100-mile diet-memories

[shootingstar]

Clarification: My mother made do with 1 bottle of soy sauce. It lasted for many months for a big family. She didn't make sauce.

Am impressed Oak, that your mom made tofu. Well, at least ours was still local..made 120 kms. away in Toronto's Chinatown. The stuff was shipped out to the smaller cities/towns to Chinese restaurants. My father got our share via wholesale prices where he worked. A good friend of mine, her family had a little home business of tofu-making in their basement in Calgary back in those decades. Plus a fortune-cookie making biz also. (A national film doc. was made by her brother.)

Have no idea what cooking wine my mother used instead of shaoxing wine.. she didn't use it much in any dish..but I did notice it in her steamed pork liver with ginger..

Yea, no kiddin'-- probably another Chinese peasant home dish. I dunno. Other Asian cuisine-raised folks probably have other memories on local food inventions/fusion. My parents wanted to try to grow some Chinese green veggies, ie. bok choy but they just weren't too green thumb oriented at all. But we did grow water spinach since it managed to survive with green onions and kohl rabi.

Noawadays if you lived in the right part of British Columbia, you could get local fresh ginger root and gingseng root. (area where kelownagirl lives).