Discussion Friday

[geraineon]

It's time for Discussion Friday again~!

I woke up really hungry so in my quest to make everyone as hungry as I am, we're going to talk about food.

Does reading make you hungry? Have you read a particular good description of food or cooking in a c-novel* that made you salivate? Or perhaps you've read something that sounds absolutely atrocious (which makes you want to try it for Science). Did anything you read inspire you to cook, or seek that dish out?

Share them and let's make everyone hungry!

*feel free to very loosely interpret c-novel here for Discussion Friday, e.g., Chinese web-novels, Chinese novels, Chinese novellas/short stories, other language novels translated into Chinese, novels by Chinese (nationality or diaspora) published in non-Chinese language

Comments

[full_metal_ox]

(our blood is soup).

That urgently needs to be the title of a Cantonese cookbook!

And you guys have a strong penchant for medicinal herbal soups, too; sometime I’d like to try the kind of…character-building herbal soup that was a staple among the Gusu Lan (although this one would fall into the For Science! column.)

(Second-gen Cantonese-American chef Grace Young includes several of these in her book The Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen: https://www.amazon.com/Wisdom-Chinese-Kitchen-Grace-Young/dp/0684847396 )

[geraineon]

Surely someone has already done it (name a cookbook "our blood is soup"), I thought, and then I searched for it and huh, nobody has! An opportunity!

I love a number of herbal soups actually, but idk if those will taste too unfamiliar to people who are not used to it. I've had medicinal soups and tonics too and blergh, no, not fun...

Thanks for sharing about that cookbook! Reading the description of the story made me smile a little because my reaction to my first encounter with tamales is "this is like Mexican zhongzi." (Mexican food has very familiar tastes to me)

[full_metal_ox]

Reading the description of the story made me smile a little because my reaction to my first encounter with tamales is "this is like Mexican zhongzi." (Mexican food has very familiar tastes to me)

Which brings to mind the design choice made by the owners of El Sol Mexican Restaurant in Harrisonburg, Virginia when they bought out an erstwhile Chinese restaurant; since they couldn’t bring themselves to get rid of the cute landscape mural with pandas, they added a few touches to Mexicanize it:



(Image description: a landscape that started out as Chinese, with a yellow full moon rising over distant mountain peaks on the horizon, a bamboo clump at left, a meandering stream, and a fir tree at right. There are a couple low-growing cacti that probably originated as something else. The bamboo is now bearing chilies, overpainted on some of the leaf shapes, as fruit.

Pandas in sombreros inhabit the scene: one eating a bamboo shoot which has been converted into a taco filling, one drinking from the stream, one sniffing one of the cacti, and one using a small stringed instrument to serenade another panda (in a mantilla tagging her as feminine) perched in the fir tree.)

[geraineon]

That's really cute!

Thanks for sharing. I thought I replied but I must have navigated away without hitting post comment orz