Cookbook Club: “Lucky Peach Presents 101 Easy Asian Recipes”

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Lucky Peach Book - flat
Learn to make Korean jap chae and many other “gloriously inauthentic” dishes from “Lucky Peach Presents 101 Easy Asian Recipes.” (Photos courtesy of Lucky Peach)(The original image is no longer available, please contact KCRW if you need access to the original image.)

It’s hard for to me remember another cookbook I’ve embraced as fully in my own kitchen as I have the “Lucky Peach 101 Easy Asian Recipes.” Maybe all those years of making Italian food made me ready for a change. Now I find that my go-to weeknight meal is often a quick stir-fry, a bold, flavored soup or a dish of noodles.

“Lucky Peach” co-founders Peter Meehan recently co-hosted “Eating Out Loud,” an evening of readings, cartoons and performances about food which you can listen to here. He also joined me as a guest on “Good Food” earlier this year when he shared a recipe for “Miso Claypot Chicken (No Claypot.”

Meehan and the magazine’s other editors have their collective pulses on the culinary zeitgeist, but they’re also writers who have to feed themselves and their families on a budget. This combination of smarts, appreciation for bold flavor and a need for quick, simple, inexpensive meals has resulted in a cookbook with page after page of “gloriously inauthentic” but easy, craveable dishes.

Just give yourself the time to buy the necessary pantry items, which the book outlines very clearly, and you’ll be ready to go. Have fun.

To get my other monthly Cookbook Club picks, click here to join the club now.

Lucky Peach - Beginner's Asian Pantry
Can you identify each of these “Lucky Peach Beginner’s Asian Pantry staples”? From L–R: 1) soy sauce; 2) sesame oil; 3) peanuts; 4) tahini; 5) mirin; 6) sesame seeds; 7) oyster sauce; 8) rice vinegar; 9) fish sauce; 10) star anise; 11) sambal oelek; 12) miso paste; 13) Shaoxing wine; 14) hondashi; 15) dried shiitake; 16) lap cheong (a.k.a. Chinese sausage). (The original image is no longer available, please contact KCRW if you need access to the original image.)