Make Pork & Chive Dumplings like Professional Chef Anita Lo
For about ten years, I lived alone. I say “about” because for the last four years, I was dating my future wife and we were splitting time between our two apartments. But for the preponderance of that time, I didn’t cook.
I certainly ate. I made simple things like eggs, sandwiches and pots of rice and beans. I’m not sure why I didn’t make more complicated things. For one, most of my recipes feed at least two if not four or more. It also seemed like a lot of work to just feed myself. There was no one to keep me company in the kitchen or pitch in with the cleanup. When I met my wife, I was needless to say very excited to have someone to cook for and started making us meals on a regular basis.
But I might have cooked more if I had chef Anita Lo’s new and clever cookbook Solo: A Modern Cookbook for a Party of One. “I put the ‘Lo’ in ‘solo.’ The A Lo in ‘alone.’ I’ve been dumped almost as many times as I’ve been in relationships—and I can count those on less than two hands,” she admits in the book’s intro. “Spread over my fifty-year life-span, that’s a lot of solo meals. So if you consider that—coupled with my many years working as a professional chef—it seems that I’m particularly well suited to write this book.”