In the past week I’ve been to more parties, taken in more sunsets, and attended more family dinners than most people do in a year. Okay, I’m exaggerating, but only just a little. Family weddings tend to be week-long affairs. There’s the prenuptial shindig, the rehearsal dinner, dim sum brunch for the out-of-towners, and let’s […]
A Cake With Sparklies | Char Siu Bao
If I were a baker, I’d be making cake – a fabulous multi-tiered work of red velvet art with enough cream cheese icing to frost the kitchen table. But it didn’t occur to me until just a few days ago that my birthday was this weekend. I was all set to celebrate my thirty-fifth year […]
THE OTHER RED MEAT | CHINESE CHAR SIU PORK
When my husband was about eight years old, he experienced an unexpected growth spurt, not in height, but in girth. If his memory is correct, as it’s often spotty and selective when the occasion calls for it, he wore a size 36 in the third grade – he’s thirty years older now and he wears […]
My Kabocha Pumpkin Soup Recipe – Merci Beaucoup Chef!
Last week was rough. By the time Friday rolled around, I was overwhelmed with an unexplained sense of ickiness. It was probably the result of five straight days of chasing my base-jumping toddler around the house, a failed toong mai experiment, and a plague that turned my husband into my third child and me into […]
Girl Meets Grill, Grill Beats Girl – Kalbi Recipe
I’m a bit ashamed to admit that I don’t know how to operate a grill, especially since we own a gas grill. Call me old fashioned, but the grill was always my husband’s domain and neither of us had any problem with that. But, after all these years I decided to learn one of Low […]
Chrysanthemum Tea – A Cure For General Unhealthiness
I thought my in-laws made up the term yeet hey until I consulted the Chinese blogging world and found that it is actually a legitimate health concept, akin to the well-known concept of qi. Yeet hay was among the first Chinese words I learned when I met my in-laws. Everything was yeet hay back then, […]
Salmon Risotto Ochazuke – Great Gourmet Comfort Food
It has recently come to my attention that Chinese people do not eat meat on Chinese New Year. As someone who is accustomed to having a smorgasbord of meat on Chinese New Year, this was a startling revelation to me (I almost didn’t believe my husband when he told me this). A lightbulb went off […]
How To Make Toong Mai – Chinese Puffed Rice Recipe
This is Low Dao’s recipe for toong mai – Chinese puffed rice. I’ve never seen him make this before. One lazy Friday afternoon he just looked in his pantry, saw the surplus of ginger candy and sweet mochi rice, and said, “I make puffy rice today”. And just like that, he conjured up some delicious […]
How To Make Li Hing Mui Kumquats – Recipe And More
I went to my in-law’s last week and found this enormous bowl of kumquats sitting next to the door. If you’ve never eaten a kumquat before, you’d probably peel the outside and discover that the inside tastes terrible, and you may assume you got a bad kumquat. Surprise! You didn’t get a bad kumquat. Instead […]
The Chinese Vegetable of Champions
I don’t know how I managed to get by the first five years of marriage without learning how to cook choy. My mother-in-law undoubtedly did her best to bury her Tiger mother instincts and refrained from throwing my Cup-o-Noodle to the floor while telling me to feed her only son more choy, although I’m sure […]