Breakfast, January 1, 2012

Before the New Year's Day osechi brunch with friends, we had a small breakfast for just the two of us.

• Ozoni / New Year's Day soup with rice cake, gobo burdock root, carrot, konnyaku yam cake, kamaboko fishcake, yakidofu [broiled tofu], and grilled ling cod
• Kuromame no fukumeni / slightly sweet soy sauce flavored black soybeans
• Kamaboko musubi-giri / fishcake cut in knot shape
• Yabane kinusaya / snow peas cut in arrow shaft feather shape
• Namasu / daikon radish and carrots in citrus vinegar marinade

We usually have a full-scale meal for breakfast on New Year's Day (as shown in the backdrop of this blog, which is the breakfast we had on January 1, 2011) along with sake, but we just wanted to have something small before friends showed up later, and I picked up several items from among osechi dishes. This combination might be something I'll cook when preparing all the different dishes for 3-4 days becomes too much to handle in the future. Simple, but satisfying.

Ozoni or zoni varies by region, and each family has its own recipe. The regional characteristic of my hometown is the grilled fish. Locally caught fukuragi -- a local word for young yellowtail -- is what people use. Here I substituted ling cod. I grilled the fish on the 29th, made weakly flavored ozoni on the 30th, let it cool, and heated it up on the 31st, adding a little more soy sauce (but it still tasted a bit weak). Then I heated it up again on the 1st, and the flavor turned out just right. A good start to the year.