Chinese New Year 2012

Kiong Heet Huat Tsai or Happy New Year everyone! My father’s side of the family usually celebrate Chinese New Year in a Chinese restaurant but this year we took a break from tradition and had the dinner in our house.

We prepared some dishes and ordered most of it from Classic Chef Catering. We made the salad with sesame soy dressing in the first picture.

This misua we ordered. This was the only Chinese dish we had. That was also unusual right? We just ordered dishes we liked and had no theme for dinner. Surprisingly everyone loved all the food. My cousins also commented that it was more relaxing to have dinner at home instead of in a jam packed Chinese restaurant waiting ages for the food to come out.

misua (Chinese noodle dish)

The only dish I made aside from the mashed potatoes was this beef shank with tomato sauce that I learned from my cousin La. I will post the recipe tomorrow.

It doesn’t look like much but everyone loved it. It was so tender even the tendon (litid) melted in your mouth. Most of the bone marrow was dislodged into the sauce making the whole dish more sinful.

beef shank with tomato paste

My cook made this lasagna which is the same one I sell in my store.

lasagna

The rest of the dishes were ordered from Classic Chef catering, the same one I used two years ago. Their paella is a must order. Even after an hour or two the rice never became soggy.

paella

seafood with dill sauce

The delicious sukiyaki cut Angus Korean bbq was my favorite.

Angus beef Korean bbq

chicken pastel

My least favorite was the super thin and shallow chicken pastel. It didn’t taste bad or anything like that. It was just ordinary and nothing special.

As usual I forgot to take pictures of the people.

For our family the look of the buffet table wasn’t important. No flowers or decorations. It’s all about the food baby!

My cute doggie Coffee was wondering if all the food was ready and if she can come out and start begging already.

my dachshund, Coffee

Thank you Cecille (Classic Chef) for giving us our favorite baked ham.

baked ham

My dad loves this ham so much he couldn’t even wait for the whole ham to be sliced.

An order of ham came with 2 boxes of homemade dinner rolls and pineapple sauce.

Chinese honey ponkan oranges

I bought these ‘bouchons’ or brownie bites from S&R. The brand is Sugar Bowl Bakery and they were surprisingly good. The brownies were a cross between cakey and fudge and were not too sweet.

brownie bites

The big hit of the night was the queso de bola cheesecake I ordered from Indulgence by Irene. I will do a separate post on this. Even non dessert lovers raved about it. I had to hide the last slice lest a cousin brought it home or decide to have another serving.

Indulgence by Irene’s queso de bola cheesecake

Last New Year’s Eve our household help were in a tizzy cooking prawns and steak on the teppanyaki grill. This time they were so relaxed and quite relieved that the food was ordered.

I think we just started a new tradition of celebrating CNY at home instead of an impersonal Chinese restaurant. It was definitely more relaxing and we got to talk to each other at leisure.

Classic Chef Catering
161 D. Tuazon Street,
Quezon City, Philippines
telephone: +632-731-2286, +63917-526-5217
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Indulgence by Irene
Quezo de Bola Cheesecake
9 inch – P900
4 1/2 inch – P200

For Orders: 0922-8303900/0917-6225800
Pick up in Ortigas
Meet up in Magallanes – Weekday mornings and afternoons
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