Title:	Buddha Jumps Over the Wall, and Other Curiously Named Classic Chinese Dishes: A Graphic Cookbook―26 Recipes & Stories
	Author:	Ying Chang Compestine
	Published:	March 4, 2025, Chronicle Books
	No. of Pages:	184
	Cover Price:	$24.95 Paperback, $12.99 Kindle

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Most foodies love to hear stories about food, especially unique and foreign foods that aren’t familiar. Many Chinese dishes have strange names, and award winning author, Ying Chang Compestine has compiled many of her childhood dishes and their stories into an excellent cookbook, Buddha Jumps Over the Wall, and Other Curiously Named Classic Chinese Dishes: A Graphic Cookbook―26 Recipes & Stories. While this cookbook doesn’t contain a lot of recipes, the stories make it one that any foodie will want to curl up into a corner and read. This is a “comic book” cookbook and is colorful and fun to read.

The beginning of the book gives a nice background of the author and the dishes, as well as an explanation of some of the ingredients that go into those dishes. The recipes list the ingredients first, and then are followed by comic book entries with step-by-step instructions. The instructions are easy to follow and are understandable to cooks both beginning and seasoned cooks alike.

While there are delightful, colorful illustrations, there are no actual photographs of the dishes; this may be the only drawback to the book. However, the book is so fun that it is still worth putting on the cookbook shelf or coffee table. The strange names of the dishes are fascinating, and the book is interesting to read.

All told, this is a very unique book and one that is fun to cook from.

Special thanks to NetGalley for supplying a review copy of this book.