The First Day of the New Year

My family's eclectic CNY First Day dinner.

Technically, it's already the second day of the Year of the Pig but since I've not slept yet, it still feels like the first day for me. =)

Traditionally, on the first day of Chinese New Year, my brother and sister and their families will come visit. Some years they'll time it so that it'll coincide with when my aunt and uncle and their families visit and we'll have a big party of people at my home. This year was one of those years and it was fun and rowdy as it should be during CNY.

Some years my mum will cook or prepare for steamboat but this year she wasn't well before CNY so didn't have too much time to prepare. So in the end, we had the most eclectic of CNY dinners we've ever had to date. Instead of the traditional steamboat, which is for some reason extremely popular in tropical Singapore, we had curry chicken, which we ordered from one of our Malay neighbours, Kentucky Fried Chicken's Treasure Feast, Japanese styled pizzas from Oiishi Pizza and 80 sticks of satay.

But we did have a traditional dinner on Saturday CNY's eve, as did all my relatives, so our not so tradition dinner on the first day didn't bother any of us. That's when all of us have to return for Reunion Dinner. When I was younger, we often had steamboat for Reunion Dinner but since my parents got older and we got lazier =D , we now usually have our dinner at a restaurant. This year we booked the 5:30pm slot at the Bottle Tree Restaurant at the Bottle Tree Park in Yishun.


The Bottle Tree Park - pix shot on a previous biking trip in the area.

While the location was quite pretty, I must say that the Bottle Tree management was probably too inexperience with dealing with so many people and the dinner didn't go as smoothly as we were used to. It took them more than an hour after we were seated to serve us our "yusheng" and I was somewhat disappointed that they didn't scatter the ingredients and pour the sweet dressing over the dish and say the usual CNY greetings, this being a proper restaurant and all. BTW, if you're interested in the origins of "yusheng" and how it came to be associated with CNY, click this link.


(First "lo hei" at Crown Palace Restaurant", the waitress pours the ingredients and the sauce over the vegetables and she'll say one phrase of good wishes in Mandarin with every ingredient she adds. )

I love raw fish but I don't usually like it sweet which is the way "lo hei" is served during CNY. But during the run up to CNY and during the 15 days of CNY, I make an exception and will participate in each "lo hei" session with gusto. The proper way to do it is to toss everything as high as you can and don't worry about making a mess and it is always accompanied with a lot of cheering and happy noise making.


(The second of my 3 "lo hei" 's so far. In this kind of "lo hei", you buy the vegetables & sauces in a pre-package like the one in the first picture. You then buy the raw fish separately and mix in all the items yourself. This was actually the noisiest of the "lo hei" sessions I had this year so far. The good thing about this kind of "lo hei is that you can control how much honey you pour in and you can control what kind of fish goes in.)

While "lo hei" used to be only eaten on the 7th day of CNY, it is now usually eaten any time from the eve onwards to the 15th day of CNY. And these days, it's not unusual to "lo hei" during the one week leading up to CNY's eve itself. This year, I've already "lo hei" twice before Reunion Dinner and will probably have another "lo hei" session at another office party that I'm suppose to attend on the 3rd day of CNY.


("Lo hei"at the Bottle Tree Restaurant. The dish came already all ready to be tossed. This is the third way this dish is often served.)

Anyway, after our "lo hei", it took them forever to serve us a second dish of vegetables and they only served us our shark's fin soup near the end of the dinner when the soup dish is traditionally the second dish that is served after the "yusheng" or the cold dish.

The food was actually quite tasty and aside from the "yusheng", the scallops and broccoli, the shark's fin soup, we also had crayfish, steamed fish and sea cucumber. But although the food wasn't too bad and the location quite lovely, I don't really recommend this for Reunion Dinner, unless they make changes next year like hire more waiters and cooks.

Still, we did have a good time. It is Reunion Dinner after all and although we're not superstitious, still I think we've been brought up with the idea that it is inauspicious and a really big no-no to be quarrelsome on CNY's eve and during the 15 days of CNY, so if this had been on any other day, we might have made our displeasure more vocal but this was the Reunion Dinner, so we had a good time. =)

We'll probably come back again as my 4-year-old niece wants to go fishing. One of the attractions of this restaurant is that there are two sections for fishing built right into the restaurant. One is a shallow rock pool where they place small tropical fish for kids to fish out with their nets. The other is a deeper pool for grown-ups to catch their fish with a rod and the restaurant will also cook it for you if you like. Unfortunately, the fishing pools were close on CNY eve and so we'll have to return again.


Fishing pools for the kids at the Bottle Tree Restaurant.


The Bottle Tree Park at night.

After dinner, we took a stroll around the park. The park was one of the reasons why my parents and my brother decided on this location. So we made full use of it by strolling around the area and snapping shots of each other when we weren't chatting.

The Year of the Pig is generally a good year and so far it's been great for us, a most auspicious beginning indeed. =)

Before I head off to bed, I'll leave you a shot of a Bottle Tree, the name of a species of tree that was imported from Australia to this park. It is also the reason why the tree and the restaurant are named Bottle Tree.



That's it from me. Good night. =)