The Choi of Cooking

Welcome to The Choi of Cooking

What you have in your hands is a book of recipes. An awesome book of recipes, trust. But we’re not stopping there. Because it’s not just an awesome book of recipes the same way the Tao of Jeet Kune Do wasn’t just a book about martial arts: Bruce Lee’s manual was a book about life, about how to approach yourself and others around you. This book is my Tao of Jeet Kune Do: a book of life, a recipe to keep living and be alive. It will fill your life with flavors so vibrant, so good, it will possess you. It’ll teach you how to make things that are good for you and good to you. It’ll make you kiss yourself as your food kisses others—seriously it’ll be that good.

I mean, that’s the goal.

I’ve been cooking for you all for a while now, but it took me this long to write this book because it took me this long to live long enough to know I had something to give you. And that’s what you have in your hands: my heart and my soul.

Off the top, this is a collection of fun dishes with some thoughts about cooking and living along the way. Some are my takes on classics, others are created from a lifetime of cooking mash-ups. If all you want to do is make some f***ing delicious food, I got you. It’s all here. You can just skip all this ramble and preamble and dive right in. A Thai-inspired chowder? Page 138. Layers and layers of greens hugging slivers of pork belly? Page 218. Fish tacos? Check page 186.

But if you’re still listening, let me tell you this story about how I got here.

I spent a long time wrestling with my food demons. Growing up and into my young adult days, I was on a whole other level of champion eating: bundles of Red Vines, gallon-sized milkshakes, whole pizzas, cans of SpaghettiOs, a dozen flour tortillas like they were potato chips, eight portions of soba noodles at a time. The whole tray of Stouffer’s lasagna. I could pound four of those personal Pizza Hut pan pizzas at a time. Who actually eats the whole bread bowl in a clam chowder bread bowl? Me, that’s who. And there is this thing in Korean called ggokbaeggi, which means “extra-large.” Yup. Ggokbaeggi for your boy. All. The. Time. From pho to jjajangmyun.

Really, though, I was eating my feelings. An evil voice would taunt me when I looked at myself in the mirror, sending me straight to the pint of Häagen-Dazs. On some afternoons when I was so depressed I could barely get off the couch, I almost couldn’t manage getting into the kitchen to microwave a pizza. Then, when I felt like I was getting too heavy, I just . . . didn’t eat. Instead of eating, I went on benders. Other addictions replaced the food. Sometimes it was drugs; other times, the casinos. I seesawed; sometimes I relapsed and fell into an abyss and had to start all over again. But for the most part, I controlled my weight and eating by ricocheting between the extreme for many years. Because at the time, I thought that’s what it meant to control your weight, to diet.

After I moved away from the drugs and the gambling and started cooking professionally and coming up in kitchens, I was constantly on the move. My meals became bits of vegetables and spoonfuls of sauces here and there. I still had my demons, though—they never completely go away—and sometimes they’d get the better of me and I’d spit fire, cook angry, smoke fuming out of my ears, eyes locked in, slamming pan after pan on the sauté station, bam bam bam, then eating angry to feed an animalistic craving that roared from somewhere deep.

Being in restaurant kitchens is a lot like being at the casino: It can sometimes be like a time warp. You miss chunks of life while you’re in that chamber. I missed all sorts of pop culture diets—cleansing, juicing, paleo, Atkins—but it’s possible I might have been too stubborn to learn them anyway. I thought my way of eating on the go, eating whatever I thought my body was telling me to eat, then not eating when it got too much, was the way. I didn’t understand that so much of what I was eating was just empty of any nutritional value and making me feel worse. At some point a few years ago, I was tipping the scales at 200-plus pounds, feeling unhealthy, hiding in my junk food abyss, falling into old habits, but trying to hold it all together with a broken smile in public.

I’m stubborn, but even then I knew my way wasn’t working. Something had to give.

I made up my mind and looked to change up how I cook. I let my chef’s intuition guide me to make stuff I crave and would eat any other day, but intentionally pulled back the meat and upped the vegetables and discovered ways to pull in rainbows of flavor. Big f***ing salads with a simple Dijon mustard vinaigrette. Grilled fish with a ginger ponzu sauce. Tofu seared and outfitted with soy, scallions, and buttery kimchi. A noodle salad filled with veggies and draped in a gochujang sauce.

And the thing is, once I started cooking and eating like this, it stuck. When I cook and eat now, I’m usually thinking vegetables first. More herbs, more aromatics, less meat, less sugar. All almost without even thinking about it.

The recipes in this book are the result of that journey. It reflects the cooking I do now: vegetable-forward with pit stops of comfort along the way. Those pit stops of comfort are key: I still have my cravings. I know the pull of that burger, of a bomb Philly cheesesteak, of a Taiwanese-style pork chop lightly fried and served over white rice. My philosophy isn’t about denial. It’s about balance. It’s about being kind to yourself. And being kind means hugging the foods that hug us back.

So rather than pretending like our cravings don’t exist, I’m going to just ask that you treat them right. When the demons come around to visit me, for example, and I need my greasy fix, then I’ve made a deal with myself: I’ll eat a burger, but it’s a burger that I make so I control every part of it. I’ll treat it like it’s my first and only burger, so I gotta make it a perfect bite because it’ll be my only bite. This means getting the best ingredients I can to really maximize the flavor—and that means just a little bit will go a long way. So, whatever craving you have, put in the care and time to cook it up yourself. I’ll show you how, and I promise it’ll be more rewarding and better for you than hitting the drive-thru.

That’s why even though this is a book about eating and treating yourself better, it isn’t your typical “healthy” cookbook in that chicken nuggets probably don’t line up with how our culture defines healthy. But f*** that. Healthy means different things depending on who you are. And I’m here to support you wherever you are in your journey.

Whatever we make together, it’ll be full of flavor layered in each bite, flavors that come from all over. I’m a kid who grew up with one foot in one culture and the other foot in another yet who had to walk a blurred one-way path, intertwined like a trail in a fairytale forest. And I’m not the only one. I see all of you out there—immigrants, Americans, everyone—who were doing and are doing the same right now. So, as we work through these tacos and salads and soups, you’ll see that a lot of dishes in this book are rooted in multiple places, and they’re going to reflect their multiple starting points to create a whole new point on the map.

I’ll also hit other dishes I grew up with but tweaked in a way that I would have done if I’d known then what I know now. That can mean something as simple as knowing when to be patient and not rush the cooking process so flavors can fully develop, loading a dish with a new sauce, or adjusting the portion size to satisfy cravings without falling back into the abyss. These are dishes that I would have made if I was the one in charge of writing the food in my childhood script. It just took till now to figure out who I really was to even write the lines.