yee sang + cnye dinner

I am feeling the pressure, as many bloggers have already posted about CNY! Victor's post also includes some of the background to some of the CNY traditions.

This year, as we are far away from my family, instead of the usual family reunion dinner on new year's eve we had a vegan potluck. This was lots of fun, though we have certainly ascertained the upper limit to having people in our apartment (twenty and a baby)! And we had to do the dishes in order to enable dessert!

I made a kapitan, probably my best yet due to the fresh lime kaffir leaves I added, and the slight tweaks I made to the paste (a combination of chilli flakes, cinnamon, cumin, coriander, fenugreek, garlic and shallots). I also cooked up a quick choy sum and garlic in tamari sauce, because I figured that nobody would bring a vegetable dish (I was right!). ETA: oh! Tahn reminds me that she brought a veggie dish also. This is what happens when I don't take photos!

Because I was so busy finding bowls and making sure there was enough room on the table, I didn't have much of an opportunity to take photos. As a result, I will have to rely on others to post about the delicious food, and I will update this post as they do, so check back! There were some amazing dishes (almost all of them gluten free!). Danni did, however, manage to take photos of Em and Jo's yee sang, about which I want to talk.



I was really excited when Jo said they'd be bringing yee sang! Yee sang is a SEA Malaysian/Singaporean CNY tradition to bring abundance. Making the yee sang is quite time consuming, though relatively uncomplicated (although be careful, Em managed to injure herself!), as there are lots of long, thin pieces of vegetables.



Serving the yee sang is very straight forward, crack the dried stuff (in this instance, gluten-free papadums, but dried tofu skin or yao chao guai is more traditional), pour the sauce, and then toss. The higher you can toss, the more abundance you'll bring, so it can get very messy.

Yesterday, first day of CNY, because we hadn't had any noodles at the dinner, after going to the movies I cooked up a char kuay teow and some fried rice with the leftover rice from the night before.

Now we're all set for the new year! Sadly this means my hair is dirty, because of the no-washing rule (can't wash hair on the first day, and I didn't have a chance this morning). But other than that!

ETA: Vicki has posted about her gluten free sponge cake; Johanna has posted about pearl balls and apricot balls; Michael has posted about dumplings; Cindy blogged about orange and szechuan pepper icecream Toby posts about radish cakes.

新年快樂!