Chinese New Year celebrates the abundance of food. Having leftover is a must as it signifies you don’t have to worry about starving in the year ahead. I enjoyed great food and had wonderful time over the festive season, and now it’s over, it’s time to deal with the leftovers from Chinese New Year.

For some, leftover mandarin oranges were thrown during the Chap Goh Meh celebration (it’s a tradition where unmarried women gather and throw mandarin oranges written with their name and contact to a river in a hope that their future spouse will pick it up). I used my mandarin oranges to make mandarin and watermelon granita.

What about nian gao which is still sitting in my fridge? Nian gao (nian means year, gao means high, so nian gao means better year ahead), has sweet and savoury version, mine is the Cantonese style, a sweet cake make from glutinous rice flour and brown sugar. When warm, it is stretchy like a melting string of cheese, and sticky like caramel. Commonly, it is eaten as it is, served pan-fried or deep-fried with batter. Red bean, yam and sweet potato are some of the common additional ingredient that goes well with nian gao. I would like to be more adventurous: banana and nian gao with coconut crumble.

Ingredients:

2 bananas, sliced

180g nian gao, thinly sliced

1 mandarin orange, juiced

Coconut crumble topping

90g flour

10g desiccated coconut

45g butter (cubed, cold)

45g sugar

1. Rub the butter into the flour until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs.

2. Add in sugar and desiccated coconut and mix until evenly distributed.

To assemble, lightly grease a baking dish, start layering in this order: nian gao, banana, drizzle some mandarin orange juice, nian gao again, and finally top with the coconut crumble. Bake at 190°C for around 20 minutes till the crumble turns golden in colour. Serve warm with coconut ice cream.

Verdict of this leftover makeover? I’ll leave that to you.

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