work fruitlessly
Cooking with sand is a Chinese idiom. Its pinyin is Chu ī sh ā Zu ò m í, which means cooking with sand. It is a metaphor for futility. It's from to Wang Lang.
The origin of Idioms
In Song Dynasty, Huang Tingjian's poem "send Wang Lang away", he said, "I'm not satisfied with cooking, but it takes a lot of skill to carve out the words on ice."
Idiom usage
As predicate, attribute and object, metaphor is futile.
work fruitlessly
his name is enough to strike terror in people 's hearts - xiān shēng duó rén
water rushes down and covers hundreds of miles of land - yī xiè bǎi lǐ