Chinese Moon Festival (& the continuation of my birthday)

I had assumed that our combined dinner thing at Eastwood was the last of my birthday celebrations. Little did I know that my birthday fell on the same day as the Chinese Moon Festival this year. And since we have a family get together every year anyway, my mummy decided to turn it into a combined Chinese Moon Festival/My Birthday thing. Yay!! It's always good when my mum spends 2 days cooking for the one meal. Well, not good for her, but good for my tummy!!

Roast Pork

My Mum had roasted a MASSIVE slab of pork that barely fit into our oven. Here is just a small plate out of the massive amount of pork we had leftover!

Salt and pepper pork

These were DIVINE! Salty and spicy. My mum omitted the chilli as the young ones can't eat that spicy, but damn they were good! I certainly didn't dehydrate to death afterwards ;)

Sweet and sour pork (minus the sauce)

Here's the pork for our sweet and sour pork. We tend to keep the sauce separate to keep the batter crunchy. The downside of cooking at home is that you can't have all the dishes ready at once. So we kept the sauce separate to pour on at the last minute

Inoki mushroom wrapped in beef with oyster sauce

My mummy's Chinese take on a Japanese dish!

Beef, wild fungus, pork stomach and sugar snap pea stir fry

Squid and asparagus stir fry

Sea cucumber, fish stomach, dried oysters, dried scallops and chestnut stew

This was sooooo good! My mum had been slowly stewing this for hours. The fish stomach had slowly started to melt into the sauce, giving it a rich and gelatinous taste. The chestnut had also cooked down into the sauce making this dish so morish! I ended up just eating the sauce and boiled rice together.

Abalone slices on a bed of stir fried lettuce

Ginger and Shallot steamed Barramundi

The complete feast

Although there was only 9 dishes, there was enough to feed 20 people! We had 12 people and barely got through half of the dishes. On top of that, we had abalone soup as well.

My cousin decided to bake me a cake for my birthday since I told mum that I didn't want to buy a cake as I'm all caked out. But since its Chinese Moon festival as well, we had to have a cake of some sort.

Look how pretty!

Mochi

I forgot to take photos of our home made moon cakes, but I can tell you, they were divine!!