2013 Mid Autumn festivities!

It's always great to have a reason to celebrate and eat good food. Mid autumn festival this year on September 19th, 2013 was perfect for just that. Mid autumn festival or harvest moon festival is very well known in Asia in countries such as Hong Kong, China, Vietnam, Taiwan and Korea. They may have different names but it's all celebrated on the same day when there is a full moon. Not to worry though, it's not about celebrating werewolves! 

Normally for big holidays my family would go out to eat because it's a lot of work prepping the food but this year we decided to stay in! 

We ended up eating a lot of veggies for this meal and one of the dishes we had was bok choy with braised preserved mushrooms. The bok choy is easy to make, all you have to do is rinse and cook. The mushrooms are a bit harder to make as you need to soak them a day or two ahead of time and then braise them for a few hours. Braising them really allows the mushrooms to soak in the flavour!

The next dish was another vegetarian dish that includes bean curd pockets, lotus roots, cabbage, vermicelli and wood ear (the black pieces). This dish is interesting because it mixes a lot of different textures into one dish. The wood ear funghi and lotus roots are very crisp and crunchy which offset the softness of the cabbage and vermicelli. The bean curd pockets are very chewy. This was definitely one of my favourite dishes. 

One of the meat dishes we had was the braised pork belly and pickled vegetables. This was always one of my favourite dishes growing up and whenever we went out to eat, I would always order it. It tastes so much better homemade just knowing how much work went into it. The best part about this dish is mixing the preserved vegetables and sauce and mixing it with your rice! 

This dish might not look that impressive at first glance but it was super tasty! This was the braised taro and duck dish. Not a lot of people like duck because it tastes a lot more gamey than the protein we are used to but I've personally never had that problem. Duck tends to be more fatty than chicken and you can really taste the difference. The taro absorbed all the sauce and fat from the duck so it was very succulent and soft. 

Last but not least was the rice dish. We chose not to have the traditional plain white rice and make a steamed glutinous rice inside. We cook it with preserved chinese meats and sausages which gives a bite to the soft rice. It's more filling than plain white rice but it's so tasty it's hard to stop at one bowl!