Celebrating Chinese New Year

yee sang and prosperity dish of oysters and fatt choy

Thank you for all the well wishes! Hope everyone had a wonderful long weekend of feasting at home, restaurants, friends and relatives' homes. I was down in Singapore for the festive celebrations.

lap mei fan with crispy crusts, tender waxed meats and aromatic fried garlic

It was a quick weekend trip that kicked off with lunch at an old family favourite - Hua Ting at Orchard Boulevard Hotel, just off Orchard Road. Here we ordered traditional must-haves a.k.a. yee sang, lap mei fan (waxed meat rice) and nien gao.

prawns fried with lily bulbs and asparagus

I had fun noting down how different things are done in Singapore vs Kuala Lumpur eateries. Here you're given seperate chopsticks (longer ones) to help you toss the colourful vegetable strands for yee sang. It means a longer arm stretch but don't worry, it still gets messy as we must The waitresses are eloquent when they are prepping yee sang for you to toss - every addition of an ingredient is followed by a prosperity or good luck saying.

the gorgeous sunflower agar agar made by my auntie

Even the lap mei fan is different here - the waxed meats are tender when bitten into (no hard lap yoke or waxed meats) and they seperate the crusts from the fluffy rice. I didn't know that bit or else I would have held out for the crispy burnt crusts - one of my favourite bits of lap mei fan. They also add fried garlic into the rice, giving an added fragrance and aroma. We also had a prawns fried with lily bulbs - no need to peel ones since we were all lazy to get the fingers dirty and a Chinese prosperity dish, fresh yuba or tofu skin stuffed with an assortment of goodies such as oysters or hoe see, fatt choy and Chinese mushrooms. Dessert was nien gao - they make a pumpkin version that tasted weird, probably because I am more used to the traditional versions which I liked fried with a thin piece of yam.

cookies galore - love letters, kuih bangkit, pineapple tarts and curly bamboo with cherry blossoms

No Chinese New Year celebration will be complete without cookies and we have an assortment of nibbles that you can't resist - homemade pineapple tarts, peanut cookies that melt in the mouth when you pop one, crispy keropok and arrowroot crisps made by my auntie, large pineapple balls and crispy shrimp rolls from Le Cafe in Singapore, kuih bangkit from Bengawan Solo, milky tasting dragon biscuits from the sisters who run the wantan noodles stall in Jalan Batai, almond rounds, love letters from Tong Kee and etc!

yellow skinned dragon fruit to refresh the soul

To balance off all the unhealthy feasting, we did attempt some healthy measures like eating loads of fruits - juicy Tasmanian cherries and these gorgeous yellow skinned dragon fruits that yielded refreshing flesh that was not cloyingly sweet compared to the usual pink skinned dragon fruits. Traditionally the first day saw us cooking "chai", an assortment of vegetables to my mother's instructions. Even the fried beehoon was pseudo vegetarian with the luxe addiction of abalone (we didn't have any eggs!). All this was paired with rendang tok and rendang Perak I bought from my favourite Shah Alam lady. Simply yummy stuff that we stuffed ourselves silly. I reckon the kids (my twin nephews and niece) had the most fun, as they got to eat everything in sight (cookies, Nespresso chocolates, ice cream, fruits and etc!). More pictures are found in my Flickr set.

So how was your celebrations? Anything eventful???