A rather belated entry about our Chinese New Year celebration(s), as we were quite busy the past few weeks. For us it began before sunrise with a visit to Billingsgate Market, London's seafood wholesaler. And we were not alone, as 65% of the crowd that day were chinese. It was hard to decide where to begin as each stall seemed to have their specialities while stocking some of the same. We did a quick survey before embarking on the first purchase, as the stock was moving really fast! We got squid, salmon, seabass, shrimp and scallops for the hotpot that night. (we had so much fun eating and preparing, we forgot to take pictures of the actual hotpot!) And as per normal, we had enough ingredients left from the hotpot to feed is for 3 days after till 初四！(4th day of CNY)
CNY is all about family, friends, fun and food- consisting of multiple get-together meals and snacks during house visits. Since most of our family were in Malaysia and Singapore, our get-togethers were via skype, chatting and checking out what's the latest going ons at home. To create some atmosphere, we tried our hand at paper cutting to decorate the house with! There's a funny mistake with the 2 goldfishes as the head/body division was cut in the wrong direction resulting in what looks like a pair of frowning frogs! Nonetheless, we were still quite happy with this first attempt and up it went on the front door. (the correct version of the goldfish is right above the 'frogs')
A CNY tea with lots of friends, who were mostly from other parts of the world became a wonderful opportunity to share local snacks! Regimented longans ensured that every piece of agar-agar served was egalitarian. Making ondeh ondeh for the first time turned out quite well, after we got over the initial intimidation- we thought of it as tangyuan coated with coconut. We requested all our guests to bring oranges/clementines/mandarins and what a lovely surprise from an artistic friend! Her mendhi design on the clementines are ace! And strangely, these tiny fruit yielded 19 seeds in one and none in the other ! We had a huge assortment of citrus fruits after the tea, even though we had exchanged them with guests as per traditional custom.
Mid-CNY, we had fun adapting the hotpot for our indian vegetarian friends; using a szechuan spicy soup base, had tofu, beancurd skin, yam, chinese cabbage, long beans, taupok, some kind of gourd, mustard greens, xiaobaicai, snow peas and freshly made 面粉果 (meehoon kueh - a sort of 'chinese pasta') ...... I guess festivals usually evoke homesickness and memories of all the little traditions and customs carried out during our growing up days.. On the 元宵（15th and last day of CNY）, we utilized the last of the vege hotpot ingredients for a really simple dinner of chaiporneng ( preserved turnip omelette), longbeans and TTT ( tauge,tanghoon,taukwa) -( bean sprouts, glassnoodles, firm tofu). Nothing extravagant but ohh so yummy! And no 元宵 dinner is complete without 汤圆！Whipping up a homemade version filled with available ingredients - rice dumping filled with gula melaka in a ginger osmanthus soup - heavenly!
As you probably noticed, we are still working our way through the snacks and new year food. We are making good progress and just last night devised an appetizer incorporating all out usual ingredients for 年糕 (a sweet new year cake) . It turned out really strange- yam and leengor omelette! But as we are commited to posting our cooking adventures here, you'll be seeing multiple facets of it !
