New Year's superstitions and food

When I think of New Year's, I typically think of superstitions. Kissing at midnight was one of those things fueled by too many romance movies as a kid. But then there are also all the foods you should eat because it is new year. You want to start the year off right and persuade the universe to dole out more things in the new year than the past. Most often these include health and money.

Growing up in Louisiana, my mom always made, to my distaste, cabbage and beans. Boiled cabbage ain't my thing and no offense to my mom but I still don't like her beans. But I would eat it for the health and wealth. 

Beans must really be healthy because even in Japan you find beans for good health in osechi ryori. Mind you they are black beans and delightfully sweet. Even if they don't give me health and only give me gas I would eat these black beans.

There are actually a ton of different osechi all with different meanings and often with excessive price tags. 

This tiny tray of shrimp is six bucks. Sure the shrimp look like old people so you might be nudging the gods to allow you to live to old age, but they are also 6 bucks.

If you are in Japan during the new year it is highly likely you will run into osechi in some form or other. But the things I am more interested in are the more make at home type of stuff. While osechi can be done at home, often they are expensive because they are labor intensive;  boiling for hours, pickling for months etc. What I want is a more rustic recipe to bring me some good luck. 

I was fortunate to find just that in my son's new letter from his Kindergarten. It talked about eating nanakusagayu, seven weed rice porridge. What with New Years being in the middle of winter, fresh foods are scare. Except for the weeds growing in my yard. Low and behold I can eat some of them. 

I looked up here what the different "herbs" are and recognized a few straight away.

Seri (せり) / Water dropwort

Nazuna (なずな・ぺんぺん草) / Shepherd’s Purse

Gogyo (ごぎょう) / Cudweed

Hakobera (はこべら) / Chickweed

Hotokenoza (ほとけのざ) / Nipplewort

Suzuna (すずな・かぶ) / Turnip

Suzushiro (すずしろ・大根) / Daikon radish

This one is hotokenoza which isn't the same as what my search for nipplewort gave me. I do know this is edible so I picked a few plants. 

I added some of this Shepard's purse or Nazuna. I also had gogyo and radishes. 

I cleaned them, blanched them in boiling water, rinsed again, cut them up and put them in a pot of water and cooked rice. I added some salt and let the water cook down until it was a nice porridge consistency. 

It was really good. If eating this bowl of gruel wards off evil for a year, I will definitely be eating it every year. Seeing as it is full of greens, foraged from my yard, there must be benefits to my health. I will likely be eating it more than once a year just for good measure.