Asian

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Taiwanese and Taiwanese American culinary traditions shine in three exciting cookbooks

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Taiwanese beef noodle soup prepared from a recipe in‘First Generation: Recipes from My Taiwanese-American Home’ by Frankie Gaw

By Leslie Brenner

A Taiwanese American identity movement is gathering strength in the United States. For those of us who love to cook and want to learn about Taiwan’s culinary culture — and for Taiwanese Americans keen to celebrate and cook the dishes of their beloved island nation — three recent cookbooks provide a delicious way in.

Each is appealing in its own way. Each also brings something uniquely valuable to the table. One is the perfect primer if you’re looking for Taiwanese culinary history and cultural context. Another is filled with great recipes and soulful personal takes on the Taiwanese American experience. The third shows you how to make beloved dishes from a cult-favorite Brooklyn restaurant and bakery.

‘Made in Taiwan’: Thoughtful overview, wide-ranging recipes

Many non-Taiwanese Americans’ knowledge of Taiwanese cooking is fuzzy at best. We might know that Din Tai Fung, the global chain of soup dumpling restaurants, began in Taiwan. Or that boba tea (also known as bubble tea) is iconically Taiwanese. We might even know — for instance, if we’ve ventured into a Taiwanese restaurant here and there — that beef noodle soup and scallion pancakes are Taiwanese favorites. Maybe we’ve heard of stinky tofu: Yes, that’s Taiwanese, too.

If you’re looking for a thoughtful overview that provides excellent context, background and history of Taiwanese culinary culture and all it has to offer, Made in Taiwan is the book for you. “I hope the world can see Taiwan as more than just a geopolitical chess piece or a controversial island near China with great night markets,” writes author Clarissa Wei in her introduction. She’s an accomplished Taiwanese American journalist who was born and raised in Los Angeles, and is now based in Taiwan’s capital, Taipei. She adds:

“Our cuisine is a hodgepodge of cultures, colored by our indigenous tribes, influenced by Japanese colonists, inspired by American military aid and shaped by all the various waves of Chinese immigrants and refugees who have arrived and made this island their home.”

We learn in an excellent chapter on the culinary history of the island that 95% of Taiwan’s population is Han Chinese, which Wei points out is but a “vague umbrella term for people who have ancestry in China.” In the 17th century the first wave of Chinese immigrants, from Fujian in south China, brought “the love of seafood, rice and pork.” Taiwanese cooking is similar to Chinese, with food that is “fried or braised in large woks, or softened in hot and steamy bamboo baskets stacked on top of one another.” Taiwan and Fujian share a common love for “lightly seasoned food, occasionally heightened with a minimalistic trinity of ginger, garlic and scallions.” Sweet potatoes — which thrive on the island’s subtropical climate — is the dominant carb, along with rice. Because the mountainous terrain lacks wide grazing lands, pork, not beef, is the de facto protein; seafood is also important.

In 1949, when the communists (under Mao Zedong) took power in China over the nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek, Chiang fled to Taiwan, establishing the Republic of China (R.O.C.), Taiwan’s official name. The R.O.C. and the U.S. became close allies and the U.S. pumped extensive military aid and exports to the island — including wheat. As a result, Taiwan fell in love with American food culture. America’s fried chicken inspired Taiwanese popcorn chicken; refugees from North China turned the wheat into dumplings and noodles.

The Recipes

Wei enlisted the help of Ivy Chen, a Taiwanese cooking instructor with deep knowledge of the island’s countryside culinary traditions that Wei says is lacking among “younger city folk.” The two traveled widely around the R.O.C. to gather inspiration from far-flung cooks.

Pickled Mustard and Pork Noodle Soup (Zhà Cài Ròu Sī Miàn)

This comforting noodle soup features preserved mustard stems, which you can make yourself (there’s a recipe in the book) or pick up at a well stocked Asian supermarket; there you can also look for fresh (or fresh frozen) Taiwanese wheat noodles, or use dried. Homemade pork broth makes the difference between a good soup and a great one in this case; I tried it both ways and vote for the homemade broth over purchased chicken broth.

RECIPE: Pickled Mustard and Pork Noodle Soup (Zha Cai Rou Si Mian)

I also enjoyed making Braised Napa Cabbage with shiitake, wood-ear mushrooms and carrots; with steamed or brown rice, it makes a lovely plant-forward dinner; and I’m eager to make Sweet Potato Leaves Stir-Fry, once I can get my hands on sweet potato leaves. A Quick Seafood Congee looks wonderful, and so does Smoked Betel Leaf Pork Sausage — though I don’t know if I’m up to wrangling hog casings. Made in Taiwan’s recipe for Three-Cup Chicken was satisfying, but the sauce didn’t work properly; it wouldn’t reduced to the “treacly, sticky glaze” the recipe promises and the famous dish is known for.

Pickled Mustard Greens, on the other hand worked great. Once I sun-dry them and age them, I can use them next time I make the Pickled Mustard and Pork Noodle Soup.

Made in Taiwan: Recipes and Stories from the Island Nation by Clarissa Wei with Ivy Chen, Simon Element, $40.

‘First Generation’: Storytelling with a giant heart, and recipes that work

If you want to gain a sense of what it’s like growing up in a Taiwanese American family, Frankie Gaw’s debut book (published in late 2022) has your name on it. You’ll eat super well along the way.

I fell hard for Gaw, the cook behind the delightful Little Fat Boy blog; His headnotes are some of the most engaging I’ve ever read. Here’s how he introduces his Grandma’s Pearl Meatballs:

“This was one of the very first recipes my grandma taught me when I started learning to cook fro her. I had never even seen it before she taught me. I remember following her lead as she combined a familiar mixture of pork, ginger and scallions into a meatball, then rolled it in grains of sweet glutinous rice that looked like pearls. After an 18-minute steam, lifting the steamer lid revealed glistening sticky rice balls, every grain soaked with pork juice and the aroma of bamboo. I can trace this recipe back to the Hubei province of China; it’s one of the dishes that makes me proud to be Asian.”

Who could resist?!

RECIPE: Frankie Gaw’s Grandma’s Pearl Meatballs

Gaw’s recipes are a pure pleasure to make — they’re as much about having fun with the process as they are with the end result. Excellent step-by-step visuals (expertly illustrated and photographed by Gaw himself) show how to pull noodles, wrap wontons, make braided bao wrappers and more.

Dan Bing

When Gaw writes that the egg crepes known as Dan Bing are a traditional Taiwanese breakfast dish his grandma used to make for him — and the simplest dish in the entire book — of course I had to make that, too. I loved them.

RECIPE: Dan Bing

And here’s his recipe for his Uncle Jerry’s Taiwanese Beef Noodle Soup, shown at the top of this review:

RECIPE: Frankie Gaw’s Uncle Jerry’s Taiwanese Beef Noodle Soup

Meanwhile, smack in the middle of the book, Gaw includes a full-page coming-out letter to his dad. It’s adorable, funny, poignant and brave — and followed by a recipe for Scallion Pancakes, whose headnote literally made me cry. Don’t ask why; just buy the book and read it all.

FIRST GENERATION; RECIPES FROM MY TAIWANESE-AMERICAN HOME BY FRANKIE GAW, TEN SPEED PRESS, 2022 $32.50.

‘Win Son Presents a Taiwanese American Cookbook’: Razzle-dazzle from a Brooklyn hot spot

This book from Josh Ku and Trigg Brown, the founders of Brooklyn’s Win Son and Win Son Bakery, (with an assist from writer Cathy Erway) is pure, exuberant fun — the kind of fun that one imagines makes the restaurant and bakery such hot tickets.

What sets it apart from First Generation and Made in Taiwan is that the recipes explode with creativity, and they don’t shy away from embracing wild fusions.

Lamb Wontons

Case in point: a platter of gingery, garlicky lamb wontons set on a schmear of labneh (yes, labneh!), dusted with cumin seeds, then sprinkled with a special “lamb spice mix,” drizzled with sweet soy dipping sauce and chile oil and showered with cilantro leaves. Weird-sounding? Maybe. Over the top? Definitely. Delicious? Absolutely.

RECIPE: Win Son’s Lamb Wontons

Win Son’s recipes are very cheffy, and not always in a user-friendly way. There are lots of sub-recipes, and in amounts that don’t make sense for a home cook. (What are you going to do with 2/3 cup of leftover lamb spice mix? Our adapted recipe adjusts so you only make enough for the wontons.) Yields are sometimes off. (The wonton recipe says it makes about 35; we had enough filling for 65.)

And sometimes the recipes just don’t behave. When I made Sun Cookies — a bakery signature — I took the authors’ suggested shortcut, using purchased frozen puff pastry instead of spending hours making a rough-puff pastry. Coming out of the oven, the cookies seemed to be complete flops, with lots of (very expensive!) pine nuts and caramelly filling spilling out of them as they baked. They looked nothing like the photo in the book. I nearly threw them away.

A sheet pan of Sun Cookies, their filling half-leaked out and looking strange, next to a photo of the cookie from the book

But once they cooled, I flipped them over, and hey! — they looked much like the ones in the book. That filling was almost painfully sweet, but the cookies were kind of evilly good — though I’m guessing the ones from the bakery starring freshly made rough puff are a thousand times better.

The Sun Cookies, once I flipped them over

These are the kinds of problems that are typical for chef books — which is why it’s so important the recipes are thoroughly tested before publication, along with careful editing and copy editing. Alas, these important steps are falling more and more by the wayside.

That said, Win Son Presents has an awful lot of charm, especially for fans of the restaurant and bakery. If you’re going to buy the book and attempt the recipes, best if you’re a more experienced cook, so you can spot any potential problems before getting too far into them. (Fear not — our adapted recipes fix all such rough spots.) If you are a confident chef who can adapt when things don’t go as anticipated, there’s plenty of worthwhile inspiration in Win Son Presents’ pages.

Win Son’s Soybean, Tofu Skin and Pea Shoot Salad

Fortunately I had my guard up when I made the Green Soybean, Tofu Skin and Pea Shoot Salad: The recipe called for 4 ounces, or 115 grams, of roasted seaweed snacks, which you’re supposed to crush and toss with the salad. I figured it was a mistake — seaweed snacks usually come in 4-gram or 10-gram packs. One hundred fifteen grams is a comical amount, a giant bowlful that would have completely overwhelmed the salad. I used 10 grams, which was more than enough, and adjusted our adapted recipe accordingly. The salad was a winner — fresh, fun and different. (And vegan!)

RECIPE: Win Son’s Soybean, Tofu Skin and Pea Shoot Salad

Win Son Presents a Taiwanese American Cookbook, by Josh Ku and Trigg Brown with Cathy Erway, abrams, 2023, $40.

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Katsuobushi (bonito flakes) will put a spring in your step and umami on your plate

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Topped with bonito flakes, the Century Egg and House Tofu at Fat Mao in Vancouver (shown above) inspired our recipe for Silken Tofu with Mushrooms and Bonito Flakes.

By Leslie Brenner

Put yourself in possession of a bag of bonito flakes — or katsuobushi, as it’s called in Japanese — and your cooking life may never be the same. Shaggy, delicate and seemingly lighter than air, the ingredient is at once essential and superfluous, ephemeral and timeless. Paradoxical! Shaved bonito looks like sawdust, but it’s way more delicious.

The reason it’s so life-changing, if you’re a certain kind of cook, is that understanding how to use bonito flakes opens up a world of easy and outstanding Japanese dishes, as well as the ability — in the wave of a hand — to drop a mood-altering, umamiful flourish on a fun assortment of other dishes.

Let’s start with the traditional Japanese part of the katsuobushi equation. (Japanese cooks must be chuckling by now, for Japanese cooking simply cannot exist without the stuff.) Bonito flakes are a key component of dashi, the cuisine’s foundational stock. Packed with powerful yet easy-to-control umami, that dashi gives soups and dishes depth and breadth, a soft roundness that makes everything inviting.

Dashi could not be easier or quicker to make: Just steep a piece of kombu briefly in steaming water, drop in a flurry of bonito flakes, wait two minutes, then strain the liquid — dashi achieved. It’s the essential ingredient for miso soup. Just whisk in some miso, drop in tofu and other garnishes (scallions, carrots, onion, spinach, turnips), and it’s done. And delicious. With that dashi in your fridge or freezer, you can make miso soup in a flash, whenever the mood strikes.

Miso soup is made with dashi — of which bonito flakes are an essential ingredient.

RECIPE: Dashi

RECIPE: Miso Soup

Dashi is so essential that it’s the first recipe in many Japanese cookbooks, including star chef Masahuru Morimoto’s excellent Mastering the Art of Japanese Cooking.

The broth may be used to dress spinach, kale or other vegetables (a dish known as ohitashi), make a fabulous dipping sauce for soba, create nimono — Japanese-style simmered dishes, or the heart-warming egg, chicken and rice meal-in-a-bowl called oyoka don. Or pour hot dashi (instead of green tea) over a bowl of garnished rice, for a deluxe version of the homey leftovers-moment called ochazuke.

For anyone eager to dive into Japanese cooking, writes Morimoto, “making dashi should be your first order of business. Your cooking will never be the same.”

Katsuobushi, straight up

Making dashi isn’t the only thing you can do with katsuobushi — you can also use it straight out of the bag. Grab a handful of flakes and drop them on top of okonomiyaki — a savory, saucy pancake stuffed with seafood and vegetables. Watch it dance! The bonito flakes are so light that the heat from the pancake stirs it to catch air currents and wave around on the plate.

Our recipe is adapted from one in Sonoko Sakai’s inspiring book, Japanese Home Cooking.

RECIPE: Okonomiyaki

Shizuo Tsuji’s seminal 1980 book Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art offers a recipe for an ohitashi (those dashi-marinated greens) garnished with katsuobushi. It’s super easy, delicious, fun and dramatic.

RECIPE: Spinach with Dashi and Bonito Flakes

OK, wait — what is katsuobushi exactly?

Yes, let’s back up a moment to talk about the ingredient. Although it’s commonly referred to as bonito flakes or shaved bonito, katsuobushi can be made of either bonito or skipjack tuna; the fish is dried, smoked, sometimes fermented and then shaved. “In the old days,” writes Morimoto, “all cooks bought the fish in blocks that resembled petrified wood and shaved them by hand into fine, feather-like flakes. (Today, most buy preshaved katsuobushi, one modern convenience I can get behind.)”

Some experts write that katsuobushi should be refrigerated once it’s opened, and not kept more than a few days; Morimoto says it lasts “virtually forever” in your pantry. I used to keep — sealed in an airtight container — it in the pantry after opening it, but noticed that after six months or so it dried out. You want the flakes to be soft, not brittle, so I recommend storing it (sealed) in the fridge once it’s open.

You can usually find bags of katsuobushi in Asian supermarkets, usually in cellophane bags with red and white or red and black graphics. Sometimes you can even find them in well stocked generic supermarkets (they have them at the Whole Foods in my neighborhood). You can also find it online (including in the Cooks Without Borders Cookshop). The brands you find most often in Pan-Asian supermarkets and on Amazon are mostly similar in quality, but if you go to an excellent dedicated Japanese supermarket, such as Mitsuwa Marketplace, you can often spend a few more dollars and find katsuobushi of a higher quality (such as the one shown above). To me it’s worth it, especially if you’re using it as a garnish.

Do try these at home

My favorite dish on a recent trip to Vancouver, Canada was at a super-cool, laid-back spot called Fat Mao — Century Egg with House Tofu. (It’s pictured at the top of this story.) The dish consisted of that a thick layer of fabulously creamy house-made tofu topped with cilantro leaves, scallions, crispy fried shallots, a delicious “black garlic sauce,” quartered century eggs and a flurry of katsuobushi. Century eggs, in case you’re not familiar with them, are a Chinese delicacy made by preserving eggs in an an alkaline solution and ash — which renders the yolks intensely flavorful (funky! stinky!) and the whites gelatinous.

I sought to create a dish at home that conveyed a similar vibe, but that didn’t require making or procuring century eggs; I wanted something easy and relatively quick for instant gratification. In place of the century eggs, I found that dry-steamed crimini mushrooms tossed in a sauce made with black garlic was a weirdly excellent analog, providing a chewy-tender texture and loads of umami. Of course the organic silken tofu I picked up at the supermarket didn’t hold a candle to Fat Mao’s house-made tofu, but altogether I think the dish works really well.

Finally, there’s chef José Andrés’s Dancing Eggplant — from his 2019 cookbook Vegetables Unleashed. Quick to make — by zapping Japanese eggplants in the microwave till tender, slathering them with a sweet, salty glaze, then topped with katsuobushi. And yep, it gets its name from the fact that the bonito flakes wave around like they’re dancing on of the eggplant.

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Treat yourself: This Chinese-style lacquered roast chicken will add outsized joy to your life

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If you can get a chicken, you can make this smashing dish.

If you can get a chicken, you can make this smashing dish.

We all need something delicious in our lives right now, and the ingredients to make many of our fall-back comfort foods have become, all of a sudden, unattainable. Depending on where you live and how you shop, it may be difficult or impossible to find pasta, eggs, dried beans and flour, for instance. Flour’s elusiveness is particularly annoying, as it stymies bread-baking, cookie making and cake creation.

Where I live, in Dallas, Texas, eggs are hard to come by, but we can get chickens — something my brother in L.A. failed to turn up in his extensive hunt yesterday.

If you live somewhere where you can put your hands on a bird — and you possess (or can get) a little soy sauce and honey — you can, with very little effort, make one of my favorite dishes ever: Chinese-style lacquered roast chicken. (Substitute tamari for the soy sauce, and it’s gluten-free!)

LuckyPeachChickenPlatter.jpg

It comes from Peter Meehan’s 2015 cookbook Lucky Peach Presents 101 Easy Asian Recipes. Though it requires preparation 12 to 48 hours in advance, that preparation is super quick and easy, requiring only about 15 minutes of active prep: Combine soy sauce and honey, paint the bird with it, wait 15 minutes, paint again, sprinkle salt on, and tuck into the fridge. After 12 hours, or two days later, pop it in the oven to roast, hands-free — no basting or turning over the chicken (no need to flip the bird!).

Serve it with a stir-fried or steamed vegetable; fortunately things like broccoli, asparagus and baby bok choy have not been difficult to obtain. I love this recipe (also adapted from the Lucky Peach book) for stir-fried baby bok choy with whole garlic — and garlic, as we know, is great for boosting our immune systems. The book calls for a choice of baby or regular bok choy — or spinach (Meehan specifies regular, not baby spinach) or pea greens.

Chinese Greens with Whole Garlic.jpg

Ideally, you’d also want to serve the glorious chicken and beautiful veg with rice. I did manage to snag a bag of jasmine rice at the online supermarket this morning (I’d been seeking it for a week); otherwise it seems to be all manner of brown rice crowding the real and virtual shelves. With this chicken, and this bok choy, brown rice sounds positively dreamy.

We at Cooks Without Borders and your fellow cooks would love to hear from you in a comment — if you try one of these two dishes, how’d you like them? Any issues? Were you able to find appropriate ingredients?

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Wow your friends with Chinese lacquered duck (or chicken!) to celebrate Lunar New Year

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Lunar New Year celebrations will begin on Saturday, January 25 and continue for 15 days until the Spring Lantern Festival on February 8. If we know you as well as we think we know you, you’ll be looking for some spectacular Chinese dishes that’ll wow your friends and family.

This weekend, the gorgeous lacquered duck pictured here can be yours — and remarkably easily, believe it or not. Though a couple days of preparation are required, there’s very little work involved — basically you just slap a marinade/glaze on the bird, stick it in the fridge, forget about it till the next day, brush on more marinade, then pop it in the oven the next evening.

In other words, bird alert: If you want the amazing lacquered duck on Saturday night, you’ll need to start preparing it on Thursday. We’re telling you now, so you can run out and buy your bird in swift order. In our neck of the woods, ducks disappear out of supermarkets like Whole Foods and Central Market after Western new year, but you can always pick up beautiful ducks (and for a lot less money) at Asian supermarkets.

Here — take a look at the recipe so you can swing by the market later. There are only four ingredients (duck, salt, soy sauce and honey), and you probably already have three in your pantry!

This spectacular lacquered duck can be yours!

This spectacular lacquered duck can be yours!

Or center your Lunar New Year kickoff dinner around a lacquered chicken. Same drill, but the chicken can be achieved in as little as 12 hours advance notice. And oh, baby — it is outstanding as well.

LuckyPeachLacqueredChickenLower res.jpg

We are working on some new recipes that would be perfect to serve with either, and hope to get them posted in the next day or two. In the meantime, you’ll find some tasty accompaniments like baby bok choy with whole garlic and two versions of fried rice in our Chinese cooking section.

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Guest cook: Susie Bui shares her fabulous Hanoi-style catfish dish, Cha Ca La Vong – a cult favorite

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The first time I heard of Cha Ca La Vong, it was on Susie Bui's Instagram feed. Back in November, she had posted a photo of her dad's version of the dish. I couldn't tell what it was exactly, but it was gorgeous – with tons of dill, and turmeric-stained morsels of something, and onions, all being pushed around in a wok. You could just tell looking at it that the flavors were vivid and wonderful.

And there were so many other delicious things on her feed, seemingly that she had cooked: shrimp and egg whites, Chinese style; hu tieu hoanh thanh (Vietnamese wonton soup); beef with mushrooms, chives and bean sprouts; tom kho tau (braised shrimp in roe). 

I'd never met Susie – or at least never in the normal way. I'd seen her and talked to her back in 2009, when she and her brother had a restaurant in Dallas, Lumi Empanada and Dumpling Kitchen. (Dallasites, do you remember it? It was in the wood-frame house on McKinney that later became Belly + Trumpet.) Her brother, married to a Brazilian woman, was the reason for the empanadas. I was an incognito restaurant critic, just starting out in Dallas when I reviewed the restaurant, and it charmed me. But because I was incognito, I didn't introduce myself. 

Susie had never run a restaurant before, let along owned one; prior to opening Lumi she was a marketing coordinator for Brinks Home Security. But she had a real flair. "Somehow," I wrote in a three-star review, "despite her lack of experience and the craziness of the concept, Bui has managed to pull it off with panache and a serious sense of style and fun." Plus a number of the dishes were terrific: Chinese five-spice duck and leek dumplings; traditional Vietnamese crab and asparagus soup; a crazy-good Thai-style blue-crab fried rice.

The restaurant didn't last long (despite the positive review,) and Susie left the restaurant business, and in 2014 she left Dallas for San Francisco.

The day before she left, though, something interesting happened: At a Dallas wedding, she met Tony Perez. "We kept in touch," she says.

And then some: In July, the couple plans to get married, in Playa del Carmen, Mexico. 

Susie has since returned to Texas, but not Dallas – she and Tony live in Houston, where he has a sandwich shop. Susie works for Samsung – out of the company's Mountain View, California office. (She only has to pop in every couple of months.) 

So, to get back to Susie's Instagram feed, everything she was cooking looked so delicious. By the looks of her posts, it seemed she visited Dallas with some frequency, so I invited her over as a guest cook for the blog. To my delight, she accepted.

On a Saturday afternoon a few weeks ago, she showed up at our house, with Tony and their friend Phong Tran in tow. So much fun to meet them, cook, hang out, talk food – and then feast on the results.

Cha Ca La Vong wasn't a dish I'd ever heard of before, and it turns out it has an fascinating story. "It's very popular in just one part of Vietnam," says Susie. "Hanoi. They even have a street named after it." 

Susie has never had the dish in Vietnam, but Phong has, two years ago, at the legendary restaurant named for the dish, Cha Ca La Vong. "It was the first time I tried it," he says; he only learned about it when he was researching what to eat in Hanoi. And it blew him away. "It was probably one of the best dishes I had in Vietnam when I was there."

Later I did some reading, and learned it's a dish with cult status. At more than 100 years old, Cha Ca La Vong is not the only place in Hanoi that serves it. In fact, there's a whole street called Cha Ca after the dish. 

Susie's parents are from the north; her dad, a wonderful cook, she says, taught her to make the dish.

Susie took stock of my kitchen (yes, I have cheesecloth! Yes, I have a mortar and pestle! Yes, I have rice paper!), then she put Tony and Phong to work grinding the galangal. It's a gnarly root that looks a bit like ginger root, but it's about 9,000 times as tough. They peeled it with a sharp paring knife, then pounded it with the pestle in the mortar, taking turns because so much elbow grease is required. "You can do it in a food processor, too," Susie said, but she enjoyed watching the boys do it the old-fashioned way. That would go into the rub for the fish. When I saw how hard it was to grind it, I knew I'd use a food processor.

Meanwhile, Susie showed me how to make our two dipping sauces: An all-purpose nuoc cham (fish sauce, lime, garlic, sugar and Thai chiles), and a funky-intense spin on it, mam ruoc cham, made by stirring pungent, fermenty fine shrimp paste into nuoc cham. Tony can't stand anything with shrimp paste – he ate too much of it once, the first time he met Susie's family, he reminisced, and he hasn't been able to manage it since. It's super-intense if you taste it on its own – and even the dipping sauce is pretty funky. But Thierry and I both loved it, especially with all those fragrant herbs in rolled up with the fish. The combination yells "wow!"

The nuoc cham, easy and approachable – and made from easily-found ingredients – will definitely go into my regular repertoire. To make it, we, just stirred together fish sauce, lime juice, garlic and sugar and Thai chiles, then adjusted the taste. For the Cha Ca La Vong, we just added a tablespoon of the shrimp paste. (If you're skipping the pungent version, you might want to serve double the amount of nuoc cham.)

 

Once we had the sauces ready and Tony and Phong had accomplished their galangal-grinding duties, Susie made the marinade for the catfish.

Oh, a word about the fish. I'm prone to bouts of angst and 4 a.m. brooding, and I worried about it. Do people want to eat catfish? My friends who are native Southerners love it, and I've always enjoyed it – whether fried Southern-style or steamed or fried Southeast Asian-style. Is it ecologically responsible and healthful? A quick check on Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch app assured me that American-raised catfish (which is what you will probably find) is a "best choice." This month's GQ magazine has Mark Bittman raving about catfish, which he calls "the one American fish we should all be eating." They're ugly customers, he points out. But "they're among the best-tasting, most sustainable fish you can find – white, flaky and tender, farmed with clean and smart techniques." Good to go!

OK, that marinade. Susie added a few tablespoons of water to all that ground galangal (what an interesting perfume it has!), then gathered it up in a cheesecloth and squeezed all the juice into a bowl. She then stirred in spices: ground turmeric, garlic powder, onion powder, sugar, mushroom seasoning and olive oil. She cut the catfish into pieces, coated them with the yellow marinade and let them sit for half an hour.

While they're marinating, I want to tell you about the mushroom seasoning. It's an ingredient Susie loves to use lots of dishes: soups, sauces, stir-fries – basically any dish in which other Asian cooks might use MSG, which Susie doesn't like to use. I didn't have an easy time finding it in a sprawling Chinese supermarket; I had to show three different employees a photo Susie sent me of her package. Finally one staffer led me to it: They had gigantic (17.5 ounce) envelopes of one brand, and it was expensive – more than $12. I bought it.

Between that and the Vietnamese herbs I sought, it was quite a goose-chase! 

Later I brooded about the mushroom seasoning, as it turned out the one I bought does have some MSG in it, listed last in the ingredients – after dehydrated mushrooms, vegetable powder, corn starch, salt, sugar and nucleotide. (The brand Susie uses does not, so check the ingredients if you're looking for it.)

The brand of mushroom seasoning Susie Bui uses does not include MSG in its ingredients.    Photo by SUSIE BUI

The brand of mushroom seasoning Susie Bui uses does not include MSG in its ingredients.    Photo by SUSIE BUI

 Not that MSG is necessarily so bad, but I don't love using it, or other products with lots of additives. Here's the good news: I wound up developing a substitute that works really well: powdered shiitake mushrooms, in combination with soy sauce. (Incidentally, that was a breakthrough that led to a whole slew of other kitchen breakthroughs – I will write about that very soon!) Anyway, our recipe for Cha Ca La Vong lets you use one or the other.

Half an hour after the marinade went on, Susie laid the fish pieces on a baking sheet and slipped it into a 375-degree oven, to help seal the marinade into the fish before we'd fry it. (In Hanoi, they grill it rather than baking before frying, says Susie. Maybe I'll try that once we're in grilling season.)

 

While the fish is roasting, that's a good time to boil the rice vermicelli, rinse it with water to cool and put it in a bowl, then set the table: dipping sauces, rao thom, vermicelli, roasted peanuts and rice paper. Make sure you have your sliced onion, scallions and dill ready at hand near the stove, along with a couple of platters.

 

After its 15-minute roast, we pulled the fish out of the oven, and Susie heated peanut oil in a large skillet, then fried the fish pieces (in a couple of batches) in the hot oil, transferring them to a platter when they were cooked. Then she poured out all but a couple tablespoons of oil, and stir-fried the onion and scallion, then added the dill. All that went onto a serving platter, then the fish on top, and then, as a garnish, roasted, unsalted peanuts.

To the table, yippeee!

Thierry rustled up a bottle of chilled rosé, I filled a shallow bowl with warm water for the rice paper wrappers, and the party began.

For our first tastes, we each dipped a rice paper in the warm water, piled herbs, lettuce, cucumber, a little vermicelli, a piece of fish with some onion, scallion, dill and peanuts on top.  Here's what mine looked like:

Then you fold the left and right sides of the wrapper over the ingredients and roll it up, burrito-style. Working with those super-thin, stretchy rice paper skins takes a little practice – don't overfill!

 

Success! Dip it in one of the sauces, and wow. So wonderful. Dip it in the other sauce, different – and also wonderful, so herbal and fragrant; all that dill and turmeric add up to something very unusually delicious, especially when you get that crazy funk from the mam ruoc cham.

After that, Susie made a rice-paper-free salad-bowl version, piling lettuce, herbs, fish, etc. in a small bowl, drizzling sauce on top and eating it with chopsticks.

Stylin'!

Up for trying?

The whole Cha Ca La Vong set-up definitely involves some serious shopping, whether in Asian groceries or online. And some adventuresome kitchen prep. But it's such a fun dish to serve at a casual dinner with friends; it's so interactively delicious.  And it's not something you're likely to find in any restaurant – unless you hop on a plane and head to Hanoi.

Yeah, I knew you were ready for the adventure. Here's the recipe:

If you make it, we'd all love to hear about it – please tell us how it goes in a comment!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Ta-dah! This glorious roast lacquered duck is a game-changer for duck-lovers

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Ten months ago, a recipe for Chinese lacquered roast chicken from Lucky Peach 101 Easy Asian Recipes changed my life. It's brilliant and simple, and because it changed my life, I thought that was the end of that, recipe-development-wise. But the first time I wrote about it, my friend Michalene said, provocatively, "Have you tried it on a duck?"

I couldn't wait to give it a go. Unfortunately, it flopped: The duck's skin burned before the meat was cooked enough.

A mission was launched. I felt this duck could work, and I would find a way to make it work – even if I had to roast a hundred ducks. 

The very next try I got incredibly lucky – hitting the timing and temperature exactly right. What I got is what you see here: a gorgeous, shining, crisp-skinned duck whose meat was perfectly seasoned, wonderfully tender and incredibly succulent and flavorful. I couldn't believe something that insanely delicious was that easy to achieve. I made some Chinese steamed buns to go with it, and served it with cilantro, sliced scallions and hoisin sauce from a jar. But the duck needed no accouterments – it was incredible on its own.

Carving this gorgeous duck was almost as fun as eating it.

Carving this gorgeous duck was almost as fun as eating it.

You don't have to give it an Asian spin, though. The duck works beautifully as the centerpiece of a festive European- or American-style feast, surrounded by things like roast potatoes or sweet potato gratin and Brussels sprouts or braised Tuscan kale. 

Here's how easy the killer duck is to achieve.  It takes some time – two days – but very little effort.

Two days before you're going to serve it, you paint the bird with a glaze made from half-honey and half-soy sauce, and scatter salt on it. Slide it (uncovered) on a pan in the fridge. Next day, paint the bird all over again with the leftover glaze, and let it sit uncovered in the fridge overnight again. Next day, roast the bird at 450 for ten minutes, turn the temp down to 325 and let the bird roast for two hours. 

That's it. No flipping the bird or basted or fussing about it in any way. No need to make a sauce to go with it – it's that delicious. It's the perfect dreamy dinner for two or three people.

But here come the holidays, I thought. Wouldn't it be great to make two ducks and make them star of a dinner for four two six? So I invited a couple of friends over, and made glazed two ducks. Into the oven they went, and when my friends arrived, the house was filled with their enchanting aroma.

An hour later, after nibbles and drinks and general optimistic glee, we took our seats at the table. But these two ducks were not as wonderful: Set just next to each other on their rack set in a sheet pan, they crowded each other, preventing even browning. One side of each bird was a wee bit flabby, and I had to turn them and leave them in the oven longer, monkeying with the temperature to brown them properly.

Back to the store I went, seeking more ducks. 

Fresh ducks have a funny way of showing up in stores at exactly the moment I'm not planning on making one. It's just like the hair-dryer in the hotel rule. If you pack a hair dryer, you'll find one in your hotel room when you check in. If you don't pack one, you won't find one.

Serve the lacquered ducks with roasted Brussels sprouts and potatoes or sweet potatoes, and you've got an American-style holiday feast.

Serve the lacquered ducks with roasted Brussels sprouts and potatoes or sweet potatoes, and you've got an American-style holiday feast.

So, with two more friends invited for Saturday night duck dinner, on Wednesday I headed to the Whole Foods Market where I'd recently seen those gorgeous fresh ducks – at a much lower price than the last place I picked up a couple. (They set me back a whopping $45 each at Central Market; at Whole Foods they wanted $30-something each for 4 1/2 to 5 pound ducks.) When I arrived at Whole Foods this time, alas, there were no ducks to be had. I almost called another Whole Foods, when I thought better of it, deciding instead to head to the giant Asian supermarket, Super H-Mart, that's only a 10-minute longer drive from home. 

I thought I'd find fresh ducks at Super H-Mart, but I only found frozen ones. That was the bad news. The great news: The nice-looking Long Island ducks were only $16.50 apiece. Fortunately, they defrosted quickly enough for me to glaze them on Thursday. 

This time I solved the even-browning problem: I set them as far apart on the sheet pan as I could before roasting them. I thought I'd have to rotate the birds halfway through roasting for even browning, but those ducks continued to brown evenly as I looked in in them now and then. The space between them did the trick. Oh, man, they looked good – and they were!

This time I served them more Euro- or American-style: We started dinner with a baby kale and sweet-potato salad, then had the duck with roast potatoes and roasted Brussels sprouts with pancetta. It was a super-easy dinner to put together, as I literally never turned on the stove. (I'm lucky enough to have two ovens, though you could always make the potatoes ahead of time and reheat them and roast the Brussels sprouts while the duck is resting.) 

I'll let you go now. I know you'll want to run off and procure a duck or two. 

Here's the recipe:

Be sure to let us know how you love it! And happy holidays from Cooks Without Borders.

 

 

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Robin Ha's new 'comic book with recipes' will turn you into an awesome Korean cook

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If you want to learn to cook Korean food and you're starting from scratch, the first thing to do is find a very large jar. The second is to procure a copy of Cook Korean!: A Comic Book with Recipes. 

The jar, which needs to be glass and very large – like 96 ounces large – is for making kimchi, which is not only delicious (and super-healthy) on its own, but also an ingredient in many Korean dishes. It's also a hugely important part of Korean culture, as this story about kimchi and South Korean "gastrodiplomacy" from NPR's the Kitchen Sisters explains.

The book, engagingly written and illustrated by Robin Ha, a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in illustration, makes learning this cuisine – which might otherwise be daunting if you're a first-timer – approachable and fun. That's because she uses her talents as a comic book artist to explain and illustrate techniques and walk you through the recipes. You can find some of her work on her blog, Banchan in 2 Pages, named for the assorted and multitudinous side dishes (banchan) served with a Korean meal.

But don't worry: Even if you don't want to make your own kimchi (which you can always buy), you can still jump in and turn out some terrific Korean dishes with Ha, who was born in South Korea, as your guide. If you're anything like me, you'll be hooked after making just a couple recipes. After you cook three or four, you'll even start to feel like an honest-to-goodness Korean cook. 

Are you game? Besides the book (or this blog post, with its linked recipes), you'll also need access to a few key Korean ingredients and (if you want to make kimchi) food-prep gloves. If you're lucky enough to live near a well-stocked Asian supermarket, that's easy. Pantry items, such as gochujang (Korean chile paste) and gochugaru (Korean red chile flakes) and food-prep gloves can be bought online, but you'll probably have to find refrigerated items, like the saeujeot (tiny fermented salted shrimp) used to make kimchi, in an Asian market. Nearly every recipe I tested in the book called for either gochujang or gochugaru or both. Of course if you do have access to an Asian supermarket, you'll find everything you need there – I even found boxes of disposable vinyl gloves. 

Gochugaru – Korean red chile flakes – will quickly become your best friend.

If you are up for making kimchi – which I found incredibly rewarding (I thought only God could make kimchi!) and not nearly as involved as I imagined, here's the way it starts: Gather the saeujeot, gochugaru, napa cabbage, daikon radish and fish sauce – along with a few other standard staples (and yes, that giant jar) – and you're ready to rock 'n' roll. 

Make it once, and you understand basic kimchi technique,  which is pretty cool, as there are a jillion types of kimchi.

This one, which Ha calls Easy Kimchi, is the most basic – starring napa cabbage. It starts with a quick saltwater brine of the cabbage. After a 45-minute soak, squeeze out the water, put the cabbage in a big bowl with carrots, daikon, ginger, garlic, scallions, gochugaru, saeujeot, sugar and fish sauce, then put on those gloves, use your hands to mix it all together really well, pack it in the jar and close the lid. Put the jar in a plastic bag ("in case the juice overflows during fermentation"; mine didn't) and leave it at room temperature for 24 hours. After that, it's ready to eat – but it gets better and better as it sits in the fridge, where you can leave it, says Ha, up to a month. 

Even that second day, though, it's pretty fabulous. And abundant: You'll need to make room in the fridge for that giant jarful. I gave one smaller jar of it to a kimchi-loving friend (she swooned!) and about a month after I made it, I've managed to polish it off, nearly single-handedly. Wylie and Thierry acted extremely impressed and ate it heartily for a couple of days, but left the rest to me. It's great on its own as a snack, or as a condiment with other Korean dishes. 

Not everything in the book is spicy, and not everything requires ingredients not often found in Western kitchens (though most do). I loved a super-easy recipe for bean sprout salad, a classic banchan you can make using stuff you can find at a reasonably well-stocked regular supermarket. 

For this you just boil bean sprouts, drain and squeeze out the water, then toss them with chopped scallion, minced garlic, toasted sesame oil, soy sauce and toasted sesame seeds. I garnished it with a little more sesame seed and scallion. So good!

Now I was really starting to have fun. And the timing couldn't have been better: Many of the recipes are for dishes served cold – so deliciously refreshing for a hot summer!

You may have heard that it gets pretty toasty here in Texas, and on one oven-like day when it was 105 degrees in the shade, I thought hoedupbap.  A salad and rice bowl topped with raw fish: That's the ticket. Ha calls it "one of the healthiest, tastiest and easiest dishes in Korean cuisine." OK, then! "Its tangy, spicy dressing," she writes, "is the key to tying all of the ingredients together."

Hoedupbag – raw fish piled on salad piled on rice – before you mix it all up with spicy sauce

Right she was, on all counts. The spicy dressing – made with Asian pear, garlic, lemon juice, gochujang (that Korean chile paste I told you about), soy sauce, rice vinegar and sugar – is similar to others in the book, all whirred together in a blender. Ha says the cooking time is 10 minutes, but that doesn't take into account that one of the ingredients is freshly cooked rice, which takes about 35, including rinsing time and letting it sit for 15 minutes. I incorporated her rice recipe into my adaptation of her hoedupbap recipe.

Once you have the dressing ready, the rice cooked, the sashimi-grade raw fish sliced and the salad ingredients prepped (Romaine lettuce, Kirby cucumber, carrot and scallions), you assemble the ingredients in each of two bowls (the recipe serves two). Rice goes on the bottom, then salad, then fish on top, garnished with tobiko (flying fish roe), crushed toasted nori (seaweed) and toasted sesame seeds. 

Add spicy sauce to taste, mix it all up and eat!

Each lucky Korean food lover adds sauce to taste, mixes it all up and enjoys. At least we did! For raw fish, I used sashimi-grade tuna I bought at our fabulous local Super H-Mart.

Next I attempted mulnaengmyun – cold buckwheat noodles. Why not? I was on a roll! 

This time, I hit some stumbling blocks. You start preparing the dish the day before you want to eat it, blanching thin-sliced brisket in salted water for about a minute.  Pull out and chill the beef, and also chill the broth. Next day, you make quick-pickled daikon and cucumber, and the pickle juice combines with the beef broth to make a pickly broth for the noodles. 

Now I had a problem: Ha said to combine 1 cup of the broth and 1 cup of the pickle juice in each of 4 bowls, but I only had 3 1/2 cups of pickle juice. So I had to tweak, using 2/3 cup of each. That was no problem; it was plenty of pickly broth. 

But once I made the spicy red chile bibim sauce, cooked the soba (buckwheat noodles), sliced the Asian pear, hard-boiled the eggs and assembled the whole thing, it just wasn't that great – especially for a two-day recipe. The biggest problem was the beef, which was tough. Oh, well.

For a final test, I thought I'd try something served hot – just in case summer eventually decides to end.

I love daikon, whether raw or cooked, and I love shiny fish, like saury (mackerel pike), so a an easy, home-style recipe that marries saury and braised daikon, plus garlic, onions, ginger and chile, sounded ideal. The dish, writes Ha, "is a good example of how Koreans use seafood in everyday meals: It's easy and inexpensive and the leftovers taste good."

Well, this one tasted so good there were no leftovers. That was a tiny issue in the recipe, actually: While I usually found the portion sizes in the book to be pretty enormous, this one, whose headnote says it serves 4 to 6, was just enough for three, as far as the fish went. (There was enough daikon for four.) 

Before I made it, I was most curious about the canned saury the recipe calls for. I'd eaten fresh grilled or smoked saury many times in Japanese restaurants, but I'd never eat (or seen!) it canned. Again, Super H-Mart to the rescue: I found at least three different brands there. How to choose?  I went for the coolest looking can. What was inside looked like oversized sardines. 

The recipe – another super-easy one – worked great. You put chunks of daikon and onion in the bottom of a pot, pour the can of saury over it (including its liquid), along with a spicy sauce you've just thrown together (gochugaru, soy sauce, sugar, garlic and ginger). Cook it 25 minutes, add scallions and cook another 3 minutes.

Ha doesn't say to serve it with rice, but that's what her comic shows, so I did. Pretty good! Wylie's friend Jack, who had rarely eaten fish in all his 19 years, tried a plate of it. I was worried that he'd be put of by the saury's assertive flavor, but he loved it. 

So, four out of five recipes tested worked great – that's a pretty impressive result. I'll certainly make the kimchi and the bean sprouts salad again, and there are a bunch more recipes I want to try. Kimchi fried rice, for instance. And rice cake soup (tteokguk), traditional for New Year's Day. I'll probably skip the Korean barbecue (I think that's probably best cooked over charcoal at a special table in a restaurant), but there's a spicy pork over rice (jeyuk dupbap) that looks good. And I'll definitely try the haemul pajean – seafood and green onion pancake, one of my favorite Korean dishes.

If I have one small caution, it would be this: While Cook Korean!'s comic-book style is a big draw, and the illustrations are terrific, the way the recipe winds around on each page can sometimes be a little disorienting.  Because of that I occasionally missed directions. For instance, the kimchi recipe calls for cutting the ginormous napa cabbage lengthwise into quarters, then cutting those quarters into bite-sized pieces. I somehow missed the part that said to make them bite-sized. The recipe worked fine anyway, though every time I eat some of the kimchi, I cut up some of it with kitchen scissors. My fault, for sure: I think I was thrown because when I went to the giant Super H-Mart in a Dallas suburb to shop for ingredients, I watched a lady making kimchi – and she was massaging the sauce into quartered heads of napa cabbage (you can see cooks doing that in the photo accompanying the NPR story, too). But it is easy to miss such details.

If you want to try one or two of my adapted versions of Ha's recipes before you spring for the book, you won't run into that problem. Sound good? I thought so! Now go cook . . . Korean!

 

 

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How to grill the best Southeast Asian crispy-skinned chicken thighs

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There are days – usually on lazy summer weekends – when nothing hits the spot like grilled Southeast Asian-style chicken. The thighs are ideal: They turn out plump and juicy, super-flavorful, with incredible, nicely charred crispy skin. 

Toss together a marinade in the morning – fish sauce, soy sauce, ginger, garlic, lime, cilantro stems, scallions and such (you get the picture!)  –  and let them loll about, soaking up flavor, till you're ready to grill. So many Asian marinade recipes include sugar or honey, but I prefer one that's not sweet, and this one (I have to say!) is pretty great. 

Thighs are fabulous for grilling, first because dark meat takes so well to smoky flavor, and it doesn't dry out easily. And second because their fairly uniform shape makes it easy to cook them evenly. 

Still, a little care (and time) is required so they don't char to blackness while they're still raw inside. I use bone-in thighs because feel like the bone adds depth of flavor, but you can use boneless ones if you prefer. 

The trick is building a good, hot charcoal fire (I use an old-fashioned Weber grill) and moving the coals to one side. That's where you'll sear them till they're nicely charred but not burned, about 5 minutes on each side. Then move them to the less-hot side of the grill, cover the grill and let them cook till they're just done – about 20 minutes or so. Have an instant-read thermometer on hand in case you're not sure – they should be 165 degrees when tested at the thickest part.  

Got it? Here's the recipe:

Let 'em rest about five minutes, then get ready for crispy-skinned happiness.

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Let's dive into an icy-cold bowl of spicy Korean noodles

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On a hot summer evening, there's nothing more refreshing and gratifying than diving into an chilly bowl of lightly spicy Korean noodles. 

It's really like a salad and a noodle bowl tossed into one – a rare example of cold comfort food. There's shredded Romaine on the bottom, then noodles dressed with a luscious, spicy sauce, then an array of garnishes on top. Toss it all together, and eat. Want it a little spicier? Add some chile flakes. 

One nice thing about this dish is it's endlessly customizable. Use either Korean somen noodles or Japanese soba noodles. It would probably be good with glass (mung bean) noodles, too. Add or subtract toppings as you like.  Top it with a soft-boiled egg instead of a hard-boiled one. 

The dressing gets its body and spicy sweetness from raw apple and puréed kimchi. Want to make it vegetarian? Leave out the kimchi and fish sauce; use a little more soy sauce and spoonful of Korean chile paste instead. Leave off the egg as well, and it's vegan.

I'm excited for you to taste this. Please let us know how you like it!

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Quick, summery bok choy-and-radish kimchi is the perfect intro to Korean cooking

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Korean cooking is one of the hottest trends out there now – in more ways than one. (Yep, this food can be spicy!) Not only are chefs all over the country using Korean techniques and ingredients and riffing on Korean dishes, but Korean cookbooks are being published left and right. 

Lately I've been cooking from three new ones. Robin Ha's Cook Korean!: A Coming Book With Recipes has been making a splash (and I just finished putting up a traditional cabbage kimchi from that book). 

And there's Koreatown: A Cookbook by Deuki Hong and Matt Rodbard – I'll be testing a recipe from that one later this week. 

In the meantime, I made one dish I think you'll love – a light, summery bok choy and radish kimchi that's quick and easy to make. It's the perfect introduction to Korean cooking. And maybe the perfect introduction to Korean eating, as well – Wylie's friend Michelle, who had never tasted Korean food, loved it. 

The recipe comes from K Food: Korean Home Cooking and Street Food by Da-Hae and Gareth West, a British couple. Los Angeles Times food editor Amy Scattergood recently featured it as Cookbook of the Week. "This is the first non-traditional kimchi that Gareth and I ever made," the authors write in the headnote. "The juicy, crunchy bok choy and radishes make it feel fresh, light and summer – quite different from the typical cabbage kimchi."

Sold! I had to try it.

It's a good introduction to basic kimchi prep. First you trim, wash and brine the bok choy and radishes. The brine is just a mix of salt and sugar you toss the vegetables in, and let them sit for half an hour. Meanwhile, you make a "glue" – a spicy kimchi base you then rub all over the veg. Following the instructions as published, though, I didn't have nearly enough glue to rub all over the copious amount of bok choy, so in my adaptation, I upped the yield of the glue by fifty percent. It's a lot of bok choy when it's raw, but it shrinks way down, and you'll be happy to have lots.

Another little issue: The instructions say that you can eat it immediately, but that it's "best after it has had 3 or 4 days at room temperature to ferment," after which you can store it in the refrigerator. Unfortunately, no instructions were provided on how to do that. I will figure that out later, and let you know. 

Meanwhile, It's really good, so I wanted you to have it right away. I tasted it immediately, as soon as I was done rubbing the ingredients all over – good. Then I covered it in plastic wrap and let it sit overnight in the fridge. The next day it was really good. Refreshing, spicy, fun and yes – ideal for summer. I think you'll love it. Do let us know!

 

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Cookbook review: 'Lucky Peach 101 Easy Asian Recipes' gets three gold wontons

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Shrimp-and-chive wontons bursting with gingery flavor. Fried rice that's even more delicious than what you get in most Chinese restaurants. A foolproof choose-your-veg master recipe for stir-fried greens with whole garlic. The moment (many months ago) I got my hands on Lucky Peach 101 Easy Asian Recipes by Peter Meehan and the editors of Lucky Peach, I felt it was a book meant for border-free cooks. As soon as I started putting its recipes to the test, I was certain of it. 

But it gets even better: When I took the first bite of Meehan's crisp-skinned, honey-colored, incredibly succulent and flavorful Chinese lacquered roast chicken, I was completely over the moon. This recipe, this book are life-changing. 

Asian cooking can be daunting to Western cooks – including pretty experienced ones. But jump into 101 Easy Asian Recipes and start cooking, even pretty casually, and you'll quickly feel you're getting the hang of stir-frying, wonton making and more. Meehan keeps the instructions clear and simple, and the recipes are appealing and uncluttered. As promised, they are easy. 

Chineasy Cucumber Salad from Lucky Peach 101 Easy Asian Recipes

His "Chineasy" cucumber salad – with a lovely touch of sesame and crushed peanuts – is a case in point. It came together in a flash, and it was so nice I gobbled it up all by myself, though it was certainly big enough for two. Sound good? Here's the recipe:

Meehan tends to do without explanations of whether a recipe is Indonesian or Chinese or Korean, or from a specific region of Thailand or Japan, going instead with a looser fusion-y feel. Somehow, the dishes I've been most attracted to feel pretty Chinese. 

Not that all are perfect as printed; among the seven recipes I tested, I had to make some tweaks here and there, which are reflected in the adapted versions you'll find here at Cooks Without Borders. After nearly ruining a pan when making the lacquered roast chicken, for instance, I added an instruction to line the baking sheet with foil. Small detail, though, when the technique – simply combining soy sauce and honey and painting it onto the bird a couple days in advance, then roasting without even flipping it over – is so miraculously good. 

A recipe for stir-fried asparagus worked beautifully, though it yielded twice as much sauce needed for one bunch of asparagus. Easy fix: I doubled the veg. (As you can see, it's still plenty saucy!)

In any case, there's so much inside that's so great that I highly recommend the book to anyone who's even vaguely interested. From its pages, you'll learn to master fried rice. (Here's the recipe:)

And pick up the basic stir-fry technique for Chinese greens. 

Lucky Peach's master recipe for greens with whole garlic is meant for pea greens, spinach or bok choy. I used baby bok choy with excellent results (can't wait to get my hands on some pea greens!).

You can even amaze your friends with shrimp-and-chive wontons. Wow – these turned out so great, I couldn't believe I made them. And I can't wait to riff on the filling, which was gingery and spot-on.

OK, if we want to split hairs, there was a editing error that might have derailed a less-than-confident cook: The recipe called for square wonton wrappers, but the step-by-step illustration showed how to work with round ones, a completely different routine. (Our adapted recipe shows you how to use the square ones the recipe calls for.) Also, the wontons seemed like they really needed to be served with sauce on them or in a soup, rather than just sent out naked on a serving platter with the dipping sauce, as the book suggests. 

Plated wontons.jpg

I poured some dipping sauce on each serving, which struck me as a little nicer. Um, yeah – pretty great. Check it out:

In a future post, I'll tweak the dumplings, fine-tuning the dipping sauce as well, until they're, you know, off-the-charts crazy-good. 

There's still much more I want to explore in 101 Easy Asian Recipes. A recipe for okonomiyaki – the Japanese cabbage-and-seafood pancake that's on its way to cult status. Thai-style lettuce cups that look delicious. Lion's head meatballs, that Shanghainese favorite. Oyokodon, a homey, Japanese comfort dish of custardy eggs and chicken. And many more.

Of the 101 recipes, there are only two desserts. One is egg custard tarts. The other is oranges. Yes, oranges. "The deal with dessert in the scheme of easy Asian cooking," writes Meehan, "is that you are NOT MAKING IT, not in the 'easy' French way of throwing together a last-minute clafoutis. You are serving fruit. Cut-up fruit if you've got the time."

You see, he's serious about the easy thing. And he has an irresistible breezy writing style that makes the book fun to work with. 

What can I say? Check out the recipes here and the stories about them at Cooks Without Borders. Make one or two that sound appealing. If you love them as much as I did, you'll want to gift yourself with the book faster than you can say dashimaki tamago. 

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Ten-minute dazzler: This ginger vinaigrette turns simple fish into a modern Asian show-stopper

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Red snapper with ginger vinaigrette

I wish I could remember exactly what inspired this dish. I'm pretty sure New York chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten published a recipe for salmon with ginger vinaigrette somewhere, at some point, maybe in the 1990s – was it in a cookbook? A cooking magazine? I can't find any trace of it, no matter how much I Google. Did I dream it?

In any case, what I loved about the sauce was that it starred lots of julienned ginger – more ginger than you usually see on one plate. I made it once, Thierry and I both fell in love with it, and I made it many times after that, tweaking and changing it over the years. Lime juice, fish sauce and scallions (not in the original) now come into play. It didn't take too long to realize it's spectacular on just about any kind of fish: Not just salmon, but tuna, halibut, snapper, scallops, shrimp – even fish with serious personality, like mackerel. 

Did I mention it's super-easy to make, and fabulously healthy? It's ideal for a light and festive dinner for two, or as the centerpiece of an elegant dinner party. 

 

The genius of it is the ginger vinaigrette, which comes together in no time flat, but you can even make in advance, which is especially handy if you're entertaining. Just whisk together lime juice, rice vinegar, fish sauce, soy sauce, olive oil and toasted sesame oil, then add sliced scallions, chopped cilantro and julienned ginger. If you're making it more than a few minutes ahead of time, wait till the last minute to add the cilantro.

Seared halibut in ginger vinaigrette

Last weekend I found some gorgeous halibut fillets on sale (it's usually so expensive!). After a couple days of seriously exaggerated eating, I wanted to make something light, lovely and easy for a relaxed dinner at home with Thierry. Halibut sounded luxurious, to boot.

It's really easy to overcook halibut, making it kind of dense and hard. But if you salt and pepper it, sear it in an oven-proof skillet in a little hot olive oil (four minutes skin-side up, two and a half minutes skin-side down), then finish it for three minutes in a 400-degree oven, it comes out absolutely perfect: lightly seared on the outside, silky and wonderful on the inside. Its delicate flavor is gorgeous with the ginger vinaigrette, which you just spoon onto a couple plates while the fish finishes in the oven. Set the fillets on top of the sauce when it comes out. 

We had it with roasted asparagus and radishes, which took on a whole new dimension as it crashed happily into the vinaigrette on the plate. Loved it!

 

But it doesn't have to be halibut, and it doesn't have to be seared. Grilling season is starting, and just about any kind of grilled fish sings with this, from tuna to snapper to mackerel – or skewered shrimp! Ditto fish done in a pan (scallops, salmon) or roasted in the oven (branzino!). 

Intrigued? Here's the halibut recipe:

Or maybe you want to try it with a different kind of fish. And you know what? I'm thinking it would also be great on grilled or seared chicken breasts. Here's the recipe for just the vinaigrette:

Please let us know you you like it!