“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 section of the store, 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.
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. Storytelling and food: the Chou family’s legacy has come full circle once again.
“I really admire my mom’s work ethic,” Meilee says. “It was cool to be able to collaborate professionally and not just see her work from the outside.”
The Universal Language of Love
In Chinese culture, food is a way to express care, love, and affection; as such, it’s no surprise it plays such a big role in holidays.
As Hsaio-Ching writes in the intro to Feasts of Good Fortune: “The meal becomes a way to convey love, generosity, and all the warmth that comes with the territory.”
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 doable 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 try not to make recipes that are challenging. 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, with ingredients that are accessible?”
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.
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.”