Now before the Lunar Year celebration comes to an end – for those who didn’t know, Chinese New Year (CNY) celebration lasts for 15 days – I thought I better blog about how it was for me. On days running up to CNY, they were rather gloomy personally. Reason being, it didn’t feel like CNY at all in Finland! Obviously since there are so few Chinese here in the first place. No Chinatown even in Helsinki. And back in Malaysia, I could read from all the Facebook posts that my friends were gearing up for the new year – shopping for new clothes and CNY accessories, packing for that trip back to hometown, planning where to have reunion dinner and of course, how many lo sang they’re gonna have.
Lo sang, btw, is a popular tradition unique to Malaysians. Lo sang basically means mixing (lo in Cantonese means to mix) a dish called yue sang, which is a combination of fresh colourful vegetables like carrots, grapefruit, ginger and capsicums, and fresh raw fish ie. salmon topped with plum sauce and sesame seeds. The idea is to mix all the ingredients in a group, raising them as high as possible, signifying that the new year ahead will have many high points/peaks. While I hardly call yue sang my favourite CNY dish, the communal take of the dish has always been more meaningful to me than the dish itself.
So here I was, in Hameenlinna, with no scent of CNY at all in the air. It didn’t help that this is the second consecutive year that I didn’t celebrate CNY at home. I’m missing the food, plus the familiar faces that I usually enjoyed. What a bummer!
Nevertheless, the prospect of CNY brightened up when I received an invitation to an open house by my Malaysian friend in Tampere, who’s celebrating CNY for the first time in her 11 years living in Finland. Compared to her, I probably shouldn’t complain *wink* The open house would be on the second day of CNY ie. 11 February, which was a Monday, as that’s her ‘off day’ from running her restaurant – she owns and operates Borneo, a Malaysian ravintola (Finnish word for restaurant), in Tampere. Will blog about her and the restaurant in another post 
To get myself in the CNY mood, I decided to attempt to bake peanut cookies, a common CNY snacks. In the past, I’d never imagine myself baking peanut cookies for CNY since I always buy various cookies every year. But I guess there are some changes that I might need to get used to. My friend, Ping shared the recipe with me – she actually baked her own peanut cookies this year! – and I thought it was quite simple to follow. I didn’t have plain flour* so I used baking flour instead. Unfortunately that meant the cookies dough rose during the baking and they turned out bigger than expected. Oh well, at least they tasted almost the same Initially I thought of baking at least two trays, but after grinding the peanuts by hand (I broke the blender weeks ago and we haven’t found a replacement!) for an hour, I decided one tray was all that I had energy for.
Two days before CNY eve, I spring cleaned the flat as per usual practice at home. And for the reunion meal, we decided to have it at home with 2 simple dishes and rice. On first day of CNY, we invited two friends over for dinner. Dishes include tofu (beancurd) with minced meat, stir-fry mix veges, roasted chicken wings and fried wontons. We managed to visit the Thai-Asian shop the day before so I had some supply of wonton skins and popiah wraps. They’re considered a ‘luxury’ for me since I don’t get to visit the shop very often due to its distance from where we lived. Dinner ended with ice-cream martini with longan as dessert! So satisfying!
Finally on Monday, I got all ready for the open house. Blue Eyes had to remove his wisdom tooth on the same day and he came back with a swollen right cheek. Too bad, he probably couldn’t enjoy dinner much. The party was awesome cos’ most of the guests were Malaysians and we obviously were excited about celebrating CNY together in a foreign place. The theme colour of the evening was red, which is the auspicious colour of CNY, and boy, was I happy to see so much red in one night! Dishes were aplenty and familiar to the taste – thank God! We had braised duck, popiahs, sambal tumis seafood, roasted chicken, dhall, stir-fry noodles and best of all, we had yue sang thanks to the super fantastic Jo! Must say, the yue sang tasted better than a lot of ones that I’ve had at home We ended dinner with some red bean soup and CNY cookies – besides my peanut ones, there were cornflakes and almond cookies!
All in all, not bad CNY I must say, especially considering the fact that most of the 5 million of Finnish population didn’t celebrate the Lunar New Year So here to the year of the Snake, may we all have better health and greater success in whatever we do! Kong Hei Fatt Choy!
* one of these days I’ll blog about how the Finns categorise their flour so stay tuned 
