Chinese New Year -- The Tse Family Style -- The Food

On the 2nd day of Chinese New Year, let's talk about some Tse Family tradition on the occasion.

When I was single-digit years old, we lived with grandma and grandpa. During Chinese New Year, grandma would make a lot of festive food for "ancestor worship" as well as the CNY feast. I can't remember all that she made, but here're some highlights.

(1) "Pond with duckies"

I don't know how it's called. Basically, it's made up of different kinds of flour (麵粉、糯米粉、粘米粉, etc.). Grandma would roll the dough into some small balls, short columns and duckies, and then arrange them in a round bamboo container so that it would look like some duckies swimming in a pond. (Grandma would let us play with the dough but all we could make were the balls and may be the columns.) Then, grandma would steam it and put some red colouring as decoration. Grandma would make a few "ponds" each time for "ancestors worship".

When the "ponds" were freshly cooked, we would eat them directly with soya bean sauce. After the first day, grandma would cut them into pieces and stir fry them just like "Stir fried Shanghai nin go (上海炒年糕)".

(2) Salty Chickens

Chickens were the main character of our CNY feast. The Consultant of the Fact and the Myth of the Tse Family said we would consume five to six chickens each CNY for different ancestors that we need to remember. The chickens were usually freshly killed (i.e. no frozen chicken) and boiled. For the first couple of chickens, we again would eat them directly with some oyster sauce. For the rest, grandma would use a lot of salt to sort of season them after the ritual, but the objective was actually for preservation. To salt fresh food is how people preserve food in the old days when there's no refrigerator. Grandma kept the style even though we had had refrigerator for a long time by then.

The salty chickens were usually re-cooked in one of the two ways: (i) steam; (ii) steam it on top of the rice so that the rice would soak up the chicken juice. The rice tasted real good as well as the chicken. Believe me. The salty chickens usually would take us till the middle of Lunar January even though we had it almost every single day! It still tasted good at the end of the period, although I have to say we (or at least me) was bored after eating them for half a month!

(3) Dragon Boat Rice Dumplings

Yes, this is right. This is our hometown's tradition to have "dragon boat rice dumplings" during Chinese New Year, but grandma would only make a few just good enough for "ancestor worship". (I will talk about grandma's "dragon boat rice dumplings" later on, so please don't comment on this for the moment.)

So much for the food. Let's talk about the celebration tomorrow.