[phatch]

Martin Yan clearly loves what he is doing. I agree, watching him is educational.

I've always enjoyed those sorts of people. Jeff Smith was the same way. There is a local weatherman who recently retired who was in love with weather and devoted his life to weather. Was always fun to watch though he tended to over-predict storms.

I recently read two Eileen Yin Fei Lo cookbooks. They were pretty good. The Chinese Kitchen and My Chinese Grandmother's Kitchen. There is some word for word reproduction between these two books, but the overlap is trivial.

I preferred Grace Young's Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen. The book has a recommendation by Ken Hom. This struck me a bit. Years ago, I read Ken Hom's cookbook about growing up in a Chinese American household and the food he ate. He grew up without much and the cooking in the book is highly hybridized and make-do. I rather disliked the cooking in it, but it was good reading about his life and food. Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen is about the food Grace Young grew up with in her Chinese American world. Very different from Ken Hom's experience and much more authentic and better food.

Eilieen Yin Fei Lo's book In my Grandmother's Kitchen is about how she learned to cook as a girl in China, but also as she fled the rise of Communism and her learning from cousins and aunts along the way.

Between these three books of eating as a child, I like Grace Young's the best for the food and understanding of the food she brings to a Western sensibility like mine.