Happy New Year of the goat! 恭喜發財! I wish you all a happy and prosperous year!
My family and I cooked up so many dishes like the crispy pork belly, there was also the traditional fat choy soup with dried scallops, shiitake mushrooms and fresh lettuce, homemade nian gao, taro cake, and turnip cake, and roast whole chicken (flavored with five-spice powder).
We’ve open up a new box of fancy grade da hong po (武夷岩茶), translated as “big red robe tea” to serve with our food. This type of tea is a rich oolong tea that have notes of oaky, vanilla flavor and goes with any of the dishes we’ve cooked.
The new addition for our feast, was the luxurious braised dish called poon choi. It’s a braised dish filled with abalone, dried scallops, reconstituted dried shiitake mushrooms, pigs’ front feet, and large shrimp. It’s a large bowl of food symbolism to bring in prosperity and happiness for the new year.
There’s also the addition of an 8-hour slow roast pork shoulder with crispy skin. We pricked the pork shoulder’s skin with a jaccard meat tenderizer and rubbed the huge slab of meat with five-spice powder, minced garlic, salt and pepper. Let it marinate overnight in the refrigerator. By the time I make my morning coffee, I oven it at 425°F for 30 minutes and lower it to 250°F and let it roast when I’m at work. When I return home, this honkin’ piece of meat is ready to slice and eat.
There’s lots of food for us to eat collectively and last us for a week, if not more. It’s meant to be that way for this holiday, as it mean we have an abundance for the new year.
