The Foodgram of a Foodie

There’s no denying that food brings people together. Whether it’s happy hour with friends on Friday night, date night with your spouse or Thanksgiving with the whole family, some of our greatest memories involve food.

Whenever I’m invited to a BBQ, I make my mother’s baked beans and potato salad. The secret sauce for the potato salad is a mixture of mayo, sour cream and mustard. Those dishes make me think of her and summertime in Tennessee. Growing up every summer, we’d spend a few weeks in the not-so-big town of Sparta, Tennessee where my mother was born. We’d stay with my late Aunt Joanne. She owned a hair salon with an apartment in the back located on the main drag of that one-stoplight little town.

Looking back on my childhood, I remember going with my father to his father’s house every Saturday morning. We would have breakfast with my dad, grandfather and uncles. My grandfather would make a traditional Chinese dish called Jūk - a Chinese rice porridge made with orange roughy and topped with peanuts and green onion. Every time my father makes it, I feel like a kid again: comforted and carefree. I get a little nostalgic missing all of those on his side of the family who have passed.

Food is an expression of someone’s heritage. My mother has amazing southern comfort food recipes, while my father is an expert in Chinese cuisine. I learned a lot from both of them and I can hold my own in a family of wonderful chefs. In my family, we try not to eat out if we can make it ourselves. We routinely have homemade chicken wings and french fries, egg rolls and chicken teriyaki bowls, and baked potatoes with salmon and homemade tartar sauce. I carry on my family’s tradition by making recipes passed down to me from my parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles.I have an entire flash drive full of secret family recipes that I’d love to share with an audience if the opportunity were to present itself.

When you break it down, cooking is just basic math and science with flavor combinations that pop. When you are creating unique recipes you have to know the physics of how things are going to react in certain circumstances: baking powder makes things grow taller, baking soda makes things grow wider, and you should NOT use reduced fat or fat free cream cheese in Chinese Crab Puffs - it WILL explode in the fryer!

Cooking is an art form, but baking is Science: cold, calculated and unforgiving. One mistake can flop the entire recipe, and you have to know how to modify recipes accordingly. For instance, when using butter milk you will always have to adjust the baking powder amounts and add baking soda to the recipe. You can add your own twist to almost any recipe as long as you know how all of the different ingredients will react with each other. Adding my own pizazz to recipes is one of my favorite things to do. I like to make a lemon cake layered with Greek yogurt and berries for my mother’s birthday every year. I was inspired just by looking at a basic sheet cake recipe. I threw in the lemon juice and got creative with the filling because my mom can be a bit of a health nut sometimes (Love you Ma!)

A lot of times I have to modify a recipe for health reasons. My father is on a Cardiac Diet and Celiacs Disease runs on my husband’s side of the family, so I often need to create a low sodium or gluten free version of a recipe. I have lots of recipes I’ve had to rework to be gluten free, and I’ve learned a lot of tricks along the way. For instance, you need to be picky with pasta. I only use chickpea pasta; it’s high in protein and doesn’t get starchy like rice-based pasta. My husband prefers to eat vegan, so we’ve been experimenting with adapting recipes for that too.

I have lots of original recipes with varying degrees of difficulty. Some are super simple with under five ingredients requiring only a hand mixer, while others are complex and time consuming like tempura battered Peking Pork Chops with homemade sauce. I like to make my own sauces whenever possible. Most of the sauces we all love are tomato based - more specifically ketchup based. Things like BBQ Sauce, Sweet and Sour Sauce, Orange Chicken Sauce and Meatloaf Sauce are all ketchup based. So if you want to learn more tips and tricks be sure to follow, like and share.