Chinese New Year Resolution: Stop Avoiding Lard

I have a New Year resolution, a Chinese New Year resolution that is. I am going to eat healthier from now on. No I’m not going to seek fat-free products on market shelves, nor am I going to reduce the fat in my cooking. I plan to use natural animal and vegetable fats in my cooking. Yes, that’s right I am not going to shy away from either natural animal fats such as lard, tallow and organic butter, or natural vegetable fats such as coconut oil, olive oil and grapeseed oil. As it turned out these fats are not necessarily harmful to your health; in fact they are often essential for your body. Besides they are delicious!

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“East Meets East” with Crisp-Fried Mushrooms

A good friend took us to an elegant Buddhist vegetarian restaurant for dinner in Hong Kong last summer. It was a spectacular meal. Not only was every dish distinctive and delicious, but innovative and sophisticated as well. There was winter melon soup with mixed vegetables, vegetarian soup dumplings, stir-fried tofu skins with seaweed and multigrain steamed rice. But the most memorable dish of all was the salt and pepper crisp-fried enoki mushrooms. When Mel from Gourmet Fury once again asked me to enter the mushrooms challenge of Beet ‘n Squash YOU! I decided to recreate this dish with a twist.

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Aw Shucks! Oysters for Valentine’s Day

Once the yearend holidays and New Year craziness are over everyone begins to look to Valentine’s Day. Lovers are not the only ones wooing their partners. Marketers, the media and even bloggers take this opportunity to court their customers and readers. Chocolate companies package their products in red and white, and the media and blogs are full of advices and suggestions on how to charm your lovers. There are articles on how to make your lady or man happy, and how to celebrate the day as a single person. Not to be outdone I’m also going to give you advice on how to create an impressive dish for that Valentine’s Day dinner.

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Help Haiti

Photo: U.S. Department of Defense It is catastrophic when natural disaster hits a country, but it’s tragic when that country is already struggling to rebuild from decades of political and…

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The Great Chinese Culinary Divide

At first I noticed a few blocks of broken links on some Web pages. Then I started receiving “connection timeout” and “server reset” messages. Access to my favorite places like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube was unsuccessful. Furthermore many food blogs I regularly visit were inaccessible as well. These were not symptoms of a widespread network failure, but rather the result of surfing the Internet from Shanghai. Such was the extent of the “great firewall” of China I encountered during my travel there last fall.

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