Enjoying breakfast at the BluJam Cafe in Los Angeles.
Photograph courtesy of Mike Ross.
Hi! I'm Edith. If you've met me at all, you know I love to cook and bake. More specifically, I love to cook and bake for other people. I love feeding other people.
I'm self-taught, learning through online cooking blogs, baking/cooking books, and random memories of watching other people cook.
Contrary to what it may seem like, I didn't grow up cooking, much less baking. The oven was used to store extra pots and pans, and we made the occasional carrot cake from the red-and-white-plaid-covered Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook. Now that I think back, I had a fascination with reading the recipes, especially for making candy (which I still have never really done). I think what I found so fascinating was the chemical reactions that occurred while baking/cooking.
I picked up baking around the fall of 2006... I really didn't know much about baking. I just knew that things some how went together and went into the oven, and voila, baked foods that people really like to eat! I didn't even know that most cookies, when first taken out of the oven, are soft and needed to be cooled to harden. After a while, I became known at work and in my dance group as the girl who brought the baked goods. I also love throwing parties. Mainly because I spend 2-3 days straight making enough food the feed the Chinese army.
Some people called my Izzy (from Grey's Anatomy), others called me the girl from Stranger Than Fiction (Ana).
Okay, so I might be an Izzy, but I don't think of myself as an Ana. I could never open my own bakery.
As much as I love baking/cooking for other people, I don't think I could do it professionally. I hate business. I hate the concept of money. Still, after having graduated and not found a job, following the advice of many, I decided to start a small baking "business" to pay for things such as groceries. Feeding myself is a good idea as well.
Order of cupcakes for a little girl's birthday party.
I love experimenting with recipes, taking a basic one and seeing what I can do with it. I've also been trying to learn how to cook Chinese/Taiwanese foods. Unfortunately, I never really had a chance to learn from my parents, but random clips and memories of my mother or my grandmother working in the kitchen surface here and there. I loved watching them cook. The rest, I've been learning from my lovely dance girls of the Fei Tian Dancers, because, for some reason, most of us love cooking and, of course, eating.
My lovely Fei Tian Dancers. Photograph courtesy of Wilson So.
I love dancing. I love rockclimbing. I love backpacking. Unfortunately, my body hates the fact that I love them and falls apart way too easily.
I love Chinese food. I love Japanese food. I love soups. I love fruits.
Oddly, I don't really like cake, and I don't care much for cookies. Unless they're oatmeal raisin cookies. And Oreos. I don't know why I love such processed foods, but I love Oreos.
I'm also a sucker for dark chocolate. I love a good, delicious bar of Fair Trade Certified dark chocolate. I also guiltily love Ferrero Rochers and Lindt Extra Dark Chocolate Truffles, even though they're not Fair Trade Certified.
Oh yeah, and bread. I love my carbs. If nobody stopped me, I could eat a whole loaf of french bread on its own. Or maybe two loaves. Okay, but I stop at 5 loaves, because that's just silly.
I love photography. I particularly love photography in the format of photojournalism; something that will hopefully explain the world in photographs.
And finally, I love traveling. I especially love traveling to another country to do work on poverty, health, and education. Hopefully soon, I will be on my way to getting my PhD, doing research on international development.
