Happy Chinese Valentine's New Day Year!

Happy Chinese New Year and Happy Valentine's Day Everybody! Wishing you a very prosperous new year and a lovey dovey Valentine's Day. Every year, even though our parents and all of our relatives are celebrating the new year in Malaysia, my brother and I will still try to whip up a fabulous new year for friends and loved ones. And the star of this meal is always the yee sang, an amazing sashimi salad which takes a fair amount of time and effort. It's always my job to arrange all the different elements of our yee sang together on a big platter, and this year I decided to make it Valentine's Day themed.

As you can see, there are a lot of things that go into this salad. This year included plump scallop sashimi and salmon sashimi, radish, cucumber, lettuce, jellyfish, carrot, pomegranate and ruby grape fruit. I arranged the sashimi in a heart shape and even carved the grapefruit. See?

This is by far the BEST salad ever! As you can tell, a lot of time and effort goes into it's construction, and it is almost impossible to do without a mandoline. (But not completely, we used to do it!)

I used to think that everyone around the world had yee sang when they celebrated Chinese New Year, but quickly learnt that it's really only common in Malaysia and Singapore. So what's so great about this salad? Well what you see above is only half of it. The fun part is coming up next.

First we sprinkle the contents of our red packets over the top (toasted sesame seeds and five spice). Then we pour over our beautifully thick salad dressing made of plum sauce, honey, lime juice, chilli, sesame oil and a little bit of kaffir lime.

Deep fried wonton skins (expertly fried by A) are scrunched up and sprinkled over the top.

...Then everyone grabs their chopsticks...

...And tosses like crazy! The higher your can lift the salad up with your chopsticks the better, and the messier the better!

And finally, you dig in! This was the BEST yee sang we've made so far, the scallops were so fresh and sweet and were still so fat even though we had sliced them in half. The dressing was sweet and zingy, and there was a perfect balance of textures and flavours. Heaven.

And if that wasn't enough for you, my brother whipped up two more amazing dishes for us to enjoy. The first was the most delicious thing ever, braised pork with chinese mushrooms, dried scallops and 'hair algae'. Don't be put off by the sound of the algae, it has a beautiful slippery texture and soaks up all the rich sauce. This was an adaptation of a dried oyster and hair algae dish which is quite common during New Years, because when you say dried oyster and hair algae (pronounced 'fat choy') in Cantonese it sounds similar to the Chinese New Year greeting of either "Good deeds and prosperity", or "Good business and prosperity". And it's like an explosion of umami on a plate. Soooooo goooooood.

We also enjoyed a whole steamed snapper, and a dessert which will have to remain a secret for now. Needless to say, we had WAYYY too much food and didn't finish anything except for our yee sang. I hope everyone else is enjoying the festivities today, and have a very happy New Year!