Named for Malulee Pinsuvana, author of Cooking Thai Food In American Kitchens, Malulee's Kitchen was a project throughout 2017, celebrating Asian American, Pacific Islander, and Asian Immigrant food and community funded by the Y. L. Hoi Memorial Award. In providing platform for API creatives of all kinds to tell their food narratives, Malulee's Kitchen soughts to both strengthen AAPI community and highlight our diverse experiences.
Malulee's Kitchen produced cooking lessons, recipe cards, take-home print goods, a pop-up library, and a zinefest in collaboration with sites such as R House, Smithsonian's Freer and Sackler Galleries, and the Walters Art Museum and creators like Sunmi and Dinner on Demand B'more.
Through this project, I developed and illustrated all promotional assets; coordinated the featured creatives, host sites, and organizations; curated a library of cookbooks, comics, zines, children’s literature, academic essays, and prose entirely by API creative teams; and hosted and lead panels, demonstrations, and booths at events with crowds as small as five and as large of fifty-thousand.
Karipap (curry puffs) are a tasty snack eaten in Thailand and throughout Southeast Asia. For the inaugural Malulee's Kitchen event, I had a pop-up cooking lesson and mini comic shop all about karipap!
Sunmi, the intrepid illustrator for the budae jjigae recipe card!!
Chef B of Dinner On Demand with her own scrumptious & unique take on the recipe!!
With Smithsonian's Freer & Sackler Galleries, Malulee's Kitchen brought a whole booth to ILLUIMINASIA 2017, a festival in the National Mall with over 50,000 attendees celebrating the the AAPI community and the FS's reopening!
Our booth featured a pop-up library of comics, zines, and cookbooks all by API artists and writers and a DIY cookbook zine!
We distributed over 700 copies of our recipe cookbook, featuring recipes by local AAPI food professionals!
There wasn't a moment where someone wasn't reading, drawing, coloring, learning recipes, or making new friends who love food, comics, and art!
For our last event of 2017, we partnered with the Walters Art Museum to put together an all-AAPI zinefest, a demonstration and tasting of coconut sticky rice with mango, a screening of Grace Lee's Off the Menu: Asian America, and following panel discussion!!
Our participants! Clockwise from top left: Margaret Huey, Jasjyot Singh Hans, Mallory Yu, Derrick Quevedo, June Culp, Steph Hsu, Jade F. Lee, Michelle Lu, Ann Xu, Sunmi (not pictured: Maria Victa, BARS (Baltimore Asian Resistance in Solidarity) )