A Recipe Of Japanese New Year's Dishes:How To Cut Kamaboko Fishcake Into Decorative Shapes

Are you interested in Japanese New Year's dishes, "Osechi dishes"? Today, I'd like to introduce one of the easy recipes. It doesn't require too much labor but it can instantly add a New-Year-Celebration feeling on dishes. 

In Japan there are various kind of fish cakes. "Kamaboko" is one of them which is steamed fish-meat in a semi-cylindrical shape, and it is often served as a New Year's dish. You can just slice it to serve, but if it is cut into decorative shapes, they can be a nice accent on New Year's dishes as you can see in the photos on the first row.

Here in the second row and the third row of photos above, I'm introducing 2 kinds of cutting way which look like birds' shape. Since this year is a "Year of Bird" in Japan as I wrote in my previous post on January 3rd, it would be good decorations for the New Year. Even for later years, it would still fit New Year dishes because cranes are one of major lucky symbol animals in Japanese culture. 

Hope you will enjoy trying this decorative cut!