1 . For those who always want to try out new things and to experience exciting flavors that come directly from Mother Earth, foraging subscription boxes (觅食订阅箱) can provide wild ingredients (材料) that no traditional supermarket has on its shelves.

Oak leaf tea, acom coffee, and pine pollen syrup are just a few of the seasonal ingredients people can now get thanks to projects such as the Forage Box. This delivery service collects wild food very few people know about, and sends it to the subscribers monthly. In this way, everyone can surprise their loved ones with delicious meals.

“The flavors are big and bold that’s the point. The idea is to show there’s a lot more going on when nature gets to farm it,” said Jim Parum, creator of the Forage Box. Since he started the project, he spends his days foraging for ingredients in environments such as the countryside, forests and the coast. The idea of the Forage Box is not to send out meal boxes but new ingredients, so information about cooking these wild items is also offered in the boxes. Delicious and inspiring recipes can also be found on the company’s website.

Underlying this project is the belief that nature has a lot to offer and can provide us with much   tastier and healthier ingredients than those in the supermarket. The project works well as people   are looking for ways to deal with the challenge of climate change while living healthier lives.

In the past, organic food was only available in specialty health food stores, but now it has a much more mainstream (主流) following worldwide. In the United States alone, it reached 50 billion   dollars in value in 2019, up from 13.26 billion in 2005. This shows growth of nearly 300 percent over this period.

Miles Irving, an international wild food expert, said, “For us, foraged food is a very powerful way to reconnect people with the land, and this provides all sorts of benefits to physical, mental, emotional and community health.”

4 . As most children have a natural interest in both cooking and screens, playing free cooking games online with your child may be an excellent way to introduce them to the world of food at an early age.     1    . They provide a number of developmental and educational benefits as well.

Cooking games for kids develop creativity.     2     by letting them experiment with raw materials, recipes, and preparation methods. Such games can help kids develop a growth mindset, creativity, and the freedom to make their own choices.

Cooking games can improve social skills. Most cooking games offer an in-built social space. For example, playing multiplayer or two-player games allows children to interact with others, solve problems in cooperation, and so on. This is especially convenient for those who have difficulty reaching out to others in the real world. Online games can help them practice their communication skills.     3    .

Cooking games boost confidence and independence. When kids take the initiative, finish a task, or follow directions correctly, they feel good about themselves and proud of what they’ve done.     4    , they are more likely to grow up with a feeling of confidence, responsibility and independence.

    5    . The act of cooking, whether virtual or in the real world, requires a lot of counting and measuring, which promotes the development of fundamental mathematical abilities. Additionally, they require kids to perform various kitchen tasks or read the recipes or lists of raw materials and then follow the directions, teaching them to read, and improving their vocabulary.

6 . It was a snowy day during the spring break when I walked into a great restaurant. In this blizzard weather, it was the only restaurant that remained open.

The restaurant has a long history in Hong Kong. Its owners, the couple, Peter and Michelle, have been running the restaurant since 2007.

“Things have changed a lot in the past 30 years,” Peter said. “Chinese students 20 years ago thought that a 70-cent bowl of rice was too expensive, but now a $20 meal is acceptable”. He also said that the new generation of Chinese students engaged with other students, bringing all their non-Chinese friends to visit the restaurant.

Peter takes great pride in his own cooking. He was curious about how the food was made and why particular foods or sauces had specific tastes. He chose to serve mainly Guangdong and Sichuan food at the restaurant, featuring the family-style Chinese dim sum or hot pot.

When I asked whether he would modify the taste of the dishes to suit the taste of most Americans, Peter said, “We are not like those American Chinese restaurants. We provide the genuine Chinese taste to our customers, and they will love it because it is delicious, and their taste will suit the taste of our dishes, not the other way around.”

“If I hear complaints from my customers, I will be so upset that I can’t fall asleep at night”, he said. “Luckily most of my favorite dishes received wide acclaim from my customers and it takes more than one person’s effort.”

He compares himself with the craftsmen in China who are proud of preserving ancient Chinese art and whose motivation is only on people’s enjoyment of their work and thought.

Such a spirit of craftsmanship has been remarkable and greatly valued in the past. The craftsman’s spirit with perfection, precision, concentration, and patience remains in Peter and his cooking.

7 . For the first 18 years of my life, my mom cooked Chinese food every day, all served family-style. But when it came time for me to teach myself how to cook, I didn’t ask my mom for help. Instead, like so many young people, I turned to the online recipes. By the time I got married, I could cook many dishes. What I didn’t really know how to cook at all, however, was Chinese food.

Part of the problem was that I only knew how to cook by following recipes. And up until maybe 5 or 10 years ago, the number of English-language recipes for Chinese dishes you could find in a cookbook or on the Internet still felt extremely limited —at least when it came to homey(家乡菜), everyday recipes written with a younger Chinese American audience in mind.

That was the experience, too, for sisters Sarah and Kaitlin Leung. Like so many other ABCs (American-born Chinese) and younger first- and second-generation Chinese immigrants(移民), the Leung sisters reached a point in their adult lives when they started to love to eat the food they’d grown up on, but found it really difficult to learn how to prepare it.

As it turns out, though, the Leung sisters were uniquely positioned to do something about it: Their father had spent years cooking at his family’s Chinese American takeout restaurant. Their mom had deep knowledge about traditional Shanghainese cooking. Meanwhile, the two sisters had grown up in New York, eating their parents, food, but also immersed(沉浸)in America’s own food culture.

So, in 2013, the Leungs started a food blog “The Woks of Life”. What made their blog different from other blogs was that the intergenerational transfer of knowledge that the Leungs were so eager for was baked right into the concept: The four family members took turns posting recipes, each sharing their own favorites. In that way, Sarah says, the blog reflected — and continues to reflect — the diversity of the Chinese diaspora(华侨).

8 . Three Cooking Myths

As a child, one of the unbreakable rules was “no swimming for 30 minutes after eating”. This was like a gospel(福音、信条), seriously not to be questioned. Turns out, there was actually nothing true about this “truism”. But for many years, children sat around, unhappily, awaiting the end of the 30-minute torture.

I only bring this up because there are a few kitchen truisms that I thought we might investigate, just for fun.

10 . Long before metal oven racks (架子) were invented, many people would place the things that they wanted to bake onto stones to keep them from burning in ovens or even directly on heat.     1     However, there are actually many applications for its use in baking.

Typical baking stones can be made of various materials, and tend to be either round or rectangular in shape. The clay stone is popular, but some people like marble. Some have a shiny surface and others don’t have.     2     Some people suggest that heading to the local kitchen supply store to purchase a baking stone is a waste of time and instead they purchase tiles (瓦片) from kitchen or gardening stores.     3     They may contain high amounts of lead and cooks would need to test them for the presence of lead before using them to cook.

    4     Baking stones absorb and keep heat very well, so when you put them in the oven and allow the oven to run for a while, the stones heat up. They transfer heat directly to the bottom of your bread or other goods, as the goods can be placed directly on the stone so they never start out on a cold surface. This allows bread to bake more evenly all over, resulting in a much nicer crust (酥皮)—particularly for artisan bread.

There are many benefits of using a baking stone to cook pizza or bread.     5     For another, the stone is also praised for its ability to evenly heat the crust and lessen chances that pizza or other bread will burn.