Chinese New Year : Have a Loverly New Year

Today is a double holiday--Valentine’s Day and Chinese New Year’s Eve. You’ll find the most appropriate gift for the occasion in Chinatown: a heart-shaped plastic box filled with candy, either fruit-flavored toffee from Holland or candied lotus nuts. Two Chinese figures in traditional garb dance inside the lacy rim printed on the heart-shaped label. One bears a gold ingot and the other a gold coin. The Chinese characters between them promise that if you eat the contents, you will have luck and money.

Candied coconut, water chestnut slices, wintermelon, ginger and other traditional treats are available in individual bags. Or you can buy a box containing an assortment of these confections to set out for New Year visitors.

Wing Hop Fung Ginseng Inc., 211 Alpine St., sells the heart-shaped boxes of fruit toffee for $1.89. The same boxes filled with lotus nuts are $2.99 at T.S. Emporium, 861 N. Spring St., Suite 101.

A 20-ounce compartmented candy tray from Soon Foods Inc. of Pomona includes candied carrot slices as well as ginger, lotus nuts, lotus root, wintermelon, sugared Chinese dates and other goodies. Packed in a festive red box, the tray is $6.69 at the Wing Hop Fung Ginseng shop at 835 N. Broadway. A 10-ounce box of the same sweets, also packed by Soon Foods, is $2.99 at the Wing Hop Fung shop on Alpine Street.

For weeks Chinatown shops have been stocking up on the stuff of Chinese New Year--narcissus bulbs nursed along to bloom in time for the holiday, kumquat trees, mandarin oranges, sticky rice New Year cakes, red envelopes in which to distribute money to children, New Year cards and much more.

Ho’s Tak Shun at 720 N. Broadway has candied walnuts similar to those you order for appetizers in Chinese restaurants. These skinless, crisp, honey-roasted walnuts come from Penutech Corp. in the City of Industry. A 10-ounce can costs $3.69.

Like most markets and provision shops, Tak Shun carries boxes of gold-foil-wrapped chocolate “ingots” from China. A 200-gram (slightly less than 1/2-pound) box of Gold Treasure Chocolate manufactured by Ningbo Liaoyuan Foodstuff Factory at Zhejiang is $2.99. The chocolates may be rich to look at but not to eat. They’re only moderately sweet.

A product that makes easy work of a New Year’s dinner is Melissa’s Brand Szechuan Fixin’s. The 10-ounce pack contains Chinese pea pods, fresh shiitake mushrooms, several ears of baby corn, whole shallots, a dried hot chile and two packets of soy sauce. You slice, chop and then stir-fry the ingredients with chicken or shrimp, seasoning with the soy sauce. To make a crunchy variation, you add peanuts, cashews, bean sprouts and canned crisp Chinese noodles to the vegetables and meat.

The box provides the fixings and the label provides the recipes and suggests accompaniments: steamed rice or Chinese noodles (take your choice of fresh or dried noodles, which are stocked in Chinatown markets), a salad with sweet-sour dressing or cucumber slices in rice vinegar. Pick up some fortune cookies or almond cookies at Chinese bakeries for dessert. And accompany this feast with a California Sauvignon Blanc or Chinese beer.

The 10-ounce pack of Szechuan Fixin’s is $4.99 at Hughes Markets in Fountain Valley, Huntington Beach and Dana Point.