"I was born, still am, and will always be hungry," says Chef Ming Tsai, TV personality, cookbook author, and chef and owner of Blue Ginger restaurant in Wellesley, Mass.
For the ever-hungry chef, there is no better holiday than Thanksgiving. "Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, bar none. Our family has an attitude of gratitude and Thanksgiving is the day that really marks that," says Chef Tsai. "And then you just get to chow [down] and eat all day. There is no other holiday where it is okay to eat all day. You don’t have to do anything but eat, eat, and eat."
Forty-four-year-old Chef Tsai’s food obsession is a family trait. The host and executive producer of the public TV show Simply Ming recalls spending summer in Taipei, China, visiting his grandparents and eating, what he describes as 'the best food in the world.' The young, future-chef spent his visits dining on 'incredibly cheap and delicious street food," as well as home cooked food from his Nai-Nai (grandmother) and Yeh-Yeh (grandfather), and also from their personal chef Ah-Hao. "My grandfather really loved to eat and he loved the fact that I loved to eat," he says.
Chef Tsai was raised in Dayton, Ohio, where he spent his summers as a teenager working at his mother’s restaurant, Mandarin Kitchen. Thanksgivings were held at his parents’, Iris and Stephen Tsai's house, rather than at the home of his Nai-Nai and Yeh-Yeh, who had, by then, moved to Dayton. Their holiday food had an East-West flair with a traditional turkey, cranberry sauce, and even packaged stuffing, but right alongside were sticky-rice stuffing with garlic, chives, and ginger and stir-fried bok choy or green beans.
Tsai has carried this marriage of two worlds into his own holiday table with onion, ginger, and lemongrass-infused cranberry sauce, stir-fried vegetables, shiitake gravy, a chorizo and fennel stuffing, his wife Polly Tsai’s apple upside-down cake, and the "pièce de résistance": brined and deep-fried turkey. He learned from his grandparents to "make 20 to 30 percent more food than [the number of] people coming to dinner. This was not only about hospitality," he says, "but in a Chinese household, it is the culture to make sure you never run out of food." Despite the quantity, he insists "nothing is wasted. We want to have leftovers. Nothing is better than a turkey sandwich the next day."
Continue to the recipe: Ming Tsai's Chorizo Stuffing and Chef Ming Tsai's East-West Cranberry Sauce
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