Chinese New Year 2008 (year of the rat)

In order to avoid going to university for another lonely Chinese New Years in Tokyo, Amy came over to our flat, and we spent the whole day cooking a feast for dinner. I spent the morning shopping for ingredients (as well as some of the night before, where I headed to Ikebukuro (池袋) to buy chinese stuff, like pancakes for peking duck, man tou (馒头), hoisin sauce (海鲜酱), oyster sauce...and most importantly Chinese Five Spice powder (五香粉)...So, after all the food shopping, I started on the prep. Cut up loads of veges; for the Peking duck, and for stir-frying later, and also cut up lots of ginger and garlic for most of the dishes. Amy managed to arrive while I had just finished the first round of cooking the duck (we were actually doing twice cooked duck, following my dads delicious recipe), and I was just starting to steam the first batch of Chinese New Year cake.

We wrapped jiao zi (饺子), Amy made Bahgudeh, we gutted and scaled a fish, steamed the fish, made some soup...

People started arriving at around 730...and so we started off with the duck...we boiled the jiao zi, had bahgudeh with rice and man tou, had steamed veges, had stir fried veges, and a steamed fish (It was a bit of a mission to find a suitable whole fish for the dinner....but after trawling through about 4 shops, including one fish mongers, I finally found one!)

Anyway, it all seemed to go down well...

Amy, looking very full (...a split second before I took this photo, Greg and Fumie were seemingly deep in conversation, but some 6th sense seemed to know that I was poised to take a photo and some instinctive reaction in both of them made them pose at just the right moment; it was amazing)