: : Reunion Dinner : :
Wena : Where is kuku (uncle) lah! Hungry lah!
Granny : Dunno leh! Think he go watch movie lah!
Wena : Aiya… can eat first or not ah?
Granny : Can can. Me also hungry lah. But lemme call Kuku first!
Wena : Ok ok ok.
Granny : (on telephone) Wei! Where are you lah! We hungry liaw!
Uncle Cyril : On the way back.
Granny : Hurry hurry ah! (puts down phone). Come! We eat first!
So, we started eating the dinner first. Just felt too darn hungry lah! Granny gets all the credit for doing the cooking. She started to cook everything at around 4 p.m.!
She deep fried a pomfret first. Then, stir-fried some strips of purple onions and ginger with soy sauce. Poured the sauce and onions over the fish. The significance of the fish is that we’ll always have some food leftover to eat!
We also had some fried prawns. She bought the big freshwater prawns which was very very very tasty! Yum! Had 6 pieces. Hee hee! In some years, it was just plain deep fried. Other times, it was good with assam Jawa. Wah!
Wena : Got meaning or not?
Granny : Think so but cannot remember lah!
This is a must : a mixed-vegetable dish. It’s significance is that we’ll always have vegetables to eat throughout the new year.
It was more of the sotong (squid) that had the meaning, rather than the mangkuang. She fried the strips of mangkuang (hikama) with strips of dried squid and pork. One of my favourite meals.
Stir-fried leek with pork and oyster mushroom. A compulsory dish to be eaten if one wants to have money saved this year. Forced to eat this. BUT! Missing this time was the Japanese tauhu. Oh well.
The curry chicken was suppose to be eaten over the next few days but since Uncle Cyril already started having it for lunch, we had a small bowl of it as well.
A BIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGGGGGGGG pot of kiam chai teng @ salted vegetable soup. Although not as elaborate as the one describe elsewhere, it’s a common soup dish that Granny makes the whole year round. Found out about the article from Uncle Alex’s site (not that I know him personally but it’s good to be polite to elders). I think the nonya restaurant mentioned in the article is the one located next to New Paris Restaurant but can’t remember.
Well, that’s it! Granny and I took a drive to buy some kitchen towels (Granny : Aiya! I bought toilet paper instead lah! Didn’t know mah!) and ended up driving around town. We’re back home now, waiting for another 1 hr 13 min for the firecrackers to go off!
GONG XI FA CHAI!