This Saturday marks the New Year in the Chinese Calendar. Several years ago, my daughter, Raquel and I, began preparing traditional Chinese New Year Foods.
I can think of no better way to appreciate other cultures than diving into the cuisine. In our mini study of Chinese New Year Raquel and I have learned that the foods often shared at the celebration have symbolic significance. Sometimes it is based on appearance. For example, serving a whole chicken during the Chinese New Year season symbolizes family togetherness. Noodles represent a long life; an old superstition says that it’s bad luck to cut them. Both clams and spring rolls symbolize wealth; clams because of their resemblance to bouillon, and Spring Rolls because their shape is similar to gold bars.Other traditional New Years Foods are prawns for liveliness, dried oysters (ho xi) for all things good; raw fish salad (yu sheng) for good luck; “fai-hai” an edible angel hair-like seaweed for prosperity and dumplings boiled in water to recover a long-lost good wish for the family. While raw fish salad and seaweed may not ever be on Raquel’s grocery list, we do enjoy making spring rolls and dumplings (wontons). We enjoy going to Asian markets for our ingredients to keep our celebration semi authentic.http://www.chinesefooddiy.com/appetizer_spring_roll.htm is the recipe that we have used.
Paper laterns, tea lights and oranges are a simple but bold decorations. For more party decorating ideas I found Party411.com to have some excellent ideas from elegant to fun.http://www.party411.com/theme-chinese-new-year.html
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Trina Dionne Tilson
