Cooking

My easiest day-to-day recipe, when I don’t want to impress anyone, is beef chuck steak on cast iron with garlic, salt, and pepper, basted with butter.

The Friday rotation

Once a month, on a Friday, I cook for the young adults and youth fellowship at my church, around thirty to forty people. These are the dishes I’ve made for church:

• 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

I named the last one after a dish I ordered on a road trip through Montana, Wyoming, and Utah in 2024, at an Asian restaurant in Montana where every worker and guest I could see was white. The dish had proper Asian components, each one well made, and they tasted amazing together. Hence the name Wasian. Shortly after the trip, I made my own version from memory: 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 went on that trip with me approved of 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 underestimated the effort of scaling a dish from the usual thirty people to two hundred. The team was undermanned and short on time, and we ended up cooking during the service, so the team missed the Sunday service.

The second time, I coordinated the team to prep and cook most of the components over the week leading up to that Sunday. I overlooked that broiling in batches in the church oven would fill the hallway with smoke after the service. A few church leaders brought in a huge electric fan to blow the smoke toward the church entrance.

The third time, every component was done by Saturday, and on Sunday we only had to reheat them in the oven and on the stovetop, without any 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.

I made v1 in July 2025. The body was meatloaf, with mashed potatoes as frosting, turkey gravy, and bacon flowers on top, and smoked barbecue ribs arranged around the base. Nothing is technically wrong with v1.

I made v2 two months later. I experimented with grilled chicken and tried to build the body from chicken gelatin, sliced grilled chicken, and eggs. It ended up not looking appetizing at all, and I didn’t like it.

I made v3 in July 2026 for the young adults fellowship members whose birthdays were in July. It’s a Hainanese chicken rice cake. I layered rice, Hainanese chicken, ginger scallion sauce, grilled char siu, and soy-marinated eggs in a glass casserole dish so the layers are visible from the side, and topped it with extra char siu, cucumbers, and crispy chicken skin crackers. I’m proud of this one, and it’s the only one I posted online.

How I ended up doing this

I joined this church in 2019. I started helping in the kitchen when the food ministry coordinator noticed my interest in cooking. I started cooking regularly for Friday fellowship around the time services resumed after COVID. There were few people at first, and I slowly scaled up my cooking as more people returned to church. I was part of the food ministry leadership until 2025. Someone else coordinates it now, and I still cook once a month.