Happy New Year! The new year has just begun, and I'm very excited! I truly hope everybody including myself will be able to have a better year.

Today my husband, my parents, our daughter and her family, and I celebrated the New Year at our house. We had a sukiyaki party, which was our son-in-law's request.

The picture below shows a typical Japanese guest room with a tokonoma. We had our sukiyaki in this room.

I was busy baking this morning. I baked two pound cakes, and I'll share the recipe sometime soon.

Since all my family members love crabs, my husband prepared some, but everybody was too full with sukiyaki to eat them.

Here's the meat. Sukiyaki requires very thin, sliced beef, which is hard to find both in the U.S. and the U.K. We Japanese prefer these marbled (fatty) meat over lean one. It melts in our mouth with one bite and is very delicious.

The dish has two different ways; the Kansai style and the Kanto style. We are from the Kansai region, so we follow the kansai style. In the style, we grill the meat first.

The picture shows my homemade otoso (medicinal sake), and I'll write about it in another entry.

The next picture shows my homemade ozōni, which is a traditional dish for New Year. It started in the 14 century.

We ate a lot, so someone said we should go for a walk. We visited a Shinto shrine to pray, and I'll write about it in another post as well.

After that, we enjoyed some large strawberries. Our grandson got excited when he saw them. He probably hadn't seen such big ones before.

Then, I served my homemade matcha and black bean cake. We had lots of fun together! My parents especially seemed so happy that they played with their grate-grandchild.

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