce, and many, many other amazing items.***

Sticky Candy. These are the only words in English on this packaging. It is gummy rice goodness with sesame seeds though. I liked the mask. It tastes fine, not super sweet, only super gummy!

Check out my friend Charlie’s new food blog: http://charlietunablog.blogspot.com/ Charlie loves food and metal and has great taste!

The Appalachian Pantry Dinner
Saturday, January 23rd, 7pm until 10pm
Ironwood Studios
119 Jennings Avenue, Knoxville
$75 per guest, $60 for Slow Food members
To purchase tickets visit:
http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/95207

In keeping with the Slow Food ideal of good, clean and fair food, Chef Matt Gallaher will prepare this dinner with ingredients nearly exclusively sourced from the surrounding counties. Even in the dead of winter, while the garden slumbers, the Appalachian Pantry allows us to eat locally.  And eat well at that! The Meal will feature some of the area’s most celebrated farms and producers. Allan Benton’s amazing Tennessee Bacon, Laurel Creek Farm Pastured Meats and Cruze Farm Buttermilk will be paired with Southern wines and Shady Grove Mead. Music for this special evening will be provided by Mitch Rutman.

For more info:
info@slowfoodknoxville.org

Mochi is a glutenous/sticky Japanese rice cake. It is traditionally served in Japan around the Japanese New Year. It is used for sweets and ice cream but also served with soup and other dishes.

How it’s made according to the all knowing Wikipedia:

Mochitsuki is the traditional mochi-pounding ceremony in Japan.

1. Polished glutinous rice is soaked overnight and cooked.
2. The cooked rice is pounded with wooden mallets (kine) in a traditional mortar (usu). Two people will alternate the work, one pounding and the other turning and wetting the mochi. They must keep a steady rhythm or they may accidentally injure one another with the heavy kine.
3. The sticky mass is then formed into various shapes (usually a sphere or cube).

Check out this:

http://www.mochiicecream.com/

And this super fast mochi making that is also on the Mochi Ice Cream site:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HKnHnUk0S8

On January 4th we went to Matsuhisa for my Mom’s birthday dinner. There were 4 of us and we probably had about 12 dishes between us all. Everything was pretty amazing. One of the most unique combinations was asparagus tips with a hollandaise sauce and salmon eggs. Fish eggs have become my favorite food this winter. The hollandaise was not too thick so all the textures combined just perfectly. My 2 favorites though were the oysters and the Mochi ice cream.

We ordered a half dozen of oysters, they never told us what kind they were, but they were amazing. This one had a cilantro leaf, lime juice, and touch of sriracha. The red/pink in the background is a Japanese peach. It was delicious.

Then came the house made Mochi Ice Cream. More on Mochi in the next post. I’ve only recently discovered this amazing food item. You can buy loads of different Mochi at Sunrise here in Knoxville and Nama serves it sometimes for dessert. Yum. This was mango and vanilla.