Happy Chinese New Year! Or as we say in Cantonese Sun Leen Fai Lok (Happy New Year) and Gung Hai Fat Choi (Wishing your prosperity)!
Chinese New Year is all about family and food (which is what any great holiday should be about!) Plus, food at Chinese New Year takes on all kinds of special meanings. Long noodles for a long life. Oranges & mandarins for prosperity. Hair seaweed for riches. The list is quite long (we Chinese tend to be a superstitious lot).
If you want a great read on Chinese New Year Foods and why they’re considered lucky, visit this post on Bacon is Magic – it’s both informative and interesting!
The Chinese New Year celebration is kind of a bittersweet time for me these days. As some of you may know, my mom suffered from a really bad stroke a few years ago and since then, we haven’t had the huge New Year’s dinners that we had in the past because she can no longer cook. My mom was a fantastic cook and was able to make many of the traditional Chinese dishes – Nian Gao, turnip cakes, Hoe See Fat Choy (dried oysters with hair seaweed), and many more. I always tried to get the recipes from her, but she was the “oh, just throw in some of that, I just do it by feel” type of cook. This year, I’m hoping to be able to get her to teach me to make some of these dishes so that I can try and re-create them for next year. 🙂
In the meantime, I asked some of my fellow food lovers to share their favourite Lunar New Year dishes and recipes with me and they didn’t disappoint! First, there were lots of tweets telling me what their favourite dishes were:
And then came the recipes! (Note: Some of these posts are from previous years so they will mention a different animal – but 2017 is definitely the Year of the Rooster!)
- vanfoodies sent us a post highlighting a beautiful New Year’s dinner filled with traditional Cantonese dishes
- Sean from Diversivore shared this simple, yet vibrant recipe for Mandelo Zaru Soba (Cold Buckwheat Boodles with Cocktail Grapefruit Sauce)
- The Cynful Kitchen shares a recipe for one of my favourite New Year’s dishes – Nian Gao
- The Yum Yum Factor talks about Scallion Ginger Noodles.
What about you, readers? What’s YOUR favourite Chinese (or Lunar) New Year dish? Or, if you don’t have one, which of the ones in the above tweets sound like something you’d like to try?
