The C.N.Y – Cow New Year

It’s the Moo Moo year, let’s kill more cows for our desires on steak!

I’m greedy this year so I’ll celebrate CNY in Melbourne and Malaysia, since I dislike the first day of CNY. Every year, there are only two scenarios, first, relatives will come visit and disturb me when I was in my dreamland early in the morning, then I’d wake up with a sleepy look and they’ll look at me and laugh while greeting me ‘Morning, Piggy’. Scenario two will be, my mum waking me up extremely early to visit my great grand mother from my mum’s side and I’ll be extremely tired for the rest of my day, all the very nice foods doesn't seem so nice after that.

Nowadays, first and second day of New Year are usually bored back in my hometown after they ban fireworks in Malaysia, without fireworks flying all over the town, the town seems like too dumb for a person to feel spirited for the festive – most shops and shopping centers are closed until the third day of New Year, relatives visit you and take up all the space in your house (bed, sofas, teles’, PCs’, etc), gamble friends set up tiny gambling den and try to win all the monies from your red-packets and the roads are so quiet with a few cars that make you feel that you shouldn’t be out on the road but somewhere else fighting to win somebody else’s red-packet.

So I decided to skip the first 2 days and happily have a dinner with my family when I get back on the 28th. This decision doesn’t make me feel extremely good though since I still have to come back to office today to finish up everything I have to do for my 6 weeks of holiday – I managed to clear out my last task this morning and will be happily enjoying my rest of the day in the office chilling around, it’s CNY after all.

Australia Day falls on the 26 January and Aussies don’t celebrate CNY, my CNY holiday was then compensated from the Australia Day Holiday on the 26th so it’s all good, if not I’ll make a third scenario soon. This year I feel I’ve started off CNY pretty happily, although the festival I went wasn’t that fun but it did made me feel that its CNY, and also, on the very same night, I finally join my housemate to another KTV session again - it’s been such a long time since the last time I joined him and had that much of fun.

Other than that, on CNY itself, I had a great time practicing my cooking skill. As usual, my family friends here, except for Nick and Warren since they are back in Malaysia this time. We made a great reunion feast…

The extremely nice Poh Piah (One of the Malaysian food) filled with fresh minced prawns, minced pork and etc… The preparation for it took like a few hours!

Michelle helping out to roll and wrap up the ingredients into ‘Poh Piah’ – looks professional until I tempted her to make funny shapes, she ended up making large shanghai dumpling instead of Poh Piah - totally lost her direction.

These are the ingredients… not easy to make them at all - there are so much work like peeling off the prawn’s shells, chopping up onions and many more…

After all the trouble, we still have to look out to make sure it’s fried into gold brownish color so it’ll be crispy and not burnt…

As for me, I think fish for CNY is a ‘must’ thing to have, so I bought a big fresh Barramundi which I made it in two different ways…

The Cantonese Steam Barra… By Me!

And the Fried Barra with Soy Sauce… By Me Again!

Then we had the mushroom Chicken that was marinated for two days! The Chicken has a strong mushy taste, and the mushroom is sooO nice!

Other than that, we had Cashew Prawns, heaps of Marinated Fried Chicken, Yellow Bean Soup with Pork Spare Ribs, Steam and fried Vegetables with Garlic. They are all so delicious that I couldn’t resist not eating more and I ended up with a bloated tummy the next day, all good for a New Year start!

Guess what!? 1 more day to go!!!!!