This Week Celebrates Fat Tuesday AND The Year of the Monkey: Eat Your Way Through New Orleans' Biggest Party and The Chinese's Most Important Holiday

It's a week of celebrations in both New Orleans and Chinese cultures with many of us also getting caught up in the festivities, as both holidays revolve largely around food.  And it's really really good food!

So if you ever wanted to know what Mardi Gras is all about and how the Chinese celebrate one of their most important holidays, as well as recipes that are typically feasted on so you can perhaps take part at home with your family, keep reading!

NEW ORLEAN'S MARDI GRAS:

Taking place this year on Tuesday, February 9th,  Mardi Gras, which mean fat Tuesday, is the culmination of the season between Christmas and Lent. Fat Tuesday falls on the day before Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. During the 46-day Lent period, many Christians forego the eating of meat, either completely or on Fridays. They also traditionally give up a favored food, drink, or habit. Fat Tuesday is a last chance party excuse before a six-week period of abstinence, and residents of New Orleans, Louisiana, are famous for their Mardi Gras celebrations and parades (most of this year's festivities occur from February 5-9th).

New Orleans has a history rooted in Creole and Cajun cultures so it should come as no surprise that these foods play a large role in any Mardi Gras celebration when you'll get your fill of gumbos, jambalayas, and crawfish.  

No Mardi Gras is complete, however,  without a King Cake, also known as Twelfth Night Cake. This cake is actually a sweetened yeast bread , usually baked in a ring shape. The cake is frosted with gold, green, and purple icing representing in order, power, faith, and justice. The traditional colors on the King Cake date back to 1872. They were taken from a prominent parade group, called a krewe.  The real fun, though, hides as a token within the cake. The tokens are usually a dried red bean or a figurine of a baby, representing the Christ child. When the cake is cut and shared, the finder of the hidden treasure is said to enjoy good luck for the coming year. The lucky recipient may also be expected to bake the King Cake or throw the Mardi Gras party for the following year.

Try your hand at making a King Cake with any of these traditional recipes from Best King Cakes.com, a great resource for all things King Cake in New Orleans with links to the best cakes, bakeries and Mardi Gras festivities.

The Whole Meal (TWM) has easy recipes to help you celebrate Mardi Gras with favorites like Shrimp Jambalaya, a slow cooker Chicken and Shrimp Jambalaya, New Orlean's style Shrimp and Grits, and a vegan Mardi Gras Collards and Black Eyed Peas. Or whip up a batch of an authentic tasting Chicken and Sausage Gumbo in only 60 minutes (While you are there register for free for other recipe inspiration). 

Most gumbos take hours to prepare and if you want to take the more traditional route, check out this authentic version.  

CHINESE NEW YEAR:

Spring Festival, widely known as Chinese New Year in the West, is the most important traditional festival, and most important celebration for families in China. It is an official public holiday, during which most Chinese have 8 days off work.  Chinese New Year is a time for families to be together. Wherever they are, people come home to celebrate the festival with their families.

Chinese New Year marks the start of the Chinese lunar calendar, and its date in January or February varies from year to year (always somewhere in the period January 21 to February 20). The traditional days of celebration this year, however, last from January 31st through February 22nd. 

The Chinese lunar calendar is associated with the Chinese zodiac, which has 12 animal signs: rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog, and pig. Each animal represents a year in a 12-year cycle, beginning on Chinese New Year's Day.  2016 is a year of the monkey. 

Certain dishes are eaten during the Chinese New Year for their symbolic meaning. Lucky food is served during the 16-day festival season, especially New Year’s Eve, which is believed to bring good luck for the coming year. The auspicious symbolism of these foods is based on their pronunciations or appearance.

Not only do the dishes themselves matter, but also the preparation, and ways of serving and eating mean a lot.  The most common Chinese New Year foods includes dumplings, fish, spring rolls, sweet rice balls and nian gao, a glutinous steamed rice cake.

Fish is a must for Chinese New Year as the Chinese word for fish (鱼 yú /yoo/) sounds like the word for surplus (余 yú). Eating fish is believed to bring a surplus of money and good luck in the coming year. 

Another traditional Chinese New Year food is Chinese dumplings. Because the shape of Chinese dumplings looks like  silver ingot - a kind of  ancient Chinese money, Chinese people believe eating dumplings during the New Year festival will bring more money and wealth for the coming year. 

Steamed Chinese New Year cake, known in Mandarin as nian gao (“higher year”), is flavored with almond extract and Chinese brown sugar. It’ll bring you good luck in the new year.

Here is an auspicious New Year's Menu from Cooking Light that would be a great way to bring in the Year of the Goat. 

Longevity, or long life, noodles are a popular Chinese dish for both New Years and birthdays. They symbolize living to a ripe old age and the longer the noodle the longer the life. There are many variations but I like TWM's vegetarian version for its simplicity and ease of preparation. 

I am lucky to have an authentic Asian market that I frequent where I will be picking up my steamed rice cake but for those of you who love to bake and/or are adventuresome in the kitchen try your hand at making your own nian gao.

It's a great week to embrace what makes America so unique; our great melting pot of different ethnicities and the cultures that continue to thrive here.  It's always the most fun to discover a new culture through its food and if you can't get to them, at least for this week, you can bring it to your kitchen.