Perfectly imperfect　: Celebrating Japanese New Year's holiday

Osechi ryori is specially prepared
New Year’s day celebration food,
beautifully arranged in lacquer boxes.

Each menu item and ingredient in osechi has a meaning
such as good health,
good harvest, happiness, prosperity, long life,
and so on.

It is said that yellow colored dishes and ingredients
such as kazunoko (salted herring roe) symbolize prosperity
and that various beans imply a wish for good health.
Also, red/pink and white colored food, such as pink and white kamaboko (fish cake) slices represent celebration colors.
To make this special Osechi ryori,

it takes a couple of days to prepare but
I am always looking forward to

making Osechi ryori at the end of each year.

Even though I am living in the USA and celebrate Christmas and Thanksgiving with my English speaking children, I still want to teach the traditions of my Japanese culture, which I experienced while growing up in Japan.
Celebrating New Year's day is
very important for me as a Japanese person.

I will introduce my Osechi ryori
and how clebrated this special day
with my family this year.

The first box

The first box is the appetizers to kick off the celebration.

Simmered sweet black beans
mashed sweet potato with sweet chestnuts

salted herring roe

fish cake
red and white pickle salad

The second box

Baked/grilled items and pickles.

simmered konbu rolls with salmon
sweet omlet

simmered shrimp

chicken hamburg

pickled lotus root

The third box

Stewed items

simmerd chicken and root vegetables

On New year's day,
my brother-in-law's family came over to my place
to celebrate and enjoy Osechi ryori with us.
It was a lot of fun to share my cultural event with everyone.
What a wonderful family I have!

Along with Osechi,
I also prepared some of my favorite party foods.

Yoshiko's famous fried chicken.

This is always a kids' favorite!
Even though kids didn't eat osechi,
I was sure they would eat this.

Salmon escabeche,
called nanbanzuke.

Onions and carrots color,

white and red (orange) are celebration colors.

Also this is one of my husband's and my favorite dish.

Fish kasuzuke

Kasuzuke is a technique to "pickle" or marinate

in sake lees or sweet sake lees.

I marinated the fish for a couple of days

and then grilled it.
This item actually belongs be in the second osechi box but
I couldn't fit it in,

so I served it separately.
This is absolutely one of our favorites!!
It could be best favorite!

Japanese style roast duck

After I roasted duck,
I marinated the duck in a soy sauce based sauce for a day.

Lovely dish!

And of course SAKE!!

We started this food fiesta from early evening.
"Night is young"
was out catch phrase,
we really enjoyed New Year's day.

Also we have another traditional food to eat
during the New Year's holiday,
called Ozoni, which is mochi (rice dough) in Vegetable soup.
There are some different varieties of ozoni,
depending on the area people are from,
such as miso based soup in west area,
soy sauce based soup in east area.
Even mochi shapes are different between areas and vegetables varieties in the soup
change from place to place.

I usually make two different types of Ozoni
during the new year's holiday.
This is Tokyo style, based on soy sauce.

We use square shaped mochi and
grill them first, then put in soup bowl and pour the soup
on the mochi.

This is miso based soup.
This miso is not like regular miso.
It is sweeter and creamier than usual.

For this ozoni,
we use round shaped mochi,
and we don't grill it first.
Simmer mochi in soup until mochi is soft.

Typically we eat the New Year's Osechi for three days,
so I arranged osechi with different plates
and change the atmosphere.

The second day,
I used white plates.