at home in…, w| Gerald Zhang-Schmidt

The dead of winter, turning of the sun… pumpkins from the fall garden still stored in a cool place, a memory of the last garden year. First, the pumpkin plants almost get destroyed by slugs. Then, they took over the patch of the garden where they were growing. Finally, quite a few pumpkins were to [...]

There could not possibly have been a time when eating was as “unnatural” a matter as it is today. Food Just Is After all, for the longest time, having any food at all was a rather stronger concern than what particular food would be particularly good for you. Therefore, “You’ll eat what’s put on the [...]

This winter was our first Central European rather than Hunan-Chinese winter (for my wife; for me, the first in a while), with temperatures not only going down to around freezing, but down to -20C, but with heating. (Hunan is one of China’s provinces south of the Yangtze, thus subtropical, thus getting no heating installed in [...]

Just a note: The new semester is about to start, but I’m embarking on new writing. First up: ChiliCult’s “Chilli-Laboratory” will get Chinese cooking class (or at least notes about cooking in China) added; a quick introductory post is online

One cannot escape the importance of food in China, whether it be as a foreigner seeking well-known comfort foods from home (poor bastards), a Chinese steeped in culinary traditions of one region to such a point that food from another part of the country is outright exotic (and not necessarily if that part is Xinjiang), [...]