Making Rice Balls With the Franciscans

In the heart of Tokyo Mid-Town, just blocks away from the Ritz Carlton Hotel is a Franciscan Monastery. This week I showed up for one of their Rice Ball making sessions. Hundreds of these Rice Balls are made to be given to the homeless that sleep in the nearby subways. It's quite an operation. Every day a group of people show up at the Franciscan kitchen to help. The sticky rice has been made the night before. We are each given a rice mold which has 4 triangular cut-outs in it. Water is smeared all over the inside of the mold so that the sticky rice won't "sticky" to the sides of the mold. The rice is squashed into the mold and of course you try to squash as much as possible into the mold so that it will hold it's shape. The person that eats it will get more rice that way also. After sufficient squashing, we poke our finger into the middle of the Rice Ball and put a beautiful red plum into the hole - they look like cherries to me.

The group that I worked with were very interesting and quite nice. There were the wives of some Disney Tokyo consultants, the wife of an Otis Elevator executive, a chef from the Ritz Carlton, and I can't remember the info on the other women - at that point, I had to pay attention to my Rice Ball making ... Afterwards, all decided Starbucks was in order - with further discussion on thoughts about living in Tokyo. One woman was pregnant with her first child - due in a month. The big discussion was how she would get to the hospital when her labor begins. It was decided that the subway would be faster than a taxi. I'll let you know what happens....