Ava Chin's Blog

This is my grandfather. I didn’t know him at this age, and yet, in a way I did.

A bartender and manager at restaurants across NYC and Long Island, he was charming, playful, and rarely serious. He was constantly cracking corny jokes that would have my cousins and me in stitches, and some of my earliest memories are from when I was a baby hoisted onto his shoulders, able to touch the ceiling at intervals spaced out by the buoyancy of his gait.

He taught me how to play blackjack when I was in grad...

I’m so happy to announce that Eating Wildly—which was named by Library Journal as one of the Best Books of 2014 (memoir)—is a semi-finalist in the Goodreads Choice Awards 2014! The Choice Awards are kind of like the American Idol for books, where every vote counts. (America, please vote for me!)

I’m up against heavy-hitters like Ina Garten, Yotam Ottolenghi, Thug Kitchen (Gwyneth Paltrow’s fav), and the entire Pollan family (whoa!)

If you’re on Goodreads, would you please vote Wildly?

Voting end...

I couldn’t be happier about Eating Wildly being nominated for a #GoodreadsChoice Award 2014 (Food & Cookbook category)! The Choice Awards are chosen by readers like you, so that makes them extra-special—and sort of like the American Idol of Book Awards. (Please America, vote for my book!)

If you enjoyed Eating Wildly, or just want to support a book that weaves cultural identity, self-discovery, and sustainability with the culinary history of wild plants and mushrooms, then please vote for it....

I love onion-y ramps—whether paired with morel mushrooms, sautéed or grilled in pasta, or pickled—and one my favorite activities in the spring is to go foraging for them.

On May 13th, the day of my book launch (Eating Wildly), I went into the woods with some dear forager friends and collected ramps from our favorite area north of the city. Also known as spring onions, wild garlic, and wild leek, Allium tricoccum are in the onion family and native to the eastern part of the U.S. (and up through...

Wild, protected sea kale, enjoying the summer sun in Dungeness

A shorter version of this essay was sent out on a Binders email and appears on Bindersink.

I’m writing from a coastal town in southeast England, wheresea kalethe size of Easter baskets proliferates along the rocky shoreline, and thestinging nettlesand blackberries flourish along the hedges. The sea kale is protected here, so I leave it alone, but it doesn’t stop me from coveting it out of the corners of my eyes and desiring to serve...

In celebration of #NationalEatYourVegetablesDay, this summer, I’m going to showcase some of the most sustainable wild vegetables that are available and growing all around us, most likely in your backyard, garden, or local park. Wild edibles are higher in phytonutrients—that’s antioxidants, and good, old-fashioned nutrients that are inherent to the flora—than most vegetables found in our modern agriculture, because they haven’t had the nutrients bred right out of them.

I’ve been talking about l...

What a whirl-wind last few weeks it’s been! Book tour can be exhausting, especially a DIY-tour, which has had me dashing off between coasts (thank you USC English department!) and venues in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Mystic CT. Here are some tour highlights, and tips at the end for avoiding Mommy Melt-downs.

Edible Manhattan: I had the pleasure of foraging with a wonderful writer and photographer in Central Park for Edible Manhattan’s summer issue. With the beautiful warm weather, the wild edible...

Eating Wildly at the Corner Bookstore

Happy Publication Day! Last night was the first NYC event for Eating Wildly, and we had a full house at the Corner Bookstore on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. What an amazing night as friends and neighbors came to hear me give a brief reading from the book and a foraging slideshow presentation.

I was all aglow from the high of sharing the book—and because I was simply honored to be on Huffington Post’s “9 Contemporary Authors You Should Be Reading” list and F...

Baby Morchella esculenta can only be found every spring, in the wild

Ah, reviews. I’m no expert on this by any means, but because I’ve worn so many hats through the years as a working writer and performing artist (slam poetry anyone?), where I’ve gotten rave as well as negative reviews, been both buoyed as well as taken to task by online readers, as well as toiled in relative obscurity, I think I know a tiny bit about the rush, pain, and elation of criticism.

Firstly, every writer and artist I...

Memoir has it’s particular challenges, especially if the folks you have written about are still alive. I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, as Eating Wildly is about to be released in just a few short days. My writing students are always asking me about the pitfalls of writing about people you know, and at least once a semester I go over something that sounds like “Mistakes I’ve Made in Memoir Writing,” which include having people I love getting mad at me and my scrambling attempts t...