From Scratch

Whenever holidays roll around, the Mild Wife and I try to do something to celebrate. We don't necessarily go all out, but we do like to participate in the festivities. We put up Halloween decorations to let the kids know that they're welcome to trick-or-treat at our house, and there was a whole series of posts this last Christmas (culminating with this one) about the festivities. Basically, we like to partake in the holidays.

Lunar New Year is no exception to this rule, so we usually end up having some form of a celebratory meal and handing out red envelopes to our nieces and nephews. Again, it's just one of those things that we like to do, to honor our heritages and get in on the celebration just a bit. It just makes things a tiny bit more cheerful.

This year, we couldn't do some of the usuals. A family gathering seemed unwise given that the pandemic is still a thing, and we didn't want to go to a restaurant, either. So, that basically left us with having a meal of some sort to celebrate. Instead of ordering it online, however, we decided that we'd cook the meal ourselves. And since we were going to cook anyway, we figured that we might as well cook as much of it as possible.

Yup, we made it all from scratch.

Now, we weren't aiming for anything ridiculous. The Mild Wife picked out a couple of recipes for chow fun and homemade dumplings that looked reasonable, and we set about preparing the meal. As it happened, the Mild Wife had meetings that she couldn't get out of on the actual day-of, so she left the actual cooking to me. Just to be clear, she did a bunch of the planning and prep work up to that point, so it's hardly as if she sat around and waited. Still, this meant that I found myself at the stove (instead of at the bottom) for this particular meal.

So, I went to work. The Mild Wife likes taking her meetings near the kitchen, so she was actually watching as I cooked. It was sort of like leaving the TV on in the background; she got free latent entertainment as she took care of her business. I didn't actually screw anything up badly enough to elicit laughter, but I did apparently draw enough of her curiosity that I caught her gaze drifting to the dumplings a few times. In fact, when she was finishing up one of her calls, she straight up told her colleagues something like, "my husband is making a Lunar New Year meal, so I'm going to get going soon. I want to try the food." If anything, that caused me to laugh about the whole thing.

All in all, I think the food turned out all right, especially for the first time making some of it from scratch. There were a few things that I would change next time (that dumpling dough is tricky), but I was content with my attempt. In fact, I'm now thinking about the next attempt, and what I'm going to change in order to make the food come out better.

Apparently, cooking the food from scratch makes the holiday that much more fun. Who knew?