More lovely spring festival food, part 3

Yesterday was February 6 and it was the 15th day of the Chinese New Year. It is also called the Lantern Festival which marks the end of the celebration and families in China walk the streets with lighted lanterns. And today, this column reports on the third part of a five part series on all that lovely spring festival food encountered this Year of the Dragon.

Site of the celebration was the Waterfront Cebu City Hotel & Casino and this establishment greeted the year with the “Fire in the Sky” with a spectacular fireworks display alongside synchronized classic and modern music. This is a continuing tradition from ancient China and firecrackers are used (remember, China invented the gunpowder!) because these small explosions are thought to drive away evil spirits.

These bring back memories to exploding firecrackers waking me up a long time ago in our family residence along A. Bonifacio St. and we had several neighbors who were Chinese. The next day, I asked why the fireworks were so late after the New Year and our maids said it was “pasko sa insik”. Those were the days of my early encounters of Chinese food stuff, from tikoy to kiamoy and from ba chiang to haw flakes (dark pink red disc, a Chinese sweet made from the fruit of the hawthorn tree) and finally, lugaw paired with ba hoo (rice gruel with dry shredded meat) or salted black beans-Taosi Temple brand eaten by our friendly Chinese grocer in sleeveless shirt. Very sweet, excuse me, these champoy memories!

Fast forward to that 2012 Dinner at the UNO annex of the Waterfront Cebu City. It is mandatory that the dishes served would conform to traditional emblems of affluence and prosperity. Appetizers were as follows: Chinese Fish Cake, Chinese Fried Prawn Roll, Popiah (Chinese lumpia) and Fried Wantons.

The fish cake is an item rarely seen in Cebu though a version, fish balls, is more popular here. The homemade version is with lots of puréed fish flesh (sometimes, pork meat is added in the core of the ball), while the street food version contains lots of starchy material.

The popiah or Fujian style fresh spring roll is the ancestor of the lumpia and again many varieties exist though my grandmother used to cook a version that was simply wonderful. Only wood was used to cook the ingredients (no LPG then) and the taste was intensified with the addition of pounded juice extracted from the heads of the shrimps. I never knew then that the chemical composition of that extract is similar to vetsin.

Main dishes were the following: Pork Spare Ribs with Salt and Pepper, Sweet and Sour Fish Fillet (my personal favorite), Lemon Chicken, Braised Bean Curd with Shrimp, Char Kway Teow and Lo Han Chai.

The latter is also known as Buddha’s delight, a vegetarian dish offered in many Chinese restaurants and in Cebu (early 60s), there used to be a restaurant, called International Rice House that served the best Lo Han Chai I have ever tasted. Shellfish used to be plentiful and cheap and their version had an overload of this ingredient.

It has been years since your favorite food columnist have been participating in the Chinese New Year celebrations at the Waterfront Cebu City Hotel and always, I brought home a nice red box with tikoy to share with the family.