Yokai of the Week Xmas Edition – Mokumoku Ren

Merry Christmas and happy holidays to all!

Should you ever find yourself in Japan and come across an abandoned home in the countryside, beware of mokumoku ren. Literally meaning "continuous eyes," mokumoku ren are disembodied eyes that inhabit dilapidated screen doors. They are generally harmless, but some legends say that you'll go blind if you look at them. One possible way to get rid of them is to patch up the screen, but then you'd run the risk of them blinking your fingers off.

Pozole

It's been quite a long while since I've cooked anything remotely interesting. A lot of it has been stuff I've already made and posted before. But today I had enough time and raw materials to try something new.

I really like menudo (the food, not the boy group), but most of the people in my family don't care for tripe. So instead I made pozole, which is pretty much the non-tripe version of the soup. We had a large piece of pork butt roast (what can you make with pork butt roast that isn't good?) and I had most of the materials at hand save for the hominy. I don't like hominy that much, so I just replaced it with corn. I had some guajillas chiles, so I made a pozole rojo.

I do need to adjust a couple of things next time. I couldn't wait for the pork to get super tender, so some of it was still a little chewy. It was cooked all the way through mind you, but could have been more tender. Also it was too salty. Next time I'll add more water when the soup condenses. Aside from those two points, it wasn't bad at all.