Year of the Goat

Or sheep. Or ram. Year of Some Delicious Herbivorous Quadruped, at any rate. Today is the eve of the Lunar New Year and, as my mother always points out, today is the day that counts. Your house is spotless, your hair freshly cut, your new clothes pressed, and you go back to your mother’s house for a celebratory feast. Actually, in my case, none of the above is true. Oh, well. At least I have dinner planned.

image ripped shamelessly from wikipedia

Because my family is (mostly) ethnically Chinese and culturally from Singapore and Malaysia, I take a pan-Asian approach to the meal. I’ll be making roast chicken with lemongrass, garlic and fish sauce; coconut-ginger rice (nasi lemak); and a simple Malaysian chopped salad (kerabu). We like to have a good stash of almond cookies on hand (here’s my mother’s recipe). And this year, my six-year-old asked, repeatedly and urgently, for char siu bao, aka Cantonese barbecued pork buns. These are crazily time-consuming to make when we live so far from a Chinatown, so they won’t happen this evening. But I marinated and roasted the pork last weekend, and froze some (I used Corinne Trang’s recipe in Essentials of Asian Cuisine). Sometime this weekend, we’ll make the bao dough together (the kids love kneading), shape the buns, and steam them. It’ll be the most time-consuming afternoon snack of my life.

It’s probably a good thing we only attempt this annually, but I’m so glad that we do. What are you up to this week, friends? How do you celebrate the New Year?