teochew braised duck

decided to record this year’s 2014 reunion dinner & cny day 1 breakfast. this a really good tradition & important occasion for families to get together & spend time with their loved ones. 🙂

we had been doing reunion dinners at my elder brother’s house all these while, but had varied a little with cny dinners at joyden restaurant (former west coast seafood) for a few years. last year we decided to go back to homecooked reunion dinner & did the same this year.

for myself, as i grow older & memories fade it is good to have a record to see what i do & how i spend my time from 1 year to the next. 😉

braised tofu (beancurd)

braised large intestines

my brother’s m-i-l does excellent braised dishes, and their indonesian domestic help now does it very well. the teochew braised duck was excellent! meat was tender & sweet. i did a braised duck for the reunion dinner last year (2013) but it was not good. now my braised duck is consistently good & i think same or better than this and more “pang” (flavourful). the braising sauce was made to good use for the braised tofu, egg & the large intestines.

broccoli with fa cai (moss)

fried leek with hae bee (dried prawns)

hör see fat choi (dried oysters with moss)

the broccoli with deep-fried tofu, mushrooms & fa cai 发菜 (which in chinese sounded like striking fortune) was very good. my eldest daughter was not much into meats & more into bread, tofu & vegetables so she enjoyed this dish especially.

the leek was always a great dish, a very sweet vegetable i liked from young.

my wife does a good hör see fat choi (dried oysters with moss) & she does that for reunion dinner & chinese new year every year. fa cai 发菜 is supposed to cause top soil erosion & sand storms in beijing & is forbidden to farm so not sure probably this was not the real fa cai.

teochew steamed pomfret

drunken prawns

my sis brought a eu yan san canned buddha jump over the wall?? (not sure if it was really). the soup was tasty, though most of us felt it was canned & not the type one would drink much. there were whole small abalones & other cut ones/shellfiah etc & mushrooms. i guess it was ok to try.

my brother did a teochew steamed pomfret. it was good. the drunken prawns looked very fresh. i took some soup, don’t take much of this dish lately, & did not take the prawns. the abalones were the usual canned nz abalones, quite ok for me. 🙂

breakfast – the morning after

it was very good dinner get-together! 🙂

next day we gathered as usual on cny day1 at my brother’s place. we had some of the braised dishes leftover from reunion dinner, some fresh fried vege, the rabbit fish 知县鱼(which was a favourite during cny & very expensive for those with fish semen..i didn’t see them much these days & these ones were cheap fish w/o the delicacy..haha..). my wife cooked & brought some black fungus tanhoon mushrooms with fermented beancurd. very nice!

after that we dropped by a friend’s place & then another friend in the area (a close friend of my wife & we visited every cny) for laksa lunch. in the afternoon we went to watch the lion men – quite a good locally produced  movie about lion dancers(& massively sponsored by advertisements…haha), certainly worthy of support. 🙂

c.h.e.f andy