You are the butter to my bread, the breath to my life

     In the film, Julie is driven crazy by sustaining complaint hotlines at work; she cried, but sits silently in her small cubicle. That scene reminds me of the moment I was in a mess and feel hopeless. Other than cooking itself, in Julie’s process of imitating Julia, the movie leads us to some serious points: how to face life and what the more important thing is than just fulfilling your dream. Passion and persistence for cooking, and love from others, these are what Julie possesses but tends to ignore in process of carrying out her project. Sometimes we are so concentrated on result, being blind to joy in the hustle and bustle of everyday life. As a result, we forget to love; love the things you’re doing and love people in your life.
     Besides,“Julie and Julia” uses warm colored pictures and lovely background music with a dash of nostalgia to convey to us the love of life. Like what Paul says to Julia: “You are the butter to my bread, the breath to my life”, the love between two protagonists and their husbands is heart-warming. 

Is Babette an artist?

Babette is quite a artist of life. The way she sings and turns over her head smiling, the way she irons the tablecloth meticulously, the way she organizes a variety of fanciful food material in perfect order, the way she tastes red wine thoughtfully, the way she at the end peacefully remarks, 'I was once the chief chef of Café Anglais', A woman of exceeding height of fame who deemed gracefully pains and gains of her life could have never received enough applauses.

Babette's Feast

     Babette's presence represents a real sense of "life balance". She not only gives the ascetic people in town a chance to face their "inherent desire", which in fact is not obstacle of their belief but the sign could lead them to the heaven, but also sounds the alarm for them, that people should not be addicted themselves to the desire and pleasant, regarding those as the purpose of life, but forget the source of beauty and grace.
     She presents her own life value by spending all her money in order to bring a magnificent feast to the austere sister and villagers, but doesn't not hesitate to reject the luxury life in Paris. 

Snow Pear

Snow Pear has been my favorite food for as long as I can remember and it always comforts me whenever time I feel upset or depressed. When I was young, my mom always cook the pears with crystal sugar and made a sweet pear soup. According to her, it is not only good for my health (especially throat) but also a good medicine to calm my mood. When I first time came to America, I missed my mom's snow pear soup very much. Luckily, I have found some similar pears in Asian food market and now I can cook it for myself.

Lvdagunr (Rolling Donkeys)

     Rolling Donkey is a rice cake made from bean-flour and is a famous Chinese snack in Beijing. Nonetheless, as a southerner in China, my mom enjoys cooking it during holidays and festivals for family. It is made from steamed sticky rice, scattered with fried soybean powder and filled with red beans. After being cut into blocks, it is rolled in soybean powder, which is why this snack gets its name, Lv Da Gun. When you roll it in soybean powder, it looks like a donkey rolling on the ground, raising dust.

       It is the first time I cook it and unfortunately it is not quite successful since I can't find the right flour my mom told me to use in the market here and it is very hard to control the softness of the sticky rice flour in a totally different pan. I tried twice and it did take me some time to figure out the exact time of steaming and the different amount of each flours.

      Recipe: 

      1.Mix the sticky rice flour with regular flour, add water and stir it hard.

      2. Steam the flour mixture.

      3.Fry soybean powder in the hot pan.

      4. Roll the rice cake and place rea bean filling in.

      5. Cut the cake into small pieces.

      6.Dip the powder.

Food of Gong's Family

      As a Chinese ancient sage has once said, "bread is the staff of life." My family in China always considered food as one of the most important parts of life. Regularly, we eat three meals every day, no tea time or night snack included. My mom is the main chef and my dad acts as an assistant sometimes (only happens when he is in a good mood). Breakfast usually consists of rice cake (my favorite), steamed rolls(my dad's favorite), soy milk and fruits. We normally take about half hour to finish our breakfast before we rush to school or work. During weekends, our breakfasts tend to be more varied, my mom used to get up early and go to nearby organic food market to buy some deep-fried dough sticks or sticky rice. But if my mom is not home, my dad and I will just skip the breakfast and jump into lunch time directly.

     Lunch usually happened when my parents were at work and I was in school, so it was not always in my record. During weekend days, we used to eat out for lunch, usually some foreign food restaurants.(happens no more after I study abroad)

my friend in our kitchen

     Dinner has been considered as the most important part of a day for our family to getting together and have some chat. My mom used to prepare food for about an hour and after my dad got back from work, the whole family would sit around the table enjoying the delicious Chinese food my mom cooked. Pork is the most common meat we buy and eat, red-sauced pork, boil pork and sausage cover by eggs, these are all favorite pork dishes in my family's dinner menu. Besides, we also consume beef, chicken and a few mutton (once two months). Vegetables and fruits occupy a big proportion of our diet too, my mom loves cooking all sorts of vegetables: fry, steam, braise, boil or make soup; there was no time in my memory our dinner was served without vegetables. Fruits are usually eaten after dinner as a dessert.
A week food (Spring Festival) consumption:
Friday:
Breakfast: porridge, rice cake & mustered tuber (homemade, about $3)
Lunch: Roast Duck, boiled chicken with sauces, sweet and sour pork, poached green peans, cold tofu, Chinese cabbage, tomato scrambled eggs, white rice (homemade, $15)
Dinner: Restaurant ($50)
Thursday:
Breakfast: Rice cake, bread ($4)
Lunch: Chow main, spring rolls, boiled chicken with sauces, tomato soup with ribs and potato, steamed crabs(homemade, $8)
Dinner: fried water spinach, beef steaks (take-out), rice, mapo tofu ($9)
Wednesday:
Breakfast: yogurt, bread ($4)
Lunch: Restaurant ($30)
Dinner: Restaurant($40)
Tuesday:
Breakfast: porridge, dumpling, flatbread, fried dough sticks ($4)
Lunch: Boil eggs with sausages, Chinese cabbage, rice, boil shrimps ($10)
Dinner: Rest from lunch. 
Monday:
Breakfast: Spring rolls, rice cake, rice dumpling (from store) ($8)
Lunch: no
Dinner: Restaurant ($200)--Spring Festival for 5 people

Boil eggs with sausages 

 

Breakfast: steam roll, boil rice cake 

Dinner before new year

A week food of a Japanese family

       I chose to live in a Japanese family from Kodaira, Japan.

      The size of my host family is four including father, mother, and two daughters. 

      According to their food data of one week, the total spending of food is $317.25, which comes about $45.32 per day. More specifically, the cost of grain of that week is $31.55, dairy is $2.26, meat, fish and eggs is $99.80, fruits, vegetables and nuts is $81.43, condiments is $28.28, snacks and desserts is $15.33, prepared food is $21.78, beverages is $28.40 and miscellaneous is $8.42. 

      We can see  that the consumption of meat, fish and eggs accounts for the largest proportion of total food cost occupies about 31.5%, with the cost of fruits, vegetables and nuts (about 25.7%) closely follows behind, then in turn, is grain (about 9.9%), condiments and beverages (about 8.9%), prepared food (about 6.9%), miscellaneous (about 2.7%) and dairy (about 0.7%). 
       The diet of this family is relatively healthy and pretty much Asian. As we can see from the photo below, aquatic products are very common in the family's table since Japan is an island country. Also as a rice-centered community, Japan keeps its food culture that prefers to cook fresh food rather than microwaving fast canned food. We can detect that the percentage of fresh food, which almost reaches 57% of the total food, is much higher than that of other countries, especially those European and American countries. It is because meat, fish, egg and vegetables all play a significant role of Japanese daily food consumption.     And if we compare the percentage of foods that need to be cooked with that of those prepared food, we could see a wide gap of disparity. As the picture shown below, Japanese family loves raw food, and eats a large amount of vegetable and fruits every day. Maybe that is one of the secrets why Japanese girls can keep their good body shapes for long.  
        Lastly, we can see that this family doesn't drink much beverage, except a little amount of soda and tea, which may indicate the food culture of Japan is relatively traditional and light.

Rutgers Prep Food Culture

Dear my Lord:

        It has been my third day in Rutgers Preparatory School, and I want to give you my first report of what they called “food” here.

Every morning, I see students hold coffee and bagels in their hands, rushing back and forth between different classrooms, but barely eat anything. It seems here, this oddball species doesn’t regard predation as their top priority but education (which seems like terribly useless and time wasted to me at least). So if, your majesty, want to occupy this planet next year, morning will just be a great time to attack.

But then, after two classes, students here normally have something called nosh, which usually is a period of time for them to have some snacks. Some students choose to go to candy machine to buy some junks while others may eat or drink what they have left from morning. Last Friday, I followed a senior to her homeroom, and guess what? All students in that room were complaining of hunger, from the very beginning to the end of period. They said their advisor never bring them food, which in my eyes, was the cruelest thing I have ever seen.

During 12:00-1:15, upper school students are allowed to have lunch in their Dinning Common. And if I have to use only one word to characterize the lunch in Rutgers Prep, that would be mixed. With the aroma of French fries and pasta, and the vapor of Chinese Mushroom soup and Italian Meatball soup, students seem to have many choices. Nonetheless, they don’t usually look satisfied; they either eat quite fast like completing missions or chat sedulously with people around them. Based on my two days’ observation, almost nobody in this school seems to wholeheartedly enjoy or appreciate the foods presented in front of them, which also confirms our expectation. Human species is greedy and hardly feel “grateful”.

        In conclusion, the students and faculty of Rutgers Prep seems to be neglect to the culture behind the food. So I recommend you, my dearest lord, to overtake this school by using our special foods to control the people here (we can make them look like regular pasta) and gradually turn the school to our military base. We can then show them how extensive and profound our food culture is.