Books

Recipes and roots, written down.

I've written two books, The Nourishing Asian Kitchen and The Nourishing Asian Homestead, and both started as my way of keeping my mother's family recipes and my grandfather's farming know-how for my daughters, written down where they can't get lost. I wrote them for my girls first, and I'm still a little amazed that so many other families wanted them too.

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Cover of The Nourishing Asian Homestead by Sophia Nguyen Eng, foreword by Joel Salatin

Cover of The Nourishing Asian Kitchen by Sophia Nguyen Eng, foreword by Sally Fallon Morell

Chelsea Green · October 20, 2026

The Nourishing Asian Homestead

Regenerate Your Land, Raise Nutrient-Dense Food, and Reclaim Your Family's Future

The farm side of our family's story, with a foreword by Joel Salatin. I first heard Joel speak at Google about 15 years ago, when I was deep in tech and nowhere near a pasture, and his ideas about stewardship stayed with me through every job after that. This book carries what my grandfather taught me about fish fertilizer and fermented plant juice, and what our family learned studying Korean Natural Farming together in Hawaii. All of us, our kids included, are now certified to teach it.

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Honorable mention · 2023 Foreword INDIES

The Nourishing Asian Kitchen

Nutrient-Dense Recipes for Health & Healing

My first cookbook, with a foreword by Sally Fallon Morell, written so my daughters would have my mother's family recipes on paper, not only in her memory. It earned an honorable mention in the 2023 Foreword INDIES, took me on a book tour with stops around the Bay Area, and afterward Google invited me to teach its employees a cooking demo, which is a sentence I never expected to write about a cookbook.

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From readers

What people say after they cook from them

★★★★★

A worthy addition to your library

“The book is filled with practical information to get you going on your homesteading journey. I especially liked the section on traditional medicines. Oh, and the recipes, too.”

DerekThe Nourishing Asian Homestead · Amazon, verified purchase, Oct 2026

★★★★★

The Nourishing Traditions book I needed

“For years it frustrated me that I was attempting to eat whole foods and then purchasing sugar and additive laden Asian sauces to put over it. … Finding this book was like winning the lottery.”

ndamickThe Nourishing Asian Kitchen · Amazon, verified purchase, Nov 2024

★★★★★

A rare gem for anyone serious about real food and nutrition

“What I appreciate most is the emphasis on nutrient-dense, traditional ingredients and the respect for cultural food wisdom that has been passed down through generations.”

Richie JThe Nourishing Asian Kitchen · Amazon, Jun 2026

★★★★★

Beautiful book with tons of information and recipes!

“There are many Asian cookbooks, and even a few paleo cookbooks, but until now, I have never seen an Asian cookbook that relies on the Weston A. Price Foundation's 11 principles.”

DerekThe Nourishing Asian Kitchen · Amazon, verified purchase, Feb 2024

★★★★★

Outstanding and worth a permanent place on your shelf.

“Really happy to have this book as a resource for healthy sauces, garnishes, pickles, etc -- as well as Eng's development of traditional recipes.”

amkThe Nourishing Asian Kitchen · Amazon, verified purchase, Nov 2025

★★★★★

Asian living

“The style, as well as the food is nourishing. The writer goes to great lengths with traditions, which I greatly appreciate.”

Gale StormyThe Nourishing Asian Kitchen · Amazon, verified purchase, Aug 2024

Why I wrote them

For my daughters, first

Sophia Eng and her mother in sun hats under a garden arch — With my mom

Sophia Eng and her mother in a teaching kitchen before a cooking demo — Teaching day, together

Some of the most useful things I know never came from a job. My grandfather taught me to make fish fertilizer and fermented plant juice, my mother's family recipes lived in her hands and her memory, and none of it was written down anywhere until I sat down to do it.

My mom is approaching 80, and that's the honest reason both books exist. I needed to pass down her most nourishing recipes, the ones that go from our farm to our table, while I can still learn them at her side, and I wanted our family's story captured somewhere my daughters, and someday their kids, can always find it.

Along the way the books became more than a family record. They're how I share the other AI, ancestral intelligence, with families who want to cook and grow food this way too. Our family finds its balance between the blue screen and the blue skies, and our youngest has logged every animal born on our farm since she was about two, so I'd say the handing down is working.

Storytelling and storyselling

The trust comes before the lead.

People ask me how two cookbooks fit into a career in B2B growth. The books are the start of the most reliable growth engine I've been part of, the one behind the real estate and lending brand my partner Tim and I built over 20 years, and it works for one reason: every piece of it is something we live.

When we talk on our podcast about the neighbors who showed up when we moved to the farm, nobody is reading a script, and listeners can tell. That's what storyselling means to me. The story is our real life, and the next step we invite people to take is one our own family already took.

You can't fake a story people are going to follow you home for.

What it looks like in real life

Storyselling, in person

A room of Google employees watching Sophia Eng teach a cooking demo — Teaching a cooking demo for Google employees

A full audience at an expo cooking demo with Sophia Eng, her mother and her daughter — A full house, with my mom and my daughter beside me

Look closely at that last table. Next to the stack of books there's a QR code for a free guide to ten must-have Nourishing Asian Kitchen ingredients and a paper sign-up sheet, and that's lead gen done in person, with my mom and my girls cooking beside me.

How a book turns into a client

From a cookbook to a closing table

Someone picks up a book.
They come for recipes and farming know-how they can use this week, with no pitch attached.
They keep listening.
Call To Farms, our family's podcast, is past 100 episodes and 80,000 plays, and it's where readers who dream about land of their own start planning for it.
They find their people.
Our free Call To Farms community is for folks early in their homestead journey, and anyone who preordered the new book got in right away.
They call Tim's team when they're ready.
When it's time to buy and finance land, my partner Tim's real estate and lending team at The Homesteading Agent is already someone they know and trust.

About 95% of that business comes through referrals, and a large share of those start with the books and the podcast.

How readers found the books, in their own words

The trust came first

None of these readers found the books through an ad. One met me at a Women in AI event and ordered that same night, and two heard me on a podcast and liked the story enough to buy. That's the whole funnel in three comments.

“I met the author, Sophia, at the Women in AI event earlier this month and ordered her book that same night. … I left that conversation wanting to do more.”

owendonnahooInstagram comment, 2026

“I heard the author on a Weston A Price podcast and loved her story. Bought the book and couldn’t be happier!!”

Amy K.Amazon, verified purchase, Oct 2024

“I heard about this book on the Wise Traditions podcast and decided to buy it … and it was a winner!”

Jericha BrownAmazon, verified purchase, Jun 2024

What it taught me about lead gen

The same rules work in B2B

Give the useful thing away first. Everyone who preordered the new book got videos and a guide called More of What You Have, on how our family stretches the staples we use every day, plus 30 days of Call To Farms PRO.
Let each piece hand off to the next. The book points to the podcast, the podcast points to the community, and the sales conversation comes last, when someone asks for it.
Count referrals, not clicks. A 95% referral rate tells me more about trust than any click-through rate I've ever reported, and it's the number I wish more B2B teams chased.
Only tell stories you're living. We raise most of our own food, milk our own cows and teach Korean Natural Farming as a family, and if we stopped, the books and the podcast would stop working too. I think that's true of every brand, including the software ones.

Why this matters in B2B

B2B buyers are people first

What we built online for homesteaders, a podcast past 80,000 plays and a free community where people introduce themselves and lean on each other, is the thing B2B brands are scrambling to build right now. Business buyers decide who they trust long before they talk to sales, and the research says so plainly.

95^%

Of business buyers aren't in market at any given time

73^%

Of decision-makers trust a company's thought leadership more than its marketing materials

94^%

Of B2B buying groups rank their preferred vendors before first contact

77^%

Of the time, buyers purchase from that early favorite

That's B2B starting to market like B2C. The brands that win show up as people and earn trust in public, months before anyone fills out a form. It's what our family has done for homesteaders with the books and Call To Farms, and it's the playbook I bring to B2B growth.

Sources: 95% from Ehrenberg-Bass and 73% from the 2024 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report; 94% and 77% from the 6sense 2025 Buyer Experience Report.

Bring the books home

The Nourishing Asian Homestead → The Nourishing Asian Kitchen →

Listen to Call To Farms → · Visit our farm →