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In This Issue
Foodies celebrate; your favorite issue has arrived. I was flipping through my personal recipe book the other afternoon, hunting down my family recipe for Banana Mango Coconut Bread, when I came across notes from some of the earliest meals I cooked for my son—Griffin’s Six Month Buttered Anise Short Ribs and Griffin’s Eight Month Curry Cod, to name a few. Memories of those meals were as crystal clear today as they were then. I’ve been tinkering with recipes ever since I tried my hand at baking chocolate éclairs in eighth grade and have volumes of compiled recipe books with clippings from various Bon Appetit and Saveur magazines and trial-and-error recreations of sauces I’d tasted in restaurants, all edited with faded yellow highlighter and scratches from the fine tip of a black Sharpie marker.
I can remember re-arranging my bedroom furniture at college to host a home-cooked four-course fondue meal for my main squeeze, now husband, and the July 4th seafood boil my sister created that inspired a Christmas Eve paella tradition. Moments of my life have been marked not by the passage of time, but of food—my very own time machine. Food can do that: trying to stay awake with my sister while a gorgeous Eight Treasure Glutinous Rice Cake steamed away late at night on the eve of Chinese New Year in Maryland; working with the chef at the now-closed Colony Restaurant to create a scallion, fermented soy and peanut sauce for Vietnamese spring rolls at our wedding reception six years ago. My staff is all too familiar with my penchant for food references. My workshop on editing, for example, is rife with them: discard rosemary sprigs, use restraint when seasoning your copy and use only the freshest local ingredients. Stories are stews, adjectives are spices and we all know that truly great feasts have thoughtful beginnings and endings. Our team has prepared gorgeous features this month celebrating the al fresco brunch, dishes inspired by five notable ingredients—chilis, ginger, mint, goat cheese and olives—and a romp through the local happy hour culture. Be ready to get hungry.
Lisl Liang, Editor in Chief
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