Mahboubeh Abbasgholizadeh and Lisa Kyung Gross, The League of Kitchens Cookbook
Saturday, November 16, 2024, 11:00 am - 11:45 am
Stop by the Foodwise Classroom for a cooking demo featuring the seasonal bounty of the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market. The demo will feature Mahboubeh “Mab” Abbasgholizadeh cooking a recipe from The League of Kitchens Cookbook by Lisa Kyung Gross.
Mab was born and raised in Khorramshahr, a city with a large Arab population in southern Iran. Her father owned a restaurant, a grocery store, and a tea importing company, and he taught her about picking the best ingredients for every recipe. Her mother taught her how to cook, often making dishes from the Azeri region of northern Iran, where both of Mab’s parents grew up. When cooking with her family, Mab learned to go “low and slow” to bring out the incredible flavors and smells of the food that would transport them back to Azeri. For Mab, cooking is the intersection between culture, memory, medicine, nature, and art. This intersectional approach to cooking is clear in the delicious, stunning, and meaningful dishes she teaches in her League of Kitchens workshops. Mab is both a documentary filmmaker and an activist—involved in the Iranian Revolution in the late 1970s, she was later persecuted by the Islamic Republic as a vocal advocate for women’s rights. After being imprisoned three times during the 2000s for organizing peaceful protests, she fled Iran and moved to New York City as a political refugee. She now lives in Oakland, California, with one of her two adult daughters, and also teaches mindfulness meditation. Mab and her incredible food have been featured in New York Magazine (Grubstreet), Food & Wine, Slow Food USA, Wall Street Journal, Saveur, Good Food Podcast, Keep Calm and Cook On with Julia Turshen, and other publications.
Lisa Kyung Gross is the founder/CEO of League of Kitchens, a unique culturally immersive cooking experience in New York City and online where immigrant women, who are exceptional home cooks, teach their family recipes. LoK has been featured in Food and Wine Magazine, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Oprah Magazine, and on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, among others. Saveur called it “The multicultural cooking school you’ve been waiting for.” As the daughter of a Korean immigrant and a Jewish New Yorker, Lisa was raised on one grandmother’s denjang-guk and the other’s matzoh ball soup. League of Kitchens is born out of her love of cooking, her connection to the immigrant experience, and her desire to connect people across difference. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two daughters.
All demos take place in the Foodwise Classroom (under the tents in front of the Ferry Building) and are free to the public, with recipes and samples for all.
The demo will be followed by a book signing with book sales courtesy of Book Passage.