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Description
With New Years Day coming to a close I thought I would share with everyone an anime screenshot of a bowl of noodles from the reboot series of Fruit Basket. In this picture this delicious dish is called Toshikoshi Soba (New Year Soba). Made from buckwheat soba noodles in a hot dashi, mirin and soy sauce soup, New Year Soba symbolises wishes for good luck in the year ahead and is eaten for dinner by the Japanese on 31st December every year. The white cubes in this dish are called Mochi, which is Japanese rice cake made of mochigome, a short-grain japonica glutinous rice, and sometimes other ingredients such as water, sugar, and cornstarch. The rice is pounded into paste and molded into the desired shape.

However as delicious as the mochi looks it's actually been known to be very deadly as last year two people have actually died eating them as they are chewy and sticky. Given they are far bigger than bite-sized, they need to be laboriously chewed before swallowing.
Anyone who can't chew properly - like children, or the elderly - will be likely to find them hard to eat. If not chewed but simply swallowed, the sticky mochi gets stuck in the throat - and can lead to suffocation. According to Japanese media, 90% of those rushed to hospital from choking on their new year's dish are people aged 65 or older.
So what is a safe way to eat them?
Chew, chew, chew. If that's not possible, the rice cakes need to be cut into smaller pieces.

So if anyone ever wants to try this delicious dish and want to have it with mochi exercise caution and chew it very carefully. But from other pictures I have seen of it others seem to subsitute the mochi with some vegetables or even fish cakes too.

Description
With New Years Day coming to a close I thought I would share with everyone an anime screenshot of a bowl of noodles from the reboot series of Fruit Basket. In this picture this delicious dish is called Toshikoshi Soba (New Year Soba). Made from buckwheat soba noodles in a hot dashi, mirin and soy sauce soup, New Year Soba symbolises wishes for good luck in the year ahead and is eaten for dinner by the Japanese on 31st December every year. The white cubes in this dish are called Mochi, which is Japanese rice cake made of mochigome, a short-grain japonica glutinous rice, and sometimes other ingredients such as water, sugar, and cornstarch. The rice is pounded into paste and molded into the desired shape.

However as delicious as the mochi looks it's actually been known to be very deadly as last year two people have actually died eating them as they are chewy and sticky. Given they are far bigger than bite-sized, they need to be laboriously chewed before swallowing.
Anyone who can't chew properly - like children, or the elderly - will be likely to find them hard to eat. If not chewed but simply swallowed, the sticky mochi gets stuck in the throat - and can lead to suffocation. According to Japanese media, 90% of those rushed to hospital from choking on their new year's dish are people aged 65 or older.
So what is a safe way to eat them?
Chew, chew, chew. If that's not possible, the rice cakes need to be cut into smaller pieces.

So if anyone ever wants to try this delicious dish and want to have it with mochi exercise caution and chew it very carefully. But from other pictures I have seen of it others seem to subsitute the mochi with some vegetables or even fish cakes too.