Blog » New Year

After a seriously insane final few weeks of 2013, I'm SO ready to dive into the new year. Literally. Yoko and I, our partners, along with Atelier Dion, and my brother, are off to Hawaii for five days of sun, sleep and...

When Old Man Winter's icy digit stops mercury from rising, I am reminded of a traveler I met in Argentina, a Canadian middle-school teacher who once ran sled dogs. It was so cold in Saskatchewan that when he and the dogs returned to their cabin...

2013 whizzed past us didn't it?!?! As I look back on the year, I recall a rager, a long day of blood/sweat/tears, a triumphant expansion, then, another expansion. Cause hey, why the hell not? It's all a bit...

I woke up on January 1, 2013 ready to shred on the tatami mats at my husband's parent's house in western Tokyo. After a great workout I took a walk and saw Mt. Fuji in clear view. It was a...

The Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur was last week, which continues the season of the Jewish New Year. To celebrate this annual cycle, challah is often formed into a round (instead of being braided) and harvest...

I was fortunate enough to peek into the Peko Peko kitchen this last weekend, while they were preparing all 40 boxes of their highly coveted annual osechi bentos. What a crew! Sylvan had about five people working the kitchen -- peeling, dicing, de-shelling 40 Dungeness crabs......

Five minutes. That's litterally how much time I had to decide whether I was going to accept the out of the blue New Year's Eve dinner party invitation from my friends in Stockholm at 12:30 in the afternoon on Dec 31, 2011. That's all the time...

As 2011 draws to a close, I am not thinking about the Mayans. Rather, I am trying to decide what I will be eating over the weekend. PRIORITIES, people! I'll be working on Saturday evening (apocalypse be damned!), but I'll have all the accouterments ready to ring...

For the last four years, Sylvan of Peko-Peko catering in San Francisco has been making osechi bento sets for the first of the year. Osechi, as you know from Yamahomo's annual posts (here and here), are foods that are traditionally cooked...

I am from a town so rural, you wouldn't believe it. Although Japan is portrayed as a metropolitan, clean, and simple city to Westerners, that's not how real Japan is all about. Whenever I say I am from Japan, first thing people usually ask is,...