Grace Meng

 

When I’m not writing or cooking, I’m a human rights researcher and advocate living in Brooklyn, New York.  In an earlier life, I was an immigration lawyer until the government broke my heart one too many times.  I ended up running away to Mexico and Spain, where this blog really got started.

I write about a lot of things — food, travel, immigrant rights — but ultimately, I’m interested in good stories wherever I can find them.

Right now, the stories I’m most interested in are about Korean food and how it became what it is today.  My friend Diane and I are writing a Korean cookbook, to be published as the first project of East Rock Publishing, a new company focusing on books about East Asian culture.   We both grew up in Seoul, Korea, and in a lot of ways, the project comes out of our shared need to know more about the world we left.  But the cookbook isn’t going to be about us—it’s going to be about Korean food, which deserves all the attention it can get.

The cookbook will be the kind of cookbook I’ve always wanted, a resource to supplement my mother whose telephone instructions on how to cook my favorite foods often end, “Just cook it until it’s done!” It’ll provide answers to the questions so many of my Korean American friends and I have: “Where does this dish come from?”; “What are these wild greens called in English?”; “How exactly is doenjang made?”

But we hope the book will also appeal to anyone who loves Korean food, anyone who is curious and adventurous about all foods, and anyone who wants to learn my mother’s fantastic way to fry chicken.

If you have any questions about the cookbook or anything else, please use the contact form below.

 

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