Happy Chinese New Year

By Sandy Hu

When I was about 25, I threw my first Chinese New Year dinner party, inviting friends to our New York apartment. I’m not of Chinese heritage, and Steve, who is, didn’t have a tradition of celebrating Chinese New Year, having lost some of the customs along the way as a fourth-generation Chinese-American.

Gathering recipes from cookbooks, I put together an ambitious, multi-course meal that thrilled my friends. But I was exhausted by the effort of trying to get all the dishes – most of which I had never cooked before – to the table in a timely manner.

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Chinese Noodles

By Andrew Hunter

There’s a Chinese noodle house east of L.A. called Din Tai Fung. Their specialty is dumplings and boy, are they special – glutinous rice shaomai, green melon and shrimp bundles, and tiny soup dumplings bobbing in clear chicken broth, to name a few of our favorites. Din Tai, as we call it, is a regular and possibly favorite stop on our weekend rotation of dim sum houses.

The place is sleek, clean and crowded with a large tinted kitchen window that gives a shady peek at cooks working shoulder to shoulder rolling noodles, stuffing discs of dough and crimping them into round, crescent and purse-shaped dumplings.

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