Food on Chinese New Years eve is very important! The foods you eat either resemble, or their names are similar to things pertaining to riches and long life. Dumplings are apparently a big thing, as are long noodles, long beans (both due to the belief of having a long life... so don't cut your noodles), fish (I know I read why, but I cannot remember at the moment), and lots of sweets and such. I decided we'd make a meal for our supper just for our family and celebrate with that.
So, we made chicken stir fry (we were out of fish... sigh) with noodles instead of rice, and I made dumplings... first time ever! It was suprisingly not too difficult, and since I didn't have a number of the regular ingrediants for the filling, I just made my own. I made a total of 12... as that was all the dough I made (although I think I made them too thick as the dough should have made 20... and I had a lot of leftover filling). It took a few dumplings to get the folds to look nice, but none opened up in the boiling water, and they were all eaten by my family. I think I'd like to attempt these again. Perhaps later today I'll make more dough and use the rest of the filling (that is a lot of chopping... I read that using a food processor makes the filling too fine and gummy, and it doesn't have the correct texture, so I hand minced it all).
For dessert I whipped up a batch of almond cookies. I looked up Chinese desserts for the New Year, and this was the only one I had all the ingrediants to. I just did a half batch, of 15 cookies, and they were a hit as well! Mmmm... almond...
For breakfast this morning (the official New Year using the lunar calendar), we had dragon fruit and tea marbled eggs. The dragon fruit we picked because it is now the year of the dragon. The tea marbled eggs I came across during my search for Chinese New Year recipes, and it looked interesting, with ingredients I normally have, so I made them! It was easy, too! And M loved them (Bram doesn't like hardboiled eggs). They had a nice flavor to them.
Don't these look tasty? I loved the effect of the marbling on the eggs! I soaked them for overnight, but I didn't have black tea, which would have made the eggs darker yet. I just used... blackcurrant tea, hahaha. It has 'black' in it... :P
Lastly, I made some red money envelopes for each of the kids. I didn't have looney's or tooney's or anything, so they got 4 pennies each. I know... cheap... but I'm actually giving them each $1.12... or any one thing they want from Dollarama. I also found out how to write their names in Chinese symbols (well, my daughter's isn't exactly right as they didn't have any name or word like her name), so I wrote them in sparkly gell glue on the backs of the cards, and used a Mickey sticker to close it for Bram, and a Hello Kitty sticker for M.
I will have to post the recipes later on in my cookbook... I will probably try them again. Although, next thing I want to celebrate is Valentine's Day... and I think I may be doing another '14 days of Valentine's'... :) Just because I can... and it's fun... :)
