Cooking With Asian Food

In my opinion, the very best way to enjoy Asian food is to cook it yourself. You never really understand any kind of food until you cook it. I did not start cooking until I was 18. My mother always made meals growing up, and it never occurred to me to try it out. Once I did, I was blown away by how much fun it was. It had seemed like it would be a chore, but it was anything but. I can tinker with the heat, the ingredients, the proportions of different things, and any number of other factors. I can spend as much time experimenting as I want, and eventually cook up the perfect meal.

When I went to an Asian grocery store, I was overwhelmed by all the ingredients I saw there. At that point, I had been living in San Francisco for a year and a half, and I thought I had a pretty good idea of what Asian cuisine had to offer. I was surprised at the hundreds of different ingredients which I had never seen before. It turns out that traditional Asian foods incorporates a lot of things that just generally aren’t fed to Westerners. Exploring these aspects of Asian cooking has been a joy for me.