Lunar New Year

It's Chinese or  Lunar New Year this weekend.

Last night Yin cooked  traditional vegetarian New Year's Eve dishes, including my favourite, the monks' vegetarian dish (Lo han jai is one English transliteration).
 It has fermented red bean curd sauce, sweet dry beancurd, dry bean curd sticks, black hair seaweed, gingko niuts, thread-fine rice vermicelli that is transparent when cooked, ear fungus, fat chinese mushrooms, and (not vegetarian because he can't help himself) chicken stock - but it doesn't need this).
 

Some things are soaked, some are marinated, some are fried until bubbly crisp.

Then all is stirred in together with the red bean curd sauce and simmered.

Then we eat it. 

It takes ages to make and Yin thinks it's a bit messy to look at, but this is the best dish ever!

Today we went in to Melbourne for New Year with the family. We saw the lions dancing through Footscray as we stopped for some red packets (we always forget something!), and a coffee and canoli at the last pasticceria left at the Footscray market.

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This picture was taken before all the food brought by the rest of the family was put on the table.

Now the year can begin (again - see the previous post).

New Year 2013

A new year, Australia Day and I'm getting back into things.

Everything is bone dry and has been since Christmas. Even my nasturtiums have died off this year.
I'm still walking barefoot in the park with Mr Pip but the grass is harsh, prickly, sparse underfoot.

Cricketers were everywhere on Australia Day - five games playing in the park when I was walking through.

in the garden my cherished plums are small and a bit dry.

The spring rains didn't really come this year, flowers have died off early, bees are scarce, I've left the self-seeded fennel and not picked too much lavender to leave the bees a little food in hard times.

Up north there is devastating flooding, down south here there are fires across the state.

And yet I am welcoming the New Year, even as I wish for rain on the fires, flowers for the bees and dryness for the people up north.

Water dragon

 This is the hazy, moody sky on the very hot evening of  Tuesday after Christmas. We'd just had the first heatwave (4 days) since last summer, and I was desperate for a cool change.

The temperature stayed in the thirties, but it got a bit sticky and some rain fell briefly, and just as the dogs and I were pottering out the gate for an evening walk - too hot to walk them earlier - over the gate glowed a double rainbow.

 Such a beautiful beginning to this year of a watery dragon.
The dragon - in fact the water dragon -  is my birth year in the East Asian astrological cycle.

 The real  New Year of the dragon doesn't officially begin until the end of January. Then there'll be a big bash with Yin's family and lions dancing among the fire crackers in Little Bourke Street. 

It's about a month between our two big family occasions, and these few weeks between Christmas and Chinese New Year are a quiet space out of everyday life. The frenzy building up to the 25th of December has lapsed into reading and making and dreaming a bit. Then after a bit of craziness with drums and gunpowder and yet more feasting, I return to work and real time.

Water dragons bringing a little rain and rainbows.