MIRI: In 10 days, the Chinese community will be celebrating their most important festivity of the year – Chinese New Year – that marks the beginning of the lunar year or the spring season.
Traditionally, on the eve of Chinese New Year, families would gather at the dinner table, enjoying a heartfelt meal of all the luxurious delicacies. For many, such joyous moment is rather precious, as they had to be frequently away from home due to work commitments.
The Covid-19 pandemic since early last year, however, has impacted people in many ways, such as causing families to struggle to put food on the table.
Abalone with steamed bak choy.
Sin Yean Yean, an avid cook, shared with The Borneo Post that despite financial difficulties, she believes that making a nice reunion meal using affordable ingredients is still doable.
“Reunion dinner usually consists of various dishes and ingredients that have symbolic meaning or expresses during the Spring Festival.
“These ingredients include fish, chicken, pork, duck, vegetables, and seafood such as prawn, crab. Those who wish to enjoy a more luxurious taste would include abalone and scallop in their dishes,” said Sin.
Sharing how using affordable, everyday ingredients could be turned into interesting, mouth-watering dishes, Sin prepared several dishes – steamed red fish, broccoli with wood ear fungus, sautéed prawn with a pinch of salt, abalone with bak choy; rolled meat cabbage; and gingko chicken soup, as examples.
‘Pocket money’ comprises scallop, broccoli and woodear fungus.
“It is important to note that every dish symbolises a special meaning. So, these six dishes I’ve prepared cover elements that the Chinese hold dearly as part of our tradition – prosperity, wealth, fulfilment, family togetherness,” she reiterated.
“Steamed fish or sautéed prawn use easily prepared and economic ingredients. Those who want a time-saving, simple meal can just steam or sauté the ingredient, not only because it requires little preparation time, but is also healthy and nutritious.
Steamed red fish.
“According to Chinese belief, fish symbolises abundance, in the context of health as well as wealth. The fish head and tail represent the start of the year until the end and in between there is plenty of food on the table and money to spend as well as good health.”
Abalone symbolises wealth, with its shape resembling a gold ingot, said Sin. Similarly for the scallop dish, which she named as the money pocket, it represents wealth and money to be spent throughout the year.
She found it surprising that canned abalone had dropped in price by at least 10 per cent.
Gingko chicken soup.
“Commonly, abalone tends to be very pricy due to its rarity. I am not referring to the farmed abalone, but the sea abalone that grows in the wild. The texture of the wild abalone is crunchy and sweet.
Rolled meat cabbage.
“Due to its rarity, it is usually risky to harvest wild abalone, thus the expensive price.
“However, due to the weaker purchasing power, abalone has dropped in demand, hence, the lower price,” she said.
The value of the dish is not necessarily important, she opined, as it is more about whom you enjoy it with.
Sautéed prawn with a pinch of salt.
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