Food: Chinese New Year Meal

Friday marked the entry to Chinese New Year. We are entering the Year of the Dog. Having lived in China and being a fan of the country, I invited my family for a new years dinner. Not everyone could meet up, but 15 of us got to spend a nice meal together.

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Here's what i made:

Marbled Tea Eggs:

These are meant to symbolize gold nuggets and are often used when celebrating new year.

You start off by hard boiling eggs.


After you've boiled and cooled them, you cracked them with a teaspoon. You don't remove any of the shell, just make cracks.


Then you add water to cover the eggs. Add 3/4 cup of Soy Sauce, 2 bags of black tea, some orange peel, a teaspoon of sugar, 2 star anise, 1 cinnamon stick and some chili spice. Let the eggs simmer for around 40 minutes to an hour. Then let the eggs lie in the mix as long as you want. Mine was in the mix for a couple of hours, but just because I was a bit late making them.


Depending on how long you let them lie in the soy water, the eggs will get intricate patterns on them from where you have cracked the shell. It's exciting for the guests to remove the shell themselves and "unravel" their design. Since my eggs only stayed in the mix for some hours, the pattern was discreet. With a couple of more hours you will get something like this:

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The eggs taste great, although someone who haven't tasted them and sees them for the first time might be a bit sceptical :)

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Steamed dumplings (Jiaozi)

These are a favourite in my family, and was the main course, you might say.
As a filling I use chinese cabbage, carrots, spring onion, minced meat, salt, sugar, sweet soy sauce, oyster sauce.:


When I first started making dumplings, I also made the wrapping myself. But it takes a lot of time to make the thin dough, so now I buy and use finished wonton wrappers. Not the brand on the picture, but the wrappers are similar:

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Now I know presantation is everything, or is it? And I would have loved to present the dumplings like this:

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Or like this:

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Thankfully my family have eaten my dumplings before, and know how good they taste. So I could wrap the dumplings the easy way:


Into the Steam-machine and the steam oven they go. Around 200 of them actually, for around 20-30 minutes.




And here is the finished result:


It's very important to make a dipping sauce for the dumplings as well.
We make ours from soy sauce, garlic, ginger, sugar and some vinegar.

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My 5 and 8-year old daughters set the table:

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I needed something on the side as well. The kids love noodles, so I bought some vegetable noodles in different colors:


Although it should only be brought to the table at the end of the dinner, my family are used to rice as a side dish to the Chinese food, so the rice cooker had to do some work.


I also bought some spring rolls with beef that I heated.

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It truly was a great meal and we ended up as 15 happy and very stuffed family members.