Bon Appegeek

You know you store too much stuff under the sink when your faucet suddenly squirts hot water around the seams and you frantically fall to your knees to pull out bottles of soy sauce, fish sauce, rice bran oil, olive oil, roasted sesame oil, perilla oil, chili oil, black truffle oil, black sesame oil, honey, [...]

My 33rd birthday is coming up. A few weeks ago my mother, a salt & pepper-haired woman fast approaching her 60s, looked at my hair and said, “You have as much white hair as I do.”
“WHAT?”
“In the back there, I see a lot of white hairs.”
“NO YOU DON’T.”
“Yes I—”
“YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO TELL YOUR DARLING [...]

I was asked about garam masala recipes after my post on Spinach Moong Masoor Dal, so I’ve decided to post the two recipes I use. Garam masala, ground “warm” spices, are generally used as a finishing aromatic touch much like ground black pepper is used in the west. Recipes vary from region to [...]

Mush gets no respect. It’s one step up from gruel, rhymes with slush, and features a character who regularly dresses in drag. “Why is that man wearing a dress? And why do those Koreans talk funny?” (Wait, that’s M.A.S.H. Never mind.) Most of my favorite foods are mushy: smashed [...]

The first hint that I would never truly tame Indian food came early on in my cooking education. Having run out of storebought garam masala, I decided to grind my own from a spice collection that had, by then, grown quite large. I confidently turned to my cookbooks and pulled down Indian Cooking [...]

Let them eat perilla seed cake.
— Marie Antoinette Kim
I’m predicting the Next Big Thing. In a year or two, big restaurants will pounce on deulkkae and turn it into the trendy new food ingredient of the decade. Why wouldn’t they? It tastes like nothing else, few in the west have heard of [...]

I had a bowl of ham bone soup this morning as I wondered about what to blog next. “Ice cream might be interesting,” I thought, as I scooped up some tender, pink ham that had fallen off the bone. “Maybe I could try making injera for the first time.” A big mouthful [...]

‘Twas the night before Christmas, when out from the kitchen
Came the crashing of cake pans and loud plaintive bitchin’;
The oven mitts hung by the oven with care
But cream, milk, and salt were spilled everywhere.
The egg shells were nestled all snug in the trash,
While I hastily gift-wrapped toy trains and some cash.
The cookies are filled now, [...]

I love greens but have always avoided chard. Why? Well my theory is that I have a subconscious terror of eating a green that sounds a lot like shard, but I’m not really sure about that, because if such a terror does exist, so far it has successfully remained subconscious. Also, chard [...]

My friend complained about morning sickness due to her pregnancy recently. That gave me an idea. I taste-tested combinations of nausea and gas-fighting spices (plus just plain delicious spices) to create a tea with complex flavor, tickling warmth, and stomach-soothing effects. It’s probably not accurate to call this a chai tea—I drew [...]

When Alanna of A Veggie Venture invited me to participate in this month’s Sugar High Friday, my mind immediately went to scones. I’ve been trying to figure out how to make a peanut butter version for a while, but after all the time I’d spent perfecting my own scone, I didn’t feel like experimenting [...]

I have a little anglophile in me left over from my childhood when I thought that royalty equaled dignity and that princesses remained happy. Those beliefs faded…for some reason…but enough remained to fuel a romantic attraction to the craggy scone. Just looking at one made me think of fog, castles, and totally cool [...]

My cousin left her family’s farm in rural South Korea (motto: modern plumbing, schmodern plumbing) more than two decades ago to live with our family in Illinois. My mom likes to tell everybody the story about how my fresh-off-the-boat cousin couldn’t figure out how to open the car door and ended up stuck in [...]

I loves my booze. Funny thing, since I don’t drink. I’m one of those unfortunate Asians who lacks the necessary chemistry to break down alcohol. A few bouts of heavy drinking in college gave me crippling back pain, lobster complexion, and no sense of euphoria whatsoever. That’s a drag when you [...]