Year of the Snake

Happy Chinese new year! Because this festival (like all other Chinese festivals) is very food centric, I thought I'd do a small doodle about food symbolism during Chinese new years. The main meal happens on new year's eve, where the whole family gets together and watch the Spring festival concert/party - I swear the whole of China watches this, it's become a part of our new year's tradition. We ate so much food! For new year's eve supper there is usually an excess of 10 dishes served (normally everyday meals have about 3 dishes). We also got tons of fruit and a giant cake as presents from my parents' friends (Chinese people like giving fruit as house presents, fruit is quite expensive in China so greatly valued -how awesome!) So I've been totally stuffing my face, starting out quite healthy in the mornings with giant bowls of fruit salad, but ending up shoveling mouthfuls of cream laden cake late at night - heehee!

Ooh I did forget to list the traditional year cake (nian gao) that we eat too - wikipedia will help me here. Its for success and good luck with achieving your goals (especially important for young people and students to eat this!) We slice ours up and fry it like haloumi, so it's crunchy on the outside and gooey and sticky sweet in the middle. But this year my parents got the cake as a present and when my Mom tried to fry it it melted! It was grey too, instead of the usual red beany maroon colour we are used to - it was so sticky and stuck to the roof of my mouth and it looked like gloopy snot wahahahaha! So turns out there another type of nain gao that you are not meant to fry :) I prefer the haloumi one, it tastes better - beware the grey snot cake!