Jaden from Steamy Kitchen and Her New Book + Giveaway!

I love Asian cuisine but I don’t cook it at home that much. Luckily, that is all about to change thanks to Jaden’s new book, Steamy Kitchen’s Healthy Asian Favorites: 100 Recipes that are Fast, Fresh, and Simple Enough for Tonight’s Dinner. It is like it was written for someone like me. I love Asian cuisine by am unsure of how to make any of the healthy dishes I enjoy in restaurants. Today Jaden from Steamy Kitchen, my go-to Asian cuisine blog, is stopping in to answer questions about her awesome new book and what we can expect to see on her wildly successful site in the future:

1) You do you such an amazing job demystifying Asian cuisines for people who are new to cooking it like me. What is the first thing you tell someone when they express doubt that they can cook authentic Asian dishes at home?

Cooking Asian food is so incredibly easy! Even with just soy sauce, garlic, ginger and green onion — items that you can get at any grocery store, you can create any type of stir fry. What makes Asian cooking so easy is that most dishes are either a stir-fry or a simmer on the stove that can go from cutting board to table in about half an hour.

While there are so many great Asian restaurants, there are just as many bad ones where everything is deep fried and covered in goopy sauce. I wanted to show people that Asian style, everyday home cooking is healthy, simple and clean. I grew up with Mom’s wonderful Chinese meals that were always light, yet so full of flavor from using fresh herbs and spices. I wanted to share that with people!

My favorite part is collaborating with my recipe testing team! Once recipes are created, they are tested over and over again by a testing team, volunteers who are average home cooks from all over the world. I get feedback and collaborate with them on refining the recipe….they are so helpful and creative!

The biggest challenge is the editing process -it’s a long process of laboring over every single sentence, punctuation and word choice!

Thank you! We have kept Steamy Kitchen going strong for 6 years now! I used to run the site by myself (which was really lonely sometimes) but starting 3 years ago, Scott began working with me full time (he’s a web developer) and the kids also became interested. There’s always so much inspiration when we work together as a family.

Here’s a little video of how we came together to create true family business. http://www.steamykitchen.com/26560-family-motto-magical-moments.html

We love the “SHARE” chapter! These are recipes that are cooked at the table, where every single person is involved in making their own food! There’s Sushi Handroll Parties, Korean BBQ, Chinese and Japanese hot pots (think of it like Asian style fondue but with broth instead of cheese). It’s so crazy fun and so much action at the table! To us, this is what eating together should be about.

YES. I do get in ruts, but it’s mostly around the blogging administrative aspects of what I do. There’s a lot of typing, editing recipes, editing video. Three years ago, I began hiring a part time assistant to help me out with that. It keeps me in the kitchen, which is awesome. I never get tired of cooking!

More videos! For the past 8 months, I’ve been publishing a video with every single recipe. We’ve been working hard building a big video archive. I’d also like to write several single subject e-books with video too!

Scott is building an aquaponics garden where we are experimenting growing fish alongside the garden. The fish poop feed the garden, the plants cleanse the water that goes back to the fish. So far, we’ve got 125 baby Koi fish happily swimming in a giant tank in our backyard and tons of healthy vegetables, using no chemicals

Thanks for stopping by Jayden!

To win a copy of Steamy Kitchen’s new book:

1) Leave a comment sharing what Asian dish you would love to learn to make.

2) Subscribe to Kelsey Banfield on Facebook.

3) Contest runs from May 8th at 7am through May 15th at 7am. Winner will be announced in the May 17th newsletter. Good luck!