If you recently celebrated tsukimi or the mid-autumn festival, you might have eaten a sweet treat to commemorate this seasonal moment: a tsukimi dango, a mooncake or perhaps both if, like Kristen Morita, you share both cultures.

Kristen Morita is a fourth-generation Chinese-Japanese American mom and creator of Mochi Mommy, a Website and blog that shares recipes and methods to create food recipes such as confections, dishes, and of course, different kinds of mochi and dango. More recently, Morita has also begun exploring and adding modern Japanese treats such as Japanese soufflé pancakes, which have become extremely popular in mainstream food culture.

Despite her love and talent for making food, Morita did not grow up in a household where home cooked meals were the norm.

“Ironically, both my parents don’t cook,” she said. “Many people say food seems important to me and was a big part of my life, but actually, it came from a desire for good home-cooked food as a kid.”

The daughter of two working parents, Morita developed her love for food through time spent with her grandparents who worked in a Chinese restaurant and particularly her grandmother, who had her helping with cooking and handing her a knife to chop ingredients from a young age. One of her great influences, Morita describes her grandmother as adventurous and not beholden to traditional methods. Adapting restaurant recipes to healthier versions to make at home, Morita’s grandmother modeled early on how to evolve traditional methods to suit her own personal tastes and lifestyles.

Not eating home-cooked meals often, Morita treasured recipes that were culturally relevant to her, seeking them out to recreate them once she had moved away from home and finding herself unable to eat them as regularly. Attempting to recreate her grandparents’ recipes, she would call them, seeking out recipes and lacking guidance for measurements or methods.

It was through this, Morita realized she wasn’t finding recipes for the foods she wanted to eat, and began putting recipes into a blog, thinking that others might be going through the same experience she was, wanting to eat the foods of her family but struggling to translate them into recipes.

Starting with people from the Japanese American community, Morita began and grew her Website.

Food helps tell Morita’s family’s history and share her cultural heritage, capturing her family’s history through recipes that reflect her own diverse background and cultural traditions, that include Japanese, Hawaiian fusion, and Chinese traditional recipes as well Americanized versions of those foods. Morita’s family includes those on her grandfather’s side who were incarcerated at Tule Lake in California during World War II who worked to rebuild their lives afterwards. Working as a gardener and later helping out at Aloha Market in Culver City, known for its tofu and tofu recipes.

Morita’s most popular recipe is one for chichi dango, a sweet, easy-to-make mochi. Starting out by making mochi in the microwave as a teenager, Morita now shares her own food traditions with her family, making daifuku mochi with bean paste and dango on skewers for her children, alongside hot pot. Her daughter also loves natto. They also enjoy hot pot and shimeji mushrooms.

Morita’s mochi brownie recipe is a personal favorite, and a guaranteed potluck hit that fuses modern American and Japanese flavors that is also easy to make. While Morita is known for her Japanese recipes, her Website also posts Chinese, Hawaiian-fusion recipes and other dishes that share and celebrate her family’s diverse culinary background.

Mochi Mommy has generated so much success to the point that Morita recently made the switch from being a speech therapist to focusing on blogging and content creation full-time, with hopes to turn her blog into a future cookbook. But in the meantime, she continues to create content, add recipes and share what she loves with others via Mochi Mommy.

Mochi Mommy is more than a food blog, it’s also a heartfelt tribute to her family’s cultures, and a resource for those seeking connection through cooking. Even if you are a novice in the kitchen or new to Japanese foods, Chinese cooking, or making mochi, Morita’s recipes are easy to make and rich in multiculturality, and will invite you to try your hand at cooking.

Morita writes from www.mochimommy.com.