Category: Asian cuisine

‘Cook the World’: Sweetwater Chef Introduces Students to Multicultural Cuisines

By Gretchen McKay From Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Pittsburgh—Andrew Alvarez’s immigrant parents had high standards. From an early age, he knew they hoped a career in medicine or engineering would follow his 2004 graduation from Quaker Valley High School. There was only one problem, and it was a biggie: Cooking is what actually fired the Sewickley, Pennsylvania…


This 3-ingredient Plum Sauce Is Sweet, Sour and Salty

Plum sauce is a sweet-sour-salty condiment vaguely modeled after suin mui jeng (in Cantonese) or suan mei chiang (in Mandarin), which is made from the prunus salicina, a tree fruit more commonly known in English as Chinese plum, Japanese plum, or Japanese apricot. It has become a popular Chinese American dipping sauce for egg rolls,…


A Simple Technique Creates a Juicy Result

The tastes of summer are bountiful. Colorful fruits and vegetables abound, and barbecuing is the welcome technique to complement summers’ best produce. Pork ribs have a permanent place on my summer menu; particularly baby back ribs that are meaty and happily take on the Asian flavors of this zesty marinade. Growing up, summer barbecues at…


Meet the Successful Japanese-American Chef Cooking Every Dish with a Dash of Positivity

In an industry known for its high risk of failure and low profit margins, Mie Okuda has survived opening a restaurant during an economic slump—twice. In the late 1990s, during Japan’s “Lost Decades” recession, she started a restaurant in one of the most restaurant-dense cities in the world, Tokyo’s Ginza district. Years later in America,…