Special Sauce: Chef Anita Lo on Cooking for Yourself [2/2]

On this week's Special Sauce, Chef Anita Lo talks about her new cookbook, Solo: A Modern Cookbook for a Party of One. To Anita, cooking for yourself is a journey of self-discovery. "I think cooking can be self re-affirming," she says. "I mean if food is culture and you're cooking what you like to eat, it's about you. It's about who you are...Food is identity."

She also says cooking for yourself is therapeutic and thought-provoking. "I've had a lot of people say to me that this book made them think about how far they'd go to cook for themselves and why they wouldn't do that," she notes. "That's interesting to me. I mean it, we need to take care of ourselves. If you don't take care of yourself, there's no way you can take care of other people."

Anita also obliged me by outlining for me in detail what exactly would happen on Anita Lo Day all over the world, including a long list of activities that starts with with, "People are eating. People are eating with abandon."

In other words, they're eating seriously.

To find out what else they're doing, you're going to have to listen to the always thoughtful Anita Lo on this week's Special Sauce.

The full transcript for this episode can be found over here at Serious Eats: https://www.seriouseats.com/2019/02/special-sauce-anita-lo-2-2.html