Spring Festival Feast, Spring Festival 2012 in New York

Spring Festival Feast, Spring Festival 2012 in New York

My family is never fastidious about food. There's never anything more than ordinary on our table. It seems as if anything cooked to be "eatable" would satisfy us: now mother wouldn't even prepare a big meal for me as she did last year when I occasionally travel home 200 kilometers from school. The best
dish now may be stewed pork with radish, which involves the greatest effort my mother would make in cooking. On other occasions, there're merely several plates on the table containing sautéed cabbage, scrambled eggs with tomatoes, and such things that everyone who touches the pan and the turner for the first time can successfully make. If you find us having for dinner something with taste or look that's above average, it must come from the food market, readily done.

This simple family diet owes largely to my mother, who was the chef before she changed her workplace and has since come back late. Father now helps her because he returns earlier, and this has slightly improved our dinner. This doesn't mean Mother is lazy in housework. She just wants everything to be done efficiently; by "efficiently" she means "never wasting any time on things
 that can, but are unnecessary to, be bettered". So she only makes what's eatable, considering neither good taste nor nice look. "Food is only made from nutrition and weight, the former keeping you healthy, the latter making you full", she says. This is probably true, since nobody in my family suffers f
rom malnutrition or starvation. But the most unusual of all, I think, is that we have our meals that way all year round. Even on New Year's Eve, there's no feast.