My Rice Bowl · Korean Cooking Outside the Lines

From James Beard Best Chef-nominee Rachel Yang, My Rice Bowl is a cookbook with 75 recipes based on her deeply comforting Korean fusion cuisine, inspired by cultures from around the world.

As co-owner of the popular Seattle restaurants, Joule, Trove, and Revel, and Portland's Revelry, chef Rachel Yang delights with her unique Korean fusion--think noodles, dumplings, pickles, pancakes, and barbecue. Along with her husband, Seif Chirchi, Yang serves food that exemplifies cross-cultural cooking at its most gratifying. In the cookbook you'll find the restaurants' kimchi recipe, of course, but there's so much more--seaweed noodles with crab and creme fraiche, tahini-garlic grilled pork belly, fried cauliflower with miso bagna cauda, chipotle-spiked pad thai, Korean-taco pickles, and the ultimate Korean fried chicken (served with peanut brittle shards for extra crunch). There are rice bowls too--with everything from lamb curry to charred shiitake mushrooms--but this book goes way beyond bibimbap.

In many ways, the book, like Yang's restaurants, is analogous to a rice bowl; underpinning everything is Yang's strict childhood in Korea and the food memories it engrained in her. But on top you'll taste a mosaic of flavors from across the globe, plus a dash of her culinary alma maters, Per Se and Alain Ducasse. This is the authentic, cutting-edge fusion food of a Korean immigrant who tried everything she could to become an American, but only became one when she realized that her culture--among many--is what makes America so delicious today.