The Family that Cooks Together…

By Sandy Hu

So much of our family life and social life center around food and cooking. In December we had a big holiday party for 75 guests and the whole family – all five of us – prepped and cooked for it. We cooked our Christmas Eve dinner, complete with a Bûche de Nöel for dessert, and we prepared our annual Christmas night Dungeness crab fest.

We had a traditional Japanese New Year with soba noodle soup on New Year’s Eve and mochi soup on New Year’s Day. We ate traditional New Year foods like sushi and other celebratory Japanese dishes and each family member, including our new daughter-in-law Lynn, prepared a dish for the feast.

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Hitting the (Thai) Sauce

By Sandy Hu

When Lynn cooks, the whole house smells mouthwateringly fragrant. Garlic, chiles and fresh herbs comingle, creating irresistible aromas as inviting as a Thai restaurant. Lynn, my new daughter-in-law, is from Thailand. She’s not a trained cook, but she has an instinctive sense of how to put ingredients together to make delicious Thai meals.

When we made kalua pig after returning from our Hawaiian vacation this summer, Lynn contributed a sprightly Thai dipping sauce that added zest, turning classic Hawaiian into Polynesian-Southeast Asian fusion.

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