Happy Happy New Year!
January 1, 2010
Posted by AnnaTheRed in Everything else, bento blog (all) Tags: soba, studio ghibli, totoro
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We didn’t go out on New year’s eve. We stayed home and I cooked “toshikoshi soba,” and we just watched the ball drop on TV. “Toshikoshi-soba” means “the end of the year soba noodle.” In Japan, people eat soba at night before the year’s over. Any soba eaten on the night of December 31st is “toshikoshi-soba.” What kind of soba you’ll eat depends on your family tradition, where you’re from, etc… For us, I just cooked soba and ate it with a little bit of scallions, kamaboko (fish cake), carrot and enoki.
Our toshikoshi soba 2009!
And to start off 2010, I made this for my boyfriend’s brunch! It’s not very special, but since we make rice balls for brunch almost every weekend, I thought I’d play with it a little this morning. I’ll do a post about this later, but here’s a picture.
It’s “kagami-mochi” Totoro! Well, it’s not mochi (rice cake), but I decided to stack them on top of each other like “kagami-mochi.”
Just like my any other Totoro, they’re made with rice mixed with black sesame seed and seaweed powder, stuffed with tarako (cod roe), and the chibi-Totoro is made with a quail egg.
Kagami-mochi is a decoration for the New Year in Japan. It’s made with 2~3 round rice cakes stacked on top of each other. Traditionally, you break it and eat it on the second Saturday or Sunday of January. But my grandma wasn’t that strict about when we broke the kagami-mochi though. I remember her beating the crap out of a kagami-mochi with the back of a knife because mochi gets rock hard after being displayed for a couple of days. (A lot of time, people use a mallet or hammer to break it.) Most of kagami-mochi sold in a store is shrink-wrapped now so it will never get too hard or moldy. We stopped by at Sunrise mart (a local Japanese grocery store) the other day and got ourselves a “kagami-mochi.”
This year is the year of tiger, so it came with a cute little tiger figure.
Have a happy new year, everyone!
新年明けましておめでとうございます。
今年もどうぞよろしくお願いいたします。
アンナ
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Have a very nice new year! Thanks for your bentos and tips. I wish you all the best(