What a feast: Chinese New Year Eve edition

For us Chinese, there's not a single joyous holiday that comes without a feast.  Chinese new year (CNY) is no different.  The Hong Kongers usually celebrated CNY eve with a giant feast as it is considered the second most important holiday of the year (the most important being winter solstice).  When I was young, my dad's side family would get together on CNY eve for the feast.  Some of the foods were prepared during the day and were used as offerings to our ancestors, then were served as dinner later in the day.  This meal usually consists of items that allude to good luck.  We would always have chicken, fish, a stew dish with expensive dried goods (usually they are either some fungi or they are from the sea), and something vegetarian.  Having chicken or fish in a meal isn't particularly a big deal today, but way back in the day, it better be a big deal before you bust that knife out to kill the chicken and the fish because those are worth at least a couple weeks worth of regular meal.  We eat fish because fish sounds like "leftover" in Chinese, which really means you have so much that you have leftover or surplus.  As much as we gripe about leftovers today, it is a luxury to have leftovers because you have to be rich to have surplus of things.  The stew dish with expensive dried goods usually has some names with blessing for the next year  (e.g. 發財好市, i.e. make lots of money and have a prosperous year, translation here.  Or 橫財就手, i.e. unexpected wealth right at your fingertips, translation here.  The “seaweed” is really not seaweed, it’s a type of cyanobacteria from genus nostoc that grows in the desert.  It looks like hair, hence it’s called “hair vegetable”.  The truth is, you may get rich eating this stuff, but the land it grew on definitely loses when you harvest because the soil would lose vegetation and becomes poorer as the nitrogen-fixing capability is being removed.  See Chinese wiki entry here.  Translation here.).  The vegetarian dish brings in fiber requirements for the day and would be eaten as the first meal on new years day in my family.  I suspect that this really may have something to do with cleansing the digestive system for more feasting later, but my mom said it’s the chicken’s birthday and therefore we should not kill any animals for good luck (who wants to be killed, least of all on their birthday, unless the person is suicidal or something?)

Even though I’m mostly alone in Philadelphia, I try to keep up with the tradition as my own little way to celebrate CNY.  This year, my CNY eve feast is below:  

Four dishes... and they are:  

Back: 富貴雞  “Wealthy chicken” (pork-and-pickled-vegetable-stuffed chicken wrapped in lotus leaf and bake in “clay”, which is really bread flour for me, and I’ll trade out the bread flour when I make it next time.  Of Zhejiang origin)
Front left: 水煮魚片 “water-cooked” fish (it’s really not water-- it’s fish cooked in a broth with spicy fermented bean paste, “sichuan” peppercorn, star anise and dried chili pepper dressed with sesame oil.  This is a Sichuanese dish)
Front middle: 花團錦簇  “Bunches of flowers” (ground pork stuffed dried fish maw in abalone sauce.  Of Cantonese origin)
Front right: 齋 “The vegetarian dish”  (Mixed vegetable cooked with Monascus-fermented bean curd <南乳>.  See wiki here for what a fermented bean curd is. I believe this is Cantonese)  

Have fun drooling over the photos!  If someone requests a Gastrolab entry on any of these items, I may just put them up....