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We had a kind of last-minute (visiting relos of relos) CNY dinner at Golden Dragon Palace on the first Monday during the Chinese New Year festivities, and we were there again on the middle Sunday, with a mostly different group of people.  Mum and Dad decided not to go for the CNY-themed dinner again for the Sunday, because they'd had quite a few of these themed dinners in the last week (seeing as they were definitely in CNY dinner mode!), so the pics for this dinner were more from the standard menu at Golden Dragon Palace.  Anyways, bunches of pics, after the jump (:

We were at Hu Tong (at their Prahran location) for Chinese New Year Eve dinner with my parents, and S, G, and E.  There had been a lot of talk previously about Hu Tong from B and Em and others, and how delicious their dumplings were, so we were all definitely looking forward to the evening's food! This is a newer location of their two - the other one is in Market Lane in the city.  Its all dressed up, sleek wood with decor totally unlike what you'd find at your standard Chinese restaurant, which I guess fits in with its location amongst other possibly hip and happening places.   Turns out that X was quite scared of the Lion doing the dancing (a change from last year when he was into all the noise and kerfuffle!), so while he enjoyed the food, he went for a walk with various people while the Lion was doing its thing.   I've put the pics after the jump, cos there's a bunch of them!

It happened to be my birthday yesterday, and it also happened to be one that was specifically a multiple of 10, so Decay asked me to not make any plans for the day, and to choose a place for dinner with friends.  Given that we were going to have a fairly large group of people (20, including a couple of toddlery rapscallions and a not-quite-2-week-old), I figured something Chinese-ish would probably work.  So ... a booking was made for the lot of us at David's Restaurant, and after a morning at a day spa, lunch at a Japanese restaurant (although our sentimental first choice was closed), an afternoon nap (!), made our way to the restaurant (passing a cop car that got itself smashed through the window of Rebel...!), and got some food infront of us!

Pics of food (a bit blurry - proofing on a point-and-shoot in dim lighting when I insist on turning off the flash and using the macro mode, is kind of ... difficult), and possibly some commentary, after the cut: 

Gran (DK and DKtE's mum, Gran to X) was coming back from her trip to Africa last weekend, and it was also the week before DKtE's birthday.  It was decided that we'd have her birthday dinner a week early, as a combined birthday dinner and welcome back to Gran, and to save Gran from having to make another trip back out after having travelled a bunch for the last three weeks.  We offered to cook something for the occasions (saves us from having to figure out which restaurant, what time, how to wrangle X, etc), so I asked (as cut and pasted from OC at work, with the names changed):

Droidy [11:09 AM]:

dinner on sunday - do you want to narrow it down to a kind of meat, or a cuisine type?

DKtE [11:09 AM]: ummm

.... which I think then led to DKtE popping over from her desk to mine, and suggesting pork, or Italian.  Which oddly enough made me think of both Maggie and Simon on the Cook and the Chef, and Jamie Oliver (again!) - both have featured slow-cooked pork in a bath of milk.  It sounded tasty at the time, so we went with it.  Milk curds might've sounded odd, but less so if we thought of them as cheese?

For as long as I can remember, we never really celebrated Mum and Dad's birthdays during the year.  I knew that the birth dates on various pieces of paper weren't actually the right date, and so we just didn't know when birthdays actually happened.   Anyways, Dad's dad (my Yeh-Yeh) kept a book with the birthdates of all his descendents, and when Mum and Dad and Stirfry made the trip to Vancouver for Yeh-Yeh's funeral, lots of things were uncovered, including this book, and in it was Dad's actual birthday!  So, in celebration of the fact that Dad actually has a real and proper birthday, we all went out to dinner at Golden Dragon Palace - and mum brought along a cake to have as well!

Well, the young sir recently became a one-year-old, and to celebrate this occasion we organised a bit of a shindig at our place, with various food-related things.  I'm not entirely sure why, but I really wanted to make it so that most of the food wasn't just from opening packets and reheating the contents. 

I don't actually have pics of everything - in the midst of meeting and greeting, and keeping an eye on where X was, my camera was put to the side.  Mum and Dad brought along some garlic and fried shallot chicken wings that they made, and some char siu, and some roast suckling pig (chopped babe!) that they picked up,  J brought along some homemade sausage rolls (that got some time in our oven), E brought along some cake portioned into the cutest little cubes, W brought along some jelly cups, and we also had a platter of deli meats (sopressa and capocollo - thanks to B for introducing us to this one!), cheeses (a margaret river cheddar, a wheel of camembert), and duck liver cracked pepper pate, crackers (of the water and savoy varieties), crisps, and some dips (roasted capsicum and eggplant, hommus, and creamy kalamata olive).  On the sweeter side, I had pre-shaped a batch of gingernuts, and choc mint cookies, and also had some lime meltaways, and a few choc chip cookies, and baked a few of each to have on some plates too.