Making friends with salad…
I started making salads from my home kitchen in Surry Hills, Sydney in 2011. Twice a week, I would dream up hearty, delicious, vegetable-packed salads, pack them onto the back of my bicycle and cycle them around my neighbourhood, delivering lunch to locals.
I called my little project Arthur Street Kitchen, because I lived on Arthur Street and my home kitchen was my happy place, where I would spend countless hours creating and feeding.
Soon, the local salad-eaters became an intrinsic part of my community. The exchange of the salad box was accompanied by lively conversation, exuberant laughter and a constantly evolving hunting and gathering of stories and histories. The salads came to represent the joyful connection that is felt when cooking and sharing food with others.
This phenomena of sharing salads soon went national, with the release of my first cookbook Community, which told my story of sharing salads in Sydney and featured sixty of my hearty, plant-based salad recipes. My second cookbook, Neighbourhood, was released in Australia in 2016, and in the USA in July 2017. My third book Family was won 2019 Illustrated Book of the Year at the ABIA Awards. My bestselling and much-loved fourth cookbook To Asia, With Love is my homecoming, a joyous celebration of the foods and flavours I grew up with as a Chinese girl born in Australia.
I have been vegetarian for over twenty five years, but my food is not just for vegetarians. My plant-based recipes are truly egalitarian, for every person who enjoys a flavour-packed, vegetable-heavy dish. No labels required.
In 2015, we packed up our little (now big) family and moved to Brooklyn, New York.
In 2017, I established Peddler Journal, a multicultural food journal, showcasing the small food stories that leave such big impressions on all of us. I am also the host of Peddler’s podcast The House Specials.
I am a regular contributor to New York Times Cooking, Bon Appétit, Epicurious, and my work can be seen on Food52, Food & Wine, The Guardian and more. I have a regular monthly column in ABC Lifestyle which I have been writing since 2017. I also write a monthly Substack newsletter called To Vegetables, With Love and you can subscribe to that here.
