Chinese New Year is one of my favorite holidays. It’s largely centered around food, and you go home with sweets and red envelopes full of money. Need I say more? I inherited my love of food from my family, so there is no shortage of good eats at our Chinese New Year feast. It typically involves my family’s takes on some traditional dishes, plus other things we love to eat.
Another great thing about the holiday is you celebrate closing out the old year and bringing in the new year. So this celebration was to close out the Year of the Monkey, but in a couple weeks we’ll get to do this again to bring in the Year of the Rooster. You can never have too many excuses for a feast.
Dinner
We always get a roasted duck. My cousin Kristi and I lobby for two, as this is our favorite and we could eat a whole duck just between the two of us.
These are chicken thighs stuffed with sticky rice. Sticky rice has all kinds of good things in it like shiitake mushrooms and Chinese sausage – I love it. This is the first time we’ve stuffed it in chicken thighs (find my Guessipe here).
Fun See is bean thread noodles with scrambled egg. It’s one of the traditional dishes we always have. Noodles represent long life.
Another traditional dish we usually have is Chinese black mushrooms with abalone. This dish symbolizes wish fulfillment.
There’s almost always beef tongue. If you’ve never had it, don’t get freaked out. It’s delicious!
Fat Choy is black moss with egg and ground pork. It’s supposed to bring prosperity in the new year.
This is fresh cuttlefish. Prior to this, I’d only ever had it dried (we loved getting bags of the dried cuttlefish from the snack section of the Asian market when we were kids).
Mapo Tofu is so good – I love the spicy, porky sauce over rice, and am always tempted to eat a whole bowl. But I must save room!
We always have a dish with 8 ingredients, as that is a lucky number in Chinese culture. This time we used lotus root, baby corn, fried gluten, black fungus, celery, snow peas, shrimp, and button mushrooms. But you can mix and match as you see fit. I adore the crunch of the lotus root and the chewy meatiness of the fried gluten.
Chinese New Year isn’t the same without roast pork with its crispy skin, and the salty sweetness of BBQ pork.
Dessert
If you’ve spent any time with me, you’ve probably heard my rant about the joys of Asian foods in contrast to the dismal affair that is Asian dessert. But you also know that I can’t have a meal without dessert. So we tend to depart from tradition in the dessert category and go with what we like, throwing in some Asian flair where possible.
This is a fairly traditional almond cake. Not bad as far as Chinese desserts go.
The fresh fruit tart is also pretty standard, and so pretty!
Here’s where we got a little creative. Lychee and longan are Chinese fruits often served for dessert. We made ours into a pie (check out my Guessipe)!
And it’s never bad to have a big container of cream puffs.
