Happy new year everybody! I hope the new year will bring us lots of peace and happiness on all of us here. Masaki and I had a visitor from London today. I met him through intenational friendship site and I invited him for lunch - and I cooked a very traditional New Year specialities called OZONI. In a word, Ozoni is some soften rice cake in the bonito-stock + soysauce flavor soup. But the ingredients are different from region to region, family to family. There are 100 different ozoni for 100 different households. Mine is quite basic and simple except one thing. I asked lots of people how to make ozoni and most of them told me they toast the rice cake before they put it in the soup. But as for me, I cook the ricecake directly in the soup without toasting in advance, following my mother's recipe. While the toasted ricecake remains some resilience in the soup, boiled rice cake without being toasted is just soft and sticky, losing any firmness in itself. Ozoni is very typical New Year food in Japan, but as it's so typical that we seldom eat it except during the New Year holidays. back home |