Oh boy oh boy oh boy. Chinese New Year is like American’s Thanksgiving, it’s big feast and friends family stuff. Since I don’t have family with me here in the US, so I can only invite some of my friends over. One of the reasons for me to move out of apartment and buy a house is being able to host dinner gathering. I have to admit, the house consumed my time the past 18 months or so because I was spending money to get the most basic things put into the house. One last furniture for the first floor, is the dinning table.
It took me a while to decide what table to get especially I was presented with overwhelming selection of tables at DirectBuy. Guess what? My interest in pastry actually helped me to narrow down to one table. You see, pastry chef use Marble for lots of stuff, fondant, chocolate, candy etc. Since scrap marble pieces are too expansive and impractical to store, I went with this marble top table. I saved about $1300 for the whole set by purchased it through DirectBuy.
Ok, back to the Chinese New Year dinner. It has been a while since I have decent Chinese New Year meal. Last year I cooked for Chinese New Year when my brother visit, it turned out quite well. Lately I have been gaining more interest in Chinese cooking, so I decided to give it a run to see how far I can push myself in Chinese Cooking. I mean, I made wedding cake twice, hosted my house warming party for 20 people, how hard a Chinese New Year dinner for 8 could be? Well, you will see.
Anyway, I’m no Martha Steward, so setting up the table was a bit challenging, especially I was on a quest to buy some good dinner wares that can be used for multiple occasions, not just Chinese New Year. I mean, who on earth want to buy those dinner plates with Santa and Reindeer design and use them for Xmas only? Those people must have huge basement to store those things.
Red is a lucky and good fortune color for Chinese, so I use that color for the table clothe. Why I need a table clothe and let it cover the beauty of the marble top table? You will have to wait for next few parts of the Chinese New Year dinner posts.
The bowls I purchased are contemporary Asian influence bowls, I’m very happy with them because they’re very elegant, but they’re quite pricey though.
I only have 6 chairs, but I’m going to have 8 people on the table. I just quickly arrange 6 seats to take the photos before I put in two more chairs that do not match the rest.
So, each seat consist of this: Soup bowl with soup spoon (top left), condiment/sauce dish, (top middle), drinking glass (top right), bone/scrap plate (square plate), napkin with chopstick (on the square plate), and last the rice bowl. The rice bowl is just like American’s dinner plate, you eat rice and put your entrée dish in the bowl and eat off of it.
Next part would be about the meal, stay tuned!
The table looks beautiful Moses! W/and W/O the table cloth! Can’t wait to read about the meal!