Best 22 quotes in «chinese food quotes» category

Like all Jews, I was probably at a Chinese restaurant!

A formal ten-course Chinese dinner was a deliberate courtship of the senses. The appetizers of cold plate meats gave way to steaming fish maw soup, cold and hot introductions to titillate and delight before the showcase of entrees: beef, pork, chicken, fish, seafood, vegetables. The ensuing textures, aromas, and flavors seduced, fulfilling the promises of the first courses. The inclusion of noodle and rice dishes provided a sense of comfort. The final dessert course of sesame balls stuffed with red-bean paste sealed the engagement on the sweetest of notes.

My food demons are Chinese food, sugar, butter.

Charlie glanced at the poster hanging on the door, which announced the store's annual Hungry Ghost Festival, just four days away. It used to be Charlie's favorite holiday, from the puppet shows at the community center to the paper lanterns that his mom hung outside and to the food- especially the food. Sautéed pea shoots. Roasted duck. Pineapple cakes that fit into the palm of your hand. Then there was his grandma's shaved ice with all the toppings- chopped mangos, condensed milk poured on thick, and her famous mung beans in sugary syrup. He could eat a whole bowl of those.

As she drank, she closed her eyes and tried to imagine she was drinking her grandmother's porridge. What she wouldn't give for a hot bowl of fish congee, sprinkled with green scallions and topped with a dollop of sesame oil! She'd even have willingly downed one of her mother's herbal soups; Fa Li used to make red sage soup almost every day when Mulan was growing up. How she'd hated the smell and pungent taste. She used to pick out the chopped pieces of the root and chew on the sweet wolfberries instead. She missed home so much.

At least there's nothing traditional about an engagement dinner, so we'll be spared having to prepare a twelve-course wedding banquet loaded with meaning. There will be no roasted pig to symbolize purity. No bright red lobster for luck. No shark fin soup for wealth.

For my first home-cooked meal in Tokyo, I took an assortment of beautiful Japanese ingredients and did what came naturally: I made Chinese food. I stir-fried some beautifully marbled kurobuta (Berkshire breed) pork with bok choy, ginger, and leeks, sauced it with soy sauce, mirin, and vinegar, and served it over rice, sprinkled with shichimi tōgarashi seven-spice mixture. This seemed like a reasonable act of Japanese-Chinese fusion. I made some quick-pickled cucumbers on the side. This was before we discovered that anything you do to a Japanese cucumber diminishes it. I should have known this; once I interviewed a Japanese-American farmer who grows more than a hundred Asian vegetables in Washington state. Naturally, I asked him about his personal favorite. Cucumber, he said. "How do you prepare it?" I asked. "Slice and eat." The whole meal was about the same as something I'd make at home, but I cooked it in Japan. It was like the SpongeBob SquarePants episode where SpongeBob has to work the night shift at the Krusty Krab, and he keeps saying things like, "I'm chopping lettuce... at night!" I was slicing cucumbers... in Tokyo!

I combined garlic, five-spice, black peppercorns, Thai chilies, and paprika in a large bowl for the seasoning. I tumbled two pounds of chicken wings out of their brown paper wrappings and into the waiting bowl, where I kneaded the pungent mixture into them, squeezing the spices into the meat like an experienced massage therapist. Another bowl full of Shaoxing rice wine awaited the wings as the next step after their rigorous massage. They soaked and relaxed, basking in the pool of wine to become drunken like their name.

If you walk into a woman's apartment and nothing's out of place, you know she's not going to want to stay in bed all day and order in Chinese food and eat it in bed. She's going to make you get up and eat toast at the kitchen table.

Chinese food in Texas is the best Chinese food in the United States except Boston.

I found Chinatown both impossibly sophisticated and unbearably out of vogue. Chinese restaurants were a guilty pleasure of mine. I loved how they evoked the living world- either the Walden-like sense of individualism of the Ocean or Happy Garden, or something more candid ("Yummies!"). Back home they had been a preserve of birthdays and special celebrations: a lazy Susan packed with ribs and Peking duck, rhapsodically spun to the sound of Fleetwood Mac or the Police, with banana fritters drenched in syrup and a round of flowering tea to finish. It felt as cosmopolitan a dining experience as I would ever encounter. Contextualized amid the big-city landscape of politicized microbreweries and sushi, a hearty table of MSG and marinated pork felt at best crass, at worst obscurely racist. But there was something about the gloop and the sugar that I couldn't resist. And Chinatown was peculiarly untouched by my contemporaries, so I could happily nibble at plates of salt and chili squid or crispy Szechuan beef while leafing through pages of a magazine in peace.

It's macaroni soup. Curls of pasta swim in steaming, fragrant broth, and pieces of boiled chicken are all tangled up with them, the meat nearly fallen off the bones. It's comfort food, the kind my parents brought over the ocean with them twenty-five years ago, and the kind that doesn't fit westernized Chinese restaurant menus. My mother used to make it for us for breakfast, before we got older and told her we had no time to eat in the morning if we wanted to make the school bus. For years now it's been only the occasional snack, a rare treat. But I still like it best made with sugar, and so does my brother Lei. Only our older sister Yun asks for it this way, savory and salty.

Sesame oil sizzled in the air, popping out of a hot wok filled with stir-fried enoki mushrooms, mustard greens, baby bok choy, and strips of pork tenderloin. My mother had danced by the stove against snakes of smoke emanating from sticks of sandalwood incense stuck in nearby pots of ash. scent filled our Chinatown apartment.

Special combo, you got it," I say into the phone. "Which one?" "The winter melon soup." Winter melon is symbolic of a wife- a special order of the soup means someone's is about to be abducted. A special order of egg fried rice? Someone's kid. Fried pot stickers? A husband. Shanghai chow mein with chopped-up noodles? Someone's doomed to have their life cut short, the promise of longevity broken.

The server soon brought large platters of cheung fun and zhaliang along with various condiments for dipping. Cheung fun was a delightfully surprising dish: nestled within the flat, translucent rice rolls were plump prawns. Zhaliang were crispy, long fritters wrapped in rice noodle. This was a favorite because of the combinations of contrasting textures: tender steamed rice noodles and crunchy golden fritters. The taste of these two dishes was determined by its accompanying dressing: spicy if paired with hot mustard, salty with soy sauce, and sweet with the peanut sauce.

The Chinese food arrives. Delicious saliva fills his mouth. He really hasn't had any since Texas. He loves this food that contains no disgusting proofs of slain animals, a bloody slab of cow haunch, a hen's sinewy skeleton; these ghosts have been minced and destroyed and painlessly merged with the shapes of insensate vegetables, plump green bodies that invite his appetite's innocent gusto. Candy.

The next morning I invited Celia over for a breakfast of congee with pickled cucumbers and shredded pork. The dried scallop and duck wings added an extra dimension of flavors to the plainness of the rice porridge. Crowned with delicate rings of spring onion and golden bits of fried garlic, the bowls of steaming porridge were comfort food. Our toppings of choice were crunchy pickled cucumbers and sweet shredded pork floss.

When I was a little girl, I would gorge on her fried tofu with chilies. I was much slimmer back then, you know." "Was the tofu your favorite dish of hers?" I asked. "Oh no, there's too many to count." Celia's tone softened as if she were waxing nostalgic about a lost, grand romance, rather than a recipe. "Everything she cooked was excellent. I still remember every dish that she made: beef noodle soup, braised short ribs, drunken chicken wings, deep-fried shrimp rolls... Your laolao cooked from her heart, and that's why her food was the best in Chinatown.

You were abducted by space aliens. Of course you want egg rolls.

I may have ruined my life, but at least I got to eat some really good Chinese food.

The gray shells of the shrimp gleamed like smooth pebbles in a stream. Ten minutes before the guests arrived, I would submerge them into a hot bath of clear soda accented with slices of ginger. I watched and waited, checking for when the shells turned coral. The soda enhanced the natural sweetness of the shrimp. This dish would be the last to be cooked because of its short cooking time. I also prepared a batch of scented jasmine rice. Every Chinese meal was accompanied by the requisite rice or noodle staple.

Yin-yang fried rice was a feast for the eyes and the senses. Swirls of cream contrasted with an orange tomato sauce to form the iconic pattern. Underneath the sauces lay a bed of yang chow fried rice containing a bounty of minced jewels: barbecued pork, Chinese sausage, peas, carrots, spring onions, and wisps of egg. Slices of white onions and pork emerged from the tomato sauce while shrimp and sweet green peas decorated the cream.