Just Add Rice

Just add rice is about Taiwanese cuisine, which seeks balance and harmony in taste, texture and nutritional value. But it’s also about home cooking, about familiarity and comfort and celebrating culture – recipes that connect the author to her parents when they lived in another city and in a distant country.

• Delicious, nutritious food on a budget.
• Comprehensive list of need-to-have pantry items for cooking Taiwanese and Chinese food.
• East Asian ingredients that are available to the South African market, with suggested substitutions.
• Essential information on traditional Chinese dining etiquette, customs and traditions.
• Simple recipes for home cooks.
• East Asians can enjoy their first locally produced cookbook with stories that reflect relatable culture and culinary heritage.
• Anyone who is interested in Chinese home cooking, food and South African food heritage.

 

About the Author

Ming-Cheau Lin was born in Tainan, Taiwan and immigrated to South Africa when she was three years old in the early 90s, growing up in Bloemfontein. Now based in Cape Town, she is a freelance copywriter and runs a food blog butterfingers.co.za as a platform to share insights into Taiwanese culture through recipes and stories – her work has been featured in local food, lifestyle and opinion spaces, and won a Getaway Blog Award in 2012. She’s a social activist – offering talks on embracing empowerment as a woman of colour, being mindful in a multicultural environment with a focus on the harms of cultural appropriation and stereotyping.

“It is important to normalise our culture, our traditions of food, to stop exoticising (thus othering) our norms so we can stop being seen as foreigners in South Africa.”

She also has an international City & Guilds diploma in patisserie and worked for the late master of preserving Oded Schwartz at Oded’s Kitchen (in the kitchen, at food markets, admin and marketing).

Ming-Cheau has a BA in creative brand communications, specialising in copywriting and has worked in well-known advertising agencies as a copywriter for seven years. She also co-founded, volunteered and skated for the Cape Town Rollergirls NPO (a women’s roller derby league) as its Marketing and PR Chair for four years till early 2016.