Local, seasonal, homemade drive creative Asian cook
When Patricia Tanumihardja set out to make the Asian recipes from her childhood, she didn’t get hung up on ingredients. She got creative.
Taking an adventurous approach, she has modernized some of her family recipes and started playing with ways to mimic flavors and textures with vegetables she could find easily. Seasonality and sustainability drive her cooking, which draws influences from her childhood in Indonesia and her family’s Asian roots. Kale stood in for other greens, while seasonal vegetables like turnips and artichoke hearts worked their way into her dishes.
Bringing a modern approach to traditional recipes, Tanumihardja has written her second cookbook, “Farm to Table Asian Secrets: Vegan & Vegetarian Full-Flavored Recipes for Every Season” (Tuttle, $15.95), in stores this month. She eschews MSG and other additives while teaching others to create homemade sauces, from sambal oelek to a vegan version of fish sauce.
Tanumihardja lives in the Washington, D.C., area with her son and husband. Find more of her recipes and blog at Pickles and Tea: Adventures in Asian Cooking, a collaboration with the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center.
Q. What were the food traditions of your childhood?
A. My family is from Indonesia, but we’re mostly ethnically Chinese and my parents were already living in Singapore before I was born. When my mom got pregnant with me, she moved to Jakarta to give birth to me so she could have her mom to help.
I may have been born in Indonesia, but I am more Singaporean than anything else. That’s where I grew up and had my formative years before college (in Seattle). With such an eclectic background, the food we ate at home was quite a mix.
Q. What was the inspiration for this second cookbook?
A. When I published my first cookbook, “The Asian Grandmothers Cookbook: Home Cooking from Asian American Kitchens,” I met a lot of people who loved Asian flavors and wanted to reproduce them at home, but they didn’t have access to Asian markets and couldn’t find ingredients.
This was five or six years ago, and farmers markets and local grocery stores didn’t carry Asian vegetables. If you were lucky you’d find Napa cabbage or baby bok choy. People were asking me for substitutes. That planted the seed for this book.
I was also managing a farmers market in California, and I grew to love eating local seasonal vegetables. I’ve made going to the farm market and a CSA box part of my life. I like organic and sustainable produce, but if you go to the Asian market it is hard to find any organic vegetables at all. (I thought) maybe I can try using substitutes to cook the traditional Asian recipes I love.
The book is also an homage to my mom, because when she first came to this country 15 years ago, she couldn’t find many of the vegetables and ingredients she loved.
Q. What is something you want people to know about this book?
A. I think some people may not think of my cookbook as being authentic. I like to say immigrants adapt and assimilate. Food, just like language and culture, has to evolve. There is a push toward plant-based diets and eating more vegetables. This book is authentic with flavors that are true to the cultures that they come from, and I want people to have an open mind when they try these recipes. It is a vegetable cookbook, not a vegetarian cookbook.
Q. What is something people should make at home rather than buy?
A. All the recipes for sauces and stocks I would make at home. A lot of bottled ready-made sauces you find at the Asian market have a lot of unpronounceable additives I would not feed my son, myself or husband. I like to make them at home. It definitely takes time. You also won’t find vegan fish sauce; that’s why I gave that recipe.
Q. What’s your favorite ingredient or technique to introduce to others?
A. A lot of these are my favorites I cook for my family at home. A lot of them are simple, and some are things that take a few days with steps, but nothing is too complicated for a novice cook.
Stir-frying is definitely a technique anybody should learn. Most of the work involves chopping. You need to know to chop the vegetables the same shape and size.
Q. What’s the most common question you get?
A. Do I need a wok to stir-fry? No, you don’t. The wok is a very versatile cooking implement. I have one and use it a lot, but if you have an assortment of pots and pans in your kitchen, use the biggest pan you have in your kitchen, even a large-scale Dutch oven, like a 5- or 6-quart.
Q. How does the home cooking you write about compare to restaurant staples with which people might be more familiar?
A. The techniques are a little bit simpler. The flavors are cleaner. I think at restaurants, especially Asian restaurants, though it is increasingly less, they use MSG in their cooking. I don’t use it, but my mom actually did. It was very common. My mom would have a bowl of MSG right next to the sugar and salt and use it liberally.
A lot of times, you don’t find home-cooked dishes in restaurants. There’s the heirloom tomatoes and egg recipe in the summer chapter. It is another one I could eat every day. You won’t find it in a restaurant, but it is a home-style dish, and if you ask any Chinese- or Taiwanese-American, they would have a recipe for it or tell you they grew up eating it.