Chinese New Year has always been one of my favourite family meals. There’s memorable “must haves” which we eat every year, like Yee Sang…

Also known as Yu Sheng, this raw fish and vegetable salad is eaten at Chinese New Year for prosperity.

This year’s salad was prepared by my Mum (and plated by me!) ready for the whole family to toss with chopsticks for good luck. Our salad featured strips of smoked salmon, and was tossed in a sweet dressing flavoured with sesame and hoisin sauce.

I brought along my homemade roasted pork belly, which I carved up into small pieces before serving. You can find the recipe for roasted pork belly here!

Jac and TFP brought some plump and juicy prawns, which Jac cooked in the wok at Mum and Dad’s with lots of ginger and garlic. She added a sprinkling of chili and spring onions over the final dish – left out of the cooking to keep the spice low for our prawn loving nieces, Ruby and Zoe!

Mum made the traditional Chap Chye, a vegetarian dish which features chinese mushrooms, cabbage, rice vermicelli, knotted dried lily buds and different kinds of fungi – like fatt choy, a black hairy looking fungus that is eaten for wealth at this time of year.

There was also Peri-Peri chicken wings – a Chew family fave, though not exactly Chinese

My older sister Flexnib and her husband M brought not one, but two, roasted ducks from our favourite roast shop, Hong Kong Barbecue!

She said that when she went in to pick up the order, the restaurant was working off two A4 pages of pre-orders - so if you’re ever planning on a Chinese roast dinner on Chinese New Year eve, take note, and order ahead!

We enjoyed everything with hot steamed rice. The verdict? According to my four year old niece, Ruby, I like prawns and the rice with the sauce the best. The sauce she was referring to came from the roasted ducks, and is a favourite of pretty much all of us, grandparents, parents, uncles and aunts!

After the lunch dishes were cleared away, I unpacked some peanut biscuits, which I made the day before.

Mum also carved up a juicy red watermelon.

We finished off the meal with my sister-in-law A’s fantastic homemade ice cream – vanilla bean and strawberry!