Viet World Kitchen

How to Do 1,000 Tastings and Avoid Disaster

Over the weekend, I did something I’ve never done before: provide 1,000 tastings at a food festival. It was at the inaugural LuckyRice night market, held in Culver City (Los Angeles). I’d attended about a dozen of these ‘walk around’ events filled with booths or stations where chefs and mixologists offer food and beverages. Why not experience it from the other side of the table?

Among the sea of chefs at the event, I was the only person whose primary profession was that of a cookbook author. That meant that I had to finesse things a little. My friend Danielle Chang of LuckyRice said that each participating chef (ahem, that included me) had to do 1,000 tastings. Tastings are not huge portions but you have to make sure that things can be plated up, look nice, and taste good. I didn’t have a professional kitchen crew so I relied on some of my best friends (THX Michelle Esperanza, Alec Mitchell and Victor Fong!) and my husband, Rory. I briefed them before the event and when we were on the ground. Everyone had a job and was ready to pitch in elsewhere.  

You also have to have a team that works fast and are people oriented. I spent about a week thinking of a gameplan and for the most part, things went swimmingly well. But there were some frightening, good for reality-TV-show moments too. Here’s a [hopefully] entertaining recap:

May Flowers: Happy Cooks, Glowing Reviews

Not long ago my mother remarked, “You do noble work.” I interpreted it as a mixture of maternal pride and understanding about my financial outlook. My career in food writing has at times stunned and miffed my parents. They did not  know how things would develop after I wrote Into the Vietnamese Kitchen. It was clear that I was capable of feeding myself, but could I afford to pay for my ingredients?

My four siblings have lucrative, conventional careers in medicine and law. Everyone thought I was destined for international business or banking, but I didn’t exactly end up among the 1%. “That’s okay,” Mom continued. “What’s important is that you are happy.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about her comments because one of the popular topics these days among food writers is how can we maintain viable careers. Amanda Hesser recently offered a reality check to future food writers. Monica Bhide revealed her personal frustrations and discussed tips for crafting a realistic food writing career. Dianne Jacob’s blog is a rich source of sensible advice for aspiring writers.

I didn’t start writing about food expecting to buy a vacation home in the Bahamas. I wanted to write about food traditions and techniques that I felt had not been presented well enough in print. That said, there are late nights when I’m cleaning my kitchen or looking up words in my Vietnamese and Chinese dictionaries that I wonder, “Why am I doing this?” 

In the last couple of weeks, a number of interesting people and great things have passed through my life to remind of why I enjoy my work:

Cooking Light’s 7 Top Asian Cookbooks: Mine are included!

It’s been kind of an amazing year full of fantastic developments in my food writing career. Along with the Asian Tofu book release, both of my earlier works were selected by Cooking Light for their Top 100 Cookbooks of the Last 25 Years awards. (The awards are in celebration of the magazine’s 25th anniversary.) Each month, the editors thematically reveal their picks.

The March issue has the fourth installment of the series, and the editors chose seven works for the Asian cookbook category. I was blown away to see the above photo with Asian Dumplings and Into the Vietnamese Kitchen in the stack along with Grace Young’s Breath of a Wok, Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid’s Hot Sour Salty Sweet, Madhur Jaffrey’s At Home with Madhur Jaffrey, Hiroko Shimbo’s The Japanese Kitchen, and Eileen Yin Fei Lo’s Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking. Not only do I respect these authors (I have used their works for years) but I am also lucky to count most of them as friends. Wow.

Tofu Misozuke: Q & A with Dang Vu of Rau Om Foods

Tofu is an extremely versatile food that can be manipulated in countless ways. A few months ago, Dang Vu emailed me about an unusual tofu product that he his wife, Oanh, had developed. The Vietnamese-American couple was selling tofu misozuke at Bay Area farmer’s markets, packaged under their company name, Rau Om (the name of a citrusy cuminy fresh herb also called ngo om; see the Viet herb primer for more info).

I’d read about the Japanese preserved “tofu cheese” in Elizabeth Andoh’s Washoku cookbook and seen it in Tofu Hyaku Chin, a 1782 bestseller in Japan. Alas, I hadn’t tasted it yet. It the world of Asian tofu, tofu no miso-zuke (how Elizabeth spelled it) is somewhat esoteric stuff. That is, a Japanese market or restaurant isn’t likely to have it.

I tried Rau Om’s tofu misozuke and found its meaty creaminess to be pleasant. Then I wondered why and how someone was introducing this rare tofu product to the Bay Area market. So I asked Dang, 32, to tell me a bit more about their background and endeavor.

Asian Souper Bowls (my Wall Street Journal article)

Last week was kind of a neat media week. Along with the Asian tofu story coming out in Martha Stewart Living magazine, the Wall Street Journal ran a piece I wrote on Asian soups. Why is the Wall Street Journal doing food? It’s been doing it for years. In fact, the Journal regularly published great food stories. Some are reportorial and business-y while others are practical with recipes.  

I was assigned to write about wintry Asian soups so I came up with a concept built on a master chicken stock recipe and four (4) soup recipes based on that stock. The pan-Asian collection of soups included Chinese hot-and-sour soup; Thai tofu, pork, and seaweed soup; Vietnamese chicken and cellophane noodle soup; and Japanese gyoza dumplings in smoky chicken soup.  The Chinese and Thai recipes are from the upcoming Asian Tofu cookbook so if you're inclined, give them a try!