Family food culture, local food memories, workers’ table stories, and personal relationships with food.
Tulan and her family, herders in Harigaobi gacha, East Ujimqin Banner, Inner Mongolia, remain committed to raising traditional Ujimqin sheep through seasonal nomadic herding. With just clear water and salt, the clean fragrance of the grassland rises from the pot.
Yiyi Farm’s universal red sour soup, made by stir-frying ginger and garlic in lard then simmering with tomatoes and celery, can boil fish, blanch beef, cook noodles, stir-fry vegetables, or become a sour soup hot pot — lifting the flavour and whetting the appetite after Spring Festival’s heavy meat and fish.
Foodthink and the Beijing Organic Farmers Market farmers present New Year’s Recipes, days two to seven. This radish simply needs the skin left on, thick-cut strips, and a dish of soy sauce set beside it — its crisp bite cuts through New Year’s rich, heavy fare.
Xiucai Doufang’s five-step, soybean paste–braised tofu is one of the dishes in the Spring Festival Recipe Collection from Foodthink and the Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market. Six farm friends each serve one dish made with their own produce, from the second to the seventh day of the Lunar New Year.
Beijing Huairou Snail Farm shares its New Year recipe: slow-braise a free-range rooster with beer and spices, and in about two hours this dish comes together easily at home.
Wu Longlong from Mutongxin Farm personally shares his method for Fragrant Steamed Pork Belly. From the second to the seventh day of the New Year, Foodthink, together with farmers from the Beijing Organic Farmers Market, presents a New Year Recipe Collection – one dish each day.
From the second to the seventh day of the Lunar New Year, Foodthink is teaming up with farmers from Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market to share six New Year recipes made with their own ingredients, helping use up leftovers while adding a new dish to the table each day.
Once the Start of Winter passes, Songyang dries starch, hangs persimmons, sets up wine vats for New Year’s Eve: Sister Zhuhua has steamed cakes for nearly thirty years; Xu Yeyin tends a hundred jin of glutinous rice into red yeast rice wine; Songzhuang’s feast begins, as ever, before breakfast.
Kouzi’s sixth winter in rural Fujian puts the rocket stove and the big kang, the polytunnel and the old granary, radish, ginger and jujube soup, and dried pumpkin to work, turning the damp cold into warm, easy days.
In Èrén Gǔ, Kouzi served roasted pumpkin, maize and homemade tempeh at the table, using an air fryer and a high-speed blender to make seasonal harvests into everyday staple foods.
