Celestial Peach's Year of the Tiger 2022-23 round-up
(Read the Year Of The Ox 2021-22 round up from last year)
January 2022
The global Chinese and luni-solar abiding community welcomed the Year of the Water Tiger, and I had just celebrated my 100th #ChineseFoodiesOfIG (a three-year interview project) with an online exhibition involving 41 artists, all visualising the answer to one question: ‘What Does Home Taste Like?’.
February
We kicked off the year proper with a big Lunar New Year party at Hackney Chinese Community Services (HCCS). The potluck club responded to the bat signal (my brief was ‘voluminous’) and catered for almost 100 hungry guests, including Fuchsia Dunlop and the Hackney Mayor!
The Asian Dessert Exchange baking collective got together in its new 2.0 iteration to support The Adobros’ BANGON! Bake For Philippines bake sale, kindly hosted by Lucky & Joy in Clapton. We raised over £3,000 to help survivors of Typhoon Odette rebuild their lives.
The first Dining Club of the year was off to a good start, with guest chef and dear friend Cherry Tang sharing her Cantonese taste of home. These Dining Clubs are part of my ‘Taste Of Home’ series, raising funds for HCCS.
March
2022 was the year of fun photoshoots. Although I worked in fashion for a decade, it’s only recently (in my late 30s!) that I’ve started getting in front of the camera. I did a spot of modelling for my friend Yiran, who proudly celebrates her Yunannese Bai ethnic minority and is founder of YICRAFTS 怡手作, heritage textile workshop in London.
Potluck #10 took place with the theme ‘TOFU or go home’. If you don’t like tofu, don’t click on these images. Here’s what I made: tofu noodles and a silken tofu chocolate ganache.
April
The second Dining Club of the year featured the effervescent Duracell bunny that is Guan Chua, serving up signature Nyonya dishes and Malaysian Chinese favourites. It’s been lovely to see Guan go on and adopt HCCS as his second home.
May
A bit more modelling for Yicrafts London at Cultural Style Week. I wore a Yi ethnic minority outfit with a fabulous ‘tile’ hat. No slouching in this outfit!
Ahead of Duanwu (端午), also known as Dragon Boat Festival, I took part in a zongzi/joong/粽子 workshop at HCCS. My friend Ana and I got schooled - hard - by the chef-aunties who made us repeat the folding until we GOT. IT. RIGHT.
The Asian Dessert Exchange got together again to raise funds for Community Meal Share, a charity providing warm meals during the Sri Lankan humanitarian crisis. We put together a Bakers’ Box in collaboration with E5 Bakehouse and raised £2,000.
June
During the Platinum Jubilee weekend HCCS hosted its annual Dragon Boat Party, which the potluck crew catered. These festivals are always a lot of fun for all the family, with lion dances, mock dragon boat racing and of course - tonnes of food.
On the 12th I got involved in my friend Connor’s ‘No More Quiet Asian’ live ESEA panel show - where I hosted a food quiz for our esteemed and good-humoured guests: Jason Kwan, Ria Lina, Ken Cheng, Helen Goh and River Medway.
July
I took the summer ‘off’, but ended up organising one of the most meaningful collaborations to date. Partnering with psychotherapist Lili Ly and HCCS, we delivered ‘Recipes For Life’, a food therapy and mental wellbeing workshop that took place over five sessions during the summer. Our small and intimate group got to take free cooking classes with a range of ESEA chefs from my community: Jaki Clibbon, Guan Chua, Xinyue Pan, Songsoo Kim and Kenji Morimoto. Meanwhile, Lili led us in conversations around how to nourish our mental health and design our own ‘recipe for life’.
Oh! Code Hospitality included me in their list of 100 Most Influential Women, as ‘an important voice, doing much to educate both the hospitality industry and the public about the food and culture of the Chinese diaspora’. Thank you!
August
I launched the ESEA Food Directory, an ever-expanding, free-to-use database of small food businesses and suppliers in the UK. This is because I often get asked to recommend caterers, supper clubs, cooking classes or artisan producers who provide food reflective of their ESEA heritage and expertise. If you are looking for a tangible way to support the ESEA food community, this is it.
September
Look mum, I’m published! My chapter on The Community Centre was printed in London Feeds Itself, edited by Jonathan Nunn and published by Open City. The book sold out of 5,000 copies pretty quickly. Am I real writer now?
On the 17th of September, Dining Club returned with the most ambitious menu and collaboration yet: Wei Guo of Red House Spice and Michael Zee of Symmetry Breakfast presented a Chinese food and wine pairing menu. With ten courses of diverse Sichuan dishes on the them of ‘Not Just Hot’, and lesser known Chinese wines expertly curated, it was certainly a unique experience. In truth, these supper clubs have been exhausting to organise and run so this was the last in a while. #famouslastwords
October
With the devastating floods in Pakistan affecting at least 33 million people, I helped HCCS to put on a fundraiser for Islamic Relief. The Asian Dessert Exchange gang once again came together to sell our sweet stash, while our friends Four Winds Mahjong ran pay-to-play sessions all day. Lewisham Councillor Tauseef Anwar gave a rousing speech, saying this was the first time he had seen anyone from outside the Pakistani community help the cause. The local community dropped by all day to pick up donated goodies by West Mill Foods and Bodega Rita’s, and we raised well over £2,000.
Potluck #12 took place with the theme Waste Not!
Then, the third annual CongeeCon kicked off. My vision for this year was a three-part conference, themed around the ELEMENTS. October’s session featured guest speakers Nicola T. Chang and Nina Mingya Powles exploring the elements of WATER and AIR.
A delightful end to the month when I heard that I was a finalist for the inaugural BeInclusive Hospitality Awards ‘People’s Choice Person Of The Year’ Award. I didn’t win, but I’m a very good loser ;-)
November
On the 7th, I was invited to speak at Moongate Mix, an arts and culture salon. The theme was ‘Food & Writing’, our capable host was Mimi Aye and my illustrious co-panellists were Claire Kohda and Dr Anna Sulan Masing.
The 2nd CongeeCon took place, on the theme of EARTH and WOOD with guest speakers Richard Choksey and Songsoo Kim.
Then, a final collaborative supper club for the year, as four bakers from Asian Dessert Exchange contributed to the Curry Club fundraising banquet with a ‘Pan-Asian’ petit fours plate. So pretty!
December
The 3rd CongeeCon marked the end of the mini-series, on the theme of FIRE and METAL with guest speakers Holly Loftus and Bei Bei Wang. I really enjoyed combining hosting, speaking and cooking, ambitious as it was. (You should know by now that ambition is not an option for me!)
January
Going into 2023, I started a virtual ‘chef-in-residence’ role at Kitchen Marronage, an experimental space for gastronomy, food history, and communal work founded by the very inspiring Tao Leigh Goffe.
Potluck came back with a bang-(quet) for our 13th session: another giant banana leaf rice with even more food than the first one.
Oh, and in the last year I published ten more essays in An A-Z Of Chinese Food and found myself a kick@ss literary agent. Now it’s just the final push to get to the end… It’s as simple as X, Y, Z :-)
🐇
Bring on the Year of the Rabbit 2023!
These epochal junctions are always a good time to reflect on what I’ve been doing and where I’d like to go. It’s clear that none of this could have happened without the coming together of individuals and organisations in the community. And it’s also clear that I wouldn’t be doing this if there weren’t a community worth being part of.
There have been lessons along the way - mostly pleasant - that would have been impossible to learn without first doing. That’s why I DO so much. I believe you do first, and take the ‘fails’ on the chin. They’re not fails really; they’re learnings. They help us to weed out the stuff we don’t need.
My strengths are obvious. I am creative and hardworking, I have big picture visions, I can rally people, I know what gets them in through the door. I’m a good communicator. My strengths are sometimes my weaknesses too; wanting to do too much, putting other people’s needs first, thinking I can juggle everything. I’m a polymath (yes, it can be a bad thing).
In 2023, these are a few overarching themes I’d like to develop: collaboration, self-expression, groupwork.
Collaboration = multidisciplinary partnerships with other visionaries / tastemakers that I admire
Self-expression = developing an authentic public voice and identity
Groupwork = collective healing and co-creating through community group activities
These form a balanced structure for how I’d like to develop my relationship with myself, with peers and with the community.
What’s in the pipeline for Celestial Peach? I’m going to start a food storytelling project about Asian solidarity, work on a book or two, share the delights of my pickle jar and keep using food as a form of social organising technology.
And in general, continue to be a student, compassionate daughter, sister and partner, and understand that generosity has the potential to be limitless. Life has been kind to me, so I strive to be kind to all lifeforms around me.
Such is the perfect man:
His boat is empty.