Chinese New Year Traditional Food

What's with Chinese and food? Chinese just love to eat, and they will make sure the person they meet is eating well. If the chao ang moh greet people with "How are you doing?" and "How do you do?", the Chinese greet people with "Lu jia pa boi?", "Ni shit pao mang?", "Sek pao mei?", "Nv siak pa mui?", "Ni chi pao le ma?" (Have you eaten?) - all in Hokkien, Hakka, Cantonese, Foochow and Mandarin respectively.

The Chinese hor...just love to eat, eat and eat and most of them do not have the slightest idea of what they put into their mouth. So, during Chinese New Year, a lot of us just eat everything that is prepared without question just to fulfill the demand of our drumming stomach. It is well understood that only during Chinese New Year, certain food are prepared. So, we all plead innocent for the setahun hanya sekali gluttonous eating habit.

On New Year's day, the Chinese family will eat a vegetarian dish called jai. Although the various ingredients in jai are root vegetables or fibrous vegetables, many people attribute various superstitious aspects to them:

The Lotus Seed

Signify having many male offspring

The Gingko Nuts

Represents silver ingots

Black moss Seaweed

Is a homonym for exceeding in wealth

Dried bean-curd

Homonym to fulfillment of wealth and happiness

Bamboo Shoots

It sound like "wishing that everything would be well"

Some more got Fish lor to represent togetherness and abundance, Chicken that symbolizes prosperity (with head, tail and feet to represent completeness) and Noodles (mee sua) to represent long life.

In the southern province of China, the typical favourite dishes are the Nian Gao, the sweet steamed glutinous rice pudding and Zong Zhi, those eaten during Dragon Boat Festival wan. The northern part pulak love Man Tou, neh the white white bread like those in the typical ancient kung fu drama.

All that were some of the traditional chinese New Year food lor. But I never know some of them. Because during Chinese New Year, all we eat are Chicken Soup Mee Sua with red wine, Bak Gua, Kao Bak Hakka Style, Sio Bee, Chap Chai, etc. All totally different from the traditional thing.

You can eat all you can and all you want. Just don't over-eat and become fat lah.

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