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In the Chinese Garden
At this particular juncture of the stars, I am in the process of putting to bed both my garden and my novel manuscript. My garden doesn’t deserve this treatment. There are at least 3 more months of growing season here in Amsterdam. According to my gardening app, I should be sowing lettuce, marigolds, red beets,…
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My Favorite Things
I’ve never felt homesick before. Not when I went to China for the first time. Not when I moved to the Netherlands. Sure, there were people and places I missed but I never felt sick to my stomach or anxious or unable to repress a desire to return. These are, apparently, all common ways of…
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Millet
For Christmas one year, Son No. 1 gave me a copy of Cuisine & Empire: Cooking in World History by Rachel Laudan. Food often says a lot about the people who eat it and, by extension, the sort of society they create. This book opened my eyes to the role of millet in the Chinese…
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Have You Eaten Rice Today?
It’s a ubiquitous phrase you’ll hear all over Hong Kong, Taiwan, and whenever the Cantonese side of my family gets together. Have you eaten rice today? Of course, that’s not a real question. It’s a greeting couched like a question that requires no answer. Just like in the United States where how are you is…
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Mouthfeel
Everywhere I turn, the word mouthfeel pops up. I see it in my Twitter feed. I hear it bandied about by my foodie friends. It shows up in my reading. Like in “Biter”, a short story by Kristen Roupenian in her debut collection You Know You Want This. Ellie is a biter. She is an…
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Food Fight
There’s a hilarious scene in Portnoy’s Complaint in which Alexander Portnoy mulls over the mysteries of Chinese food. the Lord has lifted the ban on pork dishes for the obedient children of Israel [but] the eating of lobster Cantonese is considered by God (Whose mouthpiece on earth, in matters pertaining to food, is my Mom)…
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2018 | My Year in Food
In 2018, I published no books and made no book tours. What the hell did I do with my time? I wrote and traveled, read and gardened. But above all, I ate. So why not take a look back at 2018 and a sneak preview of what’s to come in 2019 by way of my…
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A Chinese Banquet
Have you ever attended a Chinese banquet? The tables are always round and usually big enough to seat up to twelve guests. You might be in a private room at a restaurant or lucky enough to be in someone’s home. There’s probably a lazy Susan on the table to pass the dishes around. And there…
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Late Bloomers
Late bloomers are lazy; they don’t put in the effort needed to develop their God-given talents. Or, they’ve been thwarted by the roadblocks life throws in their path: poverty, pregnancy, sheer bad luck. Some late bloomers don’t get discovered in time. All of them are old. It doesn’t really matter how old. You can find…
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Jiaozi
I love jiaozi. It’s what I want to eat when I go home to Los Angeles. It’s the first stop if I’m traveling in Asia, whether that’s Kyoto (where they’re called gyoza), Taipei or Shanghai. For me, jiaozi is comfort food. But at least one website breathlessly declares jiaozi to be: at the heart and…