(Super Belated) Lunar New Year Post!

My table full of food!

It's been almost two months since the Lunar New Year (Feb. 10th) and I am just getting around to posting pictures of the food that was made! Better late than never, right? So in February I had my annual Lunar New Year's Eve dinner party and invited several friends over to celebrate, be merry, and, of course, get down on some home cooked food!

Vegetarian dan dan noodles

As I mentioned in last year's post, the Lunar New Year is also known as Chinese New Year or the Spring Festival and is celebrated by many cultures and countries.

Vegetarian Tom Kha

I made the following this year for dinner: vegetarian dan dan noodles, a five-spice tofu dish, and a vegetarian tom kha soup.

Little bit of everything

My friends Sandy and Joe brought a  bangin' stir fry. And for dessert, I made a green tea cheesecake with raspberry sauce (which turned out wonderfully).

Mmm green tea cheesecake!

My personal favorite dish of the evening was the vegetarian dan dan noodles. I found the most amazing recipe online which, I had to improvise on, but the results turned out wonderfully. The recipe required dried shitake mushrooms, rehydrated and chopped (I love mushrooms but hate the texture of rehydrated mushrooms- so I used fresh shitakes instead). The other change I made was that I could not, for the life of me, locate smoked tofu. So I cubed firm tofu, tossed it with liquid smoke, let it sit for an hour or so, then drained it. Voila! Smoked tofu! The dish was pretty spicy, due to the chili oil and Szechuan pepper, but not as greasy at it can be when you eat it at a restaurant (because it quite literally is usually drenched in chili oil at restaurants).