There's a saying in Chinese that goes something like, "No chicken, no banquet." This dish is steeped in tradition and good luck, and I'm extremely grateful to get to document how my dad does it and to share it with our community :)

This post will cover:

• How to boil the perfect, juicy White Cut Chicken
• How to make my dad’s addictive Ginger Scallion sauce
• The traditional Chinese way to carve and plate a chicken from head to toe
• The various Chinese idioms / meanings tied to whole chicken

Here are a few pictures of what the recipes look like if you want a visual :)

Superstition: Chicken

In Chinese tradition, chicken is intertwined with many sayings and superstitions of good fortune, wealth, and resilience.

Even though my parents didn't have much meat growing up in China, this is one of the dishes my parents always ate on Lunar New Year's eve and other festivities.

Especially with auspicious foods, Chinese superstition involves a lot of creative word-play. The word for chicken, gāi in Cantonese and jī in Mandarin, sounds like several words of good fortune.

Just to name a few phrases that my parents shared with us:

• hóu sai gaai 好世界 - A Cantonese phrase that roughly translates to good world, good life.
• dàjídàlì 大吉大利 - A Mandarin phrase that roughly translates to great luck, great profit.
• yáuh tàuh yáuh méih 有头有尾 - A Cantonese phrase that literally translates to: "has a head, has a tail." It means "good beginning, good ending." This is one of the reasons why it's important to make a whole chicken for Lunar New Year.
• jáau pàh jáau wàh 抓扒抓鏵 - A Toisanese phrase, related to eating the chicken legs, that roughly means "face all challenges with persistence."

So, basically, eat a whole chicken if you want to live. (jk)

Using a Proper Knife

The most intricate part of this recipe is the last step, where we carve up the chicken into pieces we can easily grab with a chopstick.

My dad has two knives - a "chef's knife", meant for vegetables and boneless meats, and a heavy duty cleaver, meant for occasions like this.

It's a lot harder to do this without a proper cleaver, so here are a few options you can look up:

• Dexter Russell Heavy Duty Cleaver
• [The same brand (not same model) as my dad's 40 year-old cleaver](https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?ut_sk=1.XR79XxYXt6sDAC8yCxOJl3U5_21380790_1609898344895.Copy.1&id=630231282048&detailSharePosition=interactBar&sourceType=item&suid=6C603

A comparison I've figured out lately so I thought I wanted to share lol.

So this post is coming minutes after everything just went wrong in my kitchen.

I wanted to cook a whole pork tenderloin and serve it with some honey butter glazed carrots and generic store biscuits that I had in the fridge.

I had thought everything was going well, I had everything timed up and was excited to try the carrots. My tenderloin was wrapped snug in its aluminum foil, with a little leakage, but not enough to make me worried, and the biscuits looked biscuity and delicious.

When I pulled the pans out however, I was sadly disappointed. At some point in the 3 minutes since I had looked through the oven door the carrots had gone from nice and tender to shriveled and dry, and the glaze was burnt and hard as a rock. The biscuits were also burnt on the bottom. Oh well I thought, and hurried to throw some canned corn on the stove top. I figured maybe the pork will make up for it.

After letting the tenderloin sit I cut in. The pork was dark and didn’t have a lot of flavor at all. I’m really disappointed in what i have cooked, and really just wanna hear some of y’all’s horror stories so I don’t feel like I should just stop cooking altogether.

This is a safe space, does anyone else have a secret similar to this?

Not a single dish has been made better by adding raisins to it. Yet I have seen raisins in carrot cake, rice puddling, coleslaw, cinnamon bagels etc..

Raisins are disgusting and every recipe they touch is destroyed. I can't think of a single dish with them that would be worse without them. Tbh getting rid of them might improve things.

People seriously need to top putting these grape corpses into otherwise good foods.

I like to cut down on plastic waste where possible and was wondering if I could reuse those squeeze bottles for storing oil or sauces.

Is it simply a case of rinsing them out until no suds?

edit: a lot of comments for a questioned answered within 5 minutes of posting

I might have liked this power ballad bop, but there's something about the pronunciation that seems so wrong, even though it's the exact same letters, just mispronounced.

I'm pissed because now it's stuck in my head and the word is all i'm thinking about

A couple of days after reading this thread about never adding too much garlic to cooked dishes, I actually accomplished the feat!

I was braising cabbage for a side dish and added a cube of frozen minced garlic that was probably over a head's worth. I really like garlic and figured it would be fine, even though the cabbage only amounted to about a quarter of a small head. I assumed the garlic would cook down into being sweet and mild during the long braise.

It tasted like eating spoonfuls of pure braised garlic. Even though it had sweetened and become milder with the braising, it was still pretty pungent. To be fair, it was actually delicious for a couple of bites, but quickly became overpowering.

So, there, I've done it. I officially added too much garlic to something that was cooked!

Edit: I ended up adding a couple of cans of diced tomatoes and turned it into cabbage soup. It was still garlicky, but not overwhelming.

I'm not talking about mujadara, although I have never tried the dish. Story goes I have a lot of lentils sitting around in my pantry. I have always been a more black bean or Pinto bean kind of guy. Navy or white if I'm feeling it. Heck, I'll throw chickpeas in my salad if I'm feeling fortunate.

Today I wanted a quick midnight snack. I had just finished the last batch of my beans and was quoted to make some more tomorrow. Problem is, all the aforementioned beans above take close to 7 to 8 hours on my crockpot.

I opened a bag of lentils, and sautéed an onion. Didn't want to do much chop and prep. It was one of those quick things where I needed empty calories and wasn't too concerned with taste.

After sauteeding, I dropped in one cup of lentils. I didn't think much of it.

Tended to household chores, took a shower etc.

All the while, subtly tasting the broth and the beans to see when they were to my desired consistency.

Now, you can't just eat beans like that. From a previous post, I almost always have some white rice on hand. Today I had brown, from last night's dinner.

Once the lentils were done to my liking, I scooped some out to a hot bed of rice that I microwaved. Put on my favorite show and went to town. Again, not concerned with flavor, just need a belly full of food. It's Christmas time.

And wow, I was in for a world of shock.

Lentils, onions and salt, make nothing else but a delicious little meal.

Of course if you have more spices and ingredients then I do, you'll end up with a better finished product. But hands down, this is far better then the canned stuff. With such a small bean, the lentils canned are too mushy for my taste.

This is the bomb dot com.

Enjoy the recipe, although it's super customizable. Lentils, split peas, green, yellow or red, just boiled with onion, or jalapeño, or any other spice, is amazing.

And the great thing is one cup of lentils quadrupled so you have enough for about 6 meals if you plan on portioning or meal prepping. With an one pound bag, you get about two cups of dried beans, so that's about 12 meals.

And you don't even have to use rice. Serve it over pasta, potatoes, quinoa, etc.

Serve with hot sauce, hummus or any other sauce and you got yourself a quick meal.

Most people know very little about Libya, and even less about Libyan culture. It's a country that for millenia has been a cross roads of civilisations and an important trading hub even stretching back to the time of the Romans. With so many cultures overlapping, the cuisine has come together as part arab, part african, part berber and part european. It's an interesting blend that leads to dishes such as Mbakbaka, a meat stew to which pasta is added. The result is one of the most amazing and unique pasta dishes I've ever had, and one that is perfectly suited to cold winter evenings. It resembles a traditional Ragu with chunky pieces of meat, however the flavors are far from anything cooked in Italy.

If you'd like to support me, or prefer video recipes, here's the link to the full video recipe. I've also left links in the comments to all my previous r/cooking posts.

What is Mbakbaka

This strangely named food is the pride and joy of Libyan people, and is regarded as a quintessential Libyan food. It gets it's name from the noise it makes (bak-bak-bak-bak-bak) as the thickened stew boils when pasta is added. It's put together by stewing meat (usually lamb, but beef or chicken can be used) with a blend of Libyan spices called Bzaar (like Bazaar without pronouncing the first "a"), which has a warming and earthy flavor composition. Once the meat is cooked through, pasta is added to the stew, where it absorbs the liquid and gets infused with the flavors of the dish. The end product is a pasta dish that's packed full of flavor, contains perfectly cooked chunks of meat, and a delicious thickened broth.

The Bzaar spice mix is what makes this dish so unique and delicious, and it's something you can only get premixed in Libya. Just like you have fish mongers, butchers and green grocers, many regions around the world including the Middle East also have spice shops. These spice shops will sell literally hundreds of unique spices and herbal remedies (used for traditional medicine) which they source from every corner of the world. It's also at these spice shops, where they grind and mill whole spices into unique blends that are used in locally cooked dishes. Bzaar itself is a blend of 10+ spices that is uniquely Libyan, but luckily a Libyan friend of mine has a recipe for a homemade Bzaar spice mix, that yo

I'm looking for the weirdest dishes that have made to see if I can recreate it

I'm undecided whether this is disgusting and wrong or fine to do? It was mopped a few days ago... We've got no ingredients to make it again and I'll be pretty gutted about throwing away a load of chicken. I figure as long as the cheese is bubbling at the bottom it will be reet. I think I'll just be conscious about finding hairs or anything else that shouldn't be in there.