More cooking

I don't remember cooking this much during Chinese New Year last year.  After dumpling yesterday, I decided to cook a noodle dish on Day 2.  Well, I actually want to make fresh noodles but time was not on my side.  So I ended up using some semi-fresh/refrigerated ones instead.  Charlie wanted more dumplings - Check!  And for whatever reason, I dreamt about lobsters so I went out and bought two lobster tails.  One for me and one for Charlie :-)

I went out and bought some Japanese mushrooms too, although no one else wanted to try them.  And I overcooked my veggies in the broth.  Oops!

Why is it that it takes forever to cook and then the meal is over and done within minutes:

Remnants of the lobster.  I forgot to take the before photo. Also forgot to cut it down the middle before cooking. Ha ha!

Urgh, so many pots to clean!!

For Day 3, I wanted to make a traditional Chinese-style marinate called "Char Siu".  I didn't realize that there were two pork loins in the packaging, so one was Char Siu and the other was a mix of oranges and thyme and who knows what else I threw in that bag. Oh, I see lemons. LOL!!

Our very good friend dropped off some egg tarts.  YUMMMM!!!!

Didn't take long for us to tuck into them :-D

It was unfortunate that a couple days after this egg tart drop off, I had to tell my friend that Graham was a close contact to someone that tested positive for Covid at school.  Thankfully since Graham didn't have any symptoms and is fully vaccinated, he could continue going to school.  And thankfully he tested negative after a few days so that was good news for my friend too.  Phew!!

So here's the Char Siu pork.  The main spice used here is 5 spice powder.  Don't ask me what those 5 spices are?!? :-P

Most of the time, there's a red coloring that's used for this particular dish.  Makes me wonder how much red dye I've eaten since I was a kid!  Yikes!!  But so glad this turned out although I had to put it back into the oven for extra cooking time.  The recommended 160F for the temperature of the meat was still too pink to my liking:

By Day 4, I decided to cook some duck.  I had thought about getting some roast duck at a restaurant but why not try and cook it.  It's actually my first time cooking duck!

I was hoping to roast an entire duck but only these were available for sale at the supermarket.  Oh M goodness, duck releases so much fat!!!  The recipe called for searing on the stove top first and then into the oven:

It looked amazing when it came out of the oven, but geez... it was super tough!!!  I could barely peel off any meat off so thankfully there was some leftover Char Siu pork from the night before.  I was going to make some Chinese pancakes but that idea was also thrown out the window due to time constraints.  I did manage to buy some "roti" or Indian bread (frozen) and that was easy enough to heat up on the stove:

Roll it all up like a burrito with some cucumbers and spring onions... and voila! This was actually pretty tasty!! But wow, what an exhausting week from all this cooking.  Ha ha!!!