a culinary genealogy
Below, view all our posts in chronological order, starting with the most recent. To browse recipes by category, course, or collection, visit our Recipe Index. Also be sure to check out our How-To section and Chinese Ingredients Glossary.
If you read the words pig feet papaya soup and are still reading—thank you for the vote of confidence! You’d never think to put pork trotters and papaya in the same pot, but this soup is a traditional Chinese recipe designed to help new moms with milk production and postpartum recovery. The powerful combination of
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The Winter Solstice in Chinese is 冬至 (dōng zhì in Mandarin Chinese), which translates to “winter arrival.” As you may already know, it’s the shortest day of the year and the longest night. The Dongzhi Festival is an important Chinese holiday, but it’s sometimes forgotten—overshadowed by the Lunar New Year (AKA the Spring Festival). In the
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With Lunar New Year coming up, many a Chinese table will soon be graced by a whole chicken. Whether it’s poached, braised, or salt-baked, a whole chicken is a deeply symbolic food in Chinese culture. Today, we have a complete guide to preparing a whole chicken in the Chinese style, so you can keep this
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Sweet and sour sauce dishes are some of the most iconic out there. Even in China, dishes like sweet and sour pork (咕噜肉 – gū lū ròu) and Sweet and Sour Squirrel Fish, (松鼠魚 – songshǔ yú), a famous recipe from Jiangsu Province, have spread across the country. Today, we’re going to talk about how
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A Prime Rib Roast is almost always our choice for a crowd-pleasing holiday dinner. Turkey is for Thanksgiving, and we’ve never been a big ham family, so prime rib is often our choice! Now we’re bringing you into our home to show you how to make the perfect prime rib roast for the holidays. Or
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The holidays are fast approaching, and we’ve got over 35 holiday recipes, new and old, savory and sweet! This might be obvious given what we do here on the blog, but the food is the main event of any holiday. This is the time of year when all of our nostalgia-laden favorite family recipes get
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Today we’ve got a recipe for you that harkens back to the early days of Chinese immigration to the United States: Chop Suey. Chinese food in America has evolved much since then, to the point where chop suey itself sounds like an outdated term. But that doesn’t make it any less tasty! Note: This recipe
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Today we have some very exciting news to share—a new addition to The Woks of Life family: Baby Ethan! Sarah and Justin recently welcomed this bundle of joy into the world, and despite the fact that he’s been cocooned at Sarah and Justin’s (flu season and all), he’s already become the star of all our
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Welcome to our How to Grow Chinese Vegetables series. It’s the last post of the 2023 growing season, and we’re talking about how to grow watercress, or xīyáng cài (Mandarin)/sai yeung choy (Cantonese) – 西洋菜. My dad used to pick wild watercress with his family in the streams and brooks near where he grew up
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Ok, people! I am pretty certain that you’ve never seen this take on Thanksgiving leftovers before, and I am super excited to let you in on our family tradition. For as long as I’ve known Bill and his family, which is almost 30 years now, Thanksgiving Turkey Congee (or jook) has been and will always
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Welcome to our latest farm update! Somehow, we’re again at the end of another growing season at our farm (well—our “working mini-farm,” if we’re being technical about it). In between writing about food and showing how to cook it, we continue in our valiant efforts to grow it, too. It’s been another year of experimenting
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Black pepper chicken is a Chinese American dish that combines a comforting Chinese takeout-style brown sauce with a good amount of black pepper. While you mostly see Chinese cooks using white pepper, this dish highlights the floral aroma and heat of black pepper! Where I First Encountered Black Pepper Chicken I admittedly didn’t grow up
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Up until now, I’ve never thought about sharing a turkey gravy recipe. At our house, making the gravy for Thanksgiving dinner has always just been the assumed final step of cooking a turkey. You marinate and roast the turkey using our go-to Thanksgiving turkey recipe, and then just use the pan drippings to make gravy…right?
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A Wife Cake, or lao po bing (lǎopó bìng in Mandarin or lou po beng—pronounced more like “baeng“—in Cantonese – 老婆饼), is a Chinese dessert with a flaky pastry crust and a sweet winter melon filling. It is a Cantonese treat, which can be found as a shadow of their former selves in most Chinese
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If your mind is turning to holiday gifting, we’ve got a gift guide for every kind of person in your life, whether they be unfailingly practical, a constant traveler, a little artsy, a homebody, or fashion-forward. Check out our other gift guides! You might have seen that we have two other gift guides that are
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Host or Hostess gifts can be so much more than a bottle of wine or other alcohol! A gift for the host of your evening (whatever gender they may be) is a lovely opportunity to preemptively thank them for the fun you’ll have and retroactively thank them for the time, thought, and effort that went
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It’s our Kitchen and Garden gift guide, full of the select items we reach for again and again—for that cooking and/or gardening enthusiast in your life. The Kitchen and Garden Gift Guide Around the holidays, we often get questions from family and friends on the “best of” cooking tools. What’s worth it, what’s not, and
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We finally have a wrapper recipe to make gluten-free dumplings! The dough can be thrown together with a few ingredients from your gluten-free baking arsenal. Rolling them out is easy, and you can pleat the dumplings just as you would with regular dumpling wrappers! Previously, the closest thing we had to a gluten-free dumpling was
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