2014-01-22-Christine Ha
Seminars@Hadley
Catching Up with MasterChef Christine Ha
Presented by
Christine Ha
Moderated by
Dawn Turco
January 22, 2014
Dawn Turco
Good afternoon and welcome to today's seminar at Hadley. I'm Dawn Turco and I'm moderating today's seminar and we are catching up with MasterChef Christine Ha. Since her MasterChef win in season 3 and last visited with us here at Seminars@Hadley, and I encourage you to go listen to that seminar if you haven't heard it already.
Christine has been quite busy. She has completed her cookbook, which is called Recipes from My Home Kitchen, and I'm sitting with a copy right here on my desk.
She's also traveled extensively and has a number of new projects on her plate. So we thought it was time to catch up and it's really difficult to know where to begin. I have so many questions I do want to ask, but Christine, let me first start with welcoming you back to Seminars@Hadley and thanking you for your time today.
I think as I hand the microphone over to you I'll get us started talking about this cookbook, and I would like to know how does one even start a cookbook. How do you develop your concept, test your recipes, how did this book come about? I'm handing it off to you Christine.
Christine Ha
Hi Dawn. Hi everyone. I just first wanted to thank you Hadley for having this show and having me on this seminar. And thank you to everyone that's listening. To answer your question Dawn about writing the cookbook, it was a very arduous process. I was expected to write this cookbook to have it out and published in time for the fourth season to begin so they could market it all together, so I was told by the editors that I was supposed to write this cookbook in about a third of the time that a normal cookbook of this caliber would take. So I was given a few months to come up with recipes and test them and have the photo shoot and have the book all put together, have the stories written with each recipe, so it was very -- a very arduous process as I said.
At the time, it was a lot of work and the process of me coming up with the recipes was I just thinking to what sorts of recipes people would be looking for in my cookbook and I knew that they would have to be recipes that I cooked on a show that did well and other recipes that sort of reflect my particular style of cooking, which I would call mostly comfort foot and because that's the food that I enjoy eating and cooking the most. I enjoy eating and cooking all sorts of food, but when it really comes to it at the end of the day I really enjoy comfort foot. And I especially also cooked a lot of Asian flavors, and so I knew that that would also be something, an aspect of the recipes in my cookbook.
So what I did was I pulled together a core staple of recipes that I knew I wanted to include in the cookbook, and once I had those together I sent them to my editors and they would sort of fiddle around with them and categorize them and see what sort of natural organization process they could place on these recipes. And then that's how the chapters were formed. And then we saw the obvious theme of the cookbook was Asian and American comfort food. And then we went back and saw okay, which chapters had less recipes than the others and we tried to fill out those and then I would have to come up with more recipes.
And it was me coming up with the recipes, testing them, sending them to the editor who also tested them and had I think a few assistants who also tested the recipes just so there were several people going through the recipes to make sure that they were solid and could stand on their own and made sense. And then we had food stylists who also prepared the recipes for the cookbook photos and such. And so that was pretty much the process of writing the cookbook.
Dawn Turco
I just can't imagine the pressure involved in all of that, but it came out just beautifully of course and you filled up 190 plus print pages for goodness sake, so you must be pleased with the result. And for those who are viewing this seminar and are able to see the screen there's a small picture of Christine's cookbook right there and I want to be sure and have you tell us how they can get a hold of your cookbook when we conclude the seminar today, Christine.
Let me ask you, when you are cooking are you one who typically just comes up with your own recipes or are there others that you follow, or do you have a favorite chef you like to check in on and see what other recipes are out there? So do you dabble like a lot of us, I'm always looking at other recipes and using them, including your book.
Christine Ha
Yeah. So coming up with recipes is a very interesting process for myself. In the kitchen, my typical process is I get a lot of my inspiration from other dishes I've tasted. So I like to travel a lot and learn about other cultures through their food, or visit new restaurants or visit well-known restaurants that have been tried and true, all the way from really fancy ones that have Michelin stars all the way to like street foods, and very cheap inexpensive but hardy delicious foods. And so I like to try everything and I get a lot of inspiration from trying different things.
And then I come home and I think about it and then maybe I'll do a little bit of research online, kind of see like, okay where can I find certain ingredients? I go into what are the main components of a particular dish, what sorts of ingredients and supplies do I need to achieve a particular dish I've had. And then I'll read some different articles, maybe read some different recipes and then come to make up my own and think about by now, you know, I cook very frequently and I've eaten at a lot of different places and tried a lot of different foods, so I sort of know kind of off the top of my head without taking it like what sorts of ingredients would go well together.
There is a balance, a really fine balance to make food taste good and it's a balance of sweetness, saltiness, a little bit of bitterness, umami, and then you need something that a lot of people forget when they cook is you need acidity. So when something feels really heavy like if there's a lot of butter or fat or something like that you need to brighten it up a little bit and that is usually achieved by lemon or lime or some kind of citrus, or vinegar, and so that's something that I actually learned on the show is to balance out dishes really well. So then I would take all of this knowledge of the dishes I've tasted and the things I've read online and then try to come up with my own version. And then I would experiment in the kitchen, and that's my cooking process. And I enjoy it very thoroughly.
Dawn Turco
I can see the influence of the other cuisines as you mentioned because the next one I have tagged to try, because it's a favorite of my husband's is the chicken tikka masala, so that's next on my list.
Have you given any thought, I mean I did see you of course on the season four when they brought you out and everybody had a bit of a scare thinking they were cooking blindfolded, but have you given thought to any other cooking shows?
Christine Ha
Funny you should ask that Dawn. I actually have a new cooking show that will premiere this Friday. Unfortunately, it's in Canada. It's not available stateside yet. We filmed it in Toronto. It's a small production. It has me as the visually impaired chef and my cohost is a fully sighted professional chef named Carl Heinrich and he actually won Top Chef Canada, season two, and so he and I team up and cohost a show called Four Senses and it will be airing on the AMI TV network, which is the accessible media network in Canada that has a lot of programs for the visually or hearing impaired and right now it's only available in Canada, but the producer is trying to see if it can either be syndicated in the states or if there might be an American version made stateside, or what not. So I do keep all of my fans updated on all of my various social media, but that is my current forwarding to television.
Dawn Turco
I did actually see an article about that some time ago, so I'm happy to hear that it did happen and we often, and may even today, I don't know, have some Canadian friends on our seminar. So this will be good news for our neighbors to the north.
When Christine and I talked last week she said, "Well, you know I like surprise questions." And so I thought I'd surprise you with one since you kind of opened that door. And I wondered if you're familiar with the television show Chopped? For those of you who may not know about it in this show four chefs come on to compete and they're presented with a wicker basket full of surprise ingredients and the idea is they open the basket and on the spot have to come up with their concept, run to the pantry, get whatever they need for what they're going to do, and then incorporate all the ingredients in some way that's in the basket. And then each show round somebody gets voted off until they get a winner.
So I thought I'd play Chopped with you and here's your virtual basket, Christine. And this would be the main dish round. So you open your basket and inside you find ground pork, fresh pineapple, jalapeno pepper and a simple box of rice pilaf. What would you do? I don't know if I should have a little ticking clock to give you a second to think about it, but I'm going to release the microphone and here you go.
Christine Ha
That's a good question Dawn. I do like thinking on my feet, but this is a pretty scary question, but I think with those ingredients I think immediately what comes to mind is sort of a version of a taco al pastor. So I would probably use the ground pork and add a little bit of cumin, add some hot sauce, some probably cayenne and chili powder and garlic and then I would make that into the base for a taco. Use the pineapple to make a salsa and then probably use the rice pilaf to make it into a sort of Mexican inspired rice to either go in the taco or on the side, and then I would serve it all in a tortilla.
Dawn Turco
You know, and I think those Chopped judges would love that. Very good thinking on your feet, and use of all the ingredients and it sounds like actually a very delicious dish. All right. I won't do that to you again.
You mentioned one of your new projects being the show in Canada. What other projects do you have going these days?
Christine Ha
Well, I have been traveling extensively as you mentioned in my introduction. I do a lot of keynote addresses and inspiring speeches at a lot of different conferences. So that's taken up a lot of time. I find it enjoyable because I get to meet a lot of the people that I inspire and when you're in my position where, you know, I have a lot of fans and it still sounds a little bit strange for me to say fans because you know I came from being an anonymous person that was just like anyone else on the street to being all of a sudden elevated into this position where I'm fortunate to be able to have a platform to motivate and encourage other people, whether with any sort of disability or any other shortcomings or not, to achieve their dreams.
But I think being put in this position sometimes it's a little bit overwhelming and I get a lot of Facebook messages and things, but when you get so many of them sometimes they start blurring together and you don't really realize for at least for me how there is really a person behind these words. And when I go to these conferences and I meet these people, or even like if I get a letter that's really heartfelt from a fan or on my Facebook page or what not, it makes I think everything seem to have a place in my life and it makes me realize more so why I've been put in this position to help other people and I'm really grateful for that because sometimes I lose sight of it, no pun intended. But I do lose sight of why I am in the position that I am, and to meet these people personally and hear their story I really appreciate it. So I think traveling to give these inspiring speeches and meet these people, that have taken up the bulk of my time.
Another thing that a lot of people have been asking is when my restaurant is going to open. There was a lot of talk about me opening up a restaurant in Houston. I've actually put that sort of on the back burner because of this Canadian show and just a lot of other opportunities that have been taking me everywhere. It's very difficult to try to open up a restaurant when you're not really in your home town for much more than a few weeks at a time, and I'm sort of a perfectionist as you can probably tell by my personality on the show, so I would not want to open a restaurant and have it not run to the best of my ability, and so it's a project that I would really want to believe in and stand behind and that would require me to stay in my home town of Houston for probably a year or two straight with very little travel time.
And there's just a lot of other opportunities right now that I'd like to pursue, so I'm sort of slowly still tinkering with the idea and I've been talking to different people about helping me open up a restaurant concept, but it's not something that is happening in the immediate future. Hopefully within a year or two there will be more I guess more of a direction with that, but for now it's sort of been on the back burner. And, you know, I also understand that just because I won a culinary competition doesn't mean that I know how to run a restaurant because that's a whole different animal and a whole different beast in itself, and you need commercial kitchen experience and what not, and so I would just need a really strong team of people behind me that understand my concept and my vision for a restaurant. So that's something that I, you know, is in the talks but isn't in my immediate plans for the future.
Dawn Turco
I was going to ask about that. In fact, here in Chicago every year there's a huge restaurant show, and it's a private kind of a convention. But I have a friend who can get me in and when you look at all that's involved in that industry, as I eat my way through it basically is what I'm there doing, but if you're ever at the restaurant show in Chicago you must let me know and I will get down there and catch up with you for sure.
You know, you mentioned your travel and your keynotes, and the inspiration that those are. I'm wondering if you have any advice or some tips for the timid cooks, or perhaps those who are new to vision loss and hesitant to get back out into the kitchen, but who had that passion earlier on.
Christine Ha
I think cooking for anyone can be intimidating if you're not experienced in it, whether you have vision or not. So I think when a person is ready for it they should get back in the kitchen. First I think you should maybe ask for a sighted friend or family member to help in the kitchen just until you build that confidence where you can start cooking by yourself without a sighted guide to help you. Start small.
I remember, this is a story I tell a lot when I talk about my journey from losing my vision to going on the show and winning the show is I really started losing my vision when I started becoming passionate about cooking, so that was really a difficult thing for me to accept, and the first thing I tried to make when my vision decreased to the level that it is now was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and I could not even make a simple PBJ and that was really heartbreaking for me. And I think just, you know, not even be able to make a sandwich and then going from that and to where I am now it's a lot of small steps and it's a progress. It's just starting from there and learning to accept and learn from your mistakes and then once you get bolder and have more confidence then you can start using a knife slowly or the heating elements.
And then once you can do that with a sighted person around you won't need them anymore and then you'll be able to before you know it start cooking full meals on your own. So it's really about taking the small steps, learning from your mistakes, not being too afraid to pick up that knife or to turn on that stove and just adapting your kitchen to a way that helps you with raised bumped up, so that's what I have on my stove, on my oven buttons, I have talking thermometers, talking digital scale, and all those sorts of things that help me in the kitchen.