Fab Feb - Food Glorious Food

❌Fitness
❌Free of alcohol
✅Fabulous food
✅Fabulous friends

Partly to counterbalance my previous post, today I'm celebrating food, glorious food.

Back in 2011, a friend invited a bunch of her friends around to celebrate Chinese New Year. Each of us brought a plate of food and even though we hardly knew any of the other guests, we thoroughly enjoyed their company. It was the first night of a wonderful tradition. We have missed two years, so last night was our seventh occasion but the ninth overall. We contribute different food each time and yesterday I took a risk by not even trialling a run of prawn cakes beforehand. I hunted the internet for hours to find an easy recipe without coriander (due to my sensitivity) and without deep-frying (due to it being unhealthy and not owning a deep-fryer). However, just a few days before the big night I discovered the quantity of prawns required in that recipe were cost prohibitive. In the end, I chose a recipe (above) from a Stephanie Alexander book, used the sauce instructions from my original recipe (combined sweet chilli sauce and soy sauce) and it ended up quite successful. Yay!

Guests have evolved over the years but there is a core group of regulars who now know each other quite well. There were over a dozen people last night and I had met them all before but one was a first timer for Chinese New Year. We dress in bright colours, mostly red, with no white allowed. There are trivia questions between courses, correct answers rewarded with Lindt chocolate. Since it is the Year of the Pig, questions were about the number of tastebuds on a pig's tongue, the country with the greatest number of pigs and the like. Please note, I don't remember the answers to any of the questions.

We arrived home sometime after midnight, still smiling. We have already started making plans for 2020, which, by the way, is the Year of the Rat.

Sorry, no photo of the san choi bau.