Winter Cure Workshop: Wèi Collective x Zoe Yang
In this winter workshop, we discuss the cultural traditions of 腊月 (làyùe), the month leading up to 春节/Spring Festival and a time when communities gathered to preserve and prepare food for the new year celebration.
We will discuss diverse culinary practices from around China and invite participants to share their stories. We come together to recreate the traditional economies of scale and communal labor that made these practices not only possible but joyous!
Participants will learn to wind-cure meat, lactoferment mustard greens, and preserve winter vegetables. In the end, you'll take home 2 prepped duck legs and 1 酸菜 (suāncài) jar, plus a bonus seasonal preserve from Wèi Collective's farm partners. We'll end with a cooking demo of suancaiyu (Sichuan's hot and sour pickled mustard green fish stew, aka “sauerkraut fish”), with tasting/snacking for all.
Local well salt and huajiao (Sichuan peppercorn) supplied graciously in collaboration with Syracuse Salt Co and 50Hertz Tingly Foods. Duck sourced from Zoe's favorite free-roaming, antibiotic- and hormone-free Jurgielewicz family farms (@tastyduck).
This is part two of Wèi Collective's yearlong programming series with telos.haus introducing Sichuan foodways and life lessons from a gastronomic motherland rooted in the deep earth. Part one (Ferments x Forages) covered the basics of Sichuan paocai and contextualized the importance of local, organic food supply chains.
Wèi 味 Collective (味·集社) is on a mission to amplify Sichuan’s ancestral and contemporary foodways.
We are the first cross-cultural, Sichuan-run central platform bridging the province’s mainland and diasporic producers, businesses, writers, restaurateurs, and especially farmers, growers, and foragers—the heart of Sichuan’s agricultural heritage.
Launched in August 2025 by Kathy Yuan, Wèi Collective’s community building initiatives will include online resource mapping & knowledge shares; bilingual career development opportunities for Sichuan/English speakers; in-person programming & small biz partnerships in collaboration with @thinkchinatown (NYC); land-to-table/mountain-to-basin tours (Sichuan); and more to come.
味 (wèi) is a Chinese character for taste, aroma, flavor. Wèi 味 Collective was founded to create a community centering Sichuan voices: our tastemakers, especially from the mainland. In the West, Sichuan food has never been more popular or reductive. We want the world to know there’s more.
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Zoe Yang: Nanjing-bred culinary brazenness. Radical forager. Transforming consciousness & ancestral/local ecologies in the home kitchen, often via the pickle jar.
You can find her cooling outside the auto body shop with the most productive ginkgo trees; machete-hacking upstate; tracing perennial bounty in the Bronx planted by immigrant ancestors past; chasing magnolia blooms to tempura in Brooklyn; hauling out bamboo stalks from the choicest New Jersey suburbs to slice up at the Bed-Stuy Home Depot (peak Kathy tip!); and in general, fearlessly traversing the forbidden outreaches of the city in search of such ephemeral threads to the land.
She teaches all this and the critical intersections of foraging and identity in private lessons and public workshops. Zoe has been writing (and eating) feverishly about foraging, cooking, food, restaurants, and Chinese wine in NYC across personal, academic, and commercial publications for over 16 years. Catch her on Substack for more.
Most recently, she was featured in the documentary Eating Spring by Yuanya Feng and Huiyi Chen. Zoe now works with the Queens Botanical Garden on a seasonal basis to root traditional Chinese plant knowledge in local space: edible plant knowledge walking tours, zongzi-making workshops using native plant materials, and fermentation sessions.