Happy Hinamatsuri!

In Japan, March 3 is Hinamatsuri, or Girls’ Festival. It’s a time when families with girls display dolls dressed in kimono, often a large number of elaborate and expensive dolls perched on a set of steps covered in red cloth. The top figures are an emperor and empress. On lower steps sit all kinds of ministers, musicians, and I don’t know what else – probably grape-peelers and bum-wipers. Each doll can cost hundreds of dollars.

We weren’t going to do that.

I did, however, want to celebrate Hinamatsuri, since my heritage is Japanese and we have two girls. So we decided to make some of the simpler Hinamatsuri food as well as emperor and empress dolls. Here’s how my four-year-old and I made the dolls.

The Kite Runner-Around-The-House

Last weekend was Afghanistan weekend. Why Afghanistan? Because I had some cubed lamb in the freezer I wanted to use up, and because Afghanistan started with an A, for our first weekend choosing a country without an obvious reason.

To teach my four-year-old about Afghanistan, I started by pointing it out on the globe, then I showed her the trailer from The Kite Runner movie (I haven’t actually seen the movie but I loved the book) to give her an idea what the country looked like. We talked about how the boys in the movie loved flying – and fighting with – kites, as well as talking briefly about what war is and how it can destroy friendships and make countries poor. Then, to lighten things up a bit, we made a kite.

A Chinese feast

The weekend of Chinese New Year, I wanted to do traditional Chinese New Year food. However, I didn’t want to work too hard at it. I thought about making dumplings (AKA potstickers or gyoza), but I’ve done that before, and while they came out delicious, it was a LOT of work. Even in my pre-gluten-free days, when I could just buy wonton wraps at the store, dumplings were labour intensive. When you factor in having to make all the wraps as well as the fillings, then form and fry/steam the dumplings, it becomes a huge undertaking. So that was out.

Next, I thought about making gluten-free barbecue pork buns, which I have also done before using more or less the recipe linked to in this sentence (I followed the directions for the bun part but made up my own low-FODMAP filling), but that too was pretty fiddly. I also rejected the idea of making turnip cake because I’d have to go to the Asian grocery store to look for rice flour and daikon, and besides, my husband is allergic to shrimp and lap cheong, with its inimitable taste, is typically not gluten-free.

The more I researched, though, the more it became clear the Chinese New Year foods that most readily popped to mind for me were far from the only ones. In fact, it seemed like almost any Chinese dish could be considered a New Year dish. So I decided to do what was tasty, easy and would create enough leftovers that I wouldn’t have to cook for a few days. On the weekend menu: kung pao chicken, gingery tofu vegetable stir-fry, mu shu duck, steamed aromatic fish, almond cookies, and “ants climbing a tree” (Sunday lunch). Yeah!

Kids’ activities – China

My four-year-old and I celebrated Chinese New Year last week (for an explanation, see Gung Haggis Fat Choy) by making a super easy dragon craft out of two sheets of construction paper. You need:

• Two sheets of different coloured construction paper (You could use three to make dragon reversible, in which case you’ll need two sheets to be the same colour. If you do this you’ll need to cut two identical heads and tails.)
• Two straws, popsicle sticks or disposable chopsticks
• Tape (necessary)
• Glue (optional)
• Scissors
• Two smallish squares of cardboard, slightly smaller than the head and the widest part of the tail
• Crayons and/or markers