Happy New Year! (Part 2)
Akemashite Omedeto Gozai-masu! (Happy New Year everyone!)
We started New Years Day rather late and I just had time to quickly wish friends a Happy New Year before our whole family had to work together to get everything ready by 1 pm, when grandma, aunty and half-brother Shota were due to arrive. Man, am I glad to have two wonderful teenage boys around to help out! One vaccumed the floor while one washed the dishes then they both helped with cleaning the hall and the bathroom so that we were ready earlier than I thought would be possible. 30 minutes before guests were due, we sat down as a family to look at last year's goals and resolutions (hubby is into that stuff and kept all our papers from last year and even before!) It was really interesting to look at my resolutions from last year - because I had totally forgotten what I had written.
Work related goals, unfortunately, have yet to be realized but one of my resolutions from last year was to resume scrapbooking somehow - digitally or manually - since I had scrapbooks for the older boys but none at all for Audrey. I have realized that through this blog and others and am quite happy that I could get one goal out of the way. This year was so full of new things, from joining the SPN forum to learning about banners, avatars(icons) and gifs, then on to creating not one but three blogs and trying my hand at video making and story readings - even if I had not accomplished any of my previous resolutions I am quite happy with what I have accomplished, but this makes it even more worthwhile.
We will have another meeting tomorrow to talk about our new resolutions so I'm thinking of what I want to work toward at this point.
After our meeting, hubby went off to get some fresh fish for sashimi (sushi without rice) and I did last minute preparations for our New Years lunch-dinner. These are the two dishes I usually prepare for the dinner:
As I mentioned in my previous post, one is a vegetable dish with lotus root (the one with the holes), burdock root, carrot, taro root, chicken, bamboo shoots and shiitake mushroom cooked in soysauce/rice wine/sugar. It is called Chikuzen-ni. I love it but my family does not eat much of it, so I only make it at New Years. The second is the red rice. The rice is made red by steeping and cooking it in the red water left over from boiling the red beans. This is also a favorite of mine and one of the few Japanese dishes my mother also prepared at New Years while I was growing up (my parents were missionaries here so I grew up in Japan). So it is full of memories.
New Years food is traditionally food that can keep because mothers would not cook in the kitchen on New Years Day - something to do with the kitchen God if we go back to old Chinese tradition (which is why Spring cleaning is done at this time too I think, but I'm not sure.) The vegetable dish I prepared is one of the traditional dishes, but there are many others and often the ingredients used have meaning as well - like with the soba as mentioned in the last entry. (If you are interested in the details, you can check this Wiki entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osechi It might be interesting to see how many of those you can find in our layered box of New Years food we ordered this year.
The osechi or New Years food we ordered this year also included some chinese and western foods such as a bit of beef stew, spicy shrimp, soft pork and ratatouille.
Our dinner also included lots of wine, and lots of good conversation. We also got Shota, our kids' half-brother to sing to us again and we played some card games together.
New Years is also a time when kids get monetary gifts from relatives (kind of like getting presents at Christmas aye?) so our kids got their otoshidama ("year-coin") from grandma, aunty and also Shota and were very happy ;)
Our dinner started at 3pm (yes, we ended up waiting quite a bit for everyone to arrive...) and ended at 7:00. It's 10:20 now and time for me to get Audrey to bed!
Hope you had/are having a wonderful day!
We started New Years Day rather late and I just had time to quickly wish friends a Happy New Year before our whole family had to work together to get everything ready by 1 pm, when grandma, aunty and half-brother Shota were due to arrive. Man, am I glad to have two wonderful teenage boys around to help out! One vaccumed the floor while one washed the dishes then they both helped with cleaning the hall and the bathroom so that we were ready earlier than I thought would be possible. 30 minutes before guests were due, we sat down as a family to look at last year's goals and resolutions (hubby is into that stuff and kept all our papers from last year and even before!) It was really interesting to look at my resolutions from last year - because I had totally forgotten what I had written.
Work related goals, unfortunately, have yet to be realized but one of my resolutions from last year was to resume scrapbooking somehow - digitally or manually - since I had scrapbooks for the older boys but none at all for Audrey. I have realized that through this blog and others and am quite happy that I could get one goal out of the way. This year was so full of new things, from joining the SPN forum to learning about banners, avatars(icons) and gifs, then on to creating not one but three blogs and trying my hand at video making and story readings - even if I had not accomplished any of my previous resolutions I am quite happy with what I have accomplished, but this makes it even more worthwhile.
We will have another meeting tomorrow to talk about our new resolutions so I'm thinking of what I want to work toward at this point.
After our meeting, hubby went off to get some fresh fish for sashimi (sushi without rice) and I did last minute preparations for our New Years lunch-dinner. These are the two dishes I usually prepare for the dinner:
As I mentioned in my previous post, one is a vegetable dish with lotus root (the one with the holes), burdock root, carrot, taro root, chicken, bamboo shoots and shiitake mushroom cooked in soysauce/rice wine/sugar. It is called Chikuzen-ni. I love it but my family does not eat much of it, so I only make it at New Years. The second is the red rice. The rice is made red by steeping and cooking it in the red water left over from boiling the red beans. This is also a favorite of mine and one of the few Japanese dishes my mother also prepared at New Years while I was growing up (my parents were missionaries here so I grew up in Japan). So it is full of memories.
New Years food is traditionally food that can keep because mothers would not cook in the kitchen on New Years Day - something to do with the kitchen God if we go back to old Chinese tradition (which is why Spring cleaning is done at this time too I think, but I'm not sure.) The vegetable dish I prepared is one of the traditional dishes, but there are many others and often the ingredients used have meaning as well - like with the soba as mentioned in the last entry. (If you are interested in the details, you can check this Wiki entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osechi It might be interesting to see how many of those you can find in our layered box of New Years food we ordered this year.
The osechi or New Years food we ordered this year also included some chinese and western foods such as a bit of beef stew, spicy shrimp, soft pork and ratatouille.
Our dinner also included lots of wine, and lots of good conversation. We also got Shota, our kids' half-brother to sing to us again and we played some card games together.
New Years is also a time when kids get monetary gifts from relatives (kind of like getting presents at Christmas aye?) so our kids got their otoshidama ("year-coin") from grandma, aunty and also Shota and were very happy ;)
Our dinner started at 3pm (yes, we ended up waiting quite a bit for everyone to arrive...) and ended at 7:00. It's 10:20 now and time for me to get Audrey to bed!
Hope you had/are having a wonderful day!