Maggie Zhu’s food blog Omnivore’s Cookbook started out as a way of making her family recipes more approachable for a non-Chinese audience. Born and raised in Beijing and now living in New York, her road to becoming a successful food blogger actually began elsewhere—in Japan.
“My culinary adventure started in 2007 in Japan because I needed to cook to survive,” writes Zhu on her website. “My first homemade dish was Japanese style stir fried sweet and sour chicken. I cooked it in a second-hand nonstick skillet where whatever I put in stuck. Yet the result was super delicious and made my surroundings feel like home.”
It was in Japan where Zhu changed her approach to cooking. “I love the meticulous way that a Japanese cookbook writes a recipe,” she says. “That is where I started and developed my own style of cooking and teaching. I was delighted to discover that Japanese websites and cookbooks actually tell you measurements, unlike Chinese cookbooks.”
According to Zhu, her grandma never used any measurement and her mom rarely does. Recreating the traditional Chinese dishes from her childhood, meant, therefore, taking note of the proper ingredient measurements. It also meant lightly tweaking the cooking process so that the recipes are easier to follow in a standard western kitchen.
Fast-forward to 2015, and Zhu moved to the US. “Learning and sharing Chinese food became a way to connect me with my roots and the rest of the world,” she explains. “I also like to use Chinese ingredients to make fun dishes, like adding doubanjiang into Arrabiata Pasta and use Sichuan seasonings to make Chili.”
According to Zhu, these days her mission is to help more people get to know real Chinese food, and expose less-known regional cuisines, such as Northern and Xinjiang food, to a broader audience. “It’s highly diverse and universal and personal,” she said of Chinese food in an interview with Celestial Peach. “I once chatted about Chinese New Year traditions with my coworkers (they were from different parts of China), and I was shocked to hear that no one does the same thing.”
This diversity comes across her equally appetizing Instagram page. We highly recommend you follow her!
