Cooking up alternatives
Pasadena foodie Ivy Dai looks to Chinese traditions for the do-it-yourself meals of the future
By Joe Piasecki 05/14/2009
Growing up in Arcadia, Ivy Dai was the prep chef in her father’s kitchen. After college, she became a news reporter, but quickly made the jump to food writing for Dean Singleton’s Los Angeles Newspaper Group, including the Pasadena Star-News, San Gabriel Valley Tribune and Daily News of Los Angeles — only to leave that position to travel to China in search of authentic culinary cultural artifacts.
Since coming back to live in Pasadena in 2007, she’s taught a number of cooking classes (the next one is Saturday) and taken some herself, served a brief stint in the kitchen at Pasadena’s Michelin-star Trattoria Tre Venezie and worked as a TV news weather-segment producer for KTLA and KABC, all in the hopes of someday producing and starring in her own cooking show.
There’s no denying it. The ebullient Dai is a total foodie.
“I love to eat. I love to cook because I love to eat, and because it makes people happy when you create something and feed it to them. I like to watch them eat. You gain a sense of adventure from food, and it can take you to different countries and introduce you to different people,” she says. “I want to know as much as I can about it and immerse myself in it.”
Dai, 26, has prepared and eaten the dishes of many nations and cultures but her taste buds always lead her back to the type of traditional Chinese home cooking her father, once a Taiwan restaurateur, handed down.
Chinese food and culinary philosophy, she contends, is tomorrow’s gastronomic zeitgeist: easy and inexpensive to make, good for our bodies and the environment and — most importantly — delicious.
“Chinese is the best food to eat in a down economy, because they have perfected how to eat amazing food on very limited resources over the last 5,000 years. You can actually make a Chinese meal for two for under five bucks,” says Dai. “Food is cut into small pieces to cook quickly and conserve fuel. And because meat was expensive and scarce, the Chinese developed really delicious vegetarian dishes and many fake meat products that taste just like chicken and beef — which is affordable and earth-friendly,” as meat requires exponentially more energy and resources to produce and emits more planet-warming gasses than soy and vegetable production.
Moreover, she explains, Chinese thinking evolved to view food as a kind of medicine, or nutritional therapy.
“Everything that the Chinese put into their bodies has some sort of value. Ginger, meats and fried foods fire up the body, veggies cool the body down. Our parents would always say we were out of balance — in a state of hwo chi da, which translates into ‘fire air bag’ — and make us eat this nasty bitter melon,” Dai recalls. “It’s basically the principle of yin and yang … for each meal not to have too much heat, with vegetables to keep the body in balance. On the Chinese table at dinner time, there’ll be a meat dish, a soup dish, steamed vegetables and white rice, the neutral canvas you eat everything on.”
In Dai’s Dragon Dishes cooking class Saturday, the focus is dim sum, a traditional brunch-style tea experience in which a large variety of small dishes are served.
The course repeats May 30, and each is $55 to attend (ingredients and equipment included), taking place at the large kitchen inside Pasadena’s Throop Unitarian Universalist Church. The menu includes pot stickers, pan-fried turnip cakes (kind of like Asian-style potato pancakes), open-faced dumplings and barbecued pork buns, which, if not exactly representative of the healthiest elements of Chinese cuisine, “are actually really easy to do,” she says.
Other classes have focused on convenient Chinese-themed dinners, aimed to help home cooks “spice life up with another flavor profile,” says Dai, who recommends adding ingredients such as soy sauce, garlic and ginger to reinvent staples such as baked chicken.
Another simple and popular dish in many Chinese and Chinese-American homes is a creation that Dai calls “Chinese spaghetti,” in which ground pork and baked tofu are cooked with garlic and mushroom in a sweet bean sauce and served over noodles.
“It’s something everybody likes, and it will last indefinitely in your freezer,” she says. “The recipes in my classes are all home and family recipes, which I feel is more authentic than what we’re served in restaurants.”
In recent weeks, Dai has enrolled in the California School of Culinary Arts to increase her knowledge of other styles of cooking. So far, she’s discovered that many of the basics take her right back to Dad’s kitchen.
Ivy Dai’s Dragon Dishes dim sum class takes place from 2 to 5 p.m. Saturday and repeats on May 30, both at Throop Unitarian Universalist Church, 300 S. Los Robles Ave., Pasadena. For more information about Dai and to reserve a spot in one of her classes, call (626) 224-5530, visit ivyeats.com or email ivy@ivyeats.com.
DIGG | del.icio.us | REDDIT