Fortune cookies may not be authentically Chinese, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have fun making them at home for the Lunar New Year. For the Chinese New Year, a.k.a. the Lunar New Year, which begins on February 1st, why not make fortune cookies at home?

In addition to making tastier cookies than you get at restaurants, you get to write your own fortunes.

National Fortune Cookie Day is July 20th, but why wait until then?

In addition to the Lunar New Year, Valentine’s Day is coming up. You can probably come up with some choice Valentine fortunes.

Here’s a recipe to make fortune cookies at home.

If you’d feel more comfortable with a kit (photo #2), or you’d like to give one as a gift, head here.

Fortune cookies are more than a snack to crack open for the fortune inside.

> Here are other things to do with fortune cookies.

> How about a green tea fortune cookie cake?

> Or a fortune cookie cocktail?

> The history of fortune cookies.

> The different types of cookies.

> The history of cookies.
 
 
WHAT IS THE LUNAR NEW YEAR?

The Chinese calendar, also called the lunar calendar, is a lunisolar calendar, i.e., it’s based on the movement of both the moon and the sun.

Because the track of the new moon changes from year to year, the Chinese/Lunar New Year can begin anytime between late January and mid-February.

This occasion is a traditional festival celebrated by many East Asian cultures. It marks the beginning of the lunar calendar year and is one of the most significant and widely observed holidays in East Asia.

The event is marked not just in China and the rest of Southeast Asia, but across the globe. Who would pass up a celebration with all that great food—dumplings, noodles, spring rolls, and a long list of favorite dishes.

Marking the beginning of another lunar year, the festival lasts for more than two weeks: family reunions, prayers, and feasting, a five-day Lantern Festival, and a New Year’s Eve of reunions and gift-giving.

The tradition of spending the Lunar New Year holiday with family means that hundreds of millions of Chinese people (among other Asian groups) are traveling home to be with family. It’s the world’s biggest annual migration.

Separate from the holiday is the ascendance of the year’s reigning animal. Each new year brings with it an animal from the Chinese zodiac.

The Chinese zodiac is based on a twelve-year cycle. Each year in the cycle has an animal sign: the rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat/ram/sheep, monkey, rooster, dog or pig.

This approach is believed to have originated during a period in which animal worship was practiced in China.
 
THE HISTORY OF THE LUNAR NEW YEAR 

The Lunar New Year, also known as Chinese New Year or Spring Festival, The history of the Lunar New Year dates back some 2,000 years and has deep cultural and historical roots, central to Chinese and other Asian cultures*.

The origins of the Lunar New Year can be traced back to ancient China, where it was closely tied to agricultural cycles. The festival is believed to have originated during the Shang Dynasty (c. 1600–1046 B.C.E.) with rituals and ceremonies to celebrate the harvest and pray for a good planting season.

Emperor Yao and Nian Monster. According to legend, there was a mythical beast called Nian that would come out to harm people and livestock on the eve of the New Year. The people discovered that Nian was afraid of loud noises and the color red.

This led to the tradition of using fireworks, firecrackers, and hanging red decorations during the festival.

The Chinese Zodiac. The Chinese zodiac, consisting of 12 animal signs, plays a significant role in the Lunar New Year. Legend has it that Buddha invited all the animals to join him for a New Year’s celebration, and the first 12 to arrive were each rewarded with a year in the zodiac cycle.

Thus, each year is associated with a specific animal and its characteristics.
It’s been in use for and As with western zodiac followers, people use it to determine their fortune for the year, romantic and business prospects, etc.

Here’s the difference between the two zodiacs.

This year (2022) is the Year Of The Tiger.

[1] How about making fortune cookies with your own style of fortunes. Try this recipe (photo © The Semisweet Sisters).

[2] A kit can make the job easier (photo © World Market).

[3] You can dip them in chocolate, as they do at Emily’s Chocolates (photo © Love With Food).

[4] The Year Of The Tiger. You can download a free PDF here of this and several other designs (photo © 2022 Happy New Year).

[1] A beauty of an electric kettle graces your counter (photos #1 and #2 © Fellow Products).

[2] The narrow spout enables precision pouring.

[3] Don’t forget the tea: January is National Tea Month (photo © Par Avion Tea).

A great find for fans of drip coffee, pour-over coffee, and tea of all kinds: the new electric water kettle from Lardera Coffee Roasters, a subsidiary of Adagio Teas. It’s efficient, aesthetically lovely, small footprint (the base is 5.75″ x 6.25″), and a treat to use in brewing coffee or tea.

It is the fastest, most accurate electric kettle on the market.

 
If you’d like additional cups, the kettle will maintain the water at your desired temperature for 60 minutes.

The kettle is a beautiful addition to your kitchen counter, too. It’s pretty enough to be a sculpture.
 
 
GET YOUR KETTLE HERE

Head to Lardera.com.

Don’t see it as pricey ($149); think of it as a beautiful enhancement to brewing your morning coffee (or tea).

While you’re on the website, check out the coffee and other gear.

January is National Tea Month, and Valentine’s Day is next month—just in case you’d like to give a more lasting gift than chocolate.
 
 
> THE DIFFERENT TYPES OF COFFEE
 
 
> THE HISTORY OF COFFEE
 
 
> THE HISTORY OF POUR-OVER/DRIP COFFEE
 
 
> THE HISTORY OF TEA
 
 
> THE HISTORY OF TEA BAGS
 
 
> THE DIFFERENT TYPES OF TEA

January 17th is National Hot Buttered Rum Day. We’ve always been piqued about why Colonial Americans put butter into a mug of hot rum, so we drilled down. First, what is hot buttered rum? It’s a toddy with butter. What’s a toddy?

A toddy, or hot toddy, is a warm cocktail concocted to add a moment of warmth to chilly weather.

It’s made with whiskey, sugar, hot water, and optional spices, those being the “winter spices”: allspice, cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg.

For hot buttered rum, the recipe is the same, with the substitution of rum for whiskey* and the addition of butter.

Why butter?

Modern sleuths have been unable to find the reason. Perhaps it was as simple as:

 
> The history of hot buttered rum is below.
 
 
HOT BUTTERED RUM OVERVIEW

In older times, a pat of butter was simply stirred into the hot rum, which was sweetened with sugar, spiced with what we now call “winter” spices, and diluted with hot water.

These days, establishments and home mixologists who serve hot buttered rum tend to make a “batter” of the non-liquid ingredients—butter, sugar, and spices —in advance, and freeze it until needed.

They find the finished drink less “oily” than floating a pat of butter on top of the hot drink.

Yet there are as many variations on the hot buttered rum recipe as there are for eggnog.

Some people replace the butter in hot buttered rum with ice cream, cream or milk, as some egg nog makers use ice cream instead of whipped cream.

Some people replace the water with cider.

Vegans can replace the butter with coconut oil (or these days, vegan butter).

These variations are not so different from the olden days, when Colonials added fruit, cream, and even eggs (which created egg nog) into their hot buttered rum, in addition to the butter, sugar, and spices.

While the original recipes may have called for the butter to be spooned on top of the rum mixture, this recipe takes the modern approach, making a spiced butter “batter” first.

We also have recipes for:

 
 
RECIPE: HOT BUTTERED RUM

Prep time is 5 minutes. The ratio is 1 cup rum: 1/2 cup butter: 3 cups water.

You can make the spiced butter/batter, in advance.

Keep it frozen until needed—unless you plan to use it up in the short term, in which case it can go into the fridge.
 
Ingredients For 4 Servings

For The Spiced Butter (a.k.a. Batter)

 
Ingredients For The Toddy

 
Preparation

1. COMBINE in a large bowl the butter, light brown sugar, vanilla extract, cinnamon, ground cloves, ground allspice, ground nutmeg, and a pinch of salt.

In a mug or a heat-proof glass…

2. ADD 2 ounces of rum and 6 ounces of hot water. Top with 2 tablespoons of the spiced butter mixture and stir to combine. Serve.
 
 
HOT BUTTERED RUM HISTORY

In his book “Imbibe!,” historian David Wondrich traced the addition of butter in hot drinks to the reign (1509-1547) of King Henry VIII of England.

It might have been a hot toddy or a hot punch.

Hot buttered rum came much later, since rum was a Caribbean spirit that didn’t gain traction until the 17th century, when enslaved sugar plantation workers figured out how to distill rum from molasses.

With that discovery, molasses was imported to the Colonies from Barbados, Jamaica, Martinique, and Santo Domingo.

It was turned into rum, and thence traded to England [source].

New England had hundreds of distilleries churning out rum. It was ubiquitous and inexpensive.

“At the peak of its popularity, colonials supposedly consumed more than five gallons of rum per person each year, paying mere shillings per gallon,” writes Katherine Hysmith in t.e.l.l. New England magazine.

It was drunk by men, women, and children, as a safe alternative to unreliable water supplies (a practice brought to the colonies from Europe).

“Rum was often combined with all manner of tonics including spring water, citrus juices, freshly grated spices, small and dark beers, warmed through with cream, hot butter, or whipped into a frenzy with eggs. And recipes varied from tavern to tavern and house to house,” Hysmith says.

Hot buttered rum became less popular as the country turned its focus to whiskey in the latter part of the 19th century (an issue to do with taxes jacking up the price of rum markedly).

Both whiskies imported from Scotland and Ireland and America’s own domestic distillates—bourbon whiskey, rye whiskey, rye malt whiskey, malt whiskey, wheat whiskey, Tennessee whiskey, and corn whiskey—moved in on rum sales.

But the drink popped up again in legendary bartender Jerry Thomas’s 1887 recipe manual, “The Bartenders Guide.”

Hot buttered rum appeared revived two-plus generations later in the 1940s, with “Trader Vic’s Book of Food & Drink,” which focused on rum cocktails.
 
 
SOME RUM TRIVIA

 
 
> THE HISTORY OF RUM
 
 
> THE DIFFERENT TYPES OF RUM
 
 
> HOT TODDY, MULLED WINE & CIDER & RELATED DRINKS
 
 
________________

*Rum and whiskey are both distilled spirits, but they are different from each other. Here’s a discussion of the differences.
 
 

[1] Hot buttered rum, garnished with cinnamon sticks (photo © PantherMedia Stock Agency / Mizina).

[2] Northern Europe and Colonial America were (and are) dairying countries. There was always butter on hand (photo © Sorin Gheorghita | Unsplash).

[3] Light brown sugar provides more depth of flavor via the molasses content. White sugar is stripped of all of the molasses that is created when the sugar cane juice is refined (photo © Webstaurant Store).

[3] A bit of vanilla adds another layer of flavor. This photo shows a premium, double-strength Madagascar single origin vanilla (photo © Madagascar Vanilla Co.).

[4] Cinnamon is one of the four spices used in the recipe. If you don’t have the individual spices, you can use pumpkin pie spice blend (photos #4 and #6 © McCormick).

[5] Whole cloves are the most pungent and oily of all spices. They are the unopened buds of the clove tree. You’ll need ground cloves for the recipe (photos #5 and #7 © Silk Road Spices).

[6] Ground nutmeg loses its flavor very quickly, so its best to buy whole nuts and grate them as needed.

[7] Allspice is the berry of the pimento bush, grown mostly in Jamaica. It gets its name from the fact that it tastes somewhat like a peppery blend of cinnamon, clove and nutmeg. You’ll need the ground version for the recipe.

[8] The recipe uses dark rum, which has more flavor than light rum. Dark rum is often the choice for for drinking straight.

[1] Most Asian countries serve tea in handle-less cups (photo © Kanaya Tea).

[2] These are freshly-picked tea leaves (photo © Paulina H | Unsplash).

[3] Matcha, originally a ceremonial tea only, has even smaller cups (photo © T2 | Unsplash).

If you eat at Asian restaurants, you may (or may not) have given a thought to the teacups. They don’t have handles. Since January is National Tea Month, we decided to ask why. Here’s a brief answer. You can read the whole article at TeaMuse, the blog of Adagio Teas.

The short answer is that various Asians cultures believe that if the cup is too hot to hold, the tea is too hot to drink.

But that’s not all.

Beginning with early man, who was nomadic, a minimum of possessions were carried. Food and drink were both consumed from bowls, so the evolution to handle-less cups was natural.

Fast forward to the e 18th and 19th centuries in Europe: Cups with handles took a while to evolve. It was not easy to attach a looped handle to a cup, and firing methods for various clays were still developing.

England was the leader in the development. Historians believe that the first cups with handles may have been more of a fashion than a utility, since these early handles often had curlicues, gilt, and images.

The handle slowly became a fixture of the British teacup. American, Bavarian, French, German, and Russian teacups followed suit.
 
 
THE PROPER TEMPERATURES FOR TEA

The proper tea brewing temperature can range anywhere from 140°F for specialty green teas to 212°F (a full boil) for black and herbal teas. There are plenty of gradations in between.

Ultimately, it’s a matter of personal taste, along with how you brew your tea (whether you pre-warm the teapot, the ratio of water to loose tea leaves, if the tea is finished by steaming or pan-firing, etc.).

You’ll see different temperatures in different articles, but here’s a guide. These are the temperatures used by tea connoisseurs to bring out the best in fine, loose-leaf tea. If you’re using an everyday tea bag, don’t sweat it.

 
 
TEA TRIVIA: WHY IS “TEACUP” ONE WORD BUT “COFFEE CUP” IS TWO?

Here’s a longer discussion of the issue, but to be brief:

 
 
> THE HISTORY OF TEA
 
> THE HISTORY OF TEA BAGS
 
> THE DIFFERENT TYPES OF TEA

National Quinoa Day is January 16th, celebrating a whole grain* that came to prominence in the U.S. about a decade ago. Yet, many people have never tried it. Those who have are nutrition-oriented, excited that quinoa (pronounced KEEN-wa or KEE-noo-ah) contains more high-quality protein than any other grain. In fact, it’s a complete protein: It contains all nine essential amino acids†. It’s equivalent to milk as a protein source. It’s also high in fiber, and is a good source of calcium, iron, magnesium, phosphorus, vitamins A, B and E, and zinc.

Cooked quinoa has nutty-earthy tones and is extremely versatile: It can be used in the place of almost any other grain, including rice, to make everything from appetizers to desserts.

Quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa) is the Quechua (Inca) word for “mother grain” or “super grain.” A broad-leafed, annual herb, quinoa grows wild in the Andes Mountains of South America; it was first cultivated more than 5,000 years ago by the Incas and was, along with corn and potatoes, the foundation of the Andean diet.

The sad part of the story is that since quinoa became a sensation on the world stage, many of the poor farmers who grow it can no longer afford to eat it.

> Here’s more about quinoa.

> More ancient grains.
 
 
COOKING WITH QUINOA

Quinoa seeds range in color from red, orange, and yellow to black or white. The tiny seeds are the principal crop.

Before consuming, quinoa seeds must be processed to remove their bitter coating of saponin. After washing or dry polishing, the ready-to-cook seeds are white, red, or beige in color. The spinach-like leaves, which unfortunately seldom reach the consumer, may be eaten raw in salads or cooked like spinach.

Cooked quinoa is delicious and extremely versatile; it may be used in the place of almost any other grain, including rice, to make everything from appetizers to desserts (make quinoa pudding instead of rice pudding). It has a slightly nutty flavor (red quinoa is the nuttiest), which makes it a good substitute for couscous or bulgur.

Quinoa has a unique texture as well. When cooked, the thin germ circlet falls from the seed and remains crunchy, while the pearly grain melts in the mouth.

If you don’t want to cook up a pot-ful, you can find heat-and-eat, microwavable quinoa from companies like Ancient Harvest, Earthly Choice, and Seeds Of Change.
 
 
QUINOA RECIPES

[1] Greek salad bowl with hummus, and quinoa. Here’s the recipe (photo © Baked Greens).

[2] Moroccan roasted carrots and quinoa. Here’s the recipe (photo © Good Eggs).

[3] Quinoa fried rice topped with a fried egg (photo © P.F. Chang’s).

________________

*Although technically a seed, quinoa is classified as a whole grain.

†Amino acids are organic compounds composed of nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, along with a variable side chain group. The body needs 20 different amino acids to grow and function properly. Though all 20 of these are important for your health, only nine amino acids are classified as essential. Lysine is an essential amino acid, along with histidine, isoleucine, leucine, lysine, methionine, phenylalanine, threonine, tryptophan and valine. Unlike nonessential amino acids, essential amino acids can’t be made by the body and must be obtained through your diet. Here’s more about each essential amino acid and what it does in the body.

Nonessential amino acids are produced by the body, and are not contingent upon the foods we eat. Nonessential amino acids include: alanine, arginine, asparagine, aspartic acid, cysteine, glutamic acid, glutamine, glycine, proline, serine, and tyrosine.