Abundance…

Sumptuous and abundant, the family reunion dinner served on Chinese New Year’s Eve is undeniably a major highlight of the festive season. It brings a joyful family together around a full table and symbolises the hopes for prosperity in the year ahead.

I ordered a few dishes from where else if not Payung Café for our dinner…

…this year so that my missus would not have to slave all day in the kitchen during those few days leading to the festival.

There was their most delightful belimbing prawns…

…and my girl’s favourite, their lamb masala…

I also placed an order for another favourite of ours there, their Thai green curry…

…instead of their kacangma chicken because my missus insisted on cooking her own…

…to give to her sister-in-law and she also cooked this very nice beef curry…

…so she could give it to her brother too – he loves her curry so much that everytime she cooks whatever curry, she will always give him some to enjoy.

He gave us the daging masak hitam and my girl’s good friend cooked us some ayam masak merah, both of which I featured in yesterday’s blogpost so my girl asked the mum to cook this yellow/butter rice…

…that goes so well with such Malaysian/ASEAN/Asian culinary delights. In the past, we used ghee to cook the rice but these days, the brands that we get here are not so nice, not very fragrant so my missus would use butter instead.

Actually, I asked my missus not to take everything out – we would do that one at a time in the days that followed so we could enjoy them slowly but it all fell on deaf ears. Well, at least, she did what I told her for some of the dishes, which was to have smaller servings of each dish instead of serving the whole lot at one go.

She only served two of her ngor hiang (meat/spring rolls)…

…her specialty and yes, she does it really well and I did ask for a vegetable dish…

…specially for this dinner and everyone loved her collagen-packed hu phio (fish maw) soup…

…with quail eggs so much.

Of course, there has to be fish – nián nián yǒu yú (年年有餘) which means, “May you have abundance year after year!” The word ‘abundance’ is ‘yu (余)’ which is pronounced the same as fish in Chinese.

For our dinner that evening on Chinese New Year’s Eve, we had “soon hock“…

…or marble goby in English, ikan ketutu in Malay. reputed to be among the Top 5 most expensive fish in Malaysia! My sister gave us one sometime ago but we had not had an occasion to cook it until now and yes, it was very nice – we all loved it!

Of course I invited her to join us that evening and she brought along her casserole of sate pork belly but unfortunately, the photo that I took of it turned out blur – it is in the main snapshot above, to the right of the broccoli.

There you have it, 12 dishes altogether for the 4 of us and no prize for guessing what we shall be eating over the next few days. LOL!!!