Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Grandma's Chinese New Year Repertoire

Day 2. Chinese New Year Day. Each and every year we go to my grandma's place for our new year's lunch (and collect our red-pockets). Each and every year she would cook all these dishes, enough to feed at least 25 people for 2 days!! I don't know how she does it. I have to say I don't like home-cooked Chinese meals but I love her stuff. A big THANK YOU for grandma!

B - will you please correct my speculations on the ingredients.

One of her specials: stir-fried fish (carp?) slices with choi sum. A simple dish but with lots of flavours and I don't know where they came from. As I understand it the choi sum was blanched first then stir-fried with the fish. Where did the sauce and the taste come from though? There seemed to be some kind of sauce.

I don't even know what this one is called - grandma's own creation perhaps. It had a variety of ingredients - 2 types of minced fish balls, prawns, broccoli, and enoki mushrooms. I hadn't noticed it at the time but she garnished the dish with coriander! This is the thing with grandma's cooking - she seems to throw randon stuff together but it always has taste. Stange.

And no New Year meal is completed without the bottomless veg stew. It always seemed to last for days: either she cooked a ton of the stuff, or nobody liked vegetables. Could be a bit of both I guess. The stew had sugar snap beans, Chinese cabbage, tofu, bean sprouts, and my favourite glass noodles. It was as good as vegetables go I guess. :-)

Kid's favourite: Grandma's Signature Wings®. They are a pain in the butt to eat (with chopsticks!!) but always taste reliably good. We tried to find out the recipe but it sounded way too complicated. From what we gathered the seasonings include oyster sauce, Chinese (rice?) wine, chicken seasoning, water, salt. I don't think it is the complete list so don't try this at home. The wings were braised for a while and the skin came off easily. Good for us picky eaters!

There were a few more dishes like pan fried pomfret, and something with Chinese radish - but I was too busy eating then. :-) She also made some slow-cooked soup - again her own creation with pork, sweet corn, carrots, and all bunch of other stuff in it. I guess I would never grasp the essence of Chinese cooking as everything seems so random.

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