I’ve always wanted to write a cook book and even more so to write an illustrated cook book and just recently I’ve finally had the chance to make a start on it. When I started planning this cookbook I almost immediately decided that I wanted to illustrate the stories behind the dishes in the book. A lot of Chinese and Taiwanese cuisines have a story behind them and I believe (hope) that people will find the stories in this book fun and interesting.

So far I’ve completed one story which I have included in this blog post. I’m in the process of creating a second story and while this story is quite long others may not be. This particular story is about a monster called Nian used to raid ancient Chinese villages and once the villagers were taught how to defeat him, this started the tradition of Chinese New Year.

Some of the images below are longer than others as these are meant to be double spreads. If you would like to view a larger version of each image please click on each one to view a larger version.

I hope you like this story.