Erickson Meredith - Kristen Kish Cooking: Recipes and Techniques

Copyright 2017 by Kristen Kish

Photographs copyright 2017 by Kristin Teig

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Clarkson Potter/Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

crownpublishing.com

clarksonpotter.com

CLARKSON POTTER is a trademark and POTTER with colophon is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

Photograph on by Gillian Laub

Photographs on by Bravo/David Moir/2012/NBC Universal/Getty Images

Names: Kish, Kristen, 1983- author. | Erickson, Meredith, 1980- author.

Title: Kristen Kish cooking : recipes and techniques / Kristen Kish with Meredith Erickson ; photographs by Kristin Teig. Description: New York : Clarkson Potter/Publishers, [2017] | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016055343 (print) | LCCN 2017006417 (ebook) | ISBN

9780553459760 (hard cover) | ISBN 9780553459777 (Ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: CookingTechnique. | Creative ability in cooking. | LCGFT:

Cookbooks.

Classification: LCC TX714 .K56665 2017 (print) | LCC TX714 (ebook) | DDC

641.5--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016055343

ISBN9780553459760

Ebook ISBN9780553459777

Cover photography by Kristin Teig

v4.1

prh

contents

INTRODUCTION

I was born in a small town just outside of Seoul. My birth mother delivered me in Room 2 of a busy, tiny clinic, and then she promptly left. What I know about her is only what I have seen in the police record:

Height: 5'4"

Oval face

Black hair set in a permanent

Arrived wearing navy jogging suit

No other details are available. The police department and clinic waited four days for her to come back. Some people change their mind, they said. But she didnt. On day five I was officially handed over to the state and was namedit was the first name I was givenKwon Yung Ran. From there I passed through a few different orphanages around Seoul.

On April 22, 1984, at four months old, I flew with an older Korean woman, a chaperone, to Detroit, Michigan, where my new family was eagerly waiting for me. They had already seen pictures of me and had been preparing for my arrival, and so they say I felt like theirs long before they got to take me home. They jumped through hoops to get me, went through the process of interviews and home visits, and then waited for me for months. They truly wanted me to join their family. As I grew up, I realized just how incredible it was to go from unwanted and abandoned by my birth mother to being part of a new, welcoming family, who felt only joy at my arrival. This is a bond we adoptees share.

April 25, 1985, is my adoption day, when everything became official. On September 18, 1987, I was granted US citizenship. All kids have a birthday, but adopted kids have a set of dates, each equally meaningful to us and to our families, with certificates for proofwere real-life Cabbage Patch Kids.

I dont think much about how differently my life could have turned out. When I was really young, my parents (both white, both from Michigan) did everything they could to make me experience my Korean roots. My parents would bring in foreign exchange students in an encouraging theyre-Korean-youre-Korean-you-should-talk sort of way, someone to relate to. We read The Korean Cinderella book before bed. When I was seven, my parents took me to the Grand Rapids Food Festival, where I had my first taste of kimchi. I loved the flavor (the smell, not so much) and imagined how good it would be piled on top of a Quarter Pounder. This is, perhaps, one of my earliest memories of flavor. Later I realized that adding acid to something big and rich cuts through the fat. That might have been the first dish I built in my head. Like most cooks, I keep in my mind an ever-growing Rolodex of textures, colors, flavors, acidity, and even historical references and old menus. It turns and turns like a hamster wheel.

Im told my love of knives started early. My mom would catch me cutting up carrots, cabbage, and whatever produce I could get my hands on. I always wanted to use the largest knife in the kitchen, zeroing in on our ten-inch chefs knife at the age of five. I would chop while cooking shows played on the small TV in the kitchen. Im proud to tell you I grew up on home-cooked comfort foods, made with canned green beans, button mushrooms, and barbecue sauce from a jugand even the occasional microwave dinner. These are the dishes that I still request whenever I visit: vegetable soup made with a base of V8; standard meat loaf, which my mom makes with oatsnot bread crumbsand serves with a healthy side of ketchup and a baked potato loaded with sour cream and dried chives; and slices of floured chicken breast, stewed with potatoes, chicken gravy, and green beans.

I grew up in a white suburb forty-five minutes from Lake Michigan. I was very fortunate to have two vacations per year, one American Girl doll, basketball camp, summer day camps, and a running-home-after-dark-with-scraped-knees sort of existence. But my absolute favorite thing, starting around the age of five, was watching Discovery Channels Great Chefs of the World. Seeing Alain Passard make cassoulet, Raymond Blanc creating cakes and confectionaries, and Takashi Yagihashi working acrobatics (purpose, no wasted movement, efficiency) with his mind-bending noodlesthough I didnt know their names then, I was mesmerized by the mix of global chefs and of places I could only dream of visiting. A great calm washed over me while watching hands work so confidently with what seemed to me then to be innate skill. Seeing the chefs agility in the kitchen, the buzz, whisk, stir, and pour, and the little pots was very soothing to me. It was the only time in the day Id be completely focused. After dinner I would run into our yard to create my own kitchen from twigs, stones, and dirt. Id collect dried leaves by the handful and sprinkle them onto my tennis racketmy pan. Pretending I was in whites, a little great chef, I would shake the tennis racket like I watched the great sauciers do. I imagined the sizzle and the smells.

As I got older, I stayed indoors and traded my tennis racket for an actual saut pan, and leaves for vegetables and chicken breasts. Home alone, I would throw whatever I could find into the pan and cook the shit out of everything, until it was basically sawdust. I was going through the process of cooking long before I had a concept of what went together or how to properly execute it.