I still crave many dishes from my childhood, like ayam goreng kunyit (turmeric fried chicken), pastel panggang (a shepherd’s pie of sorts), and roti bakso (sweet pork buns). Some, I’ve tried to recreate in my own kitchen and others, I patiently wait for. I do...
Last Saturday, I had two cooking demos at the Freer and Sackler Galleries in downtown D.C. as part of their Lunar New Year family day celebrations. The weather forecast predicted snow (they were actually right!) and I was expecting maybe 5 people to show up at...
I don't know why, but snowy days and cold weather tend to bring on a bout of nostalgia. The temperatures dipped into the teens and about 10 inches of snow fell on Tuesday, unusual for Northern Virginia. As I was curling up on my couch and...
I heart noodles. Ramen. Chow mein. Pancit. And especially my mom’s mie goreng (Indonesian fried noodles). But today, I’d like to give a shout-out to a lesser known noodle dish—japchae. A classic Korean dish, you’ll find japchae on the menu at just about any Korean restaurant in the U.S. If you’re lucky...
When it comes to anecdotes about chocolates and life, the most famous quote of all has to be Forrest Gump’s: "Mama always said life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get." Recently, I discovered another quote in a book by...
On February 19, 2015, we will welcome the Year of the Sheep. And so begins another round of eating because a new year celebration isn't a celebration without lots of food! I’ve written many posts on Lunar New Year foods: from a Singapore favorite, raw fish...
General Tso’s chicken may be the emblematic go-to dish at Chinese restaurants across North America but this supposedly Hunan dish is virtually unknown in China. In her 2013 cookbook Every Grain of Rice--Simple Chinese Home Cooking, Fuchsia Dunlop explains that General Tso’s chicken was actually invented by...
I love eggplant: Eggplant in baba ghanouj, eggplant in spicy tomato sauce, eggplant cooked fish-fragrant-style, the list goes on. As much as I enjoy eggplant in all its permutations, one thing I don’t do much of is cook eggplant. I don’t care for the tedium of salting...
We can all agree that avocado, with its smooth, buttery flesh, is a very tasty fruit. The fact that it’s packed with vitamins (especially E) and minerals, dietary fiber, and monounsaturated fats that can reduce cholesterol levels is even more of a bonus! Now, if you...
Instead of celebrating Lunar New Year like the Chinese, Koreans and Vietnamese, the Japanese celebrate the Western New Year on January 1st. This wasn’t always the case. It was only in 1873, five years after the Meiji Restoration (the revolution that transferred power from the Tokugawa shogunate to...
