Happy New Year !

Japanese New Year ornaments can cost thousands, but we usually choose the smaller and cheaper ones.

The turtle art to the left symbolizes long life, the crane to the right is for good fortune. In the middle is an ornament with mochi inside to be eaten on New Years’s day. I really don’t know why but eating and making mochi, are big part of Japanese New Year tradition!

a Japanese wedding

What can be very rich in culture but least romantic of all? Answer: a Japanese wedding! We attended my brother-in-law’s wedding yesterday. Western style wedding is popular in Japan, but traditional is still a preferred style.

The groom mostly walking ahead of the wife as she follows him around like a faithful servant. No “you may kiss the bride” after the ceremony, no first dance, rarely if none do they even held each others arm. As the bride needs to hold her kimono and the groom hold on to his fan. Its normal to see cultural presentations. This time it was Japanese drumming by a bunch of kids. Oh and the speeches, dont get me started, the head of the company who barely knows the couple has to be invited to speak, and usually ending up talking about their firm.

I love Japanese culture, but Im more interested with the couple during a wedding. Call me a hopeless romantic, but weddings should be a venue for grand display of drama, hihihhi.

Since this is sort of a food blog, these are some of the food we ate…

children's course

appetizers

that's my name in katakana , the alphabet they used for all foreign words and names

sashimi with the sake bottle

Couldn’t help but think how we made our Japanese wedding organizers and hotel staff lose their senses, when we had ours last March. Bringing in a lot of wedding professionals from the Philippines, and changing a lot of the set program they wanted us to follow, to maximize drama, hihihihi!

Christmas school lunch

Our last school lunch for the year. If you ask Japanese people what’s a traditional Christmas cuisine, you will only get 2 answers, that is Christmas cake and chicken.

I would say this is by far the tastiest and oiliest school lunch I ever had. So for today, in the spirit of Christmas our school took a break from serving healthy Japanese school lunch and went for rich, tasty, delicious and probably bad for your health menu. Who cares, its Christmas!

yogurt drink, salad, bbq chicken, Christmas cake, fried rice, bacon,egg and corn soup.

Happy holidays to all!

Purikua

There are 3 new things I included in the bento. First is an okara, the dish on the left side, which is made of the nutritious bran part of the rice, that is removed to make the rice white. It is cooked with sugar, a little soysauce and topped with onion leeks.
Then I made an onigiri mixed with Chinese black beans. Lastly, Purikua furikake for the other 2 rice balls.

marathon day bento

Everytime I work on a Saturday, I’m rewarded with authentic Japanese bento. This is the best one so far. It felt like every piece has its own distincy flavor.
Small fish grilled and flavored with miso and wrap in a leaf; mushrooms and fish tempura topped with fish eggs; grilled mochi with shiso, sashimi topped with caviar then wrapped in persimmon leaf. It is impossible to describe everything. My point is just to show the effort and the variety of flavors in a single Japanese bento.