Meehan - Lucky Peach Presents 101 Easy Asian Recipes

Peter Meehan, editorial director

Mary-Frances Heck, recipe development

Gabriele Stabile, photography

Mark Ibold, food styling & male hand modeling

Hannah Clark, prop styling

Joanna Sciarrino, managing editor

Rica Allannic, Rachel Khong, Brette Warshaw, Chris Ying, editors

Walter Green & Helen Tseng, design and layout

Jason Polan, illustrations

Kate Slate, copy editor

Ena Brdjanovic & Sai Sumar, interns

Special thanks to: Danny Bowien, Dave Chang, Joanne Chang, Angela Dimayuga, Fuschsia Dunlop, Tony Kim, Miki Takana, Regina Kwan Peterson, Andy Ricker, Laurie Woolever, Bary Yuen

Copyright 2015 by Lucky Peach, LLC

Photographs copyright 2015 by Gabriele Stabile

Illustrations copyright 2015 by Jason Polan

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.

www.crownpublishing.com

www.clarksonpotter.com

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

adapted from Joanne Changs Flour, Too: Indispensable Recipes for the Cafs Most-Loved Sweets & Savories (Chronicle Books, 2013).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Meehan, Peter, 1977 author.

Lucky Peach 101 easy Asian recipes / Peter Meehan and the editors of Lucky Peach; Photographs by Gabriele Stabile.First Edition.

pages cm

Includes index.

1. Cooking, Asian. I. Lucky peach. II. Title.

TX724.5.A1M44 2015

641.595dc23 2015015729

ISBN9780804187794

eBook ISBN9780804187909

eBook design adapted from print book design by Walter Green
Cover design by Walter Green

v3.1
a+prh

For Big H, Little H, and Joni-Bird

The seeds of this book were planted years ago, before Lucky Peach was even a twinkle in our collective eyes. Dave Chang and I were in San Francisco together doing a promo event for our book, Momofuku. To our great surprise, wed heard that Momofuku had climbed onto the lower rungs of a New York Times bestseller list, so we bought a paper to check out the standings. Inside we saw Ad Hoc at Home by Thomas Keller just crushing us, smashing our skull to splinters with its high-polish clogs.

Because Ad Hoc is a good book (and The French Laundry Cookbook was a major influence on everything that came after it), the best criticism we could mount was, Thats not really at-home cooking! We joked in a not entirely unserious way about doing a book called 101 Easy Asian Dishes wherein none of the recipes would actually be easywed promise one thing and sell another. Chris Ying, who was then the publisher of McSweeneys, was in the car with us at the time of these first conversations. Id worked with Chris on a story derived from the book for the very bonkers thirty-third issue of McSweeneys, so I knew hed be sympathetic. Dave and I had halfway invited him, halfway kidnapped him into hanging out with us twenty-four hours a day during our six-day promotional stay in the city by the Bay. He was a firm supporter of the cause.

Back in New York I got to work on it. I remember setting pineapple juice with agar agar inside jalapeos, then slicing the results so a ring of fiery green would encircle a disk of cool sweet yellow fruit jelly. These were going to go on a Hawaiian pizza (Hawaii being more or less part of Asia the way we were counting it).

But then we started this TV show project that became The Mind of a Chef and begat our magazine, Lucky Peach, and then that became the beast that swallowed my life. Ying was no longer an innocent and enthusiastic bystander, but a collaborator and eventually my partner in crime in running the operation.

When the roller coaster of launching the magazine hit a flat patchor, really, when we acclimatized to its speed, because it hasnt slowed down at allit was time to think: Whats the first Lucky Peach book going to be? I pushed for it to be that primordial version of 101 at the outset, but it quickly felt wrong. For one thing, we now had a magazine in which we could air our craziest dirty-idea laundry, and wed regularly done thatpublishing insanely complicated recipes was part of our 9-to-5 gig. Plus Id had two kids in the interim and reconnected with the beauty and, more essentially, the necessity of good and easy ways to get dinner on the table.

And so 101, which had always been a joke, morphed into an earnest thing, a project where we could publish simple and flavorful recipes with the home cook in mind. Most food magazines start out with that goal; for us, it was a new challenge. And the results of taking on that challenge are what you hold in your hands.

At the outset, I set forth two rules to hem us in:

1. No Frying

Frying isnt hard in the least, but it makes a mess, and if you cook at all at home, you know that cleaning up is half the battle. Im sure well do a book of all fried foods at some point to make up for the restraint exercised here.

2. No Subrecipes

This turned out to be a rule that had to be broken, because no matter how easy you make things, sometimes cooking requires additional cooking. But we kept it to a minimum and tried to be honest about it. We avoided anything like, Make this meal in ten minutes as long as you spend a whole day the week before cooking a jar of goop that youll never actually use for anything else! (There is a small chapter of flavorful goops toward the back of the book that you will use frequently. Theyre our go- to Super Sauces that can be dumped over nearly any food lingering in your fridge to turn it into delicious dinners.)

, might require an hour of active kitchen work, but we dont expect those to be weeknight meals, and we figure the return more than justifies the investment of time.

Of course, many of the recipes in this book call for ingredients that you cant buy at the local gas station. But in the age of online grocery suppliers, even hermits can arrange for a delivery of a full pantrys worth of goods to their local trailhead and have 98 percent of the dishes contained herein on their table the next night. I personally find the thrill of physically seeking out these products in actual markets to be about as much fun and rewarding as most guys my age find fantasy sports, golf, or strip clubs, which is to say a lot. But to each his own. Just dont cry into your pillow about how you cant find them, because you can.