Never, EVER again. Osechi cooking.....

PLEASE. Next time. Next year.
STOP ME.
I am a fool and I should know better. Far better.


Okaasan and I cooked for five and a half hours today. Five and a half hours.
Oh - with a short break for lunch and a quick trip to the supermarket.


It was hell. How I kept my smiley patience I can't say. Now I am drinking a nice Chardonnay and that is helping.


Here is what we made:

Seaweed rolls with radish and carrot inside, tied with gourd.

Umani - stewed root vegetables and chicken.

Sato imo - yams in half the sugar cane of a plantation.....


It was the blind leading the blind.
Okaasan couldn't remember what she was making. And I didn't know what she was making!
After over an hour of soaking and washing seaweed and cutting carrots and radish into tiny sticks, and washing and scrubbing dried gourd strips to tie ever so carefully round the slippery seaweed.....I realized she WASN'T making what I'd planned.....
So after 90 minutes I got her onto making the main event dish...and that stretched over lunch and beyond.

I really must never do this again.
Okaasan is beyond it. She can't remember what is inside the pan, so she constantly lifts the lid to look inside.
She can't remember whether she has seasoned something or not. She can't remember how long something has been cooking. She can't remember which is stock and which is water.
And on and on and on.

So much for my stupid "oh it will be so nice to have a shared cooking experience!".

And. Get this.....in the middle of the morning the delivery guy came with the...box of traditional New Year foods that I'd ordered from the supermarket!!! I'd almost thought about cancelling it 2 days ago, but told myself it would be ok because: Okaasan is only going to make one thing.
That was then. Now I have a kitchen choca-block with stewed and sweetened, drowned in soy sauce stuff.
We may not have to cook until spring.

I finally brought it all to a close about 2.30 pm - Okaasan had wandered into her room and sat down in front of the TV. I grabbed the chance to silently and quickly finish everything up in the kitchen and pack it all away in the fridge before she could come and look at it all again.

She did wander through though: um...I didn't eat lunch did I? I'm hungry!
I reminded her that 2 hours before we'd sat at the kitchen table and eaten lunch together..she had no memory of that experience. So I heated up some old pizza for her and fled upstairs to fall into a stupor on the sofa with a kitten.

Never. Ever. Again.