My first time celebrating Lunar New Year
Happy Lunar New Year!
Laura and I just celebrated the new Lunar New Year which was a first for us. It’s not something I’ve paid much attention to in the past but I’ve recently become a lot more interested in my Chinese heritage and I’m gently exploring it. Since we absolutely love food, that’s where we’ve started.
We did some research and tried out best to come up with a menu that sounded tasty and honoured some of the traditions which was really fun!
We had fish which is meant to be eaten on two days. The leftovers are apparently important to have. Neither of us love fish so it was not our favourite. Especially because this fish came with eyeballs and it looked at us. It even stuck its fin up while we were cooking it… Bit confronting and we kind of massacred it as you can see in the picture. Maybe we just cooked it too long?
We also made some lionhead meatballs which is just a super cool name and something that’s celebratory in China. They were super delicious, mostly because Laura spent 15 minutes mixing them in one direction by hand. We have meatballs for days now, haha. And of course, we made some longevity noodles. I’m pretty sure we didn’t have the right noodles, mostly because we couldn’t work out if the longevity noodle is the name of the dish or some sort of super long noodle with no end? But they were actually really tasty and it was the first time I tried Chinese chives which were kind of like… regular chives meets spring onion?
We also made some tang yuan, which reminded me of mochi. They had this black sesame and red bean paste inside and then a chewy rice flour outside. They didn’t come out perfect but they were fun to roll! And one of the recipes recommended pouring some ginger syrup over them and that was absolutely delicious.
The strangest thing we had on the menu was a New Year’s cake that was a really odd texture and came in a massive slab that you could probably use to knock someone out. We tried a little piece and it was crumbly and dry with slight toffee-like sweetness and then it went gooey and chewy when it was fried up with egg. Truly bizarre but actually really tasty.
Lots of the methods were vaguely familiar but still very different from what I’m used to. We had a lot of the staples already in the house, like soy sauce and sesame oil, but had to buy some others to add to our collection. We’re also making some spring rolls later and accompanied it all with some amazing pagoda black tower tea that really felt festive and was super beautiful.
To add to the festive atmosphere, we hung up a Fu sign. It’s a good luck sign that is meant to be turned upside down so the good luck can fall down on us. We put it up above our doorway but took it down just for the picture. It’s just a single little decoration because I wasn’t sure if it would feel right to fill our house with red signs but maybe next year, we’ll add something to our collection.
I’m not sure if anything we did was “authentic”. I’m sure we had recipes from different regions and everything we made was our first attempt, so there was room for improvement. Since I was adopted as a baby and grew up in Europe, I have no real ties or experience with Chinese culture and its customs. I just have the heritage and the face so it’s a slightly odd thing to celebrate something that’s rooted in me and yet so unfamiliar at the same time. I’m excited about discovering more and finding out what parts of it I like, which I want to keep, and what feels right for someone who both is and isn’t Chinese. It’s a journey and experience I’ll definitely be incorporating into my writing and books so I’m looking forward to it and I hope anyone who is reading this also enjoyed a tiny taste of what’s to come.
– Ari
