Truly, Chinese New Year (CNY) is hectic level 100 on a scale of one to 10, and cooking up yet another reunion feast for friends, immediate family, extended family and more gets draining. However, nothing beats home-cooked fare, so if you’re looking for inspiration, here are three easy reunion dinner dishes you can make in under 30 minutes!
First up, and the honest-to-God quickest recipe we’ve got: Spicy Dumplings in Chilli Oil. It’s so easy, the only kitchen skill you need is turning on the stove.
Why these dumplings for CNY, you may ask━dumplings are actually a symbol of wealth, and are considered a lucky food for the occasion! We’ve used a combination of both Golden Chef Cabbage & Pork Dumplings and Golden Chef Chives & Pork Dumplings, which take approximately 10 minutes to cook.
As a base for the spicy oil, we’re using a base of Golden Chef Clear Chicken Broth enriched with Golden Chef Rice Wine. Gently simmering it for a minute or two cooks off some of the alcohol to add depth of flavour to the chicken broth, which is made with non-GMO ingredients, as well as no artificial preservatives and nasties!
This step also ensures your sauce mix is warm, so it doesn’t cool down the hot dumplings.
Tweak the suggested ratios below to your preference: add more crispy chilli oil and fried garlic if you like, or reduce the amount of Golden Chef Chinkiang Vinegar used to tone down the acidity in the sauce, though its complex mellow, earthy notes are quite essential to the success of this dish.
Pour the dressing over the strained dumplings, or vice versa, it’s up to you. Just remember to give it a good toss-through before serving!
Goong ob woonsen (กุ้งอบวุ้นเส้) may be a crowd favourite Thai dish, but Claypot Prawn Vermicelli is also a common in Chinese cooking, albeit with slight differences in the sauce mix. Regardless of culture, it’s a dish symbolising prosperity and abundance, prawns represent happiness, and it used to only be served to Thai royalty━it’s also super easy to prepare, so it’s perfect for the Lunar New Year festivities.
We’ve used pork belly slices to add flavour to the final dish; using them to line the claypot also helps to ensure the tung hoon doesn’t end up all stuck to the sides. Ahead of that, lightly marinate the meat in Golden Chef Rice Wine to reduce any porky flavour!
You can also opt to skip the step of searing the prawns, though this releases some of their prawny goodness into the oil. If you do choose not to fry them, add a couple more minutes to the final steam.
Similarly, rendering some of the fat out from the pork belly slices till they’re slightly crisp means extra flavour, thanks to the Maillard reaction.
Putting the sauce mix together on the side might mean cleaning up one more piece of kitchen equipment, versus adding the sauces individually to the pot, but you can prep this ahead of time.
With that ready and on hand, all you have to do is just pour it over the vermicelli to cook, rather than fuss over measuring out each condiment over the stove, and stirring it in the claypot.
If you’ve pre-seared the prawns, they only need a very quick final steam at the end, when the tung hoon is almost done. Don’t overcook them!
The hotpot experience is integral to Chinese cuisine, representing harmony, community and togetherness. It sometimes gets messy, though, so this Bouquet Hotpot allows you to have it all prepped ahead of the meal. Plus, it’s a gorgeous centrepiece too!
Feel free to roll the vegetable flowers ahead of time, and transfer them to the pot before cooking. You can use a regular vegetable peeler for this: just ensure you peel them in long, unbroken strips, or you could combine two to create bigger rosettes.
Start with the biggest pieces of vegetable, for example the bok choy stems, corn and shiitake mushrooms, then fill in the spaces with whatever other vegetables you have picked. Feel free to replace the pork with beef, but don’t forget the wombok below!
While the Golden Chef Clear Chicken Broth already has a rich, full-bodied flavour, you have to remember that the vegetables will release water too as they cook.
To balance this out, we stirred in some Golden Chef Royale Vegetarian Oyster Flavoured Sauce with Diced Mushroom that’s loaded with diced shiitake mushrooms for a beautiful umami boost.
You don’t have to pour enough liquid to cover the vegetables, because as mentioned, the liquid from the vegetables will also add to the stock. And because it’s CNY, luxe up your hotpot with the addition of Golden Chef’s range of premium canned seafood, including Canned Baby Abalone, Canned Wild Abalone, and Razor Clams! P.S.: these go in right at the very end before you serve.
Bonus: Condiments
Whether you’re prepping for a hotpot feast, or wanting to treat your guests with extra condiments on the side which they can pair with whatever you’ve cooked, here are some dips you can put together with Golden Chef’s assortment of sauces! It’s an extra easy way to wow the table, rather than putting out basic bottles of sauce.
With 21 years of history, Golden Chef is a trusted brand for high-quality, premium kitchen ingredients to help you on your culinary journey. If you’ve never seen some of the items we’ve used in our recipes, you are correct, because they’re all-new additions to the Golden Chef lineup! Find the whole range ahead of CNY at your nearest FairPrice store, or on FairPrice Online.
Photos taken by Melvin Mak.
This post was brought to you by FairPrice.
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