Tell us how you became such a dynamic and creative home cook.
It started out really basic: I made a lot of lentil soup when I was first cooking on my own, which was a cheap and easy meal that I could eat for days on end. At the time, I was intimidated by the thought of cooking animal-based proteins... especially seafood! I also hadn’t figured out how to make vegetables taste really good — investing in good quality, extra virgin olive oil was a major breakthrough for my veggie skills. I still love making lentil soup, but have come a long way in terms of what I feel comfortable cooking.
I have never had any formal culinary training, nor did I inherit any family wisdom; I wasn’t encouraged to participate in my home kitchen, and I didn’t live near any of my extended family members. So when I started cooking, I didn’t have any tradition to really anchor me. I would have loved, for instance, to learn about food through my late Korean grandmother, who for decades had to make everything from scratch — including soy sauce — for a family of 10. By the time I was old enough to remember her cooking, my family had moved away from my hometown of Seoul and to the Midwest. And anyway, she was more than happy to never have to make soy sauce again, once it became available in grocery stores.
Fortunately, cooking show hosts have been great surrogate grandmothers for me — perhaps even more instructive ones, in some ways, because I’m now getting different brands of wisdom from different people. I learned so much watching Alton Brown on Good Eats, Ina Garten’s Barefoot Contessa. I was also obsessed with the Japanese Iron Chef series. Nowadays, Internet forums, food blogs, and published recipes are where I do most of my learning. I read a lot, and usually have 10 tabs open on my browser at a time so that I can flip back and forth to piece together what I think the key is to a particular dish.
What kinds of cuisines inspire you most and why?
I love the clamor of color, texture, and family-style eating that you get with Korean food. It’s very nostalgic for me, and lots of fun. I also appreciate how little you have to do while plating Korean food to make it look delicious: Basically, you just have to put it in bowls and set it on the table, and it’s ready to go. I am terrible at plating food — I just want to eat it straight away, without the fuss. I’m sort of like a school cafeteria lady when I throw dinner parties with friends, unceremoniously dishing out food to a line of people at the oven.
Indian food is fascinating to me. Cooking it makes me feel like an apothecary, having to riffle through my spice rack for flavors and elements that I don’t quite understand how to bring together; like, something basic like turmeric tastes kind of bitter on its own, but when you cook with it, it completely transforms the dish. It’s magical. I usually can use my palate to imagine what ingredients will taste like when combined, so I tend not to follow recipes very closely. Not the case with Indian food! I am measuring everything to a T and never go rogue in terms of substitutions.
I also appreciate the deep regionality and tradition that characterizes Italian cuisine. There are plenty of places in the world where food can be emblematic of a particular region — reflecting a cultural heritage, a place’s unique resources, even here in the U.S. — but for every dish in Italy, there’s also a particular wine from that same region that matches the food effortlessly. I think it’s beautiful that the land and sea can produce and inspire culinary harmony like that, with just a little bit of observation and experimentation on our part. I drink a lot of Italian wine.
What are some of your best/happiest memories of enjoying seafood?
I have never been fishing. Ever. I get seasick.
But I have been clamming and oystering many times, in Long Island and in Cape Cod, and it’s one of my favorite things to do. Searching for clams and oysters is like going on an Easter egg hunt. Even though it takes so much time and effort to pull in a good harvest, for shucking or mixing into pasta or whatever, being so connected to the meal like that from start to finish is really grounding. I end up enjoying my meal more deliberately, having a vivid appreciation for how much work went into gathering the seafood on my plate.
That might sound a little obnoxious, but it’s true! I feel the same way about harvesting vegetables, like, being able to look at a bowl of salad and to remember which plant each cucumber or tomato came from, as if they were old acquaintances of mine. I didn’t grow up saying grace over my meals, but I do feel compelled to say “thank you” when eating things that I’ve picked or grown myself.
In terms of cooking seafood, one of my happiest moments was really nailing the crispy skin for a fillet of wild salmon for the first time. It was a revelation to discover that I had the power to not cook up a fillet that stuck to the pan, that got torn apart, or had gelatinous skin. Even though I’ve seared dozens of fillets over my lifetime now, it still brings me so much joy to flip a fillet and reveal a slab of golden salmon skin.
What's special about working with wild-caught seafood in the kitchen?
Like I said, I have never been fishing. But I’ve read about how connected people in the Alaskan fishing industry are to nature, to the harvest, as well as the ecosystem. I mean, if I think that foraging for bivalves in someone’s backyard is a transformative activity, I can only imagine how I’d feel if I had spent months at sea chasing fish.
I know that so much time and energy have gone into the wild-caught seafood finding its way to my plate — and I’m not just talking about the human aspect of it, but also the ecological ones — that I feel like my senses are heightened when working with it in the kitchen. I know that there’s plenty of wild-caught seafood in the sea, but I always treat it as more precious, knowing that it’s the culmination of a crazy life cycle in nature, rather than something we can easily replicate in lab-like settings.
Also, it tastes so freaking good, so there’s that. I cannot be left alone with a plate of red king crab.
What's a new seafood dish you can't wait to make?
Salmon gefilte fish! I am utterly intimidated by the prospect of making it, but it’s my current recipe fantasy.
A few years ago, I was at a Passover Seder where the Russian host’s mother had made a beautiful loaf of salmon gefilte fish for the occasion. It was one of the best things I’ve ever eaten in my life. It was also the first time I’d ever had gefilte fish, so I didn’t understand why the dish had a rap for being anything but phenomenal. (At another Seder where the jarred stuff was served, I discovered why.)
This is one recipe where I think I need a real grandmother to show me the ropes. Call me if you know a bubbe out there who has some free time and is into wild-caught fish.
