One day, close to Thanksgiving, my daughter asked me, “Mom, have you ever cooked a turkey?” I quickly answered her, “No, never.”

In the past, every Thanksgiving and Christmas, it was either our dear friends Linda T or Linda W who made the turkey, and we just went to their home to enjoy good food and friendship. Last year, we followed our tradition and had our Thanksgiving dinner at Linda T’s home.

More than 20 years ago, three young families settled in this small southern town: Linda T’s family from Canada, Linda W’s family from Buffalo, New York, and mine from China. Our husbands work at the same place in the same research group. I don’t remember how we started but we have been carrying on with our tradition of celebrating holidays for over 20 years now: both Lindas do Thanksgiving, Christmas and later, we added Easter; I do Chinese New Year.

We started with 2 kids from the three families, and eventually, they grew into 7 eventually. Now, we are back to having 2 kids at home, 5 others either in colleges or at work. When some of the kids could not make it back to the dinner table from far away, we shared our moments of celebrations through Skype and other means – all around our dinner table.

Besides our three families, we have had people from all around the world sitting at our dinner tables. Dishes were not limited to turkey and gravy, mashed potatoes, and broccoli casserole: we had Indian food, baklava, Romania food, German food, Korean food and of course, Chinese food – everyone’s favorite dumplings and noodles, were also on the table. Our husbands would invite anyone who didn’t have a family waiting for them on holiday nights to our home and join us around our dinner tables. One holiday, there were 5 or 7 extra guests from a university working on the scheduled beam-line, far away from their families. That Thanksgiving Linda W had 36 people at her home and she cooked a 26-pound bird! Amazingly, our scientist husbands managed to arrange three tables into a T shape, across two rooms. It was a formal sit-down dinner with a pretty tablecloth and Linda W’s fine china sets. All the kids were asked to sit on a futon sofa surrounded by adults. We meant to limit their movements so they could sit there while using good table manners, but we quickly realized that the little ones had bested us on that: they were crawling out from under the table as freely as they wished.

When the kids started going to colleges, sometimes they had their Thanksgiving dinners somewhere else. They would report back to us that those traditional dinners were not as traditional as ours: there were no dumplings and noodles!

We were all proud when one of the kids cooked his very own first turkey and invited friends from different backgrounds to his dinner table.

Tradition has been passed on.

In this new land, we are thankful that we have the opportunity to pursue our dreams. We are especially grateful that we are surrounded by love and friendship – in a place far away from where we grew up!

After so many years of being at each other’s dinner tables, we have become a real family – gathered together from many parts of the world.

We are thankful!

To me, home is more about the dinner table than about anything else.

I have traveled halfway around the globe before settling down in a small town in the United States, where life is so different from where I grew up. Food, especially, is more exotic to me when I first moved to the U.S. than now. Over time, I have learned to cook in different styles: Eastern, Western, but mostly Chinese. These home-made meals bring back lots of memories – all mixed-up with my life here – just like a giant stir-fry dish.

Come and sit next to me at my dinner table, and enjoy a home-made meal and maybe a story or two.

September 24th this year is a traditional holiday in China, called Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋节) which has been celebrated for more than 2,000 years.

To celebrate, you’ve got to have a mooncake which symbolizes the whole family coming together to enjoy the brightest autumn moon. If someone from the family can’t make it back, a piece of mooncake will be evenly cut and saved for him or her.

I have learned to make mooncake recently, a special kind. Instead of flour dough, the outside of the cake is made of mung bean paste. The fillings are traditional red bean paste or a salty duck egg-yolk mixture.

This kind of mooncake used to be one of my dad’s favorite desserts in the fall season. Chinese don’t eat lots of sweets regularly, but a special occasion or holiday always comes with a special dessert.

My dad had passed away almost 4 years ago; he never had the chance to taste the mooncake I make. I think I chose to learn about making this cake to say how much I have missed my dad.

Dad, this whole piece is for you, I won’t cut it.

Traditionally, the Chinese celebrate birthdays with noodle dish, not cake. The long noodle symbolizes longevity.

Talking about noodles, oh boy, there are so many varieties of them and so many flavors that it is hard for me to know where to start.

Ok, let’s start with the thickness of the noodles. In one picture, you can see the noodles are as thin as hair; in another photo, you will see the noodles are as thick or wide as the belts.

The hair-thin noodles are from my grandma’s hometown in Fujian province (a southern place), all handmade. They are so thin that angel hair seems like a tree trunk compared to it (ok, I admit that I have exaggerated a bit). You cook this noodles in boiling water for only a few seconds.

I got a chance to visit the factory that produces this very special noodles. I was beyond belief to see those primitive, simple wooden or bamboo tools that were used to make these noodles! And we were told only a few very experienced and skilled workers can do the job and only certain days of the year they can be made successfully. The temperature and the humidity are crucial to the noodle making process and due to these the workers can’t make it year around which surprised me too. In nowadays technology, it is not difficult to measure the average temperature and humidity when it is a good time and then, set up a room with controlled temperature and humidity. Voila! You can make this high in demand noodles nonstop and year around.

This makes me think that preserve the traditions and progress to improve are a fine line to walk on. People are either refuse to change resulting in being unproductive, less competitive or too eager to change that we lose some skills and traditions that have passed down to us from generations before. Either way is sad and a loss.

Back to the very thick or wide noodles, the Chinese character for it has 56 pen strokes, most of the Chinese including me don’t know how to write it, see the photo. This kind of noodle you can only have them in the region of Shanxi (陕西), a northern region, its capital is the famous tourist destination – XiAn (西安) , where the stunning underground terra cotta soldiers buried thousands of years ago for China’s first emperor Qin Shi Huang (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qin_Shi_Huang) were found. We visited there last year and my son really liked this noodle dish.

The noodle I made here to celebrate someone’s birthday, is a typical northern dish, originated from Inner Mongolia and Shanxi province. You stir fry pork belly and green beans first and then add the dry noodles on top, add chicken broth to almost cover the beans. Cover your pan, turn the heat to low and let it simmer for 10-15 minutes, make sure you stir up the beans and noodles so the noodles fully soaked in the fat, broth and bean juice.

Serve it hot and wish someone a happy birthday!

Most of the dishes in China are regional. Like bread to the westerners here, rice is only for Chinese in the southern regions. For people living in the northern regions, steamed buns, noodles, different varieties of pancakes (饼）made of flour are the main stocks on the dinner table.

The scallion pancake is the one that both my kids love. They would order it every time a restaurant serves it when we were back in China visiting. They begged me to learn. So, here I am, learning how to make the scallion pancake.

After a few practices, I am getting better and better. The scallion pancake I made started to have many layers, crispy on the outside and soft inside. “Yummy”, my kids cried out.

But, only taste wise. Shape-wise, my pancakes are not perfectly round shaped, I can’t marry myself off, according to grandma Liu’s standards!

Grandma Liu was not my real grandma. She was a live-in housekeeper my dad hired to help my mom out. In Chinese culture, you call the elderly grandma or grandpa to show your respect.

Only in the past 30 years or so, many young girls from country villages have rushed to the big cities to seek the domestic helper’s job. When I was little, this job was mostly taken by elder women only. Some of them have a sad life story behind them, grandma Liu was one of them.

Grandma Liu was abandoned by her biological parents but was very lucky to be adopted by a very nice couple. Her dad pampered her with love and home-made toys. I would think grandma Liu had a happy childhood even though she had a rough start. Her luck ended soon after she got married. Not long after she had her son, her husband passed away. Grandma Liu was widowed in her late twenties. She never got married again.

Grandma Liu raised her son all by herself. As an illiterate woman, this was not an easy task. When she came to work for my family, her son was in his thirties.

We all loved grandma Liu dearly. She had earned our respects by being smart, happy and working hard. In those days, some basic foods such as oil, meat, egg, sugar, flour or rice in China were rationed. While we never experienced hunger, good quality foods were scarce. The government-owned grocery stores were empty most of the time and people stayed in a long line to buy fresh vegetables, fish, or anything that were not rationed.

We sometimes were eating cabbage for days because this was the only vegetable the store sold. And most of the time, they were not fresh at all. One of Grandma Liu’s unbelievable skills was that she could make the poor quality vegetables we ate for days tasted great! She would cut them into different shapes, cook them in different ways. Somehow, through her magic hands, the boring dishes were delicious to eat. That was when I started to stand by the stove watching her cooking. And that was when she started to tell me stories of her life.

We were living in a northern region then. Naturally, grandma Liu made foods from flour the most. Her cooking was like doing an art. The pancakes, dumpling wrappers were all the same thickness, perfectly round shaped. Grandma Liu said:”you have to practice hard to make the perfect shapes, make sure your kitchen is clean when you are done. Otherwise, you can’t get married, no decent men want a wife who can’t make perfect round shaped pancake. ”

Grandma Liu’s another trick that amazed my mom was she could make our very old clothes looked like perfectly ironed one without ironing them. She would carefully fold the clothes when they were about 95% dry. She put them on top of a wooden chair, then, she just sat on them, having a break herself. After a little while, the “ironing” was done and grandma Liu just got up, started doing another house chore. My mom tried a few times, she sat very still but never got the same “ironing” results.

Life was very harsh on grandma Liu. I saw her adult son coming to visit her a few times. Every time, he took money from grandma Liu. After he left, the easy smile grandma Liu always carried with her would be gone for a long while. Sometimes, I saw her staring in the distance for a long time, almost like she was kept in a horrible spell that she could not break through.

Later, when I was older, my mom told me that grandma Liu’s son was a lazy guy. At that time, most young people got married around 20, he was not married in his thirties and even worse, he was in a relationship with a married woman. He could easily get fired by just that. He squandered money he earned and always asked his mother for more money.

When my family got a chance to move to Beijing, grandma Liu was not working for us anymore but she would come to visit us sometimes. Before we moved away, my parents wanted to ask grandma Liu an important question. At that time, only very high-rank officials had a phone, mostly in their office, not their home. Grandma Liu could not read so my parents could not write to her. They went to see grandma Liu, telling her we were moving and asked her if she would like to move with us as a family member. My parents promised her that when she was too old to work, my parents would take care of her as their own parent. Grandma Liu was silent for a long while, then she told my parents that she couldn’t leave her son behind.

We never saw grandma Liu again.

Years later, we talked about grandma Liu, wondering how she was. We all hoped that at her end of life, her son had changed to be a responsible adult and treated her well. But sadly, in our hearts, we all knew this was a far reached hope.

I wish grandma Liu would know what a warm memory she had left with our family, and what an impact she had on me. Whenever I can’t make a perfectly round shaped pancake, I would remember what she said to me with a smile: you can’t marry yourself off with an ugly looking pancake.

Most of the Chinese meals are served hot, no matter it is breakfast, lunch or dinner.

Coming to the Western world, the very first thing to adjust is eating cold foods and raw vegetables called “salad”. It took a while for my stomach to get used to it. 20 years ago, it would be unimaginable that I will eat salad regularly, one big plate of it, every single morning.

Smashed Cucumber is a northern dish. The character “拍”, means “smash”, having a rugged, unrestrained personality that well fits the northerners in China. In the south, they have a similar cold dish made of cucumbers that helps to fend off the heat in the summer, but the cucumbers will be cut carefully into even slices or even fine shreds. Most of the times, southern dishes are more elaborated and northern ones are more casually prepared in China.

In the late 80s, foreigners were rare in China. I met two groups of them on trains, not the modern bullet trains that are everywhere in China nowadays but the old-fashioned green ones that burned coals. All of them were young students came to China to study or travel for fun. They were very adventurous.

They rode with ordinary Chinese people in sometimes very crowded train, squatting down or sat on the floor waiting to have a seat. The first time, it was two young guys, they even dressed in very traditional Chinese male shirts attracting lots of attention. They impressed everyone including me with their fluent Chinese, eating an apple without washing it and peeling the skin off, just a quick rub on their shirt as a “cleaning“ act. Most importantly, they touched everyone’s heart by genuinely and frequently helping some old peasants out, carrying their heavy load of produce in a dirty burlap bag to get off the train at stations that the train only stopped for 1 or 2 minutes. We had small talks. When people asked about their age, a typical question from Chinese, not a rude one, they asked me, a teenage girl then, to guess. From their beard faces, I hesitated and eventually said shyly in a low voice: around 50? They smiled, and told the curious people around they were 25. My face turned to a bloody red one.

The second time, it was a girl asking the service guy at the dining cart that grabbed attention to her. She asked in a voice with a hint of foreign accent if they had “拍黄瓜”(Smashed Cucumber). Of course, they didn’t serve that cheap, homey dish on the train. They wanted to make money off people traveling. But the passengers around were very surprised that this foreign girl knew this dish, their murmuring sounds were quite loud.

So, here you are, a homey, simple Chinese salad for the summer, a salute to all the adventurous souls who traveled in China.

1. Smash the cucumber

2. Sprinkle salt on them, sit for 10 minutes, drain the juice

3. Smash a clove of garlic, cut them into fine grains

4. Mix cucumber with garlic, one teaspoon of sesame oil, one tablespoon of soy sauce, half teaspoon of vinegar.

5. Serve and enjoy

In the pictures, I showed the kitchen knife most Chinese use, you use the side to smash cucumbers or garlic or anything you have the feeling to smash on😜. You don’t need to buy a Chinese style kitchen knife to smash things, a pestle will do the same job.

My previous post is about Grainger County Tomatoes. Naturally, I need to write this popular summer dish “Tomato and Egg Stir-Fry” we have in China.

This is such a homey dish that it is on many Chinese’s dinner tables in the summer, no matter you live in the south or north. And it is a very simple dish that both my kids learned their very first Chinese dish by cooking this if you don’t count scrambled egg as a dish.

And it is a delicious, very colorful, very appealing to your appetite, and a nutrient dish I would think most of the people will enjoy. At least, when I served this dish to my kids’ friends, most of them love it. After my son’s college friends had it, they immediately turned to my son and asked:”You can cook this, right?”

But somehow, the Chinese restaurants here don’t have it on their menu, I don’t understand.

It takes less than 15 minutes to make this tomato and egg stir-fry, here is how:

1. cut two medium size tomatoes into small chunks (Grainger County tomato is the best)
2. beat up 4 eggs with a teaspoon salt
3. scramble the egg quickly, make sure they are tender (don’t overcook)
4. with a tablespoon oil, put in one scallion that has been cut into small pieces in the hot oil, then put in the tomato chunks in, cover your pan
5. when the tomato chunks are losing its shape (soft and the juice is bubbling), add 1 and 1/2 teaspoon salt and add in the scrambled egg, stir them together to get the tomato juice evenly cover the egg
6. Serve it with steamed rice.

Even though it is a simple, easy dish, not everybody does it right. The important trick to remember is to cook the tomato until it starts to lose shape, that’s when the sweet and sour juice brings out the taste of tomato. The most awful story came from a girlfriend of mine. She was on a trip so her two kids were in the hands of her husband for a short while. Her kids requested this dish and her husband did it. The kids tasted the tomato, egg stir-fry and turned to their dad very suspicious: “Dad, why is the tomato still cold inside?” It turned out that the dad cut the tomato into 4 big chunks, threw them into the cooking pan and undercooked them, way under.

Tomato is not a native vegetable growing in China. The other day, I was amused by an article regarding foods in ancient China. The article pretends that you have time-traveled back a few thousand years in China and you are hungry. You rush into a restaurant and quickly order some regular foods you eat nowadays. Unfortunately, one by one, the waiter tells you no, no, no! At that time, the foods you have just ordered were not seen in China YET. In the article, it listed when lots of familiar foods were introduced to China. Tomato was mentioned first in a book published in 1621. So it was around 400-500 years ago, the Chinese started to have this beautiful vegetable, or as my daughter insists, a fruit, on their dinner table.

This makes me think that actually foods are the avant-garde step of globalization probably before people at that time even understood what globe was. And I believe everybody has no objection of this kind of globalization. Who doesn’t want to enjoy a tasty new food?

Interesting!