- Hi, I'm Beryl.
And the theme for today's episode is "The Lunar New Year".
Before we get into the episode,
there are going to be a few different artists today.
So, I am going to put all of their information
in the description box below.
Now, you may or may not be familiar with this holiday
but, this is a channel to appreciate
and learn about one another's cultures.
So I asked some of you who celebrate to come
into the channel and talk to us all about the holiday.
- Hi everyone, my name is Fanyi.
I live in Hamilton, New York,
but, I'm originally from Hainan, China.
- Hey everyone, this is Jacqueline wearing a nice pop
of red for the Lunar New Year.
I'm currently living in the Southern United States,
but I'm originally from Liaoning,
which is a province in North Eastern China.
- My name is Jules and I'm an Indonesian Chinese
living in central Borneo, Indonesia.
- Hi, my name is Jasmine.
I am a Chinese Canadian from Ontario, Canada.
- Hi, my name is Sarah and I was born
and raised in Singapore,
but I'm currently living in Seattle in the United States.
- I want to say this quickly,
there are a lot of different traditions depending
on where you live around this holiday.
And what you're gonna hear are just a few.
So if you have some, it would be so amazing
to share them in the comments
so that other people can hear and learn about them.
So the main question I asked was,
what does Lunar New Year mean to you?
- Lunar New Year is a special day that falls
either in the month of January or February.
And it's pretty much a day to celebrate
the upcoming new year
based off of the lunar calendar.
- It also marks the end of winter
and the beginning of the spring season.
And a lot of people get long breaks
and they often go back to their hometown
to celebrate with their family over a big feast.
- The celebration usually starts
from the night before the Lunar New Year's Eve.
- And besides having foods for ourselves,
we usually also offer foods for our ancestors.
- Normally we would wear our traditional Chinese outfits,
which are made out of silk, red in color,
because red is a symbol of good luck
and go out and attend the festivities.
There's a whole bunch of performances that happen.
The lion dance for one.
- The most fun part is having a huge variety
of fireworks every night.
- The legend goes that there used to be a monster Nian
that would come on new year's Eve
to eat people, ravage the villages and destroy their homes.
But by setting off firecrackers,
you can scare the monster away
and ward off evil spirits that might come with you
into the new year.
- Something that we also usually do during
Chinese New Year, is give out Ang Paos.
They're usually filled with money and are given
by married people in the family to non married people.
- One of my favorite traditions,
is the salad called Yu Sheng.
It's a prosperity salad where all the ingredients
have symbolic meaning.
And here's the cool part,
to toss the salad, everybody literally digs in
with their chopsticks and tosses the ingredients up
as high as they can.
The higher you toss, the more luck you bring in.
While I don't actually believe this salad
brings in luck, it definitely is a very fun
and tasty way to eat your veggies.
- Obviously, a big part of this holiday is all about food,
like most holidays.
And this is a food channel.
So I'm heading down to New York City's Chinatown,
because I'm going to pick up a couple of ingredients
to make Nian gao
which is a traditional sticky rice cake for the new year.
And (claps) look at that.
We are in vlog mode.
I'm like a real YouTuber. (laughs)
I don't really know what I'm doing.
So bear with me.
I need to go down and pick up glutinous rice flour
which is not the same as rice flour,
and Asha is coming with me.
And it's raining.
We really could have planned this better.
The easiest place to get this,
is in New York city's Chinatown.
And of course I got distracted and I had to go
into one of the many, many bakeries
and get a cream bun, because they are so, so good.
While I am doing this, we have a guest
to come and teach us about a traditional
Chinese main dish for this holiday.
His name is Randy.
Everybody welcome him.
I feel like I'm a teacher. (laughs)
I'm gonna let him take it from here.
And I will see you after the main course.
- Hi everyone, my name is Randy Lau,
and I was born, raised and still living in San Francisco.
I'm a second generation Chinese American,
and both of my parents immigrated from Guangzhou in China,
to the U.S in the 1980s in hopes of a better life
for our family.
From this, I launched the food channel with my family
called, "Made With Lau."
My dad's been cooking Chinese food for over 50 years.
- [Woman] Wow!
- Mmm. (speaking in foreign language)
Mm hmm.
- So every week we share a video where he teaches us
one of his recipes.
And afterwards, we all sit down as a family
to eat together to learn more about the recipe
and to share all of the stories
that the dish brings up for us.
- My grandma also always tell me when I was young,
eat the leg, eat the chicken leg.
- Chinese culture has always been a huge part
of my life and identity,
but I think growing up at times,
I felt kind of disconnected
from both the language and the culture.
I think a lot of Asian-Americans in our generation
can probably relate, but as a kid,
I felt like I was never quite American enough
or Chinese enough.
And that was compounded by the language barrier
that I had with my dad.
And because of that,
I've always had this desire to understand my heritage
on a deeper level.
And especially now that I recently became a father,
I feel like a higher sense of personal duty
to be able to pass traditions
like celebrating Lunar New Year,
down to my kids and future generations.
(man speaking in foreign language)
For me, my favorite part of the holiday is devouring
the gigantic nine course feast
that my dad always prepares for us
on Chinese New Year's Eve,
which is called (speaking in foreign language) in Cantonese.
(woman speaking in foreign language)
A lot of the dishes that my dad prepares
carry their own significance and symbolism.
And something that my dad makes every single year,
is steamed fish or (speaking in foreign language).
Steamed fish is traditionally one of
the main centerpiece entrees for Chinese New Year.
Like the name suggests,
it's made by steaming a whole entire fish in a wok,
usually stuffed and garnished with ginger and scallions
and other flavors and lathered
in sizzling oil before serving.
This recipe works with any type of fish,
but you'll usually see this fish made with fish like,
rock cod or sea bass for more festive occasions.
It is absolutely delicious.
And each bite is super juicy, super tender.
It's a lot like a warm hug for your mouth.
And the sauce has the perfect amount of zest from
the ginger and scallions and (indistinct)
from the other flavors.
And I remember as a kid, I used to scoop up
a bunch of the leftover sauce onto plain rice
after all of my fish was gone and I loved it.
My parents grew up fairly poor
and didn't have a lot of access to meat,
but Chinese New Year was one of the few times every year
that they would splurge and make a big feast for themselves.
And they always made it a point to make steamed fish.
So when I started our channel,
steamed fish was actually one of my dad's recipes
that I felt was really important to document.
For Chinese New Year in particular,
my dad always goes all out with his steam fish
(indistinct) is the biggest fish he can buy.
There's a Chinese phrase, (speaking in foreign language),
which roughly translates to,
"No fish, no feast," or "It's not a party without fish."
(man laughs)
(people speaking in foreign language)
- Steam fish.
- [All] Cheers!
- Okay, I am back.
I'm going to leave a link to Randy's YouTube page
in the description.
And you guys really should check out the video
on how to cook that fish, it is absolutely amazing.
As for me, I am back from Chinatown
and I'm going to be making the sticky rice cake.
I have a recipe that I'm gonna be following
which I will leave in the description
if you want to try yourself.
So, this will be my first time making one.
I'm really excited.
I'm also excited to eat it.
This is the recipe for a Chinese Nian gao.
Making Nian gao can be quite simple,
especially if you have an instant pot.
And this is obviously not the traditional way
to make this steamed rice cake.
I got this recipe from the "Walks Of Life" blog
and I have linked it below.
The Chinese word Nian, means sticky.
And the word gao means cake.
But these sounds are homonyms in Chinese,
meaning that they have the same sound
as the words for high and year.
So this cake is often made during the Chinese New Year
because it is said to bring good luck.
There are also a lot of fables surrounding Chinese New Year,
including one about a kitchen god
who lives in everybody's house.
The kitchen god does a yearly report on the family.
And by offering them Nian gao,
they'll have trouble reporting on any bad news
because their mouth will be full of sticky rice cake.
2020 was the year of the rat,
and this year 2021 is the year of the ox.
In Chinese culture, the ox is a very hardworking Zodiac sign
and it usually signifies movements.
So the hope is that this year,
the world will be less static and start moving again.
Which is something that I think we can all rally behind.
Whoa!
This holiday is celebrated not only in China
but other countries like, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia
and many more.
A common way to eat this,
is to coat the cut-up sticky rice cake
in egg and pan fry it.
It makes it warm and really really yummy.
After a few unsuccessful attempts,
I finally got it right.
And I'm very excited to try it.
(curious music)
(woman laughs)
It's another day,
I didn't realize how long the rice cake needed to set.
It was overnight pretty much.
So, that was a bit of a longer process than I was ready for.
But, ta-dah!
It was a little bit more difficult than I thought.
To be honest, I did mess up an entire batch,
but you're not always going to get it right the first time
even if you followed the directions almost exactly.
You need to follow the directions.
Okay, so this is cut up, coated in egg and pan fried.
Mm! Well, it's really chili.
Make sense.
This tastes really nice.
It's not that sweet.
The texture is a very soft and chewy,
but not like that tiresome type of chewy.
Definitely making my eye like really go.
It's good though.
It's really nice.
Wow.
This episode has made me so happy.
I've learned so much about Lunar New Year.
I got to speak with so many of you,
which was really special.
I had my first collaboration with Randy.
I just, I really feel like this community is
becoming something that's more than just
this really fun project.
It's becoming something that's was important to me.
And I feel like I'm learning more about the world
and learning more about people.
And I hope that you guys are too,
because, I don't know, this just feels like a special place.
- For me, I always look forward to celebrating
Chinese New Year with my family.
Because it's just a time for us to connect
and eat amazing food together.
As a Chinese American, it's always given me
a sense of pride to be Chinese
and to get to take part in these traditions
that have been celebrated for thousands of years.
But at the end of the day,
I feel like it's in our human nature to celebrate
the end of a chapter and the start of a new one.
And to express hope that the next chapter
will be even better than the ones before it.
- Lunar New Year signifies to me,
just the best things about humanity.
The beauty, the strength and the optimism
that we humans have.
- It also means getting back in touch with my roots.
- It was hard for me to show my Chinese culture
to a lot of people.
They just didn't understand, they didn't understand
the food.
But Lunar New Year was the best time of year
to show the world what it means to be Asian.
What it means to be Chinese for me in particular.
It's a great time of year to pretty much bond
with people that might not know what Lunar New Year is.
And to show them,
"Hey it's actually a really cool festival.
You should come join us".
- On behalf of the Lao family,
I just wanted to sign off by sharing
a few traditional Chinese New Year wishes.
(speaking in foreign language)
which means, may you have a prosperous new year.
(speaking in foreign language) which means happy new year.
and (speaking in foreign language)
which means be in good health.
(gentle music)
- When I was in Chinatown,
I picked up these.
These are the lucky red envelopes that you guys
were talking about in the video.
There are six of them
and they have this beautiful depictions
of the ox because it's the year of the ox.
So I thought, considering I am your like married big sister
in this scenario, (laughs)
that I would love to send the six of you
a new year's card with a little something, something inside.
So to enter, just make sure that you're subscribed
to my channel and leave a comment saying
something positive that has happened so far this year.
Because it's important to celebrate even
the little victories you know?
And I will pick a winner and mail it to you
and you can live anywhere in the world.
It doesn't matter where you live.
Yeah, I think that'll be fun. (laughs)
I want to say a really big thank you
to everybody who was in this video,
from the artists, to those of you who submitted videos,
to Randy.
There are going to be links in the description
for everything, so go there and check it out.
And with that, happy new year if you are celebrating,
and I will see you all in my next video.
(gentle music)