What local restaurant Border Grill’s chef-owner Susan Feniger gleefully refers to as the `the cyclone that is my life’ just packed up considerable fresh momentum. Along with co-authors Kajsa Alger and Liz Lachman, she has just come out with a new book, STREET Food: Irresistibly Crispy, Creamy, Crunchy, Spicy, Sticky, Sweet Recipes, promotion for which is now in full swing.
She recently launched it at a lunch that was part of Los Angeles Food and Wine Festival’s signature Celebrity Chef Power Lunch Series at their Hollywood restaurant Street on Fri, 8/12, where they talked up exotic spices, global cooking and traveling the world, along with servings of a generous sampling of STREET favorites, custom cocktails and wine. Then they sent guests off with custom spice packets to give the old Hamburger Helper and Shake N Bake a break and instead try some exotic street food in their own kitchens.
She will next be promoting the book next at another huge local event, the LA Times Taste at Paramount Studios over the Labor Day weekend. She will be doing a cooking demonstration using a recipe from the book at 12:45pm at the Field to Fork Session hosted by Jonathan Gold and Evan Kleiman on Sept 2.
Her first love, Susan says, has always been food, and the search for ever more interesting and challenging food have helped her discover her second love – learning about people and their cultures. “Nothing pleases me more,” she says, “than to travel in some foreign place, stop at a little stand on the street for some amazing dish I’ve never heard of, and suddenly find myself engaged in a conversation with a complete stranger.”
With cooking and eating as the only shared language on her globe trotting adventures, this interest has helped her forge bonds with rice farmers in Vietnam, women baking flatbread in Turkey, and nomad cheesemakers in Mongolia.
Since the book Street Food is a culinary spice trail from global kitchens to the authors’ Hollywood restaurant, the Introduction gets you going by breaking down the international spice cupboard into the basic flavor types.
Eighty three recipes follow, classified into chapters labelled Starters and Small Bites, Salads, Vegetables & Grains, Land and Sea, Curry & Tofu & Noodles, Chutneys & Pickles & Other Condiments, Basic Spice Mixes & Pastes, Sweets, Elixirs & Tonics & Lhassis.
A sampling of the tantalising range is enough to get your mouth watering. It includes Artichokes with Lemon Za’tar Sauce, Thai Drunken Shrimp with Rice Noodles, Korean Glazed Short Ribs with Sesame and Asian Pear, Coconut Curry Caramel Corn, Ukranian Spinach Dumplings with Lemon Marmalade and Sour Cream, Olive Bread Fattoush with Jerusalem Artichokes, Curried Sweet Potato Pancakes, Trinidad Duck and Potato Curry with Plantain and Green Beans, Turkish Doughnuts with Rose Hip Jam.
Alongside the recipes are personal travel stories and over a hundred photographs. There are tips on ingredients and readily available substitutions that will make it easy for you to
shake up your own cooking repertoire and add some exotic sizzle.
“I believe that in any country, what you see and taste on the street is the best food you’ll find,” she says, “because it’s usually one family’s recipe handed down and perfected over generations. There aren’t any frills; there’s no service; all the focus is on the food.”
“Only at a street stand, barely speaking the same language,” she asserts, “can you start out as a customer and end up invited home to cook with the chef’s mother or grandmother.”
Her secret? They cook, she learns.
For more information, visit www.streetfoodbook.susanfenigersite.com