Dinner on New Year’s Day

Every year, I go to my parents’ house in the evening of New Year’s Day and have dinner with them and my sister. Though I have been a vegetarian for more than 27 years, my mother still believes that meat is necessary to get enough nutrition for our bodies and keeps telling me to eat some meat. To avoid an awkward atmosphere, I eat fish on New Year’s holidays with my family. This year, we had sushi with osechi-ryori or special dishes for celebration of the new year.

When I arrived at my parents’ house a little over 17:00 on New Year’s Day, father was preparing salad. He and mother usually eat kiwi fruits, tomatoes, broccoli, or some other vegetables at the beginning of meal. I don’t know why, but it may be some sort of a method to keep health.

Osechi-ryori was from Entetsu Department Store. They provide many kinds of sets every year, and customers make a reservation in advance. This year, we got a 3-layered box with five chopsticks and chopstick rests. It was an ordinary set with many seafood and meat products. However, there were still some traditional foods that were vegan. They were a plum flower-shaped rice cake, baby peaches, simmered black beans, flower-shaped radish, pickled white radish and carrot, tenderized burdock, candied walnuts, and mashed sweet potatoes and chestnuts. At the lower left corner of the picture, there are kelp, butterbur, bamboo shoot, and hu or wheat gluten, but they might be cooked with dried bonito broth.

Osechi ryori were originally intended to be preserved for several days so that housewives could have a rest during the holiday season. Because of this, the foods generally contain much sugar or salt. These vegan foods were very sweet, in fact, too sweet for me. With these, I had sushi from a sushi restaurant near my parents’ house. The raw tuna was fatty, and the boiled shrimp was fishy.

We had also miso soup that father made. He has liked cooking since he was young, and he always put the same things in his miso soup: tofu and deep-fried tofu. Previously, I thought that this combination was boring, because tofu, deep-fried tofu, and miso are all made from soy beans, and they are just the same ingredient in different shapes. But now, I have come to think that it is not so bad. This time, I added finely chopped green onion. Though father used dried bonito broth, this soup can be also made with kelp and/or shiitake mushroom broth.

Father is 80 years old and is from a farming family. When he was little, the majority of Japanese people lived in countryside and had simple eating habits. Maybe this miso soup reflects such history.

After dinner, we ate ningyo-yaki that my sister, who lives in Tokyo, brought from there. Ningyo-yaki are a famous souvenir of Tokyo and were originally baked in Ningyo-cho. They are small pancakes baked in small molds and are usually filled with adzuki bean paste. The ones we had represented faces of Seven Deities of Good Luck and were filled with white kidney bean paste mixed with chestnuts, which I thought was better than ordinary adzuki paste. They were ovo-vegetarian and contained honey.

Besides these, we had a lot of things to eat, as New Year’s Day is the most important holiday in Japan. The festive time continues until January 3.