Food becomes a means of recovery for one young Seattle author in 'Feasts of Good Fortune'

This is the KUOW Book Club, and we just finished reading — and cooking along with — "Feasts of Good Fortune" by Hsiao-Ching Chou and her daughter Meilee Chou Riddle. I'm your club guide, Katie Campbell. Let's dig in.

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ne recipe in "Feasts of Good Fortune" bears the name of the book's junior author: Meilee's stir-fried chicken. And there's a good reason for that rooted in the deeper meaning of the cookbook Meilee wrote with her mom.

Throughout the book, which is more than a collection of recipes, Meilee shares a series of essays in which she reflects on multiculturalism, her family's traditions, and her recovery from an eating disorder. She writes, too, about the difficulty of being a self-described "picky eater" in a culture where "food is a means to tell someone you love them."

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"Throughout the recovery of an eating disorder — and, just generally, being a picky eater — chicken has always been my safe protein," Meilee explained in our recent interview. "We just came home from San Francisco the other week, and my grandma [who lives with us] had some stir-fried Meilee's chicken that she had made. So, it was a safe food that also meant love to me. ... When I was recovering, it was something that my mom knew would be good. It would get me protein. And it created a lot of comfort."

Her mom felt that comfort, too, comfort in knowing her child was nourished.

That shared comfort in food, even when food was fraught, made Hsiao-Ching — already the author of two other successful cookbooks — want to share this book with her daughter.

"I can talk about traditions and recipes and good practices for home cooking, et cetera, but if I don't have a person to pass along all of those good practices and traditions, then I don't know who I'm talking to," Hsiao-Ching said. "I wanted to make sure that there was somebody to receive this knowledge. And Meilee's it. She's my first-born and is a storyteller."

That storytelling comes through the teen's essays as well as her mother's family stories in the introduction to each section of the book, which is broken out into Chinese holidays and the dishes you might serve during them.

RELATED: 'Feasts of Good Fortune' is a delight for the senses and curious minds

In the chapter dedicated to the Lantern Festival, for example, you can find recipes for several variations of tang yuan, glutinous rice balls filled with sweet or savory mixtures. They're described as having "a round shape that mimics the fullness of the moon and symbolizes the circle of family and wishes for a peaceful life."

I wanted to make two kinds of tang yuan (the savory variety with pork and Chinese chives and the sweet kind with red bean paste) to present to Hsiao-Ching and Meilee during our interview. But as I told them, my tang yuan looked less like the moon and more like Earth; the filling spilled out and into the dough, creating continents of pork filling. I pivoted.

Instead of trying again with the red bean paste, I whipped up something I was more familiar with making and that used similar ingredients: a red bean mochi cake.

It may not look like much — Hsiao-Ching aptly noted the pieces look like graham crackers, leading you to expect a more crumbly texture and the taste of cinnamon. Instead, you get a very chewy, subtly sweet bite, the red beans adding another texture similar to fruit and a little extra flavor that you might not notice if you didn't know something had been added to the basic mochi cake.

My guests approved, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

"In [Chinese] cooking, there are dishes that are more nuanced in flavor, so they're lighter, they're more delicate, and to a Western palate, that seems bland," Hsiao-Ching explained. "You have to really quiet down all of your senses to really pick up on the nuances of those flavors, because we're so accustomed to everything having so much punch.

"Nothing wrong with that. And there are plenty of cuisines across the spectrum of Chinese cooking that pack that kind of punch, but there are also a lot of dishes that are extremely delicate and what you want is balance."

Balance is what she and Meilee had to find at the table, too, and in embarking on this project together.

"You don't typically see your parents in, like, a more professional setting, and have to be business partners with them, which has its ups and downs," Meilee said. "This was an opportunity for me to be a conversation-starter."

And in the end, it was another step in recovery, she said — for herself and her family.

"It was just a lot about shifting that mindset [from] 'you're eating a lot,' all the negative thoughts that come along with food when you're in recovery, shifting it to 'you're eating with your best friends or you're eating with your cousins or your family, and everybody's laughing so hard that you're choking on the food,'" Meilee said. "This was probably the most pivotal mindset shift for me."

"Feasts of Good Fortune" was pivotal for their family and powerful for a reader like me, who's had my own weird relationship with food over the years.

This book was not just a fun and challenging culinary experience but also a refreshing reflection on our relationships with our bodies, our families, and the way we preserve those things through food. Whether it's Meilee's stir-fried chicken, a successfully shaped tang yuan, or an emergency mochi cake, food invites us all to explore others as well as ourselves. And "Feasts of Good Fortune" is a masterclass in that.

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Spoiler alert: We'll be reading Putsata Reang's stunning memoir, "Ma and Me," in March. Reang's family fled war-torn Cambodia when she was just an infant. She explores her inherited trauma and the expectations foisted upon her in the years that followed.

Reang's memoir won the Pacific Northwest Book Award for Nonfiction in 2023. It was also a finalist for a Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Lambda Literary Prize. In short, you know it's going to be good.

As always, you can join the conversation by emailing me directly at kcampbell@kuow.org. You can also subscribe to the Book Club newsletter here.