Happy Lunar New Year! February 7, 2008 begins the year of the Rat, the first year of the Chinese zodiac, a time of activity and renewal. Today we’ll take you on a quick tour of lunar new year basics, factoids, and food traditions. It is said that this is a good year to make a fresh start, and after the year we’ve had, we couldn’t agree more! As uncertified joy practitioners, we here at Freshtopia.net love a good reason to celebrate and eat some delicious food. So why not wear a little red, do a spot of cleaning (a lunar new year tradition), bring some fresh blossoms into your home and enjoy some healthy, auspicious fruits and vegetables? In addition to tossing a little green, Tanja put together a wonderful, earthy, spicy parsnip noodle salad for this episode. We’ll be putting the recipe in the next edition of the Freshtopian, so if you haven’t already signed up, do so by entering your preferred address in the field at the site’s upper-right. Once you’ve had a chance to check out Tanja’s little nerd-core rap tribute above, take a look at the video below. MC frontalot is making me lose my mind, and his glasses look like mine, which is splendid. Special thanks to Justin Winokur, and Hello This Is Alex for letting us use their music in our show. And thanks to Brian Beggerly, Jakob Montrasio, John Haslam, Jim Winstead, and Laughlin Elkind for releasing their great photos under a Creative Commons license via Flickr.
