Unorthodox Osechi at My Parents'

Wow! So many visitors and nice comments! Now I feel kind of guilty because I’m going to have to disappoint you a little. More than half of the food in the photos are not home-made. Another warning: As mentioned in the title, this osechi (Japanese New Year’s dishes) we eat at my parents’ is really unorthodox. The traditional osechi is described in sites like this and this with their symbolic meanings and recipes(!). So if you want to learn about Japanese culture correctly and/or try out some of the osechi dishes yourself, refer to those sites. There are rules regarding what kind of food should be packed in which tier of jubako (lacquer boxes), but our family members totally ignore them. Besides, some Western foods are included in our osechi, as you see. Traditional osechi doesn’t really include much of “kid’s favorites,” so I guess my sis and I begged mom to pack things like meat balls, karaage (deep-fried chicken) and ebifurai (deep-fried shrimp coated with breadcrumbs) when we were kids (and my dad, too, because those are his favs.) Now the details… Those pretty colored kamaboko (steamed fish cakes), rolled sushi, yokan (sweet bean paste jello, next to the strawberries ) and green peas are store-bought. We made the boiled prawns and ebifurai. Also, in the upper right corner is our home-made konnyaku -sushi, but they’re hard to see. We made the inari-zushi （fried bean-curd stuffed with sushi rice）, meat balls, ebifurai and chicken karaage. Everything else was store-bought. The datemaki (rolled sweet omelet) in the center was a little different… it had a piece of chestnut at the bottom. The yellow and striped kamaboko had some western touch with cream cheese and salami sausage. The persimmon slices above the datemaki tasted very good. The food in the small, gray ceramic containers are more like the traditional osechi dishes. From the left, they are kazunoko (salted herring roe), kamaboko, sweetened beans including kuromame (black beans) and nishime (simmered burdock, bamboo shoot, konnyaku and kobumaki). Close-up of some simmered foods (Kobumaki, burdocks and konnyaku). Kobumaki is my favorite and it HAS TO be home-made. It’s basically strip of fish rolled with kelp and tied with kanpyo (dried gourd shavings), seasoned with sugar, soy sauce and a little ginger. I don’t know what kind of fish is popularly used, but we use mackerel. On the white plate --- Actually those were what we had left after packing jubako. The small fish, tadukuri (small sardines simmered with soy sauce and lots of sugar) and rolled squid with fish-egg in the center (the white ones) were store-bought and didn’t taste very good. We’ll never buy them again. On the blue plate --- Sashimi !! From the left, they are yellowtail, tuna, salmon, squid and deep-water shrimp. My niece and nephew love the deep-water shrimp sashimi soooo much, and I love yellowtail sashimi. BTW, my mom always makes a big fuss about getting wild yellowtail for sashimi, but this year we couldn’t find any (even though we shopped around quite a bit) and had no other choice but to buy cultured one. I forgot to share my expertise with you :) My mom and I made several of this thing out of aspidistra (Haran) leaves using kitchen knife only, not scissors. Good for decoration, and also prevents the taste of one food getting onto another when serving different kinds of foods altogether on one big plate or in lacquer boxes. (But as you see, we use aluminum foil more.)