Monday, January 26, 2009

Good eats on Chinese New Year.

New Year's Eve. Cooked a full Chinese meal with Suelyn and her charming roommates at their charming apartment.

Suelyn taught me how to make onion pancakes, which is basically just fried dough with scallions, and delicious. My mother used to make it often. I will be trying them again on my own very soon.

Clockwise: black bean tofu and chicken stir-fry, mapo-tofu, baby bak choi, onion pancakes.

New Year's Day. Hotpot in Chinatown's wildly popular Lao Szechuan restaurant. We had a room to ourselves, complete with karaoke station.

Hotpot is what it sounds like: a huge steaming pot of broth over a burner.

We were given huge platters of raw food - lamb, beef, squid, cabbage, leafy greens, vermicelli noodles, mussels, fish, shrimp, tofu, fish balls, eggplant, tripe - which we plopped into the boiling broth until done, then picked out with our individual ladles.

I ate steadily for a full hour before I suddenly realized that I had eaten more than I could hope to digest. Looking for an excuse to stuff my face, as always.

Happy Chinese New Year!

3 comments:

cecil said...

i had baby bok choi for dinner tonight. i remember lao szechaun.

there is a lot of cool stuff going in china town here, i went there and hung out for a bit today, and im going again tomorrow night.

plus a huge fucking parade this weekend.

Anonymous said...

That food looks so delicious. I've been trying to expand my repetoire of Chinese recipes. Do you mind sharing how to make cong you bing?

Faye said...

That cong you bing recipe is definitely going up in the next couple weeks. Making it with my friend got me all excited and nostalgic, so I can't wait to try it on my own.