Tag: special occasions

With the New Year comes Osechi!!

What is Osechi?

Osechi is Japanese food made to celebrate the coming new year. Anyone who has spent any time with me, especially towards the end of December knows that I celebrate Japanese New Year’s and Osechi very seriously! I don’t like New Year’s Eve, but New Year’s Day, enjoying Osechi is my type of holiday celebration!

No matter where I am, whether in Japan, or the States, you will find me at the best local Japanese market with a long shopping list in the last few days of December, ready to shop. My love of mochi (pounded rice cakes), an integral ingredient, is perhaps only equaled to my obsession with Matcha!

The Wonderful World of Osechi: Japanese New Year’s Recipes

New Year’s is one of the best times in Japan, at least for eating and relaxing. Get Lucy’s Osechi cookbook, full of recipes that are fast to make, easy, and quite delicious for your New Year celebrations (along with the history and traditions and little tidbits Lucy always includes). Get the book!

Makes a great gift too! Did you know on the Amazon page there’s an option to give it as a gift?

The Wonderful World of Osechi: Japanese New Year’s Recipes

The Wonderful World of Osechi is a selection of my favorite Osechi recipes. I love all these recipes and love making them every year, but perhaps my favorite section is on Zoni; a regional soup with pounded rice cakes (mochi), chicken or fish, and vegetables. I love the regional versatility of it, and deciding which one to make each year is fun! I’m still pondering which one to make this year, but this Hokkaido version is always a winner in my house.

For me, Japanese New Year’s always starts on December 31^st, when I make a big bowl of Toshikoshi Soba (year’s-passing soba), which is supposed to be the last food to touch your lips on New Year’s Eve, and to promote good health and luck in the coming year. I usually use dried soba, but last year I was fortunate enough to find fresh soba at a shop in San Francisco’s Japantown.

The one New Year’s tradition called Omisoka that I will admit I miss very much every year since I live in the States is opening any window at midnight to enjoy hearing all the Buddhist temples in Japan, when 108 bells are rung. This is to symbolize the expulsion of human hardship, a sort of purification so to speak, and is called Joya-nokane. I just love the sound, and to me it also symbolizes the passing of the old year into the new year.

By then, all my shopping is done, and most of my cooking and preparations have been completed, so that when January 1^st dawns, all I have to do is to make whatever regional Zoni soup (rice cake soup) I chose to enjoy, and embrace the tradition of consuming delicious food and being with family for the next day or two. It really doesn’t matter what your nationality is, we can all learn from these Japanese traditions in that if we take the time to plan ahead a bit, we’ll have all the more time later to spend the holiday as one should – enjoying the company of friends and family!

Recent Interview About the New Cookbook

If you want to learn more about the journey that was creating this wonderful book, please check out this video interview I did with my blogging mentor, Amber Temerity:

Have you celebrated the new year with osechi before?

I’d love to hear about it in the comments below!

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Festive Fare: Traditional Treats for New Year’s
NEW YEAR’S IS ONE OF THE BEST TIMES IN JAPAN – at least for eating. Shogatsu, the New Year’s holiday, is celebrated from midnight on December 31 until January 3 or 4, or even longer by diehards.

No New Year’s banquet would be complete without a bowl of zoni, soup with toasted mochi (pounded rice cakes). While most Japanese dishes differ from region to region, zoni varies virtually from house to house. This zoni, a variation of the Kyoto-style, uses sweet white miso paste, and is one of my favorites..

Although I live in the States, I continue to celebrate Japanese New Year’s to this day with my daughter, albeit in a less traditional and fancy way. We look forward to it every year. It is a welcome ritual to closing out the year. And yes, a lot, okay, way too much mochi is consumed!

The Wonderful World of Osechi: Japanese New Year’s Recipes

New Year’s is one of the best times in Japan, at least for eating and relaxing. Get Lucy’s Osechi cookbook, full of recipes that are fast to make, easy, and quite delicious for your New Year celebrations (along with the history and traditions and little tidbits Lucy always includes). Get the book!

Makes a great gift too! Did you know on the Amazon page there’s an option to give it as a gift?

My recipes may include affiliate links, so without costing you anything extra, I’ll earn a small percentage of the sales if you purchase these items through these links. Thank you for your support!
Kyoto-Style Zoni

Lucy Seligman

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Course Soup
Cuisine Japanese

Servings 4

Ingredients

10 ½ oz. small taro satoimo, peeled, rubbed with salt, rinsed, and kept in a bowl of water to prevent discoloration until ready to cook
3 ½ oz. carrots peeled and cut into thick rounds
4 fresh shiitake mushrooms optional, stems cut, with a criss-cross incision made on the cap
4 ½ cups dashi fish stock*
2 tablespoons white miso fermented soybean paste, or more if you like it very sweet
8 mochi cakes
Fresh trefoil or parboiled spinach optional
To garnish:
A few slivers of yuzu Japanese citron peel
A handful of dried bonito flakes

Instructions

Boil the taro, carrots, and mushrooms (if you decide to use them) in the dashi stock for roughly 10 minutes, until soft enough to be pierced with a toothpick.
Take a few tablespoons of the hot stock out of the pot and combine with the miso in a small bowl. When thoroughly blended, incorporate back into the soup.
Meanwhile toast the mochi until they begin to swell. Then add them to the soup, swirl around until warmed, and turn off the heat.
To serve, pour the soup into four deep bowls, making sure there are two mochi in the middle of each bowl. At the last moment, add any greens, and top with a sliver or two of yuzu peel and a sprinkling of bonito flakes. Serve immediately.

Notes
How to make Konbu Dashi Stock:
Take a 6-inch piece of kelp (konbu), wipe lightly with a damp cloth and put into a pot with 6 cups water. Bring to a boil and remove kelp. Add a generous 3/4 cup of dried bonito shavings (katsuobushi) and boil for one minute. Turn off heat and after 2 minutes, strain.

Tried this recipe?Let us know how it was!
Leave a note in the comments section (see below) if you make this dish!

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Soba Celebrations for a Happy New Year!
IN JAPANESE CULTURE, soba (buckwheat) noodles have always been seen as a “happiness” food, served on special occasions. It is traditional, too, when moving into a new house to greet your neighbors with hikoshi soba (moving soba). This involves a play on words, as soba also means “close” or “near” – like neighbors.

Another soba custom is toshikoshi soba (year’s-passing soba), supposed to be the last food to touch your lips on New Year’s Eve. The tradition is so established nationwide that often reservations are needed even for buying the freshly made soba to cook up at home. One year I attempted to make my own: working with fresh buckwheat flour proved extremely hard, but my toshikoshi noodles won nods of approval from the family even though, without the special chef’s knife used by soba cutters, they were a trifle thick.

According to a diary written by a samurai named Watanabe Hyotaro between 1839 and 1848, it was common in those days to go out and eat soba on the last day of the year. An even older story, from the Kamakura period (1185-1333), relates how in Hakata, Kyushu, a businessman from China named Shakokumei used to distribute buckwheat flour to poor people on the last day of the year, telling them how it was to erase the year of poverty and welcome in a good new year.

Perhaps the most persuasive explanation for the tradition, however, is that in the Edo era (1603-1867) merchants used to clean factory floors with soba dumplings to pick up any gold filaments. So it became a superstition that soba “collected gold”. Eventually factory workmen started to make toshikoshi noodles, and ordinary people copied them – all in the hope of having a prosperous new year.

The Wonderful World of Osechi: Japanese New Year’s Recipes

New Year’s is one of the best times in Japan, at least for eating and relaxing. Get Lucy’s Osechi cookbook, full of recipes that are fast to make, easy, and quite delicious for your New Year celebrations (along with the history and traditions and little tidbits Lucy always includes). Get the book!

Makes a great gift too! Did you know on the Amazon page there’s an option to give it as a gift?

My recipes may include affiliate links, so without costing you anything extra, I’ll earn a small percentage of the sales if you purchase these items through these links. Thank you for your support!
TOSHIKOSHI SOBA

Lucy Seligman

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Ingredients

6 ¼ cups water
A 3-inch by 3-inch piece of kombu kelp wiped with a damp cloth and lightly slashed to release the flavor
2 oz. katsuobushi dried bonito flakes
4 tablespoons soy sauce
1 tablespoon mirin sweet sake
1 teaspoon salt or to taste
1 lb. dried or 1 ¼ lbs. fresh soba noodles
4 dried or fresh shiitake mushrooms stemmed (reconstitute dried ones by soaking in warm water with a dash of sugar for 30 minutes – reserve 2 tablespoons of liquid to add to broth)
½ lb. chicken breast cut into thin slices
2 large Japanese leeks white part only, cut diagonally into thin slices
5 ¼ oz. spinach trimmed, parboiled, and drained
Seven-spice pepper to taste for garnish

Instructions

Heat the water with the kelp in a deep saucepan. Just before it boils, remove the kelp and pour in the dried bonito flakes. Boil, stirring, for about three minutes, then strain into a clean saucepan. Add the soy sauce, mirin, salt, and mushroom liquid. Bring to a boil again; taste, adjust seasoning if necessary and cook over medium heat for a few minutes.
Five minutes before serving, heat up the chicken and leeks in the broth. In another pan, cook the noodles according to instructions on the package, then drain and rinse to get rid of the starch.
To serve, place a mound of noodles in each deep soup bowl. Top with one mushroom and separate mounds of chicken, Japanese leeks, and spinach. Gently ladle on the broth and serve immediately. Pass the seven-spice pepper separately.

Tried this recipe?Let us know how it was!
Leave a note in the comments section (see below) if you make this dish!

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