Oyster Shucking in Tomales Bay

I had the great pleasure of going Oyster shucking at Hog Island Oyster Company the other day. I've never been up to Tomales Bay despite having lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for so long.
The drive upto Tomales is a beautiful calming drive that takes you through San Rafael, Point Reyes Station and up the coast of Tomales Bay.

I met the crew at the Hog Island Oyster Company in Marshall- population 50!!!
At Hog Island, numerous different types of Oysters can be purchased in huge sacks. You are giving a glove, a shucking knife, a tray and have at it!

We did bring our own goodies to enjoy with the oysters- bread, cheese, wine, grapes and of course Tobasco sauce.
Besides the traditional raw oysters, we also bbqed oysters

"oyster stew surf and turf" butter, lemon juice and salumi

Making Mochi

I suddenly had a craving for Mochi the other day. Mochi is a traditional rice cake made from glutinous rice ground into a paste. Nowadays, rice flour can be bought at your local asian market.
After some internet researching, I settled on making the following flavors for my Daifuku ( mochi filled balls):

Traditional Taiwanese peanut dusted street food style
Green tea with anko filling
Ube with black sesame filling
Regular with mung bean filling

The mochi dough recipe:
1 cup mochiko rice flour
2/3 cup water
1/4 cup sugar

to make green tea or ube, add about 1.5 tsp of green tea powder or Ube powder to the dough recipe before you start heating it up.

Instead of using the sugar called for the in recipe, I decided to make a "low carb" version since the rice flour itself is quite heavy in calories. I subsituted in 2.5 packs of stevia for every 1/4 cup of sugar called for in the recipe.

I used the easy microwave version- although I do believe that the glutens don't get a chance to build as much in this version. I will try next time to do it in a pot over direct heat.

A couple of tips
1. the recipe usually calles fro 1 cup of rice flour to 2/3 cup of water. I would up this ratio to about 1-1/4 cups of rice flour becuase the resulting mochi will be too soft and sticky to work with.
2. Continually stirring the mochi paste will help to develop gluten strands. Even when the mochi dough has turned opaque, if the dough is still hot, keep stirring to cool it down and develop those gluten strands for a chewier dough.
3. Instead of trying to make little perfect circles to roll your mochi up in, its easier to cover the spoon full of mochi dough with cornstarch and make an indention to put ur filling in. The result will be a more smooth, even mochi ball.

Next up- Mochi filled ice cream !!!