恭喜發財！

Happy Chinese New Year!

Caleb and I celebrated Chinese New Year over the weekend by going to a coworker's party on Saturday, and then having our own family dinner on Sunday. At my coworker's party, we made traditional dumplings and also lit up paper lanterns. The paper lanterns were about three feet tall, and looked like this:

I didn't take any pictures at the party, but this picture was from Mid-Autumn Festival last year and we used the same exact paper lanterns. It was super fun. One of my coworker's friends bought about 100 of these and we lit them all up. It was lightly snowing at the time, but they still went up high into the air. You can imagine it looked a little bit like this:

(www.ecorazzi.com)

Well, maybe not THAT many; we really only had like maybe five or six up in the air at a time. Still, it was really fun.

On Sunday, we had all the cousins over from my side of the family. Since I was not able to be with my parents for Chinese New Year, I decided to take ownership of my own Chinese New Year festivities. Basically, that means I get to choose what kind of food I want to prepare. I'm so disappointed that I forgot to take pictures of our little get together, but at least I can provide internet pictures of what we ate. I'm so proud of the cuisine selection, it was all moi. Well I mainly planned the menu sinceI wanted to get together, and partly because my cousins either don't know what to cook for Chinese New Year, or they just don't know how to cook the food. So I thought it would be nice to have them over and cook homemade traditional Chinese food. Here are pictures of what we ate:

West Lake Soup (image from foodgawker.com)

Cha Siu Buns (image from biggestmenu.com)

Not too bad for our first time

Potstickers is a Must! (I got this image from somewhere, but I couldn't locate the source.  However, mine TOTALLY look like that. Ask Caleb)

Cantonese Pan Fried Noodle (image from rasamalaysia.com)

Deep Fried Milk (image from gbtimes.com)

Caleb made the fried milk, this is a pic of how it turned out. It was incredibly tasty!

And of course, tong yun. Glutinous rice balls with red bean filling, boiled in a sweet soup. 

The aftermath in the kitchen

I also had some of this on the table, a childhood favorite of mine:

White Rabbit Candy

I was so busy with the food planning that I didn't have time to make my own red envelopes!! But I will get to that soon. Technically, I need to give a red envelope to my nephew. I'm not rich, but at least I should give something. So I'll be working on that soon.

It is the year of the Snake! May it be a good one for you! Cheers!