Which dishes are absolutely essential to family New Year’s gatherings? A whole chicken, representing the beginning of new endeavors? White pomfret, representing an abundance in every year? White radish, representing good omens? A loaded table filled with rich New Year’s dishes evokes long-lasting plenitude, but tends to lack creativity and overemphasize fatty foods and overpowering flavors. Take “Buddha Jumps over the Wall,” for example. Its ingredients are first fried, then boiled, with the result that a single 2,300-gram pot of the dish delivers nearly 3,000 calories. A study by the Health Promotion Administration showed that a typical person eating just one traditional meal per day would gain an average of 2.1 kilograms over the six-day Lunar New Year’s holiday. Burning off all those excess calories requires a lot of exercise, the equivalent of walking all the way from Tai­pei to Tai­nan.

How do you rework rich dishes to make them less fattening and unhealthy? A healthy New Year’s menu is your best bet.

Chef Leo Tseng

Chef Xiao Guan­zhi, an assistant professor at the De Lin Institute of Technology, is known for his “green banquets,” by which he means using energy-saving cooking techniques while also giving due attention to flavor and nutrition.

“Use of the right tools and methods can make a banquet ‘green.’” Xiao says that high-temperature cooking wastes energy, and causes unhealthy chemicals to form in your cooking oil. Pressure cookers, waterless cookware, and burner plates can help you produce healthier, restaurant-quality dishes.

Recognizing that chicken is a must at the Lunar New Year, Xiao created “Healthy Stewed Chicken with Assorted Mushrooms.” The dish requires scalding a black-boned chicken in boiling water to clean it, then placing it in a pressure cooker with a variety of mushrooms, including lion’s mane, king oyster, oyster, and shimeji, as well as garlic, jujubes, wolfberries, and clams. The liquid is brought to a boil, then the heat turned down low for 15 minutes before being turned off. When the pressure cooker has cooled enough to lose pressure, the dish is seasoned with salt and rice wine, then served. It’s both energy efficient and easy to make.

Xiao’s “Prosperous New Year” is another dish that covers all the flavor bases, and his approach to making it is really­ quite simple.

A silver carp head is washed clean, sliced lengthways, and placed in a pan. The chef then scalds a red bell pepper, removes its skin and seeds, and places it atop the fish head. He blooms green chilies, red chilies, ginger, and garlic in hot oil, then pours them over the fish. He next brings peeled-chili sauce, fermented bean curd, rice wine, sugar, rice vinegar, and water to a boil and pours this mixture over the fish too. Finally he steams the whole dish for 15 minutes, then serves.

Preparing other essentials like “Lucky Braised Sea Cucumber and Mushrooms” and “Gold Medal Buddha Jumps over the Wall” is equally simple, though Xiao does urge home cooks to soak the sea cucumbers themselves rather than buying pre-softened products. He says the process is simple: soak the dried sea cucumbers in cold water for three days, changing the water morning and evening and making sure the water stays below room temperature. The method results in sea cucumbers that are both firm and springy.

Pork ribs are a must for any version of “Buddha Jumps over the Wall,” but Xiao suggests pan frying rather than deep frying. He also recommends sprinkling them with hot water when you remove them from the pan. This results in a less oily final product, one more in keeping with the idea of eating healthy.

“Food has to be tasty, suited to your palate, and sufficiently seasoned.” Xiao’s “green” approach doesn’t yield soggy, watery meals. Instead, it retains more of the foods’ own juices and flavors to create delicious dishes.

The Food and Drug Administration has worked with local chefs to develop ingredients and menus intended to encourage healthy New Year’s feasting.

The menu designed by Chef Leo ­Tseng, an assistant professor with the Department of Culinary Arts at Kee­­lung’s ­­Ching Kuo Institute of Management and Health, replaces the typical deep-fried and stir-fried dishes with steamed and chilled options. Rather than extravagance, Tseng focused his menu on healthy dishes with a minimal carbon footprint. These were designed to be so simple to prepare that even occasional cooks could follow the recipes with ease.

Take his “Steamed Sea Bass with Pickled Mustard Greens,” for example. The ingredients are very straightforward: a sea bass, Hakka-style pickled mustard greens, ku­zu­kiri (Japanese-style cellophane noodles), cilantro, rice wine, salt, sugar, fish sauce, sesame oil, scallions, ginger, garlic, and ground chilies.

Tseng explains that you first blanch the fish, then sprinkle it with the seasonings and pickled mustard greens. You then steam it for eight minutes, adding the noodles three minutes before it is done. The method enables the sourness of the pickled veggies to flavor the fish and the fish to flavor the noodles. He adds that he prefers the Japanese-style noodles because they are gluten-free and less prone to becoming soggy.

The dish is simple and not at all oily, but Tseng stresses the need to cook it at high heat. He says that when the water is at a rolling boil, you can steam the fish in eight minutes without overcooking it.

You needn’t heat your frying pan for “Steamed Pork Ribs with Black Bean Sauce” either. You just dredge marinated ribs in potato starch, then steam them on high heat for 15 minutes with perilla plums, shallots, garlic, and black bean sauce. Decorate the edge of the serving platter with blanched broccoli or baby bok choy for a pretty and tasty New Year’s dish.

Tseng’s “Healthy Chicken Soup with Pears” offers a new twist on chicken soup by dressing it up with a variety of Asian pears grown in Yi­lan’s San­xing Township. He says he was inspired to create the dish by his purchase of pears that weren’t sweet. Rather than have them sit around unused, he came up with ways to make them ingredients in other dishes.

For this dish, you blanch a chicken to purge any residual blood, then put it in a steamer with wolfberries, jujubes, American ginseng, and pieces of pear. After steaming it for half an hour, add salt and rice wine to taste. “The poly­phenols and alpha hydroxy acids in the fruit give the soup a kind of sweet astringency,” explains Tseng.

If you want to eat something more flavorful than plain white rice, but can’t tolerate oily foods and find sticky rice with pork indigestible, why not give the nutritious, delicious-looking, easy-to-make “Rice with Sakura Shrimp and Wild Mushrooms” a try over the Lunar New Year?

For this dish, first broil diced mushrooms, then drizzle them with olive oil. Next, broil your shrimp until they begin to color, then fry a beaten egg and cut it into strips. Combine the broiled mushrooms with white rice and fu­ri­kake, drizzle the result with low-sodium Japanese-style soy sauce, and then top it with the shrimp and egg strips. Finally, steam the result to create a healthy, low-fat delight.

The Food and Drug Administration has worked with local chefs to develop ingredients and menus intended to encourage healthy New Year’s feasting.

If you’re tired of Chinese food and are looking for something new, you could try Chef Roger Peng’s Western-style New Year’s menu.

His “Corn-fed Chicken Soup with Organic Hualien Red Sage and Sichuan Peppers” substitutes morel mushrooms for the shitake mushrooms more commonly seen in chicken soup. Chef Peng, who is an assistant professor with the Hospitality Management Department at ­Hsuan ­Chuang University, says that corn-fed chicken has a sweetness that slowly permeates the soup as it cooks, and that the morels add a nutty flavor and still more sweetness.

Though the dish has a long name, the recipe is quite simple. You first steep the morels and blanch the chicken, then add slices of ginger, jujubes, and wolfberries to the pot. Simmer everything over low heat for 1.5 hours, and you’re done.

“Alsace Stew” is a French dish, but it is made very much like Taiwanese chai­buey, a stew made from all the leftovers in the fridge.

To make it, sauté garlic until fragrant. Add tomatoes and tomato sauce, and continue to sauté. Next, add water, stock, then lamb shanks, pig knuckles, sausage, and soaked beans (chickpeas, butter beans, and kidney beans) to the pot, and simmer until done. Spoon over boiled cauliflower, and serve.

“Pan-fried King Prawns” looks Western, but is at its heart a creative, Chinese-style New Year’s dish.

To make it, first wash and de-vein the prawns, then lightly salt and pepper them. Pan fry the shrimp until they begin to color, then add olive oil and your seasonings (garlic, onion, chilies, basil and parsley). Sauté until fragrant and serve.

Chef Peng also shares a tip on how to make cleanup easier by preventing food from sticking to your pans. First, heat your pan on the stove to open the pores in the metal, then add a small amount of oil and turn off the heat. When the pan has absorbed the oil, add your ingredients and turn the heat back on. This prevents your pan from spitting while cooking and your ingredients from sticking.

The Food and Drug Administration has worked with local chefs to develop ingredients and menus intended to encourage healthy New Year’s feasting.

If you’re really feeling lazy, pick up a few takeout dishes to fill out your New Year’s feast. Hotels, restaurants, and even convenience stores offer a variety of dishes and even full menus. Seeing an opportunity, Shui-Mu International, a company better known for its shoe sales, leapt into the New Year’s takeout business for the first time this year with its “Lucky and Healthy New Year’s Dishes.”

Shui-Mu spokesperson Fang Hsing-kuo says that the company has 200 locations and roughly 1 million loyalty club members, and sells more than 1 million pairs of shoes every year. But good shoes are durable, which means customers can go a year or two between new pairs. As part of the company’s efforts to grow, it has begun selling a broader array of consumables, including massage chairs, health foods, pomelos, and pears, and created an online portal promoting good health.

In 2014, it also brought in Chef James ­Cheng to endorse its products. “He’s a food genius who is also very health conscious.” Fang explains that Shiu-Mu asked Chef ­Cheng to develop two New Year’s dishes—“Delectable Buddha Jumps over the Wall” and “Healthy Pig Knuckles with Nut Sauce”—in the wake of Taiwan’s food crises.

His take on Buddha Jumps over the Wall includes abalone, dried scallops, and pork tendon, and builds its soup base from chicken bones, pig knuckles and sea cucumbers—all chosen for their low fat content. Meanwhile, his original take on Pig Knuckles makes use of a nut-based sauce he developed himself to give the dish a unique flavor. Chef ­Cheng notes that consumers who think the dishes are “missing something” are absolutely right: they contain no MSG.

Food is an essential part of the Lunar New Year’s holiday. As long as we “eat safely” and “eat healthily” it doesn’t matter whether we’ve purchased the dishes or prepared them ourselves. When our families are all gathered together, everything we eat tastes wonderful!

Chef Roger Peng

The Food and Drug Administration has worked with local chefs to develop ingredients and menus intended to encourage healthy New Year’s feasting.

The Food and Drug Administration has worked with local chefs to develop ingredients and menus intended to encourage healthy New Year’s feasting.

“Prosperous New Year,” part of Chef Xiao’s “green banquet” menu, is a delicious, easy-to-prepare New Year’s fish dish.

“Steamed Pork Ribs with Black Bean Sauce” looks as good as it tastes.

The Food and Drug Administration has worked with local chefs to develop ingredients and menus intended to encourage healthy New Year’s feasting.

The Food and Drug Administration has worked with local chefs to develop ingredients and menus intended to encourage healthy New Year’s feasting.

The Food and Drug Administration has worked with local chefs to develop ingredients and menus intended to encourage healthy New Year’s feasting.

Chef Xiao Guanzhi