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Small Bites:
📖 Purchase Beth’s cookbook The Essential Jewish Baking Cookbook on Bookshop or Amazon
🔪 Must-have kitchen recommendations from Beth for making cooking with kids that much easier, including a zester and adjustable height kitchen step stool
👨🍳 Purchase the Kids Cook Real Food eCourse so your kids can learn how to cook and not simply follow a recipe – give them the life skills to not only survive, but thrive! Here’s a free preview from KCRF: Request a free sample lesson of the “Kids Cook Solo” program, so you can see if it’s a good fit for you and your family!
🍽️ Make Family Meal Time Easier with Peas & Hoppiness Meal Planning App from our friend registered dietitian Ann Kent. Use code ONEPOTATO30 for a 30-day trial.
The Jewish holiday of Passover may have just wrapped, but in Beth A. Lee’s kitchen, the flavors, memories, and rituals of Jewish food are always on the table. Beth is the voice behind OMG! Yummy, a longtime food blog where she’s chronicles her family’s multicultural table—blending Jewish, Korean, and Hawaiian traditions with her love of Middle Eastern ingredients, baking, and storytelling. Her first cookbook, The Essential Jewish Baking Cookbook, came out in 2021, and she’s currently co-authoring a second with her childhood best friend.
As we head into May—celebrated as both Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month and Jewish American Heritage Month—Beth reflects on the power of dumplings, family traditions, and how her late son helped spark her path to writing about food. She shares gorgeous food photos and delicious, approachable recipes on Instagram, co-writes a newsletter on Substack about Middle Eastern ingredients, and also leads cooking classes that invite home cooks to explore heritage baking and global flavors with confidence.
Beth’s kitchen wisdom? Take shortcuts when you need to. Don’t stress over picky eaters. Expand your cooking repertoire one ingredient at a time. And don’t wait to ask a grandparent (or a parent!) how they make that recipe. From sweet rugelach to miso-marinated butterfish, Beth’s story is full of heart—and a beautiful reminder that every family tradition has to start somewhere.
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Looking to have multicultural flavors delivered right to your door? Head on over to Zingerman’s or Goldbelly!
If you don’t have a family rugelach recipe like Beth, order a gift box of (Better than) Bubbe’s Sweet Treats Gift Box from Zingerman’s mail order — the online shop for food lovers. Want something a little more savory? Try their German Challah Bread. YUM!
Goldbelly is your destination to shop gourmet food and meal kits for delivery nationwide; to experience more of Beth’s families food heritage, shop these Hawaiian Food Gifts or Korean Meal Kits from Goldbelly.
You can also order Beth’s cookbook, The Essential Jewish Baking Cookbook: 50 Traditional Recipes for Every Occasion: Shop Now 🍽️ (Amazon)
One Potato’s Order Up! Interview: How Beth weaves Jewish, Hawaiian, and Korean food traditions into a kitchen full of flavor and family history
Introduce Yourself:
My name is Beth Lee and I live in San Jose, California with my husband, also known as “Dormant Chef”. I’m a cookbook author, cooking teacher and preserved lemon lover. My family is a mix of Jewish, Hawaiian and Korean heritage. With a little tech support from my late son, I started OMG! Yummy – my cooking blog. When I started blogging, I discovered something really intriguing: the best stories are told in the kitchen and everyone who has a kitchen (or eats in one), has a story.
You write about the power of stories and food memories, and the influence of your own family traditions on your food journey. Do you have a favorite memory of cooking with your mom, parents, or grandparents that stands out?
My grandmother was a brilliant baker and before we moved to the west coast, I insisted on visiting her tiny Brooklyn apartment to watch her make challah (Jewish traditional egg bread made every Friday for Shabbat). This was before the digital age so my mom and I drew silly pictures with a knife-sharpened pencil on the back of an old envelope. Even worse, my grandmother baked without measurements so she tried to relay the amounts in drinking glasses that we drew in our scrawled notes. Needless to say, it took me years and years and years to get up the courage to use those notes to recreate her recipe. But that memory is still so sweet in my mind – picturing her standing at her kitchen table making her weekly challah (all the way into her 90s!).
You have shared that your “blog was my springboard to document our family food experiences for generations to come.” Can you share one family food tradition or recipe that your children love and will likely carry on?
When I think about sharing recipes and cooking with my children – well, one of my children passed away in 2017 when he was 22. But he was a great cook and also a huge inspiration for me starting my blog. We make rugelach (a tiny rolled and filled pastry) for Hannukah every year. It’s not really a typical Hannukah food but it is for us! When the kids were little, we involved them early in learning how to prepare the multi-step cookie. So I hope my daughter, who is a great baker, will carry that tradition forward. We also make Korean dumplings called mandu every year and have been training our daughter to fold for the last few years. It’s hard to pick one thing – we love all kinds of foods – we asked our daughter to make a top 5 list of best family dinners and it was quite eclectic from roasted tomato sauce to 3-day marinated miso butterfish!
You describe your family as a mix of Jewish, Hawaiian, and Korean heritage. How have those influences shaped your cooking and your approach to sharing recipes?
Our multi-faceted family heritage strongly influences our family travel, family food traditions, and my food creation and research. I consider it part of my responsibility to ensure our eclectic heritage is passed on to our children or is at least available when our daughter is ready to access it. I remember my mother-in-law cooking Korean food for us once a year and at the time, I was mostly too busy with the kids and work to do more than just be grateful she was cooking. Now, how I wish she was still here and I could stand by her side learning every step. Sometimes when we are young, we can’t quite understand why recipes and family food traditions will matter down the road. So, my blog and my book(s) are a way to make that knowledge available when our family or anyone around the world wants/needs that information to help them piece together their own family traditions or help to create new ones.
With such a multicultural approach to cooking, do you have advice to give to parents who want to bring more global flavors into their family meals but are short on time? Or maybe they’re struggling with picky eaters?
If you’re pressed for time – take shortcuts! Don’t feel guilty if you don’t have time to make new foods from scratch. Find a happy medium. Want to introduce dumplings but no time to make your own? There are really good frozen options at Costco and Asian grocery stores. Use them as a base for your meal and add fresh veggies and rice. Or pick one ingredient from a cuisine you want to learn more about and just add that to your repertoire. For example, if you want to learn about Middle Eastern cuisines and flavors, pick a spice blend like za’atar and learn about its flavors and ways to use it. Don’t feel compelled to tackle a whole cuisine or new way of cooking all at once.
If you have a picky eater, be patient – kids’ tastes evolve, so if at first they only want plain pasta and butter and aren’t interested in other foods and flavors, don’t force it. On the other hand, don’t shield them from trying anything as soon as they are able. I’ve seen young children, including my grandniece, be open to so many interesting textures and tastes from almost the minute she started eating solids.
Many of our readers love involving their kids in cooking. Are there specific recipes or activities you’d recommend for making cooking fun and approachable for kids?
As soon as they are comfortable, buy one of the special step stool-like devices for the kitchen that shield a young one from full access to the counter, make them taller and still allow them to observe and to participate! Get them involved in any way you can as soon as you can. Keep expectations low – don’t expect their first decorated cookies to be masterpieces. Or their first anything to be perfect. Just let them see that ingredients can be turned into delicious food they can eat. We have a family tradition of cooking together on Christmas day (we observe Christmas non-religiously as well as Hannukah) – and each of us picks a course and is responsible for it. We did that with friends on NYE also – gives everybody something to be proud of when you sit down for the meal.
We’re really inspired by your food journey as a parent. For parents who want to start creating their own family food traditions, where would you recommend they begin?
Follow your instincts about what your family gravitates towards or gets excited about around the table. Travel if it’s possible and take note of foods of the regions you visit. Take cooking classes at home and when you travel. Eat at different restaurants that represent different cultures in your community. Talk to your relatives and ask about written recipe history or old family cookbooks or take video or pictures when you are together to document technique or remember the foods. Even if you don’t think you are “into food”, eventually that history will matter to you or your children. We have the technology now to easily preserve things so use it! Our families don’t have a lot written down from previous generations but I am making sure that what we do now, doesn’t disappear!
Do you have a favorite kitchen tool or a chef-approved cooking skill that you use all the time that you think home cooks should practice or have under their belt?
Kitchen tool – I love citrus in all forms and one of the easiest ways to extract citrus flavor and add it to sweet and savory dishes is by using a microplane for zesting. A microplane is also great for grating parmesan cheese, nutmeg, ginger and garlic. The microplane might be my favorite kitchen tool.
Chef-approved skill? Related to the zester – building and layering flavor is really what cooking is all about. Stock your pantry with flavor makers – citrus as already mentioned, dried and fresh herbs and spices, soy sauce, just to name a few. You can take an unflavored can of beans and turn it into something delicious just by adding a flavor-maker or two.
Any final quick tips?
If you are trying to introduce more vegetarian or vegan dishes into your repertoire, remember to look to other cuisines, such as Indian, Greek, Italian and Middle Eastern cuisines (only a few examples!) where many super flavorful dishes are also naturally vegetarian or vegan. Not as an alteration but in original form.
