Xi'an Famous Foods (Cookbook by Jason Wang)

If you've spent any time in New York City, you may have a lingering love for Xi'an Famous Foods, a Flushing, Queens, food stall first made famous by Anthony Bourdain and later expanded to outlets across the city.  This is the go-to place for biang biang hand-ripped noodles with spicy cumin lamb, liang pi cold skin noodles and rou jia mo (meat-stuffed "burgers"). But in the rest of America, the foods of Shaanxi province are rare to nonexistent, making this new cookbook from Jason Wang, the restaurant chain's owner, a very welcome contribution to the Chinese cookbook canon.  Xi'an is almost as famous for its heavily Muslim-influenced, sour-spicy food as it is for the Terracotta Warriors. Featuring beef and lamb vs. pork, it frequently uses vinegar, cumin and Sichuan pepper to tame and accentuate those flavors. Shaanxi, along with Gansu province, occupies the northern reaches of what we have termed the Sichuan Pepper Belt, which stretches down through Sichuan and Chongqing to Yunnan and G