In addition to reading, cooking is something I enjoy enormously, and do so on a regular basis. I’ve always liked cooking but not until college did I really embrace it as a hobby and as something to share with others. Here are some of the dishes I’ve made:

Pan bagnat: I found this recipe by America’s Test Kitchen while watching a video on how to make better sandwiches. Admittedly, two pieces of bread and a few things in the middle aren’t what I’m typically crazy about (there are a couple of exceptions of course: Vietnamese sandwich – or banh mi – which so far has been impossible to find a good version of where I am, and a simple but delicious sandwich from my college days in KC. The latter was from a Parkville coffee shop on Main street, made with artichoke in olive oil and feta on toasted baguette. I would order this and, occasionally, a coffee then proceed to spend an hour or so in the shop or in the nearby English Landing Park reading David Foster Wallace. I have never found this sandwich elsewhere. On my return to KC, I learned that the shop had changed owner and its menu no longer carried it. It would be really lovely to have that sandwich again some day. Though I suspect it’s not unlike my time in KC – long gone and can only be brought back through nostalgia). Anyway, I digress. I made the pan bagnat on a Sunday morning and quite enjoyed the process of it. If I do it again, I would get tuna in oil instead of water and pitted olives (both mistakes mine) and dry out the tomatoes some more. Also, ciabatta replacing baguette perhaps? Fresh marjoram and not dry oregano? But rather than dwelling on the many ways one can do it over, I should really try to recreate my Parkville coffee shop sandwich. Maybe then I won’t be so sentimental about it anymore.

Eggplant parm: This is Alison Roman’s A Little Eggplant Parm recipe, with corners trimmed, cut, or forgotten altogether. Not the proper way that my friend Andrea, who was from Parma, taught me back in grad school (this method would take 5-6 hours as the eggplants have to be salted, left alone, then fried before assembly. The last time I made it, it was for my first grad school advisor Nancy. I think both of us ran low on patience toward the end and Nancy probably wished I’d stick to science instead. The time before that, it was for Giulia, who was also Italian. Now looking back, it’s hard not to think that was anything but stupid. But that’s another story). Anyway, I cooked this simpler version for Jeff and his family. The eggplants were roasted in the oven before being incorporated in layers of mozzarella and tomato sauce. I left the final product in the oven a tad too long and so the surface was crispier than I would have liked. The toasted breadcrumbs gave it some texture which some may like though I prefer the smoothness of the cheese and melanzane. I also added only a bit of anchovies to one of the layers and not fillet after fillet as Alison does. That would have been too much I think. Not that it would have changed Jeff’s daughter’s mind. She ate strawberries and my birthday chocolate instead.

Pate: Pate (or to be proper, pâté) is one of the few things that the French brought to Vietnamese cuisine in the mid 19th century. Since then, it has become a staple in our breakfast sandwich and on sticky rice. When I think of pate now, I often recall the excellent chicken liver pate made by the grandmother of my closest friend in high school. I only had it a couple of times. And though I cannot possibly remember now how it tasted, to me it has essentially become the idea of what all good pate should be. I also recall eating sticky rice and pate one morning. I was in my freshman year in high school. The phone rang and there was a brief message from someone I cared about. She said she was leaving the country the next day to attend high school overseas. It did not come as a total surprise. I had known about her plans but asked not to be told of the timing until the last moment… It was devastating just the same. And it would have been years until I would eat pate again… Anyway, my local grocery store carries chicken liver so I bought some. I mentioned to a friend who is French that I was contemplating making pate. He said if I did, he would make baguette to trade. I held up my end of the deal. My friend eventually did, too. I’m not sure when he started baking but by the time he stopped by to hand over a paper bag containing two warm baguettes, it was also most 11pm. We laughed at ourselves and at how silly it must have looked to someone else as we exchanged like two drug dealers in the dark night on my street.

Goat stew: Another recipe I found while watching a video on a new Vietnamese restaurant in Miami. The chef and restaurant co-owner is this young second-generation Vietnamese, who had no formal culinary training. He walks through the steps of making Vietnamese curry goat stew (it must be a southern dish as I never had it growing up in the north). No measurements but all the information I needed was there in case I want to make it. Though it’d be a slightly different version because I also would like to recreate a goat stew I had during my very first trip to Boston. Marie, Chris, Vasiliy (?), Shelly, and I had just started grad school. We were all new friends but drawn to one another almost immediately. The group had done a trip to the city where we walked the beautiful Williamsburg bridge together. Boston was next. On the first day in Boston, we had dinner at this place where both New England and New York clam chowders were on the menu. Inexplicably, Marie ordered the New York version and only to be told by our visibly embarrassed waitress that the item was actually “a not very funny joke”. Only then did Marie realize the cheeky description of the NY chowder which basically asked the diner to get out, take the I-95 south, and very politely, get stuffed. Later that night we ended up at this bar that served really really good mac-and-cheese and goat stew. The goat stew was coconut-creamy and spicy. It also had fried plantain that balanced everything out with its subtle sweetness. Anyway, when the chef of the Miami restaurant mentioned coconut milk as one of the ingredients, I knew I had to make it. And with fried plantain. That’s how this wonderful Vietnamese, Miami, New England goat stew came to be.

Pasta alla puttanesca: This one came from a Jamie Oliver’s cookbook I bought during college. Jamie Oliver was all over the TV then after his Naked Chef series. I first tried this recipe when I cooked for my college advisor Dr. Kerkman. It was somewhat boring and I probably enjoyed Jamie’s explanation of the dish’s name more than the actual food itself. Several years later, I made it again to bring to our March for Science in DC. I was a very poor grad student then. My friend Rachel and I had decided to bring our food along so we wouldn’t have to spend money in DC. I don’t know why I thought the dish was a good idea for a road trip but there we were, eating pasta and listening to The Cardigans as Rachel drove us back on I-95 in the rain. Anyway, for a long time I had this nagging suspicion that I had never done the dish justice. Then, during my postdoc, I gave it another try. This time, I replaced penne with spaghetti, added a lot more red pepper flakes, and let the flakes, along with garlic, simmer in anchovies and olive oil for a while to extract and marry their flavors. The result was lovely and spaghetti alla puttanesca soon became my favorite Italian dish. It’s not surprising why I like it so much. The sauce is rich in spiciness from the red pepper and tang from the tomatoes, lemon, and capers in brine. As far as I can remember, I have always been partial to spicy and sour flavors. In Vietnam, coincidentally, we also use the same two words to describe the hardships of life.

Vegan gyoza: I share my food with others and no other dishes have been shared more than gyoza and dumplings. I first learned how to make dumplings in grad school. For a couple of years I was a vegetarian (I would not eat eggs either, much to the dismay of my friend Meg, who liked to cook for me). So the the fillings had diced carrots, cabbage, tofu, and mushrooms in place of the usual ingredients. I mentioned to my (second) grad school advisor who soon invited me over for Thanksgiving dinner with her family. Her mom was visiting from Hong Kong and the old lady was curious about my dumplings. We made the dumplings together, using my recipe. The only difference was that she made the dumpling wrappers from scratch, which I struggled to follow, having almost no prior experience in handling dough. The old lady and I did not talk much to each other due to the language barrier. But she was animated in her movements and in her frequent “no! no! no!” in response to my wrapper making. Years later, once again a vegetarian in my postdoc, I came up with another version with impossible burger instead of meat. The napa cabbage is still there but the carrot now has been replaced with chives. This is now closer to gyoza than Chinese dumplings. They are also pan fried instead of steamed. I’ve made them for my YPA friends, for Jeff and Thea (while their year-old daughter crawled on my carpet), for Milena when she was too busy to cook, for Martin, Fabian, and Matt for a Germany’s football match, for Renate and Oliver, whom I now miss dearly as they’ve returned to Germany… I once made them for Sophie’s birthday. I don’t remember it was Halloween or the day before. A few days later, I dropped her off at school. She turned back and smiled, and suddenly I knew those dumplings would be the last we shared. 

Hillbilly salmon pasta: Another from my KC days. Danny made me this dish and then taught me how to cook it. First, you simmer garlic and castelvetrano olives in olive oil for an unreasonably long time. I’m guessing the idea is to infuse garlic into the oil – that’s obvious. Why you would want to (or whether it is even possible to) infuse olive into olive oil is less easy to see. But like most of Danny’s cooking during this period (college and a couple of years after), it’s best to enjoy without too many questions. Anyway, after a while you add canned salmon and heavy cream (?) then stir until everything is thoroughly mixed. Cooked pasta, preferably spaghetti, and a lot of black ground pepper then go in. Serve immediately while your guests are still around. It was sort of my go-to dish for a while. I even made it for Sarah – we sat and ate outside the French doors. She smoked while both of us silently looked at the trees in my yard. Not long after, Sarah left for Seattle. I left too, in the opposite direction. On Long Island, for the first month I stayed in this house, waiting for my rental place in Sound Beach to become available. John, the 40-something-year old house owner, lived in one room and rented the other three out to various characters, usually for no more than a few months at a time. At this point, unbeknown to his tenants, John had stopped paying his mortgage and in a year would lose the house to foreclosure – but that’s another story. The other two renters were Regina and Robin. Regina had a cat and a heroin habit which soon became the reason why we all had to lock our bedroom doors while out of the house. Robin had just separated from her husband who was a cop and who apparently drove by the house a few times out of jealousy (John admitted to/boasted about a relationship with Robin). John, who had quite a sense of humor, and I got along well. One night I cooked the pasta and invited everyone to try. The food was so magical that Robin wept. Regina quit heroin on the spot as life was worth living again. John went back to his room and sat fire to himself as he knew he’d never experience anything that beautiful again… None of this happened of course. In truth, I ate by myself and the entire house smell of cooked canned salmon for several hours after my dinner. The next morning, I came in the kitchen and was cheerily greeted by a couple notes on the fridge written in John’s chicken scratch. One said, “Robin, teach Le how to cook”, the other, “Keep Le’s black ass out of kitchen!!”. It never occurred to me till I wrote this very sentence that John may have been colorblind. In any case, I took a picture of the notes and have kept it to this day.

Roast chicken: I’ve roasted chicken a few times – my preferred method would be water-brining the chicken overnight with herbs and spices beforehand. But this is not the roast chicken I’m thinking of. It’s the roast chicken Tanya, Scott, and I would treat ourselves to almost every Sunday morning while living in Springvale South. There was a chip shop near our flat – this (the chip shop, not our flat) was where I experienced the Aussie chips-salt-vinegar-in-newspaper for the first time. After a while the shop started cooking and selling roast chicken. We would get an entire bird and “a shit load of chips” (I can still hear Tan saying it in her chirpy and slightly amused way). That was our breakfast and lunch, sometimes even dinner. For a time before that, Scott and Tan did not have stable jobs and I was just starting to save up. We couldn’t afford anything decent so Maggie, Scott’s mom, would stock our fridge with bags of frozen chips, fish sticks, and chicken schnitzel. These three were our formidable foes which I came to dread. For a few nights a week, Tan would chuck a handful of each on a tray, stick everything in the oven, then leave them out on the kitchen counter for us to grab (or ignore). We were nevertheless grateful for the free food. Things began to look up though. Tan found a job at a video store in Noble Park, Scott became a regular courier driver, and I quit Parisien Bakery, where I’d met Tan, to work 3rd shift at 5-Way Foods which paid an incredible $16.75 an hour. We also moved from Cheltenham, where our neighbor once threatened to kill us, to Terry’s (Scott’s dad) former flat on Athol road in the slightly less sketchy Springvale South. Our dinner similarly got upgraded from free food to KFC, sometimes even Nando’s. Then the local chip shop started selling roast chicken. For the two and a half years living together, not once did the three of us ever visit a proper restaurant. Yet, I don’t think we missed out on anything. The fish sticks and chicken schnitzel still sucked big time though.