About This Cookbook I'm Writing

This personal project to document my family's stories from fleeing Vietnam nearly 50 years ago and documenting my mother's recipes for our children will soon be available to all who are interested.

TL;DR We made a few changes and we are writing about it.

1. Why a cookbook, why now

Other than working full-time until my mother retired, she had always been in her natural element in the kitchen. The limited time I had with my mother when I grew up was always centered around food. I would accompany her to the grocery stores where she would show me how to pick the best fruit and vegetables, cuts of meat, etc. While at home, my earliest knife training memories with her was when she showed me multiple ways to chop scallion for many different dishes. It has been a decade-old dream of mine to write down my mother’s recipes for my children, and with my mother being 75 years old now, there are no more excuses for me to get started.

The scariest part is to share something that I am so passionate about! I’ve been sitting on this post for a few months dealing with major imposter syndrome reconciling the Silicon Valley high-tech startup/business city girl side of me and the low-tech off-grid country farmer girl side of me. But I hope that you can feel the passion and love I have for family, food, and farming!

When my eldest daughter turned six-months old 11 years ago, I began looking into what we should be feeding her tiny body when transitioning her from breastmilk. I sifted through a ton of recipes from different books and enough of them called for “organic ingredients” because of the infant’s susceptibility to the toxicity from herbicides and pesticides, namely glyphosate being the biggest culprit. Because of the added expense and trouble that came with having to source organic ingredients to make her first taste of homemade applesauce, the next question for me was when would we switch her over to our way of conventional eating, or would we have to be the ones to make the changes?

I started looking into the ingredients in our Asian recipes and all the condiments we used, the pesticides and toxic chemicals that are allowed in the meat and vegetables, and ultimately how the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is not required to review substances, such as spices and preservatives, added to food that are “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS) for their intended use. Did you know that companies may determine a substance is GRAS without the FDA's approval or knowledge? This was when I went straight to our refrigerator and pantry with a large garbage bag and began throwing away all of our spices and condiments. My mom ran into the kitchen yelling, “What am I supposed to cook with?” and I responded with, “I don’t know, but we will start from scratch and figure it out!”

I was dedicated to eating and living a more nourished life with real food the way our ancestors did with our family’s traditional Asian dishes. Over the last 10 years, my mom and I have been working closely together as I spent countless hours researching and refining our traditional recipes to be more nutrient dense, inspired by Dr. Weston A. Price’s principles of healthy traditional diets. It was during this time that one of Tim’s Army colleagues invited us over to his homestead tucked away in the Tijeras mountains that we had our very first taste of grass-fed raw milk. His sweet wife showed me around their home and introduced me to this big yellow book named, “Nourishing Traditions” by Sally Fallon Morell that changed my life.

Between building up my career, starting a business, homeschooling while also taking care of my aging parents, I made sure the delicious recipes were simply made with real clean ingredients, while my mom refined them to her discerning palate. On top of that, when Tim and I would find amazing Asian fusion dishes on date nights in the San Francisco Bay Area, we would take my mom to the restaurants to share the dishes with her and she would show me how to replicate them at home with our clean ingredients. It’s become noticeably difficult to eat out because Mom’s dishes outcompete any farm-to-table fine dining restaurants we can find in Napa!

My parents are both in their mid-70s now, and their waning mental and physical health are beginning to become a growing concern for me. In September, Tim encouraged me to take some time off and spend intentional time with Mom and Dad, to record Mom in the kitchen, record all the recipes she cooks by memory, record their stories of leaving Vietnam by boat in 1975, record stories of their escape from communism, ask questions about their childhood and what they remember of my grandparents, the list goes on and on.

What is more exciting is that Chelsea Green Publishing, the company that publishes over half of the reference books we own in our library, heard our story and offered a publishing deal that will allow me to get this project to completion with an amazing team and I’m honored to join the CGP family of respectable authors!

In just a few months, our family’s nourishing Asian recipes will be available for those wanting to live more holistically, satisfy your cravings, and maybe even reflect upon your own heritage.

2. Finding Community

Leaving the hustle and bustle of city life (in the San Francisco Bay Area), moving and living rurally in the mountains learning old-fashioned skills can sometimes be isolating. While we have kept ourselves busy with work, homesteading, and homeschooling, we have heard from a lot of working parents on how to find the balance to do it all. We wanted to start off with our family project, this cookbook, and this is where we will offer our full recipes, weekly menu plans, Q&As on our homesteading lifestyle, and anything else you want to hear from us.

After two decades of working in the tech industry and seeing how hyper-growth can be quickly achieved through ads, we want to invest in this community by providing intentional quality content for those who are interested in what we do here on our farm. Paid newsletter subscriptions are for those interested in getting access to our private community where they can comment, discuss, and interact with us and the community directly.

3. What to expect

I’ll be posting on a weekly basis to start, and you can expect cooking posts and well as posts reflecting on our regenerative homestead. As a free subscriber, you will get access to the public posts. As a paid subscriber, you will get exclusive access to recipes, the community, and AMA threads (to come soon)!

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