May ATFT Food Tee – Momofuku for 2

You may have noticed that there wasn’t a ATFT Food T-shirt in May due to many reasons – mainly because I was in South Australia for Tasting Australia, and then it left me only one day to do my laundry before catching another plane and spent 2.5 weeks in Malaysia! My bad, bagillion apologies! Well, you know what they say, it is better late than never. So this month I will be releasing not one, but two ATFT Food tshirts! Another one will be released next week!

This t-shirt is inspired by a girl who loves to cook, eat and undeniably obsessed with Momofuku. Since she received the Momofuku cookbook last Christmas, she attempts to cook all the recipes from the book, write about it and post it on the blog. To ssam it up, this Canadian girl is not afraid to tackle the world, one recipe at a time. Please welcome Steph from Momofuku For 2 and let’s find out more about the author behind the wonderful blog.

1. Tell us more about yourself, your background, how does your blog momofukufor2 started and what’s the objective of the blog?
I got the cookbook for Christmas last year. After opening up presents on Christmas Day, I laid myself down on the couch and started reading. I was hooked after the first page. In the book Chang tells about how he went from not knowing what to do in life to discovering his passion to making his passion his work. His story really spoke to me, and it inspired me to find my passion, take it and do something with it.

I’ve always loved cooking and Momofuku holds a special place in my heart due to a bizarre experience on my first visit. The idea of being able to make the food from one of my favourite chefs was thrilling. I thought to myself, cooking all the recipes in the book will be my way of getting the Momofuku experience without flying to NYC every other weekend. Momofuku for 2 is a space for me to document my journey so one day, I can look back and say, “hey, I did that!”

2. Do you have a day job? Because you are blogging everyday! Where do you find the time?
I do! I’m a freelance illustrator working from home and that offers me the flexibility to be obsessive compulsive about blogging. Admittedly the blog was very time consuming at first, but now that I’ve been doing it daily for the past few months it’s become second nature and much, much faster. Thankfully, I also bought a flash a while ago and that allowed me to cook for the blog at 3am if I need to. There’s nothing more satisfying than deep-frying in the middle of the night. Except blogging about it, actually!

3. All the media are focused on David Chang and his momofuku empire these days, are you doing the momofukufor2 blog because of spotting the opportunity to jump on the fame bandwagon?
Not at all! My first exposure to Momofuku was a visit to Noodle Bar way back in 2007. At the time, Chang and his Momo empire weren’t yet crazy big on the world-wide food scene. I’m a total food geek and I was visiting NYC, so naturally I did a Google search for the “must-eat” places around town. Noodle Bar showed up, I visited, I ate, and I was hooked! That’s the reason it’s Momofuku for 2 and not Random Recipes from Various Cookbooks for 2.

Nowadays though, if you’re into food and you’ve been to NYC, you’ve probably eaten at Momofuku; there’s just too much hype about Chang’s restaurants to avoid it. If you pay attention at all to the food media it does seem like the Momo Empire is everywhere, but I think for normal people most of the Momo fame is still pretty local to NYC (and Australia, which I never knew was so food-obsessed!). Very few people in Vancouver know or care about Momofuku, and all of my Thomas Keller/Ad Hoc posts have gotten far more hits than any of my Momo posts, so I think the Momo fame bandwagon hasn’t truly left yet. I suppose I’m on it when and if it ever takes off though!

4. Julie & Julia, then Steph & David, do we sense a new movie opportunity?
Haha, no! Not only has it been done before, it wouldn’t be very interesting! While a movie about Chang’s life would probably be crazy and cinematic, I’m just a regular girl: I don’t swear as much as Julie and I don’t go out of my way to create drama situations for myself.

5. A dinner party host or a dinner party troll? Which one are you?
Host! I love hosting dinner parties! I’ll make lists and lists of dishes I want to make and schedule out to the minute how long everything will take to make. I’m one of those crazy hosts who expect people to be on time because I love everything being hot and ready when they come over. I’m trying to relax and get into more casual hosting where I don’t mind cooking while people trickle in though, because I realize that I am a little too crazy to expect people to arrive on the dot at all, let alone sychronize their watches with mine (which is what I would prefer, if I had my way).

6. What are the food blogging scenes like in Canada compare to other countries for eg, Australia? Have you met many food bloggers in your city?
I’m pretty new on the food blogging scene and I haven’t met any other Vancouver food bloggers in real life yet. I’m envious that you food bloggers in Australia seem like such a tight-knit community who gets together often, and with food too. The majority of the food bloggers in Vancouver that I’ve seen online seem to be restaurant reviewers. Since I don’t review restaurants, I’m not very well known on the Vancouver scene. Plus, I’m pretty shy so I haven’t introduced myself around.

7. Hypothetically, you were in a bar and David Chang came and sat right next to you, what’s the first thing you’d say to him?
(blushes) I’m actually really really bad with faces, so I probably wouldn’t recognize him at all. If I did, it would probably be a not-too-witty “uh, hi?”

8. Tell us about your process from cooking Momofuku recipe, to photographing the dish, tasting it, and writing about it on your blog.
It’s pretty straightforward. At first I had the idea that I wanted to cook through the book linearly, but when I realized that it wasn’t feasible due to ingredients not being in season, I just started flipping through the book and picking at random. Lots of the recipes share ingredients so I try to cook those recipes close together.

After deciding what I want to cook I go grocery shopping. Sometimes it’s easy to find what I need and sometimes I’ve visited 3 grocery stores in a row only to find frustration. Sometimes I end up on crazy hunts for strange ingredients I can barely pronounce and the sales people look at me funny.

After ingredients searching, I read the recipe over again, then I cook. Cooking can take a little more time than it should, because I insist on interrupting myself with step-by-step photos. I can’t help it, I just have a thing for in-progress photos, even if no one else likes them! Its usually cook, photo, cook, photo.

Since the recipes usually make more than Mike and I could possibly eat, I’ll do up a show plate for photos and set it aside. We’ll eat, so I can get an idea of the food before it gets cold, then I’ll take photos of the food. Mike helps with the photos a lot too, when he’s not busy with work. Cooking sometimes happens days in advance of the post, but I always write the post at the very last minute.

9. Tell us more about the food scene in Canada. Are there any national food or specialties that we MUST try? (I recently just discovered the Nanaimo Bar)
Poutine is probably my favourite truly Canadian food. It’s fresh, crispy french fries topped with squeaky cheese curds and hot gravy. It’s calorific and divine. Other than poutine and Nanaimo bars, Canadians don’t really have a national food, though Canada is huge so I can only accurately talk about food on the West Coast, not the rest of the country. But that said, everyone really MUST try poutine at least once. I can’t speak of it highly enough.

10. Which one is the toughest Momofuku recipe you have ever attempted so far? Which one is the tastiest? And which one is your least favourite (Sorry, you HAVE to name one)?
I wouldn’t say any of the recipes are tough so much as they are hugely involved. Multi-day, multi-step, multi process recipes are common in the book. If I had to choose one recipe though, it would probably be the Grilled Baby Octopus Salad just because I had a tough time touching the octopus. I haven’t made the pig’s head torchon yet, but I’m thinking that it’ll be far worse in gross factor than the octopus and will take home the title of toughest recipe.

The tastiest recipe is much more difficult to choose. Really, I love so many of them! The Kimchi Stew was the most surprising because I thought I would hate it, but I ended up loving it. It might just be the tastiest!

My least favourite is the Scallops with Bacon Dashi. I just didn’t understand what was going on with the dish. I wanted textural contrast, but there wasn’t any. Plus I forgot the salt, so that is probably a big reason why I didn’t love it. I’d hate to be on a Gordon Ramsay cooking show making that dish, “You forgot the salt, you idiot!”

11. What do you normally do when you are not cooking or eating?
I’m never not cooking or eating! In the winter I snowboard; it’s the only sport I know how to do half-decently. I love it: the speed, the snow, the quiet time in your head when you’re going down the mountain and the laughs you have when chatting on the lifts. When it’s not winter, as cliché as it sounds, food is honestly my life; I spend a lot of time doing food-related things, like sewing pillows and plushies of food items and writing and illustrating stories about anthropomorphized food. And even though we’re not supposed to be talking about cooking and eating, I love cooking for and feeding my friends and family.

12. Garlic, pork belly, eggplant – come up with a dish.
Slow roast the belly, cool, slice, and grill. Slice the eggplant into rounds, toss with extra garlicky Vietnamese fish sauce, and grill. Serve with rice and butter lettuce. Ssam it up.

13. Share your ultimate dining experience that you will never forget.
Honestly I can’t think of one! I hope my ultimate dining experience hasn’t happened yet otherwise I’ll have nothing to look forward to! All I can say is that I hope my ultimate experience wouldn’t be a solitary one, as I think a dining experience has a lot more to do with who you’re eating with than what you’re eating.

14. How do you poach an egg?
Take a giant pot, put a cake rack in it so the eggs don’t touch the bottom, fill it with water and put it on the stove. Use a thermometer to get the water between 140˚ to 145˚F and keep it there. Once it hits temperature add your eggs to the pot and just go do something else for 40 to 45 minutes. Then take them out of the water and crack them open.

15. What’s next after completing all 98 momofuku recipes?
I haven’t thought that far ahead yet! I’m kind of in a bind with my domain name, but I love cooking and photographing food so I think I’m going to continue blogging about (less momofuku oriented) new recipes and what I love to eat!

The “Momofuku for 2” limited edition t-shirts are now available from the ATFT shop. Limited to 50 units only.

[I am always on the look out for new food bloggers around the world. If you would like to be the next featured food blogger, please visit the shop page and get involved! ]

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