Step inside the rainbow realm of Sandita’s World with this new local cookbook

Sandy Ho’s color-splattered cooking is like fine art, and now, with her self-published cookbook series, you can not only look at it but taste it in your own home.

The visual artist-turned-cook behind the pop-up series and catering company Sandita’s World serves curries, noodle bowls, salads and pastries full of vibrancy and texture, flavor and color. Her dishes can appear sculptural — tall peaks of radicchio jutting from a salad or long-stemmed flowers sprouting from a cake — while her signature dumplings and fortune cookies weave psychedelic colorways into the dough.

Her new zine-like cookbook, “Sandita’s Cooking Notes Vol. 1,” contains a handful of recipes from the Vietnamese Australian chef who’s been cooking across L.A. for the last seven years: green, herby congee with chicken salad; almond sesame lemon cake adorned with flowers, raspberry jam and a cloud of whipped cream; large folded discs of salty-crunchy bacon bánh xèo.

It sold out in two days, to Ho’s shock, but she’s planning a second run, and many more volumes to come: Volume two is slated for late July or early August, and will explore seafood and the links between Australia and Los Angeles. The new series of cookbooks, Ho said, could run to as many as 12 volumes.

Sandy Ho, photographed in 2022.

(Jennelle Fong / For The Times)

“It’s just a constant train of thought, of creativity and inspiration,” she said of her new series, “and all of it brings me back to nostalgia — which is such an important word for me and to my practice and what I do.”

The first volume is, in large part, an ode to one of the chef’s most cherished ingredients and one that holds a key to all of the vibrant, funky flavors found in her food: Fish sauce, an overlooked and even avoided item in her childhood, is now a backbone for much of what she creates today.

Her parents fled Vietnam in the wake of the Vietnam War, beginning anew in Australia but holding tight to their own cuisine so far from home. They stored bottles of their favorite fish-sauce brand — Viet Huong Three Crabs — as if they were vintages of fine wine and aged them in the dark accordingly. Ho grew up embarrassed by her parents’ boasting of their collection to guests but would come to embrace it later.

“It’s just a flavor that is in my blood,” she said. “I can be 1,000% sure that out of the womb my mom fed me a spoon of fish sauce. I think for Southeast Asians and Vietnamese people, fish sauce is such a core of so much. It’s part of what makes things taste good for me.”

In elementary school her packed lunches were never sandwiches; the other children couldn’t understand the smell of her meals, like the unctuous beauty of pork belly simmered in fish sauce and sugar.

“For a time,” Ho said, “I really rejected it and I wanted to be a white kid. It was easier on the playground to just ask my mom to make me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.”

But at 10 or 11 she began cooking with her mom at home, and she began to appreciate it, learning to decipher the nuances between those “vintages” in her parents’ fish sauce collection. In her 20s as she began cooking in professional kitchens — first in Sydney, then in Melbourne and eventually across the U.S. — she wondered why these Western cuisines and French restaurants wouldn’t integrate a bit of that amber-tinted umami bomb.

A recipe in Sandy Ho’s new cookbook makes mignonette built from fish sauce, orange, lime, Thai chiles and more.

(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)

By the time she moved to L.A. in 2018 she yearned for the taste of it, and for her parents’ cooking. Out of that nostalgia she began Sandita’s World as a pop-up in her Venice backyard, utilizing shrimp paste, fish sauce and pork. These dinners evolved into pop-ups across the city and a catering business, and while her private clients often request bright, health-minded items, her own hand gravitates toward comforting, nostalgic recipes and fish sauce in her own kitchen.

Her new series of cookbooks is a blend of both, offering familiar dishes done in Ho’s signature, colorful style, packing dishes with textures and freshness.

Ho had been asked to write cookbooks before but didn’t want to add to the cacophony unless she was saying something unique. Then she began to feel that stylistically and in trends, cooking, social media and other forms of ingesting with our eyes as well as our stomachs were becoming uniform.

“I was kind of feeling like everything was just one-dimensional, particularly in terms of cookbooks,” she said, “and so that was really the first urge to do it.”

To bring her punchy, rainbow-hued food to print, she knew she wanted to pen something that felt a little like a diary; handwritten text can be found throughout, as if Ho left margin notes personally in each copy. She sought to create a tactile experience, with various paper textures and translucent pages and inserts, and Mexico City-based creative agency BonTemps helped her bring it all to life.

Ho hopes the new self-published series will bridge the gap between how people know her — through Instagram, where she has tens of thousands of followers across her personal and Sandita’s World accounts — and who she is and how she creates behind the scenes.

“My North Star is cooking and continuing to be creative, and finding outlets to express what I want to express — in any format I want to express it,” Ho said.

Whether you’re waiting for another printing of Ho’s first cookbook volume (follow Ho on Instagram for updates) or you’re hoping to sample her culinary style before volume two releases this summer, here are two recipes from “Sandita’s Cooking Notes Vol. 1” to get you started: both funky, fresh and fragrant with fish sauce.

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Napa Cabbage Chicken Salad

This is a dish that chef-creator Sandy Ho always likes to keep stocked in her fridge. Bright, salty, funky and spicy, it’s a salad that runs the gamut and is worth roasting a chicken for, although it’s just as effective with a store-bought rotisserie chicken. It’s also a recipe that’s flexible when it comes to greens; if napa cabbage is difficult to source, savoy works just as well. Ho serves this salad atop green congee in her cookbook, but it’s delicious as a standalone salad as well. (And if you’re wondering how Ho roasts a chicken — that’s in the cookbook too.)
Get the recipe.
Cook time: 20 minutes. Serves 2.

(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)

Funky Fresh Oysters

Ho can appreciate a classic mignonette of red wine and shallots, but her own version amps up the funk with a fish-sauce base that’s punctuated by spicy pops from Thai chiles, tart-sweet citrus via orange and lime, and brightening herbs, all with an earthy finish thanks to a garnish of ground peanuts. Try your hand at this recipe for one of Ho’s event and at-home staples, and you might never return to basic mignonettes again.
Get the recipe.
Prep time: 30 minutes. Makes 2 dozen.

(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)