When I cook, when I cook because I want to be cooking, it’s about taste, opening up some memory inside. Spicy fish belly and too much rice wine, or lamb meat sticks, cut in tiny one inch pieces, stabbed through on bamboo skewers, meat, fat, meat, fat…No big chunks  or goofy burned peppers and tomato bullshit. If they get cold they’re ruined, lamb’s fat is a luscious thing hot, but once it goes cold its ruined,  grainy and pasty, like a gamey Crisco…

 Back in Shanghai , next to some bar at 3am growling through meat sticks, some 12 year old kid feeds another piece of charcoal into his makeshift bicycle BBQ. I’m two fisted, slugging down a half dollar beer in one hand with spicy lamb juice running down the other,  a big fat, drunken grin on my face, like a stupid round-eye pig and the kid is smiling ear to ear, laughing at me and my broken Chinese…

Back in Boston on a bright summer day I’m looking for the fucking ground red pepper…”Rachel, where’s the red pepper,” I yell to my wife, who of course knows where the red pepper flakes are, “Asshole” I mutter under my breath, not so much at her, but at the ignorance that I’m making Yang Rou Chuan “Lamb meat stick” and she can’t understand the importance of the red pepper being powdered. How can it be the same I’m yelling inside at myself, how can these boring ass friends of mine understand the glory of these meat sticks without powdered red pepper?

So I bust through the cabinet for the coffee grinder, pour a bunch of dried red chilies in, burr them up real quick and pour this fire red powder into a little bowl. I’m ready.

Everyone’s at the table and I’m watching the lamb start to brown, the fat is letting go and the oil is dripping into the coals like napalm, I pull them off the heat, dust them up with some cumin and  red chili and roll them back across the fire real quick, just like the kid in China.

I bring them over on a white plate and stick them in the middle of the table…The meat sticks are still bubbling and I insist everyone take one, I push them up to their mouths saying “eat now, while they’re hot…” “They’re a little spicy,” one lady says a weird look on her face “I like the sauce,” says another one, and instantly I hate them. The people, not the meat sticks.

So I missed it, I boned the lamb, ground the chilies and skewered white chunks of fat all day in an attempt to go back in time.  Trying to relive a moment the way someone looks at a photograph. Those  ½ teaspoon of this cookbook readers might not understand it, but great cooking is an expression of the past, seasoned through your lens. Inspired by everything before,  cutting through your mind and cooking your memories…