The Most Delicious Inedible Food on the Market: We Talk with Chef Sohui Kim About the Toy Kitchen Cookbook

I love two things: Melissa and Doug (who created a good 90% of the toys my children played with when growing up) and the podcast The Sporkful, which is (as the tagline reads) “It’s not for foodies, it’s for eaters”. And you would be correct in thinking that the Venn Diagram between these two things is inherently slim. Uh… colorful wooden toys are colorful… like food?

Like I say, it’s a stretch.

Until now.

So as you may have come to presume, a lot of the interviews and talks and premieres I do on this site come from publicity teams at different publishers. And 90% of them are pretty standards. “[Blank] has written [Blank] which is a whole new way of looking at [Blank] for today kids”. You get the picture. I’m a picky lady. I only pluck out the things that catch my eye. So what was I to do with the following?

PENGUIN YOUNG READERS AND MELISSA & DOUG® REIMAGINE READING WITH NEW LINE OF PLAYABLE BOOKS

Huh. Yeah, okay. Wouldn’t be the first time a toy company thought about children’s books. Those mindless Barbie books and LEGO related titles are proof positive of that.

Then? It got weird.

Chef Sohui Kim said: “Food has always been my love language. As an immigrant child growing up in the Bronx, a celebration always meant cooking and sharing meals together. My love of family cooking time planted a seed of a lifelong passion for playing with food. Now, as the executive chef and owner of Brooklyn’s Insa and Gage & Tollner, I’ve spent my career creating spaces where food brings people together across generations and cultures. If my earlier cookbooks The Good Fork Cookbook and Korean Home Cooking were about preserving tradition and elevating home cooking for adults, MELISSA & DOUG: THE TOY KITCHEN COOKBOOK is about empowering the youngest of cooks to explore flavors, textures, and colorful creativity in the kitchen. Thank you for welcoming this book into your homes and your stories. I hope it inspires a new generation to discover the joy of cooking.”

Um… what?!?

So are you telling me that Melissa & Doug made a… board book cookbook of fake wooden food and got a a twice-nominated Best Chef by the James Beard Foundation (who, to tie it all together, has been on the aforementioned Sporkful podcast) to provide… wooden-food based recipes for it?

Oh. Now THAT is something that gets my attention!

And yeah. It’s all true. Melissa and Doug in conjunction with Penguin Young Readers definitely did nab Sohui Kim for this endeavor. I mean, what was I gonna do? My hands were tied. I absolutely had to ask her questions about this!

So today, please enjoy this interview between my pretty self and the illustrious chef and (now) board book cookbook author Sohui Kim:

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Betsy Bird: Sohui! Such a delight to speak to you. When my kids were little I think I personally invested a large chunk of my annual salary towards purchasing Melissa & Doug products for my offspring. To learn that they’d paired with Penguin Random House wasn’t too surprising. But to find that they got a James Beard award nominee and cookbook author to do the text? That feels like a tale worth hearing. So tell us the origin story here. How did you come to write TOY KITCHEN COOKBOOK?

Sohui Kim: Hello Betsy!  So nice to speak to you as well! The simple answer to your question is pure luck and a mutual friend is what I owe for the opportunity to pen the very first cookbook for tiny cooks (chefs)!  Cecily Kaiser, VP and publisher of RISE, reached out to me via an introduction by a mutual friend, Joshua David Stein, with this brilliant idea a few years ago. I have to admit, it took me a minute to shift some gears in my brain to truly comprehend Cecily’s idea but once it sank in, I was locked in.  I actually couldn’t believe that such book didn’t exist already. 

BB: I mean, the book is utterly unique in a lot of ways. I wonder if you can speak a bit about the role that this kind of imaginative play has with kids. I know a lot of them love to pretend that they’re in the kitchen cooking up a meal. If they see their adults consulting cookbook,s then making such a cookbook for small children could be informative and useful in a different manner. What are your thoughts about your book as it relates to child development? 

Sohui: This book is truly unique indeed. For adults, cookbooks serve as guides of inspiration for cooking at home and entertaining.  It can also be a roadmap to a delicious plate of food if you actually need the step by step from the recipe. The approach is the same for the Toy Kitchen Cookbook.  We wanted to give step by step if the child is looking for that kind of guidance. Otherwise, it can simply be a tool for colorful inspiration for pre-verbal children. Children develop language and learn simply by watching what adults do every day. They mimic what we do, what we say, all throughout their early childhood.  For my own children, imaginative play time in the kitchen with their toys as well as real pots and pans were many as they watched me cook to nourish the family. And once they were able to talk, they loved playing “restaurants”, serving up exotic and familiar dishes that they made with Melissa and Doug wooden toy foods! Play time in our kitchen is one of their core memories growing up! So, to be able to write a book that can be a part of that special time together for families? Well, it’s beyond special! 

BB: You’ve done cookbooks before (THE GOOD FORK COOKBOOK & KOREAN HOME COOKING come immediately to mind). Compared to those, creating a cookbook out of inedible ingredients feels like a challenge, to say the least. Walk us through the process of making these recipes. Were you given a list of “ingredients” you could use, or did you get the toy ingredients themselves to play with? 

Sohui: When I was presented with the challenge of creating a cookbook for children with inedible ingredients, immediately I got stuck.  That’s what I meant when I said I had to shift gears in my mind when I first spoke to Cecily about the project. Luckily, all of my grown-up concerns of the challenge dissipated when I started to actually play with the pink toy kitchen stove from my kids’ childhood days! (I left the kitchen preserved with toys intact in the drawers of the pink stove)  Once I started cutting the Velcro-ed lemon with the wooden knife, ideas started flowing! A Fish Pot Pie perhaps!   I was given many toy sets from Melissa and Doug for additional inspiration and it all came together!  I wrote down recipe ideas and played with various toy foods and the step by step came to me as easily as it did for my two cookbooks for grownups. 

BB: My god. A real chef playing with toy food creating toy recipes. There’s something absolutely delightful about that. And I was particularly impressed in how you diversified your recipes. I see that you included shakshuka, for example. Was that in your head at all as you came up with this book?

Sohui: For the recipes, I was thinking approachable and recognizable foods first and foremost, but I also wanted to add some globe-trotting ingredients that make up so much of what makes “American” food so interesting and diverse.  Why not teach the children about how eggs can be cooked in other cultures by introducing them to shakshuka?  Why not talk about kimchi as it is so ubiquitous in our food culture now? They can handle it! 🙂 

BB: Yeah, they can! I know that you aren’t allowed to pick favorites… but, come on. Which recipe in this book is the one closest to your heart (my guess is the steak and eggs with kimchi rice and spinach)? 

Sohui: Yes, steak and eggs with kimchi rice is my favorite as it nods to my early days as a chef. It’s an example of how creative you can get when you play around with food ideas and meld in different cultures. And this book asks children to be creative in their play with food as young chefs, so I am so glad Cecily approved of this particular recipe!  

BB: Okay, so this is a potentially controversial question. Feel free to ignore it if you so choose. If you could encourage Melissa & Doug to add any toy ingredient to their roster, what would you pick? 

Sohui: I would ask Melissa and Doug to include more vegetables in their toy food roster!  Beyond salad greens, carrots, lemon, tomatoes and even broccoli.  How about some fennel, asparagus, ramps, celeriac, napa cabbage? Maybe? Anything to get children excited about vegetables! 🙂 

BB: Oh, you just had that answer locked and loaded, my friend. Finally, can we expect more of these books in the future? And what else (non toy-related) are you working on these days? 

Sohui: I hope so! It’s been a blast to work with the creative folks at Penguin RISE and Melissa & Doug! More please! For now, I am looking to put together a book on the Gage & Tollner restaurant, complete with its long history and some favorite recipes from this storied and famous Oyster Chophouse! Cheers, thank you!

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Awww. Big time thanks to Sohui for taking such care and time in answering my questions today. Thanks too to Liz Vaughan and Garrett Bond for helping to put this all together. The Toy Kitchen Cookbook is out October 13, 2026, so be sure to look for it then. Until then, happy snacking!

Filed under: Interviews