I Am Very Tall

Just got a new cookbook yesterday and I'm pretty excited about it. It's called Land of plenty and it focuses on food from the Sichuan province in China. It's very credibly written by Fuchsia Dunlop, the first foreign student at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine. A couple things about this book have gotten me pretty excited:

* Recipes have both the English and the Chinese names (in pinyin and characters). Now I can finally figure out how to cook a ton of dishes that I only have a Chinese name for
* The recipes look pretty authentic - no carrots or tomatoes, but a lot of Sichuan peppercorns, chili oil, bean paste, etc.
* It tells you where you can actually buy some of the otherwise hard-to-find ingredients (I'll save you the effort, go to Adriana's Caravan)
* Almost all of the recipes look incredibly delicious

This book is great for people with my pretty narrowly defined profile, i.e. Chinese American with relatively broad exposure to Chinese food, but without enough cooking experience to just improv everything. Anyway, with any luck, I'll be feasting on some tight home-made suan ni bai rou and sichuan liang mian by the end of the week.