There's a new year coming - Chinese/Lunar New Year! Celebrations have started around Melbourne to ring in the Year of the Ox, which officially starts on 26 January (which also happens to be Australia Day this year). There were festivities in Footscray the other weekend that I missed, but which Towser from Spot4Nosh has blogged about. And yesterday, there was a festival in Victoria Street, Richmond.
Victoria Street was closed to traffic between Hoodle and Church Streets, and along its length were food stalls, rides, random knick knack sellers, performances, and information stands. Food wise, it was Vietnamese, and there was lots of deep fried stuff, grilled food, and skewered items, with most stalls offering similar things.
Top left: Beef in betel leaves being grilled.
Top right: Corn on the cob!
Bottom left: Rice cakes (?) being cooked.
Bottom right: Bananas in sticky rice. I haven't tried these yet, and got too full for one! It'll have to go on my "to eat" list next time.
Top left: Chive cakes.
Top right: Skewers, skewers, skewers!
Bottom left: More skewers!
Bottom right: Sugar cane. Bro and I shared a cup of sugar cane juice, but we wanted straight sugar cane juice like we'd had in Hong Kong. The juice was mixed with something citrusy (cumquats?) and just wasn't the same.
Top left: Dried squid for sale.
Top right: Random pork sausage on a stick.
Bottom left: Deep fried Mung bean cake thing topped with a prawn.
Bottom right: Inside you could see the mung beans. It was soft and fairly flavourless.
Top left: Deep fried prawns on a stick.
Top right: Beef in betel leaves. My favourite item of the day. I could've eaten many of these sticks! Fortunately I restricted myself to one.
Bottom right: Pork jerky in different flavours. I didn't buy any (I'm not sure my teeth could handle it yet) but I do like this jerky far more than is healthy.
Bottom right: Egg rice cake with a sweetish, fish saucey, vinegary sauce that I poured over. The rice cakes themselves didn't have much flavour, although Bro said that they had a fragrance that put him off (he thought almond, I thought perhaps coconut). And BOY, you should've seen how much oil some the vendors were using to cook these.
Yesterday turned out warmer than I was expecting, and the sun and heat meant we soon wilted. Plus the oiliness and deep fried factor of most foods, also meant that it wasn't long before we couldn't face eating yet another unhealthy item (unusual for Bro and I, but there you have it). At least we have another year to recover!
Disclosure: I didn't take as many photos as I wanted to. However, we went to the Vic Street Lunar New Year Festival a couple of years ago (before I started blogging) so I have supplemented this post with some of those photos. Sneaky!
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