The League of Kitchens Cookbook

Join us for a special book talk celebrating the launch of The League of Kitchens Cookbook, a vibrant collection of recipes and culinary wisdom from immigrant women across the globe. This debut cookbook brings together 14 home cooks’ treasured family recipes from Mexico, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Ukraine, Greece, Afghanistan, India, Argentina, Japan, Uzbekistan, Lebanon, and Nepal. More than just a cookbook, it’s an invitation to explore global flavors, honor immigrant contributions to our food culture, and bring delicious, healthful dishes into your own kitchen.

The program will feature a discussion with Founder and CEO of the widely acclaimed League of Kitchens Cooking School, Lisa Kyung Gross alongside cooking instructors, Yipin Benon and Angie Vargas, moderated by James Gonzalez, Owner of La Fonda: (A Puertorriqueño Culinary Experience).




About the Speakers:
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 differences. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two daughters.

Yipin Benon was born in the small town of Silly in Burkina Faso in West Africa, though she grew up living throughout the country. Her father, a teacher, would move to a new town every few years to work at a different school, bringing Yipin and her seven brothers and sisters with him. They were her closest friends, so she never felt alone, even at a new school—they would walk to and from classes every day as a crew, always there for each other.
Yipin always helped with the cooking when she was growing up. As a very young girl, she learned the art of making a cooking fire—carefully building a stand out of rocks to hold the pot and gathering sticks, dried leaves, and other kindling to ensure the larger cooking logs would catch fire. When she was seven, she was assigned her own dish: Tô. These cornmeal-based dough balls are a staple of Burkinabé cuisine, and with the guidance of her mother and older sisters, Yipin soon became a master at making the perfect tô.
In 2010, Yipin moved to New York City, where she went on to get a master’s degree and become an accountant. She also became well-known in her community for the delicious West African food that she would make and sell on 125th Street in 2011-2012; she now loves to teach her West African friends in New York how to recreate the food from their home countries with ingredients in the United States. Today, she lives with her husband and three young children in the Bronx.

Angie Vargas grew up in Monterrey, a northern Mexican city near the US southern border. It’s a region famous for its cowboys, cattle, and barbecue—on both sides of the Rio Grande. Her grandparents lived on a ranch next to the river, and she loved spending time there when she was a kid. The house was surrounded by all kinds of fruit trees—avocado, lime, papaya, pomegranate, and pecan. She loved watching her mom and grandmother make fresh flour tortillas or cook in the outdoor kitchen, where they often grilled meat and fresh cactus paddles, which they harvested from their land. 
Angie has always loved cooking. She and her two siblings often helped their busy, working mom with the cooking, and whenever Angie was over at a friend’s house, she would usually end up in their kitchen asking questions. At fifteen, Angie moved with her mother and her sister to New York City. At eighteen, she started working as a bartender at a Mexican restaurant, where, of course, she also helped out in the kitchen. Since then, Angie has worked as a model, an actor, and a photographer and helped to run the Mariachi Academy of New York, a nonprofit school that offers free music lessons to children. 
She is passionate about preserving Mexican traditions of all kinds, the color pink, and being a very proud mom to her son, Alexander, and her daughter, Angelina. Angie’s diverse and delicious repertoire of recipes has been featured by The Today Show, Food & Wine, Martha Stewart Living, Family Dinner with Andrew Zimmern, The Splendid Table, Epoch Times, Nuvo Magazine, and Mommy Poppins.



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