as this is the 3rd year in a row that i haven’t been able to spend chinese new years with my family, i finally decided to do something about it here in japan. on chinese new year’s eve, i went to yokohama’s chinatown and got me some chinese grub. walking along the streets and seeing all that chinese food was soooo crazily nostalgic. it was really nice.
finally decided on a nice little restaurant for lunch. turns out the lady/owner is taiwanese and after she found out my mom was taiwanese (and accordingly, that i’m part), she became super friendly. i love that.
i asked her what she recommended for the new year and after she named a few things, my friend and i ordered none of those options, ha. we ended up getting 3 dishes, and although i didn’t think it was that much food, my friend and i walked outta there so freaking full.
we got:
squid with that soy-sauce based soupy
sauce that they put over steamed fish
at the cantonese seafood restaurants.
sooooooo freaking good.![]()
I read somewhere that we’re supposed to
eat dumplings to represent “wrapping up”
our good luck… we didn’t get dumplings,
but i figured “lettuce wraps” would work
the same way… ^^![]()
as i was finishing lunch, my mommy called me to wish me a happy chinese new year. i got to talk to my momma, my dad, my cousin athena, and attempted to speak to my puo puo (grandma). hahhaha, she couldn’t hear me, so we never ended up having a conversation, but it was good just to hear her voice again.
after lunch, we walked around chinatown a bit more in search for nien gao (Chinese sweet rice cake) and vegetable bao-tze (chinese steamed buns, or in japanese “niku-man”). i had just spoken to my japanese mom and her daughter naomi the previous friday (so 2 days earlier) about how in china, we have vegetable “niku man”s. they were surprised and told me that they had never seen or even heard of that before. after talking about it to them, i started craving a good bao-tze (WITH VEGGIES!). i talked to 2 different chinese workers and one lady was useless as she told me that no one in chinatown sold nien gao. hmph. i didn’t really believe her, so i went to another bakery and asked. the lady was super nice and started speaking to me in chinese (only half of which i ended up understanding) and directed me towards some market that should sell it. once we found the market, i found it right away. yay!
the bao-tze search was another ordeal as my friend and i couldn’t remember which alley/street it was on. we ended up finding both eventually, so i happily toted them home with me to Gunma. on the way back home, i stopped by my now favorite pastry shop, Potager, a french pastry shop specializing in sweets made with vegetables. 2 of my favorite things ever put into one product. <3 (this shop will need to be a post all on its own some time later). i went to grab a few cookies and cakes (the most intriguing being the “onion cookie”) for my momma as a belated bday gift (since fucking stupid aeroflot russian airlines lost my luggage and all my gifts for my family were in my suitcase), and also ended up grabbing a dessert for myself as well.
when i got back to maebashi, i was pretty ravenous, so i popped that gorgeous bao-tze into the steamer my mom bought me 2 years ago when my family came for christmas, and a few minutes later, bam! it was ready for the eating.
my 菜っぱまん, nappa-man, vegetable bao-tze.
more specifically, it was a 小松菜 (which translates quite terribly:
type of rape, potherb mustard, kyouna, mizuna) and pork bun.![]()
After i sucessfully steamed the bao-tze (the first time i ever tried
to steam a bao-tze, my friend and i totally forgot about it & ended
up burning that sucker… L), i had my bao-tze and a slice of carrot
chocolate flan tart for dinner. (and, yes, that is jasmine tea behind
the bao-tze. thought i’d stick with the chinese theme.)
The bao-tze was so good. it’s probably one of the 2 best bao-tzes
i’ve ever had in my life, and i’ve had many a bao-tze in my life.
the bao-tze and the flan tart were so good I almost cried.
shit. i almost wet my pants. it was so damn good.
I had asked my mom about some chinese new year traditions and she mentioned chicken soup, chinese ham, chinese sausage, fish (prepared but not eaten), and nien gao (sweet rice cake).
my mom explained that we’re not supposed to eat the fish cuz it’s
supposed to represent “surplus” for the new year.
but… given the fact that i grew up with the whole “don’t waste food.
do you know that children in somalia…” guilt-trip, i couldn’t get
myself to order a whole fish or even cook a whole fish and not
eat it. so the best idea i could think of was to buy some of those
nasty dried fish (i think they’re usually like anchovies?) at the
convenience store. i despise those nasty little fish, so it wasn’t all
that difficult for me to toss them in the trash in the name of superstition.
the fact that i hate them and they’re so small, i didn’t feel like i was
really wasting that much.![]()
aren’t they nasty little fuckers? ugly as hell and taste like shit.
anyways, hahhahahaa, dropping the negativity…
the next morning, i got up bright and early and was feeling a bit ambitious with the nien gao cooking. even though it was my first time & i am painfully bad at cooking, haha. i decided to do the ever more slightly difficult version, where you dip the nien gao in egg before pan frying it. so here we go. making nien gao part 1.
step 1: mix the egg
![]()
step 2: dip the cut pieces of nien gao in the egg![]()
step 3: stick them puppies in a fry pan with
a bit of oil and cook til soft and warm.![]()
step 4: admire your masterpiece and eat!
okay… so i totally cheated. only the first 2 pictures are actually my pictures. the last two i found online cuz i thought they looked good, hahahahha. my… nien gao… sigh, went a bit awry…
i kinda put the heat a little too high and ended up burning the outsides ever so slightly. when the edges started to brown a bit too much (like to black), i immediately turned the fire off and took the nien gao off the pan, but unfortunately, the middle was still a bit hard and not fully cooked. i put my macgyver skills to use and threw them into the microwave. about a minute or so later, they came out fully cooked and delicious~ burnt edges and all. ![]()
i rock!











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