Five Chinese cookery books you should invest in

Published on Yahoo Lifestyle UK & Ireland on 7th February 2013:

Chinese cookery books

I often wonder if my room, with its heavily laden shelves of cookery books, is just another word for the library. My collection mostly involve chefs, restaurants or French cuisine; a sure sign of the food I like to cook, or at least look at.

When it comes to Chinese cookery books, things get a little more complicated.

Sure, there are a number of Chinese-themed books on the market with TV or celebrity tie ins but a quick browse through a few of my local bookshops revealed a very narrow selection with serious recipes.

With that in mind, I’ve chosen a few Chinese cookery books currently on sale online or in bookshops that will stand the test of time and offer ideas for years to come.

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How to make jiaozi (Chinese dumplings)

Published on Yahoo Lifestyle UK & Ireland on 4th February 2013:

Dumplings by Qin Xie

There’s probably nothing more perfect than jiaozi for a Chinese New Year celebration – it’s the sort of dish that families make together and enjoy together.

Jiaozi, or Chinese dumplings as it’s more frequently known, are essentially little parcels of pastry wrapped filling. It’s traditionally considered a dish from Northern China although it’s enjoyed all over China.

The pastry is made with just water and flour while the filling can be almost anything you want. Most fillings are meat based and vary from region to region, like pork and garlic chives or beef and celery.

Here’s a recipe for pork and Chinese leaf dumplings:

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How to make tangyuan (glutinous rice balls)

Published on Yahoo Lifestyle UK & Ireland on 4th February 2013:

Tangyuan, Qin Xie

The name sounds rather strange even before you translate it (the Chinese characters for “tang” and “yuan” mean “soup” and “sphere” respectively) but it’s really just a sweet filling wrapped in a glutinous rice flour pastry and served in its cooking liquid.

In China, the most popular flavour for tangyuan is black sesame but it’s also commercially available in flavours such as rose, peanut and red bean.

There are lots of theories about when to enjoy tangyuan, which varies according to the part of China that you’re from. Some have it at the turn of midnight for Chinese New Year while others have it on the 15th day of the festival.

Either way, the most important part of the tangyuan tradition is about family. Not only is it something to be shared with family during New Year celebrations but, in Chinese, tangyuan also sounds like “tuanyuan”, or reunion.

Here’s a recipe for easy peanut butter tangyuan:

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Ten facts about Where Chefs Eat

Published on Life in Luxury on 29th January 2013:

  1. Where Chefs Eat is a directory of over 2,000 restaurants as recommended by over 400 of the world’s best chefs.
  2. There are recommendations are geographically arranged by continent: Oceania, Asia, Europe, Africa and North and South America, all mapped.
  3. There are also two indexes to help you navigate the book, by restaurant name or by recommendation type.
  4. For 26 selected cities, there are more detailed maps indicating the locations of the restaurants and in effect, turning the book into a local restaurant guide.
  5. Each of the 400 or so chefs involved has recommended a minimum of three restaurants according to the quality of food alone.
  6. The chefs were asked eight questions each: “Which restaurant do you eat at most regularly?”; “What’s your favourite place to go for breakfast?”; “Late at night where do you like to eat?”; “Which restaurant best sums up your city or region, a restaurant you’d consider a local favourite?”; “Where serves your favourite bargain meal?”; “Where do you go to celebrate a special occasion?”; “Which restaurant do you admire the most and wish you’d opened yourself?”; and “Which restaurant would you travel any distance to eat at?”
  7. It took 12 months to create, enlisting an editorial team of 25.
  8. Joe Warwick, who compiled the book, is the former editor of Restaurant Magazine who spearheaded the creation of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants Award.
  9. There are no rankings in this guide. Instead, the restaurants are categorised according to: “Breakfast”, “Late night”, “Regular neighbourhood”, “Local favourite”, “Bargain”, “High end”, “Wish I’d opened” and “Worth the travel”.
  10. Each restaurant listing includes address and contact information as well as opening hours, reservation policy, credit card, price range, style, cuisine and recommended for. Some also have quotes from chefs or short reviews.

Food blogs to inspire your inner chef

Published on Yahoo Lifestyle UK & Ireland on 28th January 2013:

Also published on Yahoo! US News on 28th January 2013:

Finding a good food blog is tough business. They say that the majority of blogs fail within the first three months but even long running ones are often abandoned. It’s not hard to see why.

You need a good idea which, with regular and careful tending, will hopefully blossom into something worth reading that keeps people coming back. It can be a very time consuming project that’s not always rewarding. As the keeper of two blogs, In Pursuit of Food and Culture Explorer, I can certainly attest to that.

A good food blog though, can afford much pleasure to the reader. The openness of food means that there are blogs out there covering everything from restaurants and recipes to special diets and gourmet destinations.

As a blog-surfer, I like the excitement of finding something new every time I go back to my favourite blogs. Blogs morph from one subject to another according to the changing interests of their owners so I also like the comfort in knowing that, in some respects, I will always find the same thing.

So after much whittling down, here are seven food blogs that have inspired me over the past year, and I hope will continue to do so:

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