“Whoa, they have Chinese sausage,” Meilee Chou Riddle remarks to her mom, Hsiao-Ching Chou, as they peruse the aisles of the Town & Country Market in Shoreline.
Meilee and her mom are shopping for ingredients to make Lunar New Year foods from their cookbook, Feasts of Good Fortune, which features 75 recipes for a full year of celebrations the Chinese-American way. Into the cart go leafy green gai lan (Chinese broccoli), ginger, a crisp head of romaine, and a bag of T&C EveryDay Shrimp. As they browse the Asian Foods section of the market, Hsiao-Ching and Meilee toss a few impulse purchases into the cart as well, including several items you might be surprised to find in your neighborhood Town & Country, like century eggs and smoked soy sauce.
"I love shopping at Town & Country Market, especially the Shoreline market, because I so appreciate how they're able to integrate all these different cultural foods into your regular grocery store," says Hsiao-Ching. "Sometimes the struggle with shopping is that you have to go to all these different markets to get all the different things that you need. But if you can go to one market and cover the world in a meaningful way, it's fantastic to me."
Try This at Home
If you’d like to celebrate Lunar New Year – or specifically Chinese New Year – at home, Hsiao-Ching recommends starting with Stir-Fried Romaine and Garlic Shrimp with Gai Lan, two symbolism-rich foods which appear in Feasts of Good Fortune.
“At Lunar New Year, you want to have foods from land and sea to show the bounty,” she explains. “Garlic shrimp and gai lan brings in a little protein but uses an Asian vegetable—it gives folks an idea of how to use that ingredient if they’re not familiar with how to cook with it.”
With the stir-fried romaine, “Lettuce symbolizes good fortune,” Hsiao-Ching explains. “Lunar New Year brings you into spring, and green reminds you of spring.”
“I chose stir-fried romaine because people don’t expect that they could stir-fry lettuce. It’s typically something you eat raw in a salad or a wrap,” says Hsiao-Ching. “But you can definitely stir-fry any heartier type of green, like romaine or escarole … and cooking it takes hardly any time at all.”
Want to experience the full range of Lunar New Year foods for yourself? Pick up a copy of Feasts of Good Fortune online or in your neighborhood Town & Country Market.
A Family History of Food and Storytelling
Born in Taiwan, Hsiao-Ching came to the US as a small child when her family moved so her father could earn his graduate degree in journalism from the University of Missouri. Her mother, also a journalist with a master's from Mizzou, later stepped away from her career in order to open a restaurant to support their family.
“My parents taught themselves how to cook and to run a business. The restaurant was a means to an end, not a passion,” says Hsiao-Ching. “I like to say that my college education was paid for by cashew chicken.
Hsiao-Ching followed in her parents' footsteps, studying journalism in school. She went on to write for Seattle Post-Intelligencer for a decade, covering—what else?—food, and later chaired the James Beard Foundation’s Book Awards Committee.
It wasn’t until later in her career, however, that Hsiao-Ching published a cookbook of her own, Chinese Soul Food. “One day, it just clicked: I need to write this book. I asked my friends, If I did this cookbook, what questions would you have for me? Once I decided, it just flowed. I knew what the story was.”
“It was important for me to pass these skills down to my kids and anyone who wants to learn,” she says.
Feasts of Good Fortune, Hsiao-Ching's third cookbook, was a project born of the pandemic, an opportunity not only to share her family’s holiday traditions with a broader audience, but also to connect with her teenage daughter.
“Inviting Meilee to talk about the recipes gives her another way to reflect on why we do these celebrations,” says Hsiao-Ching. Each section of the book opens with an essay by Meilee explaining what that particular celebration means to her. “This project was about giving Meilee a voice.”
Like her parents—her dad, Eric, is an Emmy Award-winning producer—Meilee is also a talented storyteller. She's an award-winning student filmmaker whose work has been featured in regional and national film festivals. Fittingly, when Meilee was in high school, she created a mini-documentary called Chou’s Buffet, which examined her maternal grandmother’s immigration story.
"Cooking like this has been the one thing that's just the most consistent in my life, and so it's very comfortable. I think it was a process growing up, learning how to have a good relationship with food on my own, and then how I can carry that on to my now adult life," says Meilee. "Now I'm learning to cook for myself and trying to break out of my comfort zone. I'm trying new things and doing a lot, and that's been scary. But it's really fun to have that independence, and my mom gave me all the tools that I need to do that successfully, so I'm very grateful for that."
On collaborating with her mom to document her family's holiday traditions, Meilee reflects, "My mom says food is a universal language. Everybody has recipes that mean a lot to them, and they carry memories and emotions. So it's really special to me—with all my mom's books, but particularly this one—to have that literally in my back pocket."
The Universal Language of Love
In Chinese culture, food is a way to express care, love, and affection. So it’s no surprise it plays such a big role in holidays. "At Lunar New Year, we talk about the feast as tuan yuan, which means the gathering together of people around the table," explains Hsiao-Ching. "You gather around the table to share a lot of food. Wherever you are in the world, you come home. It's about paying respects to the elders and really just having those conversations that you don't get to have every day. If you have a chosen family or you bring your friends together, it's a way to build community as well."
To Meilee, these celebrations are also about making sure everyone feels seen and included. "Something that goes under-appreciated is the fact that my mom will make a dish specifically to everybody's liking because everybody is so picky in our family. And now, as we're expanding celebrations like Lunar New Year out to more than just our family, and we have family, friends and neighbors and all these people, [you] make a specific dish for everybody so they feel invited, and everybody has something that they feel comfortable eating."
"People have different relationships with food and you don't know what they're going through, and it's easy enough for me to exclude an ingredient that somebody either has an allergy for or doesn't like," Hsiao-Ching says," she continues.
"Food is not just about community, but it's also about love."
Making Chinese Cooking Accessible
Hsiao-Ching’s approach to cooking is thoroughly approachable: all of the recipes in Feasts of Good Fortune and her two other cookbooks, Chinese Soul Food and Vegetarian Chinese Soul Food, were designed to be accessible for home cooks without prior experience preparing Chinese food.
She invites her readers to make substitutions where necessary: “I always say, I can recommend specific products, but get the thing that’s available to you.”
The same goes for kitchen equipment. No wok? No problem. “You could cook either of these recipes in a deep skillet if you wanted to,” Hsiao-Ching said of the two recipes she and Meilee shared with Town & Country.
“I think of my Lynnwood-grown husband… and I try to imagine him making them for the first time,” she explained. “I write my recipes from that perspective: how do I make my recipes streamlined without losing the essence of what they are?”
This streamlined approach makes the recipes quicker to prepare as well, a must for weeknight meals: “I can be a fussy cook, but most of the time, I don’t want to be—I work full-time,” Hsiao-Ching says with a laugh.
Adapting Family Traditions for the Next Generation
Ultimately, Hsiao-Ching sees food traditions as flexible, not fixed. "People bring baggage into the kitchen, and I wanted to release them from that weight of carrying around, Oh, you should do this, or you should do that," she says. "It's like, here's here's the story. Here are the traditions. You do what you need to do. Take a piece of it, have the spirit of of that celebration. I wanted to include Meilee in that and have her voice to represent her generation, to be a part of that so she feels connected to it and grounded in telling those stories."
In the context of her own family, this philosophy has been a success: "Through the process of this book, I've learned so much about traditions and practices that carry on down our family, and also just how traditions can change and how that's okay," says Meilee. "As long as you have that connection and the emotion at its core, the circumstances can change and be different. And so I'm learning how to create my own traditions within food and spread that to the people that I love and also carry on my family's traditions."