The first home-cooked dish is stewed chicken with mushrooms. It's best to choose wild mushrooms in the mountains for this dish. Although this kind of mushroom is thin and small, it is very sweet and more nutritious than artificially planted mushrooms. Stew chicken with mushrooms, add some ginger, pepper and salt and it will be delicious. Chicken soup, in particular, is very tonic. In our family's New Year's Eve, everyone will drink half a bowl of chicken soup before eating.
The second home cooking is steamed grass carp. Grass carp and silver carp are both common freshwater fish in daily life, with sweet and tender taste. Our annual New Year's Eve dinner in rural Hunan will be steamed grass carp, which means more than one year. Steaming is very simple, which can best retain the nutrients of grass carp.
The third home cooking is fried bacon with winter bamboo shoots. My hometown is in the countryside, where every household has bamboo forests. Whenever winter bamboo shoots grow, everyone will go up the mountain to dig them. Fried bacon with winter bamboo shoots is a rare food. Generally, guests at home will cook this dish to entertain them, and sometimes they will cook fried winter bamboo shoots with sauerkraut, which is equally delicious and appetizing.
The fourth home-cooked dish is fried pork liver with Chili. My father likes this dish very much because his liver is a little bad. He said that eating pig liver can tonify the liver, which is a conclusion based on the concept of "shape supplementing shape" in traditional Chinese medicine. When pork liver is fried with Chili, Chili can cover up the fishy smell of pork liver.
This is my favorite New Year's Eve dinner, because they represent the taste and reunion of the New Year. It also symbolizes more than one year.