Chinese New Year dinner

My Chinese New Year celebrations took the form of a meal cooked for my housemates. Or rather, two meals :)

I love Chinese food and like cooking Chinesily or rather Chin-easily. It's never anything very complicated, and is more vaguely Oriental than an attempt to authentically recreate a recipe, but I do love dim sum and big bowls of udon noodle soup are one of my go to comfort foods.

However last week saw me up for a challenge, and what should land across my Feedly but this post from the fabulous Not Quite Nigella . I became a big fan of Miss NQN just over two months ago when her recipe for bacon jam had our household practically in orgasms (more on this another time).
When I saw her recipe for Glistening Orange Duck I knew I had to try it, not least as I had a frozen duck sitting in the freezer, having vaguely considered making confit duck for Christmas. Anothre time.

At the same time, I wanted to see if I could fulfill a long held ambition and make my own cheung fun. Cheung fun is very high on my list of all time favourite foods and it's really not that easy to find. The closest place I know that does it is down the road from where my work vehicle gets serviced. I MAY have been known to schedule maintenance work over lunch.

I had looked into making my own cheung fun from scratch in the past, but was rather daunted by the twin challenges of making the pastry and then having to roll it up. One step at a time I thought, and decided to use ready made rolls, for the first few times at least.

I hadn't seen them in the shops, and looking online only pointed me to Lo's noodle factory off Leicester Square (which I still must visit some day). However I called Huong Viet in Feltham, who promised to get them in stock for me. Hurray! I ended up going home with a packet of shrimp and chive cheung fun for the meal and a packet of plain and some ho fun noodles for the freezer (as well as pak choi, beansprouts, hoi sin sauce, chilli sauce, frozen char siu bao, fortune cookies... a bulging backpack for my cycle home!).

As it happened, the larger Asian supermarket in Kingston (Longdan ) also had them, so either I hadn't been looking in the right places or they had got them in just for CNY. Needless to say I stocked up will be keeping an eye out now I know where they are kept. The cheung fun I got turned out not to be rolls at all, but rather rolled up flat sheets of pastry. These I gingerly unrolled to add the prawn filling, but it proved difficult not to split the pastry where it had bent, so I recommend having spares, at least for your first attempt. Possible solutions might be to soak the pastry in water, to make it more supple, but interestingly the packets in Longdan looked to have been formed as rolls rather than sheets (The packets read 'Chinese Cannelloni'), which should make things easier. I also wish I had used the plain rather than shrimp cheung fun, as the pastry did tend to rip around the shrimp a little.

I defrosted the duck in the fridge over 2 days (mostly, plus a few hours sitting in the meat safe/microwave) and I thought I was following NQN's recommendations of drying the duck to get crispy skin by mopping all the juices up with kitchen towel. Then I actually READ the recipe and saw I was meant to boil the duck before leaving it to dry. Oops. Never mind, it still tasted fantastic. I think boiling it makes all the difference, as quite a bit of fat is melted off into the water, so the skin crisps up well.

I also made spring rolls, again from a prepared pastry. The rice noodles I used in the filling were obviously a bit too wet (either that or I left them sitting too long between making and frying) as they pretty much all split in the pan. However the oil was hot enough that they somehow still stayed together and came out lovely and crispy so all was not lost. Lesson learnt- drain the noodles well and work quickly. I would recommend chopping the noodles up a bit and mixing them with the other ingredients rather than layering up on the pastry as this will help you work quickly, and finally sitting the rolls on kitchen towel when waiting to be cooked.

Lastly, a vegetable in the form of pak choi. This I was steaming in a stack with the cheung fun, but ended up slightly overcooked as the cheung fun took a shade longer than expected, and I left the pak choi in the pan while faffing about with the duck so it continued to cook. Next time I'll put in on later, or possibly do it in the microwave to make things easier.