Dinner Party details!

So we had this Chinese New Year dinner party last week with some of our friends. It's become somewhat PC to refer to it as "Lunar New Year",¹ but I'm okay with claiming it for China...

Preparation photos:

Roast duck: we bought a whole roast duck at the Asian supermarket. Awesomely fatty and delicious.

 

Barbecue pork buns: We made these according to the usual recipe (well, we toned down the yeast a little because the original recipe was rather excessive). The barbecue pork also came from the supermarket.

 

Sichuan noodle: Actually just linguine and chili sauce (老干妈)

 

Red bean porridge: A dessert dish, with red bean², rice, tapioca, dates, Goji berries, lotus seeds, lotus petals, and sugar. Nobody liked it except me. There are still leftovers 1 week on...

 

A fish! It's a silver carp, cleaned (scaled and gutted) at the supermarket. I'm stuffing ginger and green onion into it before we steam it. SC says fish is important for New Year's dinner.

The party:

Some dishes that I forgot to take pictures of:

1. Rice cake, tree fungus, and luffa. Stiy-fry. The rice cake is the bland kind (i.e. not sweet), so you can cut it into pieces and stir-fry it in a salty dish. Sticky rice cake is important for New Year's because of its homonyms. Luffa (丝瓜) and tree funges (木耳) are totally normal, good-tasting things to eat.
2. Steamed egg thing. I'm not exactly sure how this was supposed to turn out. Ask SC.
3. Tsingtao beer. I wanted to get some Chinese liquor, but the good stuff (I was looking for 茅台 or 五粮液) was really expensive.
4. Clementines. The sweetest ones ever, from the farmer's market³
5. Snacks. Lots of em: wasabi peas, sunflower seeds, "sesame soft flour cake" (沙琪玛), cookie rolls, haw flakes...

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1. Yeah, that's right, I used the British comma. Wut.
2. Known here as Azuki beans
3. Saw a woman at the farmer's market with a cloth shopping bag that said "My carbon footprint is smaller than yours." What an asshole...