Buddha's Delight

Buddha's delight, known in Chinese as luohan zhai, is a vegetarian dish well known in Chinese and Buddhist cuisine, its name drawn from Sanskrit by way of luohan, an enlightened being, and zhai, vegetarian food. It consists of an assortment of vegetables and other vegetarian ingredients, typically at least ten and sometimes as many as eighteen or thirty-five, such as bamboo shoots, mushrooms, tofu, water chestnuts, lotus seeds and various fungi, cooked together in a soy-sauce-based liquid with seasonings until tender. The dish is traditionally eaten by vegetarian Buddhist monks and is served in Chinese households on the first day of the Chinese New Year, reflecting the old Buddhist practice of eating vegetarian food for the new year's first five days as a form of self-purification, and it has since become a common vegetarian option on Chinese restaurant menus worldwide. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/