My older brother visited me during the Chinese New Year weekend. Normally I would just go to friend’s place to have a pot luck for Chinese New Year because there is no point to cook for myself since I do that everyday. With my brother visiting me, my step mom asked me to cook for both of us since we are overseas for the past 10 years and barely have decent tranditional Chinese New Year meal. My brother flew in from Singapore for a business trip, so some of the ingredient are pretty cheap and easily accessible at his end. Being the cook of the family (aside from my elder sister), I cooked up a 6 course meal for the New Year:
- Abalone with sugar snap pea
- Boness crispy friend chicken chop with plum sauce
- Salad shrimp
- Five spiece fried ribs
- Shark fin soup
- Stirfry noodle
Here is all the meal put together (click photo for large version):
Shark fin soup is consider Chinese delicacy that’s within reach for average Chinese family, however, it’s rarely serve in Chinese restaurant in the US. I’m not sure why, but I suspect it’s because it’s a labor intensive dish if prepared completely from scratch. The shark fin I get from my brother is the processed version, which has smaller strand and have been cleaned:
Upon unwrapped, it looks like a sheet of wool, but it’s actually stiff:
The dried shark fin require water soaking for a full hour, and boil then simmer for 20 minutes before it’s ready to be used. The shark fin soup I grew up enjoying has a very strong seafood/fishy aroma. The broth is made out of chicken and pork bone. Treated shark fin is added to the strained broth, together with crab meat, Shau Shing (sherry) wine, salt and white pepper. The soup is thicken with corn starch and beaten eggs is added to the boiling soup to create egg strand like egg drop soup:
Next course is the Abalone sugar snap pea. I didn’t know Abalone comes in a can since I never watch my sister or my step mom prepare it. When we were young, we always go out to play fireworks while they cook the Chinese New Year dinner, so I never seen the whole process nor where the ingredient come from, except I remember I had to help them to pick crab meat out of boiled crab for shark fin soup, which was a pain! When my brother bring me the Abalone, he mentioned it’s from Australia, which produce bigger Abalone than Spain. The can design looks simple and not fancy, but guess how much it cost?:
My brother said it cost SG$50+, which is about US$34! I know, $34 for a can of food, you would think it’s a can full of Abalone. Upon open it, I find it mostly filled with preserve liquid, and a single piece of Abalone, which look like this:
No no… it’s not sitting on a dinner plate, the plate is a tea cup plate, which is smaller than a dessert plate. To be exact, this is how big it is:
Got it? 4.25 inches long. Abalone is like scallop or squid, if you over cooked it, you will end up with chewy rubber tire like meat. The common cooking method is flash stir fry, where it’s sliced thinly, stir fry in hot pan for a short amount of time just long enough to heat it through without completely cooking it. The sugar snap pea is stir fried saperately, plated and top with the cooked abalone:
The sauce is just oyster sauce, garlic, a bit of the juice come with the can Abalone, white pepper and sea salt to taste. The sauce should be gravy like consistency in order to coat the pea, giving you the combination of crunciness of the pea and the saltyness of the sauce when bite into it:
Almost everybody know I like fried chicken, and boneless is the best! The crispy chicken chop is one of my favorite Chinese New Year dish. It looks sophicticated, but is actually very easy to make. All you need is a deboned chicken and very little seasoning. Deboning your own chicken is the only way to go for tasty result since you need the skin to provide extra crispy texture, yet provide moisture and flavor to the meat under the flour coating. I used half chicken for the dinner because trying to finish a whole chicken with just my brother and I is just insane with so many other dishes. I mean, we both eat like pig, but we’re not pig, just because it’s pig’s year this year, we have no interest to become one.
The chicken meat is marinated with MSG, Shau Shin wine, white pepper, salt and an egg. That’s it! Before frying, drage meat through tapioca starch. Tapioca starch is the tradition thickening agent used in Chinese cooking, just like the way corn starch is used in the western country. The secret is let the meat sit for a while after drage through the starch so that it has time to crust up. The egg bind the starch together well so it stick with the meat during frying.
The fried chicken chop is sliced to bite size piece, drizzle with plum sauce that come in a jar, and sprinkle with toasted sesame seed:
Tapioca starch remaind crispy for a period of time and coat better than all purpose flour, hmm…. crispy fried chicken:
With all the greasy food, we need something light to balance the meal a bit. Without going through the trouble of prepare jelly fish salad, I just take some romaine lettuce and top with salad cream shrimp:
The salad cream shrimp itself is part of our tradition festival cold dish/appetizer during wedding reception. Cooked shrimp is mix with special salad cream, which is a European recipe that I have to ask my brother to bring it to me since I can only find it from online specialty stores in the US, and it cost a lot. The salad cream is product of Heinz, but sadly Heinz US only into the business of Ketchup, and stupid enough to make green and purple color ketchup instead of produce more specialty item. What make this salad cream special is, it has more egg yolk flavor, stronger than Mayonnaise, not as sweet as Miracle Whip while remain creamy with the consistency of prepared mustard instead of yoguart curd blob. Sometimes simple food could be flavorful and visually appealing:
Too bad I had to use shell on frozen shrimp, otherwise it would be nice to be able to enjoy the natural sweetness of the fresh shrimp with a bit tanginess of the salad cream.
My brother and I both love meat! Pork ribs is very common in Chinese cooking. Since I was frying the chicken chop, I figure it would save some trouble to fry rib as well:
I made this dish before and my elder sister said it’s the best rib dish she ever made. I don’t know where she get the recipe, but I’m glad she passed it to me. The rib has quite a lot marinate, but the unique ingredient is five spice powder and red fermented tofu, which is the primary aroma of the dish. The ribs is marinated overnight, coated with mixture of tapioca starch and corn starch. The combination of these two starch provide a different crispiness to the dish compare to the fried chicken chop.
Eventhough the rib was cut into big chunk, it was completely cook through thanks to my super expensive pressure cooker that can be used for deep fry. The red fermented tofu as marinate give the end product a slight brown color without the use of dark soy sauce:
Last is the stir fry noodle:
I just make this dish up since I don’t have any rice in my pantry. Asian don’t have rice in the pantry!? Well, I have been on low carb Slim4Life program, and if I’m so addicted to fried chicken, how Asian do you think I’m? In fact, it’s not even real noodle, it’s just some thin spaghetti I have left in my pantry. To take some short cut, I used coleslaw salad as base, add julienne shitaki mushroom and spring onion, oyster sauce, soy sauce, salt and white pepper. The noodle didn’t turn out that well, mainly because I used spaghetti. In the past I used spaghetti for Lo Mein type of stir fry noodle without problem, which has more gravy. For dry stir fry noodle, spaghetti just doesn’t cut it because it become tough once the dish is cold and when all the gravy get absorb by the spaghetti. So, the lesson is, spaghetti absorb more liquid than real Chinese noodle.
Well, did we finish all 6 courses? Of course not, we had some left over for the following day. We did finish the fried chicken chop and the rib because we know fried food just doesn’t make good left over since it no longer crispy.
Where is the dessert? You asked. Traditionally, we would have slow simmer bird nest in rock sugar syrup and dried Luo Han Guo, which is another expensive delicacy. Alternative cheaper dessert would be slow simmer snow wood ear in rock sugar syrup with dried red date. With just my brother and I, I think we over done the Chinese New Year feast for two people and trying to chow down a bowl of dessert could turn a tasty dinner experience into a night of torture in choosing sticking a finger into our throad to purge food out, or lay on the cough, breath and moan like having a baby grow inside our stomach.
Can I come over to your house to eat? LOL. You make me so hungry! I had shark fin soup at my wedding reception! It was delicious!