Thursday 2 August 2012

cooking from books

Wendy and I went on an adventure to Wangfujing yesterday, because we want to stock up on Chinese cookbooks before we leave Beijing.
vegetarian books
It was pretty exciting - this is not even half of the vegetarian section. Of course you may recall the problems I have at times had with being vegetarian in Beijing - enduring meat as garnish, 'it doesn't have egg, it's sweet' - so some of these vegetarian cookbooks have the occasional shrimp garnish, but the ones I have are super awesome and I'm so excited.
books purchased
I have eaten so many amazing dishes while I've been in Beijing, that I cannot wait to start making these at home, and for my friends and family at home.

It was funny, my excitment over these cookbooks. I've mostly moved on from cookbooks in my life, because it's so easy to find recipes online. But a lot of this stuff I've never been able to find while searching in English, and when I google in Chinese often my eyes start to glaze over, and it's hard for me to skim read. So these beautiful cookbooks, with pictures, sometimes step by step.

Anyway, prepare yourselves, vegetarian Melbourne, for some delicious new experiments.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

oh my gosh how COOL!! i would love to have a cook book in another language -- especially chinese!

pfctdayelise said...

I AM PREPARED TO VOLUNTEER AS GUINEA PIG

steph said...

@glutenfreehappytummy - yeah i'm excited. i have a few books at home in malay, too.

@pfctdayelise YEAH I BET YOU ARE

Joey said...

Looking forward to see the results of experimenting with those bad boys!

Cindy said...

Oh, I feel excited for you too! I hope you might be inspired to write up your successful dishes in English on your blog.

I'm actually waiting for a German language cookbook to be delivered to me. I won't be able to read it and will be clumsily google-translating everything, but it's from the head chef at one of the awesome vegan restaurants we visited in Berlin and it's my only hope of replicating anything they served us.

steph said...

@joey i'm really excited!

@cindy i hope i do too! at the very least i'll take photos and then feed them to people. i'm actually really looking forward to sharing these dishes with everyone, i've enjoyed so much new stuff here.