Submitted by: Yoko Nishimura (California, USA)

I have lived in the US for over 20 years now. I love living here, but I always feel some kind of home sick if I spend time here at New Year's. In Japan, my family cooks various osechi from scratch. One year, I made as many osechi food as possible from scratch....kinton, ozoni, nishime, datemaki, kuromame, chirashi, namasu, yakibuta etc. I'm not sure if yakibuta is a new year food, but my mom always makes really good yakibuta for oshogatsu. So to me, yakibuta is essential osechi food to celebarte oshogatsu. Anyway, as I expected, it was a lot of work! Since then, i have never cooked that many variation of osechi, but I really felt oshogatsu spirit through cooking preparation.