CNY Reunion Dinner: Prep Work

I have ambitious CNY Reunion dinner plans. It initially started with only cooking dinner for 4 which is entirely within control, then I found out that M has returned from Japan with her family and we HAD to invite her and her hubby as well as that would reunite the entire Freeland Gallery family for this dinner. And what is a reunion dinner if we don't reunite the whole family? So 4 became 6. Still not out of control I guess, but a wee bit more challenging. Throw in my idea of cooking cereal prawns which I have never done before, and it gets a bit more complicated. But I have faith in the recipes I've researched on the internet, they all seem fairly straight forward, almost simple, but hey, I don't want to jinx it.

So today after a trek under blazing 40C sun looking at apartments, we decided we should do the marketing as well. The hot air reminds me of a desert wind, perhaps it has come from up north where there is nothing but sand. It was on the verge of unbearable being out in the open, any shade is good. Air conditioning is better. But we persevered. We bought the veggies, a red snapper, 1 kg of tiger prawns, 750g of char siew and roast pork (OMG, this shop does it so well, the roast pork is so lean and crispy it's almost to die for), mushroom-fish tofu and a can of longans (no almond tofu to go with though, need to check out another supermarket later).

My proposed menu:-

1. Miso soup with mushroom-fish tofu and shitake mushrooms
2. Steamed snapper Chinese style
3. Cereal prawns
4. Stir-fried Chinese chye sim
5. Char siew and roast pork
6. Dessert: CNY sticky cake (nian gao) with dessicated coconut; and longans and almond tofu

Have to run to the shops later to get some bottles of white wine, almond tofu and some fresh flowers and we are ready to roll.