X-rays showed I luckily had no broken bones or fractures. The kind Urgent Care folks sent me home with instructions for “wound care” and to take it easy.

The accident was caused by a very, very stoopid move, one that even a professional gardener would not do. We were rushing because that’s what we do nowadays – try to rush to squeeze everything in during our waking hours. Does that rush yield a better life? My toe and the rock reminded me to take time to unwind, learn new and fun things, but still focus on fundamentals.

That’s how I got to playing with rice. First, I experimented with adapting chef Ron Hsu’s chicken and rice casserole for the Ninja Combi oven. I was curious about its Sear/Saute function plus something called “Combi Crisp.” The little machine has its beeping quirks but surprisingly, it produced a casserole with an incredible rice crust at the bottom. The chicken skin was delicately crisp too.

What the Ninja Combi produced was was an excellent reason to indulge in lots of white rice! Instead of using the stove and oven to make the dish, I prepped and organized the ingredients, turned on the combi, and played with its various functions. It’s pretty amazing for a countertop appliance. Head to the website to grab the recipe and watch my video of how the dish comes together. (Ron’s conventional recipe for the casserole is also at the website.)

Rory asked me how I dialed in cooking the rice so well in the combi, an appliance that cooks fast and furious and sometimes seems to be out of control. The machine is forgiving but also, I know how to cook rice in a pot on the stove as well as in the microwave.

Why cook rice in a pot if a rice cooker is around?

When I’m in a hurry, I cook rice in my Cuckoo rice cooker. It’s a good machine but to be honest, the cooked, while good, is shy of great. When I take time to cook rice on the stove, I can coax the grains into tender-chewy, fluffy perfection. I don’t consider it a feat of daring do.

Cooking rice the old fashioned way is not only a survival skill (someday, you may lack electricity for that cooker!) but also an opportunity to practice the craft of making good food. What you learn from cooking rice on the stovetop is portable knowledge to apply elsewhere — for a paella, risotto, and sushi rice, for instance. No matter how fancy the rice dish is, cooking rice is simply hydrating and heating up grains. You just need confidence in manipulating the cooking process to meet your needs.

Every person has a cooked rice ideal based upon their cuisine, culture, and personal preference.

For my everyday eating, I like chewy tender grains of Thai jasmine rice that stick together ever so slightly. They’ll hold together as a mass when you’re dishing up the rice from the pot but when you look at them, you can clearly distinguish their shape. Such grains are more receptive to sauces and other flavors that hit them on the plate or in a bowl. (When I’m cooking Japanese, Korean, or South Asian dishes, I use different kinds of rice.)

In this dispatch, you’ll find:

• Rice cooking myth busting to help you confidently cook rice

• Pointers on rice and pan selection

• A scalable chart for you to make as much as you need

• My perfect jasmine rice recipe in full text and downloadable PDF

• Troubleshooting tips for you to craft your ideal pot of rice

Let’s bust 3 myths about cooking rice

My mom first taught me how to make long-grain rice in a basic National rice cooker. When I asked her about cooking rice on the stove, she told me about her unplugged another, which I followed before eventually developing my own recipe. When I’ve made rice with friends, they’re often surprised that I break the golden rules of cooking rice.

1. Wash the rice until the water runs clear. Washing the grains rids them of some starch so they taste fresh and clean. I wash and rinse white rice about three times and these photos show the progression. The water is never fully clear when you’re washing white rice. Just get close to it then move on to cook the rice!

2. Measure water by your knuckle. There is no universal knuckle and universal pot for all people who cook rice. The water level depends on the pot, the amount of rice you’re cooking, and your personal knuckle! Cook the same amount of rice in the same pot for a month or so to gauge the water level that works for you. Then try eyeballing the water level. Only you and your personal knuckle can truly know your equipment, ingredients, and taste preference.

3. Don’t lift the lid before the rice is done. Rice cooks by gentle steam action so a heavy pot with a secure lid helps. If you cook rice in a not-so-good pot with a loosey goosey lid, you’ll have a hard time retaining the heat if you open the pot up during cooking. With good modern pots, you can open and close the lid often without ruining the rice. Go ahead and peek!

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Rice and pot selection

My default rice for everyday eating is white or brown jasmine rice grown in Thailand. Usually, the rice is Three Ladies brand. Regardless of brand, look for handsome grains with a slight polished sheen, very few broken grains, and a good flavor, aroma, and texture. Private label supermarket jasmine rice is great too, so long as it’s from Thailand.

Jasmine rice grown in the United States is unfortunately not as aromatic or flavorful as Thai-grown rice. That said, cook up Lundberg jasmine or Jazzmen rice, if you like. When my family first came to America, we cooked Texas long-grain rice.

As for the pot, use a heavy one with a lid that will sit tightly on top. You want good heat circulation to cook the grains evenly. Choose your pot to be about twice as big as the yield. That ensures you have space to easily stir, fluff and cook the grains.

My 10-10-10 Rice cooking method

Some people boil and drain rice like pasta, but that rids too much of the sweet starches that define the grains’ comforting texture and flavor. I prefer an approach that involves a heavy pan and a gradual lowering of the heat.

To easily remember the method’s cooking and resting times, one of my friends and long-time recipe testers, Alex Ciepley, dubbed them the “10-10-10”. Use the mnemonic to cook rice in the same pot and eventually you’ll just eyeball the water level. And, after practicing this method and recipe, you’ll confidently apply it to cooking rice in claypot and donabe ceramic vessels.

Jasmine rice and water ratio

To yield grains that aren’t too firm or too soft, opt for a 4-to-5 ratio of rice to water. In the Asian kitchen, salt isn’t typically added to plain rice because other dishes will season it at the table. Use this chart for an easy rice cooking life!

When you wash rice, the grains absorb some water. That’s why my rice-to-water ratio may differ from that of people who do not wash their rice before cooking.

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Rice remedy pointers

Hold on. When you fluff the finished rice, there may be a Goldilocks moment to manage. For instance:

• If the grains are too firm and dryish, sprinkle on water, fluff to incorporate, then cover. Set the pot over low heat for 10 minutes to hydrate; let it rest about 5 minutes, then re-fluff.

• If the rice is mushy, eat it up and tweak your next batch by decreasing the water by 1 tablespoon per 1 cup of raw rice.

• If the rice smells burnt, you had the heat on way too high. I’ve accidentally done that a few times while trying to get a crusty bottom. If the rice smells and tastes acrid and burned throughout, I’m sorry. Start a new pot in a heavier pan and/or lower the heat.

Tinker to find the best rice-to-water ratio for your tastes. Jot down your ratio for future batches.

After reading all that, you’re definitely ready to cook a perfect pot of rice! There are extra pointers below so don’t scroll too fast.

RECIPE

10-10-10 Perfect Jasmine Rice

✅ Managing leftovers: Refrigerate leftover rice for up to 5 days, or freeze for a good month and thaw to eat. To reheat, sprinkle the rice with a little water, cover with a microwave splatter guard (or loosely cover with a silicone lid or parchment or wax paper), then microwave on high at 30 to 60 second blasts. If the grains compress, let briefly cool and fluff to serve. Always re-fluff before serving!

✅ Making rice for fried rice: When specifically making rice for fried rice, turn the cooked rice onto a rimmed baking sheet, spreading it out to allow the grains to dry quickly so they will fry up nicely. Let cool completely, uncovered, 1 to 2 hours at room temp (or freeze for about 20 minutes), before frying. Or, cover the baking sheet with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight.

✅ Cooking Thai-grown brown jasmine rice: Use a 2-to-3 ratio of rice to water. Wash and rinse the rice once, drain and return the grains to the pan. (The bran is intact, so one rinse is enough; no starch release.) Add 1 1/2 cups (360ml) water for every 1 cup (190g) of raw rice. Bring to a boil, and then lower the heat to medium. Simmer briskly, partially covered, for about 5 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the liquid is opaque light beige and slightly thick. Turn the heat to low, completely cover, and cook for 20 minutes. The rest remains the same, with resting and fluffing.

10-10-10 Perfect Jasmine Rice

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A master keeper recipe for your adventures in rice!

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10-10-10 Perfect Jasmine Rice

Makes about 3 cups, to serve 2 or 3

Ingredients

• 1 cup | 190g white jasmine rice or similar type of long-grain rice

• 1 1/4 cups |300ml water

Instructions

Wash the rice: Put the rice in a small (1 ½ to 2-quart | 1.5 to 2L) heavy pot and add water to cover by about 1 inch (2.5cm). Vigorously stir with your fingers to loosen surface starch then pour off the water (I save it to water our garden). Repeat two or three times, or until the water is nearly clear -- it will never be crystal clear. Dump the rice into a mesh strainer, shake to expel excess water, and return the rice to the pan.

Cook for 10: Add the 1 1/4 cups (300ml) water to the pan. Bring to a boil over high heat, stirring now and then with a silicone spatula or chopsticks to prevent clumping. Lower the heat slightly to maintain a brisk simmer for 1 to 3 minutes, stirring often to scrape bottom and circulate the grains, until glossy on top. (It’s normal for a few craters to form.) Decrease the heat to low, cover the pan, and cook for 10 minutes.

Rest for 10, fluff, rest for 10: Turn off the heat. Leave the rice to gently cook on the burner’s residual heat or 10 minutes. Uncover, fluff with chopstick, a fork, or spatula to circulate the grains. Re-cover and let rest again for 10 minutes to firm up the grains and finish cooking. Keep covered and cozy warm for up to 30 minutes. Re-fluff before serving.

Two follow-ups to Midweek Gems #60. Maia reported that sliders made from the hot rolls with char siu pork steaks were fabulous! But I’m glad she pointed out a typo I’d made (and have already fixed). Here’s the link to the hot rolls recipe without the error.

While working on our taxes I needed a fun, easy dinner and landed on chef Ron Hsu’s uncommonly good chicken and rice casserole.

His recipe in Down South + East cleverly layers gingery, garlicky, umami notes into a one-pan dish that’s doable on a weeknight. He’s also loaded the keeper recipe with great pro-chef ideas. Get Ron’s recipe for chicken and rice casserole.

Ron’s casserole recipe got me thinking about dishes that get assembled in a deep dish. Although tiramisu doesn’t require baking, it’s traditionally put together in a casserole dish. It’s made of layers of coffee soaked savoirdi biscuits (crisp ladyfinger cookies, not the soft ones) bound together by a heavenly, slightly sweet cream; it’s finished with a dusting of cocoa powder and maybe chocolate too. Tiramisu needs to sit overnight to age into excellence, making it an utterly easy and impressive make-ahead sweet.

Traditional tiramisu involves whipping egg yolks and sugar to a thick consistency much like you’d do for Vietnamese egg coffee. Thinking about casseroles and egg coffee led me to buy a large (400g) package of savoirdi biscuits at Eataly. (Note that there are gluten-free biscuits made with rice flour nowadays, too!)

When Rory saw me holding the savoirdi, he sweetly said, “Maybe you’ll make tiramisu for me?”

Spousal mind meld moment. However, I’d give my tiramisu a Viet touch!

In Vietnam, there are mousse cakes called bánh Tiramisu but I wanted to devise a Viet take on the Italian icon, which has a fuzzy history.

Tiramisu may have originated in the 1800s at a brothel in Treviso, Italy, as an aphrodisiac; if that’s true, it gives new meaning to the name’s literal meaning as a ‘pick me up’. Or perhaps someone invented it in the 1930s. No one really knows, but what is clear is tiramisu’s incredible popularity, which started in the 1980s. It’s now known internationally, with endless iterations.

By the end of the week, I had gone three rounds with tiramisu.

What I learned was this: Tiramisu is elastic and foolproof. All of the trials tasted very good, though they have their pluses and minuses, which I detail below.

It was hard to decide which to present to you so this tiramisu recipe allows you to choose for yourself. Shape your Vietnamese coffee tiramisu for your needs and interests! Regardless, the result will be a delicious Italian-Viet dessert. (Rory is very happy and so are our neighbors with all three versions.)

This dispatch fully equips you to make a killer good tiramisu. You’ll find the following:

• Vietnamese Coffee Tiramisu recipe in full text and as a downloadable PDF

• Three ways to craft tiramisu (old school, low sugar, or high protein)

• Ideas for making vegan tiramisu

• Pointers for building Vietnamese coffee flavor, scaling up this small-batch recipe, and how to serve tiramisu gracefully

• Ingredient swaps and advance prep ideas to save time

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But if you just want a quick pho for one or two, use my recipe for fast chicken pho (phở gà nhanh). I made it this week it’s splendid — chickeny, fresh tasting, and soulful in less than 45 minutes. It’s so much better than the “instant pho” sold at supermarkets, which you have to doctor up big time for it to be meaningful.

I originally published the recipe in The Pho Cookbook and this week, shared it at my website with lots of bonus tips. Go pho the fast chicken pho recipe and you won’t regret it! 😆

I adore last week’s classic bún chả for how the pork develops a smoky umami and lends those savors to the nuoc cham sauce. That’s the brilliance of the classic Hanoi rice noodle dish. But after spending a week thinking about and developing the recipe for the newsletter, I realized that the meat was simply a conveyor for the distinctive marinade. How could I make a plant-based version that tastes đặc biệt (special)? How could I craft a version that rivaled the meaty original? Do you need meat to make great bún chả?

Substituting an alt-meat such as Impossible Meat for the pork is not good enough. It has a strong flavor that’s not copacetic with bún chả flavors.

For an exciting, wholesome bún chả chay (“chay” means vegetarian in Vietnamese), I turned to tofu and springtime vegetables. I also rejiggered the marinade formula to be naturally vegan and to make the vegetables taste extra good and look very sexy.

At the end of a week of ruminating and recipe testing, I have a great recipe for you! Rory remarked how it perfumes the kitchen with wonderful aromas of caramelization, just like the meaty bún chả does. When we ate the tofu and grilled veggies, they had an uncanny meaty quality. A big veggie win!

Full of sensory razzmatazz, my bún chả chay is remarkably tasty and satisfying without being heavy. Meat does not have to define the dish’s appeal.

It’s also fun to eat because the various vegetables offered distinctive flavors and textures; go ahead and fish around the sauce bowl for different things! The best plant-based dishes fire on all cylinders to hit all your food pleasure points.

I’m so happy to present you with this recipe and all the accompanying elements so you can craft your own head-turning bún chả chay. This successful vegetarian riff underscores a culinary truth: Foundational Viet cooking lends itself to creativity so long as you understand the parameters of a dish.

For instance, with the recipe and insights below, you can:

• Vary the vegetables, depending on what’s on sale or growing in your garden and what you enjoy grilling!

• Serve this version alongside traditional pork bún chả to create an extra special, festive low-meat meal. You’ll thrill vegetarians and vegans while impressing jaded omnivores.

• If you’re calling the classic pork version the “Obama Special”, then nickname this one the “Michelle Obama Special” as an ode to the former First Lady’s health initiative for kids and White House vegetable garden.

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Supermarket ingredients go into this bún chả chay (pronounced “boon chahh chay”) to make it very accessible. If you want to use Asian market ingredients, by all means do. Here’s all you need for your vegetarian bún chả adventure:

• Bún Chả Chay recipe in full text and as a downloadable PDF

• Scalable Vegan Bún Chả Marinade formula and recipe for you to serve 2 or 10!

• Pointers on prep and vegetable butchering to help you succeed

• The same noodle prep video that’s in the meat version so you don’t have to click back (you’re welcome!)

• Ingredient swaps and advance prep ideas to save time

Make bún chả to enjoy Vietnam in your own kitchen, on your own terms!

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I know what you’re thinking. You’ve eaten Vietnamese grilled pork rice noodles bowls labeled “bún thịt nướng” on restaurant menus. You’ve doused it with plenty of nuoc cham. Maybe you’ve also made the salad-y rice noodle dish at home. What’s different about bún chả?

Compared to southern-Vietnamese (Saigon) bún thịt nướng, bún chả uses similar but fewer ingredients but it tastes more luxe and extra umami. Two cuts of pork are used – sliced fatty pork and pork patties, for you to experience different textures and flavors. The meat is juicy and seasoned by a savory sweet marinade, reflecting northern (Hanoi) flavor preferences. Sweet-savory flavors are what you typically taste in southern-style bún bowls.

Northern cooks cleverly craft bún chả’s sauce as an extra umami, delicious veil of flavor on everything that it touches. Despite similar ingredients as a southern bowl of bún thịt nướng, a meal of northern bún chả offers more nuance and depth.

Bún chả also has class. It’s eaten in a languid manner. When traditionally served, the components are served separately for diners to compose smallish bowls of greens, noodles, and grilled pork. Because there’s a certain formality involved, bún chả can be a celebratory one-dish meal or main feature of a complex party menu. In contrast, Saigon-style bún bowls are considered a casual one-and-done dish that you can eat on the run.

A bún chả meal invites lingering and coaxes conversation too. It’s the dish that Barack Obama and Anthony Bourdain shared in Hanoi in 2016.

If you venture to Bún Chả Hương Liên in Hanoi where they ate, you can’t sit at their table because it’s enshrined in plexiglass, I hear. However, you can order the “Obama Special”.

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But to be honest, the version Obama and Bourdain ate doesn’t look fabulous: the meat hasn’t gotten the caramelized bits of char that comes from careful cooking and a good marinade. And, in Hanoi there’s a modern convenient method of eating bún chả in a big bowl with lots of soupy sauce (there are fewer dishes to set and wash for the restaurant operator!) However, the sauce is diluted and strangely bland. It’s not what I grew up with or read about in old Vietnamese cookbooks. You can do better!

In fact, you can make bún chả (pronounced “boon chahh”) with supermarket ingredients, if you want! Today’s dispatch equips you with the following for a most excellent bún chả adventure:

• Explainer on how to achieve brilliant bún chả

• Bún chả recipe in full text and as a downloadable PDF

• Scalable marinade chart and recipe for you to serve 2 or 10!

• Swaps and advance prep suggestions to fit bún chả into your life

• Lots of prep tips and ingredient pointers

• Video for noodle prep that you can (and should) use elsewhere to make solid Viet food!

Time to get bún chả-ing.

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So, after what do I do after a lengthy stretch of nearly non-stop work? I spent time in my garden, then cooked and played in my kitchen to spark my brain to be extra curious and creative. I bought a new toy — the Ninja combi steam oven, and have been test driving it. The small appliance has 16 different functions! Yeah, it steams up when it cooks but for good reasons. As I progress in trying it out, I’ll report my experiences via the website.

I also made bún rice noodle salad bowls with grilled pork skewers and shrimp. It’s the cover recipe from Vietnamese Food Any Day (see page 197). It’s healthy, fresh, and versatile. I let the skewered meat marinate overnight and it got more tender. The shrimp were grilled shell-on for flavor; we peeled them at the table before diving in. Yes, those are Trader Joe’s fried shallots and roasted peanuts on top, excellent time savers.

Making the bún bowls got me thinking and then rethinking how to make nước chấm well. I’ve been making it for nearly forty-five years, since about the time I was in junior high school. Out of the blue one day my mom assigned me to do it. She likely said something like, “Mẹ cần con pha nước chấm,” which roughly means “I need you to make the dipping sauce”.

I knew the ingredients but there was little guidance. I don’t know if it was a rite of passage for a Viet girl or a test. But seeing as how my mom was put in charge of overseeing her family’s cooks when she was a tween, she likely looked at me and figured that the least that I could do is make rice and the dipping sauce — two fundamental Vietnamese foods that can make or break a meal. She’d already taught me to use the rice cooker so it was my time to pha nước chấm.

In Vietnamese, the word pha means to formulate, mix, prepare, or to make. I messed up so much at first because I was just randomly mixing stuff together — lime juice, sugar, water, and fish sauce. It did not always taste good but my family always kindly gave me a pass.

Nước chấm (pronounced “nook chahm”) defines the final flavors of countless Vietnamese snacks, salads, lettuce and rice paper wraps, noodle bowls, and rice plates. Even when the table sauce wasn’t officially part of dish, it’s an unspoken truth in Vietnamese cooking that the amber sauce is magical. It can transform mundane ingredients, making them say, “I’m Vietnamese!”

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Drizzle, dunk or toss simply fried, grilled, steamed, boiled, or raw foods in nước chấm and they instantly taste special in a Viet-ish way.

If nước chấm is so tricky to make, can’t you just buy it? It’s silly to buy bottled premade sauce, labeled as “nước mắm pha sẵn”, sold at hardcore Viet markets. Who knows how old that stuff is? Who knows what kind of ingredients were used? And, what if you want to make it low sugar, low sodium, or vegan? What if you don’t have citrus around? What if you wanted to keep it for days? Why let someone else determine how your food tastes? The bottle is likely worth more than its contents. Seriously.

A word on words — nước chấm vs. nước mắm

Though the official name of the sauce is nước chấm (literally dipping sauce), Viet speakers often use the shorthand, “nước mắm” to mean nước chấm. Nước mắm on its own means fish sauce but in the context of “nước mắm pha” or “pha nước mắm”, the phrase signals that fish sauce has been diluted, seasoned, and formulated to serve as a table sauce to accentuate other foods.

You’re safest to say nước chấm to a Viet speaker so they are clear that you’re talking about the dipping sauce; reserve nước mắm for discussing fish sauce. However, if you hear someone talking about nước mắm, they may be talking about the pure condiment or the dipping sauce.

Over the years, I’ve made nuoc cham (let’s omit diacritics from here on in so I can type faster 😄) many ways and talked to others how they finesse theirs. I’ve futzed and finessed it to make it on a whim and have written recipes for it. I’ve got tricks and tips to share with you in this dispatch, which includes:

• Three recipes in text plus downloadable PDF for:

  • Classic nuoc cham

  • Make-ahead nuoc cham

  • Vegan nuoc cham hack

• A thorough break down of ingredients so you understand how each functions, how to choose them wisely, how to troubleshoot, plus how to get creative!

To borrow from the Home Depot’s slogan: You can do it. I can help.

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It’s been a brutal work week because we’re sending Cooking Thai to print very, very soon. This weekend, chef Pim and I are reviewing the book for the final time. Authors work with a team of folks to produce cookbooks, and given that there are countless moving parts (ingredient measurements, instructions, photos, page number references), mistakes may be made. At this stage, we scrub and polish and then practice the art of letting go.

It’s always an exhaustive process at the end but this time, I feel extra energized. That’s because now more than ever, there is incredible openness and interest in Asian cultures. I credit that to phenomena like Korean pop stars and Japanese anime.

Recently, there’s “Chinamaxxing” — a social media trend that has young American TikTokers wanting to ‘become Chinese’ by getting into things like practicing qigong, cooking congee, stocking up on groceries at Asian markets, and wearing slippers around the house. They want to be their “Chinese baddie” best because this is their “Chinese time of life”. (Remember the 1980 hit song, Turning Japanese by the Vapors? It did not result in women running out to buy kimonos.)

The rise of Chinese soft power, mostly among Generation Z, is an unexpected 180-degree turn. It’s uplifting but also ironic, given that there’s been a certain level of suspicion of Chinese goods and services for a long time.

Here at PTFS, we’ve discussed things like the fervent Prop 65 warnings on Asian ingredient labels. A few years back, shared his insights on people’s concerns over French made-in China cookware to empower consumers to thoughtfully choose.

And, remember when some folks nicknamed Covid-19 as “kung flu” and how the pandemic caused a surge in Asian hate crimes and discrimination? Those were good times, right?

Way before the pandemic, looking Asian could be viewed negatively. About fifteen years ago, as Rory and I were taking a walk in our neighborhood, a group of young men drove passed and one of them leaned his head out the window and screamed, “Go back to China!”

I reflexively stopped, raised my middle finger to give them the bird, and screamed back, “Fuck off! I’m not Chinese! I’m Vietnamese!” I stood my ground with minimal fear because we were across the street from a friendly Black-owned barbershop. We could run there for help, if needed.

The car briefly stopped before the young men took off. They surely forgot about the incident. For all I know, in 2026, they may be looking to live their best Chinese lives.

There’s plenty of analysis of Chinamaxxing from TIME magazine and also some humorous-not-so-humorous advice from the South Morning Post, the leading newspaper outlet in Hong Kong, China. I’m usure what to make of the current Chinamaxxing meme and trends, but I do hope that it results in genuine greater cultural appreciation.

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Making Chinese-Vietnamese connections

Chinamaxxing also got me thinking about my own interests in Chinese culture, which started in college when I decided to minor in Chinese languages and culture. I eventually scored a fellowship in Hong Kong, traveled to China and partly built my food writing career on researching and writing about Chinese food.

Why go out of my Vietnamese lane? China is geographically and culturally connected to Vietnam through migration, politics, war, language, and yes, food. The relationship between the two countries has not always been a happy one, but understanding China helped me to better understand my Vietnamese heritage and history.

For instance, when I was in my twenties, I hung out with Teresa, a gal from Hong Kong whose father used to be film director. Their family lived in Monterey Park and Teresa introduced me to a wonderful Chinese-Islamic restaurant, where I fell for dishes such as fragrant stir-fried lamb spiced with cumin and lots of green onions and a thick, crunchy sesame scallion bread. To this day, I love to eat the two together, stuffing the stir-fry into the bread and wiping up the sauce with even more bread!

Over the decades, I’ve tried all kinds of recipes for a fabulous rendition of the bread recipe and this past Friday, to get my mind off of book proofreading, I made it again and landed on my best rendition yet. Get the sesame-scallion bread recipe and make it sooner than later to enjoy its tender chewy, nutty, rich flavors.

Because Vietnamese and Chinese languages are linked in many ways, when I learned that the sesame scallion bread (zhīma dà bǐng) was a type of bǐng (餠, the Chinese word for bread, pancakes, pies, and certain other doughy foods), I was able to wrap my head around the Vietnamese notion of bánh, a very broad category of food that includes bánh mì, cookies, cakes, dumplings, crepes and other starchy foods.

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Chinese Vietnamese people and food

When I started out writing about food, I befriended Chinese Vietnamese chefs too. The late chef Charles Phan of the Slanted Door was Chinese Vietnamese, for instance. So are my pals, chef restaurateurs Eric and Sophie Banh of Monsoon and Ba Bar in Seattle. Chinese people have been in Vietnam for a long time, so much so that there are countless people who identify as Chinese Vietnamese. They mostly see themselves as Vietnamese but can speak Cantonese and or Teochew.

Knowing about and being able to prepare and share Chinese cuisine is part of Vietnamese culture. In the early 1960s, when my dad was provincial governor in Phan Thiet in South Vietnam, my mom planned dinners that included Vietnamese, Chinese, and French dishes. She employed two cooks — one of whom was nicknamed Chú Năm Bếp (Uncle of Five Kitchens). Mom described him as a charming, talented man whose could cook practically anything; the five kitchens reflected his mastery of five cuisines.

Those factors and many others contributed to my affinity for Viet cha gio fried imperial rolls and bun rice noodle bowls as well as for Chinese fried wontons, lo mai gai sticky rice in lotus leaf, and wonton noodle soup. Hybrid foods like bo kho — the beef stew with star anise, lemongrass, tomato and carrot has southern Chinese Vietnamese roots and is considered an iconic Vietnamese dish. It has evolved over the years and cooks have taken to serve in many ways but it’s still Vietnamese at heart. I felt confident with turning the classic stew into a quick bolognese-style bo kho sauce to enjoy with wide rice noodles or pappardelle pasta. (Along the same vein, what would stop you from putting some in a banh mi roll because or use for a Viet-ish sloppy Joe. Just some suggestions!)

Chinese-ness in unexpected savors

So when I researched and wrote about the history of pho, it wasn’t a surprise that Chinese cooks and language were part of the story, which also includes the French colonials too. I’d always wondered if there was a Chinese pho recipe. ’s cookbook on Yunnan cuisine answered my question with its Chinese beef pho recipe, which you could add pickled mustard greens to, if you want. (The Red River flows from Yunnan eastward through Hanoi and out to the Gulf of Tonkin, so of course there are connections!)

Pho is highly elastic as I’ve written in The Pho Cookbook so you can play around with it with recipes like the beef short rib and vegetable pho. My traditionalist mother may think it’s weird but I like the recipe’s vegetable component, lower cost, and easy cooking in a pressure cooker or Instant Pot.

And, if you survey global cuisines, you’ll see how far Chinese foodways have migrated. Consider how widespread ingredients like tofu, soy sauce and rice noodles are. Chinese la mian noodles begot Japanese ramen. Wok cooking went to Peru and birthed Chifa cuisine and lomo saltado which then went back to Asia and eventually into Vietnam, where it yielded a beef stir-fry served atop fried potatoes. (Make my delicious umami-rich tofu and French fries iteration.)

Finally, if you shop at a Chinese market or online at Weee!, check the frozen food section because you may find frozen peeled Chestnuts from China. As noted in an earlier newsletter, American chestnuts grow on Chinese trees. So you can purchase the Chinese chestnuts, know about their history, and use them in Chinese ways like the Red-Cooked Chestnut Chicken and Braised Chestnuts with Napa Cabbage which hail from Shanghai. These are no longer fall or winter dishes. They can be enjoyed whenever, if you get your paws on frozen Chinese chestnuts!

Today’s world is incredibly economically, politically, and culinarily interrelated. If you consider all the ways that China influences our lives, there is a certain truth to what China calls itself in Chinese: 中国 (中國; Zhōng Guó), which literally means the Middle Kingdom, the center of the world.

As a Vietnamese person who’s gone the extra distance to understand Chinese culture, do I want to become Chinese?

No way! I’m too feisty and proud to relinquish who I am. However, by cooking and looking around to connect the dots, I know that I can be a Chinese baddie on my own terms. I hope you find these insights and ideas to help you add to your knowledge base, if not just sound awesome to a young person. 😆

Back to proofreading the book. Thanks for being here.

I’ve been thinking about Asian sweets to share with you because in our 2026 paid subscriber survey, a number of you asked for healthy-ish sweets that are low in sugar and can be made gluten-free, vegan, etc. I thought about those requests and landed on this Chinese walnut cookie, which as you can see, may involve sesame seeds, if you like!

Walnut cookies are popular in northern and southern China, which explains why they are well known in Mandarin and Cantonese (and I’m sure other dialects):

• Mandarin: 核桃酥 (Hétáosū) and 桃酥饼 (Táo sū bǐng)

• Cantonese: 合桃酥 (Hup toh soh)

The second character, 桃. roughly means “shortbread,” rather than “cookie”. When Rory tried this cookie, he said, “Oh, it’s a yummy shortbread.”

He ate one and felt happily satisfied. This cookie tastes indulgent but it contains fiber and protein, and is relatively low in sugar and fat. Spurred on by his positive response, I experimented with small batches, changing up the nuts and toppings to yield a recipe that you can scale up for a party or freeze for future baking.

Why walnuts? What about almond cookies?

Most of us know of Chinese almond cookies which have been popularized abroad but the traditional Chinese Lunar New Year cookie features walnuts. These walnut cookies supposedly date to the Tang Dynasty (618–907 C.E.) and a guild of potters and ceramicists. As the story goes, one of the potters dealt with a persistent cough by eating walnuts, which he crushed and added to a biscuit-y dough and baked atop the hot kiln surface. The other potters picked up on the tasty, healthy idea and as their wares spread around the country, so did the cookie.

Walnuts are rich in symbolism. For instance, there’s a Chinese notion that eating walnuts ensures happiness in the new year. I’ve also read that because walnuts look like brains, they also symbolize knowledge and good health.

It all sounds like a joke but in actuality, walnuts have been scientifically proven to be good for many things, including heart and gut health. They also figure into the cMIND diet to fend off dementia. Walnuts are a win-win-win food.

At Chinese markets and online, you may spot walnut cookies but I assure you that baking them yourself from this easy recipe using fresh, quality ingredients will make you much happier than if you bought them. Your home will also smell divine and you’ll better ensure good luck, wisdom, and health in this Year of the Fire Horse!

Below you’ll find:

• The walnut cookie recipe in full text plus downloadable PDF

• A table of swap suggestions that enables you to plug and play to make the cookies gluten-free, vegan, without refined sugar, without nuts, with seeds, or with extra fiber

• Lots of bonus ingredient and technical pointers in text and photos so you have plenty of guidance to easily make my recipe yours

A quick note: After this recipe is sent to you, it will be added to the PTFS recipe index. It’s not a perfect index and has to be manually updated. For instance, I just noticed that I forgot to add the Peking duck recipe! Thanks for your patience.

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First, although I’m not one to praise Whole Foods much, I did notice at my local store that there’s still Lunar New Year signage for “fortune foods” like whole fish at the seafood counter. The store is still running sales on Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese condiments — soy sauce, gochujang, and fish sauce, for instance. So, in the spirit of continuing the party, at my website, I assembled 25 recipes to help you further usher in the Year of the Fire Horse. Extend the holiday because that’s what Asian people traditionally do!

If you have a Vietnamese banh chung and don’t know what to do with it, I’ve got you covered with a primer and video! Ditto on pickles, noodles, sweets, and other foods to go along with the must-have Tet sticky rice cake (below, top left and center). Or if you just want to cook up a pan-Asian feast to celebrate the new year, the recipes will give you plenty of options. Head to 25 Recipes for Pan-Asian Lunar New Year Menus.

Second, I created a PTFS recipe index for you to more easily explore and find what you need. The index is one of my 2026 ,Year of the Horse goals!

The index includes all the exclusive PTFS recipes for paid subscribers as well as ones that are available for everyone. Since this newsletter started in September 2022, it has fostered a collection of about 150 recipes — the size of two modest cookbooks or one big one!

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None of this would have happened if it wasn’t for your enthusiasm for Asian cuisines and cultures and my approach to them. Thank you! In particular, we wouldn’t have this robust, hardworking collection of recipes and audiovisual how-tos without paid subscribers pitching in. Seriously.

Before this newsletter, I thought my food writing career meant I had to deeply bow to the SEO algorithm gods in perpetuity. Pass the Fish Sauce liberated me and I thank you all for your kindness.

Now head over to the NEW RECIPE INDEX and start looking and cooking around.

I welcome your feedback on the index because it will continue to evolve.

The recipes are grouped in broad categories but are not listed in alphabetical order within the categories. I’ve done my best to cross list them but this is not a professionally done index.

How to use this index

You have 3 basic options: Browse the entire list from top to bottom, use the search function on your computer (⌘ + F on a Mac; Ctrl + F on a PC) to look for specific terms, or click on a link below to jump to particular categories.

• Appetizers and Savory Snacks

• Bread, Dumplings, and Pancakes

• Dessert, Sweets and Drinks

• Eggs

• Grilled

• Meat (chicken, pork, beef, duck, lamb)

• Rice and Noodles

• Salads and Soups

• Sauces, Dressings, and Seasonings

• Seafood

• Stir-fries

• Tofu (without meat)

• Vegan, Vegetarian, and Vegetable Sides

Appetizers and Savory Snacks

• Pate Chaud (including meat + veg filling recipes)

• Curried Oysters with Cucumber Sauce

• Viet-Spiced Petit Palmier

• Japanese Fried Chicken Karaage

• Basic Chilled Tofu Blueprint (+ 4 sauces)

• Chili Crisp Candied Nuts

• Gingery Wontons in Chili Oil

Bread, Dumplings, and Pancakes

• Mandarin Pancake Mini Class

• Pate Chaud (meat + veg filling recipes)

• Helen Goh’s Traveling “Speckled Bread” (bara brith)

• Cucur Badak (a Malaysian dumpling)

• Easy Wonton Noodle Soup

• Gingery Wontons in Chili Oil

Dessert, Sweets and Drinks

• Chinese Walnut Cookies

• Boozy Fruitcake Bites (a cookie)

• Shortcut Silken Tofu and Ginger Syrup

• “Beginner’s” tart tatin

• Apricot-ginger jam

• Shortcut sticky rice and mango

• Coconutty Black-Eyed Peas and Rice Pudding (che dau trang)

• Grilled Bananas in Sticky Rice with Coconut Sauce (chuoi nuong)

• Egg Coffee + Salt Coffee (2 recipes)

• No-Churn Lemongrass Ice Cream with Coconutty Cashews

• Easy Almond Cake

• Orgeat (almond syrup for cocktails)

• Best Bellini and Windowsill Spritz (summery peach cocktails)

• Slice-and-Bake Matcha Cookies

• Persimmon Spice Cookies

• Petit Palmiers with Viet Cinnamon

• Flourless Almond Cookies

• Lemongrass Ice Cream with Roasted Pineapple

• Vietnamese Shiso (Tia To) Shrub

• Easy Lime Pound Cake

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Eggs

• Perfect boiled eggs

• Caramelized pork and eggs in coconut sauce (a southern Viet icon)

• Egg Coffee (Ca Phe Trung)

Grilled

• Grilled Lemongrass Beef Skewers

• Indian lamb steak with lemon rice and chutneys

• Tamarind-Glazed Chicken

• Char Siu Pork Ribs + Char Siu Pork Steak (2 recipes)

• Chicken Tikka Skewers

• Grilled Lemongrass Pork Dinner Plan

• Yakitori Chicken and Vegetables

• Grilled Roast Fish with Viet Tamarind Sauce

Meat (chicken, pork, beef, duck, lamb)

• Any Meat Moo Shu (pork, chicken, beef, shrimp)

• Shortcut Chinese-style Roast Duck feast

• Meat Pate Chaud

• Red-Cooked Chestnut Chicken

• Mapo Tofu Macaroni and Cheese

• Chicken and Lemongrass Curry

• Lemongrass Chicken Stir-Fry

• Grilled Lemongrass Beef Skewers

• Indian lamb steak with lemon rice and chutneys

• Mapo Tofu (my best recipe for the classic)

• Taiwanese Five-Spice Pork Sauce Rice Bowl (Lu Rou Fan)

• Tamarind-Glazed Chicken

• Maggi Roast Chicken and Butternut Squash

• Char Siu Pork Ribs + Char Siu Pork Steak (2 recipes)

• Bo Kho Bolognese, a Beef, Star Anise, and Lemongrass Pasta

• Chicken Tikka Skewers

• Mapo Tofu Meat Sauce (+ 5 ways to enjoy it!)

• Grilled Lemongrass Pork Dinner Plan

• Yakitori Chicken and Vegetables

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Rice and Noodles

• Sticky rice, chestnut and shiitake dressing

• Sticky rice with roast chicken (Xoi Ga Ro Ti)

• Japanese chestnut Rice (Kuri Gohan)

• Carrot Fried Rice and Crispy Fried Eggs

• Taiwanese Oil Rice (Youfan)

• Tamil lemon rice

• Microwave Sticky Rice

• Wok-kissed Tofu-Mushroom Pho

• Umami shiitake garlic noodles

• Crab and asparagus garlic noodles

• Pad Thai (vegetarian and vegan adaptable)

• Ginger, Carrot, and Scallion Noodles

• Singapore Noodles

• Grilled Bananas in Sticky Rice with Coconut Sauce (chuoi nuong)

• Viet Roast Chicken and Sticky Rice (xoi ga ro ti)

• Kien Giang Fish and Shrimp Noodle Soup (Bun Ca Kien Giang)

• Chicken pho salad (Pho Ga Tron)

• Panfried wheat noodles with a choose-your-own adventure stir-fry topping

• Crispy panfried rice noodles with a stir-fry topping

• Shortcut sticky rice and mango

• Beef Short Rib-Vegetable Pho

• Japanese Fried Chicken Karaage

• Easy Wonton Noodle Soup

• Garlicky Noodles with Maggi and Butter

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Salads and Soups

• Vietnamese pomelo salad

• Burmese Ginger Salad

• Thai-Khmer Tom Kha Gai (+ vegetarian recipe)

• Vietnamese Bouillabaisse (Canh Chua Ca)

• Wok-kissed Tofu-Mushroom Pho

• Snap Pea and Carrot Shira Ae

• Green Bean Shira Ae

• Hawaiian-style Tofu Watercress Salad

• Viet Thai Melon Salad

• 4 Salads to go with Nuoc Cham Vinaigrette

• Creamy Tofu Seafood Chowder

Sauces, Dressings and Seasonings

• Cambodian Kroeung

• Tamarind date chutney + cilantro-mint chutney (2 recipes)

• Tamarind glaze for chicken or tofu

• Japanese orange-ginger dressing

• Shira-Ae, umami tofu dressing

• Quick Japanese Seasoned Soy Sauce

• Korean Seasoned Soy Sauce

• Chile and Sichuan Peppercorn Mix

• Taiwanese-Style Soy Paste

• Yakitori Sauce

• Nuoc Cham Vinaigrette (+ 4 salads)

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Seafood

• Crispy lemongrass salmon tails

• Crab and asparagus garlic noodles

• Tamarind shrimp-vegetable stir-fry

• Crispy lemongrass fish

• Grilled (or Roasted) Fish with Viet Tamarind Sauce

• Crispy salmon and caramelized ginger-onion jam

• Shrimp-Tofu Stir-Fry with Bok Choy side (2 recipes)

• Crispy Seafood Cakes (crab, smoked fish, or veg)

• Coconut-Caramel Shrimp and Tofu (Tom Kho Dau Hu)

• Garlic-Black Pepper Crab (cua rang toi tieu)

• Viet-Cajun Seafood Boil

• Crispy Fried Smelts

Stir-Fries

• Any Meat Moo Shu (pork, chicken, beef, shrimp)

• Vegetarian Moo Shu (vegan adaptable)

• Lemongrass Chicken Stir-Fry

• Tamarind shrimp-vegetable stir-fry

• Tamarind tofu-mushroom stir-fry

• Shrimp-Tofu Stir-Fry with Bok Choy side (2 recipes)

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Tofu (without meat)

• Coconut Curry Tofu (+ Curry Fried Rice recipe)

• Tamarind-glazed tofu

• Coconut-Caramel Shrimp and Tofu (Tom Kho Dau Hu)

• Tamarind tofu-mushroom stir-fry

• 20-Minute Char-Siu Tofu

• Umami Tofu Stir-Fry with French Fries

• Vietnamese Spicy Burst Tomato Tofu (dau hu sot ca chua)

• Tofu Dressed with Basil and Garlic

• Tofu Noodle Salad with Chili Crisp

• Shira-Ae, umami tofu dressing + 2 salad recipes

• Chili Crisp Yuba Noodles

• Creamy Tofu Seafood Chowder

• Tofu-Wakame Chowder

• Fried Tofu Smothered in Green Onions (Dau Hu Chien Tam Hanh La)

• Easy Pan-Fried Tofu

• Basic Chilled Tofu Blueprint (+ 4 sauces)

• Yakitori Tofu and Vegetables

• Wok-kissed Tofu-Mushroom Pho

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Vegan, Vegetarian, and Vegetable Sides

• Cambodian Kroeung (seasoning paste)

• Buttery Chestnuts

• Vegetarian Moo Shu (vegan adaptable)

• Vegan Pate Chaud

• Braised Chestnuts with Napa Cabbage (a Shanghai dish)

• Burmese Ginger Salad

• Wok-Kissed Tofu-Mushroom Pho

• Vegan mapo tofu

• Umami shiitake garlic noodles

• Pad Thai (vegetarian version provided)

• Curry Fried Rice + Coconut Curry Tofu (2 recipes)

• Carrot Fried Rice and Crispy Fried Eggs

• Thai-Khmer Tom Kha Hed (mushroom version of Tom Kha Gai)

• Tamarind date chutney + cilantro-mint chutney (2 recipes)

• Tamarind tofu-mushroom stir-fry

• Apricot-ginger jam

• Shortcut sticky rice and mango

• Hanoi-style Sticky Rice, Buttery Mung Beans and Fried Shallot (xoi xeo)

• Umami Tofu Stir-Fry with French Fries

• Coconutty Black-Eyed Peas and Rice Pudding (che dau trang)

• Grilled Bananas in Sticky Rice with Coconut Sauce (chuoi nuong)

• Minimal Mess Smoky Eggplant with Scallion Chili Oil

• Tofu-Wakame Chowder

• Tofu Noodle Salad with Chili Crisp

• Pickled Shallots (dua hanh, for Tet)

• Hawaiian-style Tofu Watercress Salad

• Green Cherry Tomato Pickle

• Reduced Sugar Jam

• Yakitori Tofu and Vegetables

• Dashi-soaked eggplant

• Roasted carrots and creamy nuoc cham

• Vegan Hot and Sour Soup

• Eggplant in Garlic Sauce

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Even though the Year of the Horse officially starts on Tuesday, February 17, you can get into the Lunar New Year spirit for weeks! There’s no need to rush. Just learn how to say Chúc Mừng Năm Mới (pronounced “Chook Moong Nahm Moy”) and repeat it to any Viet people you run into during the Tết season to make us extra joyous.

I’m at my mom’s house now for Tet and she’s asked if we were going to have Mandarin pancakes for something. Yup, I brought two stacks that I’d frozen so we can wrap up Chinese roast duck purchased from a barbecue shop and moo shu — a quick stir-fry full of flavors, color, and textures.

Last weekend, for a gateway experience, I led with my Mandarin pancakes mini class plus shortcut duck recipes. Then at midweek I followed up with a homemade Peking duck recipe, in case you want your pancakes to wrap around something super duper and ultra impressive. Today, let’s moo shu with the pancakes!

If you’ve ordered moo shu (aka mù xī ròu, 木樨肉), at a Chinese restaurant in America, you know that it can be made with different proteins. The dish originated as a simple stir-fry in Shandong, a coastal province in northern China. Shandong is southeast of Beijing and has a peninsula that pokes eastward. When I was studying Mandarin Chinese, a friend joked you can see Korea from the tip of the Shandong peninsula. Stir-fries are a hallmark of Shandong cuisine.

Moo shu usually contains some scrambled egg that are deftly prepared to mimic the delicateness of fragrant sweet osmanthus flowers (Osmanthus fragrans), a symbol of longevity and nobility in Chinese traditions. In the dish’s name, the characters 木樨 (mù xī) refer to the sweet osmanthus. There are folks who say the original characters referred to wood ear mushroom (木耳, mù ěr) which are also in the dish, but in the main, people explain the characters as referring to the flower.

You don’t have to decide. Both egg and mushroom are constants in my moo shu recipes to add harmonious-yet-varied textures and flavors.

Finally, the third character 肉 refers to ròu — meat, which in China and Vietnam, defaults to pork. Traditionally the dish was prepared with pork, egg, earthy bamboo shoot, frilly crunchy black fungus mushroom, and aromatics and simple seasonings. It was a homey stir-fry that people whipped up to eat with rice.

Then, something changed.

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Moo shu pork in America

As moo shu was introduced to the U.S. by northern Chinese cooks, the simple stir-fry got wrapped up in Mandarin pancakes and served as an appetizer. That’s to say, moo shu got the Peking duck treatment! When did it happen?

Thanks to a number of women chefs and entrepreneurs in the 1950s and 60s, urban areas on the East Coast had boundary pushing Chinese restaurants. The movers and shakers included noteworthy Chinese restaurant owners like Emily Kwoh and Irene Kuo in New York City and Joyce Chen in Boston.

Kwoh opened Mandarin East and Mandarin House in the 1950s. Below is a vintage menu from Kwoh’s restaurant with “moo sue juo” (for moo shu rou) but without the pancakes — yet. The New York Times eventually credited Kwoh as being one of the first to serve moo shu with pancakes at Mandarin House.

Kuo opened Lichee Tree in Greenwich Village in 1960 and Gingko Tree in 1966. Joyce Chen operated restaurants starting in 1958. They were all likely monitoring one another’s menus. The first cookbook to include moo shu with the pancakes was The Joyce Chen Cookbook, published in 1962.

Kwoh, Kuo and Chen were talented chefs and business people. Kuo and Chen were on national TV, hobnobbed with celebrities, artists and intellectuals, and they were not Cantonese. Chen was born in Beijing and Kwoh and Kuo were from Shanghai. They favored northern Chinese over southern Chinese food. Like Cecilia Chiang in San Francisco in the 1960s, those East Coast Chinese women were looking to push the Chinese food envelope before Nixon set foot in China in the 1970s! (Chiang opened The Mandarin in San Francisco in 1960 or 1961; though she had Shandong cooks, I can’t find early mention of moo shu on her menu.)

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Have moo shu Chinese or Chinese-American style

This explains why if you go to mainland China and ask for moo shu pork, you’ll likely get a wonderful stir-fry of rich pork, tender eggs, earthy daylily buds or bamboo shoot, crunchy black fungus and perhaps some other vegetables. Mandarin pancakes are not probably going to be on the side for you to wrap up the stir-fry with a smearing of salty-sweet hoisin-ish sauce.

But if you like moo shu with Mandarin pancakes, know that it’s legit. Kwoh, Kuo and Chen tweaked moo shu for American diners and over time, the dish became redefined and it became a winning idea. Now it’s part of the Chinese-American food experience. Food evolves.

I developed two moo shu stir-fries for you that are fabulous wrapped up in the pancakes or simply eaten with rice. Below you’ll find:

• 3 recipes + PDF for: Master Moo Shu Recipe Blueprint + Moo Shu Any Meat (feel free to vary the protein!) + Vegetarian Moo Shu (with a vegan option)

• Audiovisual aids: 2 videos plus process shots to help you manage potentially tricky moves

• Ingredient guidance and swap tips: Explainers are here for those who want to shop at an Asian market and substitutions are suggested if you just want to use more accessible ingredients

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My week hasn’t been filled with Super Bowl preparations. I’ve been working with chef Pim to prepare the book to go to print in early March. We’re at proofreading phase two out of three. Cooking Thai is looking great and the early reviews and endorsements are remarkable. Phew.

I’m also gearing up for Lunar New Year. No matter how spent I am, I feel giddy about starting anew. Tuesday, February 17 will usher in the Year of the Horse. My dad was born in the Horse year so welcoming this new lunar cycle also honors and celebrates my father. My mom, siblings and I are going all in.

We’re gearing up for a mini family feast this coming weekend. Mom is already making bánh chưng (“baan choong”) sticky rice cakes, a must-have for Tết (“teht”), Vietnamese Lunar New Year. For my part, I’ve been practicing and planing an easy Peking Duck with Mandarin Pancakes, which is partly why today’s post arrived late. To guide I’ve created a mini Mandarin Pancake class for you in this dispatch!

Here’s a summary of my pancake practice plus the duckylicious payoff — which will soon be yours to enjoy too!

Why Peking duck for Tết?

Viet celebrations often combine Chinese traditions because the two cultures have rubbed shoulders for millennia. Pho was initially made and sold by Viet-Chinese cooks, for instance. Viet language used to be based on Chinese pictographs and there are many shared words. The border continues to be porous.

Plus, my Mom adores Chinese roast duck, especially when it is served with delicate, thin pancakes slathered with salty-sweet sauce and accented by cooling cucumber and pungent green onion. Unlike doughy steamed buns, Mandarin pancakes are not sweet; their delicate texture and flavor harmonizes well with roasted meats and many other dishes. We set out all the fixings and make our own roast duck wraps, like at a fancy Chinese restaurant but better because we can have plenty and the flavors are extra fresh. Along with Viet dishes on the table, the duck makes for a very tasty Tết celebration.

Why Mandarin pancakes for spring?

Mandarin pancakes go by two names. On a macro level, they belong to the Chinese food category of báo bǐng / bóbĭng 薄餅, which covers a myriad of thin wrappers used to encase or hold food. Spring roll and lumpia wrappers, rice paper, tortillas, pizzas, and naan can all fit into this category.

Many people also know Mandarin pancakes as chūn bǐng 春饼 because they’re a food often enjoyed to mark the beginning of spring — lichun 立春 in Mandarin, lập xuân in Vietnamese. The actual dates depend on astronomical moves so celebrating spring, aka celebrating the Lunar New Year, officially lasts weeks. This year, lichun goes from February 3 to 18.

Friends you’ve got time to add this pancake tradition to your repertoire. Actually, once you’ve mastered these pancakes, you can enjoy them year round. I made so many pancakes to write up this mini class for you that I’m going to freeze a bunch. And I know how well they’ll go with other roasted meats, stir-fries and many other foods!

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Wait up, Andrea. How doable is this at home?

The duck, sauce, and veggies are super easy. I’ve got shortcuts, hacks, and make ahead tips for you! The pancakes do not require any special ingredients or equipment — just a little skill practice.

Some Asian American cooks use flour tortillas as a sub for Mandarin pancakes, and I was going to for this dispatch but honestly, they’re always too thick and never as good as true Mandarin pancakes! I’ve tried Sonora flour tortillas but super thin ones are very hard to find and they’re not fresh. What about frozen? I’ve never enjoyed the taste of frozen doughy foods from overseas. The flour used isn’t as flavorful. I’ve carted back flour from China and was very disappointed.

Mandarin pancakes are a northern Chinese flatbread. You can use them to wrap duck like I do here, or go for quick char siu pork steak or char siu tofu. Stir-fried and sauteed items like chile crisp yuba skin would be glorious in these Mandarin pancakes. Rory even suggested using Mandarin pancakes instead of flour tortillas!

As I’ve worked through this recipe, I’ve noted insights and recorded videos to help you succeed in this too! Below you’ll find a Mandarin Pancake Mini Class containing:

• Mandarin Pancakes recipe in text and PDF + 5 videos to guide your progress toward success + my mishaps and flubs to help you troubleshoot and create

• 3 Shortcut Roast Duck Hacks + a magical Glossy Glaze for that Chinese barbecue shop lacquered-look

• Roast Duck Feast with Mandarin Pancakes recipe + an excellent sauce that you may want to double because it’s just that good

• Suggestions for swapping out the duck, including going vegan

• Ingredient sourcing and prep pointers in case this is unfamiliar territory

That’s a lot of content but I really want you to try this out on your own terms. Add a salad for a complete meal.

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This time of year, people tend to lean into oranges and mandarins but pomelo is wonderfully complex, multidimensional, and fun. When you peel pomelo, the oils release to pleasantly perfume your hands and the air. The pith is plushy and makes a funny sound when you pull it away from the ball of fruit inside. Better yet is when you bite into pomelo’s flesh, you burst its juice sacs to release its mildly acidic, sweet flavor that carries just a hint of bitterness.

Pomelo is wondrous in many more ways than I’ve described, and nowadays, we’re lucky to have access to many kinds. Depending on where you shop, you can find pomelo grown in America, Vietnam, and/or China, for instance.

A lucky, healthful, royal fruit

The size of a volleyball, pomelos (Citrus maxima) symbolize many good things. They come into season in early autumn so Viet people often associate their big, round appearance with the Moon Festival, a time for gratitude and family reunions — completeness. When Lunar New Year rolls around, pomelo is further a regarded as a harbinger of prosperity. Many people include pomelo as an offering to their ancestors.

In Chinese, pomelo is yòu 柚, which sounds like the word to have 有 as well as the world for protection 佑. Combine all those homonyms and pomelo is win-win fruit. If you gift someone a beautiful pomelo, it’s like you’re presenting them with good luck.

In Vietnam, it’s more than just about homonyms. The Luận Văn pomelo grown in the central province of Thanh Hoa has deep rose colored flesh and skin. Its unique lucky red appearance and tasty flesh made it worthy enough to have been presented to royalty in the past. Nowadays, the Luận Văn pomelo is sold nationwide as the ‘royal tribute pomelo’; during Tet when people clamor for specialty foods, premium perfect pomelo can sell for as much as $10 each, which is pricey for Vietnam.

And, pomelo is pretty nutritious. It’s loaded with Vitamin C, fiber, antioxidants, and it may even help weight loss, fight anti-aging, and promote heart health. All that said, like with grapefruit, pomelo’s phytochemicals can cause some drug interactions so do be careful.

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What to do with pomelo?

To kickstart 2026, I gifted myself extra healthful luck by buying three pomelo (called bưởi in Vietnamese)! Along with some grapefruit, our dining table has been full of golden-green orbs of citrus. The pomelos I’ve been buying, whether it’s from Whole Foods or a Chinese or Vietnamese market, are big boys — at least 2 pounds (1 kilo) each!

We eat pomelo as fresh fruit but I also make a Vietnamese gỏi bưởi salad. It’s a very special salad worthy of holiday celebrations and dinner parties. It’s easy to prepare and you can prep most of it in advance. However, you have to extract the pomelo flesh from the segments as clusters of juice sacs to allow pomelo to express its best flavors and textures. That’s what makes the salad unique.

Gỏi bưởi is not a salad of chopped or dressed leaves. Much of the prep is done with your finger to pull apart the juice sacs, which are jewel like. Prepping the pomelo requires about 30 minutes, but one pomelo yields enough to serve eigh people, though you could stretch it over the course of a couple days too! To encourage you, I made a how-to video to guide you along!

Gỏi bưởi (“goy buoy”) used to be hard to prepare well because good pomelos were not available abroad. That has changed so I went to town to prepare the following for your success:

• Detailed Vietnamese pomelo salad recipe (+ a downloadable PDF) that allows you to make it with or without meat

• Video tips for prepping the pomelo

• A pomelo buying guide so you can gauge the pros and cons between different kinds

• A nifty quick way to cook shrimp and chicken breast so they’re flavorful and not overcooked (it’s fab for other dishes like shrimp cocktail!)

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My family cooked up a lot of quê hương (hometown) nostalgia while I was growing up, but we also adapted things to establish roots here in America. As I wrote earlier, my mother was on a pâté chaud journey to master homemade puff pastry, a major Viet-Franco achievement for a good home cook like her. The savory pastries were a favorite in Saigon, where we once lived.

If you missed the pâté chaud backstory, this recent post will fill you in!

We were so well fed that we got chubby. Then my mom started looking for ways to eat healthier without compromising the foods we loved.

Her solution? She pivoted to creating mini pâté chaud — diamonds of crisp pastry filled with her aromatic filling. They were portion-controlled 2-biters that didn’t get you into trouble, unless you ate too many. Instead of enjoying them as a regular breakfast item, our family served them up as a nosh with drinks. We enjoyed them at Christmas and other indulgent celebrations. She trotted them out of the freezer to impress guests at parties.

I’ve stuck with the minis over the years because it’s a sane and healthy-ish way to enjoy pâté chaud. There’s less pastry and more filling and it’s super easy and fast to prep.

Many Vietnamese cooks abroad still make the traditional round shape but I’ve also spotted squares and half circles too. Modern pâté chaud may contain the traditional pork filling or feature beef or chicken. I’ve seen vegetarian pâté chaud too.

Given all those iterations, I created three recipes for you to play with pâté chaud. Below you’ll find the following:

• A mini pâté chaud recipe plus instructions for making different shapes

• Two filling recipes to craft meaty or vegetarian (or vegan) pastries

• Process shots plus a how-to video to guide your journey

• FAQ for buying, making, and working with puff pastry

• Freezing and reheating tips

The pastries are fun to make and even more fun to eat. My brother in law could hardly tell the difference between the vegetarian and meat ones!

I’m hoping that at the end of all this, you’ll be confidently and joyously baking up a platter of something like this:

Nostalgia cooking can be good because cooking up memories can lead to adaptations and innovations. Let’s make pâté chaud!

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I’m still in vacation mode but still wanted to wish a very happy 2026. Before moving forward, let’s take a look back at some of the best PTFS dispatches of the year. I learned a lot from your engagement with the articles and recipes.

When I started out with this newsletter, I didn’t know how much enthusiasm there would be for lite food history. This year, I leaned in a little more to provide extra tidbits of knowledge so that you can piece together how flavors, techniques, and culture evolved over time. There were three noodle stories, because who doesn’t enjoy noodles? And untangling their history is both fun and interesting!

I had no idea how the longish geeky articles would sit with you but you liked them! Modern life unfolds so fast nowadays that it’s easy to overlook the textures and nuances that make food extra tasty. One of the most fascinating dishes I researched last year was Japanese carrot-ginger salad dressing. I wanted something easy, healthy and delicious to add to your salad repertoire and in the process, reported on its fascinating background.

I wrote a mini series about the Vietnamese diaspora and the article that captivated people most was a story about my family’s departure. When we got to America, one of the foods that was on rotation in my mother’s kitchen was char siu (Chinese barbecue pork). She relied on a marinade mix but I’ve long mixed up the marinade from scratch, which overtime, enabled me to push the envelope a bit to char siu many things.

In 2025, my goal was to help you char siu on a weeknight so that you may quickly get at the salty-sweet-rich flavors of iconic Cantonese barbecue. In the process, I came up with a new vegan take plus two meaty options. Go forth to char siu in 2026. It’s evergreen and year-round favorite.

Long ago, I wrote a proposal for a Vietnamese American museum that included an exhibit of the items that refugees escaped with, after the fall of Saigon in 1975. That proposal went unrealized but I do hope that my story inspires other people to record their journeys.

Vegetables drive my food and dining choices now more than ever. I’m thrilled that you’re on board for this, too. It doesn’t mean an all-or-nothing approach. I love my meat but less often and in smallish quantities nowadays. The trick is to slide in veggies without wiping out the true flavors that define the soul of a dish. At the same time, I wanted to craft versatile recipes that you can easily tweak to satisfy your tastes and needs. The tamarind deep dive included one of my favorite southern Vietnamese dishes, done with seafood and veggies or tofu and veggies.

And, there’s a time and place for project cooking but weeknights is not one of them. In 2025, I offered you two of my favorite hacks.

Finally, you PTFS subscribers seed many ideas for content. For instance, John asked about prop 65 warnings, and that led to this article about the California legislation that impacts so many ingredients we reach for on a regular basis.

My resolutions for 2026 are to cook up more fun and engaging things for you. After Cooking Thai goes to print, I’m hoping to do more online classes too!

I always welcome your suggestions so please don’t hesitate to email or DM me with an idea (or two!). Thank you.

But folks, we’re still in 2025, which marks the 50th anniversary of when my family left Vietnam. For that reason, certain foods are top of mind. I’ve been thinking a lot about pâté chaud, a puff pastry snack that has a long history in Vietnam and with my family.

In Vietnamese, we call these treats bánh patê sô — not too far off from the French pâté chaud. I’d like to close out the year with the iconic favorite because it’s a great lens for viewing the modern Vietnamese experience.

I’ve been researching their history and working on new recipes for them. However, I am not yet satisfied with what I’ve got, despite having baked through three boxes of pastry dough! And the history of the pastries themselves turns out to be more interesting than I had initially thought.

So, I’m going to share what I’ve found out about pâté chaud in this dispatch plus where to buy them. In a couple weeks, when we’re back from vacation and I’ve had a chance to do another round of testing, I’ll share the recipes so you can make your own versions.

January 11, 2026 UPDATE » My Pate Chaud recipe is now available!

My family fled Saigon in April 1975 with few material possessions, but we did bring many food memories with us. One of them was of patê chaud, savory puff pastry hand pies filled with a country-style pâté or meatloaflike mixture. Involving culinary skill plus butter and wheat flour, bánh patê sô were considered a luxe breakfast item in Vietnam, to be enjoyed hot to showcase their crispy pastry shell. The literal meaning of pâté chaud is “hot pastry pie”.

Typical Saigon residents went out for them at fancy French-style bakeries, like Givral, which made all-butter puff pastry. Lesser versions relied upon margarine, my mom recalls. Founded by Frenchman Alain Portier, the bakery called Givral opened in 1950 across the way from the Continental Hotel made famous in the Graham Greene novel, The Quiet American. However, bánh patê sô had been in Saigon since around 1930, prepared by clever cooks and entrepreneurs such as Mrs. Pham Thi Truoc, who had a shop specializing in the pastries.

By the time my mother migrated to Saigon from northern Vietnam in 1954, a result of the Geneva Accords that split the country into two, Givral was the place to purchase French pastries and baked goods like patê chaud, cream puffs, eclairs and yule logs. Vietnamese people who opted to go southward felt that North Vietnam was conservative and limiting. South Vietnam was freewheeling, liberal and full of new ideas and foods.

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Pâté chaud is mostly a Saigon specialty. I’ve never spotted it in the northern city of Hanoi or central city of Hue when I visited there. In the early 1960s, Mom, her girlfriends and even my cousin, Bich Tu (who was a teenager then), were rolling out puff pastry dough at home. Butter was expensive and you had to source good wheat flour with enough gluten, my mom said.

Puff pastry needs a relatively cold environment for the dough to behave and develop the hundreds of layers of laminated dough. I have no idea how cooks in tropical Saigon, where the weather is either hot or hotter with humidity, could patiently make pate feuilletée (puff pastry in French). But they were able to do so because they were curious, determined cooks.

Our family arrived at Camp Pendelton Marine Base in Southern California in May 1975 and the temperature was likely in the low 70s. Mom said that the dry, moderate climate was dreamy; she missed her father and sisters but didn’t miss the weather. She had her notebook of recipes, one of her prized possessions that came with us when we left Vietnam. But it didn’t contain a recipe for bánh patê sô.

Soon after we settled into our new home in San Clemente, my mom began to make puff pastry from scratch and baking up dome-shaped bánh patê sô. She knew the recipe by heart and relied upon Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking for technical guidance.

As a result, as an elementary school kid, I ate pa tê sô for breakfast, reheated in a toaster oven until the exterior was crisp and the interior was blazing hot! There was liquor in her beef and pork filling so the first bite often gave me a whiff of alcohol. I’d gobble it up and go off to school, oblivious to how different that breakfast was to what my peers had eaten. I also didn’t realize how unusual it was for a home cook like my mom to make puff pastry over and over again.

But that’s what Vietnamese people are like – obsessively working to polish a skill, to mimic and master a foreign notion, and to make it their own.

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This year, I’m leaning hard into chestnuts because Rory and I have peeled a lot of them. Just last Friday night, we tackled scoring three pounds and then roasted and shelled half of them, went to bed, then took care of the rest on Saturday afternoon.

So that’s a total of five (5) pounds of chestnuts this season for me, the most I’ve ever prepped. I wouldn’t do it if was super hard but I also don’t expect you to commit to that many! I did it for practice and learning as much as for having chestnuts to eat.

New Chestnut Intel

I have a few new observations to report on the chestnut front.

What to use to score the nuts if you don’t have a bread knife? I dug up a small serrated paring knife from one of my drawers and found out that it’s just as good as the bread knife. Its tip is also fab for digging out the bits in the crevices. So if you have that kind of paring knife, it can do double duty.

How to get softer roasted nuts:? I tried a tip from and set a pot of just boiled water in the oven while the nuts roasted. The peeled chestnuts came out a little softer than without the water so that’s a terrific tip if you’re going to eat them as you peel them! Martin got the tip from a chestnut farmer who ought to know what’s what. Peeling was normal, with about ten percent initially being stubborn to peel. I’ve got more tips to deal with stubborn nuts in the chestnut peeling video, available at my website and further down in this dispatch.

Are chestnut knives worth it? The charming Opinel chestnut knife I purchased folds (in case you want to travel with it! ) has a chestnut wood handle. The short curved blade is easy to control for dealing with scraping the stubborn brown skin off the chestnut. The knife is designed for cutting the softer part of the shell, not the hard butt end.

With chestnuts in the freezer and fridge, I’ve prepared about half a dozen chestnut recipes in the past two weeks. In the process, I realized that they are a low effort, big payoff ingredient for several beautiful reasons:

• Not many are required. You don’t need a ton of chestnuts to make a special tasting dish. Their unique sweet flavor and rich texture make a big impact on food.

• They look and taste impressive. If you peel the nuts yourself, they’ll look extraordinary. Whoever that’s lucky enough to enjoy your cooking will appreciate your efforts but you will know that you didn’t have to exert too much effort. Each nut looks like tiny edible sculptures! Even when a nut falls apart during cooking it’s still cool looking and tasty.

• Chestnut dishes are low stress. They mostly require simple cooking. I reckon that it’s because the nuts themselves offer a complex, appealing web of texture and flavor. You don’t need much to amp up their flavors and they’ll enhance companion ingredients in the dish. They’ll also satisfying tasting.

3 + 2 = 5 chestnut recipes

Those wondrous chestnutty qualities are present in the three dishes that I have presented to you, so far. From last Sunday, the Japanese sweet potato rice and Chinese braised chestnut and napa cabbage are two quickies that can be served together or with other dishes for knock out meals. You can grab those recipes and chestnut peeling pointers here.

Additionally, there was last year’s popular holiday dish — sticky rice, chestnut and shiitake dressing. I adored Rory’s aunt Helen for her oyster and bread dressing but I always saved room for my Nguyen family sticky rice dressing, which is now easier to achieve with a 45-minute microwave method for soaking and cooking the rice (the normal method takes hours of soaking alone plus a Chinese steamer setup). If you have not, try the sticky rice dressing recipe this year. It’s not a stressful project. I’m over that kind of holiday cooking.

This week, I’m adding two (2) more chestnuts recipes because four is an unlucky number in East Asian numerology (it sound like death to some people) and five (5) recipes makes a nice collection of chestnut recipes to add to your repertoire.

First up is a four-ingredient personal favorite — buttery chestnuts, which you can serve during the holidays as an indulgent-seeming elegant side dish or incorporate it into another dish to make it extraordinary. The recipe is low-key cooking and you can keep the chestnuts for days, if you can hold back from eating them ASAP!

The other new recipe is Chinese red cooked chestnut chicken (Banli Shaoji, 板栗烧鸡). Red cooking refers to a braise that’s primarily seasoned with soy sauce so there’s a mahogany cast to the end result, which is considered homey fare but with the addition of chestnuts, the dish becomes rather luxe to me.

Savory-sweet with a touch of spice, red cooked chestnut chicken is typically associated with Shanghai. It’s similar to Vietnamese caramel sauce (kho) preparations like this coconutty one, but distinctively different — like cousins rather than siblings. The Chinese dish comes together in about 45 minutes, most of which is passive cooking. I tried it with different chicken parts to give you options for preparing banli shaoji with ease.

Cook up one or both dishes while it’s still chestnut season. Use nuts you roast and peel for best outcomes but if you don’t have time, use pre-peeled ones like Melissa brand. Below you’ll see the following:

• Recipes in full text plus downloadable PDFs so you can file them away!

• Sensible substitution suggestions so you can tailor these dishes to your needs.

• Tips for using commercially sold, pre-peeled chestnuts.

• Ingredient pointers so you may better understand dark soy sauce, a key ingredient in East Asian cooking and red cooked dishes. Which works best? How to substitute for it if you don’t have it or don’t want to shop for it?

• Process shots and tips to help you butcher the chicken well if you want to cook old school style.

I’m ready to cook, how about you?

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Hello there!

Late fall is a great time for cooking with seasonal, special ingredients. We’ll go into chestnuts in this Midweek Gems but first, let’s start with the all-butter puff pastry that’s a seasonal item at Trader Joe’s. My dad loved puff pastry.

💎 Celebrating my dad in puff pastry

If Dad were alive, he’d have turned 95 years old today. He died at 91 so he lived a long life, being born in central Vietnam, serving as a military provincial governor in South Vietnam, then safely bringing our family to America in the mid 1970s. In the U.S., he hustled to work as an English as a Second Language teacher, insurance salesman, and landscaper and garden designer.

He adored French food nearly as much as Vietnamese food, which is saying a hella lot! Bố Già (Old Daddy, a term of endearment) enjoyed buttery foods, which is likely among the reasons my mother practiced making puff pastry from scratch. Part of his and my mom’s ethos was that even though the French colonized Vietnam, they were sure to take the best from French culture, master it, and then make it their own.

All that said, I use store-bought puff pastry. This time of the year, I get a couple boxes of Trader Joe’s all-butter puff pastry for family favorites. I use them for a number of dishes including spiced petit palm cookies (banh palmier), which keep well for a while so I bake them about a week ahead of Christmas, when my family gets together. They’re easy to bake and taste loads better than commercially baked palm cookies. Plus you can use the palm cookie recipe to spice things up the way you want!

My dad and mom also loved a special truffle soup by the legendary French chef Paul Bocuse. The soup sported a hat-like dome covering of puff pastry. Pierce through the dome and inhale the aromatic soup underneath. It’s French culinary showmanship. It’s also easy to make and you don’t need actual truffle in my recipe for the soup to taste special. The tricky task, is getting the pastry to stick to the bowl, which I detail how to do in my Bocuse puff pastry soup recipe.

💎 The Forgotten Life of Chestnuts

As a follow-up to Sunday’s dispatch, Pam wrote me about buying chestnuts in New York City about 50 years ago and not knowing what to do with them — how to peel them, for instance. A great cook, she wanted to finally peel them, to realize the savors of “chestnuts roasting on an open fire”. Pam asked, where to buy chestnuts?

I shared that I’ve been shopping for them at Whole Foods in Santa Cruz. Seriously. The nuts there are domestically grown and they peel pretty easily using the method detailed on my website and in last Sunday’s dispatch.

While I was shelling chestnuts with Rory, he had a bunch of questions: What happened to American chestnuts? How did people cook with chestnuts? Why are the Chinese and European cultivar mostly grown nowadays in America? In other words, why is that line in the Christmas song so iconic but few people have ever experienced chestnuts?

Not that long ago, there were about four billion American chestnut (Castanea dentata) trees growing in the forests of what’s now known as the eastern United States. The American chestnut, like all chestnut trees, grew fast and big to serve as a food source for humans and animals.

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Chestnuts are like a nut crossed with a fruit and a grain. They’re high in vitamin C on a level like that of lemons and loaded with complex carbohydrates like grains. They have a little protein but unlike nuts such as walnuts and pecans, chestnuts are very low in fat. You don’t have to eat many chestnuts to feel pleasantly full and you won’t gain weight unless you pair the nuts with butter.

Humans had to compete with wild animals like turkeys and pigs to get to the chestnuts during the autumn harvest season. Insects eat chestnut detritus which helps to feed the forest floor and other animals. Chestnut trees were an important part of the ecosystem.

Once Europeans arrived, the American chestnut also became a valuable source of timber. The tree grew fast and its wood was rot resistant. Unfortunately, by the early twentieth century, chestnut trees had been weakened by root rot caused by Phytophthora cinnamomi (a fungus-like organism), and eventually many succumbed to a blight caused by Cryphonectria parasitica (a pathogen). The blight devastated most of the chestnut trees by the 1950s.

Popular chestnut recipes were defined by European traditions, like the ones in this article circa 1912. It’s a tree native to America yet the writer chides Americans for not appreciating it like Europeans do.

By 1972, the blight had dampened chestnut interest but it still existed. In James Beard’s classic book, American Cookery, he wrote that most chestnuts sold at American markets came from Europe and Asia. He lamented their loss due to the blight but encouraged cooks to explore them, “The chestnut has a distinctive flavor not found in any other nut, and it is unique in being used both as a vegetable and in desserts.” Beard included a handful of chestnut recipes (stuffings, puree, and with Brussels sprouts).

Nowadays, organizations like The American Chestnut Foundation in Asheville, South Carolina, are working to develop an American chestnut tree that is resistant to blight and Phytophthora. Meantime, domestically-grown chestnuts in America are harvested from Chinese or European chestnut cultivars.

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Indigenous chestnut cooking

Much of modern food history centers Europe but how were chestnuts cooked before Europeans arrived? Cherokee cooks combined chestnuts with corn to make a bread dough that was either boiled or baked in bark over a fire, according to Turtle Island: Foods and Traditions of the Indigenous Peoples of North America, an important new book by , co-authored with Kate Nelson and . The dough was sometimes sweetened with maple syrup or honey, he notes.

Sean’s modern take on the rustic Cherokee dish conveniently uses masa harina and is baked in the oven (he is a practical man and good cook). His chestnut-studded corn cakes are served with cooked greens seasoned with ramps (or garlic) and sumac. I made the cakes with soft Portuguese kale and served it up with roasted squash and pan-seared salmon.

Because roasted chestnuts are dryish, I simmered my peeled chestnuts in broth and used the leftover cooking liquid for hydrating the masa, which had baking powder and a little salt too. The chestnuts got finely chopped and mixed in. I feared the cakes would fry up like hocky pucks but they developed a crispy, nutty exterior and earthy, slightly sweet interior. I can only attribute that to the chestnuts being part of the equation; ithout chestnut, you’re essentially making a corny platform like what’s used a Mexican huarache. If I had beans instead of salmon, I’d have the indigenous three sisters on my plate — corn, squash, and beans!

I’ve met Sean several times and interviewed him for Food & Wine magazine. He is a serious cook with a wry sense of humor. He is among the globe’s thought leaders on indigenous culture and works to marshal Native peoples to revive their ancestors’s foodways in order to regain healthy, sustainable lives and communities. That means using practicing cooking that includes things like foraged ingredients, relying on fewer refined products, and skipping dairy and wheat. I’ve been curious about indigenous foodways ever since Rory and I visited the Southwest thirty years ago but I’m still learning. There are not enough books on the subject so Turtle Island will be a reference work and cookbook for me for years to come.

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When I started out on trying to find a better way to peel a chestnut, I never thought I’d end up unearthing so much interesting information. Now I’ll get back to peeling and eating them. Hope you make good use of chestnuts this season!

And, I’m going to sound like a broken record, but here are the links to my tips and how-to video on how to easily peel chestnuts: at my website (free) and at PTFS (for paid subscribers).

💎 Pho sure!

My friends and acquaintances usually run into me at a market. I grocery shop a lot. I like to do it. I need ingredients nearly daily. One early morning, at the cash register, I ran into chef Cheryl. I was soooo excited to see her (it’s been a while) and she and I were both carrying our Ever-Green Vietnamese herb tote bags!

Remember those? Y’all bought so many of them that they sold out before other folks could get their orders placed. I hope you’re using yours well. I was so stoked that I had the cashier take a photo of Cheryl and me.

That morning I was wearing another Viet item — a cozy beef pho sweatshirt by Kitty Nguyen, the fashionable proprietress of Semifinalist. Kitty also designed one for banh mi so check them out at her online shop.

Speaking of cozy, we’ve been eating some cozy chestnut dishes that I will spotlight on Sunday. One is an old favorite and one is a new favorite. Join us behind the paywall, if you have not.

That’s what I kept returning to this week when, along with my cookbook proofreading work, I obsessed about (1) cracking the code on how to easily shell chestnuts (Viet people are really into them this time of year!) and (2) figuring out how chestnuts got to Vietnam. The end result is that I shelled a total of three (3) pounds of chestnuts this week, cooked three dishes with them — there are even more on my “to cook” list — and boned up on chestnut history in East Asia and America.

I’m going to share what I’ve learned thus far with you so you can become chestnut experts too!

Who introduced chestnuts to Vietnam?

My family has always enjoyed chestnuts for Christmas in sticky rice dressings and as a buttery, rich side dish. We call chestnuts by their Vietnamese name, hạt dẻ, but associated them with Franco-Vietnamese foodways. My over achieving parents also made marron glacé (hạt dẻ bọc đường), French candied chestnuts.

I’d spotted chestnuts recipes in a Viet language cookbook on French cooking, but none in Viet cookbooks written in Vietnamese. No wonder I assumed that the French introduced them to Vietnam.

And, even while I’d snacked on Chinese roasted chestnuts here in the States and recently in Bangkok, I never asked myself, what was up with chestnuts in other parts of Asia. Perhaps the western notion of “chestnuts roasting on an open fire” was so strong in my mind that I never thought that the nut would have significant place in East Asia, that it could illustrate the braided-ness of cuisine, culture, and humanity.

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A simple AI-driven Google search will explain that French colonials brought chestnuts to Vietnam. Done deal, right? Not so fast partner!

Chestnuts are mostly grown north of Hanoi in the mountains of Cao Bang. Tourist websites hyping the chestnuts of Cao Bang affirm the French introduction. But I kept digging because the province borders China, and it turns out that China is one of the world’s biggest chestnut producers and exporters. In an 2017 article, a 98-year-old Vietnamese man said that his family has tended to the same chestnut tree for generations. Furthermore, he said that the chestnuts trees in Trung Khanh (located in Cao Bang province) where he lives have been there for thousands of years! 1

Trung Khanh chestnuts are reputedly extra delicious and locals enjoy them in rice porridge, sweet soups with jujubes, simmered with pork feet, in a sweet pastry with mung beans, and other dishes. They’re not cooking up French dishes like my family does.

I realized that for much of my life, I’d mistakenly romanticized chestnuts by associating them only with my family’s Franco-Viet holiday dishes. The nuts may well have been growing in Vietnam much much longer.

In China, chestnuts have been found in Han tombs and also identified at Neolithic archeological sites, which mean that chestnuts were around in that part of the world a very long time ago (c. 10,000 BC to c. 2,000 BC, to be sort of exact). Chestnuts were among the important food nuts in early Chinese cuisine and are considered indigenous plants in China. During ancient times, jujubes, hazelnuts, chestnuts comprised a trio of gifts that a prospective bride could present to her prospective partner. They were also employed in sacrificial offerings. 2

The popular dishes in Trung Khanh point to a strong Chinese connection. Chestnuts got their start in northern China, near Beijing in Hebei province. It’s still a major chestnut producing area, but Chinese chestnuts (Castanea mollissima) also grow in all the southern Chinese provinces bordering Vietnam.

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Turns out the prized variety of chestnut that is cultivated in Vietnam is the Chinese chestnut. Add to that, most of the chestnuts grown in America are also Castanea mollissima, which yields bigger nuts than the American variety of chestnut.3 The other two varieties are European and Japanese, which explains chestnut culture there.

So, from ancient beginnings, Chinese chestnuts have gone global. Maybe the French brought a European chestnut to Vietnam, but it’s the Chinese variety that likely seeded chestnut culture in Vietnam long ago.

It’s a matter of who was where first.

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Let’s cook and eat chestnuts!

At this juncture, you may ask:

🌰 Is eating chestnuts healthy? They’re a nut that’s also like a fruit and a grain. That’s to say, they’re loaded with vitamin C, have fiber, and offer many other good-for-you benefits. Eating too many of them may cause indigestion, according to traditional Chinese medicine. (Can’t you say that about many foods?).

🌰 Sourcing chestnuts: Head to your supermarket or Trader Joe’s and look for Melissa’s chestnuts. Or, look for unpeeled chestnuts and shell them yourself.

🌰 How to peel chestnuts: You CAN do it without much frustration! I put together a webpage to coach you on peeling chestnuts. Get the information on how to easily peel chestnuts, which includes a detailed how-to video.

For a streamlined cooking and learning experience, the chestnut peeling video is included below for paid subscribers.

🌰 What to do with peeled chestnuts: Eat them out of the shell to enjoy their buttery, rich slight sweetness, which Rory described as being like perfect roast chicken! But you should also cook with them because they make simple food taste very special. Chestnuts are popular in East Asia (China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam). Naturally, I’ve got some East Asian recipes for you to cook up!

• 🌰 🍄‍🟫 My family’s sticky rice, chestnut and shiitake dressing is partly made in the microwave to be less fussy and less messy! This can be made vegan, if you like.

• 🌰 🥬 Shanghai-style braised chestnuts with napa cabbage and shiitake (ban li shao bai cai) involves just a few ingredients and little time. The new recipe, bonus pointers, and a downloadable recipe PDF are below.

• 🌰 🍚 Japanese chestnut rice (kuri gohan) comes together in a simple manner but its stunning flavor reflect the genius of traditional Japanese cooking. The remarkably tasty rice is a Japanese classic that’s also popular in Vietnam, where it’s called cơm hạt dẻ (chestnut rice). The new recipe, extra tips, process photos and a downloadable recipe PDF are below.

Both the rice and braise are naturally vegan. We enjoyed them together with some steamed green beans for a wonderful meal. Leftover rice is fabulous too so even if you’re a small household like ours, you’ll want to keep the rice around!

Can you make these recipes with pre-peeled chestnuts? Yes. Pre-peeled chestnuts may fall apart in cooking so they won’t look as pretty. They are also smaller and darker so your finished dish will not look like the ones above which are made with freshly peeled nuts. But if you can’t find fresh nuts to crack or don’t have time, use pre-peeled chestnuts.

Ok, onwards!

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Hello everyone,

I hope you are enjoying good weather where you are. As for us in Santa Cruz, we’ve been enjoying sunny days and chilly nights. But it sure feels like the year is coming to a fast end. We try to slow things down by going out for walks. Mostly, we’re working from home in our offices or at the dining table. Rory is grading and managing students who may have submitted AI-written work or students who suddenly submit a bunch of late assignments in the hopes of saving their grades. I am reviewing the Cooking Thai cookbook proofs to catch errors, further polish the copy and layout, and surgically make edits so Pim and I can fit in all the knowledge we can.

Working from home means we get to eat lunch together and this past week, that’s been homemade ramen soup

💎 Ramen Spirit Guides

I’ve never cooked ramen from scratch but recently received a copy of Sho Spaeth’s new Homemade Ramen cookbook. Sho is a former writer with the Serious Eats website who dove into ramen big time to crack the ramen code for home cooks.

His debut cookbook is perfect for hardcore ramen nerds who want to go the distance with crafting the broth, toppings, noodles, and tare. Tare refers to a salty, slightly sweet and sometimes tangy sauce used for seasoning dishes. There are specific ones for certain foods, such as different kinds of ramen noodles. I make a thickish, salty-sweet tare for my yakitori grilled skewers.

Each of Sho’s ramen recipes is comprised of about eight (8) subrecipes. Rather than feeling overwhelmed, I viewed his book organization as an invitation to cook a la carte.

I selected what I wanted to make for my roasted chicken shoyu (soy sauce) ramen so I could fit it into my schedule. Instead of a 6-hour stockpot simmer, I prepared the roasted chicken broth in my stovetop pressure cooker for about 2 hours total.

To keep test driving the new nitrided carbon steel skillets, I stir-fried dino (lacinato) kale per Sho’s recipe; it included fish sauce, which it used in Japanese cuisine. I also made his pan-seared chicken which developed a lovely brown color and great flavor, thanks to an overnight dry brining (sprinkle kosher salt all over and let sit uncovered in the fridge) plus a tiny smearing of mayo before cooking.

Additionally, I prepared his shoyu ramen tare. Cooking off label, I used the tare to briefly marinate a steamed (not boiled) egg for extra flavor. That sounds like a lot but it all came together pretty quickly. The broth was made days ahead. Everything else was super simple cooking.

As I was assembling our bowls, Rory confessed to not liking shoyu ramen. “It’s too salty and obliterates the broth’s nuances,” he said.

I made shoyu ramen for me but for Rory, I consulted with Hugh Amano and Sara Becan’s Let’s Make Ramen!. Theirs is a fun comic cookbook that contains a shio (salt) tare that you simply stir together. Sho’s shio tare involved soaking ingredients overnight and lighting sake on fire. I know my weekday cooking limits.

💎 What about the ramen noodles?

I’m not a great DIY noodle maker. I rarely do it because store-bought is quite good. For this week’s ramen lunches, I used a fabulous hack from Rie McClenny’s insightful and practical book, Make it Japanese. Here’s my take on her hack:

Boil 8 ounces (225g) of dried spaghetti in a 6-quart pot of water half filled with water. Before adding the pasta, lower the heat slightly, and add 2 tablespoons of baking soda. As the pasta cooks in the alkaline water, the pasta darkens and turns kind of springy like Japanese or Chinese wheat noodles. Drain and rinse well, and know that the metallic taste disappears in the ramen broth. The noodles can be boiled days in advance and microwaved briefly (use a splatter cover) on high power to warm, 1 to 2 minutes.

If you’re gluten-free, consider brown-rice spaghetti or medium size bun rice vermicelli noodles. Sho says you can put pho rice noodles in ramen so why not round bun noodles? 😉 For instance, try Van Tho brand of brown rice bun noodles; they cook up very chewy and keep well overnight. You may find them at markets in Little Saigon or Chinatown enclaves.

Rory and I each ended up getting what we wanted, thanks to some Japanese food angels found on my bookshelves. The pot of broth I brewed lasted through many lunches. I was skeptical that I could make ramen from scratch but Sho’s book inspired me in many ways, including little techniques that I’ll apply elsewhere.

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💎 Deliciously sturdy holiday cookies

We were eating the fruitcake cookies a little too fast for comfort until Rory suggested that we gift some to our neighbors. One was expecting their first child and the other let her son and his family, which includes two young girls, temporarily move into her home. An early holiday cookie tin brought extra cheer to those households. Adrienne, the grandmother, especially appreciated the slightly boozy quality of the fruitcake cookies. Make a batch or two from the PTFS recipe. As I was packing up the tins, I realized how well the fruitcake cookies hold up. They get better as they sit and they seem sturdy enough to travel. I bet you can mail them!

Another cookie that keeps well without losing its fresh baked deliciousness is my flourless almond butter cookie. Like the fruitcake cookie, it’s a dump-stir-and-shape situation. The cookies are very easy to make and you can swap peanut butter or sunflower seed butter for the almond butter. Get the flourless almond cookie recipe.

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💎 Sale Grocery Shopping

My dad taught me to shop the discount grocery shelves when I was growing up. That’s how my family got to try strange processed foods like fried fruit pies and Twinkies. We couldn’t afford them at full price but when we spotted them on the near expiration shelf, we’d nab a few. I know, Twinkies seem to last forever but supermarkets did rotate them in the 1970s!

I was embarrassed that we bought discounted food but nowadays, as a Gen X mid-lifer, I shamelessly look for the “Manager’s Special” discount sticker. It’s a way to save money and to help the store. The other day, while I was buying a dozen eggs on steep markdown at Whole Foods, a lady approached the refrigerated case. I stepped out of the way so she could scan all the options. “If you need eggs right away, these are on sale. Eggs will still be usable beyond their sell by date,” I said and handed her a carton.

She said, “Of course, you’re right. Thank you for sharing this. Happy Holidays!” She was thrilled to get a deal.

When I buy protein on steep sale, if I’m not going to use them right away, I’ll freeze them. The discounted proteins at Whole Foods are usually very well packaged and sealed up, like the chicken feet, which I throw into stock for extra rich flavor.

I had a breakthrough this week with shelling chestnuts. I was so excited I Facetimed my mom to share the great method. I’ll write about the method plus chestnutty recipes hopefully on Sunday. After all, ‘tis the season for “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire . . .”

And, when I see slices of fruitcake on a holiday dessert spread, it seems like eating a whole slice is a lot, especially when there are so many other options! It’s a thick slice, not a two-biter. There’s only so much one can consume during the holidays — unfortunately.

My family, friends, and I are nuts about fruitcake so I decided to bake a fruitcake cookie. Maybe people who are fruitcake averse will try it out in mini form and become converted? Fruitcake lovers can eat their fruitcake and still have roo, for other holiday specialties.

Briefly scanning the internet, I noted drop cookies or shortbread with chunks of dried fruit and nuts suspended in them. Rory peeked over my shoulder and said, “Those are not fruitcake-like enough! How can you turn a cake into a cookie?” One of the recipes I looked at was by Ina Garten and it had just a touch of booze and was sliced up as rounds from a log of dough. I showed that to Rory and even though there were many positive reviews, he wasn’t swayed. “Not enough liquor. And that’s not cake like at all,” he said.

He’s tough audience and his comments forced me to consider what we do when we try to tweak an iconic food or dish. How do we ensure that it remains true to the genuine article?

Fruitcake dates back to perhaps ancient Roman times, when the earliest recipes for it included pine nuts, raisins, and pomegranate seeds that were combined in a barley mash. During the Middle Ages, honey, preserved fruits and spices were added. It sounds like an energy bar! In the 16th century, sugar from the American colonies enhanced many fruitcakes in Europe, where different recipes and traditions developed. Colonization spread the idea of western-fruitcake to places like Hong Kong (mostly in fancy hotels) and more interestingly, India, particularly Kerala and Kolkata (Calcutta).

How fruitcake got going in India1:

The story of Christmas cakes in India starts way back in 1883, when a British planter in Thalassery, Murdoch Brown asked the local baker, Mambally Bapu to taste the rich plum cake he had brought from England. Brown explained the baking process, and asked Bapu to prepare a similar cake for him.

In the old days, yeast was used for fermentation, and cakes were essentially sweet breads. But Bapu, instead of yeast, used locally brewed liquor in his cake. Brown asked Bapu to source the brandy from the nearby French Province, Mahe. But Bapu had a better idea, and used a local infusion of cashew apple and kadalippazham (a type of local banana) instead of French brandy. Delighted with the result, Brown declared it was the best cake he had ever tasted, (or so the story goes). Thus began the Indian tradition of Christmas cakes.

Indian bakers prepared fruitcakes (plum cake) with what they had, including a wide range of spices. And, if it wasn’t for Asian spices being sent to Europe and the Americas, fruitcake would be lackluster. Thinking about this, I realized that fruitcake is a tradition that’s very flexible, it interweaves ideas and ingredients from all over the world to celebrate the holidays.

Given that, I wanted my fruitcake cookies to capture the flavors and texture of the iconic cake — dried fruit, candied sweetmeats, nuts, and enough liquor to warm the spirits. I wanted those ingredients to be bound into a spiced cake-like cookie, with a boozy glaze and a nut on top of each one. The cookie needed to say, “I’m fruitcake in mini form!”

After six trial runs of baking, I yielded a recipe for these lovelies. Rory, a lifelong fruitcake fan, deemed them “incredible!” Glad I passed his review!

They’re also low sugar and healthy-ish, thanks to an uncommon cookie ingredient — sweet potato. Below you’ll find:

• Expert insights on why sweet potato works for this recipe plus pointers on which variety to use and how to cook it

• Tips for altering flavors to meet your taste for fruitiness, nuttiness, and booziness (this easy recipe is endlessly tweakable)

• Suggestions for dairy-free, vegan, and non-alcoholic variations

• 2 versions of the recipe in full text and as a downloadable PDF

• Process shots to guide you through potentially tricky spots in the recipe

I’ll be using this keeper for years to come because it’s that good and that easy going.

Why use sweet potato for this cookie?

I had a hunch that sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) would help achieve two goals — adding (1) starch to yield a cake-like texture and (2) natural sugars to lend complexity and lower the amount of refined sugar needed. The dried fruit, candied sweetmeats, honey and liquor have sugar and sweet potato would go well with those ingredients.

The sweet potato worked amazingly well but I wanted an expert take on my usage. My good friend, Mary-Frances (MF) Heck, the former food editor of Food & Wine magazine and author of The Sweet Potato Cookbook, offered many insights.

Why did sweet potato work well for this cookie?

“Moisture! Fiber!,” MF texted. “And most of all, deeper flavor that you can manipulate to host others—like warming spices—or make central by either promoting caramelization for richness, or lightening to expose the sweet, almost floral aroma of sweet potatoes.”

Of course! MF spent a good year meditating on sweet potatoes and she’s one of my favorite people to talk to about food and cooking.

We also discussed what kind of sweet potato to use and how to cook them. MF pointed out that sweet potatoes differ in moisture levels and sugar content so you can’t do a 1:1 swap.

For consistency, use orange-flesh sweet potato (Garnet or Beauregard). If you use another kind, the texture may be off.

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How to cook the sweet potato:

Do not boil it (too much water can enter the tuber). You want to roast or steam the sweet potato. You could microwave it too but it can be a bit tricky.

• Roasting is best because the flavor is deeper. Use leftover roasted sweet potato for the cookies, if it was simply seasoned.

• Steamed is ok, if you don’t want to turn the oven on.

To roast sweet potato: Use a medium to large (7 to 10 oz | 210 to 300g) orange sweet potato. Preheat the oven to 400F (205C) with rack in the center. Halve the sweet potato lengthwise. Rub a little oil all over then place cut side down on a parchment paper lined baking sheet (or not, if you want to scrub). Bake for 35 to 50 minutes, until soft (a metal cake tester or toothpick inserted should meet no resistance). Remove from the oven and let cool completely. Discard the skin and any burnt spots, then store or mash the flesh.

To steam sweet potato: Halve the potato crosswise then halve each piece lengthwise. Use a collapsible metal steamer basket or a Chinese steamer to steam the potato, skin side down, until tender when poked with a cake tester or knife tip, about 20 minutes. Remove from the steamer and let cool completely, uncovered, then store. Discard the peel before mashing.

Once the sweet potato is cooked and cooled, keep it in the fridge for up to 5 days! If the cooked flesh is stringy, pass it through a coarse strainer. You only need 130g for this recipe so snack on the leftovers.

The recipe below is written so you can use different kind of dried fruit, candied sweetmeats, and nuts. I like pecans and walnuts because they are tender but hazelnuts may work well too. Ditto for the spices — blend your own depending on what kinds of warm spices you have on hand. When I tried using more than three spices, there wasn’t enough of one for the flavor to pop so don’t go overboard. This cookie is good for using up lingering liquor.

Enjoy this recipe and do share your thoughts! I’m always here to answer questions or clarify anything I missed.

Boozy Fruitcake Bites

✅ Non-dairy or vegan versions: Use a plant-based butter. Miyoko’s and Violife brand of plant-based butters are supposed to brown. Swap the egg for an equal amount of plant-based egg or something like Bob Red Mill’s egg replacer; you’re looking for something to bind the ingredients together and to add viscosity so a replacer should be ok.

✅ Non-alcoholic cookies: Replace the liquor with orange or tangerine juice or something similar.

✅ Make ahead: Because we all have busy lives, know this:

• The raw dough can be can be refrigerated for up to 2 days; return it to room temperature before baking. It can likely be frozen too, though I have not tested it.

• Baked cookies will keep for days at room temperature or frozen for months.

✅ Boozy refresh: Before serving, refresh their boozy flavor and aroma by re-brushing with glaze, letting the cookies sit for about 1 hour to absorb. Don’t brush with too much or the cookies will become gummy.

Fruitcake Cookies

190KB ∙ PDF file

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Fit these into your holiday baking. They keep well and taste fabulous. Plus, they're health-ish.

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Yield: Makes about 3 dozen

Ingredients

Fruit and nut mix

• 150g | 5 oz mixed dried fruit (such as raisins or dried cranberries, cherries, apricots)

• 90g | 3 oz sweetmeats (such as candied ginger, citron and orange peels)

• 120g | 4 oz coarsely chopped roasted pecans or walnuts

• 1 Tbsp honey

• 1 Tbsp fresh lime or lemon juice

• Grated zest of 1 lime or lemon

• 4 to 6 Tbsp rum, brandy, or whiskey

• Fine sea salt

Dough

• 130g | 1/2 cup mashed roasted or steamed sweet potato (see tips)

• 113g | 1/2 cup (1 stick) salted or unsalted butter

• 67g | 1/3 cup granulated sugar

• 67g | 1/3 cup packed light or dark brown sugar

• 1 tsp vanilla

• 2 tsp ground warm spice blend, such as ground cinnamon, cloves, ginger, and nutmeg

• 1 large egg, at room temperature

• 215g | 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour, or 1:1 blend of all-purpose and whole wheat pastry flour

• 1 teaspoon baking soda

For baking

• Roasted pecan or walnut halves

• Glaze: 2 Tbsp rum, brandy, or whiskey mixed with 2 Tbsp honey

Instructions

Soak the fruit and nuts: If the dried fruit or sweetmeats are big, snip or cut them into pieces no larger than 1/3 (1cm) inch. In a medium bowl, combine all the dried fruit, sweetmeats, nuts, and 2 pinches of salt. Mix in the 1 Tbsp honey and the citrus juice and zest. Add 4 to 6 Tbsp liquor, so there’s a nice boozy spike. Cover and let sit overnight (or up to 3 days) at room temperature to plump up.

Brown the butter: Put the mashed sweet potato in a large heatproof bowl. Set near the stove. In a small saucepan over medium heat, melt the butter. Once foamy, slightly lower the heat to steady cooking. Let swiftly bubble, stir often with a spatula to avoid burnt milk solids, until patches of golden brown appear and the butter is very aromatic, 2 to 3 minutes. Slide the pan to a cool burner, wait for the bubbling to subside, then pour and scrape the butter onto the sweet potato. Stir to combine well the let briefly cool about 5 minutes.

Make the dough: Stir in the white and brown sugar (weigh them into the bowl for less clean up!). Add the vanilla extract then season with the spices and salt. Taste and adjust to ensure a very tasty mixture that’s highly spiced (add by the 1/8 tsp) and medium sweet (stir in sugar by 1 Tbsp).

Stir in the egg and combine well. Add the flour and baking soda, stir and fold to combine halfway. Add all the macerated fruit and nuts plus any liquid in the bowl. Mix just until traces of flour are no longer visible.

Shape and bake: Preheat the oven to 350F (175C) and set a rack in the middle position. Line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper. Use two spoons or a scooper to spoon out heaping tablespoons (roughly 1 1/2 Tbsp) of cookie dough, placing them onto the prepared baking sheets, spaced about 2 inches (5cm) apart. Moisten fingers to gently neaten up jagged edges on the dough blobs. Press a pecan or walnut half on top of each. Bake one baking sheet at a time until puffy and lightly brown at the edges, 14 to 16 minutes. Let the cookies cool 3 to 5 minutes before brushing with half (2 Tbsp) of the the glaze (re-brush if needed). Repeat to bake and glaze the other cookies.

Let the cookies completely cool on the baking sheet. The cookies are good a few hours after baking but they will taste better if left to age overnight in an airtight container.