So this is the last remaining of New Year's dish.  This black bean is cooked with mostly with sweet taste but also has some soy sauce flavor.  Beans signifies industriousness as I wrote in previous post on New year's dish.  I heard recently, lot of Japanese say this is the most young people don't like and often gets thrown away after New Year.  Sad, but I also didn't like it as a young child neither.  But beans are something that is eaten across different culture and this is my BF's favorite dish among different dish in New Year's dish.  Traditionally we cook black beans with rusted nail to enhance color of black.

Sweet kumquat is also known to be good for sore throat and coughing.  I make this dish during winter few times to battle with cold and you can put kumquat and syrup in hot water to make tea when you have cough or sore throat to help.

Ingredients

• Kumquat
• Sugar/honey (I used white sugar this time as I wanted the color yellow to be bright.  If you use honey or brown sugar, it looks little more brownish)
• Water

Directions

• Put some slice in kumquat vertically so that later you can take out seeds easily. If you don't mind needing to spit out seeds later, you can skip this.
• Boil kumquat in hot water for about 5 min or until it gets slightly soft.  This process is needed so that harshness of kumquat is removed.
• Once kumquat is slightly soft, drain them and put ton of sugar (like you are making jam) and cook it with low to moderate heat until you can make jam consistency.  I like lot of syrup to drink with hot water later, so I put some water in this, but if you are just trying to make kumquat jam, then you don't need much water.