Pastry for Butterfingers

My Grandma baked the most beautiful pies. Part of their beauty rested in her ingredients; she only used lard, rendered from the hogs she and Grandpa raised, and the flavor was exquisite. Rich and full of the wonderful brown flavors that still speak to me of earth and its bounty. The texture was perfection itself; […]

The Chinese Cookbook Project II: This Little Book

Surrounded by maneki neko, and shown with a pair of chopsticks in order to give a sense of scale, is Sara Bosse and Onoto Watanna’s Chinese-Japanese Cookbook. Earlier in this blog, I wrote about how I acquired a copy of Chinese-Japanese Cookbook by Sara Bosse and Onoto Watanna, published by Rand McNally in 1914. What […]

Book Review: Land of Plenty

Land of PlentyFuchsia Dunlop2001 Fuchsia Dunlop is an amazing woman. For one thing, she is the only non-Chinese female graduate of the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine in Chengdu, China. For another thing, she managed to write down the recipes for most of the dishes that Huy used to make at The China Garden for […]

Greener on the Other Side

A selection of Chinese greens: baby bok choy, Chinese broccoli or gai lan, and in the back, snow pea shoots. The sausages in the green dish are lop cheong. In ruminating on the Appalachian tradition of cooking greens with pork, I was reminded of how I got Zak to eat greens. It did involve cooking […]

Yin and Yang

Teaching culinary arts is one of my passions. I watch people learn; I have spent a large amount of my life studying and gaining experience and I enjoy sharing the information I have gained with others along the way. I like the shine of discovery in the eyes of students who are just now embarking […]

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