Quick Dinner Recipes

Comments on Tet, Lunar New Year, originally posted by Jenny : a Vietnamese American fascinated by the subtleties and differences between cultures.

If you read my previous post: What is cooking during Chinese New Year, then check like Jennie says the subtleties between Chinese and Vietnamese culture celebrating the Spring Festival : Tet

Vietnamese New Year

Like Chinese New Year is the most important festival for the Chinese, likewise Tet or Vietnamese New Year is the most important and popular holiday and festival in Vietnam.

Tet is celebrated on the same day as Chinese New Year, yet due to the one-hour time difference between Hanoi and Beijing.

Vietnamese culture

Vietnamese new year shares many of the same customs of Chinese New year:

• delicious food. My mother in law also makes them, the most delicious cakes in the world! and it is a dying art: Banh Chung in Vietnamese: a rice cake with mung bean and meat filling, wrapped in banana leaf (picture courtesy of Jenny)
• new year in Vietnam is celebrated from the first day of the first month of the Chinese calendar (around late January or
  early February) until at least the third day.
• Vietnamese cooking will be different than on any other festival with a lot of special holiday foods
• houses will be cleaned
• Vietnamese like Chinese will visit families and temples, forgetting about the troubles of the past year and hope for a better upcoming year.
• firecrackers
• you have to be home on Lunar New Year’s Eve before midnight (this is my first new year not doing so, so I will have a lot of feng shui to do to make up for this..)
• visiting relatives for those red envelopes filled with cash (ang bao in Chinese)
• Cong xi fa xai in Vietnamese becomes Chuc Mung Nam Moi

Technorati Tags: Vietnam | Vietnamese New Year | Chinese New Year | Tet | Hanoi | Beijing | Travel | Chinese | Vietnamese

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A lot! …

Chinese New Year Cards

If you need to send ecards in advance, then read our post: How to send eCards automatically when you travel. Yet for Chinese new Year you are right in time to start sending: this year’s Chinese New Year falls on 18th of February, and 18 is a good number!

Chinese New Year

The biggest variety of different food is cooked and eaten during the Chinese New Year reunion dinners and served to the Gods and ancestors. Very traditional food is prepared. Chinese New Year is all about family, tradition, wealth, health and special Chinese new year cooking and customs:

• The Chinese will make sure all the depths are paid off
• Everybody will visit his parents or host his children, friends and family. A lot of cooking will be done.
• Bowls of food will be set on altars as offerings (and no food goes to waste…)
• Never clean your house on Chinese new year: you want to keep the good fortune inside the house! Yet make sure all the bad luck is swept out the evening before Chinese New Year.
• Bang as much firecrackers as you are allowed to!
• My mom in law prays to the Kitchen God and in return she makes the best glutinous rice with lots of "goodies" inside, wrapped in banana leaves
• Sticky cake for gluing the mouth of the kitchen God (so the Kitchen God cannot report any bad things you did the previous year. Kitchen God needs to report to the Jade Emperor in heaven)
• And lots of other dishes, the list of Chinese new year dishes goes on…

What to eat in a restaurant during Chinese New Year?

If you are not Chinese and you want to join in the CNY food: what to order? Some restaurants in Malaysia will recommend you their dishes specially made for new year… Mostly the price is more made for CNY than the taste is and tourists will fall in the trap.

Just have a look around: if you don’t see the locals eating "the special dish", it’s probably not really a Chinese New Year Dish.

As usual:
dine where the locals dine,
order what the locals eat.

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Feature your personal recipe with a picture in "Taste of Home" !

So many years ago I had a website javabit dot come where I tried to gather home made cooking recipes. The cooking site went bust as I didn’t have a clue how to find people that would share their recipe. Since I added myself in Mybloglog.com,
suddenly lots of recipes come in.

So if you like your recipe to be featured here:

• leave a comment or
• join my community at mybloglog.com.

Featuring wokkingmum!

Who better to start with to get fast cooking tips than from a mummy? Wokkingmum has a great wok-king site : "Let’s get wok-king" and shares a delicious fast and easy mango cooking recipe with us.

Wokkingmum aka Sahm loves wok-king for her family. On her cooking site you will find delicious home-cooked food illustrated with personal pictures: the kind of culinary site I love!

Mango Ice

Mangos are available everywhere, so enjoy this mango ice, or if you have a smoothie blender: mango smoothie from wok-kingmum!

Mango Ice cooking ingredients

• 1 mango: skinned and sliced
• 1 cup (250 ml) home-made syrup to taste
  (boiling water and sugar together)

Mango Ice recipe preparation

1. Blend ½ mango and syrup in a blender
2. Remove and freeze the blended mango
3. When the mango ice is about 80% frozen, remove from freezer.
4. Use fork to pick it breaking the ice.
5. Scoop and serve with mango slices.

Mango Ice Tips

• If you have a suitable blender, you can freeze the home-made syrup then blend it together with 1/2 mango and ½ cup water in a blender.
• If your blender is not made to blend ice, don’t use this method. You don’t want to spoil the blades.

We kindly thank wok-kingmum for featuring her recipe, please leave a comment if you have a recipe to feature on theskinnycook.com

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