 [...] now the hand is coming back. And I think that has a lot to do with food. Farming is gonna be hip again and people are going to think about the things they’re contributing to society. [...] Hopefully what this is leading to is people learning to shop like all good chefs do: We go and get all the best [stuff] and come home and figure out what we’re gonna make. Italy became cool in [...] Continue reading More Peach? Make Peach Sauce.  What can you do with 24 squash blossoms? Twenty-four is too few for squash blossom canh, a clear soup that Mom used to make when I was little. The flower is the only thing of a pumpkin plant (squash blossom in Vietnam is pumpkin blossom) that I didn’t mind eating (I hate pumpkin). The flowers perish too quickly that American grocery stores almost never carry them(*). That scarcity, I can only guess, also raises them to [...] Continue reading For the Summer: Gyoza with Fruits and Flowers  It’s summer. Time for cold noodle. Refrigerated, ice-cold noodle. And all it takes is 10 minutes (that includes water-boiling time). Traditionally, the Koreans sweeten mul naeng myeon (물 냉면, “water cold noodle”) with sliced Asian pear and julienned cucumber. Asian pears are not yet in season (I don’t really know when its season is, but the tiny ones at Berkeley Bowl look too sad to slice), and when I want to cook my [...] Continue reading Ten-minute noodle and nectarine  How can you bring kimchi to lunch at work without the smell of fermented cabbage? I like the garlic smell of my homemade kimchi, but I’m not sure if I want my office to smell like it. Besides, I’m not a fan of bringing multiple containers to work. I don’t even want people to see me with a fork at my desk, and it’s even worse with an empty but dirty container. The ideal lunch is some [...] Continue reading Rice Paper Kimchi Roll – a cross between ssam bab and fresh spring roll  When I’m home, Little Mom pampers me with her food and sweeps me out of her kitchen, except when I open the fridge to snack, because her mind fixes on the idea that if she lets me touch the stove, I only make a mess. She’s right. Not to toot my own horn but when I’m home, I’m a lazy mess. So when I said Mom, let’s make bánh dầy đậu, she threw [...] Continue reading Recipe for bánh dầy đậu – Vietnamese mung bean mochi  One of my onions grew a plump white sprout. So plump that I couldn’t bring myself to throw it out. I left it alone for a week. Then two weeks. [...] Continue reading Alone in the Kitchen with an Onion  – Guest post by Mom, loosely translated by me – There are mornings, even on weekends, when I wake up feeling like a stone (Mai: she means it figuratively, the supermodel BMI runs in our family ) and still have to get out of bed because of the mountain of work waiting. Not work at work, but work around the house. Laundry, cleaning the bathrooms, tidying the bedrooms, grocery, and especially cooking even when I have [...] Continue reading Mom’s cooking #4 – Beef porridge  When I walked down that aisle, I beamed with pride. In my hand, a bag of okonomiyaki flour, a bag of katsuobushi, bottles of sauces and aonori. Kristen took care of the cabbage and meats. Pancake day. Osaka style. At least that was the plan. We didn’t plan on being authentic. We couldn’t. An American-born Taiwanese and a Vietnamese who haven’t lived in Japan at all are not gonna make an “authentic okonomiyaki” on first try. [...] Continue reading Kitchen hour: quasi-Osaka Okonomiyaki  A week we waited. Today had the moment of truth arrived. Open the jar we did. Saw some white stuff on the top layer that initially worried us but turned out to be just bits of ground garlic. Off we scraped them anyway, and to check the pickle juice that heavy jar we tilted. Little Mom, who more than anyone I know carrots and bean sprouts and bokchoy pickled has, to me revealed that if the juice [...] Continue reading White Kimchi for amateurs and Kimchi Cabbage Salad  Yesterday is momentous. Here we are, making kimchi. Is that a big deal? Yes. There’s a joke that if you’re gonna get married into a Korean family you’d better learn how to make kimchi. It’s just pickled vegetables, but it has an entire nation behind its back (and a pretty proud one at that), so you can’t mess with it and expect something good to happen. So here we are, jotting down the recipe from Lucky [...] Continue reading Kitchen hour: Make White Baechu Kimchi |
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