Anatomy of a Chinese Banquet Menu
It was Chinese New Year’s Eve and I was in Chinatown buying last minute supplies for the family gathering. Although I had already braved throngs of holiday shoppers in Chinatown last weekend, I decided I would return to buy fresh seafood and produce on New Year’s Eve. I was pleasantly surprised that the shops were not overly crowded. I was expecting to claw my way through the fishmonger and fight for the last fresh DongGu mushroom in the produce markets. Instead I found aisles wide open at the dry goods stores and plenty of supplies at the fishmonger and produce markets. This rather leisurely pace of shopping gave me time to ponder what I had decided to do this year for Chinese New Year celebration: two TEN-COURSE dinners within the span of four days.
A chill ran up my spine. What have I done?
A few of my friends from downtown visited me in my kitchen on a Saturday night a few weeks ago. It was a rather unusual gathering. I was sharing with them some basic Chinese cooking techniques by way of demonstration. More often then not I would simply be cooking to entertain these friends. But on this occasion I had specifically been requested to show them stir-frying technique before we sat down to dinner. As I collected the ingredients and was explaining the different sauces and cooking wine, my neighbor 
I’m sure we’ve all faced the same dilemma, as I often encounter, of what to do with Chinese takeout leftover rice. Do we save it or throw it out? I’m always reminded of starving children in China whenever I tip the classic paper carton over the garbage pail, before hastily reversing my action. Invariably I would clasp the top of the rice container back together and put it in the refrigerator. Very soon I would discover that the rice container had multiplied and there will be three or four of them to reckon with.
My neighbor, 
I was in Chinatown last weekend shopping for Chinese provisions to bring back to Harlem. To my delight I noticed that dong sun (冬筍), or winter bamboo shoots, are in season. Winter bamboo shoots are one of the prized vegetables, along with dong gu mushrooms (冬菇 or winter mushroom) eagerly awaited in markets by shoppers in China during winter. They used to be two of the few fresh vegetables available during the harsh winter months. Therefore they are revered and commonly paired in winter dishes.
I grew up in a rather suburban residential neighborhood of Singapore in the 1960’s. Our home sat on a hill up from a main thoroughfare. The vicinity is devoid of any commercial establishments but for a little dry goods store three quarters way down the hill. I often frequent the store for two reasons. One was to buy local and foreign candies, which they stocked in neat rows of glass canisters. Another was to ogle at the myriads of dry food products, many of which I could not even identify. I remembered the front of the store lined with sacks of grains and beans. There were white rice, glutinous rice, brown rice, soybeans, mung beans, red beans and others. There were also rows of glass canisters filled with dried mushroom, cuttlefish, squid, scallop, and all kinds of seafood. And then there were the individual cellophane packages of dried plums, nuts and Chinese fruit candies strewn all over the counters. We used to buy them by the jin, which is a Chinese weight unit still used in Singapore then. This is my memory of the Seng Hock market. 
