Cooking

What I make when I don’t want to impress anyone is a beef chuck steak on cast iron — garlic, salt, pepper, basted with butter. That is most weeks.

The rest of this page is what happens when the audience is larger than me.

The Friday rotation

Once a month I cook for the young adults and youth fellowship at my church, which is thirty to forty people depending on the week. Over the years the rotation has settled into a handful of things I know will survive being cooked in quantity and carried into a building:

• Soy braised pork belly — dong po rou
• Smoked pulled pork
• Smoked beef brisket
• Steamed black cod, Chinese style
• Jerk chicken
• Hainanese chicken rice
• The Montana Wasian Special bowl

The last one is mine, and the name is a story. On a road trip through Montana, Wyoming and Utah in 2024 I ordered a dish at an Asian restaurant in a town where everyone in the room — staff and customers — was white, and I had adjusted my expectations accordingly. It was excellent. Every component was made properly and they worked together. I rebuilt it from memory when I got home: nasi uduk and fried shallots, Filipino grilled pork, Chinese ginger scallion sauce, sriracha mayo, and a well-seasoned salad with nuts and pumpkin seeds. The friends who had been on that trip with me confirmed I had got it.

Mother’s Day, three times

Once a year the whole church eats, which is about two hundred people, and I have coordinated that team three times.

The first time I did not understand what the number meant. I had scaled a dish from thirty to two hundred in my head and assumed it was the same job with bigger pans. We were undermanned and out of time, and we ended up cooking through the service — which is to say the kitchen team missed the thing they had come for.

So the second year I moved the work off the day. Components got prepped and cooked across the week going into that Sunday, which fixed the problem I had and revealed one I had never got close enough to see: broiling in batches in the church oven fills the hallway with smoke, and it does it right as the service lets out. A few of the church leaders carried in an enormous electric fan and pointed it at the front door.

The third year everything was finished by Saturday. Sunday was reheating — oven, stovetop, no rush. The church moms were appreciative and impressed.

Meat birthday cake, v1 through v3

A friend asked me to make his wife a birthday cake out of meat. I was intrigued by the idea.

v1, July 2025. The body is meatloaf and the frosting is mashed potato. Turkey gravy over the top, bacon flowers, smoked barbecue ribs standing around the base. It worked. There is nothing I would fix about it.

v2, two months later. I tried to build the body from chicken gelatin with sliced grilled chicken and egg through it. It did not look appetising at all. There is no photograph of this one.

v3, July 2026, for the fellowship members with birthdays that month. A Hainanese chicken rice cake — rice, poached chicken, ginger scallion sauce, grilled char siu and soy-marinated eggs, layered, built in a glass casserole dish so that the layers read from the side. More char siu, cucumber and crisp chicken skin on top. This is the one I am proud of, and the only one I have posted anywhere.

How I ended up doing this

I joined this church about six years ago and was in the kitchen within the first year, because the food ministry coordinator noticed I was interested and asked. I started cooking regularly for Friday fellowship around the time services resumed after COVID, when there were very few people in the room, and the numbers grew back one month at a time. I was part of the food ministry leadership until last year. Someone else coordinates it now. I still cook.