Five-Spice Gunpowder

We recently had some good chicken at a local Chinese restaurant, and I was wondering what was in it. This restaurant is unusual in that it has a separate 'good' menu where you can order their Hong Kong style food.

The chicken tasted like it had Five-Spice Powder in it. I know this because we have some at home. Now what are those 5 spices? When I got home, I went to our spice cabinet, took out the bottle of Five-Spice Powder and looked at the ingredients which were both in English and Chinese and it read "Spice", so no help there.

I was still curious, so I looked on the web. As I was typing the letters into a Google search, it filled in the top popular useful searches. I entered the characters "five-" and it suggested "five - seven = negative two".

Huh? I studied math in school, and I already knew that 5-7 = -2. Now why would Google suggest that? Why would that be a top search? And what is in Five-Spice Powder anyway?

Here are the answers:

Many many people are searching for a nasty pistol called a "Five-Seven". They go to Google to find it and enter their search text. Google tries to show off and do the math for them and provides links underneath the result. Five-Spice Powder is the third choice on their suggestion list when they type the first few characters: "Five-".

Here's what's in Five-Spice Powder: star anise, cloves, cinnamon, Sichuan pepper, and ground fennel seeds. And here's a recipe if you want to make it yourself, and this is a similar chicken recipe to the one I had at the Chinese restaurant.

Here's a link to information about the Five-Seven pistol, and some information about cheap bullets.

If you didn't know, Google will also do other math tricks like unit conversions for you. For example, try entering "8 gallons in cubic centimeters" into a Google search.

Lastly, I suggest you prepare the chicken according to the recipe and tell me how it came out; you can even shoot the chicken yourself with your Five-Seven and serve it with some Gunpowder tea.