New Years Dinner
Happy New Year everyone ♡♡♡
Yesterday I wasn't able to do quite as much cleaning as I had hoped, but I got all the cooking done in record time and enjoyed some anime and SPN time with my son Alex before going to bed at 2:30 or so.
Thanks to your kind messages in my previous post I woke up in good spirits and was able to finish last minute cleaning and cooking before my mother-in-law came for dinner. These are the two dishes I prepared.
A vegetable & chicken dish called chikuzen-ni. It has lots of root vegetables: lotus root, carrots, bamboo shoots, burdock root, shiitake mushrooms (dried) and konnyaku. It is one of my favorite dishes.
Red bean rice called sekihan - it is made with very sticky rice (the type that rice cakes are made from) and the rice is made red by steeping and cooking it in the red water from boiling the red azuki beans. We eat it with black sesame and salt. Also one of my favorite foods and often made on special occaisons because red is the color of celebration.
Mother-in-law brought the boxes of New Years food that we order every year and hubby bought a bunch of sashimi so our table looked like this :)
After a bit of wine, I started craving some crackers to go with our ratatouille so we got Julian to buy us some at the store and we enjoyed some more wine with cream cheese-crackers with the ratatouille and various other toppings. Grandma had brought some salmon roe - also a favorite of mine and the kids. Audrey just loved the cracker- salmon roe combination and ended up eating most of the crackers :D
After dinner, Audrey showed off her piano skills to grandma and I tried to follow along with the acompaniment :P
It was grandma's first time to see our Hamutaro, so Audrey enjoyed showing him off too.
It actually snowed a bit in the morning. The flakes were so light and there was a bit of a wind so the flakes were flying all over the place. It didn't last for long and the sky cleared in the evening.
Hope you all have a wonderful New Years Day!
Yesterday I wasn't able to do quite as much cleaning as I had hoped, but I got all the cooking done in record time and enjoyed some anime and SPN time with my son Alex before going to bed at 2:30 or so.
Thanks to your kind messages in my previous post I woke up in good spirits and was able to finish last minute cleaning and cooking before my mother-in-law came for dinner. These are the two dishes I prepared.
A vegetable & chicken dish called chikuzen-ni. It has lots of root vegetables: lotus root, carrots, bamboo shoots, burdock root, shiitake mushrooms (dried) and konnyaku. It is one of my favorite dishes.
Red bean rice called sekihan - it is made with very sticky rice (the type that rice cakes are made from) and the rice is made red by steeping and cooking it in the red water from boiling the red azuki beans. We eat it with black sesame and salt. Also one of my favorite foods and often made on special occaisons because red is the color of celebration.
Mother-in-law brought the boxes of New Years food that we order every year and hubby bought a bunch of sashimi so our table looked like this :)
After a bit of wine, I started craving some crackers to go with our ratatouille so we got Julian to buy us some at the store and we enjoyed some more wine with cream cheese-crackers with the ratatouille and various other toppings. Grandma had brought some salmon roe - also a favorite of mine and the kids. Audrey just loved the cracker- salmon roe combination and ended up eating most of the crackers :D
After dinner, Audrey showed off her piano skills to grandma and I tried to follow along with the acompaniment :P
It was grandma's first time to see our Hamutaro, so Audrey enjoyed showing him off too.
It actually snowed a bit in the morning. The flakes were so light and there was a bit of a wind so the flakes were flying all over the place. It didn't last for long and the sky cleared in the evening.
Hope you all have a wonderful New Years Day!