Good morning! Today we have for you:
Friends and feasts
Hello, friends. Happy (almost) Lunar New Year! It officially falls on Tuesday, but my family started celebrating this weekend with a 10-course feast for three generations and the aunties and uncles who aren’t related by blood but definitely count as kin. As for my New York Times Cooking family, we’ve been planning our second annual Dumpling Week since last summer and will kick it off tomorrow with five new recipes and videos. Lunar New Year tends to arrive in late winter’s dark valley, when I need a reset from January’s reset. We should take any reason to gather around food now. Maybe eating dumplings is a New Year’s tradition for you, each morsel symbolizing riches ahead, or maybe noodles are on the table, with their promise of longevity. Maybe this all sounds new and also pretty great — customs are meant for sharing, especially when they’re so delicious. Among my family’s must-have dishes are these longevity noodles with chicken, ginger and mushrooms. Julia Moskin adapted this recipe from the brilliant cookbook author Grace Young, whose sauce proportions are just right for the delicate savoriness of Cantonese cooking. If you want New Year noodles with more punch, you can stir-fry nonya hokkien noodles with their spicy funk from the shrimp paste and chiles in sambal belacan. Or make pancit Malabon, the Filipino rice noodles loaded with shrimp and savory with fish sauce. Featured Recipe Longevity Noodles With Chicken, Ginger and MushroomsYou can find more Lunar New Year recipes here and some of my personal favorites below: Thit heo kho trung (pork and eggs in caramel sauce): Tet, the Vietnamese Lunar New Year which is also celebrated on Feb. 17, is full of rich dishes like this braise, savory with fish sauce and bittersweet with sugar cooked to a dark caramel. This Southern Vietnamese specialty comes from the cookbook author Andrea Nguyen, who starts with the modern touch of searing the meat for even more complexity. Be sure to throw together her quick pickled bean sprout salad to add slivers of brightness to each deep, meaty bite, and steam some rice to soak up all the amazing sauce. Vegetable dumplings: Dumpling Week spoiler alert: This year, we’re showcasing original creations built on classic foundations, scaffolded with seasonings and techniques we’ve adopted from around the world. But still, we all have soft spots for the standards. Here, Sue Li re-created the vegetable dumplings from the popular soup dumpling restaurant Din Tai Fung. Stuffed with tofu and finely chopped greens, these are seasoned with the well-loved duo of soy sauce and sesame oil. Sue provides instructions for homemade dumpling wrappers, but I’ve made these with store-bought ones and they work great. Ginger-scallion steamed fish: Steamed whole fish is another auspicious specialty that promises abundance in the new year, but a fresh catch may be hard to come by. If that’s the case, Ali Slagle has this quick option adapted from the chef Connie Chung. Cubes of salmon fillet (or cod or halibut) simply and gently cook through in a sauce of scallions, ginger, soy and sugar. The tender fish can be served over rice or noodles and with a side of stir-fried greens. Guthuk (beef and daikon soup with dumplings): Nyi-shu-gu is the second-to-last day of the Tibetan lunar calendar before Losar, the Tibetan New Year. This warming soup, hearty with meat, vegetables and bhatsa, handmade little noodles, also holds something you’re not supposed to eat: a dumpling filled with your fortune for the new year. Sam O’Brien adapted this recipe from the cookbook author Lobsang Wangdu and wrote about the rituals of banning the bad from the past year on Nyi-shu-gu to welcome in the good in Losar. Black sesame shortbread: When my kids were little, we made tang yuan together on Lunar New Year, encasing black sesame filling in sweet Chinese sticky rice dough, and then ate the chewy mochi-like rounds in their steaming, gingery soup. Now that some of my offspring are far from home, I bake these cookies instead and ship them. Toasted black sesame seeds lend a savory nuttiness to tender, crumbly shortbread. This one-bowl dough is simply shaped into a slice-and-bake log, but if you want an even easier way to get your black sesame fix, try Eric Kim’s Rice Krispies treats speckled with the seeds. See you in the new year!
|
