Sure, there are some complexities in life - taxes, immigrant kitchen identity politics, the quandary of laundry - but cooking? That’s easy! Or rather, it better be, or I’m never going to do it.
Easy Asian is about cooking not from your head, but your heart, and my heart is really my stomach. In my heart (or head?) I am a B- Asian - mediocre in arithmetic, monstrous in Mandarin, and antithetical to the glowingly racial but still not quite politically-correct angle of Ambitious, Assiduous Asian - I am lazy as fuck.
Know Thyself - in Chinese they have an equivalent saying that places value on self-knowledge. Only joking, really all their instructive idioms are shame-based and revolve around failure. Only joking, the one saying I remember is about being anxious like ants on a hot pan, which I’m sure with the right kind of chilli concoction and some deep fried garlic, I would at least try to eat.
Easy Asian only has three rules. More would require better math than I can muster.
Everything I cook herein will be easy. Easy meaning simple, informal, inexact, but most of all, easily broken down into something I could communicate through charades or interpretative dance if put to it.
I will have cooked every dish here at least three times, referencing only notes I have taken from source material (never the actual recipe). By then, it should have been substantially modified and committed to my memory or it doesn’t make the cut.
(I tried following a Chinese stir-fry recipe once, the soul was willing but the flesh was weak, and I ended up cooking an entirely different dish without even realizing how uncommitted I was to my purpose - I had never had that dish before, what would possess me to follow through if not motivated by desire?)
Cooking from memory - every dish here will be an attempt to recapture a moment in time where I’ve tasted something truly spectacular, the way one searches for a lost childhood or stalks an ex on Facebook.
My name is Janice and I am searching for an equivalent comfort food to the Peanut Butter Sandwich. The answer might be a curry puff, or rather, a South East Asian hand pie. This is Easy Asian, that swanky post-modern New American cuisine, (a pioneer woman pretender’s pipe dream?) an ambitious start to an insatiable appetite.