Lunch Date with Grandma, Pt. 2…or is that a flying saucer I see?

Lunch date is a bit of a misnomer here. This isn’t a tale about another lunch time excursion–though Pau Pau and I had many during my childhood and young adulthood. No, it’s more a fond memory of something she frequently made me for lunch when I was little, especially on school holidays and summer vacations…

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Lunch Date with Grandma, Pt. 1

I think what made my grandmother such a good instinctive cook, despite having spent a large portion of her life outside the kitchen–much of the time playing mah jhong apparently–was that she was a savvy eater who knew how to sniff out great food. It wouldn’t take her long to suss out the best market…

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And now for something sweet…please

No matter how stuffed I feel after feasting on a dozen or so different types of savory dim sum, I ALWAYS make room for sweets. I swear I must have a 2nd stomach reserved just for dessert. As a child it was an almost painful exercise in restraint for me to sit through the savory…

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Baby, take a bao

We’re 11 weeks into sheltering in place and it seems not only are people over self-isolation, many are done trying to bake sourdough bread–either out of frustration over flabby or dead starters, flour shortages, one too many failed loaves, or simply because warmer weather is driving them outdoors and away from their ovens. I get…

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The sticky subject of rice

In early March, during the nascent days of pandemic toilet paper and hand sanitizer hoarding, mom dispatched me to buy more rice which she’d heard through the Chinese grapevine was also flying off the shelves. She was in a tizzy because that 25lbs bag in the downstairs pantry was clearly insufficient to get us through…

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Art of the Wrap…or dumpling traditions

There’s this now famous scene about halfway into the box-office phenomenon that is Crazy Rich Asians (2018) where the obscenely wealthy Young family gather around an ornate dining room table of their matriarch’s impressively vast estate to make dumplings, decked out in stylish designer clothes. The scene is set up so that the elder members,…

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Fry Happy…or tales of a fearless frequent fryer

At the start of quarantine I made what many people would consider an impulsive, if not excessive purchase–35lbs. of cooking oil. No, it was not pandemic-induced temporary insanity. I did not accidentally click on the wrong item while grocery shopping online with Instacart. It was a calculated move. You see, I like deep-frying stuff. I…

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Cracking the (egg) custard tart code

I get lost…a lot. Before GPS in smartphones my questionable sense of direction led me down dead-end streets, cul-de-sacs, and roundabouts more times than Guy Fieri has driven through “Flavor Town.” Okay, even with GPS I still occasionally manage to take the wrong exit or miss a crucial turn. You can imagine, then, what it…

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Chinese Bakery Buns…or I’ll take one of each

There have been only a handful of times in my life when I didn’t live in relatively close proximity to a Chinese bakery/cafe, or at the very least, within driving distance–my college years in Santa Cruz (a veritable culinary wasteland when it came to authentic Chinese cooking) and my brief stint working/living in Monterey. I’d…

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