Growing up, my family didn't have a tradition of baking Christmas cookies. My mom would place several orders of Bûche de Noël (Christmas log cake) for our family dinner on Christmas eve and to give away to friends but nary a sugar cookie was in sight. I never...
We’ve all heard it before: It’s the thought that counts. Yeah right. I, for one, prefer not to give gifts just for the sake of giving. I actually do want to the person at the receiving end to like my gift. And during the holidays, this desire...
I’m a peanut sauce convert. There I said it. It’s true, I never liked peanut sauce. It probably has to do with the fact that my mom always served peanut sauce with boiled vegetables, i.e. the popular Indonesian dish gado- gado. C’mon, do boiled vegetables sound appetizing...
When I was gathering recipes for The Asian Grandmothers Cookbook, I spent a day with Cathy Chun and her sister, Carol, cooking, chatting and sharing. Shrimp with black bean sauce and taro cake were on the menu. While both were delicious, only the shrimp dish made...
Whew ...
A member of the fried shallot-green onion-cilantro trifecta, fried shallots are my absolute favorite garnish. Alone or as part of the team, they add loads of flavor to just about any dish. In SE Asian cooking, fried shallots (aka bawang goreng in Indonesian) are most often added as...
For the last three years, I had a pack of nigari and a wooden tofu press sitting in my kitchen cupboard. Unfortunately, the duo never saw any action as I didn’t get round to making tofu. Now that we’ve moved across the country and most of...
Many Asian dishes are naturally vegan--i.e. contain no meat products and no dairy--or are easily adapted. It's not surprising since fresh vegetables are a large part of our diet, coconut milk is our “milk” of choice, and cheese hardly shows up in any of our...
The last few weeks have been exhausting. I’ve been sick twice in three weeks (once with a gastro-intestinal virus and am now recovering with maybe strep and/or a sinus infection), and my two illnesses bookended my little man’s bout with a stomach virus (yet again)....
