Chinese New Year Day 5 Dinner

on the fifth day of chinese new year, the cell group had our very own celebratory dinner! we had a mixture of steamboat, some dishes and... yu sang! all thanks to xiuli who went home for chinese new year and brought the set back for us to 'lou'! :)

did get radish/turnip because i forgot about it when i went to birmingham so grated carrot was the only vegetables we had in it... toss in some smoked salmon and TA-DA! yu sang! had loads of fun tossing it together - and wishing good wishes of everyone getting first class honours for our degrees, for cheryl and claire to lose weight quickly and for agnes to grow up (i.e. grow taller).
had major help from ANTONIA and LYNN! :) poor antonia was roped into preparing food from 1pm till 7.30? while lynn was busy helping me when she got onto campus but cutting vegetables and doing the stir fries... plus a few people like claire and that chinese girl (oops! forgot her name!) who were lending a hand when we got to hsien's kitchen from tocil.

our stir-fried vegetables (with wood-ear mushrooms and bamboo shoots!)
we had stewed egg plant - sooooooo nice! :)
our dinner table flooded with plates of foooooood!
was sooo happy because i got to eat my fill of tofu for a while! lynn and i were sitting there at the end of the dinner just eating bowls of tofu! mmmmm...
look at all the food that antonia made! taught her to do the wantons and then made her finish all 60+ of them while i was busy cutting meat... then she also rolled out all the pork and beef balls! talk about having the easy life of a guest!
also steamed up some jiao zi (pork and chive dumplings) in my steamer at hsien's request. thankfully i didnt have to make them! just bought them frozen from wing yip supermarket in birmingham.
and then i made char siew! and roast pork! wahaha... claire was so happy to see the roast pork!
mmmmmm... i wish i had marinated the char siew overnight though... but it would have been really hard to bring marinated meat to campus on the bus and worry about transporting it while i was doing grocery shopping in tesco. sigh...
and the skin wasnt as crispy as i would have liked it to be because some of the pork wasnt completely elevated from the bottom of the pan on the onion halves. so they ended up soaking in a bit of the pork fat... next time i'll rub some sodium carbonate (or something like that... according to lynn).

i'm pretty done with cooking big meals for a while... 2 in 2 weeks is really tiring... especially when you have to deal with time constraints (originally dinner was supposed to start a 6 but it was insanely impossible because we only had me and antonia doing the prep work and we were doing non-stop from 1pm and only finished cooking at 7pm) and with little assistance... oh well... i guess we'll go through this insanity once a year...