You never need an excuse to order Chinese food but it so happens this Thursday on 19th Feb, it was the Chinese New Year! I love celebrating all these traditional holidays as most often than not, it’s all about the FOOD! <3

So what better way than to order Chinese takeaway?! I told a couple of girlfriends to come over and using my hungryhouse app, I saw Mayflower in Maida Vale had some pretty good reviews and decided to order from there. With a few simple taps and swipes, the monster order was in the bag and all we had to do now was wait…Look at all the food we ordered! :O

• Vegetarian Spring Rolls
• Crispy Won Ton
• Har Kau Dim Sum
• Beef And Green Pepper In Black Bean Sauce
• Chicken Chow Mein
• Mixed Vegetable Chow Mein
• Stir Fried Chicken And Tasty Sweet Chilli Sauce
• Shredded Chilli Crispy Beef
• Chilli Oil
• Toffee Lychee
• Fried Tofu With Salt And Garlic Pepper
• General Tsos Chicken
• Small Egg Fried Rice
• Crispy Won Ton

So! rather than roll over the sofa in hunger and anticipation, we tried to go a little extra to celebrate the Chinese New Year and decided to make some lanterns. No, we weren’t going to paint our nails and talk about boys…

This was going to be fun. Half way through making these lanterns, I really hoped I wasn’t a retard and managed to make my own. Sooooo… I think I just about nailed it… right…RIGHT?! Look at the genius idea of fitting it on the lamp. Only a true creative genius would think of this…*ahem*

Anyway…swiftly moving on to the food…

Although the food took 1.5 hours to arrive (busy time of the year and all), overall it was worth the wait. Chinese takeaways are notorious for being hit and miss. But every dish we ordered from Mayflower hit the spot. They did forget the Beef with black bean sauce though 🙁  However, to counter that, there was plenty of food to go around!

No chinese meal is complete without an obligatory of spring rolls. We decided to add Won Tons to the order too. They cleared up FAST!

Our favourite starter was the Har Kau Dim Sum (with prawns). For next time, I will definitely be ordering more of those.

For my friend who’s a vegetarian, we ordered the fried tofu with salt and garlic pepper. It had a kick of spice to it too and went nicely with the vegetarian chow mein we ordered on the side.

The shredded chilli crispy beef had a really nice sticky and sweet sauce but the beef was a little tough to chew. That is my only criticism of the dish. Otherwise it went really nicely with the egg fried rice and the chow main.

The portions were HUGE! There were 6 of us and we ate A LOT. At least I did 😛

The food was made fresh so I can forgive them for a being a little in delivering my order 😉

For dessert, we decided to go for the toffee lychee as it was unusual, never had it before but we all love lychee. It was little too sweet for my liking but my friends ate the rest happily so try these if you like lychees.

No chinese meal is complete without the fortune cookies and we all got plenty of ours! My friend got the one below- she definitely has the X-Factor. 😉

AND GUESS WHAT I GOT! :O I was a little taken aback…so true when you take this blog into context and my general state of being 😛 But completely sold on fortune cookies now…Gimme more!

So if you’re living around the area and would like to order a Chinese takeaway, then definitely order from Mayflower. They are definitely one of the few good Chinese takeaways I’ve ordered from 🙂

Now comes the fun part!

To celebrate Chinese New Year, hungryhouse has dived into the food and the traditions of the festival, to create an interactive guide to help you stage your own Chinese New Year takeaway feast in the comfort of your own living room. The guide includes information on New Year traditions, foods, a special Chinese do-it-yourself cocktail recipe, and it also features step-by-step instructions for people to make their own funky Chinese decorative lanterns to really get into the spirit of Chinese New Year!

To celebrate the launch of the guide, hungryhouse are asking people to make a lantern and then share a photo of it on twitter or instagram with the hashtag #hungrylantern. hungryhouse will then pick their 10 favourite pictures and award each winner a £25 hungryhouse voucher each. The competition is now extended until Monday, 23rd February.

So get your chopsticks out, dive into the guide, and get snapping for your chance to win some free Chinese food!

Till the next one xxx