Why hello there, and, if my recent history is any indication, happy Lunar New Year! If, against all odds, I actually get this out on Monday, happy Lunar New Year Eve. For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, don’t worry, we’ll explain it in a minute. For those who do and are wondering why I’M talking about it, I assure you, we’ll get to that as well. For those wanting to skip all of that and get to the food, here’s a link. For our more curious cats, let’s dig in.

What Now New Year?

First thing’s first: what is Lunar New Year? It’s China’s New Year. SPECIFICALLY, and I want to remind everyone that I am at best a SEMI-Professional Food writer and didn’t have a ton of time to devote to researching this, it marks the shift in years of the ‘traditional’ Chinese calendar, which is a Lunisolar calendar. What does that mean? Well, it means that months are based on the moon, and years are based on the Sun. Wait. I may have to take a step back here, and lay out the basics of Calendars.

How far back are we talking?  

Zeroth Thing First: Calendars. Most of them are based on the movement of celestial bodies. For today, we’ll focus on the three main ones: Solar, Lunar, or Lunisolar.  First one, solar, is obvious, and the most familiar for most of my readers. The Gregorian Calendar (the one America and Europe use ever since they stopped using the Julian, and therefore, by extension, most countries have been FORCED to at least be partially aware of) is a Solar calendar: our years are based on the movement of the sun. Technically speaking, on January 31st of every year, the Sun should be in roughly the same place in the sky at noon, and that place should be in roughly the same relationship to various constellations in the night sky.

Lunar is even simpler: X number of full moons = one year. Since the cycle of the sun and moon is different, most lunar years are ‘faster’ than Solar ones: the Hijri calendar of Islam, for instance, has a 12 moon year, which is 355ish days, meaning every year, relative to the Gregorian calendar, all their dates are about 10 days earlier. (This is also why their calendar year is 1443 AH, “after (Hijra the formation of the first Muslim community) despite, by our calendar, that event taking place in 622.

Lunisolar (which I KEEP thinking is “solilunar”)  is…a fusion of the two in interesting ways. Different cultures do it differently, but there is almost always a greater need for “intercalation” (the addition of days to force the calendar back into agreement with itself.) We intercalate by having a Leap Day every 4 years, for instance. China fixed this by having a Leap MONTH every 3 years: you get 2 twelve month “normal” years, and then a “long” year.

“Oh, you have a Leap DAY? How cozy and quaint!”

So, China was using a Lunisolar calendar, and then the Modern Age came about. In the early 1900’s, China tried to move to the Gregorian Calendar, and IMMEDIATELY ran into a bunch of problems, because the fuck if everyone was going to give up their holidays. The Republic of China was working out how exactly to pair the two when some dude named Mao showed up, and suddenly they had a lot less people to worry about. The PEOPLE’S Republic of China said “Of course those fools did it wrong…but we still definitely have to do this, so here’s how we’re solving it.” So now, basically, in China, they use the Gregorian Calendar, but for festivals and holidays and so on, they use the traditional calendar as well. Thus, from year to year, the holidays “move around”. If this feels very weird, I would remind you that we do the exact same thing, for almost the exact same reason, for Easter. The Hebrew Calendar is a lunisolar one, and the Last Supper is believed to have been a Passover dinner, so we had to figure out how to correlate Passover months with Gregorian dates. (this is also why Passover “moves” less than Islamic holidays: Islam, as a fully lunar calendar, doesn’t ‘realign’ with the same frequency.)

A noted difficulty of Ramadan is that it’s harder when it falls in summer. Because it’s much easier to not eat while the sun is out when the sun isn’t out much.

Anywho, that’s the technical explanation. The social/livable explanation of “what is Lunar New Year” is “Chinese Christmas”. By which I mean that “the importance, social bonding, and cultural expectation and celebration of Lunar New Year to a Chinese audience is only comparable to that of Christmas in an American one.” But weirdly, even more extreme in some cases. We might talk about this more on Thursday if my dumplings and sauces don’t show up, but like, imagine if “the Christmas Rush” overwhelmed airlines, highways, trains, and buses from December 10th until January 20th. And I mean OVERWHELMED. In 2009, the Chinese ministry of Railways WARNED people, because their estimates showed that 340 million people were going to use their trains over the 40 days…on a system that on average can handle 3.4 million people per day. Meaning that they only had capacity for less than HALF the expected travelers. It’s WILD.

It’s ALSO got a LOT of traditions associated with it. Because it’s a big family dinner, you make a bunch of food, a lot of which is supposed to have import and symbolic meaning. Fruit is a very common gift at this time of year, particularly orange fruits (orange is supposed to symbolize wealth and prosperity, and in some dialects, the word for Orange sounds like the word for luck) and apples, whose name in Mandarin sounds like their word for “peaceful”. Which, I’m just going to put out there: if Peaches had been readily available during our New Year season, we would DEFINITELY have a cultural joke about and widespread market for wishing people a “Peach-ful” New Year

I knew in my heart, as I wrote the pun, that it had to be the label for a craft beer.

Other traditions include eating dumplings (to represent prosperity, since various dumplings look like either old school ingots of precious metals, or money pouches), a whole steamed fish (because “fish” sounds like “surplus”, and you want a whole one so your surplus lasts “from head to tail”/”the whole year”), Rice Cakes (there is a variety of glutinous rice cake directly named “Nian gao”, or meaning both Harvest Cake and “Year Growth”) and Noodles: specifically, Longevity/Long-Life Noodles. Supposedly, on your birthday and at New Year, you eat long noodles for a long life. The Longer, the better. And also, as we alluded to, a rather pointed question: Jon, since when are you Chinese?

Since When Are You So Nosy?

Title Jon abandoning his standard pun game is a weird development, but one I don’t want to question. And to be clear, yes, I am not Chinese. Hell, from what I know of the linguistics of Mandarin, I don’t even think you can SAY MY NAME using standard Mandarin vowels. (Though you can get pretty close: my understanding is it would end up sounding closer to “ohk-wen”) But in my defense, I was invited.

We call this a “ratio”, these days.

Yes, that’s right folks, we’re talking about cultural appropriation again! In case this is your first time, a quick overview: ‘cultural appropriation’ is a technically neutral technical term for the process by which cultures acquire ideas, styles, foods, tech, etc, from other cultures. The process can even create a feedback loop to the parent culture, often called the “pizza effect”. And Pizza is a great example: Italy makes “pizza”, sauced flat-bread with cheese and herbs. America finds out about this food, takes it, and starts putting their faux-Italian sausage “pepperoni” on it. (In case you also missed those: yeah, pepperoni is an American invention. It’s BASED on Italian salumnis, but its particular composition arose in the US.) And crumbled sausage, and a spree of other toppings. This comes back to Italy, who strengthen their association with pizza, and what toppings they approve of or disapprove of. Meanwhile, other countries learn about American-style pizza, and form their own versions, with toppings that even free-wheeling America would find strange: Japan likes Tuna and Corn pizza with Mayo as the sauce. Sweden loves to have their pizza with “pizza salad”, basically a vinegar-based coleslaw. They also love “Africana” pizza, which uses curry powder, bananas, peanuts, and ham or chicken. Korea goes…extra crazy. Right now, on Korean Domino’s, they have a Lunar New Year pizza that has Dumplings ON IT.

Since I can’t read Hangul, I have no idea how much of this ad I can edit out. But seriously, LOOK at that pizza.

Now, as an American, you may have had the thought there that some of those things I listed “aren’t pizza”. That’s where we get into the darker side of cultural appropriation: while it is, technically, a neutral term, in the last few decades it has predominantly used to discuss what would be best defined as “disrespectful or inconsiderate appropriation”. An example of this is the famous War Bonnet of Plains Indians of North America. People love the LOOK of the Feathered Headdresses, so they adopted them. But…those feathers have a purpose. An Eagle feather was the Plains Indian equivalent of a medal. Wearing a full eagle feather headdress to a football game is roughly the equivalent of slapping on a surplus uniform and pinning to it a Purple Heart and Medal of Honor to go to a Washington Generals game.

The fact that you think of it as a “Washington Generals” game instead of a Harlem Globetrotter game is already a problem.

And given Britain and America’s…shall we say “uneven” past with handling matters of extreme importance to other cultures (Remember back in the 80’s, when the explanation for like, 10 horror movies was “well, maybe we shouldn’t have bull-dozed that Indian burial ground”?) we often catch the short-end of the “that’s probably not cool” shtick. Which, to reference 80’s movies again, you intuitively understand. We’re the swaggering star QB of the Football team, when we rob from the geeks, it’s bullying. When they rob from US, it’s comeuppance. You know, that famous movie: Comeuppance of the Geeks? We couldn’t afford name-brand comedies.

The point is that if you want to celebrate Lunar New Year, or to at least recognize it, it’s better to do so gently, and passively. I’m not forcing myself into the Seattle International District, bedecking my house with red to ward off Nian, putting money in the traditional envelopes, or any of that. I’m just going to observe the holiday in the passive sense, and get some noodles and dumplings out of the deal. Food is a very resilient bit of culture, and one that adapts very well. It’s an easy doorway to learning new things. AS such, I present the following recipe not as any kind of authentic piece of Lunar New Year tradition, but as my attempt to acknowledge and honor this important time for well over a billion people.

Which is great, because a LOT went wrong.

Wok This Way

Oh, and now he’s back to the puns. Damn his inscrutable nature. Anyway, for context, this was my attempt to replicate a recipe I found on the website Woks of Life, hence the Title Pun.  Woks of Life is a great resource for Chinese cuisine (And have a BUNCH more articles about the specific traditions of Lunar New Year, if you want to learn more from a better source), with a ton of great recipes.

At its core, this recipe is VERY simple, as long as you ignore the many ways it is complicated. Specifically, you’re technically dealing with only about 4 ingredients: chives, mushrooms, noodles, and sauce. The DOWNSIDE is that A: the sauce itself has like, 8 ingredients, and B: as a stir-fried noodle dish, there’s a little bit of finicky-ness: stir frying on higher heat can be nerve-wracking your first few times, since the time between steps is measured in seconds.

So, the first step is shopping: there’s a couple ingredients in this dish you’re unlikely to find at your local grocery store, so you’ll want to find an Asian market. Fresh (or reconstituted) Shiitake Mushrooms you can probably get, but Garlic Chives/Chinese Chives/Nira are much harder to find outside of Asian markets.

Supposedly, if you plant it, it grows like CRAZY, so that’s one solution.

They’re flatter, and have a more vegetal/mild taste than our chives, and used in a LOT of Chinese cooking. The other major ingredient you’ll need that might be hard to find are the Noodles. If you’re fancy, you’d make your own super-long noodles. Barring that, you might hunt down yi mein/e-fu noodles, the ‘standard’ Long-life/longevity noodles. If you can’t find them, you might look for lamian or “hand-pulled” noodles. And if you can’t find THEM, congratulations, neither could we. I spent at least 10 minutes looking over probably 70+ types of noodles at the local H-Mart on Saturday, and couldn’t find a single one that looked like what we wanted (which, in their defense, is much like showing up to a grocery store the Monday before Thanksgiving and being surprised that the Stuffing mix is all out) so we settled for some fresh kalguksu noodles, which I’m sure threw the entire recipe out of whack, for reasons we’ll get into later, but are most noteworthy now because, as “knife-cut noodles”, they definitely conflict with the “long noodles long life” goal, and imply that we’ve set ourselves up to be murdered this year, symbolically speaking.

The sauce is not particularly complicated, mainly notable to me only because it continues to add to my belief that there’s some kind of pseudo-mother sauce of Chinese cuisine my recipes keep dancing around: there’s only so many times I can be told to mix soy sauce, sugar, water, dark soy sauce, sesame oil and oyster sauce, in minor variations of ratios, before I start to say “This is just like, a thing, right? There’s just like a basic “savory sauce” that these are all riffs on?”

This one looks HIDEOUS, because the sesame oil and white pepper interacted in a weird way.

Sauce prepped, cook whatever noodles you could find, but do it a little under package instructions: they’re going to be stir-fried for around 3-5 minutes, so that will cook them the rest of the way. Cut the garlic chives into 2” segments, thinly slice the shiitakes, heat a wok, and make sure everything’s set up nicely. If you want to be REAL cool, you can test your wok with long yao, essentially a mini-preseasoning, where you take your smoking hot wok, and swirl it with a small amount of oil, just to ensure that everything is properly non-stick, and to create some…crap, I can’t remember if its’ carbonization or polymerization of the oil. (Part of the flavor of wok-fried foods comes from, essentially, the oil BURNING to a light degree, which this can aid with. Another thing that will aid it, if you don’t have a high-power burner, is using a torch as you toss the food, but that’s a step outside my comfort zone for the moment. I can barely TOSS this wok right now.)

Anyway, once everything’s ready, add 2 tbsps of oil to the pan, then the sliced mushrooms and the lighter parts of the chives. Toss them for about 30 seconds, doing a quick check in case the mushrooms absorbed all the oil. If so, add a little more if they still look dry. Then, in goes the noodles, and toss that all together for 20 seconds. OR, if your kalguksu have solidified into a single mass, swear violently and beat the crap out of the mixture for like, a minute. Add the sauce, and toss to evenly coat.

Turns out it is NOTABLY hard to take a clear picture while tossing stuff in a streaming wok.

Cook for another minute, while eye-balling the situation, and adjusting it as you see fit. If the noodles are still clumping, or sticking to the pan, more oil. If they look dry, add some hot water. I added a little extra soy sauce, because I remembered that our noodles were a little more than called for (the recipe calls for 12 ounces of noodles, we had 14) Once you think it’s looking pretty good, Add the rest of the greens, and toss everything together for 1-3 minutes, until you think the noodles are heated through, and everything’s looking good. Then slap that sucker in a bowl.

Hey, that looks pretty good, actually.

The result is…fine? Honestly, I’d call it under-seasoned. Though that’s probably a good sign: I know there are many Americanized versions of Chinese food that are considered too salty by traditional standards. And hey, too much sodium is bad for you, so over-seasoning your longevity noodles can’t be a great call. I will say that, other than the noodles bunching up, the process FELT very intuitive and reasonable. I definitely recommend it if you’re trying to start out learning to use a wok. (or wait till Kenji’s next cookbook about Woks comes out and see what he says.) Mushrooms, as we’ve discussed before, are functionally impossible to overcook, and if your chives end up a little extra wilted, that’s not too noticeable.  So Happy New Year, everyone! May it be a peach-ful one.

THURSDAY: DUMPLING SAUCES, OR CHINESE LOGISTICS? I FEEL LIKE I MAY HAVE COMMITED TO THAT SECOND ONE TOO EARLY.

MONDAY: IT’S TIME TO COOK FOR THE GRIDIRON, AS WE REPRESENT ONE OF THE CHAMPIONSHIP TEAMS OF THE NFL. WILL IT BE CINCINNATI OR LOS ANGELES? WE DON’T KNOW FOR SURE, BUT GIVEN THAT WE DID LA THREE YEARS AGO, WE’RE LEANING TO OHIO.

Recipe

Longevity Noodles

Makes 4 servings

Ingredients

                Sauce

⅛ teaspoon sugar

¼ teaspoon salt (or to taste)

1 tablespoon hot water

2 teaspoons regular soy sauce

2 teaspoons dark soy sauce

2 tablespoons oyster sauce

1/2 teaspoon sesame oil

White pepper

                Noodles

Water for noodles

~12 ounces yi mein noodles, or whatever long, preferably flat noodles you can get your hands on. In dire straits, you could do this with linguine.

5-6 shiitake mushrooms,

8 ounces garlic chives

¼ cup vegetable oil

Preparation

1. Make the sauce: dissolve the salt and sugar in the hot water, mix with all other sauce ingredients.

2. Bring the water (at least 2 quarts, depending on your noodles) to a boil, and UNDERcook the noodles: like, whatever the al dente number is, shave a minute or two off of the lower one for that.

3. While water is heating/noodles are boiling, you can stem and slice the mushrooms, and cut the chives into 2 inch segments, separating the lighter end from the darker one. Pre-heat your wok until smoking.

4. Add a dash of oil to swirl around the wok, seasoning it, and then add half of the remaining oil. Add in mushrooms and lighter ends of the chives. Stir-fry for 30 seconds, adding more oil if mushrooms seem dry.

5. Add noodles, and stir-fry/toss for 20 seconds, or until properly warmed up to absorb sauce. Add sauce, and cook another minute, tossing to ensure noodles are evenly coated. If noodles are sticking, add more oil. If noodles look dry, add hot water.

6. Add remaining chives, and cook an additional 1-2 minutes, until noodles are heated through.  Remove from heat, move into bowls, and serve.