chinese new year - your favourite foods

Happy Chinese New Year! Or as we say in Cantonese Sun Leen Fai Lok (Happy New Year) and Gung Hai Fat Choi (Wishing your prosperity)!

Chinese New Year is all about family and food. Which is what any great holiday should be about. Plus, food at Chinese New Year takes on all kinds of special meanings. Long noodles for a long life. Oranges & mandarins for prosperity. Hair seaweed for riches. The list is quite long.

As my family prepares to ring in the Year of the Horse with our own Chinese New Year family feast tonight, I asked some of my friends on Twitter what their favourite Chinese New Year dish was and why and got some great responses.

pork dumplings (potstickers)

My mom is a great cook. I know a lot of kids grow up thinking this way, but what I love about my mom is that she still makes a lot of traditional Chinese dishes, even though she's been a Canadian citizen for over 40 years. She even makes many traditional dishes that her friends and family don't bother to make any more at home because they're too time-consuming (like zong zhi, turnip cake and Fa Cai Hao Shi).

Now that I've decided to become a better cook myself, I've been shadowing my mother in the kitchen, in the hopes of picking up some of her recipes so that I can try making them myself. A lovely idea in theory, but, as many of you know, moms who are great cooks never seem to have a "recipe" - they just throw in the ingredients and it magically comes together. Whenever I ask my mom for measurements, I get a shrug and an "I don't know, it'll just look right". Yeah, thanks mom. That doesn't help me when I 'm trying to make the dish on my own (or trying to write a recipe blog post!)

I finally managed to nail down (I hope) my mom's pork dumpling recipe. These are probably better known as "potstickers", but I've never referred to them as such, so prefer to continue calling them dumplings. They have that nice crispy brown bottom and I you can exchange the pork for another meat (or shrimp), but my mom has always made these with pork (she does, however, sometimes sub in another green for the Napa cabbage). 

Make sure you get dumpling wrappers, and not won ton wrappers (they're square and thinner) so that these hold up to the steaming and frying.

green tea ice cream

About five years ago, my lovely sister got me a Cuisinart ice cream maker for my birthday after I mentioned that it would be fun to have one. I used it once (to make a mango sorbet) and then put it back into the box where it languished for the next half-decade. Until this week.

You see, for the past couple of weeks, Chung-Ah from Damn Delicious and I have been talking about making ice cream. She had recently bought an ice cream maker and I just happened to have an extra copy of the Williams-Sonoma Ice Cream book which I sent off to her. All this talk of making ice cream made me want to pull out my own machine and give it another spin.

So all week long I planned to make rhubarb ice cream but when I woke up Friday morning I thought, "Why don't I make some green tea ice cream for my dad?" You see, it was my dad's birthday and he LOVES green tea ice cream. I know he had just finished a store-bought pint recently and I thought it would be a delicious surprise if I made some for him myself.

I have several green teas powders in my pantry, including a couple I bought during my trip to Tokyo, but the one I chose was the Matcha Matsu tea from David's Tea, a Canadian company. I figured that it would be easier to get my hands on more if this recipe turned out to be a success.

I prepared the mixture Friday evening, let it chill overnight and then made the ice cream on Saturday afternoon. It turned out perfectly. My dad's reaction "This is better than the ice cream I just bought. You should sell this!" How awesome is that reaction?

The taste of green tea ice cream isn't for everyone, but if you're a fan, than you'll love this one. It's creamy, well-flavoured and easy to make.

At the end of the day, I don't know if making my own green tea ice cream is actually cheaper than buying it, but check out the ingredients list on the one that my dad had bought (I found the empty container on the kitchen counter):

"milk ingredients, sugar, glucose solids, modified milk ingredients, green tea, mono and diglycerides, guar gum polysorbate 80, carrageenan"

After seeing that list, making my own version seems much healthier and less, um, chemically-infused.