Hi everyone, this is an essay that I wrote for our cookbook, The Woks of Life: Recipes to Know and Love from a Chinese American Family, now available wherever books are sold.(If you haven’t already, grab a copy! It has 100 recipes, including 80 that aren’t on the blog, as well as lots of family photos and stories we haven’t shared here!) Due to space constraints (ahem, we actually wrote about 80,000 words too many in our first draft), we had to cut this essay out of the book.However, I’ve been wanting to share it with you all for a long time, because I think it lays out the origins of the blog, as well as our family’s evolving philosophy on recipe development.

I hope you can relate to it, connect with it, or just get some entertainment out of it.Enjoy! – Sarah “How do you know how much to pour in?” I asked my mom, as she streamed soy sauce straight from the bottle into a bowl of dumpling filling.“It smells salty enough” she said, putting her nose close to the bowl and taking a big whiff.

“Needs more wine.” “How does something smell salty?” I ask.She doesn’t answer, too absorbed in the giant bowl of ground pork and chives.*** This is what cooking in our house looked like before The Woks of Life.

A little of this, a little of that.Yes, there’s the imprecision that results when a recipe has never been written down, but also the skill of cooking by feel, learned from hours of watching, tasting, and yes, smelling to see if there was enoug

Read More