Jack Chen

Writer & Home Cook

I'm Jack. I grew up in a Cantonese household in Guangdong, in a home where the answer to almost every question was a soup simmering on the back burner. When I moved to the United States, I kept cooking the way my family cooks — by the calendar, not the recipe box. But everything needed translating. The pork shop near me sells shoulder, not spare ribs by the section. The dried longan from my mother's care package ran out, and the replacement I found at the Asian grocery three towns over was sweeter and bigger. My American spouse asked me, for the third time, why we were eating hot soup in July. Ginger & Sesame is my translation notebook. I write down what my family actually eats as the seasons turn, then work out how to cook it here — with Whole Foods and Costco ingredients, with a dutch oven instead of a clay pot, for people who did not grow up with any of this. No health claims, no miracle foods. My grandmother would find the internet's obsession with "healing" Chinese food hilarious. She just called it dinner. Everything on this site is cooked in my own kitchen first. When a dish turns out badly in the American version, I tell you. When an ingredient substitution works, I tell you that too.