Nothing ever tasted like fusion in his mom’s cooking, but the diversity and quality of the ingredients in California was a revelation to them both. He always suspected he wanted to be a chef, but her move to California, when he was a senior in high school, cemented it. Wu-Bower had been cooking alongside his mom - and for his mom the nights she worked late - all his life. Recipe: Soy-braised swiss chard with shallot-marinated beets » Wu cooks bright red Swiss chard from her local farm using a technique she learned in Ningbo, China Wu-Bower’s beet marinade pairs shallots with a sticky rice vinegar he tasted, loved, and wanted to use. The latter dish pairs Wu’s chard with Wu-Bower’s beets and exemplifies the divergence of their styles. Red, a lucky celebration hue, shows up in a chile paste massaged into crab the color of flames and also in soy-braised Swiss chard with marinated beets. Thousand-year eggs are a standard new year symbol of fertility they whisk them into a vinaigrette that is drizzled over silken tofu, Santa Barbara uni and more eggs. Their approaches converge when they create a dish as a team. Now that I’ve got stuff from around the world in the pantry, there are no rules to it.” I dig really deep into roots, and then, I can fly.”Īnd Wu-Bower counters, “Mom, you taught me through our ingredient shopping sprees. Wu respects his stance, but explains her creative process further, “I want to trace where things come from. I want an amalgamation of my childhood: heavily Chinese and Thai, Cajun and Creole from dad, Mexican from Rick, Middle Eastern and Italian from Chicago.” “I’m so proud of being Chinese - I always have been - but I just want to cook the food I want to eat. Recipe: Hong Shao Rou: Red-cooked pork belly » Still, Wu says, “I’m looking for authenticity because that’s my generation. Ours is not a traditional Chinese New Year’s by any means, ” Wu-Bower says. “Mom’s life and my life are such a collection of different cultures. Their menu has evolved with their culinary paths while retaining ties to their past. Now, it’s chefs Stuart Brioza and Nicole Krasinski and former colleagues from Wu’s careers at the San Francisco Chronicle and as an executive chef at Google. In childhood, that included Wu’s colleagues, her son’s soccer team, and chef and restaurateur couple Rick and Deann Bayless.
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Wu lives in the Bay Area Wu-Bower runs Pacific Standard Time in Chicago, but they reunite at Wu’s Moss Beach home to cook a feast for Lunar New Year. Nearly 30 years later, they are both chefs. Wu raised Wu-Bower in the suburbs of Chicago he remembers trekking into the city every week to scour farmer’s markets, Vietnam Town and Chinatown for ingredients. She moved to the United States for college at 16, and started cooking to ease her homesickness. In Bangkok, Wu ate Shanghainese food at home and Thai food out in the world. When she was a baby, her family tucked her into a fruit basket and fled their native Shanghai on a plane headed for Thailand, to escape the Communist takeover because of her father’s strong Nationalist ties. “If there’s any place I consider a hometown, it’s Bangkok,” Wu says. They are a fitting start to a celebratory feast that traces the culinary journey of Wu, a celebrated Northern California-based cooking teacher, and Wu-Bower, a James Beard Award-nominated Chicago chef. It’s mian kam, a Thai finger food that is a one-bite riot of hot, sour, salty, sweet.
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The first appetizer Olivia Wu and her son, Erling Wu-Bower, serve for Chinese New Year isn’t Chinese at all.