Chinese Radish Salad 紅蘿蔔沙拉

Here's a cool, crunchy, vinegary dish for the hot Hong Kong summer.  And you can make this Chinese Radish Salad  紅蘿蔔沙拉 in under 5 minutes too.  Isn't it a pretty sight on the dinner table with it's blushing reds and delectable whites? What a charmer, eh?  If you need another dish for dinner during the hot summer, why not add a quick cold chinese salad dish like this?  

Radishes are great for you, lots of vitamin C as well as iron, magnesium and calcium.  My little girl loves this radish salad too!  Pink one, pink one, she says.  Don't worry about the peppery taste of the red radish eaten raw as it will be transformed into vinegary sweet mellowness when prepared into this radish salad.  Hope you like it!

Grandma's Zong Zi Meat Dumpling 肉粽子

Zong zi, I think, is love. A tender and lovingly wrapped package of pure love.  Find this hard to swallow?  Prove it to yourself by unwrapping and eating a zong zi, or 粽子, that is laboriously prepared by someone who loves you and see if you don't feel completely satisfied, happy, really loved after that deliriously aromatic, droolingly savory (or sweet) zong zi.  

I know that I had that feeling often enough in my childhood, while happily eating the 粽子 that my dearest grandmother made just for us.  I truly believe, as taught to me first by Tita from the wonderful story Like Water for Chocolate, that the feelings and love that you have inside can be transmitted into the food that you cook and thereby to the people who eat your food.