To Asia, With Love

McKinnon’s fourth cookbook and the one that brought her to international attention. To Asia, With Love is a joyous celebration of the foods and flavors she grew up with as a Chinese girl born in Australia, now filtered through decades of cooking and a life built in Brooklyn.

Why Start Here

To Asia, With Love is the book where McKinnon’s voice comes through most clearly. It is personal, warm, and unapologetically rooted in the specific experience of being a child of immigrants learning to claim a culinary identity. The recipes are entirely vegetarian but never feel like they are missing anything. You will learn to make knife-cut noodles, dumplings, chili oil, and kimchi from scratch, alongside quicker preparations like miso-glazed eggplant and turmeric coconut rice.

What makes this a better starting point than her award-winning Tenderheart is scope and accessibility. At 256 pages, it is focused and inviting rather than encyclopedic. The recipes work with supermarket ingredients, the techniques are approachable, and the headnotes give you just enough context to understand why each dish matters to her. For anyone curious about vegetarian Asian cooking, this is the most welcoming door into McKinnon’s world.

What to Expect

A 256-page hardcover with warm photography and personal essays woven between the recipes. Organized around the building blocks of Asian home cooking: noodles, dumplings, rice, salads, and sweets. Named one of the New York Times Best Cookbooks of Summer 2021 and recommended by Nigella Lawson. The difficulty level is genuinely accessible, with most recipes achievable on a weeknight.