Celebrating Lunar New Year

We’ve been cooking more and more Chinese food over the last few years – partly because all members of the family love it, and partly because we have a growing number of great Asian shops in Colchester, due partly to the influx of far Eastern students to the University of Essex, as well as the growing ‘settled’ Asian community, so it’s easy to find ingredients and tempting to spend longer than intended browsing the shelves of unfamiliar packages, picking up odd things on spec. Some of these have been well-used and become store cupboard staples, while others have, admittedly, languished – if anyone has a good way to use dried lotus seeds, please let me know.

Growing up I never ate any Chinese food – my background is half Japanese, and to my mother Chinese food was something like the enemy as a result, while my father’s famously omnivorous appetite gets as far east as India before, puzzlingly, running out of enthusiasm. I can’t help thinking that the lack of good Chinese restaurants in the 80s and early 90s was a contributing factor. Gloopy orange sauces and ubiquitous greasy fried rice is hardly likely to inspire an exploration. But when I was introduced to good Chinese food in the early 2000s I became increasingly interested. When we moved out to Essex, we found there was a very good Chinese restaurant nearby and became regulars for dumplings, hotpots, whole steamed fish and char siu buns. When the kids were babies and we were feeling exhausted, we’d order a takeaway, and when they were able to sit at table we would go for dim sum lunches where they would be drawn in by the multitude of shapes and textures and try everything on offer.

But the quality – and the warm welcome - at that restaurant started to decline after a change in management, and they started to use plastic instead of tinfoil for their takeaways. The Asian supermarkets started to multiply, I bought my first Fuschia Dunlop book and started to think I could do better myself. This got turbocharged during Covid, when cooking our favourite restaurant foods became a way of getting some of the excitement of eating out to punctuate the endless weeks. We all became competent at stuffing and folding dumplings and I started to navigate more confidently around the flavour and texture profiles of the regional food cultures that Dunlop – for us as for so many others – introduced us to.

Last year we celebrated Chinese New Year just by ourselves because – of course – we had no other choice. But this year – with my #cookingtheyear project in mind, and with an increasingly long list of symbolic and traditional foods I wanted to cook – we definitely needed extra mouths at the table. So we invited over some friends and I went, well, a little mad.

We had:

• The New Year’s essential boiled and steamed dumplings with four different stuffings –minced pork and prawn, shiitake mushroom and tofu, minced carrot, cabbage and celery, and a Xinjiang-esque pumpkin with cumin.
• Cold buckwheat noodles dressed with chilli, garlic, spring onion, and sesame.
• Tiger salad – for the year of the tiger – cucumber, green pepper and coriander leaves with a sharp-spicy dressing
• Clay-bowl chicken – a cold dish of poached chicken with a sesame paste-based dressing topped with roasted peanuts, spring onions and sesame seeds
•  The traditional whole fish – a seabass, simply steamed, with sizzling oil poured over strands of chilli, spring onion and ginger on top
• Tiger-skin pork – bowl-steamed for hours with black beans and salted mustard greens
• A vegetarian ma po tofu – a dish I’ve been meaning to make for ages, and hadn’t got round to trying
•  Stir-fried oyster, shiitake and enoki mushrooms with garlic and spring onion
•  Blanched choi sum with sizzling sesame oil over spring onion, chilli and ginger strands
• Rice…of course!

It was joyous, insanely good fun to cook, and fulfilled the test of having more on the table than the nine of us could possibly eat at one sitting. We ended up with fortune cookies, a friend brought a book of Taoist astrology from which we read out our horoscopes with much glee, and the kids tried to teach everyone mah jong, which was thus proved to be totally incompatible with lively conversation – and the conversation won out. I didn't take any nicely staged photos, which is exactly as it should be.

A great store of leftovers is never a bad thing and I actually made a further dish – fish fragrant aubergines – and decided on the night that would be just too many things, so kept it back. So our New Year’s feasting will keep going for a few more days, and I’m looking out for more auspicious calendar dates that can provide an excuse for exploring seasonal, symbolic Chinese foods from across that huge country.