On New Year’s Day we had special food called o-sechi. It came in a stack of 3 boxes, each of which has a theme: Chinese, western and Japanese. Each box contained a variety of carefully-prepared and beautifully-presented delicacies.

The Chinese food looks like this:

It has various roasted and smoked meats, prawns, walnuts, and ma bo nasu aubergines. Most striking are the shiitake mushrooms decorated with gold leaf.

Here is the western-style selection:

The most delicious items were 3 different terrines; a terrine of duck with orange, a vegetable terrine served with cute miniature pancakes, and a prawn and urchin terrine. There were also smoked salmon, European-style pickles, roast meats, green olives and pumpkin purée.

This is the Japanese box:

The pink-and-white discs are kamaboko; there are prawns, cod roe, shellfish, sweet black beans, salmon, asparagus, chestnut purée and various other items.

To accompany the o-sechi, Yuko made a special rice dish with red beans called sekihan (a favourite of mine) and a soup with mochi called ozouni.

 

 

 

So, this was our New Year’s Day breakfast. Itadakimasu!