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Farina Kingsley Accepts The Challenge To Get Me To Cook … Asian Food … At Home!!
Your DeathbedFood blogger doesn’t cook. In fact, some people think I don’t even know how to use a knife in the kitchen.
Your DeathbedFood Blogger Helps Out In The Kitchen
But, in my endless search for DeathbedFood, I’m always looking for new ways to find it – including learning how to cook. And who better to teach me than international culinary instructor and multi-cookbook author, Farina Kingsley? I’ve been helping her with social media consulting and now she’s willing to step up to the challenge to teach me how to tackle the kitchen!
If anyone’s equipped to do that, it’s Farina who has some serious cooking chops.
Farina Kingsley (Photo: Russel Wong)
Among other accomplishments, Farina has:
- Taught the Asian Culinary Program at Tante Marie Cooking School in San Francisco for 10 years;
- Written several cookbooks (Organic Marin: Recipes from Land to Table; and three Williams-Sonoma cookbooks: Essentials of Asian Cooking, Food Made Fast Asian, and Wiliams-Sonoma Collection: Asian); and
- Developed her first cooking App, Farina’s Asian Pantry, to demystify Asian cooking for the home cook.
Her App is really geared towards people who cook and who love Asian food but who typically don’t prepare it at home and want to learn more about it. Her goal was to make a go-to source for learning about ingredients and techniques required for the various types of Asian cuisine. In this video below, she explains it best:
She recently updated her App with new features including a GPS function to help people find Asian grocery stores in their area. Going forward, she’ll continue to update it based on feedback largely from her social media Blog, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube community.
Meantime, she’s created Asian Pantry Kits to make it easy for people to get hard-to-find Asian ingredients. Essentially, it’s like she’s going to the Market for people so they don’t have to. She’s chosen ingredients which are used the most for each region (China, Japan/Korea and Southeast Asia), are shelf stable, and are typically hard to find:
Farina’s DeathbedFoods: So even with that credentialing, I couldn’t quite commit before I knew what her DeathbedFoods may be. It turns out, they’re all very healthy:
- She loves restaurants in Asia which are on the beach where you can choose your fresh fish – they grill it for you and serve it with Sambal, along with rice and vegetables. To her, sitting outside near the beach and enjoying that dish along with an ice cold beer is the best.
- She also adores anything braised – especially Oxtail Stew and Osso Bucco.
- Fresh-picked vegetables from an organic garden also ranks up there for her.
Hmm, while I love grilled fish and Osso Bucco, I have to say my DeathbedFoods are not quite as healthy … my newest addition is, after all, Peppermint Bark from Bouchon Bakery …
Peppermint Bark from Bouchon Bakery
Still, I have faith we’ll be able to find a middle ground, partly because I think we share many of the same foodie interests. For one thing, she likes some pretty cool-sounding things in Singapore like:
- Garrett’s Popcorn. a Chicago chain, she feels its “sweet & savory” mix is particularly popular in Singapore and the reason behind why they have incredibly long lines in each of the 10+ stores they have there (sounds delish!)
- Independent Coffee Houses. Singapore has one of the largest ex-Pat communities in Asia with huge numbers of Australians, Americans, French, Germans, Russians and Chinese nationals among others. Farina says the ex-Pats have been key to bringing independent coffee houses to the city. Specifically, Dutch-Indonesian Erik Posthuma and American Luke Norman thought up a Be Disloyal program you can go to of the eight indie cafés (listed here), and ask for a Be Disloyal card. You buy a coffee, get your card stamped, and check out the remaining cafés. Once you’ve visited all of them, you can head back to the first one to redeem your free coffee. Sounds really fun to me.
So, what will Farina attempt to teach me to make? Since I’m on a Thai kick lately, we decided that it would be fun to have her teach me how to make these popular Thai recipes from her App:
Lemongrass & Seafood Soup
- Green Coconut Curry Shrimp & Vegetables
My cooking lesson will take place around Christmas and will be videotaped … stay tuned!
aaadfredgu 
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