Happy New Year! Can you believe it’s 2017 already!? I sure can’t. We didn’t do a whole lot for New Year’s Eve but we did stick to our tradition. I made dinner at home for us, we did our Year in Review sheets, played some games and waited to toast at midnight.
For our New Year’s Eve dinner I made pork belly bao appetizers and some Peanut Sesame Sauce Noodles to pair with it.
I got the bao buns at H Mart – they’re over in the freezer section if you want to pick a few up. I used “Lotus Leaf” buns. They are small so I felt they were a better size for appetizers. You simply steam them for 8-10 minutes and they’re ready to go.
I also got sliced pork belly from H Mart and simply pan seared the slices with a dash of salt and pepper. One slice per bun. Then I topped them with a tiny bit of peanut sauce, added cilantro and green onions plus some chopped peanuts. Viola! Easy peasy.
This is very similar to the noodles dish I posted last week – the only different is I tried doing half sesame paste and half peanut butter. The sesame paste was a bit stronger than I anticipated! I think we all like the peanut butter sauce a bit better but it was good to try it out. I also swapped the sugar snap peas for snow peas.
These two little cutie pies asked for a little love and a little bit of pork belly.
After dinner we worked on adding to our time capsule. I misplaced the time capsule last New Year’s Eve and therefore misplaced 2015’s sheets. Oops.
I printed these sheets off the Internet. After filling them out, we read the sheets from 2014 that I made with my own questions – we liked those questions more than this random one I printed off. I’ll have to make my own template again for next New Year’s.
After that we played a game called Timeline. I actually bought this for Jake last Christmas and this was our first time playing it!
Timeline has a bunch of different themes but this one is “Americana” – so all events are related to the USA. Each player gets four cards to place into the timeline. One card is turned over from the stack and you have to determine whether one of your cards takes place before or after the starting card. It gets trickier the further you get into the game as there are more years added and you have to get your card into the correct spot in the timeline. We played three rounds and had a pretty good time with this fun, historical based game.
I think I’ve had these glasses for three years now. I lost all the other ones I had.
Right after Jake put these glasses on he started channeling Elton John and sang Crocodile Rock. Heh.
I can’t believe that T will be graduating from high school this year! How insane is that?!
Here’s to a another new year full of food and blogging!
happy 2017 mary! steamed buns seems ambitious to me but glad it wasn’t as difficult as I imagined! your time capsule thing is so neat! we played board games and video games until midnight. almost missed it too haha. hope you drop by oh-soyummy more this year! =)
Hi Lynn – It would be ambitious if I tried to make the buns from scratch but I deemed that too much work. Though I would like to make them from scratch one day! Sorry I have been an absent blogger friend, I will try and do more reading and commenting in the new year! 😀
Happy New Year Mary! Your NY dinner looked delicious, especially that crisp pork belly skin. That timelines game seems like a lot of fun . Ineed to get some new games to play so I will check that one out. I also like your idea of doing a Year in Review sheet. I would love to start that tradition with Bert and TC
Hi CC – Happy New Year to you, as well! And thanks for the nice comments! I think you’d enjoy the Timelines game – it’s fun and you also learn things at the same time! Next New Year’s I’m definitely making my own Year-in-Review sheet so it’ll have better questions.