food blogger, television personality and cookbook author

MOLLY YEH cooks and eats seasonally. But at the moment, she’s in a time warp. But

The calendar says that it’s autumn, the heart of the High Holidays, a time of celebration and reflection between Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish new year) and the day of atonement, Yom Kippur. The just-aired episode of her Food Network cooking show, “Girl Meets Farm,” (for which she was nominated for both a Daytime Emmy Award for outstanding culinary host and a James Beard Foundation Award in 2019) concurs. Filmed on the northwestern Minnesota farmstead that Yeh shares with her husband and new baby girl, it’s mix of hearty Oktoberfest fare, and sweet and savory treats with a twist — both seasonally appropriate and indicative of her approachable, mix-it-up style.

It’s a pretty harvest scene. But the weather — surprisingly summery now, with major snowfall looming in the forecast — seems to have missed the fall memo. That’s probably just as well, since inside Yeh’s sunny prairie kitchen, it’s already December.

The award-winning food blog that launched this farmhouse empire, My Name Is Yeh, is in full recipe development mode. Like most of Yeh’s oeuvre , this recent crop of holiday recipes deconstructs old favorites and playfully reassembles them into new forms. And since Christmas and Hanukkah overlap this year, Yeh — who grew up with a Chinese Christian father and a mother with Hungarian Jewish ancestry — is planning a gleeful celebration as unapologetically food focused as the ones she grew up with. That’s an impressive goal considering her family’s annual international dumpling bash has been known to induce food comas due to excessive consumption of steamed buns and cheese blintzes.

“Every holiday was based around the food,” Yeh says. “Does it smell like a brisket cooking? Then it was one of the Jewish holidays. Does it smell like oil, frying donuts or latkes? Then it was Hanukkah. During Christmas and Hanukkah, we would have ‘Our Dumplings of the World Party’ or gingerbread house-building parties, or we would have bagels and lox on Christmas Day. The best part about Thanksgiving was just hanging out in the kitchen all day and cooking. So honestly, I would just say that basically every family tradition revolves around food.”

Those family traditions seem especially resonant this year, as her husband Nick races the weather through the endurance challenge that is the sugar beet harvest (the Rosh Hashanah brisket has been served in the cab of a combine more than once), and Yeh chops garden vegetables as their daughter naps. This spring, readers rejoiced at the arrival of Bernie, a curious little sweetheart who spends her days kicking her chubby baby feet to Raffi (her parents, who met as classical musicians at Juilliard, did try Bach and Mozart too). She peers out at the world from a carrier on her mama’s chest, as Yeh cooks in the farmhouse kitchen originally customized for her husband’s grandmother. Bernie will be the sixth generation to grow up on the family farm outside of East Grand Forks. Yeh is already passing down this agricultural legacy along with the family recipes.

“I want her to know the smells of the Rosh Hashanah feast cooking and the smells of Thanksgiving, and to just really enjoy the whole process of getting ready for these feasts and the process of going to the market and buying all the ingredients,” says Yeh, who speaks like she writes, chatty and conversational, her sentences spilling over each other good-naturedly. “Or going out into the garden and picking the vegetables and the herbs for everything, and going to our apple trees and picking the apples for apple pie and knowing where food comes from. And then also knowing how to make recipes that are meaningful and that are celebratory.” like she writes, chatty and conversational, her sentences spilling pes that are meaningful and that are celebratory.”

Yeh’s 2016 cookbook, “Molly On The Range: Recipes And Stories fluences, from her childhood in suburban Chicago to the dive into as her interest in a career as a classical percussionist was waning.

Yeh’s 2016 cookbook, “Molly On The Range: Recipes And Stories From An Unlikely Life On A Farm,” features plenty of both. Written in the relaxed, familiar tone of her blog, it explores her culinary influences, from her childhood in suburban Chicago to the dive into the New York restaurant scene that sparked her interest in food just as her interest in a career as a classical percussionist was waning.