Chopsticks are small, thin sticks that can be made of a number of different materials including wood, bamboo, ivory, silver, gold and plastic. Chinese choose chopsticks as their tableware rather than a knife and fork since they consider a knife and fork to represent a sort of violence, and resemble weapons.

Chinese simply choose chopsticks as their tableware rather than knife and fork since Chinese people, under cultivation of Confucianism, consider knife and fork bearing sort of violence, like cold weapons.

The important festivals of a year enjoyed by Chinese are accompanied by corresponding drinking activities, such as the "calamus wine" on Dragon Boat Festival, the chrysanthemum wine on the Double Ninth Festival and the New Year Wine on the New Year's Eve.

Most Chinese New Year dishes have names that sound like good or fortunate things. Fish (Yu) is a homonym for abundance, and New Year rice cake (Nian Gao) represents advancement and family cohesion.bn

Fortune Cookie News would like to wish all of our readers a happy Chinese New Year! According to the Chinese Zodiac, the Year of 2008 is a Year of the Rat, which begins on February 7, 2008 and ends on January 25, 2009.

Many Chinese begin their day with a warm bowl of congee, a watery rice gruel that bears a marked resemblance to porridge.

Generally speaking, Chaozhou refers to Chaoshan-Guangdong area and southwest Fujian. "Kongfu Tea" of Chaozhou is actually the art of making tea, instead of the skills of tea production.

Asian cooks are equally fond of fungi. Anyone who likes Chinese food has noticed that mushrooms appear on restaurant menus as a vegetable dish and are used to enhance other dishes. In Chinese, it is called xiānggū (香菇, lit. "fragrant mushroom" or "delicious mushroom"). Two Chinese variant names for high grades of shiitake are dōnggū (Chinese: 冬菇, "winter mushroom") and huāgū (花菇, "flower mushroom," which has a flower-like cracking pattern on the mushroom's upper surface); both are produced at colder temperatures.

The herbal tea and the special ingredient soups usually require hours of slow cooking in an ancient style clay pot, before they reach maximum benefits. These soups are often used for postpartum, illness, old age, and weak energy.A large part of the special ingredients is based on the concept of yin and yang, the two forces that rule the universe. Depending on the context, yin refers to the feminine, darker, cooling forces, while yang represents the masculine, lighter, hot forces. Here are several samples of Chinese soups used to treat illness.