Sunday, February 7, 2010

yee sang

This is the time of the year when this dish comes out...yee sang. I was introduced to this dish when I got married and moved to Seremban to live. It seems to be very popular here. Never seen it in Sitiawan before (but recent years; this dish has reached Sitiawan too).

KC says yee means easy and sang means up. So when you lou yee sang it means you are hoping for your business to go up this new year. For Chinese, we want everything we do to prosper so whatever we eat around the CNY is related to properity.

This is the yee sang dish which we ordered. It has vegetables and fried stuff and sweet sauce to make it sweet. There is raw fish which we drowned in lime juice. If we eat it at home, we would have added liquor to kill whatever germs there are in the raw fish. There is also pomelo. With the lime juice and sweet sauce, this dish has a nice sweet and sour taste and of course the crunch of all the fried stuff.


Here we are 'louing' (tossing) the dish. You toss it high and say all the good stuff you wish for the new year like for us with kids we will bless the kids with may you get all As this year, may your exam be easy all the way etc etc. It's lots of fun when there are lots of people tossing it together.

I love this dish. This is the first for this coming new year and I am definitely going to eat quite a few more rounds of this before the lunar new year celebration comes to an end.

(I wonder if this dish is found in other places. I heard that it originated in Malaysia and has caught up in places like Hong Kong).

3 comments:

PreciousPearl said...

ahahaha! i remember one yr my mum made this for us, and we all complained that it wasn't cooked! so the next time she made it just like chap chai/ mixed vegetables, Foochow style!

Sia Mooi said...

I have never seen this in sitiawan until recently.

PreciousPearl said...

my mum trained in KL a long time ago - maybe that's where she picked it up. she told us some funny stories about talking in foochow with Nguk Jean's mum - the local cantonese ladies thot they were Japanese!