Chinese New Year Gathering

quotes-haven (70)in LAKSHMI • last month

A motley crew of the usual suspects had a Chinese New Year gathering at friend Ernest’s place last Saturday. Ernest had volunteered to cook for us (again), on this occasion. As usual, he cooked a scrumptious meal for us. Since it’s Chinese New Year, he cooked some Chinese dishes typically consumed during the Chinese New Year period..

Some snacks for tea – chips, pastry Chinese New Year cookies… etc. for tea, for those who arrived earlier in the afternoon.

For Dinner, we started with a raw fish salad. This dish is also called the ‘Prosperity toss’ – a dish consumed only during the Chinese New Year. There is a ritual to it. Strips of salmon or tuna fish, (we added abalone to the dish), sauces and condiments are mixed into a plate of vegetables. The vegetables used are carrots, white radish, green radish and cucumber. However, one can improvise, and use the vegetables they like. Each ingredient is added in a specific order, while reciting an auspicious phrase. When that is done, using chopsticks, participants dig into the salad and toss the salad high into the air while shouting out wishes. People believe the higher the toss, the better the fortune. It can end up pretty messing with the dish spilling all over the plate. But what is a little mess if doing that brings you abundant fortune, right?

We were very careful and there wasn’t a mess. So, we might not have abundant wealth this year!

Anyway, our second dish was shark’s fin soup. Shark’s fin soup is a soup or stewed dish. The shark fins provide texture, while the taste comes from the other ingredients. It is commonly served at special occasions such as weddings and banquets, or as a luxury item.

For the main course, we had claypot rice, and ‘Pun Choy’, also known as ‘Chinese casserole’.

For claypot rice, the rice is cooked in a claypot together with the ingredients. In this instance, the ingredients used were duck liver sausages; salted fish, and chicken. Dark sauce is added to the cooked rice, stirred and served.

‘Pun Choy’ also called ‘Poon choi’, and variously translated as ‘big bowl feast’, or ‘basin cuisine’ is a Chinese casserole dish of many ingredients served in a large communal bowl. It's a celebratory dish that's often eaten during Chinese New Year. Typically, it consists of expensive ingredients like abalone, scallops, fish maw, roast meat, dried mushrooms...