My Cooking Journey I never met my grandmother. She passed away shortly before I was born. Yet she was the biggest influence in my cooking life. Her name was Somjitr, though everyone, including my grandfather, called her Khun Yai, the formal Thai term for maternal grandmother. Specters of her were everywhere in our family''s home in Bangkok, especially around the kitchen, where her presence was most strongly felt. Her culinary prowess was the stuff of family lore. Everything delicious prepared at our house was said to come from Khun Yai''s recipes. "Khun Yai wouldn''t have approved" qualified as a grave slight, while "just like Khun Yai''s" was the highest compliment.

Her most beloved recipe was for namprik pao, an ambrosial blend of fragrant fried shallots and garlic, spicy roasted chili, sour tamarind, salty fish sauce, and sweet palm sugar--the very embodiment of classic Thai flavors. Khun Yai''s namprik pao (page 44) was always present in our family''s kitchen, packed in a tall glass jar with a red plastic lid repurposed from an old Nescafé instant-coffee container. The thick, reddish-brown puree could be mistaken for a dark berry jam but for the glistening layer of red chili oil on top. The chili jam made its way into many dishes in our home. A ladleful to finish a pot of the sour prawn soup called tom yum goong (page 193). Mixed with chopped garlic and bird''s eye chili as a base for spicy stir-fries like the clams on page 240. Whisked with lime juice and fish sauce for a basic yum salad dressing, which is good on just about everything (try the seared scallops recipe on page 97). And, my favorite, spread like sweet jam on a slice of toast for a tasty, if a little pungent, breakfast.

After moving to the United States to attend graduate school, first in Washington, DC, then Los Angeles, and eventually ending up at the University of California San Diego, I found myself unmoored in a sea of unfamiliar flavors. My lifeline was always a treasured jar of Khun Yai''s chili jam--the comforting taste of home--made for me by her premier disciple, my eldest aunt, Chawiwan Kasemkhun, or Pah Pui, as I called her. The chili jam was always selfishly guarded and carefully rationed to last until the next trip home. Sharing was simply out of the question. I had not, nor have I since, known myself to be so disciplined. Becoming a Cook I moved to Silicon Valley to work after graduate school. As I became more settled in California, and the trips back to Bangkok grew less frequent, learning to reproduce the flavors from my childhood became more important, a central project for whenever I did return. Each journey represented an opportunity for kitchen fieldwork: I spent time in the kitchen with Pah Pui and tracked down old relatives and family cooks who apprenticed with my grandmother.

I asked them to share her secrets--and perhaps some of their own--with me. I reveled in spending time in the kitchen in Thailand, pounding, chopping, and cooking my way back to my childhood. The day I mastered Khun Yai''s chili jam was a milestone in my cooking life. It was the day I finally considered myself a proper Thai cook. Before that, I''d only been tinkering, making easy stir-fries and curries from store-bought pastes. A few months earlier in Bangkok, I had carefully observed and helped Pah Pui make a batch of chili jam to take home to California. The supply I carried back was depleting at an alarming rate, and the next trip to Bangkok was still far on the horizon. I had to do something about it.

I pulled out my little black notebook--oil-stained and a little worse for wear, having spent many a hot and humid day in Bangkok kitchens--and set to work. Step by step, I cooked through my notes. I began with peeling and slicing a pound each of shallots and garlic. Make sure you use a sharp knife, my note admonished. A dull knife or a food processor would bruise the alliums, turning them bitter. Then I fried the garlic and shallots in a hot wok. I used far more oil than I thought prudent, but that''s what my notebook--in lieu of Pah Pui looking over my shoulder--said to do. One ingredient after the next, the gooey mess in the wok began to look and smell more like Khun Yai''s chili jam.

By the time I was done whirling the final mixture in the blender (the one modern consolation my aunt allowed), it could have been the same chili jam from the red-top jar on the shelf of my childhood. I made myself a bowl of steaming-hot jasmine rice, stirred in a generous spoonful of the freshly made chili jam, and took the first bite. Leading with a hint of sweetness, followed by the smoky warmth of the chili, a bright acidity from the tamarind, and rounded out with the salty shrimp paste, there it was, my very first batch of chili jam. It wasn''t exactly like Khun Yai''s quite yet, but surely she would have approved. Becoming a Chef In the early 2000s, during the initial waves of social media, I launched a food blog--one of the first!--simply named Chez Pim . It was highly opinionated (me being me, after all). My day job was at Cisco Systems working on a project that regularly took me to Europe. In Paris and London, I spent my spare time and dollars shopping and cooking from local markets and eating in Michelin-starred restaurants and writing about those experiences.

The blog became quite popular, and I was even covered in The New York Times and in The Guardian/Observer in the United Kingdom. As a result of the blog''s success, I wrote my first book, The Foodie Handbook (forgive me the hubris of youth), about those food experiences, mostly with recipes adapted from fancy chefs I''d met. But all the while, what I actually craved was doing something with my hands. I wanted to cook . Living in California, among some of the most beautiful produce in the world, I decided to learn how to make jam. I read everything by Christine Ferber, my favorite French jam maker, who concocts delicious, surprising jams such as raspberry, rose, and lychee. I tasted every jam that I could get my hands on from June Taylor, my favorite not-French jam maker. Based in Northern California, June makes jams that are clear, pure expressions of the local fruits at their peak ripeness.

Then I set out to make my own jams. Aiming for a style that was somewhere in between the two, I wasn''t afraid to explore unusual flavor combinations but always preserved the fruit''s best savors. The jams were my first foray into cooking outside of the circle of family and friends. My one-woman jam company took on a life of her own. I was happy with my jams but was surprised by how much people really loved what I made. My Flavor King pluot jam and blueberry and golden raspberry jam won consecutive Good Food Awards in 2011 and 2012. Jeffrey Steingarten raved about my jams in Vogue magazine. Nigella, yes, that Nigella, tweeted about dreaming of my "peach+saffron" jam.

I sold all my jams en primeur style, at the beginning of each season to subscribers. The big success of my little project brought me to a point where I had to decide if crafting jam full-time was the path for me. Things were becoming almost unmanageable. I was still making all the jams on my own, even harvesting some of the fruit that went into them. Did I want to take the success and expand the jam company? Was that really what I wanted to do when I "grew up"? I knew I made delicious jams. I had access to some of the best fruit available, and I did my best to preserve those fresh flavors. But I didn''t really have anything to say. I had nothing groundbreaking to contribute as a jam maker.

Meanwhile, I looked around at the state of Thai food in the United States. When you went to a Thai restaurant, without even glancing at a menu, you likely knew what you could order. That''s because the chefs were all cooking the same dishes--crowd-pleasers like pad Thai, tom kha gai, and pad see ew, which they knew would help them cover expenses. You could order curry by the color, then tell the server what protein to add and how spicy you want it. That was the extent of Thai cuisine for many people in the United States. But that wasn''t my Thai food, not the flavors I grew up with. Constrained by the economic realities of making ends meet, many Thai restaurants could not afford the care and quality ingredients required to craft the kind of food I had experienced in my family''s kitchen. I wanted to fill that void.

I knew I could. I began crafting a plan to open a restaurant. My aim was not to "elevate" Thai food. Thai cuisine didn''t need that. Rather, I intended to do it justice. Using the best ingredients, I would show the world the depth and breadth of Thai cuisine beyond the simple dishes people thought they knew. That became my mission. An opportunity arose when my friend Doug Zeif called about a tiny restaurant space in a downtown San Francisco hotel that the investment company he worked for had just acquired.

That space in the Parc 55 hotel in Union Square became my first restaurant. I named the restaurant Kin Khao: Kin means "to eat" and khao means "rice." For Thai people, to eat is to eat rice. So colloquially when you say "Kin khao," you mean "Let''s eat!".