The Steamy Kitchen Cookbook. Jaden Hair

      So, I didn’t become a kitchen rock star until I moved away from California (where my family lives) to a little town in Florida to start a family of my own with my husband, Scott. Suddenly, without easy access to good Asian markets, cheap Asian midnight eats and, of course, Mom’s kitchen, I was forced to learn via telephone calls while digging for ingredients at the supermarket, tossing fragrant garlic and ginger in a wok and virtual taste tastes at the dinner table.

      What a fine education it was. $448.63 in cell phone minutes later (which, by the way, is way cheaper than three years at a fancy culinary institute), I discovered that I was insanely good at cooking. I must have inherited Mom’s natural talent of creating spectacularly simple meals for family and friends.

      How it All Started

       You might be wondering how I got from cell phone diploma to writing this book, and it’s kind of a silly story. Right after we moved from San Francisco to this little town in Florida, Scott started a computer repair shop in the middle of a local strip mall, and right next door was a restaurant called “Bangkok Tokyo”. I’d often walk next door to Bangkok Tokyo to grab a to-go order.

      Well, one afternoon I was waiting for my order when I overheard a woman at the sushi bar just behind the hostess stand chatting loudly on her cell phone with her friend, “ . . . come meet me for lunch! I’m eating sushi at the Chinese restaurant!”

      WTF?!!

      Bangkok Toyko? HELLO? Last I checked, neither Bangkok nor Tokyo was in China.

      Oooooooh . . . I was upset. And yeah, I totally overreacted and took it personally, having just moved from San Francisco, one of the greatest culinary destinations and cultural smorgasbords. It didn’t help that the week before I had watched a television celebrity chef feature an entire show on the foods of Thailand while wearing a Chinese cheongsam and cooking Japanese dumplings. Seriously, I’m so not kidding! (By the way, details have been changed to protect the guilty in case I happen to run into this particular celeb chef one day and then be forced to act all embarrassed, wondering if she has read my book! Ay-ya!)

      Okay, back to the story. After the “eating sushi at a Chinese restaurant” incident, I cried and whined to Scott, wanting to move back to San Fran. And do you know what he said to me?

      “Honey, don’t you see that this is such a great opportunity for you?”

      Welllll . . . truthfully, it went something like this: “Quit your bitchin’. If you don’t like this situation, why don’t you do something about it?”

      And so I did.

      I called a local cooking school called “The Chef’s Table” and asked if I could teach some cooking classes, focusing on teaching Mom’s family recipes, the virtues of fish sauce, how to stir-fry and, of course, the differences between Chinese and Japanese food.

      That’s how it all began. Oh, and the blog, SteamyKitchen. com? I started the blog because I needed a place to store all of Mom’s kitchen wisdom and recipes. I was too lazy to write by hand, too unorganized to record audio notes and too scared to leave precious family recipes on my laptop hard drive. A blog was an ideal solution, and I named it Steamy Kitchen, as it perfectly described both my Mom and me, though in different ways. There’s always something cooking in Mom’s kitchen, a soup simmering away for hours or the flash-bang-cling-clang of her speedy wok master action. Basically, the kitchen was always steamy, with a variety of goodies cooking away. And then there’s me. “Steamy” perfectly describes my fiery-hot nature and passionate personality.