Chinese New Year Recipes: Menu planning guides

Lunar New Year is a big celebration for Chinese. Also, people get to gather to spend time with families and eat tasty foods. In this post, I share some Chinese New Year food ideas and recipes that my families often eat during spring festival celebration. Besides, this will be a great menu planning guide for your next Chinese New Year dinner!

What is Chinese New Year?

Chinese New Year is also called Lunar New Year. Chinese around the world will celebrate this spring festival which is the beginning of a new year on lunar calendar.

Also, it’s normally around late January to early-mid February. The date is different every year according to regular calendar, but will be the same every lunar year.

Besides, other Asia countries such as Japan and Korea also celebrate this Lunar New Year differently.

What do people usually do during Chinese spring festival?

Chinese spring festival is like western Thanksgivings that families gather together for annual reunion dinner and yummy foods.

Traditionally, three days before Lunar New Year (lunar calendar the 28th) people will deep clean their house because they believe to clean and sweep away bad fortunes to welcome good luck.

In addition, people like to decorate their house with good fortune words, couplets and Chinese poetry on red papers around doors and windows.

Also, people light firecrackers and fireworks. Some do lion dance around houses. Besides, married couples will give red pocket money to kids and unmarried members in the families or friends which is a symbolic of good luck.

What kind of foods will people eat during Lunar New Year?

Different areas have different traditional Chinese New Year foods. Usually northern Chinese like to eat noodles, boa zi and dumplings for spring festival.

However, southern Chinese like to eat chicken, seafoods such as fish, crab and shrimp, duck, braised mushrooms, turnip cake, sweet glutinous rice cake, tang yuan, candies, mandarin oranges and etc.