eat/drink steph@themusic.com.au
LUNAR NEW YEAR Whether you celebrate Lunar New Year, want to learn more, or are just keen to join in the festivities, here are some of the city’s LNY events.
Valley Chinese New Year Festival – 20 & 21 Feb, 5 – 10pm; 22 Feb, 12 – 5pm, Chinatown There’ll be all the staples: lion dances, firecrackers, street food, traditional music and live entertainment, dance performances, tai chi, religious rituals, lanterns, puppets, roving acts and much more. There are also the Asian Markets on 20 Feb in Chinatown Mall. Part of BrisAsia Festival. Shanghai Jazz Dance – 20 Feb, 5.45 – 6.15pm, Chinatown Mall Experience 1930s Shanghai when traditional Chinese culture began to merge with western culture. Sunnybank Community & Sports Club – 18 – 20 Feb Every night there’ll be lion dancing from 7.30pm, as well as a special Chinese New Year menu, consisting 24 • THE MUSIC • 11TH FEBRUARY 2015
of dishes like roast duck and BBQ pork platter, ginger and shallot lobster tails and san choi bao. There’s palm reading and feng shui with Tom Lo on 18 Feb from 11am–1pm. On 19 Feb Chef Sam Shui will present a noodle making workshop from 3 – 5pm and on 20 Feb, he will be running a cooking class from 3 – 5pm. Gold Coast CNY Festival – 21 Feb, 3 – 9pm, Young & Davenport Sts, Southport These celebrations include the delicious Asian Food Market, outdoor cinema, fireworks, arts and cultural performances on the main stage from 3 – 9pm, interactive cooking displays, live roving entertainers and street performers, interactive cultural workshops (lantern painting, calligraphy), lion dancing and much more.
PROSPERITY TOSS This raw fish salad symbolises abundance, prosperity and vigour. It’s mostly associated with Chinese communities living in Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore. Not only is it supposed bring good luck for the year, but the process of preparing and eating it is good fun.
WHY LUNAR? For some cultures, such as Chinese, Korean, Mongolian, Tibetan and Vietnamese, 1 Jan doesn’t mark the start of the year. Rather, the Lunar New Year will usually begin sometime in late Jan to mid-Feb. It’s based on the lunisolar calendar, which I read up on but still don’t understand, so just look it up yourselves. Sorry. Anyway you probably know the gist of what goes on. At base level, there’s a lot of amazing food, some particularly prosperous to bring you wealth and health for the new year; there’s lion and dragon dancing (the difference being two performers in a lion and more than that – plus the use of sticks in the costume – in a dragon); firecrackers (fun at first but soon enough will make you go “STFU already, my ears have suffered enough”); lit lanterns; fireworks; and depending on who you’re related to/friend with, red envelopes containing cash moneys.
The base ingredients include shredded vegies – daikon, carrots, capsicum, turnips, red pickled ginger, sun-dried oranges, key lime leaves, Chinese parsley, chilli – and jellyfish, sesame seeds, and peanuts. Then fried dried shrimp or shrimp crackers, raw fish (commonly salmon), and the sauces (plum sauce, sesame oil, rice vinegar, kumquat paste, five spice powder and more) are added, with auspicious wishes said after each addition. Finally everyone at the table stands up and uses their chopsticks to toss the salad together, picking up ingredients high into the air to symbolise growth in fortune, and yelling out auspicious wishes or just lo hei (Cantonese name for the dish).
LUCKY NY FOODS
Fish: eaten whole. A homophone (in Mandarin) for ‘surpluses’. Leek: a homophone (in Mandarin) for ‘calculating (money)’. Mandarin/Orange: a homophone for ‘gold’ (in Cantonese) or ‘luck’ or ‘fortune’ (in Teochew dialect). Niangao: a dessert pudding made from glutinous rice flour. A homophone for ‘higher year/more prosperous year’. Dumplings: symbolises prosperity. Noodles: longer noodles = longer life! Fat choy: a kind of thin, black algae used as a vegetable (literal translation: hair vegetable), which is a homophone (in Cantonese) for ‘struck it rich’.