Bad Piggies Chinese
Karoline Oum
It was pretty clear to me on a recent visit that China has become one of the biggest global markets for Angry Birds. The game was everywhere and around 100 million Chinese downloads are expected this year. It made me wonder if this was somehow linked to rising concerns over inflation and a way of getting back at those (increasingly expensive) mischievous green pigs.
Certainly inflation has been a key feature of the environment this year in China and one should pay close attention to it. Rising inflation is a crucial social concern and takes a heavy toll on household incomes that are already struggling to keep up with economic growth.
So China finds itself exposed to large and random food shocks, mostly domestically driven, which sporadically batter the consumer price index. The initial impact from shocks to raw food then seeps into other parts of the consumption basket, shows up for a bit in nonfood inflation, and dissipates after about 6-12 months. While macroeconomic policy can help dampen the pass-through from food to other items, it can do little to counter the fundamental source of these pressures.
Coming back to the most recent inflationary episode. Our take is that the initial shock this time around materialized in fresh fruit, vegetables and grain in the first half of 2010, due mostly to weather. Toward the end of 2010 we saw inflation start to feed through to other items in the consumption basket, coinciding with a moderate easing of credit conditions around the same time. By the Spring of this year, the momentum was starting to fizzle, partly dampened by a tightening of macroeconomic policies. Inflation peaked in July and was all set to quickly retreat in the latter part of this year.
Unfortunately, just as China appeared to be heading out of the (inflationary) woods, pork happened. An ongoing (and literal) hog cycle, embellished by some localized pig disease, caused pork prices to skyrocket. We are now seeing this feed back into inflation more broadly, starting up the transmission mechanism again. Given that this process is well underway, it would seem premature to now start to backpedal on macroeconomic policies.
The good news is that this particular food price shock should be smaller than in the past; the hog-cycle will soon turn and the effects should wash out reasonably quickly. The bad news, though, is that the return to more normal times and lower inflation will be postponed once again. Darn them piggies!
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Happy Lunar New Year everyone! Happy year of the pig. We celebrated potluck style with family and some really great friends. The night was filled with good food, great conversations, and laughter. It was crazy loud (how could it not, with 7 kids in the house) and a bit chaotic but a good kind of chaos.
There are many delicious dishes traditionally served at a Chinese New Year feast. Each dish symbolizes the hopes for the new year. Noodles symbolize happiness and longevity. Fish and dumplings symbolize prosperity and wealth. For the best part of the meal (dessert), tang yuan symbolizes family togetherness.
Lesson learned from making Tang Yuan this year, buy glutinous rice flour well before the Chinese New Year celebrations begin. We went to the local Asian market the week before and all of the glutinous rice flour packages were gone. The entire shelf, empty. Fortunately we had a little bit left at home, just enough for a batch.
Tang Yuan or sweet glutinous rice dumplings are used to make a sweet dessert soup. They can be filled or left plain and served in a lightly sweetened syrup. They are smooth and chewy in texture and the ones we made are filled with a sweet sesame paste. The wonderful thing about the tang yuan is that you can fill them with other delicious flavors like peanut or red bean.
The ingredients and the process of making the dough is extremely easy but filling the dumplings can be a bit tricky. The dough is smooth and pliable but feels a little like oobleck. The longer it stays in you hands, the stickier it gets and the harder it is to work with. With a little practice, it gets easier.
To make the piggies, follow the recipe below to make the dough and the filling. Portion out a ball of dough 1/2 inch diameter in size for the eyes. Use 2 drops of black food gel to color the dough. Color the remaining dough with pink food gel to your desired shade of pink. Reserve a ping pong ball sized pink dough to make the snout and ears.
Viola! Filling these dumplings was a bit of a challenge but we had fun and the piggies turned out adorable. For some added color, we made a rainbow of unfilled tang yuan (just roll the dough into little balls) to compliment the piggies.
Hi There! We are a pair of Taiwanese-American identical twins who love food and love to experiment in the kitchen! We have fun creating not only tasty but charming looking food that make our hearts and families happy. To us, food is more than mere sustenance. It brings people together and creates good conversations and fond memories. Stay awhile and have some fun with us!
I used store bought ready made lotus seed paste, red bean paste, and snowskin premix which may be easily purchased from the bakery supply shops in Malaysia and Singapore. Red bean paste in cans and lotus seed paste in bags may be purchased at the Asian grocery stores here in Minnesota. If you wish to make your own filling, please check out my Red Bean Paste recipe.
The recipe below was adapted from Anncoo Journal to suit local measuring conditions and availability of ingredients. I used vegetable oil instead of shortening and inadvertently omitted the powdered sugar. However, I am pleased to say that it did not affect the outcome at all. In fact, I was very pleased with the texture and Ro-Ri San and Ro-Jiro thought it was superb! The dough was soft and smooth after resting two hours in the fridge. It was just as good the next morning. Snowskin mooncakes should be consumed within 3 days.
Hi Biren! These piggies are so adorable!! I have actually never seen mooncakes made into piggies before. This is my first time, and they just look so cute! Now, I want to play with making these at home too. I hope my Asian grocery store will carry lotus seed paste and red bean paste!
WOW Biren! Your piggies look super cute especially the one with blue eyes ? I also love the way you displayed them next to the pumpkins, so pretty!
Happy Mooncake Festival to you and your family!
Thanks so much Ann with all your tips and directions on where to get the ingredients. I had so much fun making these. Will definitely make them again. The snowskin is really soft and delicious. Hubby and son loved it! ?
I am not the only person who has suddenly found themselves flooded in these mysterious texts. Last weekend my friend Mark Slutsky and I were texting some of our favorites back and forth, including this particularly intriguing one that Mark received:
We talked for a while and we have trading (crypto) in common now. She assisted making an account on a OTC website for trading crypto. Everything is very shady and kindness like this doesnt exist. Weve made certain trades and its gone through and ive make money but this is super sketch need some help.
In this case, the victim deposited the money into a fake crypto platform that told him his investments were performing well, presumably to entice him to deposit even more. Of course, once he tried to withdraw the money, he found he was unable to. In the comments, a near-victim describes the process in more detail:
i was the victim of a chinese badass scam, That chinese woman texted me 'by mistake' and she has an uncle who taught her trading, she lives in new york for 20 years but originally from hong kong, studied finance and she's a business owner, she was fattening me for two weeks then she wanted to mentor me and help me earn money, she was obviously using google translate because she was quitting WhatsApp every minute and then translating to English then she pastes the message, which made me even more suspicious: how come she's been living in new york for 20 years and she's using translator? i got fattened and was prepared to be slaughtered and once she asked me to send money to this website: flxbank.com , i started researching it and i found a post on reddit that got me educated about it! Reddit's community literally saved me 700$!
The scam's pattern is the following:
- She texts you 'by mistake', she keeps talking to you and befriending you, she asks you a lot of questions about your life, she keeps telling you about her successes, trades and profits, she also said that she gives 20% of profits to charity and wants to mentor me to trade under one term- give 20% of profits to charity, which was a big point that made me believe her.. but in fact, 100% of profits\'invested' money is going to the scammers, to fund the scam and hire more scammers and expand their criminal businesses.. she almost gained my heart but her progress and her slaughtering got halted when i've read an amazing article on a wonderful and remarkable website, 'reddit.com'.
Send two pictures of luxury bags or jewelry to the guest and ask the guest to help choose one, hinting to the guest that one has recently made a considerable amount of extra income and wants to buy a gift for family.
Send high-end restaurants to comment on their expensive and unpalatable meals. Better off to stabilize the side income first, or it's too wasteful.You can ask the guest what they usually do when they are bored. After the guest answers, they will usually ask you what you have done and you will have a chance to get in.You can say: travel, walking the streets/window shopping, listen to music, play mahjong, making money on WeChat, etc. [or whatever platform]
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