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2020 Cookbook Year In Review with Becky Krystal Staff Writer for Voraciously at Washington Post FoodPhoto credit- Tom McCorkle for The Washington Post; styling by Marie Ostrosky for The Washington Post. Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors,Becky Krystal: I'm Becky Krystal, I'm a staff writer for Voraciously at Washington Post Food.Suzy Chase: So Becky it's been a year since we last chatted about cookbooks. And I swear, it feels like it's been 10 years.Becky Krystal: Yes!! I was going to say that, it doesn't feel like normal time.Suzy Chase: It doesn't! How has your year been?Becky Krystal: It's been interesting like everyone else's. Our office closed very early on, actually probably before a lot of other offices so we lost access to our food lab and our kitchen and everything else all of our thousands of cookbooks in mid-March and I've been home ever since cooking in my own kitchen testing in my own kitchen. We've had lots of logistical challenges with regard to photo shoots and I was sending and driving cookies around to everyone for our holiday package and for about six months, I had my three and a half year old home with me. So it's been a year - 21.Suzy Chase: What is one of the hardest things you had to conquer cooking in your own kitchen this year? It'll make us all feel better to hear it.Becky Krystal: I think just figuring out well there's a lot, I guess, but figuring out where to put everything actually has been really challenging because I was testing recipe and I recipes and I also have my own cooking supplies. I have the food I was cooking for my family. You know, sometimes I'd have meat marinating for work and other dishes in various states of preparation and my refrigerator and my freezer were just overflowing and I knew I was going to be doing a lot of baking for cookies so I bought 50 pound bags of flour so I have these massive industrial size buckets of flour, basically still sitting in my dining room. So, uh, space is a pretty big challenge, actually.Suzy Chase: You and the Voraciously team put together your favorite cookbooks of 2020. Can you read us the intro to the article?Becky Krystal: Sure. Like all of you, we’ve been at home for most of 2020, cooking more meals in our own kitchens than we ever expected to. Many of us have turned to familiar ingredients and recipes time and time again, when we just needed to get dinner on the table or couldn’t run out to the store. Thankfully, we’ve also had cookbooks to help us get out of the rut. They introduced us to new dishes, new people and new ways to “go somewhere” without actually leaving our homes. Great cookbooks do a lot of things. They inspire us. They make us think. In 2020, our favorite books were tasty and timely, providing us with satisfying meals and food for thought about underrepresented voices and cuisines, how to make do with what you have, and more. We think you’ll find these 12 cookbooks, each selected by a staffer, just as inspiring this year — and beyond.Suzy Chase: So each cookbook was handpicked by a staff member, which I love. And you can read the whole piece over on Voraciously.com. Could you take us through the process of putting this article together this year? What was the criteria you had to work with and who was included in this?Becky Krystal: Yeah, obviously it was a pretty different year this year. Usually we're in our office and we are getting cookbooks so many in hard copies that, I mean, we're literally tripping over them. So we had to obviously shift that because there's only so much we can pile up in our own houses. So we got as many digital copies as we could. We requested hard copies when we wanted to. And it was just, I mean, we had like a Dropbox file with tons and tons of cookbooks. Basically we asked whoever sent us, can you just send us a digital copy? So all year we were looking at cookbooks, we were cooking out of them. Um, my colleagues Ann Maloney and Joe Yonan, as well as myself, would sometimes feature recipes in our columns over the year and that sort of helped us get a jumpstart on what books we were most interested in. It was just a lot of looking over books. And we had a bunch of meetings where we talked about them and what caught our eye. And we were recommending books to each other and dishes to each other. And then we just sort of looked at our most promising ones and what really spoke to us and what we made dishes out of that we liked and was sort of representative of the diversity of what was out there. And that was kind of how we came around to our list.Suzy Chase: I found it was so hard to cook out of the digital copies this year.Becky Krystal: It's really hard to get as good of a feel for a book in a PDF, which is why when we found one that we thought was especially promising, we would go ahead and ask for a copy. I mean, I still don't really like propping my Kendall or my laptop or my phone up in the kitchen to cook with. So it was really nice when I did have books that I could either cook out of, or I even take my cookbooks down to my printer and scan the recipe and then just have the sheet in front of me. So yeah, it is different both in a tactile sense and just like almost emotional sense to not have tons of books in front of you.Suzy Chase: With the pandemic and some cookbooks being postponed or some canceled all together were you able to spot any cookbook trends this year?Becky Krystal: I think once we start talking about some of these books this'll get into it, but you know, there has been more, I think, of an emphasis and interest on spotlighting cuisines and voices we might not have heard about, or as much about things that have not received the attention they obviously deserve in the publishing industry and even in food media. So we get into all the different African cuisines and In Bibi's Kitchen and obviously even the Russian cuisine and Beyond The North Wind and Korean food in My Korea so I think that's really refreshing. There was still a lot of obviously chef driven books, but like some of those books I just talked about, there's also more, I think of an interest in regular people cooking, right? You know the recipes coming from the Bibi's, the recipes coming from the home cooks in Russia, that's obviously appealing to a lot of home cooks who maybe are intimidated or even put off by these really chefy books. Pie. There was a lot of pie this year, which I think is just wonderful. I love that. So that obviously jumped out to me and bread too, especially sourdough, you know, there were books, I think that were already in the works that just happened to coincide with this uptick of people doing sourdough for the first time myself included. Um, so we had New world Sourdough by Brian Ford. We had Living Bread by Daniel Leader and Lauren Chattman. So I think those are the things that jump out at me in terms of what we could sort of spot this year.Suzy Chase: Okay. So we're going to chat about five of the cookbooks on your list. First off is your personal pick One Tin Bakes by Edd Kimber. What drew you to this cookbook?Becky Krystal: Well, it's baking book and I am a passionate baker. It's definitely my strongest suit. I love the idea that as the title says, everything is made in a 9 by 13 pan, which is not the most glamorous pan it's, you know, the brownies and the blondies and in England, they talk about the tray bakes and stuff, homier things but Edd just had so many different ideas for how to use this one piece of equipment that is inexpensive and really versatile. I mean, I looked through and I wanted to make almost everything in there, which is always a good sign. And I felt like I could, the recipes are really approachable and extremely well-written, which I think is not always the case in cookbooks. And it's not the like sexiest thing to talk about, but a well-written recipe is just absolutely priceless and it's a beautiful book to look at Edd shot all the pictures so it really draws you in. And I just, I think it's lovely. It's not huge, which I also like, because I can feel overwhelmed when I sit down with a book that's like 200 recipes, but there are 70 and you think I could make a lot of these and everything I've made has turned out really great so far.Suzy Chase: Well, baking is not my strong suit. So I loved this cookbook because it seemed super accessible. It wasn't intimidating for me at all.Becky Krystal: Yeah, no, that's, that's definitely true. I mean, they're really, really easy kind of one bowl, couple of ingredient recipes. There are ones that if you feel confident in your skills, you can tackle those. You know, there are a couple of rolled cakes or the layer cakes that sort of stand on their side. So there's a spectrum, but most of it is really approachable even for, I would say beginning bakers really.Suzy Chase: It's funny cause we were talking about the term tin and I said, you know, here in the U.S. we say the word pan and he told me the story about how he actually pitched the title one pan bakes to the publisher. And they were like, um, no, the word pan does not sound nice in the title.Becky Krystal: Yeah. Well, it's also like, it sounds a little more savory almost, you know, there's a lot of talk here people love one pan meals and stuff like that so probably if I heard that, I guess even if you said one pan bakes, but there's something more lyrical about one tin bakes. I agree.Suzy Chase: And I made my very first Dutch Baby out of this cookbook. Did you make the Dutch Baby?Becky Krystal: I did. I actually highlighted it in my regular recipe column a couple of months ago. And it was super popular. I mean, it actually is one of our most popular baking recipes of the year. It's great. I did it with berries. I even tried it with apples. It's so fun and so easy. I thought it was such a delightful recipe.Suzy Chase: I'm going to make that on Christmas morning because it's so easy and it's kind of a showstopper.Becky Krystal: Yeah. You got to get the picture right after it gets out of the oven because it does tend to start to like collapse a little bit. So get your Instagram picture right when you pull it out.Suzy Chase: That's a really good tip now too In Bibi's Kitchen by Hawa Hassan with Julia Turshen. So I think this book is a real gem of 2020, because it fills the void in the cookbook market for African cookbooks. So who chose this cookbook on your staff and why did they choose it?Becky Krystal: Yeah, this was the pick of my colleague Olga Massov who's an assignment editor with us. She is a cookbook author and co-author in her own right so she knows a good cookbook once she sees one. I mean, she just raved about this book. It's an extremely practical book because that's the type of cooking that these women do. It's a lot of pantry ingredients. It's not very long ingredient lists. There aren't a lot of expensive ingredients because often these are people just cooking at home. And even in some parts of the world where these women are from or where they live, they can't access certain ingredients. Even in some places, meat is a rarity. So it's approachable also. I mean, I keep using that word, but it's true. Obviously also with the Black Lives Matter movement, it was incredibly timely to showcase these women who are in Africa or who have immigrated to other places. It was very human, right? Cause each chapter highlighting each of the eight countries has interviews with the women. It's not like, you know, one of these glossy lifestyle books, it teaches you about the cultures. Each intro also includes facts about the countries like their economy and the religion and language geography, stuff like that. It doesn't feel clinical though. It feels like you're just learning something. And it also fights this misunderstanding that African food is all the same. It gets lumped together a lot. And there are obviously differences and each of these countries deserves to be looked at on its own as opposed to, I mean, a massive continent, right? I mean, you would never dream of saying, Oh, European food, but that's what happens with African food.Suzy Chase: Totally. That was my biggest takeaway. Just the diversity of the food on the continent. And it's not a country. Like people think it's a country. It's not.Becky Krystal: I mean, how many more people are in Africa then all the other countries and other places combined I mean, it's unfortunate that it gets lumped together. And I think we all need to do better about making sure we highlight these different cultures and recipesSuzy Chase: Now to My Korea by Hooni Kim.Becky Krystal: Yeah. My Korea was actually the pick of our restaurant critic, Tom Sietsema. It's funny because Tom loves doing stuff like this because he is always, well, I was going to say dining out, he's doing mostly takeout these days. So he loves being able to dive into a book that he can cook at home. And he went shopping at H Mart and got ingredients. And he loved the fact that this is such a great book for people to get a better idea of Korean food. You know, it's not quite the same as Africa, but a lot of us, we think, okay, Korean barbecue, maybe some kimchi, whatever. And there's so much more to this cuisine. And it's just a beautiful book to, you know, Tom, it's a very visceral book. When you look at the photos, there are lots of little things you can start adding to your pantry to add flavors like, you know, the goguchang and the chili flakes and dried anchovies. And a lot of this frankly, is very appealing to me right now in this winter weather, you know, he's got stews and short ribs and dashi. I actually talked to him when I, we ran his bulgogi recipe in conjunction with the story and he said, I wanted to write a book to introduce people to Korean food and I think he succeeded incredibly well.Suzy Chase: I had him on the podcast in late April when we were like the epicenter of the pandemic. And it was a really hard time for him, but he was so smart because he pivoted with his two restaurants to do meal kits and my family and I have gotten his meal kit about almost every week. It has gotten us through this pandemic. It's so good and it's so much food!Becky Krystal: It's also really smart because especially now when so many of us are not doing a lot of grocery shopping, not everything is going to be available when you take your one little trip to the grocery store so if he's helping people get access to these ingredients and dishes, they might not otherwise be able to do in their streamlined kind of shopping then yeah that's a really great idea.Suzy Chase: This is my favorite kind of cookbook because it tells his personal story and then weaves in the recipes.Becky Krystal: Yeah, no, that's really refreshing. I mean, if you want someone to commit to reading and cooking out of your cookbook, I think there has to be some kind of relationship with the reader. I think at least I personally enjoy that voice of the author and learning something about them and why this matters to them. I think it makes you want to invest in it more too.Suzy Chase: We love Hooni.Becky Krystal: Yeah. He's, he's great. I learned a lot from him just inspeaking to him, you know, about his, his recipes.Suzy Chase: Totally, I had him on again in September because I wanted to get an update and he's just so wonderful to chat with.Becky Krystal: Yea he is.Suzy Chase: So next is Beyond The North Wind by Darra Goldstein.Speaker 2: Yeah. This was the pick of Tim Carman who's one of my fellow staff writers. It's such a beautiful book to look at and to read. And like I said, there is a lot that I think people don't know about Russian cuisine and like some of the other books too, the recipes often don't have a ton of ingredients they're usually pretty accessible. You know, not a ton of us around here have access to buckthorn, which is like one of her favorite things to call for but she makes a point of saying like, okay, if you don't have like the horseradish leaves or currant leaves it'll be okay. And one of the things Tim pointed out and something that she sort of alludes to in the book is that, you know, how long, like Rene Redzepi has been teaching everyone about fermenting and foraging and stuff and that sort of caught our attention. People in these places in Russia have been doing stuff like this for a long time, fermenting things and kombucha and all this stuff and I think that's probably not something many people know about and you know, it's just the classic making do with what you have nd that's what these people have been doing for hundreds of years, especially in these places that are very far North.Suzy Chase: My two takeaways from this cookbook, um, were Russians love the taste of sour and they also love honey. I made her honey cake.Becky Krystal: Yeah. Honey cake is also think maybe having a little bit of a moment, you know, there was the Baking At The 20th Century Cafe book, which also had like a really famous honey cake recipe. I mean, I think that's incredibly timely. They've been doing honey using honey for, you know, hundreds of years. And, and I get questions from readers who don't want to use refined sugar and I feel like I should just refer them to a lot of the recipes in here because before they had access to the beet sugar and stuff, they were cooking with honey and it's trendy for some people, but not for these people who it's their tradition.Suzy Chase: This cookbook is almost like a trip to Russia. Her photos are extraordinary.Becky Krystal: Yeah. Actually I was reading it last night and it was called and I was under my blankets and I felt like this feels very appropriate and I could almost see, you know, the Northern lights and the snow. And you know, it's the same with My Korea also and In Bibi's Kitchen, I mean the photography itself also is really important to setting the mood and helping you feel like you're really going somewhereSuzy Chase: The last cookbook we're going to chat about as Modern Comfort Food. I mean, God love Ina for pushing up this publication of the cookbooks so we could all have it mid pandemic.Becky Krystal: So Modern Comfort Food was the pick of Mary Beth Albright, who is our food video guru. And I mean, it's delivers on what it promises, right? It's nothing in the right way. It's nothing that you're like, Oh, I've never heard of that. Right. I mean, she says, she likes to find the things that appeal to us and puts her twist on them. So yeah, tomato soup and grilled cheese. She's got a shrimp and linguine fra diavolo. She uses that same spicy sauce to do the spaghetti squash bake, which I've really been wanting to do since I have one from my farm box, it's friendly and it's not intimidating. And I think for those people who are turned off by extremely novel things or people who are just devotees of Ina, they're not going to be disappointed in this book.Suzy Chase: She's just so real. Like in the cookbook, she wrote about the evolution of a recipe with her Boston Cream Pie that she'd been trying to perfect for years. And I was like, you know, she didn't have to tell us that she's been like struggling to perfect this for years. So I was so thrilled to read that story, how she was chatting with Christina Tosi and she suggested something like a syrupy glaze that you brush on the cake to give it lots of flavor and it also keeps it moist. And so I love that story and how real Ina is.Becky Krystal: Yeah. I mean, we've all been there. Like, there's just this thing that's bugging us and we're trying to master a recipe. And so yeah, I found that very relatable and I found the idea of an orange scented cake and pastry cream in Boston Cream Pie, just, I mean, yeah, 10 out of 10 we'll eat.Suzy Chase: So I had on Trent Pheifer and he has his Instagram and blog called Store Bought Is Fine and he's cooking his way through all of Ina's recipes. Are you familiar with him?Becky Krystal: I am not actually. I think I need to, I know but yeah, it's like he's pulling a Julie & Julia thing, but with Ina which sounds really fun.Suzy Chase: Exactly. Oh my gosh, you have to follow him on Instagram. He's amazing. And he was so much fun to talk with. So what are you looking forward to eating in the new year and what cookbooks are you looking forward to in 2021?Becky Krystal: I am looking forward to eating anything that I don't cook. Um, I've been doing, you know, we've been doing takeout, but, uh, I definitely miss eating what my colleagues make for me. Um, I sometimes will get things that they drop off or if I take home from a photo shoot, but I definitely miss that. And yeah, sitting in a restaurant meal, definitely. Cookbooks. Obviously my list is a little baking heavy because I love baking. Uh, so the things that jump out to me there, Roxanna Jullapat who contributed one of the cookies to our holiday cookie issues has a book called Mother Grains coming out. A lot of whole grains. We previewed a recipe from there, with Linzer cookies that are made with corn flour and we're really excited about that one. The Cookie Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum, who I know you've talked to I think. I mean, of course that's going to be good. Zoë Bakes Cakes by Zoë François who is someone who I absolutely adore. She's great on Instagram and I swear by her. Artisan Bread In Five Minutes A Day that she's done with Jeffrey Hertzberg, To Asia With Love by Hetty McKinnon, who also contributed a cookie to our package. She's great. I mean, she's one of those people who also seems to be always churning out books and recipes, and they're all interesting I mean, I just, and people are always making her recipes. I'm really excited about that one. Life Is What You Bake It by Vallery Lomas who is also really fun baker and she was a previous winner of The Great American Baking Show. Got a shout out to Dorie Greenspan who I know, and also just absolutely adore Baking With Dorie Sweet Salty & Simple, sort of more on the savory side. Julia Turshen who we talked about with In Bibi's Kitchen and she has a book coming out Simply Julia 110 Easy Recipes For Healthy Comfort Food. And then one of my other favorite people, Patty Jinich has another book coming out, Patty Jinich Treasures Of The Mexican Table Classic Recipes Local Secrets. I think that also has the potential to do a lot of what we've talked about with these other books in terms of introducing people to different ideas and sort of more home cooking. So those are some of the things I'm really jazzed about for 2021.Suzy Chase: For me, in 2021, I'm looking forward to eating a chef cooked meal inside a restaurant, not on the street or take out and I'm eagerly awaiting Water, Wood, and Wild Things, Learning Craft and Cultivation in a Japanese Mountain town by Hannah Kirshner. I can not wait for that. So head on over to Voraciously.com to check out all 12 of their favorite cookbooks of 2020, and thanks so much, Becky for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.Becky Krystal: Thanks Suzy. Let's do it again next year!Outro: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com and thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

How To Eat Your Christmas Tree: Delicious, Innovative Recipes for Cooking with TreesBy Julia Georgallis Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase, he's just a home cook in New York City sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.Julia Georgallis: I'm Julia Georgallis and I'm the author of How To Eat Your Christmas Tree cookbook.Suzy Chase: There is this BBC One documentary that was released in 2017, I believe, called Judi Dench. My Passion For Trees, and I saw an excerpt and she has such reverence for trees. It's so easy to take trees for granted, but Dame Judy discusses how she touches her trees she talks to her trees, she loves her trees on her six acre property. Her lifelong fascination with trees started when she was little. When did you get interested in trees?Julia Georgallis: I've always been really interested in nature and I've always really loved plants and taking care of plants and I'm also really interested in edible plants like foraging and keeping herbs. So I recently moved back home with my mum in September and I brought with me a sourdough starter. I brought with me my kombucha, and then I brought about 20 plants home with me. So it really started in a big way when I left home, but it's kind of just got progressively more and more as I've gotten older, really.Suzy Chase: First when I saw the title of this cookbook. I was like, what? But then after I started reading it, you made me think about things I've never thought of, like 40 million trees are cut down per year at Christmas time. That is an astounding number and I've never looked at it as wasteful. Can you talk a little bit about that?Julia Georgallis: I think it's not just about Christmas trees. I think we do kind of waste a lot of things, especially around Christmas. Christmas is a particularly wasteful time of year. And this book is it's, you know, obviously the title is How To Eat Your Christmas Tree so it's very much about Christmas trees, but it's also about thinking about how we waste things in general and how we could reuse things and look at things in a different ways, including the plants that we keep and the food that we eat.Suzy Chase: I'd love some tips on how to have a more sustainable Christmas.Julia Georgallis: There's actually quite a lot of things you can do. And funnily enough, when I started this project in 2015, having a sustainable Christmas, wasn't really something that people were really discussing, but now there are so many things you can do. So for example, you could cut down on your meat intake. I'm not saying that you forego the Turkey completely, if you really, really want to eat Turkey on Christmas day, fine, but you know have you ever thought about maybe not eating so much meat in the run-up till Christmas? There's also things like ditching Christmas wrap and maybe not sending Christmas cards, which maybe people don't really do anymore anyway, but those things really, really are quite wasteful. I've also got a recipe in my book for edible Christmas decorations because Christmas tree decorations are so, so wasteful, including Christmas tree lights they're really, really unsustainable, just the way they're made and also the fact that they run on quite a lot of energy. There's quite a few little things that you can do to make your Christmas a little bit more sustainable overall.Suzy Chase: So what's one edible Christmas tree decoration we could do. Off the top of your head.Julia Georgallis: Well, you could do things like gingerbread cookies cause they obviously they keep for a long time so they would, they would last really nicely on your tree. But then in the book I've also got some edible Christmas tree decorations, which can also be eaten by birds if you want to have your tree outdoors, if you have the room or if you have a garden and those are basically seed balls. So you could make seed balls, energy balls, that kind of stuff.Suzy Chase: Can you talk a bit about how cultures around the world see evergreens?Julia Georgallis: Yeah. So this is something that I really enjoyed writing about actually in the How To Eat Your Christmas Tree book, because I haven't just focused on the kind of standard Western Christmas trees like pine, fir and spruce. And I've also looked at things like bamboo, which is very, very surprising to a lot of people because in the East, in Korea and Japan in China, the pine, the plum and the bamboo are kind of known as the three friends of winter and these three plants are seen in a very similar way to how we see pine, fir, and spruce. So they're symbols of longevity, they're really plucky, they're really hardy plants and then also I've written a lot about Juniper, which is a cousin of, of pine and the fir and the spruce and that again is quite a plucky plant. And then there's also the olive, which I refer to as the OG Christmas tree, because the Romans and the Greeks used to decorate their houses around winter time with olive branches, because olives are also symbols of everlasting life.Suzy Chase: Can you describe the flavor profiles of fir, spruce and pine?Julia Georgallis: Oh, uh they're delicious. So I'll start with spruce because that's my favorite tree to eat. So it's, it's really kind of in a way of vanilla-y and I actually recently discovered because I was always a bit baffled as to why my spruce ice cream tasted of vanilla and I actually recently found out that kind of artificially produced vanilla used to have notes of spruce in it as well. So that's the kind of flavor profile that we're dealing with with spruce. And then fir is a little bit more zesty it's a bit more grassy and pine is much, much more delicate than the other two. So pine is, it's very delicate it's quite woody.Suzy Chase: Ya know, it's funny because when I think of pine as a flavor, I think of Pine-Sol the cleaner, do you guys have Pine-Sol?Julia Georgallis: Yeah. And that's the thing that people really think about because they, they always associate pine with like the Christmas tree shaped car smell things that you put on your dashboard.Suzy Chase: And it's such an invasive smell! So it was interesting that you said that pine is a little softer.Julia Georgallis Yeah. Pine is the softest out of the three, like when you boil up the needles, because initially when we first started this project, that was the first thing that I did I boiled up the needles to see what they tasted like and pine doesn't really taste of much when you boil it up, unless you add kind of other things to it. But yeah, I was surprised as well, really.Suzy Chase: So I guess the pine smell is made up.Julia Georgallis: It does smell quite different to how it tastes. And I don't know why, because in a forest it kind of smells a lot more expansive, you know.Suzy Chase: Can we tell if a tree is poisonous to eat?Julia Georgallis: No you can't, but yew's which kind of look a little bit like pines are poisonous so just make sure you're not eating a yew tree. And the other thing is a lot of people will buy trees that haven't been grown in an environment, which means that you can eat them. So quite a lot of trees are sprayed with things, with paint, with all kinds of chemicals so just make sure that if you are buying your tree and you plan to eat it, that you buy it from somewhere that sells organic and nicely treated trees.Suzy Chase: Can you talk about page 126 for a minute, about how we do seek out an edible Christmas tree?Julia Georgallis: Buying an edible Christmas tree it's a little bit like how you are encouraged to buy your food you know, it's like buying an organic Apple for example, or, or something that's been grown in a nice way without lots of pesticides. So in my book, I do have a little section in the back as to where you can buy edible Christmas trees around the world. In the States, you can buy your Christmas trees from the National Christmas Tree Association RealChristmasTrees.org. There's different organizations around the world which are doing really nice things with buying edible Christmas trees. So in Portugal, you can rent your trees from the country's fire service. And they're all kind of nicely grown trees, which I thought was really lovely.Suzy Chase: So you can rent your tree in Portugal?Julia Georgallis: You can rent your tree yeah and you can. You can rent it. They are nicely grown in forests. And then once you're done with it, then the fire service will come and take it away for you dispose of it nicely.Suzy Chase: Then cue the post-Christmas world, where as you put it, it's nothing like the pre-Christmas world everything is glum we're fatter we're poorer, and we're still a bit hung over. We must repent for all the fun we've had and to top it off the mass, throwing away of millions of little trees, commences. What are the five ways to recycle our Christmas tree?Julia Georgallis: So the five ways to reuse your Christmas tree, you can recycle it if you contact your council and check with them, how it's best to recycle your tree. You can also contact your nearest Christmas tree farm for example. Make friends with your local Christmas tree farmer. Where I buy my Christmas trees from to eat they turn their Christmas trees into kind of like horse jumps and all kinds of things, which is quite nice. You can donate your tree to a local zoo or a safari park or any park in your area. I mean, I think the really nice thing to do with your tree is to, if you can, repot it and replant it, and then you can have a tree for next year, it's, it's almost like you're growing a tree that will kind of live alongside you. You can also dry the branches and use them as decorations or make a dried wreath for next year or I would really love to see more people talking to their local florists and see if the florists can do something with some nice pieces of pine and fir and spruce.Suzy Chase: Christmas tree vinegar is by far the easiest way to reuse your tree. Can you describe this recipe? That's on page 45 and this also makes a great gift.Julia Georgallis: Oh yeah. I love this recipe. It is super, super easy. So all you need is a couple of large kilner jars or a mason jar. You will also need about two liters of good quality side of vinegar and roughly 200 grams of fir, pine or spruce and you'll take the needles from your, fir, pine or spruce you will sterilize your glass jar, and then once your glass jar is sterilizing, you'll prepare and finely chop the needles. So there's also a little section in the beginning of my book for how to prepare the needles properly, but it's really easy you basically just snip them off the brunch. And then once your glass jar is sterilized you'll pour the vinegar into large sauce pan heat over a medium heat until it's warm, but not, not quite boiling and then add all the chopped needles to the jar and pour the vinegar over that. Once that's all in the jar, you'll tightly seal your jar and leave it to infuse for at least two weeks, but you can infuse it for up to three months. And so obviously if you leave it for three months, it will be stronger. And you'll kind of know when your vinegars infused because all the needles sink slowly to the bottom of the jar. So once it's infused, you'll use a fine sieve to strain out all the needles and pour the strained vinegar into a new sterilized jar. And then once you've actually made this infused vinegar, it lasts for ages. It can last until next Christmas. So you could potentially make all your vinegar in January for next Christmas and I think that's a lovely, lovely, festive gift.Suzy Chase: Ash is used in cooking all over the world. As home cooks how can we use it?Julia Georgallis: It's much easier to use ash than even I actually thought it was. You basically char your branches. I mean, in this case, Christmas trees, but I guess you could use other types of tree as well. So you put your branches inside your oven, turn your oven up until your branches turned black, essentially. And then you blitz your branches with a hand whisk and then you have ash to use in delicious ways. I've got some recipes in my book for the Burnt Ash Cauliflower, there's Ash Baked Vegetables, Ash Honey Glaze, which I really, really love that's really, really simple to use and you can use that on meat or fish or vegetables, or even pastries actually. You can kind of do lots of different things with it and it gives this really lovely, smoky, quite expansive flavor. You can really taste the kind of pine and the spruce and the fir in the ash. Yea ash is much easier to cook with than I even imagined, to be honest with you.Suzy Chase: So you wrote in the scent of pine essay, which I love by the way you wrote "On a metaphysical level, the forest humbles us, gives us perspective and sparks creativity, making appearances in every creative pursuit of man poems, literature, folklore, religion, and belief systems, art, music, and dance as a place of magic and deep contemplation and an enabler of ritual." What is the most powerful magic that trees have?Julia Georgallis: Yeah, it's the smell, isn't it? It's the smell of a forest. The fact that it can transport you backwards in time and that's quite powerful, isn't it? I suppose, because there's so many different memories that, that sparks for me anyway. And I think for a lot of people, you know, what I really love about my own memories of pine is that they're at different parts of my life and they're in all parts of the world. And they're also at all times of year, like pine forest in the summer in Sweden, you know? And so it's this lovely kind of amalgamation of all different, lovely memories. It's great.Suzy Chase: Pine for me kind of evokes kind of like a romantic loneliness. I grew up in Kansas and it's flat and to me, the flatness is super comforting but then when I get into a forest, it hits me as very lonely. Isn't that weird?Julia Georgallis: Yeah you know, that's the opposite of what I think of them as. You know my first memory of pine is we have some land in Cyprus where my family are from, and my first memory of pine is going and sitting under the pines in the summer and everyone goes and sort of drinks their coffee and plays cards and things and it's kind of very sociable. And, you know, I imagine kind of pine forest by the sea in Sweden, where everyone's kind of running around and going to the beach. So it's kind of the opposite of your memories actually, which is really nice,Suzy Chase: But mine is kind of like a romantic loneliness.Julia Georgallis: Yea like a comforting loneliness.Suzy Chase: I made your recipe for Pine Nut and Chocolate Brownies on page 94. Can you describe this recipe?Julia Georgallis: That's a funny recipe actually, because I think a lot of people don't put two and two together that pine nuts are from a Christmas tree.Suzy Chase: I know! Last night my husband and I were talking about it I said, Bob, have you ever made the connection of pine nuts to pine trees? And I thought, he'd be like, yeah, it doesn't everyone. And he was like, no.Julia Georgallis: No one does. it's so funny. That's why I love this recipe so much because it kind of draws people attention to the fact that Christmas tree is a part of our lives all year round. But this, I mean, I love this recipe it's based on an Italian dessert called, Torta al cioccolato con pignoli. And I love the fact that the combination of the oils in pine nut kind of make this brownie really, really fudgy and very creamy because pine nuts are quite creamy, so super easy to make. So you just need kind of a lovely dark chocolate, and handful of pine nuts. And you end up with this really gooey brownie. It's great.Suzy Chase: Now for my segment called Last Night's Dinner, where I ask you what you had last night for dinner.Julia Georgallis: Oh, so last night, well, I'll start with what I had for lunch because it feeds into last night's dinner, but I had a plate of mussels for lunch in butter and garlic and coriander. And I kept the kind of juice from the muscles that I made for lunch, and I warmed up some rice in it so it was kind of like fishy and garlicky rice and then I made a kind of soy sauce formula with spring onions, chop that up put that in the rice and use half an avocado and lemon and a little bit of sesame oil. So I had egg fried rice basically with some leftovers.Suzy Chase: Yum. That sounds amazing. Where can we find you on the web and social media?Julia Georgallis: So you can find information about my work on JuliaGeorgallis.co.uk. And I'm also on Instagram, which is @JuliaGeorgallis. I am actually launching a new project for all of my food research to sit on. And that's also on Instagram, it's called @TheEdibleArchive so it's TheEdibleArchive.org and that will be launching in January.Suzy Chase: Well, this has been eye opening. Thanks Julia, for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast and Merry Christmas to you.Julia Georgallis: Merry Christmas, Suzy. Thank you so much for inviting. I really, really like your podcast.Outro: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com and thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

The New Rules of Cheese: A Freewheeling and Informative GuideBy Anne Saxelby Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York city sitting at her dining room table talking to cookbook authors.Anne Saxelby: So my name is Anne Saxelby of Saxelby Cheesemongers and I just wrote a book called The New Rules of Cheese, A Freewheeling and Informative Guide that was published by Ten Speed Press.Suzy Chase: Saxelby Cheesemongers is New York City's first all American cheese shop. Daniel Boulud called you the most sophisticated boutique fromagerie or cheesemonger in the United States. Tell me about the American artisan cheese revolution.Anne Saxelby: So the American artisan cheese revolution really started in the seventies with a bunch of really talented enterprising women making goat cheese. There was Laura Chenel in California, Mary Keen, also in California of Cypress Grove Laney Fondiller and Allison Hooper in Vermont and Judy Schad of Capriole Dairy in Indiana. And if I forgot anybody, I'm so sorry, but there were these group of goat ladies, basically, as they would affectionately call themselves and they started making fresh goat cheese which at the time was a very new and novel and probably bizarre thing for people to see in the grocery store and on menus at restaurants, but it was kind of the back to the land movement and also just synchronized nicely with some different things that were going on with fine dining in America. There were some French chefs kind of up and coming and not finding the ingredients that they needed for certain dishes and fresh chevre certainly fit right into that role. So these women started kind of creating these boutique small-scale creameries and really kind of ushered in the whole artisan cheese revolution. Following them in the eighties and nineties, there was a whole wave of different small-scale producers, mostly centered in Vermont and California, a little bit scattered throughout the Midwest, but it seems like the East and West coast were really kind of the first seed beds I would say of the artisan cheese revolution and it's just kind of continued to grow kind of like a mushroom and like an inexplicable, but like awesome way where now there are thousands of different artists and cheese makers across the country in every state making really amazing cow, goat, sheep, even sometimes water buffalo cheeses. And so any kind of Italian mozzarella that's the real deal is made from water buffalo milk, but there, there was a herd of water buffalo in Vermont, and I know that there is still one or two herds of dairy water buffalo in the United States. I think there's one in New Jersey now actually it's called Riverine Ranch and water buffalo milk is just awesome. I think it's very rich and fatty and great makes really flavorful cheese, but I've heard that the water buffalo are a little bit trickier to raise, especially in the colder climates where, where we live. I think they like the warmer environment a little bit betterSuzy Chase: I thought you were going to say well they're all over Paducah or something.Anne Saxelby: I wish.Suzy Chase: So I'd love to hear about your relationship with cheesemakers.Anne Saxelby: I feel like that combined with my love of eating this delicious stuff are the two biggest reasons why I'm in this business. I went to art school in New York City. I went to NYU and studied painting and drawing as an undergrad and when I graduated, I kind of wasn't feeling the art world in a big way. I felt like there was a little bit too much pretense, you know, it was like a highfalutin kind of exclusive club, you know? And I was like, ah, I don't know if I really belong here, but I had no job prospects and so I asked Cato Corner Farm at the green market if I could come and have an internship with them and they were like, yeah, but not until the fall. I had to kind of wait for a little bit to have that opportunity but once I got there, I was just like oh my gosh, I fell in love with not only the cheese making process, but the cheese makers, you know, Mark and Liz who owned Cato Corner. Mark was a former English teacher. Liz was a former social worker and they just wanted to find a way to make a living, having a small farm and making artisan product and cheese was a way for them to do that. And I feel like most of the cheesemakers that we work with have similar stories. She's making this kind of the second career one that was just born out of like a love for art, for food, for community, for sustainable agriculture so I feel like the people to me are just as interesting as the cheeses they make. Having those relationships, those close relationships with our producers is a big motivating part of what makes having Saxelby Cheesemongers so fun.Suzy Chase: At Cato Corner, you wrote in the book, that's where you realize that cheese making was a lot like art.Anne Saxelby: Yes, cheese making is a lot like making art, except it's not quite as, I guess neither one is quite as romantic as people kind of imagine cause if you're really doing something day in and day out every day, you know, it's really hard work but for me, the thing about cheesemaking was that starting with a blank canvas and winding up with a painting or starting with raw milk and ending up with a wheel of cheese was a very similar process. You had to have a good technique and be consistent and apply all of your skills only with cheese. There was no room for BS, which was the thing that kind of bothered me about the art world, because I feel like a lot of contemporary art, you can look at it and you're like, huh, I don't know it looks like a banana duct tape to a wall to me. I don't know if that's really, that's really art or not.Suzy Chase: Or it's like I could have done that.Anne Saxelby: Yeah, exactly.Anne Saxelby: You know, and I was like, is it brilliant Or are you just pulling the wool over on us, but with cheese that doesn't happen. You know, if you don't follow all the steps, if you don't apply this real rigor, that's both science and art you're not going to end up with something delicious. And so there was something about that kind of authenticity of cheesemaking that really spoke to me. I was like, okay, here's this edible art form and it makes people happy so it's just kind of a, win-win win.Suzy Chase: Murray's, Citarella and Whole Foods has enormous cheese cases from cheese from around the world. But I love that you're focused on building a small case featuring American cheese. Can you talk a little bit about that?Anne Saxelby: Sure. So before I opened my shop, I actually went to Europe for a little while to learn more about cheesemaking and wine making. I figured it was kind of like my last to like travel and learn all this stuff before I hunkered down and started my own business. But I also felt like it was important to just learn as much of the background of not only the making of these products, but kind of the selling and aging and, and all of that. So when I was traveling in France and Italy, I was kind of spying on different businesses of all types and trying to take inspiration from ones that I thought were doing things well. And when I was in France, the thing that really inspired me about all the cheese shops, there was their kind of laser focus and attention to detail and a cheese shop in France you're not going to find anything other than cheese. I feel like if you go to a cheese shop in the States, you know, it's usually a little bit of cheese, charcuterie, crackers, olive oil, vinegar, chocolate, all these kinds of other gourmet kind of specialty items. And then also oftentimes also a lot of prepared foods, whether it's sandwiches or salads or things like that. And it's a cultural thing. And there's a reason that laser-focused cheese shops work in France because people have this kind of built in appreciation that's just in their blood, literally through the millennia but that kind of simplicity of just focusing intensely on, on one idea, I found really like exciting and something that I wanted to emulate. So when I opened my own business, I really wanted to just focus in on cheese in particular. And then because of the tiny, tiny little space I found to open my first store, which was on the Lower East Side in Essex Market I literally had a hundred square feet and half of it was a refrigerator and I was like, all right, well, I literally have three feet of cheese case to merchandise cheese and so I'm going to take a gamble and just work with the American artisans that I love and see what comes of it. And luckily people have been into it.Suzy Chase: So your cheese case dictated what you were going to have?Anne Saxelby: Yeah. So I was thinking about the store and I always wanted to have a focus on American, but then once I saw the actual size, I was like, well, you know what, I'm going to do all American because there's not room to do anything else there because that's what I really want to do anyway. So let's, let's just go for it.Suzy Chase: So now you're at Chelsea Market downstairs and cheese has become the lens through which you see the world where you share what you know, and help others, now to help us you kicked off this book with the rules, for the cheese counter of which you have 12 talk a little bit about these rules and why we need them.Anne Saxelby: I was just trying to kind of demystify the cheese shopping process because I feel like shopping for cheese, if you're not like already a cheese nerd can seem a little intimidating so that's really what I wanted to get at with the first 12 rules, like support your local cheese shop. I think it's so important for people to kind of seek out a small independent retailer, if they're lucky enough to have one in their area or a farmer's market, just because those are the people who are super passionate, who are really going to be knowing the details behind the products that they're selling and supporting small business I feel like now more than ever is just so important. And then I talk about learning what the five basic styles of cheese are because when you go to a cheese counter and you see a hundred or 200 or however many different kinds of cheese, you're like, oh my God, how could I ever choose? But all cheese basically fits into like five basic categories, which are fresh, bloomy rind, natural rind, washed rind, and blue. And if you can kind of just know those basic types, you can start to identify what you like a lot easier.Suzy Chase: So I bought the five styles of cheese last weekend at your shop and okay, so number one was fresh and I got the Narragansett Mozzarella. What's fresh?Anne Saxelby: So fresh cheeses to me are cheeses that don't have a rind they're very young, they're very simple to make and they tend to be really mild in flavor. So mozzarella, fresh goat, cheese, ricotta, queso blanco, queso fresco, those to me are fresh cheeses, and they're great to start a cheese plate with because they're really light and mellow, and then you can kind of progress towards stronger flavors. They're also great to cook with. So they're great to have around because if you're using them on a cheese plate, great, but you can also put them in a salad or on a pizza or in an omelet. And so it's a really nice thing to have in your kitchen.Suzy Chase: The next is bloomy rind and I got the Kunik, is that how you pronounce it? Mini?Anne Saxelby: Yes, the dream boat bloomy rind cheese. So bloomy rind cheeses to me are cheeses that have a rind that looks like brie. So they're kind of covered by like a white fuzzy mold. And they're called bloomy rind because this white fuzzy mold literally blooms on the outside of the cheese as it ages and forms this beautiful and kind of protective rind around the cheese. So these cheeses tend to be a little bit softer, a little bit gooier, more buttery and can have kind of a mushroom flavor as well due to that bloom on the rind and the Kunik is one of my all time favorites. It's a triple cream goat, cow blend. I always tell customers behind the counter, it's kind of as close as you can get to eating goat milk ice cream without actually going there.Suzy Chase: The next one I got was natural rind, and that was the Jersey Girl Woodcock Farm.Speaker 3: And I feel like the category natural rind is cheating a little bit, cause it's lumping like so many different kinds of cheese into one group. But to me, a natural rind cheese is anything like the Jersey Girl that has kind of a natural from earthy crust or rind on the outside and that rind forms in the cave, they don't do anything special to the cheeses as it's aging to kind of influence the bacteria and the mold one way or another. They might brush the cheese and flip the cheese as it's aging, but these natural rind cheeses, they tend to be a little bit more aged maybe between, I would say like three and gosh, upwards of like two years old and they can have more intense flavors like that Jersey Girl that you got is like buttery and a little bit sharp and also kind of just earthy and beautiful and I think it's nice to have one of those on a cheese plate that's just a little bit more rustic, a little bit more aged, a little bit more intense.Suzy Chase: The next one I got was a washed rind, the Lazy Lady Farm Two Lips.Anne Saxelby: Yeah. Two Lips from Lazy Lady. So that actually, I don't know if you saw the goat on the label, but Lazy Lady is probably one of our most politically active cheese makers. She says one goat, one vote when we were talking about the election, she was talking about marching, her goats actually down to her local polling place, which would have been amazing if she actually did it. So it's a washed rind cheese, it's washed with a salt brine as it ages and so what that washing process does is that it encourages this kind of reddish orange bacteria to form on the rind and that's what gives washed rind cheeses their signature, pungent smell and pungent quality. And so washed rind cheeses tend to be pungent intense and it's always lovely to have something that's like a little bit funky to push the boundaries.Suzy Chase: The last one is blue and I got the Bayley Hazen Blue from Jasper Hill Farm.Anne Saxelby: Oh yeah. Bailey Hazan is such a classic. That's like my go-to blue whenever I need something to snack on the, at the cave or at the shop. And so blue cheeses are very easy to recognize, of course, because they've got those beautiful blue veins running through them. The mold is not injected into the cheese as many people think, but it's actually activated by oxygen. So this blue mold is put into the milk during the cheese-making process and then about a week or so after the wheels of cheese are made, the cheese maker will come and poke holes in the wheel and anywhere they poke a hole, a vein of blue will grow. And if they're extra kind of like nooks and crannies and the interior of the cheese that oxygen will find its way all in and the mold will kind of spread all throughout the middle of the cheese. And so an important thing to know about blue cheese is that they're not all created equal. Some blue cheeses are super strong and super intense and other blue cheeses are like very creamy and mild and just really kind of luscious and decadent like there's Gorgonzola Cremificato, which is a great Italian blue that's very mild and sweet and there's Cambozola, which has literally combination of Camembert and Gorgonzola and that's another very mild blue. So even if people think they're afraid of blue, I would recommend that they try some just to see, cause there's kind of a full spectrum of delicious flavor to discover there.Suzy Chase: Okay. To eat the rind or not eat the rind. That is the question.Anne Saxelby: Oh, for me, I always eat the rind. Well, unless it's wax cloth or bark, I always try it. Unless it is those three things, it is edible. It's just up to you whether or not you like the taste. So soft cheeses like Kunik, I would not miss that rind for anything. Firmer cheeses like Jersey Girl, I might nibble a little bit of the rind, but maybe it's going to be a little bit earthy and a little bit intense, but I always do try it cause I feel like it can sometimes add really delicious flavors.Suzy Chase: So I guess for the holidays, if we want to make kind of a basic cheeseboard, we should do the five basic styles of cheese?Anne Saxelby: I think that's a great place to start. Yeah. Because then you can get all of kind of these different textures, styles, flavors represented, and it's going to really give you a whole nice spectrum of cheeses and flavors to work with.Suzy Chase: So quickly tell us about your theme to cheese boards. I love this.Anne Saxelby: I was just saying there are a million different ways that you could take it when you're making a cheeseboard, like choose a country you can do an Italian, a French, a Spanish or an all American, or if you wanted to get more specific, you could even do an all Vermont or all Wisconsin or all California cheese plate. You can also do like a tour of the barnyard and pick different cheeses from all the different milk sources. You could also be really silly and do like an 80's theme cheese plate include some, I don't know, weird cheese in a can or no, I wouldn't really do that, but you know what I mean?Suzy Chase: A cheese ball!Anne Saxelby: Yeah, exactly. A cheese ball covered with nuts but I mean, there are a million different ways you could take it and I feel like that's what makes eating cheese fu.Suzy Chase: Okay. So you wrote in the book, cheddar is a noun and a verb.Anne Saxelby: That is true. So cheddar is a style of cheese, but it is also what is done to the curds during the cheese-making process that makes cheddar unique from all other cheeses.Suzy Chase: Now to my segment called Last Night's Dinner where I asked you what you had last night for dinner.Anne Saxelby: Oh my gosh strangely it involves zero dairy. That is very unusual. Actually, so I sell cheese, my husband sells meat, so we're, we've got a pretty like dairy and meat, protein, heavy diet going on. But last night we had shrimp tacos actually.Suzy Chase: Oh, did you make them?Anne Saxelby: I did. Yeah. I feel like during the pandemic we discovered the frozen food section of the supermarket more than we ever had before. And so now I always keep frozen shrimp and my freezer and frozen dumplings because those are great in a pinch. And so yeah I just did the shrimp real quick with some, with some garlic and lemon and you know, cooked some beans and made some pickled red onions and we just threw it all together.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web, social media and in New York City?Anne Saxelby: So on the web SaxelbyCheese.com and we do sell copies of the book online. I will sign the books and send them out if you order them from our website and we also ship cheese nationwide. On Instagram and Twitter, we're at Saxelby Cheese. And in the real world, we are in the Chelsea Market, which is on 9th Avenue, kind of between 9th and 10th Avenue, between 15th and 16th Streets it's a great market.Suzy Chase: You can find me there downstairs too!! It's my favorite place. I'm telling you this book is a wonderful holiday gift that everyone has to get. And thank you Anne so much for coming on Cookery by the Book Podcast.Anne Saxelby: Thank you so much for having me. It was such a pleasure.Outro: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com. And thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

Snacky Tunes: Music is the Main IngredientBy Darin and Greg Bresnitz with Khuong Phan Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.Darin Bresnitz: Hello, I'm Darin Bresnitz. I'm the cohost and coauthor of Snacky Tunes: Music is the Main Ingredient, which is our new book that I did with my brother, Greg and our business partner Khuong Phan. Now it is a perfect gift for the holidays. And if you have kids, you will look like the coolest parent in the room.Suzy Chase: Darin, I've known you, I think since like 2004 or five, when you used to play squash on and off with my husband, Bob, and now you're married and expecting your second child. I can't believe it. Time flies.Darin Bresnitz: I mean, it's pretty wild. I remember when you used to DJ at Trophy Bar. Oh my gosh. Back in the day, what a great spot.Suzy Chase: And then around 2007, you developed TV's first music and cooking show called Dinner with the Band an award-winning series. You and your brother, Greg are legit OG food media guys. So then in 2009, you went on to create Snacky Tunes, the first food and music radio show and you just mentioned Trophy Bar. I feel like we've kind of led parallel lives. Cause I had my soul music podcast that started in 2005. I had my DJ residency at Trophy Bar in 2010. That's when Brooklyn was the epicenter of the food and music explosion and all while I was creating this cookbook podcast. So I'd love to hear about your evolution in Brooklyn, from Dinner with the Band and your podcast and now the book with some stops along the way at Refinery29 and Tastemade.Darin Bresnitz: Oh man. Well, you know, I'll go back to 2001. When I was at school at Boston University and I gotten into television and I opened up the phone book to find myself an internship and the only show listed was The Phantom Gourmet and it was a restaurant review show on NECN, which was their local like a New York 1, but for all of New England and I called them and we chatted and that was my first foray into food and you know, this is like I said, 2001 and so explaining to people that I was working in food TV or working in food media, some people just raised their eyebrows, politely. Some people needed a larger explanation, but you know, from back then, I just really felt that that was really, where the greatest stories lied with greatest people lived, I felt that this was the path for me to really explore the world and I really haven't taken my eyes off the prize. You know, I really have never stepped completely out of the food media world. As you mentioned, I spent a little time at Refinery29, but even there, I was always bringing food into the events that I was doing there, but we were still doing Snacky Tunes, the radio show. We were still doing our barbecue blowouts in Williamsburg, where we had high-end chefs come to Williamsburg and pair them with a DJ. You know, it was always just traipsing along in the different types of media forms and in college when I had the idea for dinner with the band, I thought that if I was going to get into this business that I didn't want to ever just work on other people's show that the whole idea was to create your own thing, which I had taken from a lot of the DIY basement sort of punk rock shows that we were going to as kids, whereas you didn't need anyone's permission. You just went out and you built something and it was yours. And some people came, most people didn't, but at least you made something. And so that building of the show, building of Dinner with the Band in the late aughts is what was sort of the backbone for the first part of my career in TV. And then that ultimately went away and around that time, 2009, when we were sort of making the show and it was also sort of ending is when we started, Snacky Tunes, which Greg and I started at Heritage Radio Network, which was an absolute blast. You know you couldn't get more epicenter right? In the back of Roberta's 2009. I mean that's it. We were just in the heart of it and you could feel it was special at the time. You know, you could really just feel the ground shifting and you could see what was happening, post recession and all the new food ideas, you know, Roy Choi's Kogi Truck coming out of LA and the national, international effect that was having on restaurants and what could be considered a restaurant or a food truck and the accessibility where you didn't need to be in Manhattan or even Williamsburg, you could just be out anywhere and that was what Roberta's was teaching us and stuff. It was just great to be at the center of it. And then, five, six years later, 2015, I just felt the winds shifting for me a little bit and came out to LA and have been lucky enough to be part of the food movement that's happening out here. You know, I would argue that LA is one of, if not the most exciting food cities in the last few years, obviously the pandemic upended not just LA, but a lot of places, especially as we head into a second shutdown right now, but you know, I've been happy enough to be at Tastemade overseeing a lot of our original series for the networks. I just found in my lane early on. I think that's the best way to really describe it is that I found my lane and my lane was food and I never wavered. And there was a lot of setbacks and it's easy when you say the highlights like this to be like, Oh yeah, I went from this and that. And that, the other thing, you know, there was also bankruptcy and taxes owed and ideas not getting picked up and hunting for jobs and being freelance. But at the end of the day, I just never wavered. And food has just sort of been my guiding light, my North star, and I've loved all the food people I've met and all the chefs and the stories that have gotten told, and we've gotten to eat and where it's taken me all over the world and how I met my wife and how we're raising our family and just, it always comes back to food.Suzy Chase: I honestly, think you made that lane and you made it a really hip lane.Darin Bresnitz: I don't know if I would claim to say that I made it, you know, I think that I was happy to be in that lane with some people and I'm happy to be considered when anyone does that I'm a part of that. What I love about my role in this is, and this is where the weird thing is about being on the podcast and having the book is that we're not really front and center. You know, Greg and I have really worked to make the show as a platform for other chefs. And when I go back and listen to my interviews over the last decade or so, what I personally have worked to have done is taken myself out of the show as much as possible. It really is like a setup, a question, and then get out of the way. So, you know, it's doing this media talking about the book, which I so happy that we got to do and to curate and be a part of in many ways. It's like, you know, we wrote the intro and then we got out of the way and we let the chefs tell their stories.Suzy Chase: Okay. So will you sing your Snacky Tunes jingle with me?Darin Bresnitz: Oh man. Uh, let's see. Can I tell you the story about it before we sing it?Suzy Chase: Yesss!!Darin Bresnitz: So we were deejaying at the time and we didn't have a theme song and we're like, okay, we should have a theme song. And the original idea was to have different people. Cause we were having all these bands on and uh, you know, we had all these different musicians that were in our lives at the time and we're like, okay, we'll have people do different theme songs, like one every season or something like that. And then, uh, we were touring with Ricky Reed, AKA wallpaper, AKA Lizzo's producer. And we said, Hey man, can you make a theme song for us? And he was like, yeah, no problem. And then he sent over the theme song that is still the theme song today. And we heard it. And the reason why it's still the theme song is because he nailed it. He wrote the lyrics, he'd wrote the music, he sent everything and it was just like, okay, we're done. And that's, that's it. But yes, you know, tried to remember.Suzy Chase: All right, here we go.Suzy Chase: We talk about food we talk about music with musical dudes, finger on pulse, Snacky Tunes!Darin Bresnitz: Then it has like the NBC ring out like bomb, bomb, bomb. But no, it was great. It was like, Oh my God, uh, you nailed it. We don't need to ask anyone. And then Freelance Whales who was really the first live band that we had on that changed everything. Greg had found them busking in Brooklyn and they came in live and played a five song set. And that was really what changed the way that we did the show. We switched from DJ's to live bands somewhere on one of the episodes they were on they did a cover of, of it which is, you know, you have to dig up in the archive.Suzy Chase: I have to find that. So you and Greg wrote in the book, one of the most important ways people define themselves is by how they connect both to themselves and to the world at large, for us and many of the chefs who have appeared on our podcast, Snacky Tunes, those connections have been expressed by their lifelong intertwined relationships with food and music. I think the only way you could do that podcast and this book is to also have a deep connection to food and music. Can you talk a little bit about your personal connection?Darin Bresnitz: We grew up surrounded by food and music, both aware and unaware of how unique it was to our family. You know, our grandparents on my dad's side were Auschwitz survivors. My grandparents on my mother's side from Poland, for your Russia, a DP camp in Italy came to Brooklyn. And so in many ways we were second generation American Canadians. Our dad's parents wound up in Canada and a lot of the food we grew up eating was a harken back to this old European Eastern style of cooking, you know Hungarian on my grandmother's side and my dad's side and, and Polish on my grandmother's side. And so the idea of us eating food from scratch, being cooked from the kitchen, my mom carried on the tradition as well was just second nature to us, you know, and taking it for granted is maybe a weird way to say it, but just being unaware, that, that wasn't how everyone ate like we didn't eat fast food. We rarely went out to restaurants, not in a bad way. We just, you know, we're always cooking at home. And if we did go out to eat, it would be Chinatown or, you know, Jewish deli or something like that. And so food really became something that we were excited about. And then for music, you know, my father played guitar and was really into music. He was in Montreal growing up and he would go see all the Motown bands that would come over from Detroit and sneak into the bars when he was like 16. And he would also come to the States when he and my mom are dating and bringing back LP's that hadn't been released in Canada and have people over and share music with them. And so, you know, growing up, you'd always share music with us and there was always music on in my house, you know, every weekend morning, wake up to music and food and things like that. And so it just became ingrained in us that listening to music and eating food was just central to bringing people together, connecting with family, taking time to listen to a record or eat a meal together. And then as we got older and we started going out into the world, we weren't cooking as much for ourselves and this was the late nineties so food really hadn't taken off the way it had, but music, you know, we were super into the music scene and we'd go out of the suburbs of Philadelphia and into the city itself or go to our friend's shows and see emo bands and indie bands and punk rock bands and things like that and just the idea that you could create your own show, you could create your own t-shirt, you could make your own songs that just sort of gave us the definition of making things on our own to us, the food and the music itself is how we connected with people.Suzy Chase: So this book is complete with all new interviews, recipes, and playlists from 77 chefs from around the world who share how music has shaped them and its influence on the culinary world. When I first saw this book, I was like, yay, it's a compilation of your podcast interviews from over the years, but it's not, it's all new. Describe how you chose the chefs for this book.Darin Bresnitz: Greg had the concept to do a book and I believe the original idea was go back, pull this out of interviews of chefs that we had on the show. But to be honest, you know, if you go back and listen, like music pops up, but not every chef really goes into depth. And the stories that we're asking are not really the stories that we asked in the book. So we quickly realized that we needed to do a whole new format. Dale Talde, Nyesha Arrington, and Marc Vetri were the three chefs we reached out for the pitch whose stories wound up in the book and they helped us formulate what we would ask and things like that when we were doing our proposal for Phaidon, you know, knowing that this is gonna be a national international book, we sort of said, okay, half-ish of them were going to be North America, the rest will be international and then we kept going along the lines of how do we want to make this book diverse, right? Because we thought that you could easily fall into a very specific type of chef who do these compilation books and then you're not getting any variety. And we knew that we wanted to have some heavy hitters, you know, your Dominique Crenn, your Curtis Stone, your Asma Khan, your Ben Shewry but then we also wanted to have some new chefs that people may be had never heard of like Loic Dablé or Manu Buffara, or Monique Fiso some chefs who might be on our radar but might not be known at a larger level if you didn't know chef in general. And so we just went to work. I mean, we gritted it out to be honest, like we really were really disciplined and diligent in the type of chefs would reach out to and the diversity which was really key from us the beginning and we didn't want to have the thing where we're doing all this work and we wake up six months, seven months, eight months in and we go, oh my God, we didn't stick to our guns you know, we sort of fell short in who we wanted to be in this book. And so, you know, after the friends and after the colleagues when we started looking at who we saw, it still needed to be in the book and where we wanted some representation, you know, we have all six continents represented, we started just doing research and some of them were cold emails some of these people, the only interaction we've ever had with them was hi, how are you? You don't know us. Would you be a part of this book? Here's the questionnaire? Do you want to get on the phone? Let's talk things out. And people were really gracious with their time and their stories and the communication I have now, dozens of cities and chefs that I want to visit all over the world and eat their food and meet them for the first time.Suzy Chase: You just mentioned Manu Buffara, is that how you pronounce her last name? Yes. A chef in Brazil, but I love that you gave a voice to emerging chefs. Can you talk a little bit about her?Darin Bresnitz: Manu's incredible. In doing our research and what I personally know about chefs all over the world, I would say South America is one of my weak points. I don't know a ton. I haven't had the pleasure of visiting there yet and we knew that Brazil has one of the best culinary scenes in the world. It's super diverse they have a great amount of history and cultural representation ingredients. And what we love about Manu is that she really is at the forefront of this new type of cooking, where it's both paying homage to Brazilian cuisine, but at the same time, moving it forward. I mean, the fact that she picked Feijoada, which is I believe the Brazilian national dish, as her dish, but then modernizes it with some of the techniques. And some of the ingredients really shows the culmination and is really a perfect example of the type of food she makes. Feijoada. It was created by African slaves who came to Brazil and it's beans and it's beef and it's pigs ears. You know, it's a lot of, sort of like the bits and ends of food, but the culmination of the dish is something that's absolutely incredible. And then it just creates this gorgeous stew and you serve it with white rice and you have all these great garnishes. And it's just this very comforting, very soul hugging type of dish. Manu just works with local communities, she transforms abandoned sites into urban areas, she's a teacher, she's a chef. She's just one of those people who I go, can I hang out with you? How do we get to hang out more? And we reached out. She said, yes. And she gave us some incredible stories, a great playlist, and introduced, at least me personally, to a lot of artists who I didn't really know anything about. And I would say, and I probably butchering the name of this, but Céu, she was one of the artists on her playlist has become one of my favorite artists of 2020.Suzy Chase: Can you describe the look of this book and how it's all organized? It's super stylish.Darin Bresnitz: Oh, sure. Well, I cannot take really any credit for it. Phaidon paired us with an incredible set of designers Omnivore and they absolutely knocked it out. Now, the way that it works with the process is that we delivered the text so then they were going to parents with the designer and originally we were going to have 50 entries, right. And when you have 50 entries and you have X amount of pages and design costs, that allows for one type of design, well, Greg and Kuhong, and I had a very specific idea about who we wanted in the book and the amount of diversity that we wanted to represent the stories we wanted to tell. So we wound up delivering 77 entries with 86 chefs and restaurateurs. We had quite a few duos and so when you hand in that amount of information, I believe, I want to say the original amount of words we handed in maybe 200,000 words, and we got it down to maybe 110,120 thousand. But you know, when you have that much text, there really isn't that much room for illustration. And when you have that much text, you also think, like you said, how do you organize it? And so Omnivore really just knocked it out with the layout, the way that everything's presented, the way that we have different pull quotes. And we were involved a little bit in the feedback process, along with Phaidon, but I got to give credit where credit's due and they just do absolutely amazing work.Suzy Chase: Kendrick Lamar is in this book 12 times. What do you think that means?Darin Bresnitz: Well, I mean, so none of the chefs knew what any of the other chefs were submitting and when we did the interviews, we did not give any restrictions. We had a list of questions that we asked and we would ask the questions and then sit back. We didn't tell anyone what recipes to make, what songs to pick, which ours to lean into. And when you do something like that, you get some really fun coincidences such as this one. Let's be honest. Kendrick Lamar is one of the most prolific artists in the last half a decade, decade, right? But also he's got that same mentality that all great artists have. And a lot of the chefs we've talked to are great artists into themselves. It's inspirational. It's pushing yourself. It's, you know, looking at a tough situation and persevering. And I think when you're just in the kitchen, you're grinding it out and you're making a name for yourself and you're working really hard. You know, someone like Kendrick Lamar is a perfect ally when you're listening to music and looking for that type of inspirationSuzy Chase: Now to my segment called last night's dinner, where I ask you what you had last night for dinner.Darin Bresnitz: So I finally was able to unpack all of my cookbooks and I didn't want to fall into the, these are ornamental only. They look nice, but I wanted them to be both form and function. And so what I am made was The Phoenicia Diner's Chicken and Dumplings. You take a whole chicken, you boil it, you break it down, you pull the chicken off. Then you add all these root vegetables with some cream and little cornstarch to thicken it up and you just let that cook. And that's just absolutely incredible. And then you make these little biscuits with fresh chives and buttermilk, which are their take on the dumplings, which actually I really liked because I do like the texture a little bit better. And then you serve it up in one bowl and there's just so much in this recipe, but actually gets better each day. So day three of the chicken and dumplings was absolutely fantastic. And my daughter loved it. My wife loved it. It's, it's a very comforting dish when, when it gets to be, I guess, cold out here is below 50, but it does make me feel like I'm back East. It doesn't have like a lot of those flavors.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media and tell us about your virtual book tour.Darin Bresnitz: So you can find everything you need to know about us at snackytunes.com. You can also go to heritageradionetwork.org or phaidon.com is where you can buy the book but also if you want to support independent bookstores, we are huge, huge, huge advocates of that so you can go there and personally you can find me at Instagram, Darin Bresnitz. The virtual book tour. Greg had the idea of doing a virtual book tour and started putting it together and then Khuong and Phaidon and myself also helped put that together but we did over 10 stops. And the idea was in each city, we paired a different chef with a band and usually the chef of the band knew each other but, you know, look, we wanted to talk with people. We wanted to get the word out. We wanted to at least somewhat celebrate the book and some sort of physical presence. And the response we got was really good, hopefully sooner than later, at least hopefully for the second half of 2021 people will get back to physical tours.Suzy Chase: In the book you wrote, we hope you'll find a piece of yourself somewhere in these stories and be moved to create something of your own to share with the world. It was so great chatting with you, Darin. Thanks for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.Darin Bresnitz: Thank you so much for having me really appreciate it and stay safe. Have a great holiday season, and we will see you in the new year.Outro: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com. And thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

Store Bought Is Fineby Trent Pheifer Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.Trent Pheifer: Hi I'm Trent Pheifer and for the last five years, I've been cooking my way through all of Ina Garten's recipes.Suzy Chase: If you enjoy this podcast please be sure to tell a friend I'm always looking for new people to enjoy Cookery by the Book, now on with the show. I feel like Ina's cookbooks are a must for any home cook. I have so many questions for you, Trent, but first tell us how you got this spectacular idea to cook through all of Ina Garten's cookbooks and the TV show.Trent Pheifer: It happened about five years ago. At the time I had just read, Julia Child’s, My Life in France, and it kind of coincided with a time that my roommate and I were constantly watching the Barefoot Contessa on Food Network, but not totally making a lot of her food. So those two things kind of combined at the same time I was in a relationship. I was cooking a little bit more. So I started to try to branch out and develop my knowledge of cooking. After a summer spent with hundreds of failed recipes I decided that I should probably stick to one cookbook author that throughout the course of the several recipes that I had made, had always come through for me. And that was the Barefoot Contessa Ina Garten. Her recipes have been foolproof, I'd made three or four over the course of the summer. And I jokingly mentioned to my friend that, you know what, maybe I should just teach myself how to cook by working my way through all Ina Garten's recipes, ala, Julie and Julia one of my favorite movies. Who doesn't love Meryl Streep? So I started the Instagram account kind of on a whim with a photoshopped image of me and Ina called Trent & Ina saying that if I cooked three recipes a week, I would finish all of her recipes in five years and that I hoped Meryl Streep was available to play us in the movie. Yeah. And it's been five years since then. And, it's been a really crazy journey.Suzy Chase: So you just finished Barefoot Contessa Parties. And you mentioned on Instagram that you cook from all the books simultaneously, how do you organize everything?Trent Pheifer: So when I first started, I realized I was going to need some sort of system at the time there were like I said 800 recipes, and now they are about 1300 and my memory is failing me so I knew that if I didn't have some sort of system I was going to be repeating recipes, forget recipes. So I created a massive Excel spreadsheet. I downloaded all of the lists of recipes from all of her books and then split it into spreadsheets that are divided into tabs of appetizer, soups, alcoholic drinks, lunches, sandwiches, dinners, breakfast and then those are broken down into, by meat or vegetarian, just so that I can easily with a quick glance pick out the recipes that I want to make for the week. And each of those have the recipe name, the title of the book, the page number, my rating, any notes I did, and then any hard to find ingredients or expensive ingredients. And it just saves me so much time on meal planning because I can go into that document in five minutes and say, I have time to run to one grocery store, which recipe can I get that won't have hard to find ingredients and then kind of match it up to other recipes on the spreadsheet.Suzy Chase: All that stuff on your spreadsheet, you put on your blog, like the page number or the TV episode, all of that, right?Trent Pheifer: Yea and my original plan was to build those out a little bit more. So I include the book and page number, the episode category of how easy is that, is it easy, intermediate, hard to make ingredients that you could use store-bought is find ingredients hard to find ingredients, pricey ingredients. There used to be more categories. I used to do kind of a two-fer idea where, what would you turn the leftovers into, what you could serve it with, but time kind of gets away from you and so I've kind of kept it simple on the website. It's kind of all the basics for, if you're looking to make this recipe, here's what you need to know.Suzy Chase: So yesterday I was interviewed by BBC radio and they asked me who I would love to have on the old cookbook podcast. And I blurted out Ina and they were like, who's that? And so I kinda, I just, I just, how do you, how do you, and so all I could say was she's iconic. She's our iconic American chef cookbook author. So what is Ina to you?Trent Pheifer: I think that Ina has always been somebody that, and like I said, with my, with my roommates, we used to watch the show and never really cook anything. She just has a magnetism to her that she has this fabulous lifestyle that I think all of us would aspire to be having an amazing time with her friends, but she's also super approachable. So she welcomes you into her house. She makes you feel like you belong there, that you can cook. And then once you start cooking your recipes, you realize that she tests these over and over and over again. She watches people cook her recipes and then incorporates things that they made mistakes with into the actual recipe. So I just think that she's been in the game for how many years she has nailed how you make a recipe and how you describe a recipe to somebody. But on top of that, she's a fun, loving, everyone wants to be friends with her, everyone wants to be invited to one of her parties and when you watched a lot of those early shows, you kind of felt like you were the in in-crowd with her at one of these fabulous parties. So I think she's just an expert that is welcoming and is not intimidating. And everyone feels welcomed with her.Suzy Chase: The first recipe you made was the Lentil Sausage Soup from Barefoot in Paris. How did you choose this as your first recipe to kick this project off?Trent Pheifer: I wish I could tell you that I spent so many hours to pick the perfect recipe, but to be, to be real honest, it was probably what I made the week before. I started this project in early October weather's getting a little cooler. Who doesn't love the combination of sausage and, lentils? And give me a soup any day, every day. So to be honest, it was probably just what I had cooked the week before and had taken a photo of.Suzy Chase: I love it. Would you rate these books from your favorite on down? Are you doing that on your Instagram?Trent Pheifer: So at the end I will, I feel like do a rating of each of the books. Right now I tell everyone that my favorites are Barefoot Contessa At Home and Barefoot Contessa Back To Basics. I just really think there are so many go-to recipes from those two books that like, especially if you are a new cook, there's just a lot that I repeat all the time. I mean, the Back To Basics Shrimp Scampi was one of the first recipes I made, and it's one of the recipes that I am constantly making. It's just so simple and such an impressive meal. So I'm doing ratings of each of the recipes as I go. I'll be very curious once I aggregate all the recipes from every book to see what ratings, the books end up coming out to. 'Cause I rate each recipe one to five, so we'll see how all that adds up in the end.Suzy Chase: Oh my God, I can't wait. So when I was piling up my collection. I realized that she, somewhere along the line, dropped Barefoot Contessa in the title.Trent Pheifer: Yes and I'm not exactly sure, like after I said Back To Basics, I was like, I actually don't know if it's actually called Barefoot Contessa Back To Basics.Suzy Chase: It is. I'm looking at my pile right here. It's called Barefoot Contessa. But that's the last cookbook that had Barefoot Contessa on it, like forward facing.Trent Pheifer: And I think that for so long, she was known as Barefoot Contessa, but I have found sometimes when I mentioned Barefoot Contessa to people, if they're not into cooking, they might not know exactly who she is, but a lot more of them have heard of Ina Garten. So I wonder if that was a conscious move after Back To Basics, to skew more towards name recognition of her own name.Suzy Chase: Yeah. I'd love to know that story. Okay. Trent, you need to find that out.Trent Pheifer: Hey, when maybe we'll all have a dinner together or lunch together and we can find it out together.Suzy Chase: That would be amazing. So I know you have a tiny New York City kitchen like I do, and your kitchen seems fully stocked. Where do you store everything?Trent Pheifer: So when I first started project, I was living in Harlem and the kitchen I had was absolutely tiny and I probably had just your basics, your plates, nonstick pan, silverware, and some odds and ends. And over time when people realize you have a passion, they start buying new things, or you start partnering. I partnered with Cassandra's kitchen, which is like a one-stop shop for all of Ina Garten's favorite tools and ingredients. So I partnered with them and so over time I've built up so much stuff that at one point in my old apartment, I was storing things under my bed, under the couch. I had a bookcase that was full of, things. I've started to pair down a little bit of what I have, but right now I have a little bit of a bigger kitchen in my current apartment in Washington Heights. So I have a little pantry that stores a lot of things, and there's just a lot of storage for the small kitchen that I do have. I think when I first started dating my boyfriend, he was like, are there pans and baking sheets under your couch? And I was like, just ignore it. You'll thank me later when I'm cooking you dinner, breakfast, or any of that. So I do have more space here, but it's always a challenge, I feel like in a small kitchen organization has become my friend as soon as I'm not cleaning the dishes as soon as I'm not prepping everything ahead of the recipe is when I start to lose my mind, I have three pans of roasted vegetables I have no clue where I'm going to set them as when I have a little bit of a meltdown in the small kitchen.Suzy Chase: Same. I like how honest you are in the descriptions, like on recipe, number 469 Artichokes with Lemon, Terragon,Aioli, you confess that you don't love artichokes. How do you cope with foods you just don't like.Trent Pheifer: I think one of the blessings of this project has been having to make recipes that I don't want to make. I usually, if I really, really think I'm not going to like it, I try to cut it in half or quarter it, I try to cut it down to the smallest portion that I can but that's not always an option. I think with that recipe, it might have mentioned that like I love a cheesy artichoke, give me a artichoke spinach dip or artichoke pizza, but there've been some surprising things. I think that, uh, one of the dishes that I thought I was going to hate, and I'm happy that I didn't cut in half was her Roasted Sausage and Grapes. It was just a phenomenal dish and I never thought of roasting grapes, but it really concentrates their flavor and the sweetness from them paired with the salty sausage was just absolute perfection. On the flip side, there have been ones, such as her Pear and Parsnip Gratin that I made a whole casserole dish of and I just don't love mashed up pears and parsnips. I'm not a fan of parsnips and had to eat a casserole dish of that for a week. Not my favorite thing, but in the end, I truly believe that for any dish or any ingredient, you need to try it at least three times, you could have purchased a bad ingredient. You could have gone to a restaurant and they just aren't good at making that certain dish. So I try to live by the idea that I need to try things multiple times. One of those things that I'm still working on is finding the perfect anchovy. So if anyone has any recommendations for a delicious anchovy, let me know, because I can't find one I love.Suzy Chase: When do you break down an order from Seamless or do you?Trent Pheifer: All the time. All the time.Suzy Chase: Really?Trent Pheifer: There's just certain recipes, I love cooking and I probably cook four days a week or five days a week, but there's just certain things that I'm not going to spend at home, especially work's been busy and I want something quick and delicious and tasty. If I haven't gone grocery shopping, I'm going to Seamless just because grocery shopping for me has become a little bit of a bane of my existence in the city. The grocery stores just don't have this big of footprint as they do in many other places. And so I find myself going to three or four stores just looking for chives. So at that point, I know I can order from Seamless my favorite Thai place down the street, or my favorite ramen place down the street. And I'll be there in an hour. It's just, you're exhausted after a day. Sometimes you just need Seamless.Suzy Chase: So talk to me about food photography. It's the hardest thing for me. I make something and then I'll take a photo and I really want to make it look delicious. And oftentimes it's dark and my photos don't come out great for Instagram. What do you do?Trent Pheifer: I mean, if you really scroll back to my early Instagram, you'll know that I struggled with that a lot early on. The premise originally was to put my horrible photos next to Ina's beautiful photos but over time, I guess, five years of taking pictures of everything you've eaten, you start to figure out what works. And I know that everyone says that natural light is your best friend. So a couple of years ago, I got a very large day light bulb from Amazon. I think it was like $15. And then I got a little clamp thing to plug it into and it has changed my life. I'm no longer chasing the light to get the perfect picture at 8:00 PM at night. And I think for probably $30, I have something that just saves me a lot of stress. And to be honest, I think natural light is your best friend. That's the one thing. I shoot all of my photos on iPhone 11 people are always like, what special equipment do you use? And all of my photos are shot on iPhones and it's finding natural light. And I mean, sometimes I wish that I weren't taking pictures of the food and I could just glop it onto a plate, but it ends up being a lot of fun. And I do think that what I would recommend is getting one of those daylight light bulbs, because it makes a world of difference.Suzy Chase: I'm going to get that because it's so hard for me cause I make dinner for my family and it's usually out of a cookbook and I need to take a picture and it's like right now and it looks muddy. So I'm going to get one of those light bulbs. Thank you.Trent Pheifer: And we'll send you all the information and I'll send you some pictures of stuff I've taken at night that people are convinced during the day.Suzy Chase: Yay! So do you have a favorite Ina recipe?Trent Pheifer: This is such a hard one after a thousand recipes, this is one of the hardest ones, but what I really always keep coming back to is her Sausage and Fennel Rigatoni. It's from Cooking For Jeffrey, it just hits all the spots. I never thought I would love fennel as much as I do. I still don't love raw fennel, but cooked fennel is absolutely delicious sausage, cream sauce, pasta, you really can't go wrong with it. So that's one of them that I always recommend to people. And then I always hear back saying thank you so much I can't believe I had not made that one, but if I have to pick one that's the one I always go with.Suzy Chase: Speaking of cooking for Jeffrey, I went to BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music). When was that? Like 2014?Trent Pheifer: I think so. Yeah, it was right around then... Oh no, no, no. It had to have been 2015 or 2016 because I didn't start this until 2015Suzy Chase: And yeah, 2016. And Ina was at BAM doing a cookbook talk for Cooking for Jeffrey. And they were taking questions at the end and someone, and I swear to God, I thought it was you, stood up and mentioned your Instagram Store Bought Is Fine.Trent Pheifer: I was so upset because I was actually on a trip with a friend to hike Machu Picchu. And I was on a plane on my way back. My Instagram started blowing up and I was like, what's like, or maybe it was right after I landed on. My Instagram was blowing up. And my friend has Hasani was like, I just stood up in front of the audience and told them about your account. And I was like, you get free food for the rest of your life!Suzy Chase: Yes!! And the whole row was like, what is that?Trent Pheifer: I think that was only a year into this project, but I truly think that was a little bit of a turning point in this project. I mean building a following on Instagram can be a hard thing there's, there's so much competition and I think that was one thing that people started to hear about me and the community has just been so absolutely wonderful and so supportive it's been this nice little corner of the internet that just brings me so much joy and everyone's so supportive and we just all share a love of Ina.Suzy Chase: Today on your Instagram, you wrote "it's been nearly a month since I posted an Ina recipe with any significant amount of green veggies. I was stressing y'all." You can say that again. So first I want to tell you what I made last week, stress cooking during this election. Creamed Spinach and Eggs page 234 Modern Comfort Food. That was the perfect morning after election breakfast.Trent Pheifer: That sounds perfect. That's been high on my list too.Suzy Chase: The next was Chicken with Goat Cheese, and Basil on page 114 Barefoot Contessa At Home. One of the very first recipes I ever made for my husband when I was first married. So easy.Trent Pheifer: Do you still make it regularly?Suzy Chase: Yeah, it's the easiest, most delicious chicken.Moist, which is key.Trent Pheifer: And that's what I love too. And I do hear from a lot of people 'cause Ina often recommends getting boneless skin on, which is very hard to find, but I'm always telling people like, it's not that hard once you've, deboned a chicken a couple times you have all of that to use for stock and then you get these delicious chicken breasts and the skin just keeps everything moist and with this one, you really need it because it holds the basil leaf and the goat cheese and that's just one of those phenomenal recipes.Suzy Chase: And the next one I made was the Croissant Bread Pudding on page 192 of the very first Barefoot Contessa cookbook. All I can say that is so much half and half!Trent Pheifer: It is!! That is one of my favorite dishes ever. I'm not big on the raisins. I can skip the raisins, but that was just one that I could not stop eating. And then I couldn't stop thinking about how many calories were in it.Suzy Chase: It was perfect last week though cause we didn't even care.Trent Pheifer: No. Last week was a free week, free calories nothing sticks.Suzy Chase: And now we're back to green veggies today.Trent Pheifer: We got to have balance in life, I guess.Suzy Chase: What would you make for Ina if you had her over to dinner?Trent Pheifer: So I always joke that this would be wonderful and also would stress me out so bad that I would probably stress about it for a couple of weeks and then I would head over to Popeye's and I would pick up a Spicy Fried Chicken Sandwich. We'd enjoy that. I would make her favorite Whiskey Sours. And then for dessert, I would make my grandma's Red Velvet Cake with Heritage Frosting. I know that with red velvet cake, people are adamant that it needs to have cream cheese frosting, but my grandma's heritage frosty is out of this world, it's a cooked frosting where you mix flour and milk and create kind of like a bechamel and then you cool that, and then you whip in the butter and sugar. And it has been my favorite thing since I was a little kid. And I just want Ina to experience that as well.Suzy Chase: Tell us the story about when you met her in Paris.Trent Pheifer: It was truly kismet. I had seen a couple of weeks prior that she was in the city, but I had assumed that by the time we were there, she was not going to be there. And we had made reservations at a tasting menu, a restaurant called Verjus and we had made them originally Friday. Our friend was like not getting into until Paris until Saturday, can we change the reservation? So last minute we changed reservations to Monday and it was just truly meant to be. I walked in and the restaurant is no larger than a large living room. And directly in the corner are Ina and Jeffery enjoying a meal in Paris of all places. We both live in New York, but have never run into each other. And I run into her halfway around the world. I didn't want to bother them right then so we kind of bee-lined to our table. I had to face away from them because I wouldn't be able to concentrate the entire meal. And we did the wine pairings. So I, over the course of the next hour, hour and a half, I built up my liquid courage and my friend and I walked over after we had seen they've paid their bill and I was like, "hi Ina. I absolutely love you. I just couldn't pass up this opportunity to introduce myself. I'm sorry to interrupt. I'm cooking my way through all of your recipes. And then I go, I'm Store Bought Is Fine." And she looks at me and she goes, "I heard you were in town." I think I could have died. Happy. I think people that had followed me had commented on her Instagram saying Store Bought Is Fine is in Paris too, you have to find him. So we had this really lovely conversation, talked about the dinner, talked about our trips in France. Just talked about the night and both of them were so friendly, so gracious and at the end I was like, could I get a picture? And Ina goes, "we just called a cab I'll give you the heads up when we're heading out and we'll go out and get photos." And she took photos with us and just could not have been more sweet. You always worry about meeting somebody that you appreciate and you look up to so much that maybe they could never live up to what your expectations are. People are humans, but she lived up to them in every way, shape or form. And it's just one of those nights that I have to pinch myself every once in a while 'cause I still don't believe that it happened.Suzy Chase: Does she follow you on Instagram?Trent Pheifer: She doesn't, but she's super supportive. She comments on photos, likes photos but she keeps her following, like who she follows very low. I think she tries to keep it at a hundred people at all times. I mean, she's super wonderful. If I reach out to her, she responds super supportive.Suzy Chase: So I'm curious to hear about your new found passion, developing your own recipes.Trent Pheifer: So that is something that I have just not had time over the last four years, as you can imagine, doing this project, doing the grocery shopping, cooking, photographing, writing for the website and for posts, chatting with followers, all of that kind of stuff takes up a lot of my time. So over the last two years, I've started a document every time I come across an idea of a recipe that I want to try to perfect, a recipe from my childhood, that I want to update, a recipe from a restaurant that I went out to. So I have this master list. So once the project is over and I should wrap it up in about, I think 15 months if I stay on schedule, I really want to start developing and diving into developing my own recipes and putting my own spins on a lot of dishes that I have ideas about.Suzy Chase: Have you gotten to be a better cook through all of this?Trent Pheifer: I always tell people, this was where I got my cooking education. Prior to this, my cooking was whatever I heated up from the Trader Joe's frozen food aisle. And in five years, I've moved from there to being able to make my own carnitas at home and making Baked Alaska at home. And it's just one of those things that I think so many people get intimidated saying they don't know how to cook and I think they think that you should walk into the kitchen and it's intuitive and you should know everything, but you just have to build those skills up over time. I always think back to something Ina says, and it's like, once you know how to do one technique or way of doing something, you know how to do a hundred techniques once you know how to make a broth, chicken broth, you know how to make vegetable broth. You know, how to make pork broth. Yes, there are variations to each of those, but once you can learn the basics, everything else becomes a little bit easier. So I look back five years ago when I was screwing up almost everything that I was making and just think of how far in just five years that I've been able to come. It helps that it's one of my passions and it's my happy place, I think the kitchen used to be a source of frustration as I think it is for a lot of people. And now during quarantine was my savior. It was that place where I could go have a little bit of control in my life, create a satisfying meal and just space out for an hour or two hours. So yeah, this has really taught me how to cook. And I think, Ina always says that she cooked her way through Julia Child's Mastering The Art Of French Cooking and that's how she learned to cook as well.Suzy Chase: You just mentioned the Baked Alaska, how hard was that to make?Trent Pheifer: So I would say overall easier than I was expecting. I think one of the issues is I was very paranoid about timing and then, cause I was worried that ice cream was going to melt at every step of the way. But when you really look at the basic elements of it's relatively easy. It has a raspberry sauce that you can make ahead of time. And it's Ina's classic raspberry sauce that she uses in tons and tons of her dessert recipes. It's store-bought cake that you cut into circles, it's store-bought ice cream that you mold into balls. So it's raspberry sorbet and vanilla ice cream that you mold into a ball and then put on the cake and then you freeze those until it's rock hard. I think the hard part might be the meringue if you're not used to making meringue that could be the difficult part, but I think, and I think a lot of people think that, it would be a near impossible dish to make at home. How are you putting ice cream in a 500 degree oven and it coming out perfect? But it did. The meringue really insulates the ice cream and you have this perfectly sugary delicious meringue with crisp brown edges and freezing cold ice cream and a sponge on the bottom. And it was much easier than I thought it would be.Suzy Chase: Now to my segment called Last Night's Dinner where I asked you what you had last night for dinner.Trent Pheifer: I had a goulash recipe. So I think maybe a month ago I had a follower reach out and she had said she had created a cookbook of her children's favorite recipes from growing up and that she had an extra copy of it and she reached out to me and said, I want somebody to have this that is as passionate about cooking as I am and so she sent it to me and I was sobbing. I was sobbing when she told me about it. I was sobbing while I was reading. It is a book filled with so much love and I think that so many of us have those recipes from growing up in our childhood that will never be the same as the ones our moms made, but it's always nice to have the recipes so that you can go back to them and I made her Beef Goulash last night and it was such a great comfort food served over egg noodles. It had paprika and red pepper and the sour cream and it just was spicy. It had the perfect amount of spice. The meat was falling apart. It was an absolute delight last night, so long story, but that was what I had last night. And I just thought that was a great story.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?Trent Pheifer: You can find me at Store Bought Is Fine on Instagram. My website is www.storeboughtisfine.com also Store Bought Is Fine on Facebook.Suzy Chase: Thank you for bringing Store Bought Is Fine into our lives and thank you for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.Trent Pheifer: Thank you so much for having me. This has been so much fun.Outro: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com and thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

Ikaria: Food and Life in the Blue ZoneBy Meni Valle Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.Meni Valle: Hi I'm Meni Valle and my latest cookbook is Ikaria: Food and Life in the Blue Zone.Suzy Chase: What if there was a place, an idyllic island where residents don't go to gyms, don't take pills or adhere to fad diets, and yet they live longer and have a quality of life many of us could only envy. This amazing place is in the Aegean Sea and it's called Ikaria, a beautiful Greek Island named after Icarus, a mythological figure who fell into the surrounding sea when his wax wings melted in the sun. I first learned of Ikaria from you and this gorgeous cookbook. When did you first learn of Ikaria?Meni Valle: For me it would have been about five or six years ago, and I was just doing some research into the Mediterranean diet, which I'm very, very interested in. I'm coming from a big Greek background as well. And I just stumbled across some work and interviews and things about Ikaria and the blue zones and I delved more into that because it was just fascinating. I wanted to learn more about the food and what it was about their eating that was helping with their longevity but even when I found out about the food and learned more about the food, there was so much more I learned about the joy of Ikaria.Suzy Chase: So it's been said that this Island is the most shining example of all the blue zones. What exactly is a Blue Zone?Meni Valle: The Blue Zones are places in the world that have been identified where people are living a very long life, either free or very little chronic disease. They're living a long life, you know, many residents over 80, 90, over 100 but leaving a really healthy life. So there are five places in the world that have been identified they are, they are Ikaria, obviously from Greece, Sardinia, Okinawa, Costa Rica at Loma Linda in California. And even though these are all very culturally diverse, they do have common threads and their common threads are things like the plant-based diet exercising, naturally in that I mean, walking to work or working in their gardens and walking most places actually and the most important one I find was that really strong sense of community, which they all seem to have.Suzy Chase: The inhabitants of the small Greek Island live on an average 10 years longer than the rest of Western Europe. Can you talk a little bit about speaking with the locals and how they cook and eat and what were some takeaways for you?Meni Valle: I've spent quite a bit of time in Ikaria. My first visit was in 2017 and I've been going back every year, except for this year, of course. And I've gotten to know quite a few of the locals that have almost become family and there was a woman that lived about two doors down from where I normally would stay. Her name is Monica and she's 90 and I remember the last time we sat down and had coffee with her when I was there last September. And I did say, you know, Monica, tell me about your day. What is it about your life here? She said, I get up in the morning the first thing I do is guide into my garden, I look after my plans, I talk to my flowers, water, the garden, do everything I need to do. Then it's breakfast, which is normally something simple, like some herbal tea, a bit of toast with their beautiful Ikarian honey, their local honey, which is also been quite well known for their medicinal purposes too and their health benefits. And then she said I'll go out to the garden, do my work again out there, look after the house. And then I start on my lunch and start cooking and they have their main meal of the day around 2pm and that would always be so lots of vegetables, maybe a little bit of meat, maybe a little bit of fish, but mainly plant based veggie dishes or bean dishes, lots of salads. And then in the afternoon, so rest and they do take the time. This is the thing they talk about a lot is make sure you take the time needed to rest, do not rush through your day. If you need to rest, you take that time so they always rest in the afternoon in the evening, she said it's a light dinner could be just a bit of yogurt or fruit, but the other thing she said in the evenings if we say we might go for a walk, if someone has their light on in their house we'll stop and say hello and walk in and have a bit of a chat sit with some friends, have a glass of wine, maybe have a chat so they've got this slow pace life. And those are the things that I've come away with this slow pace. They're always with other people too you don't find them, that thing was really interesting, you don't find people that are on their own very much or lonely as we have in our modern world. They don't have any old people's homes, for example, it would be shameful for them to put their old people in a home. Everyone sort of lives together. They look after each other, the older people, the grandparents and the older people that the ones with the wisdom and the ones they do look to quite a lot for everything. So I think for me, I took away the slow pace, that sense of community that looking after each other, they do actually have a genuine care for the people in their village and everyone on the island.Suzy Chase: I'm curious about two things you just brought up the local herbal tea and the honey. Um, can you talk a little bit about Liza, the beekeeper, after you talk about the local herbal tea?Meni Valle: So when I was in Nas which is the place, I normally will stay with Thea and Illia, they did say to me, you must go visit Liza she's the beekeeper not far from Nas and she has got a beautiful honey farm. So we did, we went up and knocked on her door basically and opened with open arms. And with very little notice she was very happy to show us around and we sat and tasted some of her honey bread. One of the most exciting experiences there, quite a highlight, was when she took us out to the bees and smoked the bees and she actually put her hand inside and removed some in her hand. And when she was holding them, I did ask her what does that feel like? And she said it actually feels like holding soft cotton. She was very passionate about her bees. She talked about them like they were her family. She's very knowledgeable in beekeeping and her honey. And she talked about the different honeys that they've got there and the different varieties. The thyme honey, I think was my favorite. They've got a lot of seasonal honeys as well, but all delicious in their own way. And she said, you know, a teaspoon of honey every day, that's her little secret, I suppose that as you will live to a hundred, but they were beautiful. And she was an incredible, incredible, passionate woman about her honey, and like I said, she treated her bees like family.Suzy Chase: I would love to hear about how you gathered the recipes for this cookbook.Meni Valle: I've been to Ikaria now three times. So while I was there, I was cooking in the inn many times, I'd go in and just peek in the morning and see what she was doing and we would go forging, we would go to farms. And I've got to know quite a few of the locals there. And we always would sit and talk about food over a coffee or a piece of cake. And they're all very generous and talked about what they make and how they eat. And it would always invite me to their home, please come and have lunch and we would I'd go and we'd sit and we'd talk. And many times we'd cook together. So over the last four years, probably I've been sort of collecting those recipes, but also seeing how they did things and put those recipes together. It has been quite interesting and also I just love the way the story is behind the recipes as well when they talk about the food they make and why they do certain things. Beans, for example, are a big part of their diet, whether it's black-eyed beans or chickpeas, that kind of thing. They do have them a lot. And there was one lady who was saying to me, when we have our beans, we always serve with pickles on the side. And I said oh yeah is there a particular reason for that apart from they taste good together. So when we serve our bean dishes, whether it's a salad or a stew casserole, we always serve some pickles on the side, whether it's a pickled zucchini or a mushroom or whatever that might be or cabbage or whatever. And that is because apart from the fact that they taste good together, they actually need helps them with their digestion of the beans. So that was interesting to hear too, because obviously all the recipes in the book everything's meant to go together, it's about sharing a big sharing table. So, you know, it's about picking recipes out of the book that you like and putting them on a big table and just sharing it. And the pickles go with the bean dishes. A lot of the sides like the tzatziki or calamari or other sides there will go really well with the vegetable dishes like fried zucchini, tzatziki. So it would be just a dish in front of you that you would eat individually. You would share a lot of these dishes. So I love the way they do that too. And the different breads they make and the way they make their phyllo which is different from the way my mother used to make it because when mum came from Northern Greece and she made her phyllo like quite different to the ladies, what they do in Ikaria and I find that really interesting as well, because even though most people wouldn't know of a phyllo pie and a spanakopita which is quite well known but every place in Greece makes it their own unique way, they have their own techniques and I find that interesting. I love learning about that and listening to the stories that are behind those dishes.Suzy Chase: What are a few things you can always find on the Ikarian table.?Meni Valle: You will always find on the Ikarian table bowls of salads, fresh bread, beautiful fresh local cheese, which they make their goats cheese. You would always find some of their local wine. There's always, the bean dishes, the salads, like I said, the vegetable dishes the cheeses, pickles, olives, and they have local olive oil as well. Very healthy kind of food obviously, and everything is designed to be eaten together on the big sharing table.Suzy Chase: The other day, I made your recipe for Collard Greens with Potatoes on page 69. Can you describe this recipe? And can you say it in Greek for me because I'm not even going to try.Meni Valle: Okay. The Prasino Kolaro Me Patates that's just a very rustic dish not only simple, but really, really healthy, nutritious it's collard greens potatoes and it's a stew and if you don't have a particular ingredient you can use other ingredients as well. I love this. Simply served with some olives and cheese and some fresh bread it is a meal on its own, or you can have it as a side if you want, you know, with a bit of grilled fish, some meat, but on its own it's just delightful. It's just simple, and I was saying a little while ago to someone they're really, really simple dishes. And they said, well, there's complexity in simplicity. So it might be simple, but it's very, very good as well. So using the best seasonal ingredients you can get when they taste the best of course, that's, I think, the key to any of these dishes in the book.Suzy Chase: So I wanted to ask one more question about the people. They're so sharp and they're living such long healthy lives. Do you think there's a genetic component to this mystery? Or do you think it's just all lifestyle?Meni Valle: I'm not sure about the genetic component to be quite honest, Suzy, I think really it is lifestyle. I really do. Ikaria is a textbook example of a Mediterranean diet, but in a holistic sense, it's the food they eat, not just what they eat, how they eat it. And by that, I mean, by sitting down at the table and sharing that food with family and friends, that strong sense of connection of community and sense of purpose and having people around, I think those are the things that contribute to their longevity. They did talk about technology and, just said, yes, you know, we have mobile phones here of course its internet just like everybody else you know, we have all that, but we use it in a different way. We're not obsessed. And our teenagers aren't glued to their mobile phone devices, or they spend a lot of time outside whether it's gardening or just outdoor activities. I really believe it's their lifestyle, their philosophy of life. They also are very famous for their Panigiri which is a festival and they have these quite often from about March to about October, and everyone in the island, or most people in the island will gather in a village and they'll have roasted goat wrapped in paper. They come to the table, you have your salads, you have your local wine they drink, they have a band, everyone's dancing from about 9:00 PM till about 9:00 AM the next morning singing and they have a lovely time. But the main thing about these Panigiri's and the thing that really struck at the most apart from having a fantastic night and a lot of fun and energy out there is that all the money raised in these festivals goes to a common cause on the Island. So if any family might need some medical help or to get to the mainland or a school might need some repairing or some roads need repairing all the money goes to that cause. So again, it's that sense of community and it's illustrated every single day that I saw there, I saw people helping each other. And I remember something that Monica had said to me, the 90 year old lady, she said Meni you need to be where your heart is full. And that really was something I think about quite a lot. And she was an amazing person and full of energy at her age and she always would say to me, don't ever stop smiling and be where your heart is full. And I think that kind of says it all about Ikaria, that slow pace, that community, that eating fresh, seasonal food, the joy they find in the little simple things in life. That's what it's all about. So that's their magic and their soul.Suzy Chase: Now to my segment called Last Night's Dinner, where I ask you what you had last night for dinner.Meni Valle: Last night's dinner was a simple Greek salad. I had some beautiful tomatoes that I had bought from the market. So it was just tomatoes, cucumber. I had some lovely feta cheese that I put in and I just had some fresh bread I had bought yesterday morning from a bakery that I love, and it was a very, very simple dinner last night, just a Greek salad. So it's my go-to.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media.Meni Valle: My website is many menivalle.com.au, and you can find me on Instagram @Meni.Valle. You can find me there.Suzy Chase: You need to be where your heart is full definitely sums it up. Thank you so much Meni for coming on Cookery by the Book Podcast.Meni Valle: Thank you so much. Lovely chatting with you, Suzy.Outro: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com and thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

Chasing Flavor: Techniques and Recipes to Cook FearlesslyBy Dan Kluger Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table talking to cookbook authors.Dan Kluger: I'm Dan Kluger, and we are talking about my new cookbook called Chasing Flavor.Suzy Chase: If you enjoy Cookery by the Book please tell a friend I'm always looking for new people to enjoy the podcast. Now on with the show. You are the quintessential New York chef, you've worked under and alongside some of the great names in the restaurant world. Danny Meyer, Jean-Georges, Tom Colicchio, and Floyd Cardoz who we lost to COVID in April. Can you talk a little bit about how all of these guys influenced your cooking style?Dan Kluger: I started in the front of the house at Danny Meyer's Union Square Cafe and had really no idea that I would someday become a chef. I was really just spending my days off in the kitchen to learn a little about what goes on back there in the hopes that it would become an owner someday. I should know what goes on. And Michael Romano, who was the chef at Union Square Cafe at the time ended up offering me a job. So I started, I think it was back in 1995 as a prep cook, just peeling potatoes and frying calimari and cleaning salad greens. And it was an eye opening experience to begin with. But, you know, really taught me about the basics of food. It taught me about the basics of production of food, and it opened my eyes to some incredible Italian food. When, when Michael Romano was cooking his Italian food, it was not always you know, what we think of as Italian food. It was from areas all over Italy and he would hone in on something really specific. And so there's a lesson to go with it, which I really loved as a young cook. So, you know, I got a little taste of, of, uh, cooking, a little taste of food and flavorful food and great products from the farmer's market all while working at a place that I had originally worked in front of the house. And so I was tied to hospitality and it was tied to taking care of people. I think that really kind of spawned the interest in this for me and specifically the interest in not just cooking, but cooking to really make people happy and, and bring the whole experience. So that was my time at Union Square Cafe and towards the end of it I was really fortunate enough to be friend Floyd Cardoz who was working out of Union Square Cafe as he was building Tabla and doing menu tastings and his food was incredible. And, uh, you know, at that time it was kind of like nothing else. And Michael Romano was also a huge fan of Indian food so they shared a love for it. I think that's in part why Tabla became Tabla. I didn't grow up eating Indian food and I didn't grow up really with really any ethnic food other than going out for Chinese food and once a month with my parents, so it was really an eye opening experience and a great opportunity. And through that, I ended up going with Floyd to open Tabla and I worked actually alongside him for seven years. And again, like just every day was a learning experience, both in the culture behind the Indian food and the flavors of Indian food and then because this was not just your average Indian restaurant and it was really American and French techniques with Indian spices. I learned so much about technique and building flavor and so I would really credit Floyd as having started my taste buds and my love for this balance of flavor. That's something we talk a lot about in the book I've talked about throughout my career. And, uh, after seven years there, I went off to work with Tom Colicchio on a private club in Midtown. He was a consulting chef and he hired me as a chef and so now going to work for him, I was able to really hone my skills on what I consider American food and what I consider my food today. And then from there I met Jean-Georges and decided to go work with him. I opened a couple different projects for him, but ultimately ended up becoming the chef of ABC Kitchen, which opened, I guess it was 2009, 2010, somewhere in there, and was really based on farm to table nothing could be from further than 150 miles with the exception of our olive oil and our lemons and things like that. So I was able to really polish and hone my skills on flavor using these products and under his tutelage and within this incredible setting of a brand new restaurant. And then I opened Loring Place back in 2016. And here we are today with, with Chasing Flavor. It's a culmination of all those experiences tied into a book that I want it to act as a way for people to become more comfortable with both flavor building techniques, whether it's charring or roasting or smoking, as well as comfortable and confident in terms of building a pantry that they can use with all sorts of different products to create these really flavorful meals.Suzy Chase: Okay. Before we talk about Chasing Flavor, I have to tell you a funny, kind of New Yorky tidbit. I remember when chef Cardoz opened Tabla in 1998, and I could only afford to go to The Bread Bar downstairs, but it was amazing. It was the less expensive alternative. You kind of got a little bit of what was going on upstairs and the onion rings were amazing.Dan Kluger: Yes, they were, yes they were. Yeah. It was an incredible restaurant again, you know the right place, the right time to launch Indian inspired concept that really could speak to lots of different people, whether it was through The Bread Bar, which was this home-style Indian kind of street food menu or upstairs, which was, kind of the crème de la crème of ingredients and techniques to showcase these Indian spices.Suzy Chase: So the month that Loring Place opened, I had Mimi Sheraton on my podcast. And since she's a neighborhood gal, I asked her what her favorite restaurant was and she said, Loring Place. And I was like, what? What's that? And she said, "Oh, it's on eighth street. It's my favorite restaurant." And I was like, oh my gosh, I have to check it out. And so let me just talk about where it's located. So it's located in Greenwich village on eighth street, practically across the street from Electric Lady studios and for the longest time eighth street wasn't, shall I say, the most desirable street? And I feel like you made the street, what it is today. How did you discover that location?Dan Kluger: I don't think I made it what it is today, but I was certainly able to be a, I guess, a big part of, um, it's change and what it's become today, but really I would give the credit to my friends who own Eighth Street Wine Cellar, which is right across the street from me. And they've been around, I think, uh, 14 years now. And I used to come down here a lot after work. And so for me the street was kind of become home. And then probably about seven, eight years ago, uh, The Marlton which is a nice hotel that opened up on the corner and I think really helped Stumptown coffee. And so just through those two places and, and the wine bar, I think we started to see a change in the street, New York in general, started to get a little bit cleaned up from the riff raff that was on that street before and we came in you know, right time before too many restaurants around the block and I was really excited to be part of a neighborhood that I like and a block that I had already seen a bunch of growth on and now be part of its continued growth.Suzy Chase: So I feel like the majority of your career has been centered around the Union Square Greenmarket. Can you share some of your shopping strategies for going to any green market? Like, do you come with a list? Do you have the route mapped out before you get there? Or do you just walk from one end to the other, which is what I do?Dan Kluger: It's all of the above. We're shopping for the restaurant there's obviously a list. What do we know we need? And if we need 10 flats of tomatoes to get us through the weekend, we will probably, pre-order five of them from one of our favorite farmers. And then we'll spend the rest of the time walking around finding the other five so that we kind of distribute amongst other farmers and we're able to pick up tomatoes and taste them as we go. In terms of restaurant, that's a big part of it, but it was not as targeted as that. If I'm not shopping for the restaurant, I'm shopping more for menu development or for myself, then it's really more a matter of I like to walk through with really open-mind looking for whether it's something new or something that I didn't really expect to pick up and cook with, but was sort of inspired at that moment.Suzy Chase: You believe that every recipe should leave us with something beyond a tasty dish. Can you talk a little bit about your takeaways?Dan Kluger: Every recipe as you said, has something called the takeaway .The takeaway could be that this chili sesame condiment is great on the arctic char, but it can also be used not for a raw fish dish. You can braise tomatoes in it and serve it with poached halibut, or the takeaway could be something as simple as, you know, how we cook our parmesan croutons and that's something that, again, they're, they're there for a specific soup, but they can also be used on a salad, or it could be about how we marinate something or how we roast something to get enough caramelization on it that, you know, something like a brussel sprout is still creamy, but now it's crunchy. It's got a little bitterness, it's got extra sweetness from that caramelization. So again, the idea is that we're giving you the confidence to use these skills, whether it's the key ingredient or a full dish.Suzy Chase: So normally you write a recipe for the kitchen staff, how much tweaking did you have to do for us home cooks in this cookbook?Dan Kluger: There's certainly some where we simplified them a little bit, maybe a restaurant recipe, we make an herb oil that has to hang overnight and was a little more time consuming and expensive and in this case we just chopped herbs. So the idea behind any recipe that's in there is still that dish at its best.Suzy Chase: You talk about elderflower syrup in this cookbook, which is one of your secret ingredients for salad dressings.Dan Kluger: We used a lot at ABC, but I grew up every summer going to England and elderflower is a big thing there and I remember my grandmother having this bottle of syrup and kind of fell in love with it at a very young age and at ABC, I really kind of learned the versatility of it and started using it in lots of different things from hot sauces to, to vinaigrettes.Suzy Chase: So I grew up in Kansas and corn was everywhere, but I only learned about a corn zipper on page 11 of your cookbook. Where have I been?Dan Kluger: You know I fell in love with the corn zipper many years ago and just found that it's a little bit easier and cleaner than just using a knife, but obviously a knife works really well.Suzy Chase: I need a corn zipper in my life. So let's go back to that magical day in 1995, when you were a student at Syracuse in the food service program, and you were asked to show a special guest around campus.Dan Kluger: I owe the credit to gentlemen named Leon Genet. His children went there and I think he may have even gone there. And so he had an auditorium named after his wife and a lecture series that he sponsored and he used to bring all these different people up to speak, whether it was the CEO of Macy's or Tommy Hilfiger or in this case, Danny Meyer. And Leon and I had kind of hit it off at an early stage of my time at Syracuse. And he said, I got Danny coming, Danny's great I want you to show him around and we set it up and I attended the lunch with Danny and then we took him for a walk around Syracuse campus and we took them to the Carrier Dome and up in bright lights was welcomed Danny Meyer. And we kind of hit it off and after that, I applied to Union Square Cafe to be a summer intern.Suzy Chase: That's a crazy story.Dan Kluger: Yeah. I lucked outSuzy Chase: Totally well, no, you made it happen. You made the magic happen.Dan Kluger: You know, I think I've talked about this other people for when I've said, you know, I lucked out or I was lucky, then they said, no, no, no, you, you made it you've you you've made these things happen and I think I've made things happen and I've used my opportunities to make the best of them. And I certainly not just been handed a silver spoon at the same token. I got very lucky with these things. I got lucky in meeting Danny. I got lucky in meeting Floyd and I got lucky in meeting Tom. I got very lucky in meeting Jean-Georges and you know, those things, I, I truly believe are luck I mean, I worked my tail off to get to those places, but if I hadn't met any of those people, you know who knows where I'd be today. So I do think luck does have something to do with it.Suzy Chase: This cookbook teaches us some new cooking techniques. So why should we use a wire rack when roasting vegetables?Dan Kluger: So the wire rack sometimes called an icing grate, goes on a normal sheet tray is really great for roasting vegetables because you toss the vegetables in some oil you put on top, and as it goes into a hot oven, the hot air of the oven is not only cooking the top of the vegetables and the sides that are exposed, but because it's on the rack it's going underneath and cooking the bottom of them whereas if you just had them on a tray or on a piece of parchment, they're actually going to steam in part. So this, this makes them become, depending on what you're cooking and how you're cooking it. I kind of refer to it as like raisinating them and it starts to dry them out a little bit and intensifies them and that's what I really like about it is you can take something like a butternut squash and roast it on there, and I just find it, it takes more moisture out and it just makes it more naturally intense.Suzy Chase: That's so smart because there's nothing worse than one side that's kind of crispy and caramelized and nice. And the other side is just kind of like wet and goopy a little bit.Dan Kluger: Yep. Exactly. That's what we're trying to avoid.Suzy Chase: I made your recipe for Heirloom Tomato Toast on page 39. And it took me back to the Union Square Cafe days. Can you describe this recipe?Dan Kluger: Yeah. So it's funny that you talked about Union Square you know, every season we had the tomato bruschetta, uh, where we just took ripe tomatoes and tossed them with a little bit of olive oil, salt, and garlic, and put on toasted bread. I thought it was great, obviously very simple, but for me, it was just a little too simple. It was always missing something. And so at one point I decided to make this heirloom toast where I bought, obviously some of the best tomatoes you could find, but then took the toast and rather just grill it we actually toast it with parmesan so you get this crunchy layer parmesan on it, but it makes this like really great layer to put the tomatoes on it, lots of flavor and then we build the tomatoes up. They're sprinkled with salt and olive oil. And what actually happens is they, they leach out a little bit of their liquid. The bread has been toasted, so it's a little bit dry and can take the liquid. And so now you have this like parmesan bread with soft tomatoes and the bread is starting to soak up some of that juice. And so it just to me becomes an incredible flavored toast.Suzy Chase: Now to my segment called Last Night's dinner, where I ask you what you had last night for dinner.Dan Kluger: I made vegan ramen last night. I built this broth by really caramelizing, deep caramelize, the onions and garlic and ginger, and then add it in miso, which is really one of my favorite products and some Korean chili paste and tomato paste and even some vegetable Marmite basically cooked all that together and then finished it with soy and vinegar and all these things by making this really flavorful base. You wouldn't have known that there's no pork fat in there. I mean it was like still really jammy and rich, just like if it was a deep, normal ramen base. So again, it's, to me, it's always about building flavor in stages.Suzy Chase: Before we wrap it up. I want you to tell us about your Thanksgiving dinner kit at Loring Place. It looks delicious and I'm going to order one for my family.Dan Kluger: Awesome. It's all of my favorites, obviously turkey and then we take the breasts we cook that separately, the legs we braise and we bake into an incredible pot pie and then we have roasted spiced acorn squash, we have roasted brussels sprouts, mashed potatoes, cranberry chutney, which has, you know, this sort of Tabla Indian note to it, then stuffing and then last but not least a gravy that I've been making for years with Apple Jack Brandy and apple cider. So you can have dinner on the table and probably a half hour with not a whole lot of work.Suzy Chase: I'll say hey, look what I made everyone. They'll say, this is delicious. Where can we find you on the web social media and your restaurant here in the village?Dan Kluger: Website is dk@dankluger.com. Social media is Dan_Kluger, LoringPlaceNYC,on social media, as well as our new restaurant opening this December called Penny Bridge LIC and then both of them are PennyBridgelic.com and LoringPlacenyc.com.Suzy Chase: Thanks so much Dan, for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.Dan Kluger: Thank you. It really a pleasure talking to you.Outro: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com. And thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

SerVe: Revisiting a Century of American Legion Auxiliary CookbooksBy The American Legion Auxiliary Unit 1879 Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.Ann Diaz: I'm Ann Diaz, and I'm here to talk about SerVe: Revisiting a Century of American Legion, Auxiliary cookbooks.Suzy Chase: If you like this podcast, please be sure to tell a friend I'm always looking for new people to enjoy Cookery by the Book. Now on with the show. Growing up, I was familiar with the American Legion hall that was located in Overland Park, Kansas and bingo and wedding receptions were the only things I knew about the American Legion, but it's so much more than that. Many of us don't know the story of the American Legion. Could you give us a little history?Ann Diaz: So most people know that the American Legion is a patriotic service organization that's been around for a long time. It did start in 1919 following World War One when it was observed that returning veterans needed a place to share memories and the challenges of war with each other and so Congress actually authorized the formation of the American Legion. Today there are more than 2 million members, which we call Legionnaires and I think 13,000 posts worldwide so including the United States, also France, Mexico, and the Philippines have Legion posts. But you know, it's really more than a social club, The Legion also offers benefits to veterans and advocates for veterans, and it's also a place for veterans to continue serving their communities a lot of them are service minded they work with youth, you've probably heard of Legion baseball. They also have shooting competitions. They have scholarships and oratorical competitions, and there's also a program called Boys State and Boys Nation. There's also Girls State and Girls Nation it's for juniors and seniors going to be seniors in high school to learn about leadership and citizenship training. So they do a lot of things that people don't always know about. They were also behind, the startup of the VA and they wrote the first draft of the GI bill back in 1944, it was called the servicemen's readjustment act back then. Since that time more than 8 million veterans have gone to college with that bill. So they do a lot in our communities.Suzy Chase: So the American Legion Auxiliary celebrated 100 years last year, tell us why The Auxiliary was established.Ann Diaz: So The Auxiliary was established just shortly after The Legion. As you can imagine, the women who were left behind during war time, they were busy, folding bandages, stretching resources, picking up the slack so they were not about to be left behind when it came to ongoing support of veterans and community service. So Congress also agreed and they chartered the American Legion Auxiliary that same year that The American Legion was started back in 1919, our unit, which is called Unit 1879 is the first one to be affiliated with the college campus so that's really cool. Our mission statement for The Auxiliary talks about the spirit of service, not self. We're here to support legionnaires and all veterans active duty service members and their families. There's a lot of fundraising that goes on oftentimes around food, right? Cookbooks, pancake, breakfasts, bake sales. We also educate youth on citizenship and the military, and we have a poppy program that recognizes veterans and raises money for them and gives us an opportunity to connect with veterans. You've seen the poppies, they're just like little red and green paper poppies that we hand out to veterans, take donations if they'd like. It's a fundraiser, but it is a way to connect with veterans.Suzy Chase: There's quite a bit of setup for this interview. So first, can you describe how this cookbook, a labor of love, came about in 2017 and your involvement?Ann Diaz: The seeds of the idea started as part of my grad school project, but it really became more powerful as The Auxiliary got involved. My auxiliary sisters in Unit 1879 really brought it to life, but the backstory I think is important too. So I was bothered by the number of veteran suicides and started researching what's known as the civilian military gap, the disconnect that we have today in understanding veterans, because we have a lot fewer connections to the military today. Less than 1% of our adult population serves, where compared to after world war two, where 12% of the adult population served. So there were a lot more family connections, people understood the challenges. So it's easy to stereotype what we don't understand. And it's definitely hard for us to support what we don't understand. So that's the civilian military gap. And I made my way to the local Legion post, wondering if bingo was really like the only way that I could get to know some of the veterans there. And they invited me inside and I wasn't really prepared for that, but suddenly there, I was sitting with about a half a dozen veterans from the Korean war from the Navy. And so I thought, wow, okay, this is my opportunity to get to know them a little bit. And, you know, I realized, I didn't really know how to engage in conversation. I didn't know what to say. So I realized I was part of that problem, part of the civilian military gap. So I went home and I brushed up on my military literacy. I did some research and I had conversations with veterans, with 22 veterans over the course of about five months and the conversations were so diverse, surprisingly diverse and really the only commonality I think was that we were conversing around food. So that was kind of one thing, but it was really transformative for me, any stereotypes that I may have had about patriotism or supporting veterans was kind of shattered in that process and at the same time, I was reading a book of essays called See Me For Who I Am. They were student veterans stories about war and coming home. And there was this line that caught my attention, a student veteran by the name of Jeffrey Norfleet. He wrote something like "I'm a walking discovery channel. Ask me about the cultures I've seen, asked me about the foods that I've eaten, asked me about the countries and the people and the nightlife." And I thought, wow that's really interesting. I could have a conversation about that. So the simple idea of food just kind of kept popping up the idea of the old spiral bound, auxiliary cookbooks. I kept thinking about food. I kept thinking in my out of my element, trying to, you know, write about the military I really don't know anything about the military. Why am I not writing about like food? And then I realized that that was really kind of the bridge, this idea of food and cookbooks and food stories, which is something really that women in the auxiliary have known for generations, right? Show up, bring food, listen simple. Really. So my advisor at CSU and I was just started imagining this historic cookbook, like how it could be a vehicle for increasing military literacy. And then I realized that there was an actual auxiliary unit right there on our campus. And so I met with them. I shared that idea and I realized that I was eligible to join because of my father's service and he's a member of the Legion. This was in 2017. So we had two years because 2019 would begin the hundredth anniversary of the organization. So the ideas kind of started to pour in, collect vintage cookbook from.. Has to be one from at least every state from every era and we're going to start with that. We're going to glean through for recipes and interesting tidbits, but we have different skillsets. We have Debra, who's a retired nurse and Jen, who's a registered dietician. And Rachel, who's really comfortable with technology. She's younger. And she said I can help with the online part of it, the e-commerce and the fulfillment. We have another Rachel who owns a cleaning company. So identifying the interesting household tips throughout the books, we have Karen Boehler, who is a former school principal with a huge servant's heart she's been involved with the Auxiliary for decades she was co-project manager with me. She researched and wrote the histories and many of the food stories for the book, Sharon is a customer service expert so she's really organized and she did our bake sales and help choose recipes. And we just had this great collaboration of skills and talents. I'm a writer and editor. I took a class in InDesign, so I could design the book because I had a vision for what it should look like that allowed us to self publish it and save a lot of money so we can donate more for veterans.Suzy Chase: I wanted to have you on the cookbook podcast because today is Veterans Day and I want to shine the spotlight on what war means and the sacrifices paid. And I wanted to note that The American Legion family must be nonpolitical. So this is about serving our country and honoring a legacy. Over the past couple of years, as you said, you've been collecting American Legion Auxiliary cookbooks. Where did you find all these cookbooks?Ann Diaz: Yeah, it was a lot of fun. It was a good challenge. We were really determined to collect one from every state or department they're called in The Legion family and covering all eras so discovering that one really did exist from 1919 was really the jumping off point for the project while it was still in the research stage. I did an online search and found a reprint of a book from Eureka, California from an auxiliary unit there in 1919. So that was the, okay, this is going to work sort of moment that they're out there from that far back. And then a lot of Google searches followed after that. eBay, Amazon just general searches, Kitchen Arts & Letters in New York City tracked down about a half a dozen books for us. And some of the online vendors, like a 1920's book from Seymour, Wisconsin is a leather cover with gold embossing on it and they wanted $90 for it. So I wrote and told them what the project was about and they gave us a really nice discount. We did that a couple of times, but all of our ladies reached out to their friends, made personal phone calls. So everybody really did their part. And Karen who I mentioned, our unit president for Rolodex is like a who's who of people in The Auxiliary and so she started reaching out to people and she got us some 1920's books from Idaho that are canvas covered, binder style cookbooks from the 1980's. She has friends in Alaska and Hawaii. So those hard to find books, she helped us with those.Suzy Chase: The 1919 recipe is the oldest recipe in this cookbook. What's that dish.Ann Diaz: So those are Clifford Teacakes. Isn't that just a charming, old name? Clifford Teacakes um, you just think of like doilies and fancy China, but really it's like an icebox cookie. You might remember Icebox Cookies? It's almost got like the texture of a biscotti, which people enjoy today so we wanted it to be a contemporary looking book to bridge those generations. So you're not going to see the photo of it on grandmother's China. It's going to be something a little bit more contemporary to kind of illustrate that hey, these are things that maybe your great grandma made, but you would enjoy it today. Some recipes will say like 15 cents worth of ground pork or to cook it in a warm oven and it won't say any amount of time. So we had recipe testers figure all this out for us. We had about 75 recipe testers, including our ladies across the country who volunteered but we paged through all these vintage books once we collected them and we identified and put on a spreadsheet over 600 recipes that were interesting for some reason. So we sent out the original format of them and people had to figure out like, what are some of these things mean? And they filled in the gaps and, and we said, you know, make it a little bit more contemporary, people might not use oleo or lard or whatever. Like what would you use today? We want it to be a book that people will use. They did that. They sent us detailed notes about what they did. They took photos. And then we re typed the recipes that made the cut. And then we sent those out again to another set of recipe testers to make sure that it still made sense and then it was going to work. So every recipe has been tested twice. And then below the title of each recipe in the book, we credit the original contributor and the book title that it was from and the year. So that really connects us to the past.Suzy Chase: I love that you put some of the recipe tester notes in the cookbook and you call it "Overheard in the Test Kitchen." I thought that was super cute.Ann Diaz: Yeah, it's kind of like marginalia right like the stuff that you'd maybe scribble in your cookbook.Suzy Chase: I noticed that most of these recipes are comfort foods and comfort food was so important to the military that the US spent, I couldn't believe this, $1 million in 1945 to convert a barge into a floating ice cream factory. Can you just talk a little bit about comfort food and the connection to home?Ann Diaz: So it's been said that an army marches on its stomach, that's an old saying, I suppose, with a lot of truth to it. So comfort foods were important and still are important on the military front. It's good for morale. There are some fun stories in the cookbook. There's one about the Hershey's company. So the military, I think this was also during World War II, that the military commission, that Hershey corporation to make a candy bar for field rations.Suzy Chase: Did it taste funny?Ann Diaz: Yeah, apparently it took many tries. They didn't want it to taste that great. Those were some of the criteria. They said it had to be small, four ounces so that it would fit in their rucksacks. It had to withstand the heat of the Pacific theater. It had to be high in energy and that it should taste only slightly better than a boiled potato so that the troops wouldn't overindulge. But then it got to the point where I think they got better with the recipe to the point where some service members would trade their cigarettes for the chocolate. Cause they really wanted the chocolate.Suzy Chase: My dad was in the Korean war. So my mom used to make SOS. Your recipe in the cookbook is from the official USMC Food Service Association recipe from 1952. I didn't realize there were so many different versions of this recipe in different branches of the military, for those who aren't familiar. Can you describe this recipe?Ann Diaz: Yeah. So it's like a toast covered with a white sauce that either has ground beef or chipped beef in it and my stepdad says when they made the chipped beef, that's when we'd go out for pizza like that, that was really bad. The chipped beef was awful but he also thought that in the Navy, there was more of a tomato base to it. So yeah, it was different in different branches of the military, different recipes. We didn't expect to find that recipe. It's not one that women would have passed down as the pride of their kitchen, but we were just talking about it and started looking for it and then a cookbook from Tennessee showed up in the mail and lo and behold, this recipe from the Marine Corps, this official recipe was in there. So Carrie, one of our members called the local tavern and said, hey would you guys be interested in making this SOS on armed services day a couple of years ago and served it free for veterans who came in. And so veterans came in, they got a free meal, they got to reminisce a little bit and we got to hear some of their stories. So that was pretty cool.Suzy Chase: Could you tell us about the three-fold mission of this cookbook?Ann Diaz: So the first part of our mission is to honor the legacy of these women that have served for a hundred years. The second is inspiring conversation, equipping people with tools so they kind of understand the wars that we've been involved in and give them some ideas for conversation about simple things like food. And the third is supporting mental wellness for veterans. So this is of course a fundraiser we're donating nearly a hundred percent of the proceeds because most of our costs were covered either by sponsors or work that we did ourselves. So we're donating proceeds to mental wellness programs for veterans. A lot of the creative arts, The Auxiliary collaborates with the VA on a national veterans creative arts program. Cause that's really good for mental health. And we've also helped publish a book of essays written by veterans in our area. So those are just some of the things so far. And we're just getting started.Suzy Chase: Now to my segment called Last Night's Dinner where I ask you what you had last night for dinner.Ann Diaz: We actually made a nice big pot of Beef Burgundy. It's a recipe in our cookbook and it was delicious. It was missing the homemade bread, but I'm cutting back on carbs right now and my grandma would be really disappointed in that, but it was delicious Beef Burgundy.Suzy Chase: Where can we find this book on the web and social media?Ann Diaz: On the web it is alaservecookbook.com is our website. And we also have a Facebook page under the same name, ALA Serve Cookbook where people can find us. They can find us at Kitchen Arts & Letters and some stores in Colorado, but that information is on our website.Suzy Chase: I think if we all lived by the motto, service not self, our world would be a much better place today on Veterans Day, we give thanks to our service members and veterans. And thank you, Ann for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.Ann Diaz: Thank you, Suzy,Outro: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com and thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

Help Yourself: A Guide To Gut Health For People Who Love Delicious FoodBy Lindsay Maitland Hunt Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.Lindsay Maitlan...: Hi, I'm Lindsay Maitland Hunt, and I am the author of Help Yourself, A Guide To Gut Health For People Who Love Delicious Food, as well as the cookbook Healthyish, which came out in 2018Suzy Chase: For more Cookery by the Book. Join me over on Instagram and if you enjoy this podcast please be sure to tell a friend. I'm always looking for new people to enjoy Cookery by the Book, now on with the show. So you've lived in LA, New York, Berlin, and now Jackson, Wyoming, hopefully back to Berlin soon. You've been a recipe developer, a magazine editor at Real Simple, one of my all time, favorite magazines, and now a two time cookbook author. This cookbook has come out at the perfect time for me. I'm not alone when I say I've been emotional eating and drinking during the quarantine, so much banana bread and so many Aperol spritzes. Who is this cookbook for?Lindsay Maitlan...: Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me. And the answer to your question is it's for everyone, because the thing about gut health is what that term is referring to is that we all have this collection of microbes that lives inside our large intestine, which is known as the gut microbiota. You might also hear the term gut microbiome, which is another term that's used for the collection of microbes, but also refers to their genes. So what happens is that this is the waystation to health because everything we eat gets digested by these microbes. And then those end up communicating with the rest of our body via chemical messengers. So the point is that this book is for everyone because we all house a community of microbes. No two are exactly alike. It's sort of, I like to compare it to a fingerprint. They all look similar, but they're all completely individual. And like I said, these microbes are the waystation to health. And so even if you have a diagnosed illness that you might be treating via how you eat or via the gut microbiota, it's also true if you're in great health, you still maintain this community of microbes. So no matter what this cookbooks is good for youSuzy Chase: Let's start with your food journey. So you were sick for three and a half years. Describe the tipping point for you when you knew you'd exhausted all the doctor's visits and 17 pills a day.Lindsay Maitlan...: So what happened was that I was accumulating a grab bag of symptoms, and I think so many people can relate to this. It wasn't necessarily something so clear. There was no straightforward diagnosis, but rather symptoms. So heartburn, migraines, itching, weight, gain depression, you know, hives all over my whole body, not even looking like myself in the mirror to me. And what happened was every time I go to a doctor for whatever symptom I had, you know, you go for the hives, you go to an allergist for feeling depressed you go to a psychiatrist or psychologist, things like that. Never was anyone able to connect for me that these were coming from something together. And I would say, you know, is there a connection? I, I never had heartburn and I never had itching and hives and I never had migraines. Could these things be connected at all? And I would always be told like, no, there's no connection. And then I would ask, is there something that I'm eating? I don't know. I mean, I'd been a recipe developer for so many years at this point, but I really saw food as a modality that had mostly to do with taste and maybe secondarily to do with how much I would weigh or how I looked but I wasn't really thinking about it translating and how I felt. And these doctors also told me that there was no connection there. So what happened was that after all these years, I really didn't feel like myself. And I ended up going to stay with my parents in Wyoming. I was feeling really depleted. I'd been living in New York and felt like I just have to give up because I'm spending all my time, going to doctors, dealing with the health insurance claims that come with that calling the insurance company, because inevitably something went wrong and really starting to feel like my identity was changing and being defined by feeling sick all the time. And I went to this functional medicine doctor. So he's someone who's trained in functional medicine, as well as having a traditional MD and he charted all the symptoms when they started and showed me this graph that showed them coming up into a wave and he said, this is totally normal. I can help you. What he told me to do was actually to cut out foods to cut out gluten, dairy and eggs. And I tried that and I did not feel any better. And so when you ask about the tipping point, you know, that's when I really had the ah-ha moment of like, I think I just need to buy the books by the scientists about this gut microbiota, whatever that means and start interviewing them and start reading scientific papers and figure out based on the science, which turns out it's these health promoting microbes that live in our gut. What they actually thrive on is dietary plant fiber. Once I understood that, I just started adding in those things that the microbes loved and also taking out refined grains to excess, not fully cutting them out and cutting out refined sugar to excess, again, not fully cutting it out, but really cutting back. And that's when my health started turning around.Suzy Chase: So the standard Western diet today is centered around many forms of the same thing, sugar, how toxic is sugar?Lindsay Maitlan...: I think this is something I say in the book, it's a saying from toxicology, which is the dose makes the poison. I think sugar in its self, like any ingredient or food is not inherently bad. Like I really like to stay away from moralizing terms like good or bad or guilty, or, you know, guilt-free, I think sugar is fine in moderation. And, and again, like I think part of this way of eating that is more like what I like to say, plant focused rather than plant-based because it's not a vegan cookbook, although it encourages eating as many plants as possible as making up your day-to-day way of eating. Sugar has a role for many people who get in better touch with their bodies and, and want to have some things sweet and delicious. It's so satiating, it speaks to pleasure. Or, you know, you mentioned stress eating during the pandemic. I certainly know I've wanted more sugar than ever in the past six months and anticipate through the election and to come that I'll probably be wanting sugar as well. Um, yeah, it's really when you get into excess, because it starts changing the way our body functions. And so what happens there, so satiating that you end up eating something and maybe it takes the place of those foods that actually the health promoting microbes in your gut need to thrive, which again is like a variety of whole plant food sources. So you might eat something that's really high in sugar and therefore skip that plate of broccoli because who really wants broccoli when a cookie is sitting in front of you. Like I know I don't.Suzy Chase: So I think you just touched on this a little bit, but to me, this seems like a modern phenomenon. My mom and grandma never complained about these issues. Do you think it has to do with our modern process food?Lindsay Maitlan...: It has to do with processed food. I mean, yes that's, that's definitely true. Um, the rise in use of antibiotics, indiscriminately is one thing that's also pointed to because there's nothing wrong with antibiotics they are such life-saving tools. But often, I mean, we know this right now, there's a pandemic caused by a virus, a virus isn't killed by an antibiotic. An antibiotic can only kill a bacteria, but so often people have taken antibiotics sort of just in case. And what happens is that those don't just kill one tiny individual microbe, but they wipe out whole strains and that can change how the gut microbiota community functions long-term because you can end up wiping out so many of these health promoting species. Yeah. And you mentioned processed food. I think also the reality is that it takes time to cook. And this is something, you know, that I think is a little more complicated than we have time to get into the podcast but if anyone's interested in the way that the rise of women not having as much time in the home or working, the second shift has affected the way we eat. There's this book called Formerly Known As Food by Kristin Lawless that really digs into that. So it just takes time to go healthy food, which is something that I think a lot of people want to shy away from. But that's the truth it's a process food it's just fast and ready to go and so when you have less time, you're less likely to create the dinner that's made from whole food plant sources.Suzy Chase: So instead of recommending high fiber foods for gut health, you say work in a variety of plants, including vegetables, whole grains, beans into your diet. I love that this cookbook makes it clear exactly what we need to get at the grocery store.Lindsay Maitlan...: So there's a book, another book I love reading. And, um, there's a book called Nutritionism by Gyorgy Scrinis, who's a researcher professor out of Australia and he is the one who coined the term nutritionism which Michael Pollan also popularized, which basically says, when you talk about the nutrient above the food. So originally I went straight forward with the proposal for this book. I was like, it's about low-glycemic high-fiber foods, you know, but if someone hears that they don't necessarily know what that means. Then they look at the carrot and they're thinking, is this low-glycemic and high fiber? What does, what does that mean? What does glycemic even mean? But if you understand that, the reason that we know that a variety of plants is so good for us is because of some things that we know they're high in complex chains of carbohydrates, which are what dietary fiber is, and they contain antioxidants and polyphenols and all these flavonoids, these complicated words. Sure. But at the end of the day, does that really matter? Those are the things we are able to name, but what about all the other components of the food that we don't know about yet and what happens when they're combined together? Instead, if we think about just getting the variety of those whole food plant sources, we're still getting the high fiber low-glycemic high antioxidant, all this sort of health jargon that's out there and is meaningful in a lot of ways. But at the end of the day, often I think for many people obscures what we eat away from choosing the whole foods when possible, and going for the packaged foods that might say, Oh, this is high fiber, you know, but it's actually a carrot that's been dehydrated and refined and used as a powder. We don't know what that's inherently as good as eating it and it's whole food source. And in fact it seems that there is actually a complex matrix of things that happen when that fiber is encased in the actual food. So that's why I try to stay away from those sorts of jargony health terms.Suzy Chase: Two weeks ago, I finished a 10 day cleanse and boy was that rough. And you know, my biggest problem was with flavor. I wish I would've had this cookbook, back then to learn about your nine ways to dress up a meal. I basically relied on flaky sea salt the whole time. Can you give us a couple of your delicious examples?Lindsay Maitlan...: Of course. I'm curious to know what kind of cleanse you did while I'm looking up that page.Suzy Chase: I did The Class.Lindsay Maitlan...: What's that?Suzy Chase: Do you know The Class by Taryn Toomey?Lindsay Maitlan...: Oh, it's a workout.Suzy Chase: Well, it's a workout called The Class by Taryn Toomey, but then she has The Cleanse. So you do The Cleanse and then you do classes every day of the cleanse.Lindsay Maitlan...: I see. Okay. So the nine ways to dress up your meal is something I like to just have on hand for always thinking about how to make a combination of relatively plain ingredients taste more delicious, add half an avocado out a quarter cup of chopped nuts, always adding fresh herbs tastes delicious. And this is part of a section called Prep city, which is in the front of the recipe portion of the cookbook where I give basic vegetable recipes, a little section, I call Three Magical Transformations, which includes roasted chickpeas, pickled shallots, and breadcrumbs made from cauliflower. I also talk about making beans, legumes and whole grains, broth, chickpea, flatbread, and idea is that, of course, it's great to make a whole recipe if you want. That is either from my book or someone else's book or anything, but sometimes it's actually more efficient to have some components ready to go, to throw together a meal. But if it's just a bowl of like brown rice roasted, cauliflower and you know, steamed broccoli, I don't know if that's going to feel like a meal. And so this nine ways to dress up your meal. Like I said, avocado nuts, herbs, you could add a fermented food, you could shake some seeds all over. I have a seed shaker in my book, which sounds kind of silly to stir some seeds together in a jar, but it is actually amazing because instead of pulling out the bag of hemp seeds and flax seeds and chia seeds, there's in a jar ready to go, always sea salt and get a real pepper grinder. Don't use the kind in the tin and finishing with a cold pressed oil, whether that's pumpkin seed or walnut oil or olive oil, these types of things make a random jumble of components or take out or whatever you have leftovers. They make them feel a little more satisfying flavorful and usually colorful and more exciting to you.Suzy Chase: The other night, I made your recipe for Shrimp Black Bean and Kimchi Tacos on Page 260. What an interesting flavor combination. I would never think to mix black beans with kimchi. Can you describe this recipe?Lindsay Maitlan...: Absolutely. This is something I get told a lot about my recipes, like, oh, I never would've thought of putting that together. So what you do is you start scallions, beans, kimchi, fish sauce, and some water and a skillet so that everything is bubbling and sort of starts to have a sauce. And then you just store in shrimp and those steam through just, you know, two to three minutes, you don't ever want to overcook shrimp in my opinion, and then throw some cilantro on top and those get piled onto corn tortillas. And it is an unbelievably fast dinner. And it gets a lot of the things that we know are good for gut health, like beans. You have the corn tortillas. I love sprouted corn tortillas. Kimchi is a fermented food also what's great is that it has cabbage in it so there's that extra vegetable in there. And obviously like shrimp is delicious and has a lot of benefits for us.Suzy Chase: What I don't see often in cookbooks as a nutritional index. And wow, I can tell you put so much work into this. Talk a little bit about the nutritional index because it is a thing of beauty.Lindsay Maitlan...: Thank you. So I really appreciate that. So one thing I did was partner with two nutritionists, one who was a supervisor on the book for me and another who ran the numbers. And the three of us worked together to make sure that nothing was too out of control when it came to what the general health recommendations of the government and of these nutritionists were. And so I paid for the nutritional analysis because I knew that it would be valuable and it is a lot of work because you're looking at so many numbers, but part of what I do at the beginning, when I introduce it as say, like, I really don't use these numbers, but what I do look at, and if anyone wants to, and these are marked in blue rather than black for the rest of the numbers for each recipe, the total dietary fiber and the added sugar are marked, because as discussed earlier, dietary fiber corresponds to what we know that beneficial microbes like to eat that's comes from plant food sources and added sugar as on the flip side, the thing that we're trying to reduce for a variety of reasons that are a little more complex. And so those are marked on the nutritional index for anyone who wants sort of a light touch engagement with understanding what we're thinking about overall, getting towards helpfulness with the gut in mind, that being said, there's also this scorecard, which is something that's on every recipe, which is another way of thinking about nutritional, which is more my way of thinking, which is the additive way because everyone's body is different and I mentioned this like a calorie is not equal. So if I eat a 500 calories slice of cake, and then I do 500 calories on the elliptical, then I'm fine, right? It's not a net net like that. And a calorie from sugar is not the same as a calorie from a carrot is not the same as a calorie from a kale. And on top of that, your individual community of microbes in the gut microbiota and the large intestine changes how you actually extract calories. So someone might extract 570 calories from that piece of cake and someone else might extract 470 calories.Suzy Chase: Wow. I haven't never heard that.Lindsay Maitlan...: Oh, it's crazy. I mean, it's so, so interesting. And another book that's amazing by Gary Taubes is called The Case Against Sugar. He talks a little bit about that and another book called 10% Human and all the books that I read and referenced and the scientists I spoke with and there's all the citations in the back as well for anyone who wants to do further reading. I created this thing called the scorecard, which you'll see on each recipe. If it's relevant, it'll have a little check mark for how much to check off on the scorecard, which you can download on my website and you can either save it to your phone or print it out. And the idea is you actually check off what you do in each day. So you had a serving of leafy green vegetables, you had two servings of other vegetables and fruit. You had a serving of whole grains and you can sort of track over time how it is that you're doing in terms of keeping your beneficial gut microbes in mind.Suzy Chase: For the Shrimp Black Bean and Kimchi tacos the scorecard is LGVs beans and legumes and fermented food. What's LGVs?Lindsay Maitlan...: Leafy Green Vegetables.Suzy Chase: Oh yes. That ticks so many boxes.Lindsay Maitlan...: Yeah, exactly. And that's what I wanted to show was like, this is not crazy. There's so many ways to be incorporating these types of things into our way of eating that maybe we wouldn't have because it wasn't on our minds. It's like, I know this is true for me. I just wasn't that focused on making sure I ate leafy green vegetables every day, because I had this idea of like healthfulness being determined by calories and exercise and how big my body was. And I think that's a really dangerous way to be thinking because like health has just, it's not just about whether your jeans fit.Suzy Chase: Now to my segment, this season called last night's dinner, where I ask you what you had last night for dinner.Lindsay Maitlan...: I'm really glad that I have a good answer to this.Suzy Chase: Pizza Hut! ha.Lindsay Maitlan...: I actually made a version of the recipe it's from prep city. So one of my favorite recipes in the book that I cannot recommend more is on Page 253 Roasted Eggplant and Chickpeas with Herbed Oat Pilaf. So I had the herbed oat pilaf. I roasted some patty pan squash. I sauteed shallots and swiss chard stems together to make the sort of topping and then braised the swiss chard leaves separately, more like spinach. And then I roasted some leftover broccoli, like the way that I do the cauliflower breadcrumbs cut them really small, toss them with olive oil, salt, and pepper, roasted those until they were crispy and delicious to sprinkle on top and then had some of the tahini sauce from the book to drizzle over top. Oh, and there were some roasted lion's mane mushrooms.Lindsay Maitlan...: Where can we find you on the web and social media and where can we find the digital scorecard?Lindsay Maitlan...: So you can find me at lindsaymaitlandhunt.com and if you go to lindsaymaitlandhunt.com/help-yourself, you can get a little overview of the books and some blurbs see some links to buy the book. And if you go to lmh.house/scorecard or lindseymaitlandhunt.com/scorecard, you'll be able to get a little overview of how the scorecard works and I recommend actually best just taking a screenshot with your phone because you can use Instagram to just mark it up in the little stories function, if that makes sense.Suzy Chase: Oh, that's smart.Lindsay Maitlan...: Yeah. And then I write a newsletter, which you can find at lmh.substock.com or you can find me on Instagram at instagram.com/Lindsey Maitland.Suzy Chase: Awesome. Well, thanks Lindsay, for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.Lindsay Maitlan...: Thank you so much for having me it was a delight.Outro: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com. And thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

An Entertaining StoryBy India Hicks Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.India Hicks: Hello, my name is India Hicks, and I have just recently published a book called An Entertaining Story.Suzy Chase: Part cookbook and part reflection on parties past, this book is a good reminder for us all about how to throw a dinner party. How have you been entertaining during this crazy time?India Hicks: So the first couple of months, like most of the world, we were locked down on our properties and certainly not allowed out. I live on a very small, tiny Island in The Bahamas called Harbour Island, and it's only three miles long and half mile wide, but The Bahamas took the lockdown very seriously, the prime minister is a doctor and he could see that it would be very detrimental to a nation such as The Bahamas where there is no medical infrastructure whatsoever. So the lockdown was so harsh and draconian that we were not actually even allowed out on our properties. We weren't allowed to the beach. I very, very luckily, have a garden, a large garden and so I was at home with, my other half, David and my five children and it was rather than an amazing time all together. But one of the things I really noted was even though we weren't entertaining as such, we certainly weren't inviting friends over we didn't see anybody for a couple of months I still wanted the time that I had together with my kids when we were actually sitting together at supper to feel memorable and meaningful. So yes, of course, breakfast, everybody made their own and lunch sometimes we even skipped if we just were making sandwiches, but dinner, we insisted the kids learn to cook something as they went along. And when one kid said he was gonna make cheese, souffle's we thought, right, this is a real cause for celebration. It was quite an intrepid first meal for him to be undertaking but I really went to great lengths to lay a beautiful table, to make sure that the candles were lit to make sure that the linen was starched to make sure that there was a pretty tablescape because I think it was a lovely evening for us to sit together as a family. So it was interesting that the world had stopped and the way we had entertained had stopped, but the way we were gathering together as a family hadn't stopped. And I think that that's still warranted making the extra effort around the table. We also celebrated a lot of birthdays. I think we went from March, April and May to having three different birthdays in every month. And we certainly went to great extent to make beautiful and imaginative cakes. I made a Corona cake. I can't cook Suzy at all. So you're talking definitely to the wrong person for your podcast, but I can bake and I certainly can decorate and I made this Corona cake and it had a face and a big blue mask across the top. We did have a lot of fun with that. I had never made, I think we call it Royal icing. You call it something different, I think in America, but I'd never made it before. And I found a recipe that involves melting marshmallows to make the icing. So that was kind of funSuzy Chase: Organized by meal this book begins with the most important meal of the day. And what is that?India Hicks: Well, I felt that that was drinks time. There's something really comforting about the drinks not only cause it involves alcohol for the most part, but also it's the prelude to what comes next. And I think sometimes we rather take it for granted. And in my book I talk about let's, let's make the most of it. So if you are not necessarily able to set up a very pretty arrangement at the end of a dock during a sunset on a tropical landscape, don't worry about it that's okay but if you can find a new corner of your apartment to set up an interesting drinks table, that's just lovely. If you can have it in the garden, that's even better. So just be a little bit more imaginative with the way that you actually host drinks. I also, as I said, cannot cook. I am, what's known as a culinary idiot, but I certainly can lay out a platter of all different kinds of choices so that when you've invited someone over for drinks and it may be a grumpy mother-in-law, it may be a new colleague you're trying to impress. It may be the mother of a school friend of one of your kids, but it is nice to give somebody something to eat while they're having their drink and I said that it's so easy to lay an imaginative platter and it may have honeycomb on it and different types of cheeses and different types of salamis and it may have dried fruits, but it's just fun to put it together and you can do them by color scheme, or you can do them by vegetable or fruit piled up together, however you want but I think it's, I think it's a fun and an inviting way to start a drinks hour.Suzy Chase: Your culinary skills or lack thereof have been inherited from your mother. You said she can barely boil an egg, but she's very good at peeling grapes. Is that hilarious?India Hicks: Well, it's only hilarious when you really realize that that's the truth. I didn't want it to sound like she's absolutely useless, cause she's certainly not in the times that she might've not have spent in the kitchen. She certainly made up for, with having a very extraordinary progressive mind. And she is very well versed on everything. Deeply knowledgeable version of encyclopedic memory, even at 91. So I think it was actually a good thing. She wasn't in the kitchen because she was doing a lot of other very worthwhile things.Suzy Chase: Since you got those culinary skills from your mother, you have Claire Williams around. Can you tell us about her?India Hicks: Definitely. We call Claire our top banana and I'm lucky enough to have had Claire join our family 16 years ago. She came out from England and at the time I was working and traveling quite a bit for, and so needed a nanny to be there with the kids. David was also working. And so Claire arrived as a Mary Poppins type figure into the household. And soon it was evident that actually she, she enjoyed her food as much as she did looking after the children. And so she sort of graduated into the kitchen, which has now become very much her headquarters. And so there are recipes in the book, but do not for a moment, think that I have either tested them or tried them. They are very much Claire's recipes. And I asked if we might borrow some for the book. We chose them very carefully because I thought the book is actually quite relevant for right now what's going on in the world because we are talking about entertaining again in a very meaningful way, where when you get the opportunity to be with people, you want to make the most of it because God knows how long we're going to have those opportunities. Now, you know, any stage the British government is going to shut us back down I'm actually in Paris right now, the bars and restaurants are going to close. So when I'm with people, I want to make sure that it's really the people I love and want to spend time with or who inspire me or educate me or excite me. And so having that time together, I think you don't necessarily want to be overly thinking about your menu. So all of the recipes that we've included in my book are actually very relevant for right now they're comfort food like honey roasted sausages or mackerel pâte or chicken pot pie or an apple crumble. There's nothing very fancy. It's all very doable.Suzy Chase: One of my favorite photos in the book is on page 46, where your mother's cutlery mingles with your fathers. I would be remiss if we didn't chat for just a bit about your parents. So there's really nothing more elegant than that photo of your mother with her breakfast tray on page 202, I read Daughter of Empire this summer next to the pool. And did your mom have a life? I also have to say, I'm crazy about your podcast with her. And basically any time you sit down with her, I'm curious to hear just a little bit about her and that breakfast and by the way, her memory is incredible.India Hicks: Well, I'm so glad Suzy, you've really done your homework. Not only can you can number the pages in my book, but you can also reference the title of my mother's book. Yes I'm lucky to have had an amazing mum who has been inspiring in many ways and we are completely different characters and yet we get on incredibly well. We share the same sense of humor. She has a very dry wit that's extremely amusing, she's a brilliant raconteur and as you say, her memory is sharp as a tack and I think the podcast came about because we just had enjoyed reminiscing. And then I realized that when I put tiny snippets of these conversations up on Instagram or social media, people had a real thirst for them they wanted to hear more. I mean, she's of a generation that that is really a dying breed. I think the war babies who went through a war and put up with an awful lot of bullshit that we all scream and shout and stamp our feet over, they just got on with it. And so it was great to have the chance for us to sit together and for her to tell her stories and for me to ask the questions and of course, you know, even my mouth dropped open on a couple of occasions for the kind of the shock of the life that she led and the generation, the upbringing that she came from, where certain things were just taken for granted and, you know, our generation is so incredibly different but it was a wonderful opportunity to do that.Suzy Chase: Another book I read over the summer, was your father David Hicks' scrapbook. Your father is up there with my all time favorite interior designers, Mario Buatta and Sister Parish, can you give us a brief overview of your father and a couple of his more notable design projects and then tell us about his love of ice cubes?India Hicks: Well, my father was a very unique character. Certainly, you know, I said that he set the world in light with his very dynamic designs, which he did. I mean, he shook up the very quiet English drawing rooms and he mixed colors together that were vibrating, vibrating, never clashing, He said. He mixed geometrics. He put old with new and he really did things in a very different way. And his work is emulated today as much as it was in the sixties, when he was at the top of his career, he was a whirling dervish, extremely decisive, extremely opinionated. And people paid a lot of money for that opinion because he did have world class taste. He traveled a great deal. He was very adventurous. He was very experienced in the world of design and really knew every beautiful house, every beautiful garden, every beautiful hostess. And he was a bon vivant he loved to live life to its fullest. He had some very notable projects. He designed the Prince of Wales' bachelor apartments at Buckingham Palace. He designed the bowling alley of The White House. He designed the American Airlines tie that geometric A when the American Airlines first dress their air stewards. So certainly he's had an illustrious career. He was very definite about certain things and an ice cube, as you say was one of them. And he felt that the ice cube should be large. And it shouldn't be these ridiculous pity, things that come out of ice machines there's those were useless in his opinion. So he had these very large, there was some metal ice trays. And I remember a handle that we had to leave a back in order to release these oversize ice cubes into this would never work. That handle never worked right. Handled it ever. Right.India Hicks: Needless to say, I'm a huge fan of your family, your brother, Ashley got me through the quarantine with his delightful Instagram lives where he flipped through the design books and did virtual home tours. Your whole family got me through the quarantine basically.India Hicks: That's very nice to her. Ashley is brilliant and funny and very acerbic and has a very dry English wit, but he's actually at extraordinarily well-read and knowledgeable also. And whilst I was creating my book on Christmas cakes and birthday parties, he was devising a book on tombs and I think for my mother, it must be very funny to see two very different children, both publishing books, actually his book on tombs never did get published. So he's probably rather annoyed that my silly book on Christmas crackers did.Suzy Chase: He says, we all love jib doors. I love it when he says that.India Hicks: That's very him.Suzy Chase: So your father once wrote in your little autograph book, good taste and design are by no means dependent upon money. Can you talk a little bit about the dinner that you had in LA when you still had your company?India Hicks: Oh goodness. Um, I love the fact that you've read all this and my father was absolutely right. You know, good taste and design are not dependent upon money. And there have been many occasions where we have borrowed things or been very careful and crafty in the way that we have hosted events. And I don't think you need to have overly exorbitant budgets to have a wonderful evening. And when I was in LA and we had, I think it was about 60 or 80 of these amazing women who I had worked with for a while come and join us. We wanted to thank them for their time with the company we put together this incredible long table, very, very dramatic. And we kept the wondering what are we gonna be able to do down the center of it and I realized that we had this overstock of towels, swimming towels. And I said, why don't we use the swimming's towels? We can repurpose the swimming towels to go down the middle of the table. And they were blue and white. And then I said, right, that's our theme, blue and white and we hired some blue and white dinner plates and then I found these big blue on white paper lanterns very Oriental looking paper lanterns off Amazon. And we tied it with fishing wire onto the end of some bamboo poles. And we've got some vases that we put them in. And I think the effect was pretty dramatic. And I think it made the woman feel very thanked. And we were, as I said, very careful and crafty with the budget, the girl who was helping me with the event had a brilliant idea, which was, she said, never let a friend invite a friend. It's just got to stick to the list. And that's so true. You stick to your list. You don't let someone bring an extra guest.Suzy Chase: Unless it's me! Yeah, the table runner and the whole table looked like, let's say a blue Staffordshire ad or something like that.India Hicks: Good. Why do you think it was at that level?Suzy Chase: So Pretty. So what is your philosophy when it comes to seating arrangements or placement as the French say,India Hicks: I like a placement as I say in my book, I think there's nothing worse than kind of lingering, waiting to know where you're going to set or who you're going to end up with or feeling like you're going to be chosen last for the tennis team. I think it's nice when a hostess immediately, it says, right, Suzy you're going to be sitting there, David, you're going to be sitting there. Timothy you're going to sit there. I also think it gives an opportunity for the hostess to have really thought a little bit through first. So we know who would be interested by sitting next to so and so would they actually spark a good and interesting conversation? Will it make the evening more meaningful for them? I think there's nothing worse than sitting next to somebody, you know, terribly well, who you see all the time. What is the point of that? If you've got the opportunity to meet somebody new or be inspired by somebody or learn from somebody that's so much more interestingSuzy Chase: At one dinner party, your mother was sitting next to Lenny Kravitz and she called him zinni crayfish.India Hicks: Yes. The next day she said, how fascinating that chat was. Was he a musician that zinny crayfish?Suzy Chase: So once we're seated then comes the hard part. The small talk you stack the guest list with someone you think will be riveting. Tell us about Captain Bob. Speaking of riveting.India Hicks: Well, anyone who comes to Harbour Island, know Captain Bob, because he runs the local grocery store, but he's a good friend of ours and his wife and I both have the boutique together, The Sugar Mill, but Captain Bob, he's a wonderful local character and he was at sea for many, many years on a fishing boat and they would go out for crawfish and it was such a valuable commodity that they literally took guns on board the boat because there are modern day pirates out there. They would be at risk of having their cargo thieved. So I love the idea that, that he has fought modern day pirates out at sea. He's also been struck by lightning and he's been bit by a shark. I mean, who doesn't want to sit next to somebody who tells those kinds of tales?Suzy Chase: I love that you're not afraid to use baby's breath on a table. I always used to think of that as kind of, let's say like a filler for flower arrangement, but it goes so well with the rustic wood table.India Hicks: But I love a filler for a flower arrangement, especially one that you can then dry and use afterwards. Again, it comes down to budget. That's fantastic. I can't bear the waste of flowers when they're, when they're dying and you don't know what to do with them.Suzy Chase: I know that's such a great idea because you think, Oh, I'm just going to throw this away.India Hicks: Yeah, don't dry it.Suzy Chase: How is entertaining in The Bahamas different from entertaining in England or LA?India Hicks: Uh, more challenging just from the fact that, you know, we have one boat that comes once a week and if the boat doesn't come, then you're kind of screwed. You know, in England you can pop out to the local supermarket to get something that you may have forgotten on Harbour Island it's just much, much harder, much more limited in resources, much more limited in the selection of things that you can get hold of. I think that oddly that's made me more resourceful in the way that we decorate. So, you know when you pull out your white tablecloths and you realize that actually it's still got wine stains on it, and there is no way that you're gonna be able to get those out, think about, oh, I'm going to take the bedspread off my bed and use that as a tablecloth cause actually that looks so much better when it's washed and pressed on the table than the white tablecloth with the wine stains. So I think we are forced to think creatively.Suzy Chase: Paris is always a good idea, they say. You're in Paris right now with your partner, David Flint Wood and I see that they're shutting down the bars today.India Hicks: Well, that's what I've heard but I was out and about earlier and I didn't notice a tremendous difference. So we'll see what happens. But I think, I was very keen to make sure that life moved on and forward as much as possible. Yes, there are some very dramatic and very necessary restrictions on our lives. But we found a way that we were able to come to England and I was able to spend six weeks of my mother. And then we got on a train and came to Paris and we found an apartment that, that people had left the city they didn't want to be in the city and we were able to get the apartment very inexpensively. It's got an amazing view. And for David and I just for a couple of weeks, it's been so lovely. I know I can pop back on that train and get back to my mother or kids at any stage I need to. And even if the bars are closed, you still get to walk around in an amazing, beautiful city. So I'm very, very grateful to be here and I'm very happy to be here. And I don't really mind at the bars are closed because we can always get a bottle of wine and just sit in the window ourselves and drink it and look at the view.Suzy Chase: Now to my segment called last night's dinner where I ask you what you had last night for dinner.India Hicks: Oh my God. I had, probably not what you're expecting. We had artichokes with a lot of melted butter and David cooked them in lemon juice, which was rather nice. And then we had a big French baguette with some Camembert cheese, and then I finished it off with half a box, and I'm quite proud of that, half a box of After Eights.Suzy Chase: Wow.India Hicks: Yeah, yeah. That's what my stomach said as well as I went to bed.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media and where can we find your podcast?India Hicks: Oh, these are the really lovely questions on Instagram, India Hicks Style. I write every word I post every picture. I edit every look and feel of it. So it's very much me. I have a blog. If you go to IndiaHicks.com you'll find my blog there and the podcast, any platform that has podcasts, you'll find it's called The India Hicks Podcast.Suzy Chase: This has been a once in a lifetime treat for me. I cannot thank you enough for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.India Hicks: Well, thank you. It's a pleasure for me and how amazing as well that we can talk from Paris to New York with such ease. Outro: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com. And thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

One Tin Bakes: Sweet and Simple Traybakes, Pies, Bars and BunsBy Edd Kimber Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.Edd Kimber: I'm Edd Kimber and my brand new cookbook One Tin Bakes is out now.Suzy Chase: If you enjoy Cookery by the Book, please tell a friend I'm always looking for new people to enjoy the podcast now on with the show. Food writer, baker four time cookbook author, and winner of The Great British Bake Off first season in 2010. Can you believe that's 10 years ago, by the way,Edd Kimber: I know it's crazy. To me it feels like minutes ago, but then 10 years a lot has happened in the last 10 years.Suzy Chase: Because of the show you were able to leave your job as a debt collector. What advice do you have for home bakers who are thinking about competing on a cooking show.Edd Kimber: A lot of those shows are very different when they become more established. I think I was very lucky to be on an early season, the first season, and it gives you different opportunities and it could be better or worse depending on your viewpoint. But for me, the reason I think it was better is it didn't quite have the same attention, you know, the press didn't have this odd British vendetta against anything that's popular and the criticism that the contestants get, because it's such a big show now with social media, wasn't there. So for me, I was able to go on the show and it was enough to give me a little stepping stool, to be able to take a risk and try and do this as a job, whereas now much more high pressure. So I think if you're going to go on the show these days, you have to really think about what you want and how you think you will achieve that. Because now that the show is every year and people are used to that kind of roll out of new contestants, their attention spans are incredibly short. And unfortunately, if you don't make some form of impact very quickly, then you will be forgotten sadly within the next year. And so I think it's much, much harder now to actually have success on those shows. So what I would say is, you know, I learned a lot about myself on the show. It gave me a lot of confidence and really helped me define what I wanted to do going forward. If I was going into it now, and I pinned all my hopes with my future career on that show and the success it might bring to me, it could be incredibly difficult and disappointing when that just doesn't happen because there's so much competition out there. So I would say try and just enjoy it for what it is. It's a fun thing to do. All of these shows can be fun to film.Suzy Chase: Before we dive into the cookbook. I'd love to chat about the title One Tin Bakes. I interviewed Lola Milne a few months ago and she wrote the cookbook Just One Tin. She changed the name to Just One Can for the U.S. Version. Did you ever consider the name change for the American market?Edd Kimber: Yes. So I initially when my publisher and myself sat down to talk about doing this book, I suggested to make it more international. The book should be called One Pan Bakes. However, it was decided the word pan doesn't sound very nice in the context of a title. Whereas One Tin Bakes has a slightly nicer lilt to it. And because we live in a slightly more international world these days, most people will understand that tin and pan are interchangeable, but it is really tricky with those words. And I have the same thing when translating recipes from, English to American having to choose which wording to use. And to be honest, I actually used the word pan completely interchangeably. When writing the book, I would often slip into writing pan because it's just often why use, I sometimes will call a Bundt pan, a Bundt pan, and I would never call it a Bundt tin because it just doesn't sound right to me. So in the end it doesn't seem to affect it too much, but there has been a few people who've been a bit snarky about the English title and the fact that English ingredients are listed first and American ingredients are listed in brackets. Some people have not liked that.Suzy Chase: That's hilarious. I was talking to Skye McAlpine last week and she kept saying, I heated it up on the hob. And I'm like the hob?Edd Kimber: We have the same thing with grill because obviously grill here means something very different in the U.S. so when I say cook something under the grill, that might be very confusing to someone who's like, do I put it under the grill? No, no, no. It's under the broiler, which to me just sounds like a very unattractive where to broil something sounds. It sounds so gray and I don't know, there's just something very disappointing. And I don't know, just something very sad about the word broil and I don't know why, it's just how it reads to me, but, yeah, there is always a slight difficulty I've realized over the last 10 years that you really cannot please everybody. And unfortunately, I've also realized I don't want to, because if you try and please every single person you're making something, that's not going to be interesting. So my kind of rule is I always try and please myself first, because I think I write from a place of trying to write what I would have wanted, you know, a decade ago or two decades ago for the home baker. And hopefully if I find it interesting, that means other home bakers would find it interesting too. And I also try never to talk down to my audience, to my readers. I want to help uplift their skills. So I try and make something that's interesting from my point of view and hope that people are along for that journey, which most people are, which is good.Suzy Chase: So in One Tin Bakes what is the exact tin that you recommend?Edd Kimber: So it's a metal 9 by 13 pan. It's just made incredibly well, it will last you a very, very long time. So if you want the exact tin I recommend that one from Nordic Ware is my preferred tin. But in reality, especially in America, so many people will already have a 9 by 13 because it is for brownies you know, it's a very classic pan so if you want to use what you already have, that will be absolutely fine. That was the reason we chose, or I chose a 9 by 13 tin when my publisher came to me and said, we kind of were thinking about this idea you've been talking about baking everything in one tin and we really liked the idea, but we don't know what that would be. So I went away and fleshed out the idea more than I had in the past and I settled on a 9 by 13 because I thought it was more flexible than anything else out there really and a lot of people would already have it because it's so popular for brownies.Suzy Chase: The reason this book exists is because of the Milk Chocolate Caramel Sheet Cake on page 12. Can you tell us that story?Edd Kimber: The whole kind of Genesis of this book stems from this one cake. So people who have followed my work, read my website and follow me on Instagram will recognize that cake hopefully because I published it now, I can't remember how long ago it is now a year? No must be more than that, I did it a long time ago, basically. And I posted the sheet cake recipe that I'd been working on for awhile and I absolutely loved it. It was just something so delicious to me and sheet cakes really, aren't a huge thing in the UK. We have this thing called tray bakes, which I don't really like as a term because it conjures up to a lot of people, old fashioned boring, kind of things your grandma would make, but not in a kind of cool nostalgic kind of way. And so I kind of tried to avoid that term, but sheet cakes were not really a thing of the UK. I really like them because I find my approach to making fairly international and I've been working on this recipe for awhile. I posted it thinking, Oh, I think it will do well. It's chocolate, chocolate always does well for me and the frosting was to my mind, just ridiculously good, but the response to it kind of blew me away and the recipe went completely viral I had hundreds of people making it the first weekend. They posted it. And within a couple of weeks, thousands of people had made it and posted pictures of it. That was the original thinking for the book. And after that happened, my publisher kind of got me in and said, this is the thing we think we should be talking about. And so after this recipe did so, so well, we decided this should be the thing. And that kind of was the starting point for the book. So, I love the recipe so much. I made a version of it quite often.Suzy Chase: And I've read somewhere that this cake is the best way you know how to make friends. Oh my gosh.Edd Kimber: Cake is always the best way to make friends. I think all of my friends at some point have been bribed into friendship with me through baked goods. I think that's basically a descriptor of my life.Suzy Chase: Tell me about your love of chocolate. You have so many chocolate recipes in this cookbook,Edd Kimber: Someone wrote a negative review of the book saying there's too much chocolate. And I really thought is there? Who hates chocolate? Also, I am a very, as my partner would say, I'm a very, very sensitive person. And so when someone leaves me really quite aggressively negative reviews, I have to go through the book and prove it to myself that they're wrong. I went through the book and I remember thinking, but it's very well balanced. There's a real breadth of recipes. But to me, chocolate is something that I love working with because it's a never ending source of inspiration. There's so much you can do with chocolate. There's different styles, obviously there's different origins or the flavor profile is different. It's just a completely fascinating product. And I think, you know, I've been doing this for 10 years and I know with baking what is going to be popular and chocolate is always going to be most people's favorite thing. So for me, chocolate is something I like using, because I know people are home like using it. And for me, that has always one of my guiding principles is I want to make things that people will actually want to make. I think you look at say, very chef led or, you know, high-end cooking books for me. They can be a great source of inspiration for me, but I think for most people at home, those books are so alien to them because the styles of recipes or the amount of effort put in there, or the ingredients, or just the level of complexity can be very, very off putting. And I would never want to do that. So everything I put into my books I think is doable by the home baker and something a home baker would want to do, and that will vary in skill level. So you'll have people who are very, very new to baking and just want something that's a one bowl cake that you can whip up without thinking about. But then you'll have people who have been baking for decades and wants something that's exciting from an ingredient point of view or a technique that they've not heard of before. But that's kind of the lens I always view my recipes in. So chocolate will always be in my books. I refuse to apologize for that. It's something that people just love. So, I'm sorry if you don't like chocolate, but there's 70 recipes in this book and I think maybe 15 are chocolate. So, I think there's plenty if you don't like it too, but if you don't like chocolate, I'm not sure we can be friends.Suzy Chase: So, one thing that's not chocolate is you have a distinct memory of when pop tarts made it to the UK. It cracked me up. Cause you said when you were young, you saw pop tarts as exotic and cool. Talk a little bit about that.Edd Kimber: Neither of those things are true. So I am basically, I, I grew up in that kind of period in the nineties when there was a big real push in the UK to kind of towards American things. And that could be, you know, American TV when I was a kid, Friends was the biggest show ever, and people were absolutely wild for it. But then also it was the period where a lot of American ingredients were, brands at least, we're trying to make in the UK, this new thing that seems so different to a British tastes seems so different and interesting and cool. And it turns out that pieces of sweet cardboard and I remember trying one, and it was one of the more wacky flavors. And I just thought this is so disappointing on every level. But the main reason they are bad to me is the pastry or whatever actually is made from is such an odd, unusual texture that it's just not good. So I love this idea. I have the Poptarts in my head and I wanted to go, okay, let's make a really, really good hand pie that just happens to look like a pop tart. And I love, love, love that recipe.Suzy Chase: It's on page 74, if anyone wants to make it.Edd Kimber: Yeah. And it's a really adaptable one. You can really use it as your template and recreate your favorite if you do have one pop tart or just let your imagination go wild and choose whatever filling you want really just don't make it too wet because it will end up making the pastries quite soggy. So something that's a little bit thicker.Suzy Chase: I have a heck of a time lining a pan with parchment paper. There's always one corner that looks crazy. Can you talk about your genius clip technique?Edd Kimber: I've been doing this clip thing for years and years and years, and I didn't realize that other people didn't do it because it seemed so obvious to me, but the reason I started doing it is, and I know this is not as common in the U.S., most modern ovens in the UK are fan ovens and they have quite powerful fans sometimes. And so you're making a batch of brownies and you've lined the tin so that excess parchment comes up the side so you can remove the brownies really easily later. I was finding very often that and would blow into the brownie and bake itself into it. And it would be really annoying cause you'd ruin the look and it would be messy and hard to use. So I would clip with a kind of just bulldog clips really. And they just hold the parchment in place along the side of the tin. And it's really something, I only do for square or loaf pans or 9 by 13's, round tins that I'm not normally lining the sides very much. So it's not really an issue, but in the book I give a number of different ways to line a tin with parchment because depending on the recipe, there's different ways you'd want to do it. But the way I do most often is instead of lining all four sides with one giant piece of paper where you will get really kind of ugly corners, if you don't cut it so it sits neatly. I basically cut a long strip that will go across the entire base and then up both of the longer sides of the tin and it kind of acts as a slang. So when the recipe id done all you need to do, depending on the recipe is just use a blunt knife just to kind of separate it from the top and bottom sides, the smaller sides. And then you use the sling of parchment just to easily lift out. And it's very, very straightforward. And then sometimes you won't need to line it at all because it's something that just pops out easily. And then sometimes I want to serve the recipe in the tin, because that's kind of the joy of a 9 by 13. You can make it in the tin, serve it in the tin and so for those occasions, sometimes I just lined the base so that you've not got kind of ugly parchment showing. So there's a whole range of ways of doing it, but the clips is a very useful way to just hold that in place. But what I would say is if you're going to buy some clips, make sure they're not plastic coated because the plastic will melt in the oven. So I try to find one side just metal, no coating on them whatsoever.Suzy Chase: Your photos in the cookbook are just as flawless as your recipes. Did it take some time to master the art of food photography?Edd Kimber: Yeah, so I've loved photography since I was a kid, really, I studied art at one of our kind of school things called an A Level, it's kind of a bit like your diploma. And I have learned just by being, alongside some amazing photographers over the years that I've picked up many tips. And I've also over the last 10 years of doing my website. I've kind of developed what I think of as my own style. And so when my publisher had approached me to potentially shoot this book, as well as write it, I had been in a position where I was trying to do more photography work professionally anyway. And that actually interestingly changed London during our lockdown because I ended up shooting for multiple magazines from home because I was one of the only food stylist in London that could also photograph. And that meant I was a hot commodity, but that would be very useful. But having the confidence to do my own book took a long time because I'm so enamored when I get to work with incredible teams, like my previous book Patisserie Made Simple, I got to work with one of my all time favorite photographers and just the most incredible team of a food stylist and a prop stylist and then myself. And it was just the most joyous six week process. Whereas doing this was much more different because I was at home and I was shooting on my own with no assistance, no stylists, no nothing. I did the whole thing. And so it was a very, very different process. But the thing that enabled me to do was to shoot as I wrote, which was a massive benefit because I try and write a seasonally as possible. So I don't really like shooting with strawberries from December or, you know, stone fruit in January. I try and use the best. So it looks like a look when you use it and the benefit of doing it as I wrote the book rather than one block after it was finished meant it was much easier to do that, but it was a really interesting process and something I actually loved, like looking through the book at the finished product I'm so, so proud of how it looks and how the feel of the book has a noticeable style. My boyfriend says to me all the time, well, that would be a very Edd Kimber shot because it's got a certain look to it and a certain style to it because I'm not one for propping lots of things. I like things quite clean and simple. I also like very graphic shots of closeups of the food, because that's what the book's about. It's not about pretty tablescapes. I was very, very proud of the finished look.Suzy Chase: Last week. I made your recipe for Tahini Chocolate Chip Cookie Bars on page 53. Can you describe these?Edd Kimber: So the Tahini Chocolate Bars were one of the last recipes I developed actually for the book, I get told off very often by all of my editors, whether it's for my books for my magazine work or our newspaper work, because I have obsessions with ingredients and I tend to want to feature them all the time. And there's a few of them generally, my most known one is cardamom, I try and sneak it into everything cause I think it's an incredible spice for baking and tahini is another, and I'd already written a recipe for Tahini Babka Buns, which was inspired by a trip to Israel. And I kept thinking, do I need another tahini recipe or really the question was, will I be able to sneak in another tahini recipe without my editor going, well, you can't have two, but I think the benefit of tahini right now is I'm not a big fan of kind of like food trends cause I think it's a little bit reductive, but for what it's worth tahini is a very popular ingredient at the moment in the UK. So it felt very easy to be able to write a second recipe. But the nice thing about that recipe is the tahini isn't necessarily the most forward ingredient, it's basically adding a ton of depth. Sometimes you'll have a recipe where tahini is kind of the front and center and it's all about that sesame flavor it's all about that kind of nuttiness that it brings. And sometimes tahini can be more of a background player or a way of adding depth. And I think with that recipe, the tahini is there, but it's not smack you in the face, this is just about tahini it's a real nice blending of a kind of classic chocolate chip cookie profile with this underlying warmth and nuttiness from the tahini that goes so well with chocolate. I think it's a match made in heaven. It just was a really nice way of doing something that wasn't just a chocolate chip cookie in a bar form, but it had something else going on that makes it just a little bit more interesting. And I don't know, tahini sometimes to me makes things have this slight addictive quality because it adds this real warmth, nuttiness, and you go, I just really liked that and I want a little bit more of it. And so I, yeah, I really liked that recipe. And I think I said that about everything I've become a broken record? And I think it's because I have this rule. If I don't like an ingredient, it doesn't go in my book because if I don't like it, how can I talk about it to someone else? So I have this habit of saying, Oh yeah, I really liked the recipe. I'm like, yeah, of course you do, you wrote the book, you should really like all of them.Suzy Chase: Now for my segment called Last Night's Dinner where I asked you what you had last night for dinner.Edd Kimber: So we didn't cook last night, we were at in-laws house, so my, I'm not married but I call them my in-laws, my mother-in-law, my partner's mother made us a kind of tagine with lamb and almonds. And I'm not sure what fruit she used. There was a sweetness to it though. And then she also made us a kind of Thai aubergine curry. And then we had rice and two types of couscous. So it was a real mismatch of foods, but it was delicious and very nice to have a meal that wasn't cooked by myself for a while, because I tend to be one of those people that I spend all day in the kitchen and then I will very often make the dinner as well. So it's nice when someone else is doing that for you.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?Edd Kimber: I'm very easy to find I'm @TheBoyWhoBakes on everything. So my website is TheBoyWhoBakes.co.uk and I'm on every social media that I'm actually on is just @TheBoyWhoBakes. Very easy to find.Suzy Chase: Well, thanks Edd, for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.Edd Kimber: My pleasure, thank you for having me.Outro: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com and thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

In Bibi’s KitchenBy Hawa Hassan with Julia Turshen Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase, she's just a home cook in New York City sitting at her dining room table talking to cookbook authors.Hawa Hassan: My name is Hawa Hassan, and I'm here to chat about my new cookbook In Bibi's Kitchen.Suzy Chase: If you like this podcast, please be sure to share it with a friend. I'm always looking for new people to enjoy Cookery by the Book now on with the show. So your cookbook is based on recipes and stories from the kitchens of Bibi's. What does the term Bibi mean?Hawa Hassan: So Bibi is the word for grandmother in Swahili, which is the most spoken language on the Indian ocean. On the African side of it.Suzy Chase: Give us a little overview of the cookbook with the eight countries that border the Indian ocean and how you came up with this concept.Hawa Hassan: Well, In Bibi's Kitchen is meant to be an exploration of recipes and stories through food. It's intended on keeping conversations from our matriarchies, which are our Grandmothers. I spent a long time trying to figure out how to make foods from home. So how do I cook Somali cuisine when I've never been shared written recipes? And when I originally got into the food industry, I knew that along the timeline of me making condiments and you know, who knew what else I'd go on to do. But I knew the one thing I really wanted to do was do as I'd often done, which was speak to women who were older than me, about what they were cooking. It's rare that I got to ask even my own grandmother. What inspires you? What are you most proud of when you look back? Um, so it's really just their stories and their words and their recipes that are in this book and are the backbone of In Bibi's Kitchen.Suzy Chase: So describe the complicated content process. How did you go about testing these recipes?Hawa Hassan: Originally? When we approached the Bibi's, we knew that we wouldn't get a full recipe from someone. So what we did is we used my iPhone to record. We used Skype to record, we used what's app to record. So it was a lot of recording, a lot of just watching. Was it a pinch? Was it a heavy pinch? Was it a can of coconut milk? That's how we got there.Suzy Chase: How long did that take to examine what they were doing and then get it down on paper?Hawa Hassan: Honestly, not long at all. I think the thing that we were most concerned about was just making sure that the recipes were true to what the Bibi's did you even got the feel for the recipe when you were in their company.Suzy Chase: So if you really examine it, this is an old fashioned cookbook that has nothing to do with trends.Hawa Hassan: Absolutely. Our intent was not to talk about what's new and next, but to really focus on how do we preserve these stories? How do we tell big stories from women who inspire us through recipes?Suzy Chase: Tell me about where you grew up and your early life growing up.Hawa Hassan: I was born in Somalia, in a city called Mogidishu in the late eighties. In 1991, Somalia was experiencing civil war. And so in the midst of that, my family and I packed up moving to Kenya. And after the first year of being there, my mother was presented with an opportunity to have myself accompany a group of people who were moving to Seattle, Washington. And so with the hope of them joining me, my mother sent me ahead. I ended up living with this group of Somali people for quite some time in Seattle. Sponsorship, never came through for my family and ultimately they ended up relocating to Norway and Oslo in Norway, and now they live there. They'd been there for a little over 20 years and that's where I call home. But yeah, we were separated for quite some time because they didn't have the capacity to come in the mid-nineties.Suzy Chase: Since you were separated from your mom for so many years at such a young age, do certain recipes help bring back fond memories of your whole family being together?Hawa Hassan: Oh, absolutely. I mean the Somali chapter is really, an ode to my mother. I think I keep having this conversation in telling people that so much isn't about what we're cooking, but the smell of the spices. And so our Xawaash is what, you know, I could be anywhere in the world and if I smell cinnamon toasting, I'm like, oh my God, it smells like my mom's house.Suzy Chase: The other night, I made your recipe for Somali beef stew on page 93 and the Xawaash spice mix on page 74. Can you describe the Xawaash spice mix?Hawa Hassan: Yeah. Xawaash is a bunch of warm spices put together. The word Xawaash comes from Yemen, but Xawaash for Somalis is really inspired by the Indian Ocean. So it's, cardamom cumin, cinnamon, whole cloves. You toast all of these together. You grind them together. Then you toss in some turmeric, stir it all together, all of the flavors really dance off of each other making your dish just warm and sweet, but then yet savory. And I think that really speaks to Somali cuisine and not just Somalia, but most of the country along the Indian ocean in that our foods are really focused on, warm spices and not sour spices. And so it adds to our food in that way.Suzy Chase: So of all the countries on the entire African continent, Somalia has the longest coastline at the tip of the horn of Africa. You featured Ma Halima and she lives in Minneapolis. Can you tell us a little bit about her?Hawa Hassan: So Ma Halima is a woman that I met in Minnesota. She's someone whose story is just as wide as the continent is. She had lived in Saudi Arabia, had been born Ethiopia. I had grown up in Somalia, had moved to Minnesota, her husband and her children put her kids through school. But Ma Halima used to have a restaurant in Minnesota. She's what all Somali women are for me, boisterous a little direct, loving, inclusive. She just welcomed us with open arms, myself and Victoria who actually shot that day for us.Hawa Hassan: What's one takeaway that you learned from the women that you interviewed for this cookbook,Hawa Hassan: That nothing is permanent. That life is about heaps and flows and not to get too attached. I really walked away having a greater sense of what purpose meant and how I could better use time. And that was from just sitting around in their kitchens outside or inside having those conversations and interviewing them.Suzy Chase: You brought up a really interesting point, the void in the book market for cookbooks that feature African food. Can you talk a little bit about that?Hawa Hassan: You know, Africa is 54 countries from my perspective, the way that Africa has been written about is that it's one country. And the way that stories are shared about Africa is as it's one place and Africa is not a country, Africa is a continent. And for me, what was my main inspiration outside of speaking to women was to really use the opportunity of being given a book deal, to introduce eight countries. And what better way to use the Indian ocean as a thread, right? Because what I want to do anyways is to demystify that Africa is far away and the foods of Africa are hard to cook and it's still such a mystery to so many people.Suzy Chase: So on that note, I'm glad you brought up the fact that so many cookbooks are written and photographed by people who aren't from that place. I guess it's maybe an offshoot of cultural appropriation?Hawa Hassan: I think it depends right? What the context is. I think anyone can write foods from wherever they enjoy writing them from, but it's just, what is the intent behind it? And how are you being homage to that culture? And are you acknowledging that these foods do not belong to you, but to someone else and then like, is there someone else better than you to tell that story? That's closer to the story, right? So I, I really want to get away from the idea that people can't make foods from other places, because I think that would be a disservice to everyone who enjoys food, but we should start getting closer to the idea of who is telling these stories. What perspective are they telling them from? Is there someone closer to the story that can tell the storySuzy Chase: Now to my segment called Last Night's Dinner, where I'm dying to hear this, so what did you have last night for dinner?Hawa Hassan: So I had miso salmon on a bed of white rice and I shared this with my partner. I don't want you to think I had all of this myself. And we had a half of a chicken, on pureed potatoes and kale salad from Walter's in my neighborhood.Suzy Chase: I thought you were going to say peanuts cause you just got off a flight.Hawa Hassan: No!Suzy Chase: I thought you're going to be like... A diet Coke and some peanuts.Hawa Hassan: No. So I got home late last night and then he ordered it. And then I had a glass of Chenin Blanc from South Africa.Suzy Chase: Oh, nice. Perfect.Hawa Hassan: Yeah. They're not serving food or anything on airplanes anymore, so that's okay for me.Suzy Chase: Yeah, that's fine. Where can we find you on the web and social media?Hawa Hassan: My company Basbaas is available at basbaassauces.com. And I am available @HawaHassan on Instagram and you can follow Basbaas Sauces on IG if you want as well.Suzy Chase: So I saw you like three years ago, speaking at Dean and DeLuca and I bought my first jar of Basbaas there.Hawa Hassan: Tou were an early, early adopter. Exactly. That was when we had the bad branding and everything. Thank you.Suzy Chase: Where can we find it? Just on the website?Hawa Hassan: Yeah. So right now we're focusing all of our attention on direct to consumer, but stay tuned because we've got more flavors coming, a new design coming, and hopefully we'll continue to create condiments from the continent.Suzy Chase: This cookbook brings home the fact that we all speak the language of food. Thanks so much Hawa for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.Hawa Hassan: Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate you. This is fun.Outro: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com. And thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

Your Starter Kitchen: The Definitive Beginner’s Guide to Stocking, Organizing, and Cooking in Your Kitchen.By Lisa Chernick Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.Lisa Chernick: I'm Lisa Chernick and my new book is called Your Starter Kitchen.Suzy Chase: For more Cookery by the Book you can follow me on Instagram. If you enjoy this podcast, please be sure to share it with a friend. I'm always looking for new people to enjoy Cookery by the Book. So, you are an executive food editor at Weight Watchers, a James Beard book awards judge, a two time James Beard book awards nominee, you spent more than 20 years as a food writer and editor, including work at Epicurious and Food Arts Magazine. By the way, I miss Food Arts so much. It was a glorious magazine.Lisa Chernick: I agree. I miss it too. Even when I wasn't part of the team officially, I always felt like I was part of that team. They were great people. I love the magazine. I miss it a lot.Suzy Chase: Okay. We need to talk about bringing it back, but we'll talk about your book first.Lisa Chernick: Okay. I like that.Suzy Chase: So tell us about how this book is based on your experience as an American, who lived in Italy and trained in the French culinary tradition?Lisa Chernick: Well, the book is really a collection of experiences that I've accumulated, as you said, from living in Italy from going to culinary school, which just happened to be a French training program. And, you know, I think more than anything, it was an opportunity for me to share all of the knowledge about what makes my kitchen run well and some of the things that maybe I thought could be improved upon that I wanted to share with other people, everything that I think really a cook needs, and it all kind of had the opportunity to come together in one place and I just thought that that was a great thing. And in terms of the particular types of cooking that are near and dear to my heart, it really just, I think is my good fortune just because I was in graduate school when I was in Italy and I came to really value a lot of the ingredients and a lot of the cooking sensibilities that Italians have. They're very good about portion control, sort of just this innate easy going way of, you know, a little bit of everything because it tastes so fantastic seems to satisfy. I'm a huge fan and supporter of using great olive oil. I love pasta. I love great cheeses, good tomatoes, olives, capers, a lot of the things that were sort of in the Italian, pantry and fresh ingredients and it just sort of informs a lot of what I do. I think it's just because my time that I was, I was very open to learning, happened to be when I was over in Italy so I picked up a lot there. And then cooking school kind of filled in the rest.Suzy Chase: I love that you call this book a journey, it concentrates on items you need and pantry staples that you should have on hand in three different phases of having a kitchen. Talk a little bit about the three phases.Lisa Chernick: Well, the first phase was really meant to be helpful for someone in that very first kitchen that you might be pulling together away from the kitchen you grew up in, chances are you're going to have roommates and chances are you're going to be starting out with pretty much nothing. Whatever, few things you might've been able to swipe from your parents house and that's about it. So I wanted to kind of jump in right there and help people see what they really need and also avoid the sort of quantity over quality trap that I think happens a lot of the time when you're doing a kitchen for the very first time. You know, you think you need a lot of things and some of them you probably do, but a lot of them, you probably don't. And I wanted to have all of that written down in one place. I mean, I wish that I would've had that written down in one place. When I think back to my first apartment, it kind of makes me laugh some of the crazy, ridiculous things that we all thought we needed to have. It's also important with the roommate situation. If you're going into a kitchen together, if each of the roommates can sort of use some of their resources to buy one really nice thing and bring that into the kitchen, you know, really good knife. And nice sauce pan whatever the item might be. That's a high quality item. They can bring that along with them through their whole cooking lifetime. And then you don't have to have an argument about who gets stuck with the crummy chip plates at the end, and who gets to have the nice knife. If each of the roommates has their one thing, it'll be theirs forever. And I also wanted to teach some easy, simple stuff in that first kitchen, like how to make a vinaigrette, how to make eggs for yourself a frittata that you could eat for breakfast, or you could have for dinner, just things that make you feel taken care of. And then the second phase is for people who are a little further along, you know, maybe it's your first place of your own. That's truly yours. Maybe you bought a place or maybe you're getting married or moving in with someone. And, and maybe if you're lucky you even have the power of a registry behind it. And you're looking to figure out what to put on that registry. And so I wanted to kind of touch on what I felt was important at that point. And the third phase is really that chance to whether it's because you have more space or more resources financially or both that you can kind of really splash out and fill it with things that would be really wonderful without being just cluttery or unnecessary. I tried to touch on all of the elements in each of those three and give recipes and techniques too.Suzy Chase: What are the gadgets we shouldn't be buying. And what's a gadget that you bought in your first kitchen that you shouldn't have bought.Lisa Chernick: I have a cherry pitter that I bought that is still with me since forever. And I don't have the heart to get rid of it because it was kind of nice, I think when I bought it and it's not that big so I feel kind of like, well, it doesn't take up that much space, but this cherry pitter, if I use it once every few years, it's a miracle. It should be paying rent. It's like taking up space in the drawer and it has been there forever. And it does virtually nothing just don't buy it to begin with.Suzy Chase: What are some tips for a more seasoned cook.Lisa Chernick: For the more seasoned cooks, I feel like one of the main things that you come to discover is that planning is as important or even maybe more important than the execution that French term mise en place, which is like everything in its place, the more you cook, the more you realize how much of a difference it makes to be organized before you start. And also now that we're all cooking so much more than we used to because we're home so much, I think also planning meals, that's a job, that's a real effort and you have to do it in order for things to really work well in your home kitchen. I was thinking about the holidays and I was thinking about how Thanksgiving is kind of the ultimate expression of that, of that planning and being ready for something the list-making for Thanksgiving. It kind of begins in October and you know, it's like, what are the dishes going to be? What's the menu, who's coming and then sort of breaking it all down into what to, by when, so that you're never feeling overwhelmed. And I have a little section about this in the book. It's a big undertaking and it can be so much fun. It's my favorite holiday because I love cooking all of those dishes and the challenge of timing. It all. It's, it's really fun.Suzy Chase: What is one item that makes your kitchen your own?Lisa Chernick: Good knives, sheet pans and several pairs of tongs.Suzy Chase: And a cherry pitter.Lisa Chernick: And a cherry pitter that just stares at you making you feel like a dope, yeah. A good sharp knife is much less dangerous than a dull one. A well sharpened knife is just going to glide through the food and you're going to be fine. Y.Suzy Chase: You have a whole section dedicated to kids in the kitchen. Talk a little bit about the kids essential collection.Lisa Chernick: Having the right pantry items and what you need on hand to do some easy baking with kids and to do some cookie decorating and the kinds of things that really feel magical to kids. That's really not that hard to do. It's not a lot of stuff you need to keep on hand. It's just a fairly tight list and I have it in the book and I think it's just really nice to be able to be ready. And let me say, on the topic of cookies, one of the recipes in my book, is a pan cookie, which is essentially just like a bar cookie recipe. I came to love that recipe so much because I think kids love making cookies to the point where they love adding ingredients and stirring and making the dough and that's all the glamorous part. And then they kind of burn out and kind of leave. And then the parents find themselves rolling out four dozen chocolate chip cookies, thinking like, how did I get myself into this? Why aren't the kids doing this part? And the kids are sort of done. And so the bar cookie slash pan cookie is the best answer. You let them make the dough, put it in the pan and then when it's all done, the bar cookies are out on the platter. And everybody's happy.Suzy Chase: Now for my segment called Last Night's Dinner where I ask you what you had last night for dinner.Lisa Chernick: Well, I love this. This is such a great segment. And my last night dinner was really hilarious. So I would be delighted to share this with you. It was sort of the crown jewel in my weird Italian Jewish mashup series. If I could call it that, where I used leftover brisket from Rosh Hashanah from the Jewish new year. And I turned it into my pasta sauce that I had with pappardelle. And the funny thing was there was also leftover kugel and I was kind of contemplating how to bring that into the picture, but I just sort of felt that they really needed to be separate. We sort of had to just move that one over to the side. And I made this really nice salad with arugula that had some of the dressing, but it was a beautiful apple cider vinegar and mustard vinaigrette. There were apples and there were some roasted brussels sprouts and there was a little bit of cheese in there. What else did I have in there? Oh, some toasted rye bread croutons that I made myself and that was really yummy.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?Lisa Chernick: My Instagram is Lisa dot Chernik and my website is LisaChernik.com. And you can keep track of me in either of those places.Suzy Chase: This book is the reality check for our kitchen that we need. Thank you so much, Lisa, for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.Lisa Chernick: Thank you so much for having me. I loved talking to you.Outro: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com and thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

A Table for Friends: The Art of Cooking for Two or TwentyBy Skye McAlpine Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.Skye McAlpine: Hi, I'm Skye McAlpine and I'm a cookery writer. My latest cookbook is A Table for Friends.Suzy Chase: For more Cookery by the Book. You can join me over on Instagram. And if you like this podcast, please be sure to tell a friend I'm always looking for new people to enjoy cookery by the book. Now on with the show, Katie Amour Taylor of the Katie Considers blog wrote "You are the most perfect person to turn to if you're looking for inspiration in the kitchen or setting our dining room table." I could not agree more. So when you were six, you and your family moved from London where you were born to Venice. One special thing about this cookbook is it's your take on Italian food combined with your husband's Australian Italian heritage. Can you talk a little bit about that?Skye McAlpine: Yes. Um, well, so for me these are all recipes that I make often, you know, that are really part of our family life. And, it's called A Table for Friends because for me a huge part of that is our friends who come and join us for Sunday lunch or supper on a Tuesday, whatever it is, are an extension of that family. So it really is kind of food to share with the people that you love. I've been thinking about this quite a lot recently, and I think food...We kind of all tend to speak in a language of food. There are kind of certain dishes and ingredients and ways of cooking, things that we grow up with and that I guess our families give us as children. As teenagers, as young adults become part of our language. And then as we make our connections and our own life choices and maybe go on our own travels or our own experience as we add to that language and it becomes richer for it. And it evolves a bit like kind of actual language. So for me, it's a lot of Italian influences. A lot of, in many ways, Venetian influences a lot of the food that I kind of grew up eating or that I might have kind of tweaked the recipes a little bit or acquired this recipe. Maybe I was on a holiday somewhere and had a dish that was particularly amazing and came home and recreated it. And then that became part of a repertoire of the language of food that I use regularly and a big influence of course has been my husband. We first met first met at University so we were both 18. So we'd been together a long time and he is of Italian heritage, his Grandparents immigrated from Sicily to Australia after the second world war, like a lot of Italians and then left in Australia, which is where his Father was born and where he was born. So a lot of the dishes like favorites of his, like there are a couple of recipes for meringue cakes, which are sort of halfway between a pavlova, which is like his favorite thing in the world to eat and a kind of cake. Cause I kind of make like these tiers, like circles of meringue and piled them up one, two, three on top of each other and layer whipped cream and maybe fresh fruit or lemon card or sugared chestnuts or something like that between each layer. So the kind of influences from my own family and from my new family. If that makes sense,Suzy Chase: I love that you don't call yourself a chef. You call yourself a self-taught cook. Tell me about your obsession with cookbooks.Skye McAlpine: Oh my god, my favorite thing. It's borderline unhealthy for me that almost like children's books, but for adults, I know that seems mad, but nothing bad ever happens in a cookbook, only good things are in cookbooks, Apple pie and ice cream and all sorts of amazing happy things happen, But I'm hugely fascinated by food. I'm a very, very greedy person. I love eating. I love the rituals that surround the meal and the food, but I've also endlessly fascinated by the stories behind food. And I think people so many authors and cooks tell those stories so beautifully in cookbooks. Literally my dream afternoon is to kind of snuggle up in bed with a mug of hot chocolate or tea and a pile of cookbooks and just kind of leaf through them and dip in and out and read the stories and plan what we're going to eat tomorrow. And literally that would be the dream for me.Suzy Chase: You wrote A Table for Friends just as you cook. How should we be using this cookbook?Skye McAlpine: I kind of divided each chapter by where you cook the food. So recipes that you just throw together where there's no actual cooking in a traditional sense of what's involved. It's more about assembling ingredients and tossing them together and bringing them together to make something delicious recipes that you could cook the hob and recipes that you cook in the oven. And then I also found that when I plan a menu, I basically have like a one star dish and that could be like a really scrumptious frittata. Or it could be like a macaroni pie, you know, like puff pastry, filled with pasta or something, but it's like one big central star dish. And then I do a couple of like sides to go with that, which is usually a salad. If a main dish is meat or fish, I might do some potatoes or couscous or something like that, go with it or roasted fruit or what have you. And then I'll always do a pudding because I just kind of like love a pudding. So the other kind of division and the book or the other theme in the book is instead of doing kind of starters and then main courses, et cetera, I just got stars, sides, sweets. And at the end I've got a little chapter called extras, which are sort of for when you want to go that extra mile, you know, you feel like making your own mayonnaise which is so good and so easy to do, but so unbelievably delicious to eat, or you might want to bake your own loaf of bread to go with lunch. They're not essential to the meal, but it's that little extra special touch.Suzy Chase: So speaking of pudding, you don't do starters or the kind of fiddly dishes you might find in a restaurant, but you do do pudding on an extravagant scale. As an American I have a different pudding experience from you. Can you describe the pudding that you make?Skye McAlpine: Well pudding is... I think it's like an English colloquialism pudding for me is basically like the sweet or the dessert. So it could be anything from ice cream to a meringue and whipped cream cake to apple pie. I do this one that I absolutely love that's in the book. It's like one of my absolute favorite recipes. It's kind of like really custardy apple filling, and then it's got like buttery sugar crumble on top. So pudding for me is that, but I think in the U.S. pudding is more like a sort of creamy dessert isn't it like a sort of set jelly.Suzy Chase: Yeah.Skye McAlpine: Which I also am a big fan of.Suzy Chase: So I watched your Vogue video with Hamish Bowles and he asked you, how do you chop garlic? I laughed so hard. He is just so darlingSkye McAlpine: He's wonderful. But he, it was quite fun because we filmed that video at the very, very start of lockdown and kind of within weeks, he turned into this kind of Cordon Bleu chef. I mean, he was texting me photos of what he was cooking and it looked amazing. It was kind of like Duck à l'orange homemade bread and I basically wants to move in and live with him so that I could eat his food.Suzy Chase: You know, he lives a few blocks from me and I'm always looking to run into him to be like, Hey Hamish, it's Suzy! He doesn't know me, but I would love to know him. Um, so your first step in planning a lunch, dinner or party is planning the menu. What goes into that?Skye McAlpine: You know, I'm all about making your life easier and simpler. I think the simpler, you can make the business of cooking for more likely you are to do it. So when I'm planning the menu, I obviously thinking about factors like how many people have I got coming over? This is less relevant today, but you know, am I cooking for 20 people? In which case, I want to go for a dish that is very low maintenance, not something that involves a lot of like fine chopping or complicated timings or cooking in batches or anything like that. I just go for something really simple that I can pop in the oven or prepare in advance and leave as is. how much time have I got. If I don't have much time, then really paring everything back and thinking, you know what, let's just do really good shop-bought ice cream for pudding from the gelateria with cones. That's like, everyone's favorite thing to eat or something really, really quick and simple. Like one of my other favorite recipes in the book, is frozen berries, which just like a melted white chocolate and saffron sauce. And you literally just melt white chocolate and some cream together in a pan with a little bit of saffron. So it goes as kind of gorgeous, like sunny, yellow. And then after dinner, you sort of put a bowl of frozen berries in the middle of the table and pour the hot sauce over it. And it kind of goes like sticky and fudgy. It's completely delicious, but literally probably take 10 minutes to make if that, so that's the kind of dish that I will really do if it's a busy day. If I've got a lot of work, if I just, for whatever reason don't have the time or the inclination to cook, I kind of choose dishes like that. Again, it goes back to this thing of like thinking about my kitchen. So again, if I'm cooking for a lot of people, I'll think about things like oven space. And if I am doing something that involves roasting in the oven, I might just quickly try and put the roasting trays that I'm going to use and try and fit them all in the oven as I'm planning my menu, just check that it will all fit rather than kind of going out, doing all the shopping, setting my heart on that menu and then just as I'm starting to realizing that I can't squeeze it all in the oven, that's when it becomes stressful. When you have moments like that.Suzy Chase: Oh I hate that.Skye McAlpine: Yeah, me too. I've definitely been there. Many times.Suzy Chase: You're also a huge fan of dishes that can be made well in advance.Skye McAlpine: Yes, that for me is the absolute dream. I love that because I really enjoy cooking. I'm really happy, like puttering around in the kitchen with an audiobook, listening to a podcast or just kind of lost in my own thoughts. And you know, I'm happy cooking. What's not fun is when you're cooking and you've got other things that you need to be doing or you're racing against the clock or there's this added element of stress. So I think if you can prepare in advance, it just makes any party or any meal that you're cooking so much more relaxing because you know, that that bit is done. If you've made your frittata ahead of time, like I do this, it's in the book like four or five different kinds of cheese and spinach frittata , but I might assemble all those ingredients two, three days before actually cooking it. And then I can cover it with some clingfilm, keep it in the fridge or if I freeze it. And then when the evening comes, all I need to do is just pop it in the oven. And that just makes it also much more relaxing.Suzy Chase: So your father, Lord McAlpine had a cupboard of curiosities as a child. Did you take after him with your love of objects and art?Skye McAlpine: I guess so, I mean, both of my parents are very, you know, my father was and my mother still as very visual people, they both have a very strong sense of style and definitely growing up in Venice, which has got to be one of the prettiest cities in the world I'm always very aware of aesthetics in a way, and of the fact that a few small beautiful touches in your world, even if that's something as simple as a bowl of sunny looking lemons or, you know, at this time of year, like a lovely big bowl of pomegranates or something like that sitting on your kitchen table, these small beautiful elements can transform your day and your mood. And over time it makes your life better to be surrounded by beautiful things. So that's definitely been, I think, a big influence for me since childhood. I feel very lucky to have grown up with parents who kind of taught me to value beauty around you and value sort of taking the time to create it, but also the ability to sort of see it in smaller, more unusual things, whether that's a bowl of huge red onions or a beautiful painting.Suzy Chase: So talk a little bit about setting the scene where the foundation of a good meal is the table.Skye McAlpine: I love a table that feels really welcoming, and I think it's such a fabulous thing. If you feels almost like you're having a party or it's a special occasion and actually it's just supper on a Tuesday night, but that just makes that Tuesday, that makes that whole week more memorable and more special. You know, I love decorating the table. I, I use a lot of candles, everyone and everything, I think looks more glamorous by candle light. So lots of candles and flowers when they're in season, I think obviously so beautiful, but also even just using fruit, you know, grapes and plums and cherries and peaches in the summer months and apples and pears and the autumnal months just sort of big bowls of them on the table. It looks so beautiful and so inviting. And it does create this sense of relaxedness. What I love about that is like, you'll all have dinner and then you'll find that sort of after dinner that bit where you're kind of lingering on around the table, relaxing, maybe having a coffee or a tea chatting people kind of help themselves to the decorations and eat a little bit of a plum and have a cherry or two. And it's just really relaxed and fun. And I also find kind of bluntly put decorating with fruit is not so wasteful or expensive. Like I love flowers, but can often be quite extravagant, whereas fruit is more affordable. And also once I've used it as decoration, I will, we eat it either in cooking, I might make a pie or apple crumble or whatever it is. I'm a big fan of that for the table. And, you know, small touches like actual cotton or linen napkins, I think is a small touch that can feel so luxurious. It sort of sets the tone for the meal to be a special meal, even actually you've just ordered take out putting a few candles on the table, maybe a jug of flowers. What have you, laying the table nicely just makes the difference and elevates the food.Suzy Chase: I adore how you mix and match China. Are they all family pieces?Skye McAlpine: No, I mean, some are bits and bobs that I've inherited from my parents or that they kind of had lost interest in and I scooped up like a magpie, but many a pieces that I find in charity shops or on eBay. Second hand, some are new pieces. I just worked recently on a tableware collection with Anthropologie. So I've got a few of these pieces dotted and that it's a mix of old and new. A lot of old and like you said, completely mix matched. I kind of love that I think it makes the table feel more colorful. It makes it feel a bit more relaxed because I think you want beautiful plates. You want it to feel like a special occasion again, but you never want to set as a table where everything is completely perfect and precious and so perfect and precious you're kind of sitting there thinking, Oh God, I don't want to drink from my water glass in case I break it. So I think that by mixing and matching things, you do kind of add a feeling of relaxedness and casualness to the meal otherwise it can be a little sad to buy a beautiful plate and then never get to use it because it's too precious.Suzy Chase: So I bought your teal and white splatter serving bowl from your Anthropologie collection. And I cannot wait for it to be delivered either today or tomorrow. I'm so excited.Speaker 2: I hope you enjoy it. Yeah, that was a really fun collaboration to work on because you know, I love, china and plates and all things table top. But also part of what I feel is my experience pragmatically, as someone who sort of taught themselves to cook, is that in terms of making the table look beautiful is it's a lot about the plates. Cause a lot of really good foods, if we're being really honest, it's quite brown. It often tastes delicious, but it maybe it doesn't look so appetizing. But I think if you put it on a colorful, beautiful plate that transforms everything. So it was really fun to kind of create some of my dream pieces.Suzy Chase: So over the weekend, I made your recipes for Burrata with Preserved Lemons, Mint and Chili on page 24 and Strawberries in Lemony Syrup on page one 92, these are two quick and very, very easy showstoppers. Can you describe them?Skye McAlpine: Yes You've chosen two of my favorites, the burrata is basically you just buy burrata, which is, as you know, it's an Italian cheese, a bit like mozzarella, but the middle is kind of buttery so it's sort of creamier even than mozzarella and you can buy it definitely in England, you can buy at most supermarkets now definitely in Italian delicatessans, if not, if you can't find burrata just a really good mozzarella is delicious as well. And then I just get preserved lemons and just slice them up thinly and sprinkle on top maybe have some chili flakes, a bit of mint, or you could use thyme, whatever you like. A drizzle of olive oil and literally that is it, but it's so yummy and fresh and creamy. And this is kind of what I love about it is it's again, this notion of throwing things together, this style of cooking, but it doesn't involve pots and pans. If you're working from a galley kitchen or a student kitchen or your oven is broken or whatever it is, you can still create something that you really want to eat. That you're really proud to serve to the people that you love, but that doesn't actually involve any cooking. And similarly, the strawberries and lemon syrup, what I find is you just slice them in half and then squeeze over them a little bit of lemon juice and sprinkle over a bit of sugar and let it sit for maybe half an hour. So you might do that. And then you go and have your lunch or dinner. And then by the time you come around to eating, then they've kind of macerated and these almost pastel pink syrupy juices have formed and it's just so deliciousSuzy Chase: Now to my segment called Last Night's Dinner where I ask you what you had last night for dinner.Skye McAlpine: Oh it's so delicious. Again, it was one of these things that didn't look very appetizing, but it was a really cold day yesterday here and I was really craving like comforting warming, nourishing food. So I made the soup with lentils and lemon and spinach. It was just what I felt like heating last night. It was really, really good.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?Skye McAlpine: SkyeMcAlpine.com will soon becoming to the internet hopefully when I get my act together and mostly I'm on Instagram, which is @SkyeMcAlpine, and that's where I share most of my things that I have to share recipes and snapshots from daily life and points of inspiration.Suzy Chase: Well this has been so lovely. Thanks Skye for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.Skye McAlpine: Thank you so much for having me. It's been such a joy chatting with you.Outro: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com and thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

AmboyBy Alvin Cailan Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors. Alvin Cailan: Hello everyone. It's Alvin Cailan, and I have a new cookbook out called Amboy: Recipes from the Filipino-American Dream. You can also find me as the host of The Burger Show too.Suzy Chase: In the preface you wrote "Eggslut Chef writes first cookbook! If you're looking for 100 food porny egg sandwich recipes, then you're going to be extremely disappointed in this book." So you kicked this cookbook off, talking about working your butt off for two years, sacrificing friendships and leveraging all your credit cards for the brand it has become today. Can you talk a little bit about how your brand has evolved and what Amboy means to you?Alvin Cailan: Oh, wow. Starting Eggslut was, was one of the most difficult things I've ever done in my life. I really do believe it was like a Masters and a PhD in, restaurant and hospitality management. But I think the most clearest way I can explain that introduction and the transition into Amboy is that I created Eggslut, but I am Amboy like Amboy is who I am. It's what my Grandma called me when I was younger. She would describe me to her friends at church as Amboy, meaning, American born and it stuck with me. And then as I went through this journey through my culinary career, I realized that Amboy is actually the definition of my style of cooking, because it takes all the influences of my culture being Filipino and, mixing it with all of the recipes that I've, I've learned either professionally or through where I live.Suzy Chase: You say, this is a story about a brown kid from a brown family whose roots are in Southeast Asia. Talk a little bit about not feeling American enough or Filipino enough.Alvin Cailan: And didn't speak English until I was five years old. I think my parents tried to speak Tagalog to me from the moment I started to talk till I was five, because they knew that I was going to go to school in America and learn English. So they were going to leave, the English teaching to the teachers. So when I first started school in kindergarten, you know, I would say, and pronounce things weird. And it was always kind of like, I was the odd ball out because I also grew up in a predominantly Mexican neighborhood. And so I was already the most different one out of everybody. Then after school, when school was over and it was summer vacation, my parents would ship me off to the Philippines to hang with my Grandma. And when I was in the Philippines, I wasn't Filipino enough for the Filipinos. I was still just the American boy. So my entire life been trying to figure out my way either in American culture or in Filipino culture. And honestly, I've just really embraced the fact that I'm a first generation Filipino American, and I'm owning it. I'm not ashamed of who I am. I'm actually really proud of being Filipino, but I'm also like very, very, very American.Suzy Chase: You know, what cracked me up in the book was your dad was brother Tony, the leader of the Lips To Lips Gang.Alvin Cailan: So, yeah, my Dad.I had no idea until I started going to the Philippines and, and it was kind of like a weird, like Michael Corleone moment in the Philippines when we would arrive at the airport and seven dudes would come pick us up and we would roll in a caravan back to our native province. And while we were there, people would line up to talk to my Dad and I would never understand it. And one time I was being disciplined by my father in front of his Dad. And his Dad ended up saying like, Hey, why are you so tough on this kid? You're a knucklehead too. And my Grandfather ended up telling me like, yeah, your Dad was the leader. Like, he was like the leader of the band. He had a group of friends and he was the boss. And I was like, I had no idea. So now I use that against my Dad. Every time he gets mad at me, when I do dumb things,Suzy Chase: I heard you say once that your parents are pretty big haters, do they love what you're doing now?Alvin Cailan: They're tossed up. Like they couldn't understand me being a cook. And then now they don't understand me being a TV personality slash businessman because, you know, I'm always busy and just having lunch or dinners, I have to schedule you a month out and they don't understand that. My Dad's kind of worked his way around it, where he just comes and visits to me at work. My Mom's more of a home body. She lives in her little bubble and she doesn't venture out. So she's a little bit more of a hater than my Dad, but you know, we're working on it.Suzy Chase: You say, sauce is a magnifying glass for food. Tell us about that.Alvin Cailan: Ooh. I mean, so this is another quintessential Amboy, theory, right? Because Filipino food is relatively saucing. Lots of things are one pot wonders. And so growing up, I, you know, I had an affinity for sauce, everything I had to have. I mean, I like ketchup and it's almost on an embarrassing level, but I realized that like a lot of like American food that I eat is very dry. And I was like, man, like fried chicken when you eat fried chicken. And it's just like the juiciness of the fried chicken and that's it. And so it's different from Filipino culture because if we have fried chicken in the Philippines, we eat that with an all purpose sauce, which is like a brown sugar bread crumb and like chicken liver sauce. And it's, it's super, super good. And then growing up, my Grandmother used to serve us fried chicken and I would add, Ketchup to it. And like when I went to culinary school and it was fried chicken week, I'd asked the chef. I said, Hey, chef, new century, we have all this fried chicken that we made. Is there any catch-up in it that I could use with it? And people were like, what, what are you doing? I'm a big fan of sauce. And then even through my culinary career, you know, I've always excelled in the saucier station. Uh, it was one of the things that like, I love building flavors, you know, with stock and all that stuff. So actually believe that sauce doesn't take away, but it can definitely enhance dishes.Suzy Chase: And do you think you got that love of sauces from your grandma, Emma, who was really your great Aunt?Alvin Cailan: Oh yeah. A hundred percent. She, so she, she brought in the fanciness into my life. She, she was married to a French chef and she, herself actually is still cooking. She has her own cafe in Montreal or Quebec and she, she taught me so much. I mean, like one of the first sauces I ever learned was just the simple mayonnaise with Dijon mustard. And I ate it with crudité and being seven years old, growing up in a blue collar town in Pico Rivera, eating crudité with dijon mustard and mayo was definitely a pinkies up type of situation. And I, I loved it. I was like, Oh my God, I know this is fancy. And my friends would probably make fun of me, like during the lunch hour, but I am, I'm going to show this off and I'm going to show people. And you know what, honestly, that actually like, kind of helped me socialize when I was younger. And when I was a kid, because I would always bring weird, ketchup in mayo sauce, we would mix sauces during our lunch hour at school. And we would mix sauces that we would get in the cafeteria. So, yeah, I think I definitely have my, my Grandma, I'm not to blame for that. And, uh, also my best friend, Mark Tagnipez growing up, he was like, he was literally the first person I talked to, um, on my first day of kindergarten. And, um, he's also a chef now in Melbourne in Australia. So, you know, food and sauces and all of that really like run deep in our veins.Suzy Chase: In the cookbook. You have some tips on how to make the perfect pot of rice. What is the number one thing I'm doing as a home cook to mess it up?Alvin Cailan: Well, number one is you have to clean your rice. You have to rinse your rice because it has a lot of that excess starch. And it has like a gritty mealy texture to it when you cook. So when you rinse off that, extra starch and, when they dry the rice granules, it also has like residue and honestly, in the mentality of a Filipino you're in the old world, they would have these gigantic nets and they would dry rice, and it wasn't necessarily considered sanitary. I remember vividly my grandma tossing rice in her patio and picking out all of the pebbles in the little rocks that came from the rice pods. And so we were taught to thoroughly, thoroughly rinse your rice, even if it was packaged, bought rice at the store. And honestly it really does make a difference because I actually had to fire a line cook for not washing the rice and really getting bombarded by Asian Americans on Yelp, because that day they totally could tell that the rice wasn't cleaned. Oh my gosh. I think Asian-Americans probably can tell, because I think all of Asia at such a young age, we were taught to thoroughly, thoroughly rinse the rice.Suzy Chase: So I have a couple of egg related questions for you and they're super random. So why do we need to crack eggs on a hard flat surface?Alvin Cailan: I personally believe that it prevents the shell from a breaking like the thick white membrane. When you have fresh eggs, there's usually, like the idea of the anatomy of the egg would be the thing whites, the thick whites and the yolk, and what you don't want is the thick whites to break. Cause when you crack them into a pan, you don't want the whites to run out you kind of want it to stay in a kidney shaped form. That's one. And also when you crack eggs on the side of a bowl it's harder for me to control when I crack it all, all open because I have to stick my thumbs in between the crack that I made and then open it. So I think really it's just to prevent the shell from mixing with your egg.Suzy Chase: And here's my other question. Why do you crack cold eggs into a cold pan?Alvin Cailan: I personally think that when you cook eggs and when you start off scrambled eggs specifically, fried eggs are a different story, but scrambled eggs have to be cold eggs in a cold pan because I don't know if you've ever had, uh, like when you've made scrambled eggs and then it kind of has like this, like a watery consistency after it's cooked. It prevents, it, prevents that from happening. It really just gives you the creamiest and, fluffiest scrambled egg, when you start off that way.Suzy Chase: Okay. Here's my last one. What's the deal with chives and eggs?Alvin Cailan: Oh my gosh. It's like peanut butter and jelly. It's something that doesn't take away from each other. Like the egg flavor does not take away from the chive flavor. The chive flavor doesn't take away from the eggs together. It's just married beautifully. It's it's like harmony in a bite.Suzy Chase: I have to hand it to you for being so brutally honest in this cookbook, especially the chapter entitled The Reality of Success. It really shows the struggle and pull between your creative concept and control and losing that by leveling up your brand. What advice would you have for chefs figuring out exactly what they want to be.Alvin Cailan: For people seeking advice I always give you the option or I say, where do you want to end up? What is the end goal? Do you want to be a rich millionaire with multiple locations vacationing in, Greece? Or do you want to become a James Beard award winner or, you know, cause those are two completely different worlds. And so when you become successful and your brand is now visible, it almost becomes a household name. You have to examine yourself as a chef. Do you want to stay creative and make amazing dishes and teach different generations so that they become great chefs? Or do you want to capitalize and become a business mogul? And that's the crossroad, that's the fork in the road that you have to choose and whichever path you choose, you stick to it and you make your decisions based off of that one particular goal, like in the kitchen it's everything to me. And when I see customers come in and out of my restaurant and they're happy, it honestly makes everything the hard work, the sweat, the blood, the tears worth it. And no monetary figure for me can ever replace that.Suzy Chase: That's deep.Alvin Cailan: Yeah. It's really deep because a lot of people think like when, when you have dreams and goals and you're just setting foot on, trying to accomplish those goals. You never, ever planned for what would happen once you achieve those goals. I was one of those guys where like, I was like, all right, well, I'm going to make a brand. I know it, it feels good. It feels right. I think we're going to kill it. But by the time I got to the point where we were had four hour lines at the restaurant, we were winning awards left and right. You know, I really did have a hard time choosing whether or not to become the next, Ronald McDonald versus do I want to follow the footsteps of my mentors and chefs that taught me along the way. And I went the old school route and now I feel like my job is more than just a chef. It's like more of like a teacher and, and almost like a counselor.Suzy Chase: Speaking of killing it. When you were at Chef's Club Counter here in New York City, I couldn't get a table to save my life. It was always packed. So I was excited to cook up The Slut on page 286, because I couldn't get one made by you. Now, this dish changed your life. Ruth Reichl basically got the word out. Celebrities fell in love with it. And you even did a popup with Drew Barrymore in Aspen. How is this dish similar Jöel Robuchon's?Alvin Cailan: Oh, it's definitely 100% influenced by Jöel Robuchon. Jöel Robuchon was my chef idol growing up. And when I was in culinary school, he was going through like, he had like 18 Michelin stars at that time when I was in culinary school. And he was just like the Michael Jordan of it all. And so when I made potato puree or mashed potatoes, I always use his recipe. And I remember doing this particular dish, the coddled egg dish in a martini glass for like a final in culinary school. And I was like, well, that is such a pretentious dish, but it could totally be a cool dish. And kind of like for the masses, if we did it in a mason jar, when I created Eggslut and we were menu testing, I used to buy those eight ounce mason jars or six ounce mason jars at the grocery store. And, I would pipe the potato puree in the mason jar, crack an egg on it and then slow poach it in a pot of simmering water. And honestly it didn't skip a beat. It was amazing. And I have to thank, Jöel Robuchon for that inspiration.Suzy Chase: It's, mind-blowingly simple.Alvin Cailan: It is. Again, it's like the harmony of simple ingredients and everything having an affinity for each other and then all of that in your mouth, just giving you the best experience possible.Suzy Chase: So tell me a little bit about your latest concept, Amboy.Alvin Cailan: Well, so Amboy is, it's like it's a loose term, right? It's it's who I am. And so in February, when we were thinking about opening a restaurant before COVID, we wanted to create a burger shop during the day and a steak shop at night with Filipino flair in the evening, and then COVID happened in the citywide shutdown happened. And, it was super hard for us to get provisions, eggs, bacon, meat. You know, I was ordering off of grocery apps and what was arriving at my home was just awful. I mean, I was ordering New York strip steaks and I was getting chuck steaks delivered. I was growing frustrated with it. So we pivoted the restaurant, we really put a focus on selling raw meat, eggs, and bread and bacon and hot dogs. And it was for the community. And really the community was like, yes, we need this because at the time there was like a looming meat shortage happening. And, we definitely were able to offset that for the household consumer and the neighborhood is, has taken ownership of who we are. And now we are, one of the better burger restaurants in the city and also a boutique butcher shop.Suzy Chase: So now on to my new segment, this season called Last Night's Dinner, where I ask you what you ate last night for dinner.Alvin Cailan: Oh, wow. Okay. That's easy. We, usually don't sell any old cuts of meat, in the case. So on Wednesday nights we take home a lot of the like three or four day old steaks that were in our case. So last night I cooked a couple of Denver steaks and a Picanha steak. And we ate that, believe it or not, which just ate it with bread. And it was delicious.Suzy Chase: You're a huge hip hop head. What is your favorite rap song of all time?Alvin Cailan: My favorite rap song of all time, even though it's almost like bad to talk about him right now because of who he has been in....Suzy Chase: Are you going to say Kanye?Alvin Cailan: Yes. Yeah. So the song Runaway it's pumped full of ego, cause there's like a five minute instrumental riff before the lyrics even start. But that, that song Runaway really describes who I had to be in order to become who I am today. And it was because I had to sacrifice a ton of things and you know, I was called half of everything in that song. But if you can relate to that song you can, you understand that through all the hardship and through all the loss of friends and family at the same time, you kind of have to celebrate the fact that you made your dream come true and you can have the best of both worlds. Honestly, that song has resonated to me a lot. And it's kinda hard to listen to now, because all I could hear is Kanye's, current rants in the news and stuff like that. But that is definitely one of them. And then I think before Eggslut and before success, two-part so that was my current favorite song. And secondly, when, before all of that, it was always, I Got Five On It by The Loonies.Suzy Chase: From back in the neighborhood.Alvin Cailan: Yeah. That was my old school jam. That was like the anthem of our neighborhood. And yeah, those two songs I think are some powerful hip hop songs and in my personal life.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web social media and in LA?Alvin Cailan: I made it super easy for everyone. It's just @AlvinCailan on Twitter, on Instagram. And then on Facebook, it says my full name, super easy.Suzy Chase: I cannot thank you enough for pulling this story out of your heart and putting it down on paper. And thanks for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast to celebrate my 200th episode with me.Alvin Cailan: Hey, thanks for having me.Outro: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com. Thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

Big Love CookingBy Joey Campanaro Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City sitting at her dining room table. My name is Joey Campanaro executive chef and owner of The Little Owl restaurant. And I'm a partner at Market Table and The Clam with Chef Mike Price. And I'm an author. My newest cookbook is called Big Love CookingSuzy Chase: For more Cookery by the Book, you can follow me on Instagram. If you enjoy this podcast, please be sure to share it with a friend. I'm always looking for new people to enjoy cookery by the book now on with the show. So coming from South Philly, did you think it was inevitable that you would get into cooking?Joey Campanaro : It was absolutely inevitable to get into cooking and being in South Philly. It's one of our jokes like you've worked in a restaurant at some point. If you're from South Philly, the restaurant business in Philly is just, it's a part of culture and a part of life. And it's like that everywhere, I think, but so much so in Philly that it's all interconnected as well. So some people that I work with now, you still work at the same restaurant that I worked at in Philly. And we didn't even know each otherSuzy Chase: In 2006, you opened your dream restaurant, Little Owl. And my son who started high school this week used to go to PS 3 and we walked by Little Owl every day to and from school. So tell us the story of the space. And can you describe the iconic building and your darling 10 table restaurant?Joey Campanaro : I'd love to. So I was working at a restaurant called Pace down in Tribeca and the owners of the restaurant decided to close. And so I was going to be out of a job and my wife at the time, Paula had a friend who lived around the corner from where we are on, on Bedford and Grove. And she was walking by and she saw that there was a for rent sign and I had just lost my job. And so I was kind of in a depression and she was adamant that I would call this number. And even if it was 11 o'clock at night, she was like call the number. I called the number. And so I did, and that was pretty much how I found this place. I had no idea that it was the Friend's Building (TV Show). I didn't know that a 10 table restaurant would be able to change my life and touch so many people's lives in such a positive way. It's a magic place. And I just really love to be here and how wonderful it is to celebrate it in this book. Couldn't think of another title that would be more perfect to describe how it feels at this restaurant. And now that the restaurant is upside down, it's the entire thing is it's inside out. And you, you, you get to a place where, you know, been here for 14 years and I've never seen it like this, and it's actually more special.Suzy Chase: Well, you know, I've been in the West Village since 1996, and I can't honestly remember any of the restaurants that were before Little Owl and Calvin Trillin wrote basically the same thing in the forward. The Little Owl is so iconic in the neighborhood.Joey Campanaro : It's also an homage to the neighborhood. It's called the Little Owl because of the little owl that's on the roof, across the street from the restaurant.Suzy Chase: So we need to talk about that house. 17 Grove is for sale right now and they just reduced it to over $8 million and the taxes are $54,000 a year. Isn't that crazy? And I never noticed that little owl until the other night. So tell me the story of how it caught your eye.Joey Campanaro : I always thought I would be an architect. It just never panned out that way. I get to draw the interior and I get to design my restaurants, but I don't do it like an architect would, but it's really fun to be able to express my vision on paper in the language that the person that's going to see it all the way through understands and actually appreciates. And I think that also inspires really great work. And I think it has to do with, you know, paying attention and keeping your eyes open to create something that is timeless and that makes it more special. You know, it's a 350 square foot dining room that feels like you're on a movie screen. It's really about celebrating the space and the location.Suzy Chase: I think since you're a neighborhood person, you really knew what we needed in terms of restaurant and cuisine. It's a really interesting demographic that I think you only understand if you live here.Joey Campanaro : It's also so great to visit because when you get to feel like you're a part of it and it creates this crave, right? Like for now, for instance, we're doing a happy hour at the little owl for the first time in the history of the restaurant. And it's a Spanish tapas theme. And so it's 2 for 1 wines and $1 tapas and getting to meet people that I would never meet before to see how, after 14 years, how this is a brand new restaurant, it's magic to, to be a part of that Suzy. And to see how it's a new beginning, it's a new birth. You know what the restaurant is to somebody at nine o'clock on a Friday night can be the exact same thing to somebody else at 3:00 PM on a Tuesday, the restaurant businesses is old school. It has been around, you know, it's one of the first businesses that ever existed. So that's an addiction to me. I just, it drives me and to be surrounded with people that feel the sameSuzy Chase: So Monday night, my husband and I went to your restaurant for our anniversary and had your famous meatball sliders, the other addiction. So in case people don't know you are the meatball King, can you describe your meatballs and what makes them so special? And they're in the cookbook.Joey Campanaro : Yes, they're in the cookbook. So the first time we made this dish was I was actually at Pace, which is now Mr. Chow down in Tribeca and put them on a bar menu and no one would order them. So the staff ended up eating them each night. And then that restaurant closed and the owner, Jimmy Bradley when he sent me out on my own, he basically said, whatever you do, put those, put those meatballs on your menu. And so I did. And the next thing I know, they were on the cover of Bon Appetit magazine. Oh yeah. And I was like, okay, well, you know, this is the intention is to create a place where people can feel comfortable eating with their hands, right? So it's a little slider and there's no bun that you can buy to replicate the dish. So we make the buns, it's a pizza dough recipe mixed with roasted garlic and pecorino, romano cheese. And I really love the salty sharpness of the cheese. So it's a blend of beef, pork, and veal. And I use panko breadcrumbs, chopped parsley, salt, pepper, eggs, and the secret ingredient. And this is a tip from my grandmother. Her name was Rosie Bova. And Rosie would say, you want to know why my meatballs are so moist Joe? And I would say, why mama? And she said, cause I put water in. And that's the secret ingredient is adding H2O to the mix when you're mixing the meat and the eggs and the cheese and the breadcrumbs and the parsley, and you season it with salt and pepper and that pecorino romano, and then add cold water to the mix. And the meat has to be cold. The water has to be cold. So we're moving this meat really fast. It's cold. It's, there's fat, there's water, there's stuff to hold onto. And then we form them into golf ball size meatballs, put them on a tray and stick them in the refrigerator and get them even more cold. Then we get a hot pan and we individually fry each meatball after they're fried, they come out. We strain that oil that we use to fry when you're left with a lot of brown bits. So then we fry the meatball. We strain it. We get those brown bits now starts a whole new process in the same dirty pan. We add olive oil, garlic, onion, fennel seeds, and chili flakes.Suzy Chase: Fennel seeds! Yeah.Joey Campanaro : I'm going to get into the fennel seeds in a minute. This is called like the us, it's a sofrito, right? So it's very aromatic and the onions are cooking and the garlic is cooking and the fennel seeds are toasting. At that point. That's when we add in the tomato, we use a San Marzano, whole peeled tomatoes. We rinse the can out with water and then pour that water in. And this comes to a boil and we really make this intense tomato sauce after about an hour of simmering. That's when we put it through a food mill to remove all the seeds and that crushes any of the onion. That's when we add in the fresh herbs, parsley and basil. And so it releases all of their aromas into the tomato sauce, which is about to be called gravy when we're through with the process. So after it goes through the food mill, that's when we add the meatballs back into it, and then it just continues to bubble and percolate until it's concentrated and rich and delicious. So the fennel seeds is because one time my grandmother, Rosie Bova was making her Sunday gravy and sausage store in Philadelphia, which was called Fiorellas. Fiorellas was closed and she wasn't going to have one of the main ingredients in her gravy. And so she thoughtfully replaced the Italian sausage with fennel seeds. And I was like, that's brilliant. She wanted to achieve the flavor that she would get for her typical Sunday gravy from the sausage, but she couldn't get the sausage. Right. So she rolled with the punches and added a little bit of fennel seeds to the gravy. And it was so unique and defining for me because I don't ever see people putting fennel seeds and tomato sauce or gravy that thoughtful move on her part was something that was very inspiring to me.Suzy Chase: So I've heard you say that you plan your menus around women. Is that right?Joey Campanaro : It's true. Yes. A hundred percent.Suzy Chase: How come?Joey Campanaro : I think women pay attention. So what they're eating, there are things that are more important to their experience than it is for men. I think men do appreciate texture and thought in final dishes, but I think women notice it. So I actually find gratitude when someone notices something unique, whether it be texture, flavor, temperature, timing, it's all very important.Suzy Chase: This cookbook made me so happy. Just seeing people in the restaurant gathering, eating, and laughing. It felt like it was like a lifetime ago. How are your restaurants in the neighborhood doingJoey Campanaro : Businesses is swift. It's very dependent on so many things. And the major thing that it's dependent on is something that none of us can actually control just the weather. So the spirit of this neighborhood in the city is evident.Suzy Chase: I counted and I think if I'm right, you have more tables outside than you had inside.Joey Campanaro : Yes.Suzy Chase: I feel like you guys are. I hate to say killing it right now during COVID, but you know, I went by The Clam mid pandemic and there was a line outside and I think you're doing the best you can.Joey Campanaro : Yes, absolutely. And you know, there's consistency. And in our effort, we're building this team right now with people that want to work and they're doing what they want to be doing, then there's a focus to it, which are just celebrate every day.Suzy Chase: Well, I have to tell you our waiter the other night his name was Jordan and he said, you're a big hearted guy.Joey Campanaro : Well, that's nice that he said that he's been such a wonderful addition to the team. And, and, you know, he came on board after the shutdown. It was like opening a business with somebody that I didn't know. He didn't know me and we connected on so many levels. Like when you work with somebody and you don't bump into each other, it's kind of like not stepping on toes on the dance floor adds synergy to the work it's electric, it makes the hours go by a lot quicker too. Cause it's funSuzy Chase: Now to my segment, this season called last night's dinner where I ask you what you ate last night for dinner.Joey Campanaro : I had a Bacon Cheeseburger at The Little Owl.Suzy Chase: Did you have fries?Joey Campanaro : I didn't get fries with my burger, when I order a burger they know how I order it. I don't get all this stuff. I just get the bread, the meat bacon and the cheese, and then I'll put hot sauce on it. Or sometimes some sliced jalapenos. Cause I like it spicy. So I got my burger and I was actually talking to a guest at the time and the server said your burger's ready. And then I asked the guest, if I could sit and eat my burger with him, Patrick with his two, two little dogs they're adorable. And so he was gracious enough to let me sit at his table and I ate my burger there. But at the same time, there was another table, two girls behind me and they had French fries. And so I was walking by their table and I looked at their French fries and they were kind of like looking at me in an inviting way. And I said, can I have some of your French fries? It was like, I had a burger at one table and I had French fries at another.Suzy Chase: That's big love right there!Joey Campanaro : That's right.Suzy Chase: So where can we find you on the web social media and in the West Village?Joey Campanaro : Yes. In the West Village at the corner of Bedford and Grove, sometimes I'll mosey down to Hudson and Leroy and hang out at the best seafood restaurant in Manhattan, The Clam or I'll run down to Market Table right on Bedford and Carmine. Bedford Street is my lifeline and then online, JoeCampanaro on Instagram, LittleOwlNYC, BigLoveCookingBook, you're going to want to cook things online right from the book, share the results on this page. And it's gonna be a lot of fun.Suzy Chase: So much for sharing your big love. And thanks for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.Joey Campanaro : Thanks for having me Suzy, please say hi next time you're at The Little Owl.Outro: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com and thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

My KoreaBy Hooni Kim Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City sitting at her dining room table. My name is Hooni Kim, and I'm back with Suzy to talk about my life, my restaurants especially my new book, my career, and anything else that has to do with running a food business, right?Suzy Chase: “You caught me at a tumultuous time.” That's what you said to me. When we chatted on April 4th. Now it's five months later. How are you doing?Hooni Kim: I'm healthy. My family's healthy, which means that we're doing okay. But it's, it's still it's been tumultuous for the past six months. So I guess we're used to it while. I'm used to it, but it's still not, we're still not doing well.Suzy Chase: So talk about your restaurants a little bit. So you have, for people who don't know, you have Danji right in the middle of the theater district, and you have Hanjan in the Flatiron District, how are they faring?Hooni Kim: Most restaurants I know, most chefs I know are really losing money. Meaning they're putting in every week dipping into their savings to meet payroll, to meet rent. Fortunately for me, I have two restaurants and one of them Danji, we're only doing outdoor seating outdoor dining, which we have five tables and the revenue that we're generating is about 15% of what we were doing before April. So that's not good, but fortunately I started the meal kit business or service at Hanjan my other restaurant a week before we were closed. So this next week is our 26th week of delivering weekly meal kits to many of the families in the tristate area. Wow. Yeah. And you being one of them as well. And that does generate enough revenue to make up for all of Hanjan's costs as well as makeup for almost everything that Danji is short on.Hooni Kim: So fortunately, most weeks I don't have to put in money from my savings, but this past week we did because Labor Day, week and a lot of New Yorkers leaving for vacation, visiting relatives and nobody coming in, which is very difficult for New York because we know that during the summers and holidays, a lot of New York leave the city, but we do expect a lot coming in and sometimes even more coming in than leaving during Christmas and New Years. But since the pandemic it's always people leaving or, and nobody coming in. So it's tough.Suzy Chase: You started off by selling 10 of your meal kits on the first day. How many are you selling now?Hooni Kim: Well, we go by weekly and I think the first week we sold 40 and every week we kept selling more. And by after a month we were selling out at 160 meal kits a week and we had to cap it at that because back then I delivered by myself and I couldn't deliver more than 160 in a week. And we were doing that for a while until the school's closed. And then all of my clients sort of, well, I wouldn't say all of them, but a lot of them decided to leave the city because they didn't need to be here, no school, no work. And we were hovering around during the summer 80 to a hundred past couple of weeks in a little bit less. Most of our clients are repeat customers. And hence we changed the menu every week.Suzy Chase: Well, I don't know how much feedback you get, but I have to tell you that these meal kits have been the bright spot for us during quarantine. And I'm honestly going to cry if I talk too much about it, but having your meal kit come on Fridays was like the one thing my family could look forward to in the middle of the pandemic when we were like on lockdown in our tiny apartment. I mean we can't thank you enough.Hooni Kim: Thank you so much, I still remember dropping off the food on the stairs. Yeah. When I was in New York, I'm in Korea right now. You know, I been in Korea for the past month. We're experiencing in Korea, a little bit of a boost in the infections. And it's not just me. I think a lot of chefs that I know we're trying to find ways to to make ends meet. Now. I haven't gotten a paycheck since March, so I have to look beyond my normal resources, my usual regular resources. So I have an opportunity to come to Korea to do a TV show. So I jumped at it.Suzy Chase: Oh gosh. So what kind of a TV show?Hooni Kim: It's like a Top Chef.Suzy Chase: Oh, that's awesome.Hooni Kim: A cooking contest. I'm a judge and the contestants are foreign chefs, chefs from Italy, Vietnam, Thailand, China, all over the world who most of them own restaurants in Korea and they're competing to win a hundred thousand dollars. So it's a, it's a regular paycheck for me, a weekly paycheck, which I haven't had since I had my restaurants. So for four months, I have to do this to make sure that I can pay my mortgage and buy my son some clothes for school.Suzy Chase: I want to get back to the meal kit because I want to hear what your favorite dish is in the meal kit. And I want to tell you what our favorite dishes are in the meal kit.Hooni Kim: So I like spicy food. I like food that have an impact on your palate right away. So right before I left, I made this spicy cold noodle. I don't know if you remember, orSuzy Chase: Yeah, that's my husband's favorite!Hooni Kim: Okay. This noodle is spicy. It's tangy. It's sweet, it's salty. It has all of these different tastes that whatever you're into it'll have. So that was one of the dishes that I was excited to put on the menu. Right before I left.Suzy Chase: The Spicy Noodles is on page 246 in the cookbook.Hooni Kim: Of my book. Yeah.Suzy Chase : If you're going to buy the book, if you already have the book, you can find that on 246. Now my favorite is I need a drum roll. Your hot wings!Hooni Kim: Oh, which one? Because we have several that we, is it the goopy one with the red sauce,Suzy Chase: Yes, it was the thick, sticky, hot. It hits you. And then it's sweet. It was like super duper sticky. I think you offered it maybe twice and then it didn't come back.Hooni Kim: I think you're right. We had it on just twice, two or three times. It's tough when we have just one menu, because we first started this meal kit when a lot of my customers couldn't come to the restaurant because they had to stay home with the kids. So a lot of the menu items we couldn't do really spicy or really bold. We sort of had to think about the kids who the meal kit was feeding, but we were able to sort of put in the spicy dishes once in a while. And then we get complaints like, my four year old can't eat spicy food. So it was on and off, but now it's different. Now. I think my clientele has changed even, just because the families with the children have left the city. And I hope they come back next week with the wings that you like, they will come back. I think next week it's on the menu, not the kimchi menu the week after. So yeah.Suzy Chase: Well it made me laugh because on one of the menus, it was like, these wings are not for children or something like that.Hooni Kim: Yeah. anything that's red is spicy in Korean food. We don't use ketchup. We don't use tomatoes. So anything that's red is red hot peppers. Whether it be in pepper flakes or Gochujang, which is a pepper paste. I sometimes forget that some people might not notice that, you know, after the complaints, we decided to put it in writing certain dishes don't feed your kids.Suzy Chase: And you can find that recipe on pages 296, 297 and 298.Hooni Kim: Yeah. That's a Danji spicy wing recipe that is actually served at Danji right now with our outdoor dining.Suzy Chase: We'll have to go up there. I'm going to bring napkins with me.Hooni Kim: It is so much better when it's straight out of the fryer and the sauce is sort of just put on. There is that textural sort of a goopy sauce and a crispy wing that makes it just besides being delicious. It's just fun to eat. When you have that textural change. A contrast.Suzy Chase: So, our 14 year olds favorite dish was the radish and beef soup. And it's on page one 94 in the cookbook. Can you describe it?Hooni Kim: It's funny that your son likes that. Cause my son, who's 11, that's his favorite breakfast dish. It's a soothing, comfortable dish that you can eat a lot of because it's not spicy. It's not really peppery. It's not really too salty either. And you can have it with rice. It will hydrate you in the morning. Yeah, it's my son's favorite. And it's explaining it to your son's favorite too,Suzy Chase: But, but I just have to say everything in the meal kit is amazing. There was nothing we didn't like everyone in New York needs to order it.Hooni Kim: Thank you. Thank you so much. You know, it's tough because my staff, we were not used to making 160 portions of anything. At the same time, we became a, almost a banquet kitchen where we never done banquet style food. We always made one or two servings a la minute when people order it and it took us a couple of weeks to learn how to do it the right way. But we're, we're, we're pretty comfortable now. So all of my cooks myself we're very technically, I think there, when it comes to making these meal kits.Suzy Chase: I got so excited when I saw that article come out and made, it said kimchi could make it difficult for the coronavirus to penetrate the body. Did you see that article?Hooni Kim: I didn't read the whole article because it's something that I believe from a long time ago. It's something that I posted even in April or healthy gut biome is so critical in your immune system. So I made that connection a while back when there's an article about kimchi or any kind of probiotic dishes helping to fight off bacterial and viral diseases. It's, you know, something Koreans have known for a long time.Suzy Chase: So does going back to Korea as an adult make you feel like you're a kid again?Hooni Kim: I used to come to Korea for vacation, for fun to eat. I did have more of a connection to my past. I saw relatives. I visited my father's grave on his homeland Soando, but this time not so much, I don't travel. I won't dare to try to visit my father's islands, Soando just because it's not safe. The restaurants in Korea are all closed by 9:00 PM. As far as I know, schools are still closed. You know, this world has changed. You know, my trips to Korea was something that I always look forward to. And when I was here every minute that I was stuck in my hotel room, I felt like I was missing out on another meal or visiting another city. But now it's serious. So I'm just being very carefulSuzy Chase: On a lighter note this week in your heat and serve meal kit you are offering for the first time, I think your 120 day kimchi stew. Tell us about that.Hooni Kim: Second time. Because first time we offered it was I think when we first started, yeah, it's, it's a very deep, deep, acidic kimchi flavor. And when it's over two, three months, when it's 120 days, I don't like to eat it just straight or I wouldn't say raw, but just the kimchi as a banchan, as a cold dish I feel better cooking it because the flavors are just so bold. So strong. I do feel like I need to balance it out with, in this case, pork fat and and anchovy broth and some tofu to make it not so bold. Yeah. It's, it's delicious. And I consider it medicine, but yeah, I'm excited to be able to offer it again after what is it four months now? Since the last time we offered it? Well, that's how long it took for us to 120 days. Yeah.Suzy Chase: So the season on the podcast, I have a segment called Last Night's Dinner. What did you eat for dinner last night?Hooni Kim: You know, the same thing I've been having for the past three weeks, I don't go out to dinner. So in my hotel there is a Dosirak system. Dosirak means like a little bento box where they give you a balanced meal. And for me, because I have a gluten sensitivity, basically it's a vegetable ragu with French fries and a salad and some cheese for dessert. Yeah. It's not exciting. It's not something that I want to brag about. It's not Korean, but I'm just glad that they're giving me something because I am not able to venture out to restaurants because I am here to do a job and I cannot risk, not just myself, but my entire, you know, the staff that we're working with and the entire show, if something horrible happens to me. So I'm just doing another quarantine by myself, in my hotel in Seoul.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?Hooni Kim: You can find everything about my book, my restaurants at HooniKim.com. But I think I am the most active on my Instagram, which is Hooni Kim as well and I think next week is when the restrictions will ease up a little bit and I would start venturing out to as many restaurants as possible. So you know, my, my feed gets a little bit more exciting next week and I hope you can join me.Suzy Chase : I will close with a quote that you translated on your Instagram and it goes, "effort will never betray you, the truth reveals itself through flavor." Thank you so much. Hooni for coming back on Cookery by the Book podcast.Hooni Kim: Thank you so much for having me again, Suzy.Outro: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com and thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

Everything Is Under Control: A Memoir With RecipesBy Phyllis Grant Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table talking to cookbook authors.Phyllis Grant: My name is Phyllis Grant, and I've written a book called Everything is Under Control, and it is a memoir with recipes.Suzy Chase: This book is both a memoir and a cookbook. You give us a candid glimpse into a few of the most pivotal times in your life. I noticed that you use words sparingly, but you managed to relay a vivid story. Bill Addison in the LA times wrote that your single line spacing suggests a poem. To kick things off, can you just talk a little bit about your writing process?Phyllis Grant: Well, a lot of the stories in my book are stories that I started writing decades ago. So I found that when things have been hard in my life, that writing about them and rewriting about them to my friends over the years has really helped process and sort of move on. To help me sort of let go of postpartum depression, let go of particularly hard births, let go of the intensity of dancing in New York and finally moving on to another career. So the process of writing about these experiences led to this book. So this is really a collection, not really of diary entries, but of things I've written to friends in order to process sort of the milestones in my life over the years. And that has ended up being hopefully, a more accessible sort of way of not only telling stories, but also having people be able to take them in as in some ways as their own stories. As more universal, the essence of life is what I was trying to achieve in this book.Suzy Chase: I guess you just answered my second question, is why did you choose to write this in present tense? Was it because you wrote things down on the spot in the moment?Phyllis Grant: That's part of it. Also, it would be so fascinating for me to go back and look at all the different iterations of this book because at one point it was not in the present tense. At one point it was in the second person. I think part of the writing and rewriting process for me was to take it into many different forms. At times, this book was way overwritten and sort of a bloated memoir, filled with all sorts of food imagery and senses and so on, and it was a bit over the top. So by paring it down and bringing it into the present tense again, it was more about being more relatable, more universal.Suzy Chase: I can't imagine this was ever a bloated memoir. That's so funny.Phyllis Grant: Well, I had a book deal with a different publisher about seven years ago and I was sort of pushed in that direction and it was really the wrong direction for me as a writer. And I think in the end, getting my book back, moving on, reselling it to a different publisher, allowed it to become a much, much stronger book, a much shorter book, but way, way more relatable. And there's a lot of blank space in the book, but what people have said to me is that those blank spaces really allow you to pause and breathe and take in each section before you move on.Suzy Chase: The subtitle is a Memoir With Recipes. Tell us about the 17 recipes in the back of this book.Phyllis Grant: Well, it was really hard to choose 17, I have to admit. Because I have hundreds, they aren't all as well tested as these 17, but in many ways I was trying to look at the recipes in the same way that I looked at the stories. So wanting them to be less specific recipes and more templates. So in other words, if someone wants to learn how to make a tart, I have a very detailed narrative recipe about how to make tart dough, but then all these different things you can do with it. Same thing with salad dressing, same thing with stew. I give you sort of an outline of how to do it the first time, and then my idea as a teacher is to help you make it your own. And these 17 really are more like templates and I'm hoping that they will help people learn how to cook, especially people who don't normally cook every day. We've had a lot of time lately to cook and people have mentioned that cooking three meals a day for the first time in their life, they're really learning quite a bit. And I've learned a lot by repetition, so I like to take recipes and make them over and over and over again. It's not about making it perfect and then moving on, it's about letting the recipe have a life.Suzy Chase: One recipe that caught my eye was your grandma's Fudgy Icebox Brownies on page 221. Can you describe this recipe and talk about why you freeze it?Phyllis Grant: This is based on a brownie recipe that my grandma used to make. So I certainly think of this recipe is very comforting. I see my grandmother's face when I make the recipe, when I read the recipe, I think about her and she always puts cinnamon in them, a little bit of cinnamon. You almost can't taste it, but it does something to dull the sweetness and sort of bring out the chocolate flavor. So that's sort of the unusual twist in this. And the thing that I experimented with and it was sort of accidental, is taking the brownies out when they're a little bit under cooked and then letting them cool and then freezing them and then cutting them into strips. And then when you want a little tiny chocolate snack in the middle of the night, or with glass of wine, you can just take this, basically, it's like a log of brownies out of the freezer and cut off just a few slices. It's very rich, it's almost fudge like, but I find by freezing it, it lasts a lot longer, and it's always there for you when you want a little treat.Suzy Chase: You wrote, "When I cook, I'm calm and confident." Tell us about that, because I'm not.Phyllis Grant: It's true. It's what I've always done to relax, to sort of meditate, to get away from the hard stuff. Whether it was when I was 10 and hormones were kicking in and I was feeling overwhelmed by life or hormones postpartum. It's just always been the place where I've gone. The kitchen has been where I go to recalibrate in some ways, to start over and to be able to sort of face what's next. And I write about that in the book in relation to pastry when I'm young, because I think there is, even though I encourage people to play with recipes and learn, there's also something very grounding about having a recipe that you know will work always. Very, very comforting.Suzy Chase: I'm going to read a few various lines from the book. The first is, "There's no such thing as being full. We eat so we don't have to acknowledge what's coming next, and we are so hungry." Many women were brought up to believe thinness show the world, how much we were in control. I know I was. I don't think we realized how often food and life intersect. Can you talk a little bit about that?Phyllis Grant: One thing that I've noticed looking over the past 50 years is when I write about anything in life, there is a through line of food. Part of it is we all have to eat. So that's just naturally a part of our day. But for me, as I said, it's more than just that, it's like the actual act of cooking for myself, cooking for my kids, cooking for my partner. It's incredibly gratifying. But at times in my life it's been about not eating or it's been about being confused that I'm not hungry. And so tracing over 50 years, the role of food in my life was a big part of writing this book. And as a dancer, especially there were times I was not eating much at all because I wanted to look a certain way. And of course in the end, I didn't feel well psychologically. It didn't work out so well to not eat, and I learned that pretty quickly. But I think especially when you're young, food like when I was living in New York City, without my family, I missed the smell of the brownies cooking. I missed someone bringing a platter of steaming brown rice and chicken and putting it in front of me. I missed that so much so I would seek that comfort in other ways. So for me, it was always at the end of the day, I needed to have a big cup of coffee and enormous blueberry muffin with streusel on top. And I found throughout life and now maybe it's cheese and a martini, but there's always something in the day that helps sort of, again, going back to grounding me in the ritual of something. That's the comfort in that food brings me.Suzy Chase: You just mentioned dancing. How old were you when you came to Juilliard here in the city?Phyllis Grant: I was 18 and Julliard didn't have a dorm at the time. So I actually lived in a residence hotel at 93rd and Broadway with a bunch of other Juilliard students and a bunch of drug addicts. Not the Juilliard students, but the building was definitely questionable. There was a gunshot hole in the front door, and you didn't feel so safe in the middle of the night and the stairwell. It was a little sketchy to be 18 and living in a place like that. But you grow up pretty fast and you build a pretty strong community of people and we looked out for each other. But that was 1988 in New York City, it was a different time. Wow.Suzy Chase: That was a really different time.Phyllis Grant: Especially upper, Upper West side, definitely.Suzy Chase: Oh my gosh.Phyllis Grant: Yeah. For better, or for worse, it's certainly changed a lot.Suzy Chase: Describe your first Thanksgiving away from home at Windows on the World.Phyllis Grant: Basically it was the three of us, Berkeley girls needing each other so badly and wanting a very special dinner. So we went to Windows on the World and it was so terrible. It was the worst meal I've ever had. And the truth is there was so much turnover in that restaurant. You never know what you're going to get, it was a bit of a tourist trap at the time. And we ate all the terrible food and we drank way too much wine and then we threw up in the bathroom and went back to our lives uptown. It was definitely not one for the books. It was a pretty depressing night for sure.Suzy Chase: Well, for people who don't know about Windows on the World, it was in the World Trade Center before 9/11. It was amazing, I vividly remember going there and standing in the floor to ceiling windows and just staring out at the city. But we never ate there, we just drank.Phyllis Grant: Yeah, I do it in my book. I mentioned that exactly what you said, the floor to ceiling windows and sort of needing that sort of special separation. It's like way downtown and it was way up high. And of course it has so many more layers of meaning now because we were in New York city on 9/11 and we watched the second plane hit. We watched those buildings fall. So it's kind of a wild thing to think about being there at 18 for Thanksgiving dinner and then 20 years later, watch those buildings fall.Suzy Chase: How did you go from dancing at Juilliard to being an apprentice at some of the top restaurants in New York City?Phyllis Grant: Well, it was the nineties and you could knock on the back door of a restaurant and walk in and say, "Hey, can I work for free or what needs to happen today?" And that's what I did. So I would go eat a meal at a restaurant and then asked to meet with the pastry chef. And they were really eager back then for extra help. And part of it was the celebrity chef thing hadn't happened yet. So I think once Food Network kicked in, which was probably the mid-nineties, something like that, there was this excitement about working in restaurants. So it became much harder to do that. But the time I did it, which was '93, '94, people really welcomed me into their kitchens because they needed the extra help. And then once you're in, you're in like in most jobs and you can slowly work your way up. So, that's what I did.Suzy Chase: What was the favorite restaurant you worked at?Phyllis Grant: I guess I would say working at Bouley really was extraordinary. They had just gotten four stars from the New York Times and it was very similar to dance in terms of the adrenaline, it was very exciting. So I personally, would feel very nervous right before service, sort of getting set up and all that. And then once you start, you just fly. It's just like six, eight, nine, 10 hours of service. And the thing that keeps you going is adrenaline. It's really exciting and you learn a lot really fast in that kind of environment.Suzy Chase: I found the similarities between dancing and restaurant work too. And I was thinking that the guy that runs the kitchen is basically the same personality type as the person that teaches ballet at Julliard.Phyllis Grant: Very similar, yes. Old school sort of hierarchical and male dominated, absolutely. There's so much in common there. And things are changing, thank goodness. But that back in the nineties, things had not started changing yet. And so part of it was, I just like with dance, with restaurants, I knew the game I was playing. I stepped in and I played my role and I did what I was supposed to do. And sometimes that meant sort of putting up with a certain amount of abuse, harassment. Yeah, so very similar worlds.Suzy Chase: So at a certain point you reconnect with M, a former lover and realized how much you've missed cooking for him. Then you get married and 9/11 happens. What happened next?Phyllis Grant: Well, we had lived in New York City for a decade and there was something about this traumatic event that I think part of it was this feeling of you only live once. And what are we doing living in this 375 square foot apartment in New York City? Why don't we try something new? So I was a yoga teacher at the time and my husband was a working actor. So we moved to Los Angeles. So three weeks after 9/11, we drove across the country and moved to Los Angeles, and boy was that a rough transition. We missed New York still. I still miss New York, frankly. It's a hard place to leave, but there was something about that moment, that shift, that crack open that 9/11 gave us. It was a devastating, devastating time, but I'm grateful that we decided to try something new.Suzy Chase: Talk about how you move to a condo above your grandmother. What impact did that have on your life?Phyllis Grant: At the time we had two young children. So I worried a lot that we were being too noisy, that was the hard part. But the beautiful part was just knowing that my grandma was downstairs and that she was in her late eighties at the time. And she needed a lot of support and it was so great to be there for her. And she was very private, so I wouldn't go knock on her door and barge in, but I would check in almost once a day and any food I was cooking, I would bring her some. And it was really lovely to sit with her and actually, to sometimes sit in silence. To have tea, to have cookies and just let that be okay. There's less of this urgency of, "Oh, I only see you once a year. We have to get in all this quality time." Instead, we just became a part of each other's daily lives in a very important way.Suzy Chase: I feel like you had more in common with your grandmother than your mother.Phyllis Grant: Oh that's interesting. I think in some ways that's true, actually. My mom actually growing up, always used to say that she wanted a more traditional upbringing in a white picket fence. And there's certain sort of things she wanted because her dad is an artist and they were always moving around and they didn't have any money. And my mom really wanted something more traditional. And I would say that I am more like my grandmother in that we moved around a lot and I don't necessarily need things to be traditional, in fact, I'm sort of well known in my family for always doing things a little bit differently. So I think that's really actually insightful of you Suzy, because she and I, my grandma and I share a lot in terms of how we live or how she lived and also how we cook. And I also appreciate my mom so much and her meticulousness, in fact, my daughter, I think is very much like my mom and I love seeing how it skips generations.Suzy Chase: How did it feel getting Ruth Reichl, and Elizabeth Gilbert's glowing reviews of this book.Phyllis Grant: Oh, so moving. So the first blurb I got actually was Elizabeth Gilbert. So I have to tell you, starting off with that one gave me a nice little push. And then the last one I got was Ruth Reichl, So it was nice to be book ended by those two incredible women I've admired for so long. So honestly, sometimes I feel like I'm just going to wake up and it was a dream.Suzy Chase: No, it's real.Phyllis Grant: Is it really? I know it's on the back of the book, I guess it is real. Yeah. The fact that they took the time. You can tell they read the book and they really took it in and I can see that in their blurbs. So that means the world.Suzy Chase: In this Instagram perfect world we're living in, how was it opening up about the tough intimacies of your life that you probably wouldn't just talk about at a dinner party?Phyllis Grant: I started a blog about 10 years ago called Dash and Bella. And initially I would write about making cupcakes and playing with the kids and the chaos in the kitchen and so on. And then these posts started to morph a little bit more into the hard, raw, uncomfortable stuff. So I got used to writing about it. And the reason I continued to write about it is the community I started to build. People would reach out to me, they would direct message me, email me, and start telling me their stories. So what I realized is by telling my heart stories that it helps other people tell theirs. And as I said earlier, it's therapeutic being able to write about the hard stuff can help you let go a little bit, and if I can just do a little of that with this book, I've been really encouraged by the fact that people are starting to write their own stories and reaching out to me and thanking me for telling mine. So it feels more like a community responsibility.Suzy Chase: So here's the big question. At this point in your life, do you feel like everything is under control? I need a drum roll or something.Phyllis Grant: No, but there are things that are, and I suppose that's what keeps us all going. Just sort of that realizing what is under control and partly going back to what I said, like ritual like my coffee is there in the morning, my dog is there looking at me, ready for the food. My kids need me to feed them. There's so much beautiful stuff to read. So I'm trying to find control in the smaller things, but it is true, big picture is pretty terrifying right now in terms of lack of control.Suzy Chase: Yeah. And I think we can focus on resilience.Phyllis Grant: Yeah. And I see that in my children too, as I talk to my friends a lot about what's it going to look like in a year for all of us, when we look back? What will we have learned and done. And I do see how strong and resilient our kids are. And yeah, thank you for saying that about my book. I feel like, yeah, I look back on the past 50 years and I did, I got through it all, knock on wood. So far.Suzy Chase: So yesterday I made your Classic Jammy Anchovy Sauce on page 192. Can you describe this recipe?Phyllis Grant: When I would go in and work on my book for a few days, which often was the only way I could get anything done, any writing done, I would go away. I would want to cook to procrastinate instead of work on the book, just because finally I have time and I would think, "Oh my gosh, I want to cook all day." So instead of actually cooking all day, I would throw all these ingredients into a pot with a jammy sauce. So anchovies, and tomatoes, and wine, and sugar, and salt, and vinegar, and let it bubble away all day while I was writing. So it a way to cook and to smell something wonderful cooking, but still be able to work on my book. This jammy sauce you can put on so many things. You can put it on pasta, you can put it on toast, you can have it as the base of a pizza, it can be like a ketchup on a sandwich. So it's quite versatile, it's really hands off because all you do is stir it every 20 minutes, if that, and then you can freeze it and you can make a big batch of it.Suzy Chase: Now to my segment called my favorite cookbook. What is your all-time favorite cookbook and why?Phyllis Grant: That is impossible. Which is not the answer you want.Suzy Chase: Wrong.Phyllis Grant: There is one book though that does pop into my head always when people ask me that question and that is Chez Panisse Desserts by Lindsey Shere. And she was the original pastry chef at Chez Panisse, and this is the book I cooked my way through when I was 22, just deciding that I wasn't going to be a dancer and I needed to find something else, and that's when I realized cooking was my thing. And if you open this cookbook, there's chocolate all over it. The pages are filthy. And I think that's a sign of certainly a well-used book. And I would call that my favorite.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media and your blog?Phyllis Grant: I haven't posted much on my blog, but some people have been saying they've been going back and looking at the archives of the recipes. So I think I'm going to put those in a more organized form, but that's Dash and Bella, it's a blog spot. You can just type in dashandbella.com and on Twitter and Instagram, I am @dashandBella. And Instagram is really my world these days, that's where I tell stories. That's where I'm sort of doing a daily food diary. It's replaced the blog in some ways.Suzy Chase: And here it is our summer beach read. Thanks Phyllis, for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.Phyllis Grant: Thanks Suzy.Outro: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com. And thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

Salad PartyBy Kristy Mucci Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery By The Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.Kristy Mucci: I'm Kristy Mucci, and my first cookbook is Salad Party, and it's out now from Chronicle Books.Suzy Chase: You're a writer, produce enthusiast, recipe tester and developer food and prop stylist, former editor at Food 52 and Saveur magazine, and now cookbook author. With Salad Party, these days of the boring salad are officially over. Beyond the standard bowl of lettuce and dressing you put together unique combinations. Can you describe how this cookbook works?Kristy Mucci: Yeah, it's actually my editor who had the idea for the design, but each page is broken into three panels. So the top is the dressings and the middle is what we're calling toppings, and then the bottom is bases. And they're little flaps so you can switch back and forth and mix and match and make over 3000 combinations.Suzy Chase: I read somewhere that someone called it a flip book for adults.Kristy Mucci: I love that.Suzy Chase: I love that too.Kristy Mucci: It kind of makes making salads a bit of a game, which some friends of mine who have kids have said it's been great for them. The kids are a little bit more involved in helping decide what they're going to eat and cook. I'm thrilled about that. If I could get more kids excited about cooking and produce, then that's a win for everyone.Suzy Chase: During the quarantine, I really made an effort to think of salads as more of a main dish than a garnish. Do you have a favorite go to weeknight salad combination out of the book?Kristy Mucci: Out of the book? I want to say right now, I'm really into the cilantro lime dressing, so I'm kind of putting that with everything. But I really like a cold salad with cilantro lime dressing, the shredded chicken and white rice. And then I can throw in herbs or shaved radishes or some grated carrot as a base. The rice and the chicken and the cilantro lime dressing is my current favorite.Suzy Chase: And I noticed that not all of the bases are lettuce. Can you talk a little bit about that?Kristy Mucci: Yeah. So most people think salad is like leaves on a plate with maybe some vegetables thrown in, and that's not necessarily true. A salad can be an entire meal and it can be a grain-based salad or a pasta salad or something that's a little bit heartier than I think what most people think of when they think of salad. They're like, Oh yeah, just like mixed leaves and maybe some tomato.Suzy Chase: Speaking of tomato, in the summer, there's really nothing better than a good cherry tomato in your salad, out of the salad or really wherever. You have an awesome hack for slicing all the tomatoes at once. Can you tell us about that one?Kristy Mucci: Yeah. I actually learned this from Amanda Hesser at Food 52 way back in the day when I worked there. You take two tops from deli containers and you fill one with cherry tomatoes and then you place the other top on top of that, and you just take your knife and slice right through. And then you have a bunch of halved tomatoes.Suzy Chase: You wrote an article when you were working at Food 52 about vinaigrette. This was way back in 2016. You wrote, "I used to love putting time into making a salad, carefully washing and drying the leaves, making a proper vinaigrette. using my hands to make sure the leaves were all evenly dressed. That's a lovely time. And I'd been depriving myself of all that enjoyment. Thanks to Nora Ephron, I felt inspired to get back to my old ways." Can you talk a little bit about that?Kristy Mucci: That is part of a series I did for Food 52 after I went through kind of a really messy time. I was going through your divorce and gosh backstory one day, my husband left and didn't come home for five months and refused to talk to me. So I kind of stopped cooking. I just totally stopped all of life. And then I moved into a new place. And then this messy divorce started, and so I took really a full year off of cooking, because I was just sad and trying to figure out a new life. And when I wanted to get back to cooking, it felt really awkward. I dropped a knife one. I've never done that in my life. I'm a professional food person. So I was just kind of getting my sea legs back in the kitchen and Kristen at Food 52 let me write a series about getting back to cooking, which is really getting back to my life. And I read Nora Ephron's Heartburn. I've read it a couple times, but there was one weekend I read it in the middle of writing this series and this light bulb went off because in the book, the character is food writer and she mentions her vinaigrette. recipe a lot throughout the book. It's so good. Her ex-husband is never going to find anybody who makes a vinaigrette. just like this, and she's not going to share the recipe. And I don't know if this is a spoiler, the book's pretty old, so hopefully everybody's read it. In the end, she shares the recipe. But this light bulb went off and it was really thanks to Nora Ephron. I was like, "What am I doing? I'm just throwing stuff in a bowl and drizzling some olive oil and maybe squeezing some lemon and not even caring if I got lemon seeds in there. And it was this nice reminder that there's this part of my life, and there's this wonderful thing that I love doing and I can give that to myself. So I started keeping a jar of her vinaigrette. in my fridge, and that was kind of really one of the first major steps to getting back to being a professional food person.Suzy Chase: You have a classic vinaigrette. and salad party. Was this one influenced by Nora?Kristy Mucci: Yes, yes. It was the first thing I thought of to include in the book. Everybody needs a classic vinaigrette. and I cannot think of one without thinking of her.Suzy Chase: One interesting recipe I saw in the cookbook was spicy fish sauce. Can you describe this? And what goes good with it?Kristy Mucci: So we have a combination of super savory fish sauce and lime, and I use the juice and the zest of the lime because I want all of the acidity and tang that a lime can provide. We have a little bit of grated garlic and some red pepper. And I only call for a quarter teaspoon of the red pepper flakes, but you can go as heavy as you like, as mild as you like, but I start there. And I really like it with the black rice and garlicky shrimp. And then I'll throw in a bunch of herbs to go with that, particularly cilantro and a little bit of mint. I also think it's really good with the broccoli, with lemon and almonds. And I like that to go on top of either the soba noodles or the sliced kale, and maybe I'll add an egg to that, to just make it a little bit more substantial. I really like it with the tender lettuces and the shredded salt and pepper chicken. And I'll definitely add some shaved radishes and more herbs, I kind of like to throw herbs everywhere.Suzy Chase: This just goes to show us that this book is so creative. You can do so much with it.Kristy Mucci: Yeah. And you don't even have to stick to the three components. If there are two toppings you really like, or however many toppings you think would be good, it doesn't have to just be a three component salad.Suzy Chase: Talk about a little bit about how you prep for the week.Kristy Mucci: Every week, usually it's a Sunday, I'll put on a grain. Right now I'm just really craving white rice, so that's the one I'm making. So I always make a grain, and then if I have some hardy greens, I slice those up or I prep them to be the shape that I want them to be for kind of just like grabbing and adding to a salad. I always set a pot, a very salty water on to boil. And then I just put a few different vegetables through there so I have things that are crisp tender and ready to go to add as garnishes to any meal. This week I did romanesco cauliflower and some carrots and asparagus and some new potatoes, all with the same pot of water. I always have two jars of dressing in the fridge. So basically, by the end of my few hours, my kitchen or my fridge is full of containers of things that are ready to go and putting a meal together is kind of just like assembling a puzzle. I don't know, it feels very minimal effort, but then the payoff is huge because I have everything I need just kind of at the ready.Suzy Chase: Now I'd like to chat about your personal website, Kristymucci.com. And on that you have the most wonderful resource page for getting good ingredients from small farms and businesses while social distancing. Plus, over on your Instagram page, you share a Google spreadsheet of black owned farms.Kristy Mucci: Yeah. I am a big supporter of farmers and I have very personal relationships with them and I do some consulting. And my whole passion, I would say is about supporting small farmers. So when the restaurants closed, I was really concerned about how all the farmers I knew were going to make up for those losses. So I reached out to them and started putting together a list of farms that were pivoting to CSA models or that we're offering some kind of contactless pickup. So I made that list. And then people were asking, "Where do you get your ingredients from, how are you going to do this while you're social distancing?" And luckily, a lot of the places I love to buy from have very easy online ordering. So I just put that together to help people out. And then in the past few weeks with all of the protests and all of this learning that we're doing, I thought it would be good to especially help black farmers. The history of prejudice against black farmers in the country is atrocious. And a lot of people don't know about it. And somebody put together this amazing spreadsheet with links to that information, and then just with links to all of these farmers that you can very easily support. And they're doing the same things, offering CSA or contactless pickup. It feels really important right now to be supporting small farmers and supporting black farmers as much as we can.Suzy Chase: So the other night I made tender lettuces, mushrooms with shallots and thyme, with maple and mustard vinaigrette. That was such a delicious, interesting combination.Kristy Mucci: That sounds really good. I like that a lot. And I think in the colder months, that would be really nice with kale as the base.Suzy Chase: And what is also good about this cookbook is, I'm not going to the grocery store every day now. So I kind of chose this thinking about what things I had in my pantry and it turned out so good.Kristy Mucci: I'm so happy to hear that I want to help people make delicious meals as easily as possible. So if this is what you have on hand, you can definitely make a combination from this book.Suzy Chase: So other than this combination that I made, there are 3,374 more in this amazing cookbook. What went into testing all these combinations?Kristy Mucci: Oh boy. Having a few friends over and I would do three at a time and make all of the various combinations from that and then save leftovers and then make three more and then taste all of those. It was just a lot of eating. And when I was developing the cookbook or initially coming up with ideas, I was obviously thinking with that idea in mind, everything has to go well together. So I thought that I would try to keep the toppings. Obviously they are good on their own, but they can be a little bit more mild in flavor. And I would use the dressings as like the real kick.Suzy Chase: So when you were planning for this cookbook, did the layout come first and then the recipes come second? How did that work?Kristy Mucci: Yeah. My editor Dan, she reached out and said, "We have this really fun design idea, but we need an author and a concept and recipes. Do you want to do it?" "Did you really just ask me if I want to make a cookbook? Of course I do." And we decided on salads. We had talked about maybe pizza or pasta, but I felt like salads were really the most versatile and I'm so crazy about produce that it just made the most sense.Suzy Chase: Now for my segment called my favorite cookbook, what is your all time favorite cookbook and why?Kristy Mucci: I think it has to be An Everlasting Meal by Tamar Adler because that book has gotten me through many cooking ruts in my life. Every once in a while you just kind of turn off and stop cooking, and I pick that book up and I'm back to it. It's like a little reminder of everything I love and believe about cooking. I would say that one. And I think it's a book that would make any novice feel comfortable in the kitchen and a successful home cook.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?Kristy Mucci: I'm on Instagram @Kristy Mucci. That's kind of the main thing I use. And then my website, people can get in touch with me through there.Suzy Chase: And your website is KristyMucci.com.Kristy Mucci: Yes.Suzy Chase: Well, thanks Kristy for coming on Cookery By The Book podcast.Kristy Mucci: Thank you so much for having me.Outro: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com, and thanks for listening to the number one cook book podcast, Cookery By The Book.

The Marshall Mathers LP is arguably the biggest rap album in history. Released 20 years ago on May 23rd 2000, this video reviews and celebrates this iconic album, 20 years later. Check out The Labz: https://thelabz.com/ Support me on Patreon! http://www.patreon.com/UnabashedlyReggie Skip to a section! 00:02:19 - Production 00:05:59 - Lyrical Content 00:14:32 - Controversy 00:14:35 - Controversy - Homophobia 00:16:07 - Controversy -Kill You 00:17:11 - Controversy - Beefs 00:21:37 - Singles 00:21:42 - Singles - The Real Slim Shady 00:22:36 - Singles - Tommy Coster Jr. Interview 00:23:54 - Singles - The Way I Am 00:25:57 - Singles - Stan 00:28:44 - Fun Facts 00:28:48 - Fun Facts - Album Cover 00:29:54 - Fun Facts - Censorship 00:30:59 - Fun Facts - Uncle Ronnie 00:31:25 - Fun Facts - Rappers's favorite 00:31:54 - Legacy 00:36:10 - Outro ----------- Subscribe! http://www.youtube.com/UnabashedlyReggie?sub_confirmation=1 Like me on Facebook! http://www.facebook.com/UnabashedlyReggie Follow me on Twitter! http://www.twitter.com/mrstraightfire Follow me on Instagram! http://www.instagram.com/mrstraightfire Anchor: https://anchor.fm/unabashedlyreggie

The Elements of a Home: Curious Histories behind Everyday Household Objects, from Pillows to Forks.By Amy Azzarito Intro: Welcome to the number-one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City sitting at her dining room table talking to cookbook authors.Amy Azzarito: My name is Amy Azzarito. I'm a design historian living in the Bay Area, and my new book is Elements of a Home: Curious Histories Behind Everyday Household Objects, from Pillows to Forks.Suzy Chase: For more Cookery by the Book, you can follow me on Instagram. If you enjoy this podcast, please be sure to share it with a friend. I'm always looking for new people to enjoy Cookery by the Book. Now on with the quarantine question round. Number one, where are you living?Amy Azzarito: I'm in Marin County, which is in the Bay Area, just north of San Francisco.Suzy Chase: What restaurant are you dreaming of going to after the quarantine?Amy Azzarito: I picked two. One is an omakase restaurant in San Francisco. It's the special occasion restaurant for my husband and myself called Sasaki. 10 people sit at a bar and watch the sushi chef make everything. It's one of those restaurants where they don't let you put your own soy sauce on things. Then the other is a restaurant here in Marin County called Guesthouse. They make these amazing ribs on Thursday nights that I've been missing.Suzy Chase: What dish is getting you through this that you're making at home?Amy Azzarito: Yeah, so Cooking Light has a recipe for, they call it Instant Pot Vegetarian Cassoulet, that I have made more times than I can count. Our stay at home has coincided with my one-year-old daughter developing into a real eater, a person who eats real food, so I'm cooking more than ever, and she loves this dish. I'm making it once a week. I'm making something with cannellini beans for her once a week if I can find them.Suzy Chase: Now on with the show. You are a sought-after expert on the topic of design history both past and present. We go through everyday life using napkins, forks, spoon, tablecloths, and even a punch bowl not even considering these items have a story and a history. My whole apartment here in New York City is filled with family heirlooms, and I love looking at history through the lens of objects. That is what this book is all about. Can you give us a short history of household objects?Amy Azzarito: Sure. In the introduction to the book, I explain that most of the objects in our home were conceived to fill some sort of a need, something to lie on, something to drink from, to sit on, but that doesn't mean that, just because they filled a practical void, that there wasn't an aesthetic consideration. Human beings seem drawn to beauty. When we consider the history of household objects prior to the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, which is fairly recent, some of the things that we today deem essential, or many of the things, rather, so pillows and chairs and forks, the things that you mentioned, all of those things were handmade and available to a very few. This book looks at objects through that lens. What were things like? What was it like to live in that time period? What were the stories of these objects?Suzy Chase: The extensive bibliography in the back of the book is the roadmap of your journey, and it's extensive. Can you talk a little bit about the process of figuring out what items you wanted to include in the book and your research?Amy Azzarito: I came up with the object list in a few ways. I did spend time just noting the things that are ubiquitous in all homes, so mattresses, for example, and pillows. Then I'd see what was available on the history of that object and if it seemed like an Avenue that I could explore or if it was a dead end. Other times, I may have read something more general. I mention Joan DeJean's book on comfort. She writes about the history of the sofa in the context of a larger narrative. I thought the story of the sofa was so compelling that reading her take set me on a path to research more. With one hook like that, I would then look over those bibliographies, look for additional books, look for articles, dissertations, so just following the thread if I could.Suzy Chase: Talk a little bit about how the French pops up over and over in this book.Amy Azzarito: In the introduction, I was just trying to head off anyone complaining like, "Why is there so much French stuff here?" I do quote Edmund White who wrote that the French invented the idea of luxe and they have always been willing to pay for it. Beginning in the 16th century, there's a lot of money from French colonies, and the French spend that money and they spend it on... not just the kings but the aristocracy, and they spend it on food and clothing and decorative objects, and they're fashion-forward and they start trends. As this consumer market evolves, people makers, artisans, are enticing them to spend more. I mean it's like our economy, really, so there's always something new, new clocks, new style of silver. You certainly don't want to be seen with the outmoded, whatever that was. Then everybody is just trying to catch up for the next even... You could argue, even now, we're still looking to catch up to their aesthetics.Suzy Chase: Well, case in point, Versailles.Amy Azzarito: Right?Suzy Chase: Oh, my gosh.Amy Azzarito: Yeah, yeah.Suzy Chase: Over the top.Amy Azzarito: I mean it's interesting because Versailles is not just a palace for one king like we think of it, the fairy stories, but it's actually like this giant sprawling apartment complex. All the nobility are living there. Everyone's there. In fact, a lot of them who have these amazing townhouses in Paris are called to be there at the behest of the French king. It's how he keeps an eye on them. They're crammed, sometimes, into small apartments, but it is crowded. They bring their servants and they bring their dogs, but they're all there together, so you have all these people with money all together all the time. They're bored. They're looking to spend their money. They're looking to outdo one another, and it just like... It's this explosion of style.Suzy Chase: Let's start off with the good-old fork.Amy Azzarito: Yeah.Suzy Chase: It's actually the first thing you wrote about for Design Sponge, a popular, now-defunct design blog that we all miss so much. You wrote, in the book, it was once considered immoral, unhygienic, and a tool of the devil. Many people, even aristocrats, preferred to eat with their hands. Can you tell us about the fork?Amy Azzarito: Yeah. Most people ate with their hands. Part of the reason that the fork is seen as this implement of the devil is the early fork looked like a pitchfork. It was a two-pronged implement. The idea was that God made your hands and your hands should bring the food to your body to feed your body, and that's what God intended and, by using something else, it's devilish. I mean it's hard to get back into a medieval mindset, but that was the logic. To me, what's fascinating about the fork is that everyone was fine eating with their hands, that that was working really well. There was a lot of ritual around hand-washing, so everybody was very clean and there was a trumpet that would blow and call you to the table to hand wash, and they would pour the water over your hand not dip your hand in the basin. It was a nice ritualized thing. Well, all of the sudden, there's more sugar, again from the colonies. Chefs create this way to preserve fruit in this sugar, and they make this sticky, syrupy fruit dessert, and people just go gaga for this.Suzy Chase: British food writer Bee Wilson pointed out that there are fork cultures and there are chopstick cultures, but all people around world use spoons. In the old days, people wouldn't leave their home without their spoon, and what it was made of said everything about your social standing. Can you give us a little history of the spoon?Amy Azzarito: This time period, pre-Industrial Revolution, so anything before the 1850s, things, objects, everything, cloth, everything you wear, shoes, everything's made by hand, which means it's rather expensive. That's the reason you're carrying your own spoon around with you. It's not until we have more manufacturing they can afford to buy spoons for everyone. This is where we get the idea of... The concept of being born with a silver spoon in your mouth comes about this time as the spoon is a popular... silver spoon, rather, is a popular baptismal gift. It's basically just because it was the least expensive item of silver one could get, so that's sort of how that started, although if you were really wealthy, you might give a baby, say, 13 spoons that would have a little apostle on the finial of the spoon. Once we hit the 18th century, the problem isn't, "Do I have enough spoons?" Now that people can buy spoons, they want to have as many spoons as possible, and so, in the Victorian era, they have a spoon for everything.Suzy Chase: I didn't know that bread used to be the plate. Tell us about the trencher in the Middle Ages.Amy Azzarito: When you think about the medieval plate, we're thinking about a round slice of aged bread basically. That's what the early medieval plates were made of. There are recipes floating around online because these are aged, hard slices. They were aged for a few days so that they worked as a plate. We have these medieval plates, these trenchers, and the fork burst onto the scene, and people began eating all of their meals with this awesome new fork, and the fork pokes holes in the bread plate and the sauces run through, so bread doesn't really work as a plate. Then, as a stop-gap measure, people put maybe wood or something underneath the bread plate, so you have the bread plate then a... Finally, they're just like, "Forget it," and we get rid of the bread and we just have the plate.Suzy Chase: Can you talk about how, in ancient Rome, the wine glass was disposable?Amy Azzarito: Yeah. I think that's probably one of my favorite facts about the wine glass. The blow pipe had... which was a technique, a way to make glass, had just been invented in Syria, which was, at that time, part of the Roman Empire. We're talking like 50 BCE. All of a sudden, there's a plethora of glass. There's a lot of glass, and so if a Roman housewife chipped a glass, it was cheaper to just throw it away and buy a new one. That that kind of disposable mentality also existed in ancient life is fascinating.Suzy Chase: I've never put much thought into the napkin that I use at any given meal. In the book, you say this essential domestic item has surprising origins. Can you talk a little bit about that?Amy Azzarito: Yeah. This is one of my favorite facts from the book is that the earliest napkins were actually made of lumps of dough that were used by the Spartans. They would have a dough ball, and they would just kind of roll it and clean their oily fingers during the meal. Then, at the end of the meal, they would just, again, throw the dough to dogs or the poor people, and then that became a slice of bread that they would use as a napkin. Using a piece of dough would have been much less expensive than getting someone to weave and sew and make cloth to then use for napkins just to wipe your hands with.Suzy Chase: Why do you think medieval diners would be horrified by our casual attitude toward table linens?Amy Azzarito: Dinner and meal time and these dinner objects are so interesting because they are so ritualized, and they're symbolic, and they mean a lot to us, so having a bare table when you could afford to have cloth would have just not made any sense to them. It would have been behavior like a peasant.Suzy Chase: Tell us about Charlemagne's tablecloth party trick.Amy Azzarito: Charlemagne, just to remind everybody, he was the first emperor to rule over western Europe. We're talking about the year 755. He had tablecloths woven with asbestos and would throw it in the fire after a dinner, and the crumbs would burn off, but the tablecloth would remain intact.Suzy Chase: Oh, my God.Amy Azzarito: There are stories of Romans doing this, and so it's like there are... Is it true or not? Asbestos is apparently fireproof, and so the Greeks and Romans would use it as shrouds, and so it was used as a material, a cloth. They also knew that people who had the job of weaving it seemed to get really ill and die, but they kept using it.Suzy Chase: Yeah. Hello, lung cancer.Amy Azzarito: I know, right?Suzy Chase: But we don't care.Amy Azzarito: It was not a great time to be a human, quite possibly, because even if you're wealthy, you don't have air conditioning, you don't have electricity. Then, if you're not, you're a slave or you’re a peasant. Life was about survival.Suzy Chase: When I think about the punch bowl, I think about a cold beverage, but in the book you wrote, "The first versions of punch were always served hot." Can you talk a little bit about that?Amy Azzarito: When I think of punch, I think of something cold with sherbet in the middle, but yeah, the first punch comes from India, and it was served hot. You want to think about a mulled wine sort of thing. It was made to be drunk communally, but it was usually made with a liquor that needed a lot of spice and sugar to be palatable. It's initially drunk by sailors, but it just becomes the thing to drink in Britain in the 17th century because it's just cold, and so warming from the inside, and then getting a little tipsy or more and forgetting about your troubles was the thing to do.Suzy Chase: We just talked about a bunch of food-related objects, but there are many more types of objects in this book. Do you have a favorite?Amy Azzarito: I write about the mattress and about Henry VIII would have his attendant stab the mattress through every night to make sure there wasn't an assassin lying in there. We talk about the sofa and the chandelier and the jewelry box and the pillow. I don't know that I could pick a favorite, Suzy.Suzy Chase: Now to my segment, putting you on the spot again, called My Favorite Cookbook. What is your all-time favorite cookbook and why?Amy Azzarito: I am a digital subscriber of The New York Times and subscriber of the cooking section also. They had the amazing Melissa Clark, who's been a guest on your podcast.Suzy Chase: Yes.Amy Azzarito: She has a recipe I used to use years ago, how to make maraschino cherries. I learned how to do that via her column. I just have love for our papers right now. It's a hard time for them. I might have to just pick the paper. I know.Suzy Chase: That's fine.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?Amy Azzarito: I am everywhere. Amy Azzarito, my first and last name, A-M-Y, A-Z-Z-A-R-I-T-O on Instagram. That's where I am most often.Suzy Chase: Well, thanks, Amy-Amy Azzarito: Thank you.Suzy Chase: ... for coming on Cookery by the Book Podcast.Amy Azzarito: Thank you.Outro: Subscribe over on cookerybythebook.com, and thanks for listening to the number-one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

What’s Gaby Cooking: Eat What You WantBy Gaby Dalkin Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York city, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.Gaby Dalkin: Hi guys, it's Gaby Dalkin from What's Gaby Cooking. And my new cookbook is called, Eat What You Want.Suzy Chase: For more Cookery by the Book, you can follow me on Instagram. If you liked this podcast, please be sure to share it with a friend. I'm always looking for new people to enjoy Cookery by the Book. Now on with the quarantine question round, number one, where are you living?Gaby Dalkin: Los Angeles.Suzy Chase: What restaurant are you dreaming of going to after the quarantine?Gaby Dalkin: My favorite is this like hole in the wall restaurant on the West side of town called Don Antonio's, where they have burritos, the size of an infant. And I cannot wait to go back.Suzy Chase: What kind of a burrito are you going to get?Gaby Dalkin: It's like a carne asada super burrito. So there's carne asada, lettuce, beans, cheese, guacamole, smothered in a wet sauce with more cheese on top.Suzy Chase: Oh my God. That sounds amazing.Gaby Dalkin: I haven't been thinking about that for the last 60 days at all.Suzy Chase: No, no, no. At home what dish is getting you through this?Gaby Dalkin: Oh, I have had a constant IV of hummus into my body the last two months.Suzy Chase: So, now let's talk about your cookbook. On your YouTube channel called What's Gaby Cooking, in the description you wrote, "2019 was one for the books. Can't wait to see what 2020 has in store." Now at this point, how are you feeling about 2020?Gaby Dalkin: So, I would like my money back. I think 2020 is going to be a wash in terms of doing anything as groups or going on a book tour or anything like that. We're all going to have a very new normal by the end of this year and that's okay. That's what we got to do. We got to stay together and do... Like everyone's got to be in this as a team, but I don't think 2020 is going to have a lot in store in terms of video content for making a really epic year end review video.Suzy Chase: I hope you're wrong.Gaby Dalkin: I know, I hope I'm wrong too.Suzy Chase: So you were the pickiest eater until you were 18 and now your latest cookbook is called Eat What You Want, how did you go from then to now?Gaby Dalkin: Yeah, so I didn't have seafood, I didn't have steak, I had very limited vegetables growing up. My mom's a picky eater, so I was also a picky eater. In college I was definitely still picky, but I learned to have steak because my friends were all ordering it at restaurants and stuff like that. So I tried a couple of new things, but it really wasn't until I got to culinary school in 2009, 2010, and my teacher... And I went to culinary school with no intention of actually staying in the food world. It was just a way of me to learn how to cook for myself and my boyfriend who's now my husband and my friends, like I just wanted to be a sufficient cook. And she, my teacher looked at me and she was like, "Gaby, if you don't learn how to like this, this and this, you're never going to make it in the food world." And I was like, "Oh, I accept your personal challenge and thank you." And then I really opened up my eyes to all the incredible food that's available to us and broadened my horizons.Suzy Chase: Lately people have been asking you, what are you eating in real life? What does that even mean?Gaby Dalkin: So I think a lot of people think the food I post on Instagram, it's beautiful, it's styled, it's photographed professionally. I think they think that's for show, but in actuality, it's exactly what I eat in real life. Granted, when I make pizza, it's not always that beautiful in my kitchen because I'm not actively trying to food style it before my husband and I demolish it.Gaby Dalkin: But that's why I wanted to write this book, Eat What You Want, because I wanted people to understand that all the food that I'm putting up on my Instagram and Twitter and Facebook and Pinterest, that's exactly what we eat. We're not hiding anything, I'm not doing anything else that you don't get to see, it's just real life. And it's all about eating a balanced diet and you're not depriving yourself of any kind of food.Suzy Chase: Gaby's famous guacamole on page 257 is such an interesting recipe. Now, what do you love in your guac and what do you hate?Gaby Dalkin: So my guacamole has lemon and lime juice and chives rather than cilantro. So I love that it's got both the lemon and lime, so like extra acid, it's super flavorful, and really cuts through the creaminess of the avocado. One of my dear friends hates cilantro. She has that gene where it tastes like soap. And so a long time ago, I made this switch to chives rather than cilantro. And honestly, I just think it's better. And other than that, I think it's a pretty traditional guac.Gaby Dalkin: I don't believe in putting tomatoes in guacamole, because unless you find really incredibly flavorful tomatoes at the peak of the season, I think it's worthless. And anything else you can put in guacamole, I mean, I'm down for it, but like a regular guac that you can use on everything this is like my tried and true recipe.Suzy Chase: You're the first person I've ever talked to who puts chives in their guac.Gaby Dalkin: Yeah. I know because some people hate cilantro and we've got to make sure everybody's happy.Suzy Chase: Yes. I'm going to totally try it this weekend.Gaby Dalkin: It's really fresh. They have like a really nice... It's just something unexpected and very subtle, but delicious.Suzy Chase: My avocados are too hard. I need to give them some time.Gaby Dalkin: Yeah. Put them in a brown paper bag with an apple or a banana they'll ripen faster.Suzy Chase: This cookbook and how you live is all about balance. On the weekends you like to recharge and let the week go with maybe some rose and a cheeseboard. You have upped the cheeseboard game on page 40 with a burrata platter that will blow people's minds. Can you describe this?Gaby Dalkin: I love peas. Like, I don't think they get enough love all throughout the entire year. We just kind of beat them in the spring and then forget about them. But frozen peas, especially during quarantine are so incredible. They can really make or break a meal. We've been putting so many pea recipes on my website, but this recipe is basically smashed peas with some snap peas and the lemon pecorino dressing with a big giant ball of burrata on top and some prosciutto. And it is so delicious.Gaby Dalkin: And you could say, like in the book, it's served with crostini, but you could also serve it next to some chicken or some steak and smash it all together for the most incredible bite of your life. My go-to appetizer, I make it for almost every party, I love it.Suzy Chase: And it's so pretty too.Gaby Dalkin: Thank you. Yeah. I mean, we eat with our eyes first, so I always am aware of what things look like. I think about that when I'm developing recipes for the book and the blog, I want it to be beautiful and I want it to be colorful and textured and all that kind of stuff. So that always plays into my recipe concepting.Suzy Chase: Tell me about surprise vacation and how that got you into traveling.Gaby Dalkin: Yeah. So my family we've been traveling. That's what we do. Like my parents always said, we're not going to spend money on fancy cars or this or that, but like, we do want to take you and travel so you can see the world and experience cultures and meet people you wouldn't normally meet and try new things.Gaby Dalkin: So, it has always been really important to us. Surprise vacation started when I think I was eight and my sister was five. We both have summer birthdays and one of us would always cry at our birthday parties. So my mom was like, forget this, no more birthday parties. We're going to start taking you guys on a surprise vacation every year, and you'll get clues leading up to where we're going, that you can try and guess.Gaby Dalkin: So it was fun for them because they got to not throw us birthday parties anymore and fun and educational for us because they would give us all these clues that we would have to think about and look up in encyclopedias, because that was before Google existed, all that kind of stuff.Gaby Dalkin: So, that started 20 plus years ago. I don't even remember, math is very hard. So, we've been going strong. We've gone every year since I was eight. And now my husband comes and our surprise vacation just got canceled for 2020 because it was in July and apparently the property who we're going to aren't even opening this year. But it's one of the most special things my family and I do together every year. We love traveling and experiencing cultures and it's really fun to be able to do that with your parents.Suzy Chase: I feel like your recipes are a reflection of your travels, is that right?Gaby Dalkin: I'm so inspired by other cultures and what people are cooking and then bringing those ideas back and putting my California girl's spin on it. I think is a really cool way for me to let my audience experience those other cultures without having to get on a plane, which is so important now more than ever, because none of us are getting on planes. So it's really cool to be able to travel the world and pay respects to all the different cultures via our own kitchens.Suzy Chase: Okay. When you're able to travel again, where do you think you're going to go first?Gaby Dalkin: I want to go to Rwanda and Uganda and go see the mountain gorillas, been on my bucket list for years. And we did Safari in South Africa and Botswana a couple of years ago, and it was the most life changing trip of my life. And now I need to go do the same thing with the mountain gorillas.Suzy Chase: Did you see Nature a couple of weeks ago? They had those gorillas on Nature that show on PBS.Gaby Dalkin: No, I didn't, I missed it.Suzy Chase: You have to see it.Gaby Dalkin: Okay. I'll go back and see if I can find it on demand. The mountain gorillas are some of the most special creatures in the entire world. And if I have to track eight hours to go see one and just sit in its presence for two minutes, nothing would make me happier.Suzy Chase: There's nothing I love more than a simple salad. And your little gem salad is just that. Four heads of little gem lettuce, two avocados, chives, there's the chives again, and lemon vinaigrette, that's it, perfectly simple.Gaby Dalkin: It's one of those recipes that you could serve with any main course or carb or whatever it is, and it's going to work. There's nothing, there's no flavor profile it wouldn't work with.Suzy Chase: It took me so long to get over being afraid of the kitchen. You've said your mission in life is to help people and their fear of recipes and cooking in the kitchen. What is your message for an intimidated home cook, especially now in the quarantine and we're all home cooks.Gaby Dalkin: Yeah, I think it's really important to figure out where you want to start, like pick one really easy dish and master it. And then once you feel really comfortable with that, and you could do it without looking at a recipe or where you feel comfortable with the cooking techniques, then pick something else and it's slowly expand your repertoire that way. It's like a stepladder, like you're just taking little steps here and there and getting comfortable with your skills and different flavor profiles and expanding from there. I think that's really important.Gaby Dalkin: I am incredibly comfortable in the kitchen now and perform well under pressure, but that's not where I started. And it was really scary to me. So in college, I only cooked chicken parmigiana, literally in pasta. That's all I made for my tennis team, for my husband's team, like all of that.Gaby Dalkin: And I just got super comfortable with it. And after I knew I could nail a chicken parm, that's when I started branching out and doing other things. And I've since obviously grown from that, but I thought it was really important to have something that I'm like, this is my recipe, and I can totally do it for however many people are coming over. That gave me a lot of confidence back in the day.Suzy Chase: The first family you ever cooked for as a private chef was obsessed with the Miso Cod at Nobu. This is going to be one of the first things I get when restaurants reopen here in New York city. Tell us about your version of this recipe.Gaby Dalkin: So, the Miso Cod is incredible. And I remember the first time I ever made this, it was like the ugliest saddest looking fish I've ever seen in my entire life. It was just like limp and not crispy and black and on top, it was so sad. I have since changed how I cook it.Gaby Dalkin: But the Miso Cod at Nobu takes three days to marinate and that's a lot of time, so this I have hit on the same flavors, but you don't have to let it sit in the refrigerator. You can for three days, but you just need to do it for three hours. And then it's really just about that delicious rice on there with some seasoned bok choy and getting that golden crispy crust on the fish is, I mean, it's a recipe for success.Suzy Chase: Oh, that golden crispy crust. Oh my gosh.Gaby Dalkin: It's so good. And then broiling it on top is like, you'll read that in the recipe for the people listening. But when you broil something on top, you get that high hit of heat that crisps everything up and looks like it's about to burn, but it's not going to burn. And cod is a very forgiving fish, so it's not going to overcook it either. I love that recipe so much.Suzy Chase: Your dad has recently taken up bread baking. Has he been a bread baking machine during the quarantine?Gaby Dalkin: My mother is like, "You need to stop going through all of her flour." Like, what are you doing? Yeah. Papa Dalkin is crushing the bread game. He's making regular bread, sourdough bread. He's making sourdough pancakes, he's baking cookies and muffins. He's a doctor. Like he goes into the hospital, he operates still, even during quarantine, but I think baking is his way of decompressing. My mother and my sister who lives right next to them, they're quarantined together. They have no shortage of baked goods right now.Suzy Chase: I love it. So this week I made your Black Bean Soup on page 92 and the Double Chocolate Chip Muffins on page 18. Can you talk to us about these recipes?Gaby Dalkin: So, let's start with the muffins because I think that's probably going to end up being the most popular recipe in the book, just based on what I've been seeing everyone post on Instagram. These muffins are inspired by, did you ever have the double chocolate muffins from Costco back in the day? Like they came as a 12 pack and they were the size... Oh my gosh.Gaby Dalkin: Okay. So they're roughly the size of your face when you're a child and my mom, who is incredibly healthy, like basically an Olympic swimmer would let us, me and my sister, split one every morning for breakfast and it was so delicious. And we would savor every bite and the melted choc... Oh my God, it was so good. I've been trying for years to perfect the recipe.Gaby Dalkin: So, finally we did, and I thought it was worthy of going in the cookbook. They're incredibly moist, they're stuffed with chocolate. They're great for breakfast or dessert or a snack, really good with coffee, I'm obsessed.Gaby Dalkin: As far as the Black Bean Soup goes, my mom used to make a version of this when we were kids. And it's just a really simple Black Bean Soup with a mirepoix. It starts with onions, carrots and celery, garlic and then it has a little bit of spice from the cumin and chipotle, black beans, just canned, nothing crazy and some limes and it is so comforting. You can put avocado on top or cheese or sour cream, cilantro, chives, whatever you want. It's really a great pantry staple, comforting soup recipe.Suzy Chase: So good and I made it for Cinco de Mayo. My husband and son were so happy. And last night we had baked potatoes and I put it on the top of the baked potatoes.Gaby Dalkin: Ooh, I love that idea.Suzy Chase: I'm cooking in quarantine here.Gaby Dalkin: I love it.Suzy Chase: My grocery store is out of chocolate chips. So this weekend I'm going to make Mat's Shortcut Mole Nachos. I cannot wait.Gaby Dalkin: They are really good. I mean, making Mole traditionally in the past has been like a multiple day process. We went to a restaurant in Mexico City, they served us like 746 day mole and I'm like, that is aggressive. Nobody has that much time. And this version is equally as delicious and still packed with flavor, but doesn't take 762 days. So it's really good. That also, if you have leftover mole sauce would be great on a baked potato.Suzy Chase: Now to my segment called my favorite cookbook. What is your all time favorite cookbook and why?Gaby Dalkin: I'm obsessed with Joshua McFadden's Six Seasons cookbook, that is really incredible. And then there's another cookbook called Istanbul and beyond by Robyn Eckhardt, which is another fantastic book.Suzy Chase: Yes. I had her on my podcast.Gaby Dalkin: Yeah. I love her. I love her style of cooking and the photos in that book are beautiful. And I went to Turkey as a child, but I was a picky eater. So I didn't get to experience really any of the food because I just ordered French fries, every meal.Gaby Dalkin: So cooking my way through Istanbul and Beyond, I feel like I'm making up for some lost time. And then Joshua McFadden's Six Seasons is basically a Bible for vegetables. It's pretty phenomenal.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web, social media and YouTube?Gaby Dalkin: So my website, WhatsGabyCooking.com, and so is my YouTube. Instagram is What's Gaby Cookin, no G at the end, because it was back in the day when Instagram used to cut people off for having too long a username. Yeah. What's Gaby Cooking on all the things.Suzy Chase: So you wrote in the book when it comes to maintaining balance in my life, a crucial part of that is letting go and letting loose. Thank you so much Gaby for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.Gaby Dalkin: Thank you so much for having me. This was so fun.Outro: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com. And thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

The Tinned Fish Cookbook: Easy-to-Make Meals from Ocean to Plate - Sustainably Canned, 100% DeliciousBy Bart van Olphen Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.Bart van Olphen: My name is Bart van Olphen and my latest cookbook is the Tinned Fish Cookbook.Suzy Chase: For more Cookery by the Book you can follow me on Instagram. If you enjoy this podcast, please be sure to share it with a friend. I'm always looking for new people to enjoy Cookery by the Book. Now on with the quarantine question round. Where are you living?Bart van Olphen: I live in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands.Suzy Chase: What restaurant are you dreaming of going to after the quarantine?Bart van Olphen: Well, I have one very favorite restaurant here in Amsterdam, which is called Caron, Café Caron. It's French cuisine, bistro. Traditional but really, really good.Suzy Chase: When do you think they'll be opening up?Bart van Olphen: Well, they're speaking of opening terraces from the 1st of June. So yeah, in a couple of weeks from now. Opening the whole restaurant, this is another thing. Not sure yet.Suzy Chase: Oh, June's not far off though. You're so lucky.Bart van Olphen: No, no, it's true. It's like three weeks now. Yeah, three... It's now the 6th of May. Yeah, it's something what they think they will announce tonight on the evening news. So yeah, exciting. Not just for me to eat food, but I mean, all those entrepreneurs, all these small restaurants and bars they need to right? They will be bankrupt, if not. So we need to support them. Yes.Suzy Chase: What dish is getting you through this time?Bart van Olphen: Well, the positive part of this era, of these weeks is that you certainly have a lot of time to cook and to do groceries. So yeah, I cook a lot with my kids and one of the things, and it sounds a bit like maybe posh or luxurious, but they just opened up lobster season here in the Netherlands. So we had classic lobster hollandaise yesterday with fresh asparagus, which are in season right now, too. So yeah, it's not the thing I eat every day, but it was fun and it was really good.Suzy Chase: So let's talk about your cookbook. After years in the restaurant business in France and the Netherlands, you learned that every fish had a story, and traveled the world to live, to cook, and to fish together with the most amazing sustainable fishing communities. In 2008, you were named the world's most sustainable seafood entrepreneur. Can we first talk about taking care of the oceans?Bart van Olphen: Actually, how I became aware I was in, I think it was 2002, maybe a year later when I opened my fishmongers in Amsterdam. And actually I opened a fishmongers because I worked in Paris and I saw so many different species and they're all lovely, and they has amazing stories when the fish supply came in. So I thought, okay, I bring these stories, I bring these fish into Amsterdam, open my fish counter, my fishmongers, and then someone of the WWF came in and told me, "Are you aware of the fact that like 80% of our oceans are over-fished?" And that sounded really un-logical to me. My impression always was like all these small, beautiful fishing boats entering the ports in Spain, and you ate like next to it on a terrace, a fresh piece of fish, but that's not the case. And from that moment also what I realized is that seafood is the only food we still massively consume out of wild. It's the nature what gives us this delicious fish. So we need to listen to our oceans. And that was actually the moment that I started to travel and to search for these sustainable fishing people, these communities. Yeah, so we need to be aware. Over 80% of our oceans are over-fished or fished to the limit. We only can consume out of 20% of them currently. So yeah, that's a sad story.Suzy Chase: What was your favorite fishing community that you visited?Bart van Olphen: What I found the most fascinating ones are often the ones in developing countries. They need to fish to live, right? It's not that commercially driven in the way we do it here, for example, in the US or here in Europe, where we trade fish. There people need to fish for living. So I've got two amazing ones. One's I can mention. One is the Maldives. It's the only country in the world where they only fish for tuna by pole and line. Small atolls, which are islands in the middle of the Indian ocean. And they go out fishing on a dhoni, which is the typical traditional local name for a tuna boat. And they catch the tuna one by one. It's amazing. Another one is in your country in Alaska, at the Yukon river. It's a really remote fishing community Unalakleet the Yupik community. And they catch the most delicious salmon of the world. But if you're there, you end up in a community of like 900, 1000 people, and it's all about fishing and they live by subsistence for the rest of the year. So it brings you back with two feet on the ground. This is how we would say it in Dutch. Fishing for living, for eating, but we should not over-fish because if we over-fish, we won't have any fish left by tomorrow.Suzy Chase: Where these recipes and the cookbook inspired by dishes you ate in fishing communities?Bart van Olphen: Absolutely, some of them. Well, the great thing about cooking tinned seafood is it's... we're not suddenly cooking different species, right? So we're cooking tuna, we're cooking salmon, we cooked sardines and anchovies. It's the similar fish then when I cooked it in my three star Michelin restaurant in Paris. The difference is that the fish is already cooked for you. So cooking tinned fish is more a mindset change, then suddenly cook a totally different thing. So what I wanted to say is that what I cook in the Michelin starred restaurants, you can translate it into a dish made of tinned seafood. When you travel, often people ask me, "What is your favorite fish dish?" I cannot tell you the right answer because every time when you travel somewhere else, it's the surroundings, it's the way how they cook. How we interact gives the dish so much more value, so much more flavor, maybe more from a romantic point of view, then the ingredients. One example, mas huni. So I just explained you about the Maldives. Maldivians are the most heavy seafood consumers in the world. They eat like 150 kilograms per year, which is a lot. If you go there and you're on the local Island, you'll have lunch... breakfast, dinner it's all fish, fish, fish, but it's also all tuna, tuna, tuna. And then the national dish is called mas huni, which means fish and coconut. And actually what they do, they squeeze a red onion and chili and curry leaves together with some lime juice and salt, they really massage it and squeeze it. And then they add fresh coconut, grated coconut, and tuna, grated tuna. It's like tuna in a tin. And it's fantastic. It's fantastic. So this is typically a local dish, but you also will find other dishes like the classic tuna melts or stuffed paprika. So when I travel, I take the recipes back home. It's amazing what you can learn from local communities.Suzy Chase: Okay. You just mentioned your Michelin star restaurant. And I read something, tell me if this is true, when you were a young child it was your dream to work at a Michelin three starred restaurant.Bart van Olphen: I was collecting Michelin guides already when I was six. So I've got 60 different guides. The first one I've got is 1908. And there was a chef called Roger Vergé and Moulin de Mougins, which is in the South of France. And he had this fence in front of his kitchen, and I asked my mom when I was eight years old, "Could you please drive to that fence?" And I was just standing there looking into the kitchen at a 20, 30 meter distance just to observe how these chefs we're working. So ever since it was my dream to work in gastronomy. And I loved it. I mean, but those were the years, Bocuse and Michel Guérard, and all of these big... Saint Laurent where I worked in Paris. So more the classic ones. It has changed. But it was a dream since I was six, seven years old. Yes, definitely.Suzy Chase: You know what my favorite thing is about tinned fish? You don't have to descale or get rid of the guts or clean them.Bart van Olphen: Cooking tinned seafood is a really easy, fun thing to do. Affordable. But one of the things is that you start at the point that the fish is already cooked for you. So when you open this tin, you see maybe a bit of pale non-colored piece of fish, texture is soft. But having these two things in mind, you can create this amazing fish dish without gutting or filleting. You would just add like a bit of structure, like a bit of lettuce, some colors, some acidity, and some sourness. And with a few steps, you can create something really, really well without actually cooking the fish itself. But also you can use the fish cooking, but always add it at the end of the recipe. That's something often when we cook fish, fresh fish, you would start with the fish to get it maybe with the veggies, and then end up with the whole dish. With tinned fish, don't think about cooking the fish. It's just adding the fish at the latest point. So when making a pasta puttanesca, for example, of course you give this flavor of the anchovies to the sauce, but at the very end, you only add the tuna. There's nothing more easy than cooking tinned fish.Suzy Chase: You wrote in the cookbook, "Walk into a random supermarket in Southern Europe, and you'll be amazed by the extensive selection of tinned fish products." Now, with the advent of COVID-19 and food shortages, do you think Americans will see more jarred or canned fish on the grocery store shelves?Bart van Olphen: I hope so. I hope so. I really compare the US to what the Netherlands was like four or five years ago when I started this challenge, actually. I often visited Southern European countries like Portugal and Spain and France. And it was amazing to see what kind of seafood in a tin they sold. It was the highest quality. Like if you buy a ventresca de atun, which is that the belly part, you need to ask a key at the cash desk to open this little box, to get this tin of 20, 30 euros, dollars, out of that box to take home with you. So it has a much more higher quality perception in these countries. Why? Because they know how to treat fish in a tin. So what happened in the Netherlands, but also in the US, is that the cheaper, the better. We always seen this product as a secondary product. You Americans, the number one seafood product sold in the country is a tin of tuna. Well, in most of the cases, to be honest, it's not a good product. So we need to appreciate better quality. We need to be ready to pay maybe a little bit more for it. Maybe a tin of $1.50 will be $1.60. First because we need to make a choice for a sustainable product, but secondly, also for the quality. And if you have a right quality product, you can make amazing fish dishes. But there is a way to go. And I think it can go quite quickly, but you need to be aware of the fact there is good quantity and bad quality. If you cook with a bad quality tin of sardines, you would never do it again. If you would cook with a fantastic tin of sardines, you would eat it every day.Suzy Chase: In the cookbook you cover tuna, salmon, anchovies, sardines, mackerel, herring, and then you have an interesting sort of extras chapter that includes cod liver. Can you tell us about cod liver?Bart van Olphen: If you would have asked me, what is your favorite fish out of a tin? I would say cod liver.Suzy Chase: Really?Bart van Olphen: It's fantastic. It's so oily. It's how you would, in the past, I'm not eating that anymore for animal welfare, but if you would eat foie gras, goose liver, you would treat it the same way. So you would add a bit of sweetness to balance that very oily flavor. It's fantastic. It's so flavorful and it's really nutritious. It's so healthy. I mean, forget your fish oil capsules. Just eat a tin of cod liver every week and you're done. It's fantastic. The structure is amazing. The flavor is amazing. It's different. Yeah, I don't know how to say, just give it a try. It's not in my cookbook, but one of the dishes I cook already for years is to serve it in a bit of reduced orange juice. And you serve it with some sesame oil, maybe some pink peppercorns, and that's it, on toast. It's fantastic. You really should give it a try. And the recipe I made in the book was with a miso and herring. I learned how to make a miso and cod liver paste from a fantastic Japanese chef and Shiogama, which is around two hours from Tokyo. And this gentlemen was 86 years old and he taught me how to do it. And that's the recipe in the book. It's fantastic.Suzy Chase: I'd love to go over a day's worth of tinned fish with you. So what would you suggest for breakfast and then lunch and dinner.Bart van Olphen: Okay. For breakfast, it's an omelet. So I made scrambled eggs and salmon on toast. And you have lovely salmon in the US. That's one other thing, Suzy, I need to make you aware of. Okay, 52% of the world's fish consumption is farmed, from farm sources. If you go to the shelf in a supermarket of tinned fish, 100% is wild. And you won't find it in the frozen category, or you won't find it in the fresh, but you will find it in the tin division. It's all wild and wild, in my opinion, tastes always better. And you have fantastic wild salmon. So that's the reason I serve you a breakfast of scrambled eggs and salmon on toast. And then I'll take you from there for lunch to the Maldives. I've explained it already to you, mas huni. Everyone should try mas huni. It's the new generation of tuna spreads, but no oil. So it's healthy and full of flavor. You taste the tuna. You taste this coconut. It's fantastic. And then when we go to dinner, how often do we make curries? A good thing about making curry is you slowly cook the fish in the curry. So the reason why it won't dry out... tin fish is a great substitute for fresh fish in a curry, for example, or I'll make you a pasta puttanesca. It's one of my favorites. It's obvious one, but to make a good pasta puttanesca is one of my very, very favorites too. Because every ingredient almost in this dish, is out of your pantry. So you have your canned tomatoes, you have your canned tuna, you have your canned anchovies, you have your capers in a jar, you have your dried pasta. So one can survive with a pasta puttanesca.Suzy Chase: Yesterday I made your recipe for sardine hummus on page 92. Can you describe this recipe?Bart van Olphen: Well, easy. It's creating like a hummus. Of course with chickpeas, and you add the tahini, and the clove, and the lemon, parsley, a bit of spiciness, maybe some chili flakes, Tabasco if you like, and then you add the fish because in this case, these oiled sardines, they already give so much taste. So you just have these on top and you eat it together. So it's like a classic, maybe a bit my way of hummus with sardines on top.Suzy Chase: So now for my segment called My Favorite Cookbook. What is your all time favorite cookbook and why?Bart van Olphen: Well, my very favorite, but it's more from a designer's perspective, is the book of Salvador Dali, Les diners de Gala. And he always wants to be a chef, but he didn't succeed to enter the cookery school. So then he became an artist, or maybe he was already at that time, of course you're born as an artist in my opinion. But then his dream was still to make a cookbook. So in 1972, he made a cookbook for his wife, for Gala, and it's called Les diners de Gala. And it's amazing. It's over the top. It's over the top. If you see the images, it's '70s, but in the '70s already over the top. So that's from a designer's perspective. Well, how it looks like, it's a coffee table, I can dream with that book. But I won't choose a recipe out of it. Julia Child, especially also in your country, made people happy to cook and let people realize that cooking is not difficult at all. And it's fun to do. So I think from a mental point of view, she made people really happy and it opened many doors I think, to how we would eat today. She was a revolution, I think. Yeah, and if I look at YouTube and I see her on television in black and white, even in black and white, the dishes are amazing. Yeah, it's fantastic.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on web and social media?Bart van Olphen: Well, you can find me... I've got a YouTube channel, which is called Bart's Fish Tales. Here I travel, you see a lot of my travels, cooking together with the local communities. Obviously these months, it's not happening. And I cook in my studio in Amsterdam. And the objective is to show people that cooking fish is not difficult at all. In only a few steps, you can create an amazing fish dish. And a similar thing I do in Instagram for anything is five years ago, I started on Instagram with the shortest cooking show on earth, was a 15 seconds cooking show, when Instagram still had the limit of 15 seconds in video. Now it has one minute. And on my Instagram also on Bart's Fish Tales, I share my stories and my recipes, and all you need to know about seafood, sustainable seafood.Suzy Chase: Well, thanks Bart for coming on Cookery by the Book Podcast.Bart van Olphen: A pleasure. Thank you for having me.Outro: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com. And thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

The Women’s Heritage Sourcebook: Bringing Homesteading to Everyday LifeBy Ashley Moore, Lauren Malloy, and Emma Rollin Moore Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.Emma Rollin Moore: Hello, everyone. My name is Emma Rollin Moore, and I am the author of The Women's Heritage Sourcebook and my two coauthors are Lauren Malloy and Ashley Moore.Suzy Chase: For more Cookery by the Book and to see what recipes I made out of this cookbook, head on over to Cookery by the Book on Instagram. Now, for my quarantine question round, where are you living?Emma Rollin Moore: I'm living in Santa Barbara, California.Suzy Chase: What restaurant are you dreaming of going to after the quarantine?Emma Rollin Moore: I hope this is okay, but I'm actually dreaming of a progressive where I go to get cocktails from this craft cocktail place called Shaker Mill, and then some yuca frites from a cuban restaurant, and then heading to Corazon Cocina in the projects for this like fresh farmer's market salad. See, I even know what I want. A farmer's market salad in an ahi tartare.Suzy Chase: So at home, what dish is getting you through this?Emma Rollin Moore: For us, what gets us through is we have a sourdough pizza night every Friday night, and that was a steady constant before the quarantine. So I really see how important that steady drumbeat of a rhythm is really helpful for our family, especially our kids. They look forward to diving in and helping me make sourdough and coming up with different topping ideas and things like that. So I'd really say that the sourdough pizza specifically is really getting us through.Suzy Chase: Now, on with the show. So given what's going on in the world right now, I think on some level women are feeling inspired to be more self-sufficient. I'm thinking a lot about local ingredients and home-cooked meals. How did the idea of women's heritage come to life, and how did you and your partners meet?Emma Rollin Moore: I absolutely agree with you. I think when entire food systems are shut down and we're asked to stay home, I think we naturally feel inspired to create, especially in the kitchen and in the garden. And for Lauren, Ashley, and myself, we came together creating Women's Heritage with the idea that we're just three momma friends and we actually took a trip with our families to the High Sierras in California a couple of winters back, and we actually caught ourselves in a snow storm. It's kind of funny. We were actually in lockdown then, and I had brought my sourdough bread for everyone to enjoy and Ashley was learning more and more about herbalism and brought some herbal tinctures and Lauren just has this deep knowledge of animal husbandry and so we just started chatting about how we wanted to learn from each other, how I wanted to learn more about the herbs that Ashley was growing and making tinctures from and Lauren wanted to learn more about how to make sourdough bread. Even though I grew up on a dairy farm, I had never kept chickens before so I actually was really interested in learning from Lauren about chicken-keeping. Really the idea of Women's Heritage was born then when we had this idea that when we get back, why don't we just put it out there to our friends and family members? If anyone's interested, let's put a class together, and so our first class was on sourdough bread baking. And I remember we came up with the name, I think in the High Sierras and put an Instagram flash website really quickly together. We put it out there to our friends on Instagram and I want to say an hour or two hours later, the class was sold out.Suzy Chase: Oh, wow.Emma Rollin Moore: And then our next class, we had Ashley do a herbal medicine basket, and Lauren also taught how to milk a cow and then I taught everyone how to make cheese from the cow milk. But along the way, we just started to realize the importance of our community and ourselves, how we were really yearning to connect back to our roots and learn and make and do things altogether with each other and separately too. But really, really the idea of learning from each other.Suzy Chase: Yeah, because what I took away from Women's Heritage is it's more about interdependence than independence.Emma Rollin Moore: Yes, absolutely. I think that's the heart of how I function and it's the heart of how Ashley, Lauren and myself and at the heart of Women's Heritage. It's really about the idea in this fast paced world, I think that sometimes we're told that we can do it all, and I don't think it's about doing it all. It's thinking about, "What are you passionate about? What do you want to bring yourself, your family? How can you connect back to your roots in those ways?" And then also how liberating to know that you don't have to do it all? So maybe you learn how to can, but you say, "Oh God, I don't ever want to can." So then you find a friend who will can for you, or you decide you make it fun and do a canning together. Like you have an apricot tree that's going gangbusters and you decide that you're going to make apricot jam together. I think the idea is learning and creating and making with each other. And then also if you don't have those tools nor do you want to, that you're more informed about making more sustainable choices for yourself and your family. So for example, if growing all your food which that seems daunting for even me, I can't possibly grow all my own food for our family. That would be something that would be overwhelming. So I have a nice little garden, but I also believe in supporting our farmer's market, joining a CSA and just knowing where food comes from.Suzy Chase: What does the term homestead mean to you and to Women's Heritage?Emma Rollin Moore: That's a really good question. I think that for someone who grew up on a dairy farm, which I did, but now lives in the city, I think that homesteading for myself, but also what is also at the heart of Women's Heritage means making things from scratch, growing what you can, finding it fresh from the farmer's market, or joining a CSA. And then also knowing where you can get what you need from others around you, who are also makers and doers. I think that is at the essence of who we are, but it's also at the essence of how I also function too.Suzy Chase: So part of your approach to cooking includes fermentation.Emma Rollin Moore: Yes.Suzy Chase: What are your favorite foods to ferment, and what are the health benefits?Emma Rollin Moore: So, I would say my favorite foods to ferment is definitely kimchi. I love the flavor punch and profile of it. I absolutely love to ferment sourdough bread. There's something so special about taking out a fresh loaf of bread from the oven and enjoying it. And then I've recently gotten into making my own tempeh, and that was something that I was really intimidated by, but there is nothing more enjoyable and taste worthy than making your own tempeh. So right now those are my favorite go-to's. Kefir, the sourdough bread, the Tempe and then I would also say just a really nice kombucha is also really nice when it's in the warmer months and you're wanting something effervescent. And then when it comes to health benefits, I think that the benefits on our gut are so incredible. So we're actually pre-digesting the food. This is a great example for this is sourdough bread. It also can be a detoxifier. For example, oxalic acid and fatty acid can get broken down with fermentation. That's a definite reason why we might soak or sprout grains. There's a nutrient enhancement that happens. So fermentation can add nutrients. Almost all ferments have elevated B vitamins. And I think one of the most profound benefits of fermentation is really the live bacteria themselves. So not every ferment has living bacteria. For example, bread, beer and wine. This is filtered out, chocolate, coffee, canned sauerkraut. But when we eat fermented foods that haven't been heated or processed after fermentation, you're ingesting that healthy bacteria and people buy pills for this at the store.Suzy Chase: You've made all these daunting recipes sound so easy like your homemade ricotta.Emma Rollin Moore: Thank you. Yeah.Suzy Chase: It's just four ingredients. Can you walk us through this recipe?Emma Rollin Moore: Yeah. And I have to say, that's why I am so passionate about the book and the recipes is that I really think it's doable for everyone. And so, I think if you're interested in diving into homesteading make this homemade ricotta because it is so good. And all you're doing is adding three and a half cups of whole milk, a half a cup of heavy cream, and just a half a teaspoon of sea salt. You're just putting all of that in a little sauce pan, heating the milk to 165 degrees, and then you're removing it from the heat and then you add the lemon juice. You stir it once or twice, you let the pot sit undisturbed. Then you line a colander with a few layers of cheese cloth, and then you can eat that yummy cheese that forms because you're just catching those curds really and letting the whey release, and you can eat it right away or you can refrigerate it. It is easier obviously to just go buy that at the store, but it definitely is rewarding.Suzy Chase: So, what's a shrub?Emma Rollin Moore: Oh yeah. That's a really good question. It's a drinking ... Yeah. I get this all the time. People are like, "What is a shrub? Is it something you grow?" But a shrub is a drinking vinegar and it actually includes vinegar, fruits, and sugar. And once the drinking vinegar then is made, and then you can add Bali water, or you can add a bit of alcohol or some bitters to spice it up. It's really one of our first forms of soda. If you wanted to make a shrub, you would really have equal part that vinegar, fruit and sugar.Suzy Chase: Something changes in my brain when I'm in nature whether it be swimming in the ocean, which I really miss right now or touching the bark of the tree in the woods. Talk a bit about slowing down and being present in nature.Emma Rollin Moore: I just think it's good for the soul. It's good for the mind. It's good for the body. It's good for the spirit. Even if you live in the city where you just have a porch, but you're putting your hands in the soil and growing some tomatoes in pots this summer. But there is something even more so about getting outside in nature. And there's definite research and doctors are prescribing forest bathing now. And I really think that's also at the heart of the Women's Heritage Sourcebook, it's just that idea of how nature and getting out and experiencing nature in those ways I think can be really nourishing for our soul. And that we actually really do yearn for that when it's taken away. I think like anything it's about a balance. When we have a lot of technology, I think a really great counterbalance is this idea that we can get outside, even if we're not making and doing but we're just looking from a foraging standpoint to just go on a hike and be able to know what is growing and just breathe and breathe in the air.Suzy Chase: Your hens give you plenty of eggs. I found we've been eating so many eggs during the quarantine. And the other day..Emma Rollin Moore: Yes, we have too.Suzy Chase: It's crazy.Emma Rollin Moore: Yeah.Suzy Chase: So the other day I made your recipe for Mini Herb And Cheese Frittatas on page 189. Can you describe this recipe?Emma Rollin Moore: So, I love this recipe because it's one of those things where it's also something that kids can easily do this at any age. You could decide that you're going to not have the kids crack the eggs, or you can. Once you've whisked the eggs with the milk and the cheese and the herbs and any add on's, just eight to 10 minutes at 350 degrees Fahrenheit, and you have a really lovely egg dish. I'm a really big advocate of eggs and breakfast for dinner. That's savory. It's great to have these on hand, even as snacks.Suzy Chase: Now, for my segment called My Favorite Cookbook. What is your all time favorite cookbook and why?Emma Rollin Moore: This probably gets said a lot, but for me, Alice Waters, The Art of Simple Food. I remember getting that book early on and it's just so much about slow food and knowing where food comes from and cooking fresh seasonal honest ingredients. And it's just inspired me in my life and how I've chosen to cook and raise my family and inspire other people to also cook and to shop at farmer's markets and know where food come from.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media and your store?Emma Rollin Moore: Find us at Women's Heritage on Instagram and it's @Womens_Heritage. And then you can also find our store at Heritage Goods And Supply on Instagram as well. And I would just say that our store really was a product of us teaching classes and having other people teach classes and there's definitely a desire for people that wanted to know where they could get their bread cooking baskets and their herbal supplies.Suzy Chase: So this cookbook shows us how to achieve comfort through self-reliance. Thanks so much, Emma, for coming on Cookery By The Book podcast.Emma Rollin Moore: Thank you so much for having me, Suzy.Outro: Subscribe over on cookerybythebook.com. And thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery By The Book.

How to Dress an Egg: Suprising and Simple Ways to Cook DinnerBy Ned Baldwin & Peter Kaminsky Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.Ned Baldwin: I'm Ned Baldwin. My first cookbook is How to Dress an Egg.Suzy Chase: For more Cookery by the Book, and to see what recipes I made out of this cookbook, head on over to CookerybytheBook on Instagram. Now for my quarantine question round. On Instagram, you wrote on your Houseman Restaurant account, "We're closing today. No takeout, no delivery. Don't know for how long. Looks like residents are going to be cooped up for some days. I'll be in the restaurant through tomorrow, closing things down, dealing with perishables, et cetera. We plan to reopen in whatever form is appropriate as soon as we can. We'll miss you." So, that was on March 17th. How are things going for you now as a restaurant owner in the epicenter, in New York City?Ned Baldwin: Yeah. It makes me sad to hear that. Well, we're still closed. I'm still not doing takeout. Every day, several times a day, I do the thought experiment about what it would feel like to do takeout, and who it would benefit, and at what risk. I mean, I have to say I kind of love working under adverse circumstances. Probably if I didn't, I wouldn't work in restaurants at all. You know, there was a blizzard a couple years ago. We were the only restaurant in the neighborhood open. My wife was hosting. She doesn't know how to do that. My daughter was busing tables. The guy who owns a suit shop next door was mixing drinks. He does not know how to mix drinks. It was me and one other cook. And because we were the only restaurant open, and nobody wanted to go very far, we were crazy busy, and it was one of my favorite nights that we've had at the restaurant. It was super fun. I think we did 80 covers, me and another cook.Ned Baldwin: And I would love nothing more than to serve the community in that way under these circumstances, but these are not the same. My chef de cuisine has a child, and I have two. I think the best thing that I can do right now... As much as I'd love to be providing Houseman's roast chicken to the people, the best thing we can do is be closed, and go to the grocery store infrequently, and encourage our customers to do the same. And, you know. I'm spending my time talking about this cookbook, which I'm excited about, and I think is an appropriate tool for the time.Suzy Chase: What dish are you making at home that is getting you through this time?Ned Baldwin: That's a fun question. I think one of the funny consequences of sort of living the life that I've carved out for myself is I'm like a gastro thrill seeker. I want maximum spice and acid and crunch and creaminess, and a panoply of spices. I mean, I'm actually not bored during this time at all, but when it comes time to eat, I get excited about it. That's probably no different from any other day of the week. And my family are normal people when it comes to food, so for them, I cook a recipe from the book maybe twice or three times a week, and that's the roasted broccoli.Ned Baldwin: Everybody loves broccoli, and actually, that recipe is in the book because my family likes it so much. That's broccoli kind of cooked like it's meat. So, salted a little bit, broken up. I show a way to cut it nicely, that has these sort of sweeps out of the dock, in a hot pan and then in the oven, and it's done. That's just sort of fun. My kids love crunchy stuff, and they also love browned stuff, so the heads have a lot of caramelization, and the stalks still have a good amount of crunch in them. So, that's what I'm cooking for the family. I mean, that's not all, but that's a thing that everybody seems to like a lot.Ned Baldwin: And then for myself, I can't seem to get enough of curry flavors right now. Curry is a broad, loose, kind of flabby term that describes a whole bunch of different combinations of spices, depending on where you are and what you're doing. I've been doing it with chick peas, with pork, with chicken and lots of spices, and with fried leeks. I mean, the sky's the limit.Ned Baldwin: Actually, I discovered something super fun a couple of days ago. I was breaking down a hangar steak, and hangar steak has this sort of ribbon of super tough, chewy... Like you can't eat it the way it is when you cook a steak... gristle. And you know, I removed it, and I looked at it for a second and thought, "Wait a minute. I love tendon." You know, in Chinese restaurants? And I love pork skin, and all that kind of stuff. And this piece, it's that, so it just needs to be cooked differently. So I immediately put it in a pot with ginger and shallot and garlic and chile, and with some onions and a bunch of other stuff, and braised it for two or three hours. And, wow. What a revelation, and super fun. I guess that's kind of the sort of nonsense I'm getting up to.Suzy Chase: You are a gastro thrill seeker. I had no idea you were going to say that. That's so funny. Hey, I made your broccoli last night. It's life changing.Ned Baldwin: Cool.Suzy Chase: I'm never making broccoli any other way ever again.Ned Baldwin: I love hearing that.Suzy Chase: It's so good. So, on to the cookbook.Ned Baldwin: Mm-hmm (affirmative).Suzy Chase: I love that this cookbook is all about cooking simple things. At first glance I thought, "Oh, this is a restaurant cookbook," but it's really not. Can you talk a little bit about that?Ned Baldwin: Yeah, sure. So, I was 36 years old when I set foot as an employee in a restaurant environment first, and preceding that, I was both an impassioned home cook, and a great eater in New York City restaurants, and other cities' restaurants that I managed to get into. I just love eating, and I love cooking. And so, I was a home cook for more years than I even still have been a restaurant cook.Ned Baldwin: I ended up working in the industry and opening Houseman Restaurant five years ago, and so I've been a restaurant cook for maybe 10 years, and the way I kind of feel... You know. I do my best to be a great restaurant cook when I'm in the restaurant. But also, there's a part of me always that's like a home cook spy in the restaurant world, and sort of picking apart, "Oh, that thing, the way that we do that." And that would be totally useless at home. No home cook would ever do that. It's timely. It requires unusual equipment, and just not useful at home at all. And then, other things, a few here and there, I think, "Wow. God, I wish I had known that when I was only cooking at home." So, almost like a home cook spy in the restaurant world.Ned Baldwin: And the book, it isn't all stuff that I learned in the restaurants that I thought would be useful at home, but some of it is. The broccoli, for example, just was like, "I know my kids are going to like broccoli cooked like this." Like our roast chicken recipe, which I think is one of the more important chapters in the book, was born from cooking chicken in several different restaurants.Ned Baldwin: Restaurants are funny. You go in and you sit down, and there's certain windows of time that the kitchen has to produce food. Like, you want your entrée between 15 and 30 minutes from when you sit down in the restaurant, and if it's more than that, a customer starts to get kind of anxious. So, roasted chicken takes a long time, and so a lot of restaurants mitigate that by precooking or par cooking their chickens, which I think decreases its quality by 15 to 40%, right off the bat with that.Ned Baldwin: And so, I wanted to cook chicken from cold, like take it out of the fridge to done in 12 to 18 minutes. And just kind of goofed around with a bunch of different ways of doing it, and finally discovered that I could get certain size chickens and cook them from raw pretty efficiently. That translated to the home very well, and it also, like there was a big a-ha moment when I was... I think I was at Craft and I saw cooks doing this. That they used the floor of the oven. They lift the rack up to the higher shelf, and just put pans on the floor of the oven.Suzy Chase: What does that do? Does it bring more heat underneath the chicken?Ned Baldwin: Yeah. The way ovens are designed, there's almost all ovens, the heat comes from an element that's underneath the metal pan on the floor of the oven. And so, if you set the pan on the floor, that element is like a low temperature burner. So, it's sort of like having your pan on a low flame while also in the oven. And what that does, if you're cooking something wet... Like any kind of meat, chicken... the liquid that comes out of it while it's cooking that would otherwise inhibit the skin from crisping properly, like if it was on a shelf in the middle of the oven, it cooks that water off really fast. So, one of the things people love about our roasted chicken is the skin is like a cracker. Crispy. Really, really crispy, and nicely browned.Suzy Chase: So, speaking of your chicken, in 2015, Pete Wells wrote in The New York Times, "Houseman is a new restaurant where you can get, among other good things, an excellent roast chicken. 'Big whoop,' you say. 'I can get excellent roast chicken at a place in my neighborhood.' Well, no you can't," he wrote, "Unless you live across the street from Barbuto. But let's not argue." And then Pete even wrote, "In restaurants, I manage to get a chicken like this roughly once out of every 50 attempts." That is some high praise right there. After he wrote that, were people just coming in for your chicken all the time?Ned Baldwin: We sold a gazillion, gazillion roast chickens. Yeah. Yeah. It's impossible to work at Houseman, and not end up being a great chicken cook. And for what it's worth... And I kind of love that this is true... all my cooks, when they cook chicken at home, they do it the same way they do it in the restaurant. Because it works, and it translates at home.Suzy Chase: So, you know this to be true. If you can learn to cook one thing well, and make a recipe truly your own, you have opened the door to creating a lifetime's worth of recipes. What's the first thing you learned to cook well?Ned Baldwin: Oh. Fun question. Well, that's an opportunity to talk about my wife's father, my father in law, who is one of my best friends in the world, and who is just a spectacular cook. I think my love of home cooking... I probably would have been there anyway, but boy did it get a chance to emerge, in cooking and building a relationship with him. He cooks everything well. His name's Jay. We did moules, just like Belgians do mussels. One of my great loves in cooking and eating is finding a thing that I thought I didn't like, and just falling in love with it.Ned Baldwin: I actually quoted him at the beginning of the book, saying, "If you think you don't like something, you probably just haven't had it cooked properly." That's his perspective.Suzy Chase: True.Ned Baldwin: Which is great. What he's saying is it's a fundamental openness to all food on the planet. And I make those mussels all the time. And then, even more impactful was lobster bisque that he made, that just blew my doors off. So delicious and rich, and it was about squeezing flavor out of every step of the way. Breaking the lobster down, and crushing the shells and roasting them, and reducing and roasting and reducing, and flaming with cognac. I mean, it was great. Just great. And I've done some version of that recipe hundreds and hundreds of times now.Suzy Chase: So, the one thing I've been cooking more than anything else during quarantine has been eggs. We are going through eggs like they're going out of style. Would you share the story of the dressed egg?Ned Baldwin: Shortly after the restaurant opened, I was going to put a dish on the menu called oeuf mayonnaise, which is a boiled egg in some kind of delicious mayonnaise. I had gathered some ingredients, and was on my way down the stairs to where the food processor was to make the mayonnaise. I was just literally halfway down the stairs with an armload of stuff, and stopped and thought, "Why does this need to be mayonnaise?" Walked back upstairs, and made the following. I made something that we now call egg candy, which is almost like a slurry of capers and anchovies, chile, lemon zest, some fried herbs, and a lot of olive oil. And then we made some fried leeks and some fried parsley. That was the first one.Ned Baldwin: I put it on the menu. It was one of those lovely moments where it was like, "What are we going to call it?" "I don't know." "Oh, let's call it a dressed egg." And then it became one of our bestselling things, and one of the things that's consistently been in the restaurant since we opened. I sort of recognized a framework, like your seven and a half minute eggs are gorgeous. Jammy and delicious all by themselves or with a little bit of salt, but then if you dress them up... And you can dress them up a million ways.Suzy Chase: So, tell us about your co-author, Peter Kaminsky, and how he influenced you.Ned Baldwin: Well, Peter is a cookbook rockstar. He's written with a zillion chefs who are better than me. I honestly... You know, I just have to say, between Gerardo and Pete and Christopher Sheinlin and Melissa Hamilton, who photographed the book, and Rux Martin, who edited the book, and David Black, who's our agent... Every minute that I think about this team, I say the same thing. I don't know how the hell I got on this team. It's just an amazing crowd of people.Ned Baldwin: You know, it started with Pete. Pete came to the restaurant. He read Pete Wells' review. As he likes to say, he's not really a review chaser. He wrote the Underground Gourmet for New York Magazine. He was a food reviewer there for some years. I think he's sort of done with the next trendy restaurant, but he said he thought he found something in Pete Wells' review that made him excited about trying Houseman, and he came, and [inaudible 00:13:16]. Pete has a parallel life as a fishing writer, and I mentioned earlier, I'm totally obsessed with fishing. It's all I want to do if I'm not with my family or cooking.Ned Baldwin: And so, when I saw he was coming in, I had actually just read a book that he wrote, which is just lyrically beautiful, about fishing in Montauk in the fall. It's called The Moon Pulled Up an Acre of Bass. I had just read it for the second time about a month before, and so I... You know. Normally if I recognize somebody in the restaurant, if they're not a friend, I leave them alone. Meryl Streep or whatever. But Gabrielle Hamilton, that owns Prune, had a great line. She said, "You know, if they changed your life, tell them." So I did that, and we ended up chatting and finding that we got on well, and shared a sense of humor.Ned Baldwin: He came back a few more times, and I guess wasn't disappointed with the food. And then on December 17th of 2015, called the restaurant, and he said, "Do you want to do a book?" And I said, "No." Which was insane, but... You know. I had just opened a restaurant. And he said, "You know, Ned, it takes a long time to write a book." He was quite right. It took us a year and a half to kind of carve out what the concept of the book was, and then a couple more years to get it fully written. I took cookbook writing 101, 202, 303, 404 with Peter, who has written 17 cookbooks.Suzy Chase: Now for my segment called My Favorite Cookbook. What is your all time favorite cookbook, and why?Ned Baldwin: I... And I bet you do, too... I love Bonnie Slotnick. I love her bookstore. I love going in there and spending half the time talking to her, and half the time looking at books, and I have done for many, many years.Ned Baldwin: I can pull out some silly ones. I love Rex Stout, the author. He wrote the Nero Wolfe books that take place in New York City in the '30s and '40s and '50s, and he was a gastronome who lived in the West '30s in his townhouse, and he had a chef in his house? This is all fictional. He had a chef in his house. His name is Fritz. And one of the great joys of the books is him describing the meals that Fritz, who's a German cook, but was making what I think is really traditional high American food from that era. There are probably, gosh, I don't know, 20 or 30 Nero Wolfe books, and someone pulled all of the recipes out of them and made a cookbook out of them. I really, really love that one a lot.Ned Baldwin: I was just reading It's Not a Cookbook. But, we have a group out here on Sunday evenings. Somebody picks a text, and we Zoom together and take turns reading the text. So, I had remembered a Jim Harrison essay. I think he was in Michigan, and got caught in just the storm of all storms, and kind of dug a hole with his hands and got in the hole. It's a really beautiful piece, and sort of makes me feel a little bit about some version of how our psyche's feeling at the moment. For those who don't know, Jim Harrison's an outdoorsman and a food writer, and he wrote some movies. He died a couple years ago. And he just writes amazingly about food.Ned Baldwin: You know, I couldn't remember where the heck that passage was about him getting caught in the storm, so I ended up reading two of his books over the last couple of days. And just, I mean wonderful food story after wonderful food story, and half of them are him at home, making pozole... He's like a super rustic cook... and half of them are him at some three Michelin star restaurant, eating woodcock and drinking magnums of Petrus. So I like him a lot, too.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?Ned Baldwin: My website is housemanrestaurant.com, and I have Facebook, but I don't really use it, and I have Twitter, and I don't really use that, either. But I do use Instagram quite a bit, and my Instagram is also just Housemanrestaurant.Suzy Chase: Judith Jones wrote in Eater, "To me, cooking is an art form, and like any art form, you have to learn the fundamentals. Well, this cookbook is a good place to start." Thanks so much, Ned, for coming on Cookery by the Book Podcast.Ned Baldwin: Thank you for having me. It's a lot of fun.Outro: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com, and thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

Party In Your Plants: 100+ Plant Based Recipes and Problem-Solving Strategies to Help You Eat Healthier (Without Hating Your Life).By Talia Pollock Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York city, sitting at her dining room table talking to cookbook authors.Talia Pollock: I'm Talia Pollock. My new book is Party in Your Plants.Suzy Chase: For more Cookery by the Book, you can follow me on Instagram. If you enjoy this podcast, please be sure to share it with a friend. I'm always looking for new people to enjoy Cookery by the Book. Now for my quarantine question round, where are you living?Talia Pollock: I'm living in Pound Ridge, New York.Suzy Chase: Oh, Pound Ridge is pretty.Talia Pollock: It is. We've got lots of trees.Suzy Chase: Oh my gosh. You said the woods, so I thought you were way upstate. What restaurant are you dreaming of going to after the quarantine?Talia Pollock: Okay, well we just found out that the reason we moved to Pound Ridge, which was because of the Inn at Pound Ridge, which is a Jean-Georges restaurant, which, if you don't know, is very similar to ABC Kitchen, which is in the city, which also we love ABCV. We just found out that the Inn at Pound Ridge is open for take out starting tomorrow. We're so excited. Then once we get our fix on there, we cannot wait to get back to ABCV, our favorite restaurant in the whole world.Suzy Chase: What dish is getting you through this?Talia Pollock: I don't, nothing's getting me through this right now. I'll tell you, I have funfetti cupcakes, less unhealthy funfetti cupcakes with crap free vanilla frosting in my fridge right now that I made to celebrate my book launch virtual party the other night. Those are getting me through.Suzy Chase: On with the show. I think we all want to eat healthier without hating our life. You want to take the hell out of healthy eating. Talk about how the coconut creamy smoothie you ate in college gave you a plant eating epiphany.Talia Pollock: Ah, yes. Well, for over eight years prior to that smoothie, I struggled so much with my health. I had really bad digestive issues, which our digestive system's the epicenter of our body. They call it our second brain, our gut. When your digestive system is horrible and you're feeling sick all the time, it really affects everything. That digestive stuff led to immune issues. It led to lack of energy and then depression and lack of confidence. I was just a mess walking around and nowhere even close to my best self, not even in the ballpark. I was struggling so much. I knew there must be a better way to feel in the world. This couldn't be for me. I was very relentless in finding solutions. I tried multiple gastroenterologists and acupuncturists, naturopathic, hypnotherapist, everyone under the sun. All they could say is I had IBS.Talia Pollock: I was an aspiring comedian at the time. I did my internship my junior year of college in LA where I was working for Adam Sandler's Happy Madison Production Company. In my off time, I was exploring all that LA had to offer in terms of wellness. I discovered spinning for the first time, colonics, whoa, juices, all of this stuff I never heard of before. I grew up on the East coast. My mom always says trends start out West, so I guess that was going on. It was 2008, so it was really early for all this stuff.Talia Pollock: One day I'm going. I'm at this woo-woo healer who's touching parts of my body and telling me all these supplements I need to buy for all this money to heal my parasites. I don't know. I was desperate. I told that person as I was paying, I'm hungry. She said, "Oh, go across the street. That place has amazing coconut smoothie." I go across the street to this woo-woo place with incense wafting into the street. I asked for the coconut smoothie. They hand it to me. It's this white, frothy, creamy thing. I say, "Oh, I'm so sorry. I don't do dairy." Because at the time I knew at least that upset my stomach. They say, "Sweetie, this is vegan." I didn't know what vegan meant. I didn't want to cause a scene. So I took the smoothie, sat outside on a bench, drank the smoothie. For the first time in over eight years, I consumed something that didn't make me feel sick. I felt strong. I felt vibrant. I felt healthy. I felt energized. I was like, "What is this vegan thing?" I proceeded to spend the rest of my time in LA just sitting in Barnes and Noble, because this was before blogs and Instagram and everything, just learning everything I could about eating plants. It changed my whole life.Suzy Chase: And naturally that place was called Planet Raw, aren't they all?Talia Pollock: Yes, right? Yes. It was Planet Raw. It's no longer with us, but it was heaven.Suzy Chase: Fast forward to the day when you realized you'd forgotten and ignored your own voice.Talia Pollock: Yeah, so what happened was that I fell in love with the plants. They changed my health. It was amazing. Really. I became a new, I couldn't believe how good I felt, but it was very hard to be a normal member of society, "normal." I was in college, so I had my senior year to finish up. After that internship in LA, I went back to school. Now I was this person soaking almonds to turn into all almond milk in my on campus apartment while my friends are off doing keg stands. I was dehydrating kale. This was so long ago you couldn't even buy almond milk in stores. To get coconut water, I would crack open coconuts with a machete and scrape out the meat and turn it into ice cream. This was my college activities. It was very hard to be a contributing member of society when I was just this health nut hermit.Talia Pollock: I graduated college more unhappy than ever before. I felt like I had to choose between my happiness and my social life and my health. I chose health. But then I was so sad and so alone and so depressed, and so I had to figure out how to combine the two worlds. That's what I've done. That's what I do with Party in my Plants, but it really stemmed out of this really sad place of being stuck, having to choose one or the other.Suzy Chase: I've been a follower of Rachel Hollis for a long, long time. She says, "The quality of your habits is the quality of your life." What are a few pointers for folks who want to go full throttle like you did?Talia Pollock: One, I love Rachel Hollis, awesome. Love her. Two, some habits, my overarching philosophy is I just want to help people eat more plants in a given day, meal, snack, week, month, year. Then they eat crap. Crap being chemical, refined, artificial and processed food. That's the principle. That's what I want to help people do. If you adopt that, then you're taking the all or nothing mentality out of the picture, which is what causes so much stress for people. It takes perfectionism out of the picture and it really, as I say, it takes the hell out of healthy eating.Suzy Chase: Do we really need a blender?Talia Pollock: Ha. You're referring to the intro from my book, "What you need more than a fancy blender." That's me saying what you need is this book. That'll serve you more than a fancy blender. The truth is that there's not a shortage of recipes out there, right? I mean, you know as well as anyone, better than anyone that there is no shortage of recipes on the planet for people to learn and make. What is missing for a lot of people struggling to eat healthier is the spark, is the desire, is the excitement, that, "Oh my God, if I change things I put in my body, I can show up in the world so much better than I ever thought possible." My book and my work aims to be that spark for people that gets them to want to eat the plants. Then I happen to have awesome recipes, but it's really this catalyst for igniting your desire to do it. That's what you need more than a frickin' blender.Suzy Chase: I love your recipe on page 105 called the High Def TV Dinner. Can you describe this?Talia Pollock: Yeah. Well, I'll flip to it. 105, no, it's awesome. I mean, all the recipes are divided by real life situations. Like I said, my story stems from having to compromise my real life to accommodate my healthy stuff. I don't want anyone to have to do that. This is like a TV dinner where you basically, it's like a sheet pan meal. You just eat off like those old fashioned TV dinners where you see people sitting on those folding tables and eating their airplane food in front of the TV. This is that, because everything you're making for dinner involves just one pan. You can do chickpeas and any roasted vegetables that you, vegetables you have to roast. Then I suggest you pair it with quinoa or cauliflower rice or sweet potato or something like that. It's like a souped up HD TV dinner.Suzy Chase: I do love that you use humor to inspire people to eat more plants. I feel like vegetarians and vegans are so serious.Talia Pollock: Yeah.Suzy Chase: Why?Talia Pollock: Yep, I don't ...Suzy Chase: I don't get it.Talia Pollock: It's so unnecessary. I mean, all that does is make it less appealing for people, right? I mean, this is not supposed to be a miserable thing. We eat a lot. It would be cool if the process of eating was enjoyable and not stressful and not black or white and not intimidating. I don't know why that's the route that so many people choose, but I have not chosen that I am here to make it fun, so you actually do it.Suzy Chase: Speaking of fun, can you talk about apple cider vinegar?Talia Pollock: Yeah.Suzy Chase: ACV.Talia Pollock: Nice transition.Suzy Chase: Right? I just like smooth right on into that one. Is it the miracle food?Talia Pollock: I mean, what's more fun than apple cider vinegar, right?Suzy Chase: Right?Talia Pollock: I mean, I don't know. What are you going to say about miracle food? It's wonderful, I'll tell you that much. I've been consuming two tablespoons of apple cider vinegar in my morning cocktail, if you will, which is just water, two tablespoons of apple cider vinegar. Then I do some greens powders, a powder, and that's like a green juice cocktail. It's amazing for digestion, for detoxing, for your skin, for energy. It's just, it's really, really lovely for your body. I use it in a lot of recipes. It's great in baking to help things rise.Suzy Chase: I'm obsessed with your YouTube channel. I have to say my favorite episode is, drum roll ...Talia Pollock: What is it?Suzy Chase: The best Mexican restaurant tips where you ...Talia Pollock: Oh my gosh.Suzy Chase: ... show up in the R Kelly Fiesta video, which is hilarious.Talia Pollock: Oh my god.Suzy Chase: The best takeaway from this video is to always order soft tortillas in lieu of tortilla chips. Can you talk about that and tell us about your YouTube channel?Talia Pollock: Oh my God, you're so awesome. Thank you for watching my videos. That is very funny. Yeah, that's fun. Yeah, I think that is the pro-iest pro tip of all pro tips. I mean, when you go, when we can eat at restaurants again, to Mexican restaurants, they always bring you a basket of these fried tortilla chips. You can ask, "Oh, excuse me, can I just please have some soft tortillas?" Then you can just use those as your scooper or your dipper instead of eating a plethora, the fried stuff as you're starting your dinner. You can also ask for vegetables as well.Suzy Chase: Do they look at you funny if you ask for vegetables?Talia Pollock: You know what? I don't care.Suzy Chase: Yeah.Talia Pollock: That's what this is about. This is about, owning it. What would Rachel Hollis say, right? Wash your face. Order the chips. I mean, not the chips, the tortillas. That's what this, I'm here to help people do. A lot of the barrier between not eating healthfully and eating healthily is that inner confidence. It's that boldness. It's that I'm just going to do it and not care what other people think because I'm that committed to my wellbeing. That's what you need more than a blender, going back to what we said before. It's that unwavering authenticity to just do the damn thing and not worry about what other people look like when you're doing it.Suzy Chase: I think we're all learning that now in the quarantine. I have a mini trampoline and I'm on my roof and I'm sure hundreds of people can see me bouncing on my roof, but I don't care.Talia Pollock: That's amazing.Suzy Chase: It's in your day.Talia Pollock: You brought it to your roof. That's awesome. That's so cool. Yeah, YOLO. That's what we're living in. Okay. If you're bouncing on a trampoline in your roof in public, then you can order soft corn tortillas.Suzy Chase: I can, and I can order vegetables too.Talia Pollock: Yeah, I think you can.Suzy Chase: Yeah, bring it. Sea salt or pink salt?Talia Pollock: I love pink salt. It's not just cause I'm girly. It's just I've always done pink salt, but you can do sea salt. I just like the Himalayan pink salt.Suzy Chase: Some of the names of the recipes crack me up like Pad Thai in No Time and Cheez-Isn'ts.Talia Pollock: Yeah, they're like Cheez-Its, but isn'ts.Suzy Chase: Sweet Ass Sriracha Tofu. How long did it take you to put this book together?Talia Pollock: I mean it was a lot. It was, I think a year, a full year before edits. Then there were edits, but it was a year. It was the best. I had such a blast.Suzy Chase: Now to my segment called my favorite cookbook. What is your all time favorite cookbook and why?Talia Pollock: Oh, okay. Clean Food by Terry Walters was the first ... Do you know that one?Suzy Chase: No.Talia Pollock: Oh, it's, she's the OG. She's the OG. She's clean food before clean food was ever a term. I just so happened to have grown up as her neighbor. She was making all this stuff with teff flour and rice flour and all this gluten-free, whole food stuff in my backyard. She really inspired my journey, so Clean Food by Terry Walters.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web, social media and your podcast?Talia Pollock: My podcast is the Party in my Plant's podcast. I am Party in my Plants across all social media and internet things.Suzy Chase: Well, thanks Talia for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.Talia Pollock: Thank you so much for having me.Outro: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com. Thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

A Good Meal Is Hard To Find: Storied Recipes from the Deep SouthBy Amy C. Evans & Martha Hall Foose Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.Martha Hall Foose: I'm Martha Hall Foose, and I've got a new book coming out, A Good Meal Is Hard to Find: Storied Recipes From the Deep South, with my good gal pal, Amy C. Evans.Suzy Chase: Okay, let's do a quick quarantine question round. Number one, where are you living?Martha Hall Foose: Right now I'm in Greenwood, Mississippi, which is about halfway between Memphis and Jackson, in the Mississippi Delta, right on the banks of the Yazoo River. We also have a farm that's the next county over, that's a family farm, and then I have a house out there in a place called Pluto, Mississippi. Lately, we haven't been out there too much except to go mow the grass because of a lack of internet connection, but we split our time back and forth between the two places.Suzy Chase: What restaurant are you dreaming of going to after the quarantine?Martha Hall Foose: Without question, The Beauty Shop Restaurant in Memphis, Tennessee. Karen Carrier is the chef there and I want to eat her dish called Watermelon and Wings. It's chicken wings with cashew dust and chili sauce and then slices of cold watermelon on the side. That's what I want more than anything.Suzy Chase: I've been revisiting recipes that make me feel like home, things my mom used to make, like a simple bologna sandwich or potato salad. I know you have a reverence for passed-along recipes. I'm wondering what dish is getting you through this.Martha Hall Foose: I know this sounds corny, but chicken pot pie.Suzy Chase: No, not at all.Martha Hall Foose: To me, it's just the ultimate comfort. In A Good Meal Is Hard to Find, we have an easy peasy recipe for one. When my son was little and he'd get mad at somebody, he would say, "You chicken pot pie," and so that always makes me laugh and feel at home, and my mom makes a great chicken pot pie. The other thing that seems to be a big comfort dish is just simple broiled catfish with tons of lemon and butter and Worcestershire sauce on it, just broiled with some rice on the side. For some reason, that's been something that we've been going to at least once a week.Suzy Chase: Okay, now on with the show. As I understand it, this cookbook is a love letter to women and food and the deep South. Can you talk a little bit about that?Martha Hall Foose: First, I love my collaboration with Amy Evans. She's a dear friend and also has been really inspirational to me. So the first love letter would be to my partner in this venture. I think a lot of times when people talk about Southern cooking, there are two extremes. It's either mamaw in the kitchen or it's some dude chef with a pig tattoo, and there doesn't seem to be much in the middle of people that, as Amy and I say and has been said before, of people that are trying to make a way out of no way. I think that's something that probably resonates with people a lot these days.Martha Hall Foose: Also, Amy and I always found this sort of mystery of the names that are at the bottom of recipes that are in community cookbooks. A lot of times the woman isn't even mentioned by her own name. It's Mrs. J.D. Palam or something like that, and not even recognized by their own name. They were just the adjunct of whoever the husband was. That kind of rankled me and Amy, and so we wanted to give a voice to just the neighbors. Through that, we just created this whole community of imaginary friends.Suzy Chase: Women were their husband's wives back then. They weren't an individual.Martha Hall Foose Right. If there's a community cookbook from a church league or a benevolent society of some sort, for example, there's one recipe title that always stuck with me, called Mrs. Munson's Cold Tongue. It was this beef tongue recipe, but it wasn't even Lila Munson or whoever she was. We don't even know who Mrs. Munson's first name is. Things like that were a jumping off point for us.Suzy Chase: Yeah, I remember my mom used Mrs. W.S. Chase up until I'd say the mid '70s and then she dropped it and she became Marilyn.Martha Hall Foose: Yeah, and then sometimes it would be Mrs. George Jones, nee Snavely , so you could have her father's name, but you still didn't know her first name.Suzy Chase: Yes. Oh my gosh. Food is a lens to society. When I think of Southern food, I think of a story that goes along with a dish or ingredients. You touched on this a little bit just now, but talk a little bit more about how community cookbooks or the Junior League cookbooks have influenced you.Martha Hall Foose: Those were the first cookbooks that I really read. When I was a kid, they were always in our kitchen. Growing up in a rural area, like the Delta, everybody was trying to do a fundraiser for either the church building society or the missionary society or the Elks or the Episcopal church ladies. All sorts of fundraisers were always going on. Those were pretty much the first cookbooks that I was exposed to really, that and Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook or Joy of Cooking. They have a fond place in my heart just because they were the first things that I knew of what a cookbook was.Suzy Chase: How did you meet Amy C. Evans?Martha Hall Foose: We were both trying to figure this out. She had come down to work on an oral history project throughout the Delta and we think we met through that, maybe at the farmer's market here, which was just getting started and she was documenting the beginning of the new farmer's market here. That was I don't know how many years ago, over a decade I would guess.Suzy Chase: Can you describe the first time you two sequestered yourselves at your farmhouse in Pluto, Mississippi to put this cookbook together?Martha Hall Foose: I was so thrilled. I had approached Amy about this idea a couple of years before this initial retreat and kind of bugged her about it. Then I was like, "Quit bugging her about it, Martha." Then out of the blue, she called. She had been at a conference and one of the things was about collaboration, and then she finally warmed up to the idea. Then it was like, "Okay, let's get together and do this."Martha Hall Foose: She came out to Pluto, which is 17 miles to a gallon of milk once you get out there. Basically you have to bring your own fun when you come. She was bringing her daughter, Sophia, who was pretty little at the time. I figured I needed something to keep her occupied, so I brought my cotton candy machine, which did a great job of keeping her busy. My cousin, Leanne, who is the inspiration for Lenore's Hot Tamale Balls, which is a recipe on page 82, her name is Lenore Ann, but we all call her Leanne, she came out with this. Leanne cooked for us and gave us inspiration. Amy and I sat at this sort of 1950s Formica table in the kitchen and stared out the window, and honestly drank a bit of bourbon and ate a lot of pie, and just started thinking about the wonderful titles to her paintings.Martha Hall Foose: Some of the titles, let me get to the illustration page and I'll tell you a few of them that are my favorite. There's one called Loretta Put the Coffee on the Stove and Crawled Back in Bed to Find the Details From Her Dreams. She had already set up the first line, or the idea, through just the titles of her paintings. Then we started to talk and imagine these women's back stories. What kind of coffee was Loretta going to put on the stove? What was she getting in back into bed to think about? Or one painting is Marge Took Her Usual Measurements. I think that's the first recipe in the book. Actually, it's the second recipe I think in the book. We decided that that would be two fingers of vodka and some grapefruit juice that she was measuring.Martha Hall Foose: We just got really into these women's back stories and then the more we talked about them, a lot of times the more tickled we got at ourselves, first of all, for just sitting there making up these ridiculous stories, and then second of all, some of them are a little poignant. Some of them are about heartbreak or remembering somebody that had passed. I mean, at some point it got to the point where we really felt like they were just pulling up a chair at the table and telling us about themselves.Martha Hall Foose: One of the things we really wanted to be cognizant of is Amy's paintings usually just include three objects and sometimes they're very baffling, like the one that is the chicken pot pie recipe. The painting is a vintage Swanson's chicken pot pie box, an old rabbit foot keychain like you used to get out of the prize machine at the skating rink, and a dill pickle. Then it has a painting of a floral oilcloth on the side. We wanted to keep the stories that didn't just tell a start-to-finish story, that also gave you room to interpret the stories the way you wanted to and the way that these women, we made them up for the readers and home cooks to finish the story themselves so that they became their own friends as much as they had become our friends.Suzy Chase: I'm curious to hear about Grace's Four-Cornered Nabs on page 85. Can you read this head note?Martha Hall Foose: Sure. This one was inspired by Amy's grandmother. It's one of my favorite of Amy's paintings of all time. It features a old Samsonite-style train case with the outline of a large ham, with a comma and then a nab. For those that don't know, nabs are the little crackers named after Nabisco's little crackers like you find at a convenience store.Suzy Chase: It looks like a Cheez-It.Martha Hall Foose: It looks like a Cheez-It, but for those in the know about nab, there are two different types of nabs. If we were on a road trip and we pulled into a convenience store and I was going in, I would say, "Suzy, do you want some nabs?" and if you said yes, now I would say, "Do you want round or four-corner nabs?" Round nabs are the ones that are regular plain or malt crackers with cheese in the middle or peanut in the middle. If you say I want four-corner nabs, that means you mean the cheese ones with peanut butter filling.Suzy Chase: Oh.Martha Hall Foose: That's a little nab trivia for you there.Suzy Chase: Can you read the head note, please?Martha Hall Foose: Sure.Martha Hall Foose: "Grace couldn't take any chances, so she fit all sorts of contingencies in her train case. This was, after all, the first time she was making the trip to visit her granddaughter all the way over in Texas. For all Grace knew, they ate brisket for breakfast, lunch and dinner. That just wouldn't do. No, ma'am. Grace made sure that they would have some proper Alabama staples within reach during her visit, so she packed some nabs at the last minute just to make the trip bearable."Martha Hall Foose: Then it has a recipe for the cheese crackers and then a peanut butter filling.Suzy Chase: Apparently, they're are proper Alabama staple. That's my favorite line.Martha Hall Foose: Well, that and a good ham.Suzy Chase: Yes. It's so funny, because I can vividly picture Grace in my head.Martha Hall Foose: Good. That's what we were hoping for. See, now she's your friend, too.Suzy Chase: You have a Notions and Notes section with every recipe, and this recipe, you included some ways to serve the crackers, other uses for the filling, and the best is if you don't have a decorative pastry cutter on hand, you can use a rotary fabric cutter with a scallop blade, but wash it before you return it to your sewing box. That made me laugh.Martha Hall Foose: There are a couple of the notes that are pretty silly and then some of them that are actually geared to help the home cook complete these recipes. For the most part, they're really straightforward recipes. Most of them are only a page long. Things like notes on serving, if you want to make something extra fancy, or if you don't feel like making part of the recipe and you want to use a frozen pie dough or refrigerated pack crust, we're not going to shame anybody and be like, "Well, you've got to make your home pie crust or you're doing less." But sometimes a girl's just got to do what a girl's got to do.Suzy Chase: Amen. I, like you gals, am intrigued by consumerism. This line right here in the cookbook jumped out at me, "How the throwaway matchbook can become a keepsake for a lifetime." Now, I remember when my dad remarried this lady who was from West Texas, her name was Wylena Joe. We called her Joe. Well, Joe loved her pastel-colored, modern '80s decor. She'd say, and I'm not even going to try to do a Southern drawl, she would say in her Southern drawl, "Suzy only likes old stuff." Can you talk a little bit about your hunt for stories at estate sales or resale shops? I live for estate sales.Martha Hall Foose: We do too. It's the things in the back of the drawer that we love.Suzy Chase: Me too.Martha Hall Foose: I found this towel hook that's this small hand and it's so weird that it's like, first of all, who would buy this, and then second of all, why would you keep it in the back of the drawer because it's so awesome if you had it. It's questions like these that really sent Amy and I. We also love the sweet little gestures of people using things that they've got. Amy and I talk about she had done a wonderful oral history with Miss Streeter, Pattie Streeter that runs a farm right near here. At the farmer's market, she ties up her bundles of spring onions with little red yarn bows. It's things like that that Amy and I just love. We love everything from old Avon perfume bottles to, oh, don't get us started about a yardstick that advertises a hardware store. Who knows how many of those each we've got. It's those things that you're not ever going to see again. They're not making more of them.Martha Hall Foose: I said this in my first book, that in a way we're sort of homesick for a place we still live. That's not saying we have some imagined idea of what good old days in the South were like, because that's not what we're saying. It's more of the community involvement. I guess during this stay home time for everybody, it's spending the time to do those little things and to appreciate small things, I guess, a little bit more.Suzy Chase: Last night I made Clementine's H-Town Queso. It goes with the Crawfish Puppies, but I can't find any crawfish in New York City right now in the middle of the pandemic. I made this, and this dip was inspired by the old Felix Mexican restaurant in Houston. Can you tell us about this recipe?Martha Hall Foose: One woman that Amy and I both are inspired by and love so much is Lisa Fain and her Homesick Texan blog and also her Homesick Texan cookbooks. Amy grew up in Houston and lives there now. Although Felix's is no longer a going concern, this queso had a cult following and is very regionally specific to the Houston area. As much as the recipe has a lot of characters that are in the Delta, we also wanted to make sure that Texas got a great representation and so Lisa was actually kind enough to share the recipe with us.Martha Hall Foose: For those that are thinking this is the ubiquitous cheese dip that you found in a Tex Mex restaurant, it's got sort of a, how would you describe it, I would say sort of a garnet oil slick across the top of it.Suzy Chase: Well yeah, because you use real cheddar cheese and I think that makes for the slick.Martha Hall Foose: Yeah, yeah. It's got a little chopped onion, and diced tomatoes, and garlic, and chili powder, and hot paprika, and you use shredded cheese in it. I mean, it's just a good snack if you're hanging out on the couch.Suzy Chase: Which we all are.Martha Hall Foose: Yeah.Suzy Chase: What I learned from this recipe is the secret ingredient is the paprika.Martha Hall Foose: Kudos to Lisa, because I'm sure there was a lot of research that went into trying to get this thing just right.Suzy Chase: Yeah, queso's a toughie.Martha Hall Foose: She has a book, she has a book that's called Queso. If you want to broaden your queso world, you can to her book.Suzy Chase: Speaking of cookbooks, now for my segment called My Favorite Cookbook, what is your all-time favorite cookbook and why?Martha Hall Foose: My all time favorite cookbook is one that was published in the Delta and I think initially it was published in the '70s, but it's called Bayou Cuisine. One thing I love about it is because it's sort of brilliant the way it's put together, not just the way that the book is structured, but they used this comb binding that you see on so many community cookbooks. But this one has a time-release self-destruction, where after about five years the comb binding gets so brittle it breaks and the index falls off the back. The recipes aren't divided up by breakfast, appetizers, fish, poultry, in that kind of order, so there's no way for you to find the recipe unless you have the index. Then after the index falls off the back, you've got to buy a new copy of the book.Martha Hall Foose: I think that's going to be my plan for my next book, is to put a self-destructing comb binding on it. But I think you can find copies of it online and I think they've put sort of a condensed version in a bound copy, but Bayou Cuisine, or as people one state over might call it, Bayou Cuisine. But in Mississippi we say bayou.Suzy Chase: So it's spelled B-A-Y-O-U?Martha Hall Foose: Mm-hmm (affirmative).Suzy Chase: Okay.Martha Hall Foose: We're very specific down here.Suzy Chase: I love it. Where can we find you on the web and social media?Martha Hall Foose: There is a website that we're beginning, or Amy is beginning to get together, called AGoodMealisHardtoFind.com. As I get my social networking together, you'll be able to find all the links how to get in touch with us in any possible way. Also, there's a section for people to get in touch with us. As people make recipes, we'd love for them to send us pictures. In the end of the book, we say, "Thank you for visiting with all of us. Please do stay in touch, drop us a line and some snapshots of your favorite dishes when you have a minute. Amy, Martha, and the ladies. P.S. You can find us at AGoodMealisHardtoFind.com."Suzy Chase: This cookbook is the perfect Mother's Day present. Thank you so much, Martha, for coming on Cookery By the Book podcast.Martha Hall Foose: It was my pleasure. Y'all stay safe and tell some stories and cook a lot and be safe.Outro: Subscribe over on cookerybythebook.com. Thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery By the Book.

My Korea: Traditional Flavors, Modern RecipesBy Hooni Kimwith Aki Kamozawa Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery By The Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table talking to cookbook authors.Hooni Kim: Hi, my name is Hooni Kim and I have just written My Korea: Traditional Flavors, Modern Recipes.Suzy Chase: As a Korean chef, you're constantly thinking about Korean food and its place in American culinary culture. You have two restaurants here in the city, Danji and Hanjan. Danji received a Michelin star in 2011 and 2012. The first ever Korean restaurant to receive a Michelin star. That is extraordinary.Hooni Kim: Oh, thank you.Suzy Chase: So, now here we sit in the epicenter of the pandemic and life's been turned upside down. We have a broad sense of what's happening in the restaurant industry, but it would be so great to hear how you and your two restaurants are dealing with the Coronavirus situation.Hooni Kim: You have caught me at a very sort of tumultuous time, not just me, but all the chef friends that I know and all the restaurant owners. I think we are now three weeks in. I think next week is the fourth week of this situation. I will let you know that Danji, which was the restaurant that you were talking about receiving the first Michelin star for a Korean restaurant is right in the middle of the Theater District and we closed as soon as the theaters closed, which was two days before the city mandate that all restaurants had to close for in dining. So Danji hasn't been open for a month now. Fortunately my other restaurant, Hanjan, we were able to pool our resources, my chefs, people on salary that who have been with me for eight ... my manager at Danji's over nine years.Hooni Kim: We understood that ordering food to go was going to be very common, but I personally and a lot of my friends didn't want to order a big meal every single day, two, three times a day to go out and eat. So what we did was figure out a bunch of Korean dishes that held well in the refrigerator and the freezer and we sort of made a meal kit for a family of four that could last two, three meals. And we decided to sort of sell that. And I would do all the deliveries myself. I still do. And we started that right away, even before the restaurants closed because we knew this was going to happen. And I think the first day we sold 10 and we were very proud. We were so happy that week we ended up selling about 80. I had to hire more staff to cook more because the following week we sold 100. Last week we sold 130 and we finally figured out that I can only deliver 30 a day and that's the maximum that I could personally deliver. So this next week we are capping it at 150 and we have just sold out yesterday of this entire week.Suzy Chase: Oh no, I was going to order.Hooni Kim: Well, no, I got your email yesterday so you're in it. And I didn't reply because I hadn't replied to anybody else. But yes, you're on the list. And we did sell out yesterday. Yeah.Suzy Chase: That is awesome.Hooni Kim: Thank you. I mean it was my mother and my manager, they suggested it. I thought it was a great idea and when we started it was just four people. Now we have eight people working at the restaurant. So we have staff that's making money in this situation. And that's I think the biggest sort of pride that I have.Suzy Chase: You know, it's almost like your version of home food or what do they call it in Korean, Jip BapHooni Kim: Jip Bap yeah.Suzy Chase: It's kind of for your version of that.Hooni Kim: Yes. You know, a lot of Korean food the traditional kind sits well in the fridge. All the banchans are meant to sort of, you make it once and you eat for a week. Kimchis can last months and years. Even the stews, they taste better the second day. So, it's more delicious when I make it and then deliver it later in the night and they eat it then or the next day it actually tastes better because the flavor set more, they settle more, they meld more, the soy sauce, any sort of fermented soy, soybeans, those sauces develop more through time after it's cooked. Every week we change our menu and I study the dishes that might hold better or even become better once the food is delivered. So, that's been interesting. But that's sort of what we're going for. The real traditional Korean foods that Koreans consider [foreign language 00:05:07] that can hold well in a fridge and a family can enjoy for two, three days. That's the whole point.Suzy Chase: So what's the best way we as a consumer can help you and other restaurant stay afloat?Hooni Kim: You know, I don't know. A lot of restaurants are selling gift certificates now and they're not free because we sell too much of it now and we spend that money later on. Our revenue's going to fall because of those gift certificates. It's a very short term sort of fixed. But I don't know if that's really going to help us in the long run. I'm also not comfortable asking for handouts. You know, I think a lot of restaurants are asking for freebies, but I just don't feel comfortable.Hooni Kim: I just feel like nothing is free in this world and I've never taken a handout ever running my restaurants and making sure my staff is paid fairly. And it just takes a lot for me to go that route. The reason why I decided to do these deliveries and the reason why I personally do the deliveries is because I want this to grow so that I can hire all my staff back even if they're not making as much money as they did before we'll get there. As long as my restaurants reopen, I can hire all of them back and with time they will get to where they were before. And that is my goal. But asking my customers who have enjoyed supporting us this whole time for a freebie, for me, I'm just a little uncomfortable.Hooni Kim: So to answer the question, how can you help us? I think the best way to help us really is as soon as our restaurants are ready to open for you to come flooding back. I'm sure many people are sick and tired of ordering delivery food or even cooking at home and are just itching and wanting to go out to restaurants, which we took for such granted going to a bar and sitting down ordering a beer. Wow, that sounds so good now.Suzy Chase: There's a picture in the cookbook of, I think it's Hanjan, it's your other restaurant that's like a pub and I was just staring at it. All the people were just sitting right next to each other drinking, eating. It felt like a lifetime ago when we were all doing that.Hooni Kim: And that's what worries the most. Most restaurants in New York City are built to sort of crowd people in. Right now, that's very uncomfortable and for a restaurant to function even after we open at 50% of capacity because that's sort of the physically safe thing to do, we're not built for that. We will fail. We will fail within two weeks if we don't get very close to the numbers that we were doing because we were making 5% margins anyway. If we get a 20% drop in revenue, we're done.Hooni Kim: That is what worries me the most. This culture of staying away, being apart, the social distancing, if that carries over to the restaurants we're done, unless you're a very fine dining restaurant that charges $300, $400 per person who can sort of afford to social distance tables. 90% of New York City restaurants aren't designed that way. We are designed to pack people in because real estate is very expensive, not just real estate. Everything is very expensive here and even with that, our budgets being 5% at most, 10% I'm just very afraid that we might not go back to ... or it will take a lot of time to go back to where we were a month ago.Suzy Chase: Well, I know we're all rooting for you and we're here to support you any way we can.Hooni Kim: Thank you very much.Suzy Chase: So now moving onto the cookbook.Hooni Kim: Wow, that was depressing, huh? I'm sorry.Suzy Chase: To happier times. Your cookbook, My Korea, is deeply personal and heavily researched. And when I say heavily, I mean it took you seven years to write. Why so long?Hooni Kim: To be perfectly honest, when I was first approached to write this cookbook, I had just opened on Danji, it was my first year. Basically what they said was my menu just read like the chapters. So I thought that's one of the things that when you become a chef, you do. You write a cookbook. So I said, "Sure." Little did I know that I didn't have the story to share. The story that I shared, everything was at Danji. A lot of the things you couldn't put into words. So the story of Danji, a story of me, wasn't a good book. And my first editor pointed that out. You know, we all have writers because we just don't have the time or the skills to write a book. I am not a very good writer or I wasn't. I'm much better now.Hooni Kim: I'm still not a good writer, but much better than when I first started. And I thought the process would be, I tell stories and the writer writes it. Not the best way. So by the third time, my first two manuscripts were rejected. They weren't good enough for my editor. The third time, I wrote it myself and my writer basically fixed what I wrote, grammatically, helped me write all the recipes because I am used to describing how to cook to my cooks, not to home cooks. So fixed a lot of the recipe lingo and having to write this myself just changed what I wrote. Instead of sort of sharing my stories, I first had to sort of look within and find what is my story. And that's why I went really back to my first memories of liking food. And to be honest, I had forgotten a lot of the stories that I write about when I was a kid.Hooni Kim: It wasn't a part of my first two manuscripts. When I started writing the book, memories from 35 years ago, 40 years ago, came alive again. Yeah, I mean, starts right with the intro. I go way back from my first memory of food, which was in the island of Soando and Busan, eating the rice cakes off the street and that is my first memory of food and that's where we start.Suzy Chase: Do you think you can credit Maria Guarnaschelli with tapping into something inside of you to really dig deep and get these memories?Hooni Kim: Completely? Maria Guarnaschelli wasn't able to finish the book because she retired right before we were able to go into print, but she would not let me, allow me to publish my first two versions, which I thought they were good books, but so relatively lesser than what I was able to write when I wrote it. And it's not even the difference of writers because the second manuscript, I have the same writer as this manuscript or this book, the published book. So it wasn't the writer, it really was just me sitting down and looking within and trying to remember why I started cooking, how, and I would've missed all that out if Maria Guarnaschelli would have just went ahead and published a decent book, but not the best book that I could write. So I still thank her.Suzy Chase: Speaking of food memories, can you tell us about your first taste memory with Korean street food?Hooni Kim: Yes. It was in Busan. I must've been four years old and this was when I had come back to Korea to see my maternal grandmother living in Busan. My cousins are all older than me and they were used to the Korean street food. They didn't think that I would like spicy food, so they would let me partake. But one day they let me and, and it was spicy rice cakes, tteokbokki. And at that time for one penny, you got a toothpick.Hooni Kim: And with that toothpick you had to choose because it was rice cake and fish cake that you could pick one. And I remember taking the rice cake because it was called rice cake. So I thought the rice cake must be better. Tried it and the flavors just exploded in my mouth. It was uncomfortable. Too much flavor for a four year old. It was spicy, salty, sweet, and the gooey, soft texture almost just melting in your mouth and ... it's the first time I had rice cakes. It was actually the first time that I had something spicy that I really enjoyed. You know, that was my introduction to a Korean street food 44 years ago.Suzy Chase: And I think it was a lot for you to taste because weren't you living in London at the time?Hooni Kim: Yes. I had moved to London when I was three years old with my mom and I was actually attending boarding school at that time, three hours away from London. So we weren't used to eating anything spicy. I remember I was the only Asian in my boarding school and I was the only Asian in the town. And we would take field trips to town and these old ladies would come around touching my hair because they had never seen straight black hair before. This was in the 70s. So this was a long time ago and it started when I was four. But every summer my mom would send me back to Korea just because she didn't want me to lose sight of where I was from, my culture. My grandmothers were still alive from both my mom and my father's side. So they needed to see me.Hooni Kim: So every summer until even after high school, when I started college and it was basically up to me to decide myself, summer vacations, I would end up going to Korea because it was habit. I enjoyed it. The Korean food has always been different with ingredients grown in the Korean terroir, Korean food as good as it is in the US just doesn't compare to Korean food eaten in Korea.Hooni Kim: I knew there was a difference between Korean food in Korea, Korean food in the US and I wanted to bring the Korean ingredients to the US to really show New Yorkers, Americans, this is the Korean food that I know. This is my Korea. And that's what I wanted to share. And Danji was born.Suzy Chase: So when you realized that there was a difference between Korean food here and Korean food in Korea, what were some of the differences you saw between like Koreatown and the food from Korea?Hooni Kim: You know, 40 years ago, food in Korea didn't have many chemicals. There weren't preservatives. The trade wasn't going on. It was more expensive to bring vegetables from China or Japan than to grow in your country, which is completely the opposite now, for most countries. Local produce was not more expensive. It was cheaper and that's all you used. Preservatives were expensive, so buying canned sauces only rich people could do that. MSG was so expensive in the 70s that only rich people could sort of use MSG. So all of these chemicals, which we find in fast food, cheap food these days, Koreans didn't cook with them until late 80s so the food that I know that I remember, the Korean food that I fell in love with, where just what we consider now fine dining, local produce that doesn't have preservatives, pesticides, flavor enhancers, just all natural food. That's still what I consider real Korean food.Suzy Chase: I want to hear about your second taste memory and gim your favorite food to eat when you visited your paternal grandmother?Hooni Kim: Yes. Wow. So my mother used to, not even joke, but she would say, "Your paternal grandmother lives in the furthest place on earth." And what she meant was to get there from both New York and London you take a plane and back then there were no direct flights. It was too long. So you'd stop at Anchorage, Alaska, for a couple hours to refuel, and then you couldn't fly over the Soviet union because of the Cold War. So instead of going the fast route, you would have to go all the way around. Basically what is a 14 hour flight used to take 20 hours with a stop in the middle.Suzy Chase: Oh, my God.Hooni Kim: So that's not all because then you arrive in Seoul and then Korean transportation back then wasn't as good as as it is now. So from there on we would take a little, local plane to a city called Quanzhou an hour. From there on, we would have to take a bus, a two hour bus to this city near the coast called Wando. And from Wando we would have to take a ferry about two hours close to the island that my grandmother lived in Soando, but Soando was too small that it didn't have a dock for a large ferry. So a boat, a little fishing boat would have to meet the ferry 45 minutes in the middle of the ocean.Suzy Chase: What?Hooni Kim: Yeah. We will have to transfer in the middle of the ocean with no bridges. So for me, being little, they're just carrying me and throwing me onto the small boat. And that was the scariest, scariest ... I still can't swim because of that because I was so scared. And it was a 45 minutes on a small, I call it a tong tong boat because that's the sound that the motor made and we'd go 45 minutes in while being very seasick and from there on to my grandmother's house will be a 30 minute walk. Three days.Suzy Chase: Oh my goodness.Hooni Kim: Yeah.Suzy Chase: Would you describe this island? I want to do a whole podcast about this island.Hooni Kim: This island had one phone, it had one market and that market had the phone line that didn't have numbers, digits. You call and then it connects you to an operator and you would verbally tell them the number that you wanted to call. But on that island nobody had phones. So basically it was a connection to sort of the outside islands or the cities or even so. That's the phone that my grandmother used to call me to England and through to New York. Electricity on the whole island would go off at 9:00 PM I think the island had three TVs when I first started and we would all go visit these houses to watch the TV. For me, we had a TV, I don't say it was a new new thing, but to most of the younger it was still a fascinating machine to to sort of see motion in a box.Hooni Kim: My memory is just going to a friend's house or a relatives house and watching black and white TV until nine o'clock and then going home. Nobody bought food at the stores. You know you bought alcohol at the stores if you didn't have enough or making it home. All the food was grown in your backyard. They had a communal rice paddy that the whole village farmed together to share. The whole island got together in November and did Gimjang, which is a sort of mass kimchi making for the entire year. Wando or ... that's South West area of Korea is famous for seafood and also famous for seaweed, Kelp as well as gim all around our farmhouse had gim. I guess people would know that as Nori or laver, it'd be dry. And that's what we would have breakfast, lunch and dinner with kimchi for a meal.Hooni Kim: Every time I go to Korea, every new restaurant I go to, every new brand of gim or nori that comes out, I try it because I want to find the closest thing that I remember. And nothing, nothing could come close or have come close to the Kim that I had on that island.Suzy Chase: So, your father passed away when you were two.Hooni Kim: Yes.Suzy Chase: Did visiting your grandma on the island kind of make you feel connected with your dad?Hooni Kim: You know, I was so young and I had never known my father, him passing away when I was two, before I could sort of remember anything. So I was fine with not having a father. I did get a sense that instead of me having a connection, my grandmother felt that connection with me a lot more. And it never changed. Every time I was there, I would never see her sleeping. When I went to sleep, she was holding my hand. When I woke up in the morning, I found her holding my hand. So I knew that half the time, maybe it wasn't me that she's thinking about, but it was my father that she had lost, she was thinking about.Hooni Kim: So I hated going there. You can imagine living in the city and then go into a farm that smelled like pig dung everywhere. You know? I understood why I was there. I complained, but I still went because there was a time when I didn't actually go. I did go to Korea, but I didn't go to Soando island because my mom couldn't make it and I was too young to be able to go by myself and I felt really guilty the entire year. So after that, I made sure that I went.Suzy Chase: Yeah. And it touched me because your dad was an only son and you were the only grandson of her only son.Hooni Kim: I have an only child, so ...Suzy Chase: Oh my gosh.Hooni Kim: Yeah. Not by choice, but yeah, we have one son.Suzy Chase: Yeah, same here. We had one, we tried for another, we didn't ... it's New York City, so ...Hooni Kim: Yeah, it's New York city, we started late.Suzy Chase: Yeah, same here.Hooni Kim: Yeah.Suzy Chase: So in the cookbook you have a recipe for dashi, which has been a mystery to me. Can you describe dashi and the process of making it?Hooni Kim: Basically dashi comes from Kelp, which is a dried, thick seaweed. And in Korean it's called Tashima. In Japanese it's called Khombu and there's a lot of nutrients and there's a lot of natural glutamates. We're trying to make that MSG man made flavor in natural form. And that's why you want to keep the nutrients of this Kelp. You want to keep the glutamates or you want to keep the flavor and that's why we don't boil it.Hooni Kim: We sort of heat it in hot water for a long time to sort of get all that flavor from that kelp. We also add shitake mushrooms and I like to add anchovies, dried anchovies. And what that acts is as a base, anytime the recipes call for water, I use dashi. Anytime it calls for, you know, like a French restaurant, Daniel ... I don't ever remember cooking with water. It was always veil stock, chicken stock, vegetable stock. Anytime we needed liquid it was one of those stocks because you never want to waste our efforts to sort of add more flavor to food. So that's sort of the same principle that I applied to Korean cooking and especially in my restaurant. And in this book, rarely use water. Water is used to make dashi.Suzy Chase: The other day I made your recipe for kimchi and brisket fried rice on page 228. Can you describe this dish?Hooni Kim: The star is the rice and of course in the kimchi fried rice, the kimchi is going to be the main flavor of the rice, but the flavor that comes out of brisket beef has a very sweet flavor because brisket is very fatty and people don't like brisket too much to sort of saute because it has a hard texture, but if you slice it really thin and you sort of cut it up and you get all that fatty beefiness into this fried rice, you get the sweetness and the fried rice that actually really helps the flavor of the kimchi because kimchi in itself is sort of acidic, sort of sour and to have a naturally sweet fat from the beef flavor the rice alone, it works. And we serve it at my other restaurant Hanjan, my second restaurant, this exact same way.Suzy Chase: Now for my segment called My Favorite Cookbook. What is your all time favorite cookbook and why?Hooni Kim: This cookbook, I have it. I study it like it's the Bible. I practice my Korean and my Chinese characters because there's just so much in this book about Korean cuisine that I still need to study to become a real Korean chef. It's called Dongui Bogam. A lot of Koreans, a lot of people don't even consider it a cookbook. It's the first medicine book ever written in Korea. But in Korea, medicine was practiced with food in the beginning. So this book is all about these Korean ingredients, how to prepare it and what it is used for as a doctor to improve one's health, to fix certain diseases. And to me, it's ... so what is important as a chef? I mean, yes, I cook good food, I cook delicious food like every other chef who's been cooking for 30 years. But to apply it to our health, that's I think another degree that we as chefs can sort of challenge ourselves on. And for me, I want to cook delicious food that is healthy.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web, social media and where can we order food for delivery here in New York City?Hooni Kim: I'm not going to point out my restaurant. I think there are so many Korean restaurants that just started Caviar delivery, DoorDash, Postmates, I don't know what these delivery things are called, but Jua is a small restaurant that just opened a month ago that they're struggling to sort of stay running because of this situation. I think you should order delivery from them. Atoboy they just started delivery. There are all of these small independent Korean restaurants that you should order delivery from. We should support these small restaurants as well as my restaurants, but you can find me at hoonikim.com it has all of my information on my restaurants, but also on Instagram where I'm the most active at @hoonikim and that's where I'm at.Hooni Kim: I'm also delivering food to 30 families Monday through Friday every day because I feel like I'm the best delivery person in my staff and I'm the only one who has an SUV. We might be able to survive right now with these takeouts, but how's it going to be when we are able to open again? And people are uncomfortable going out as much as they used to. We don't know. And I think that's the toughest part. We're not in control and we don't know what's going to become of our industry. The best thing you guys can do is actually order the take out, the delivery food, and especially when this is all over, come and support us. Come dine at our restaurants and that will be amazing.Suzy Chase: We can't wait.Hooni Kim: Thank you so much.Suzy Chase: So thank you for sharing your love of Korea with us all. And thanks for coming on Cookery By The Book podcast.Hooni Kim: Thank you so much for having me, Suzy.Outro: Subscribe over on Cookerybythe Book.com and thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery By The Book.

Meals, Music, and Muses: Recipes from my African American KitchenBy Alexander Smallswith Veronica Chambers Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.Alexander Smalls: Greetings. My name is Alexander Smalls and I have just penned a new book called Meals, Music, and Muses: Recipes from My African American Kitchen. I'm very excited to talk about it.Suzy Chase: I am at a point in this quarantine where I don't even know what day we're on, but what I do know is breakfast continues to be the most important meal of the day. I saw on your Instagram a couple days ago, you made a gorgeous breakfast of eggs, sage sausage, and steel cut oats. Melissa Clark from The New York Times got me so intrigued by savory steel cut oats. Tell me about this breakfast.Alexander Smalls: Well, I'm not one of these people who likes to have my oats sweet. I discovered that oatmeal has really a brilliant flavor when you treat it like you would, say, grits or couscous or grains. I like cooking my oatmeal with stock, vegetable stock, chicken stock, and I like to mix the thick cut oats and the steel, because it creates more texture. When I make my breakfast, I usually cook one half part of steel, one half of thick flake in chicken stock, which takes a while. I like to put a little coconut oil to give it that flavor and I love to serve it with savory protein, like sage sausage and, of course, a nice egg or two to top it off. I also put red pepper flakes and black pepper. So, there's a twist for you.Suzy Chase: Where do you get sage sausage?Alexander Smalls: It's an organic sausage that I buy at Whole Foods. Now, I have made my own, and when I do have the time, essentially taking some ground chicken and putting in my seasonings, everything from Herbes de Provence to lots of fresh sage. That works as well. It just depends on your time.Suzy Chase: Well, we all have time right now, you know?Alexander Smalls: It depends on what's in your refrigerator.Suzy Chase: Yes. This cookbook marries your love of food and music. How is music getting you through the isolation?Alexander Smalls: I rise every morning around 5:00 AM. On my way to the kitchen to make my first cup of Earl Grey tea, I pass by the Sonos and get it going on my Bach radio station or my Spotify and classical music just immediately starts to pipe in. There is something so healing for me. There's nothing like passing through and there's a wonderful Chopin etude going crazy or a wonderful cello piece that sort of invades the air. And now and then a vocalist will come on to singing a song that maybe I sang when I first started studying music, one of the art songs. And I stop and I sing through that and then I just keep going. But this, it's such an incredible companion, music. And so towards the middle of the day, I may switch over to some light jazz by sort of late afternoon. I'm really listening to some bebop and things like that. And then at night, I move into Afropop and it just makes me smile. It makes me feel good.Suzy Chase: Have you checked out D-Nice on Instagram, the DJ?Alexander Smalls: Yes.Suzy Chase: Oh, my gosh.Alexander Smalls: Just unbelievable. Talk about the perfect panacea for these times and then you see your friends names flashing up in the background and you start to go, "Oh, I see you, all right, blah, blah, blah."Suzy Chase: And there's Chaka Khan. Oh, I love him.Alexander Smalls: I love him.Suzy Chase: Yes.Alexander Smalls: It's a wonderful time to really contemplate and feel the love that just comes from strangers and people who want to engage you wherever they find you in their own way. It's a beautiful thing.Suzy Chase: So could you read the most recent passage you wrote on Instagram, which is asmalls777 for anyone who wants to go check it out.Alexander Smalls: Why, yes, yes. It is what it is. We are who we are. Human beings, ill-equipped to manage life without the heartbeat, laughter and joy, the absence of another's embrace, grace and understanding. But be strong, courageous and steadfast. Joy will ultimately find us resilient in the coming mornings, believe.Suzy Chase: Amen. Well, stay strong. Keep posting your dishes on Instagram and take good care.Alexander Smalls: Thanks, Suzy.Part 2:Suzy Chase: You are a self-described social minister, James Beard Award winning chef, restaurateur, author, singer, and tastemaker. What I found so intriguing is you spent decades in Europe as a classically trained opera singer. You have a Grammy and a Tony. Now, how did you pivot over to becoming a chef and restaurateur?Alexander Smalls: You know, that's a really good question and what I would say about that question is I've always been all these things. It was just really about when they were going to take my life over at what particular time. And what I mean by that, is that I grew up essentially with my, and I called them almost my imaginary friends, but my two best friends was food and music. They really described best who I was and how I saw the world. I think that for me, they were the two languages, creative, artistic expressions that suited my personality and kind of mapped my journey in life. The music was essentially the driving force that launched my career and took me to reasonable heights and I received a tremendous amount of satisfaction.Alexander Smalls: But I hit a glass ceiling as a black male opera singer trying to break through to the elite level of classical music. Black women, for the most part, were exotic, and there were quite a few of them, but black men had a very difficult time and often we had to go to Europe, and usually to Germany, to really sing at these sort of vocal factories where they would just abuse your voice. You would sing three, four times a day and probably come back home with a wobble and a vibrato completely out of whack and basically a tired voice.Alexander Smalls: And I had my third audition at the Metropolitan Opera. After my audition, singing two operas, the voice from the audience there, one of the directors said, "Oh, great job. We see the maturity in your voice." I had auditioned for them before and I'd been living in Europe and studying at a Paris opera house. And they said, "Well, we'd love for you to come and work with us and we're doing Porgy and Bess and we'd love you to do chorus and some small roles."Alexander Smalls: Now, what you have to understand is that I already had a Grammy and Tony for the recording of Porgy and Bess. So it was a frightful slap and disappointment. And I went home and decided I was no longer going to pursue opera as a career. And I turned to my second best friend and love, which was food and hospitality. And I decided that I needed to take my living room public and open my own restaurant.Suzy Chase: So, in the book, you dedicate it to your parents, their parents, and your ancestors. I'd love to hear a little bit about your family.Alexander Smalls: Well, I had a wonderful family, loving, supportive, generous. I was very fortunate when I was born, my aunt and uncle, who were living in Harlem, my aunt, a classical pianist, and my uncle, a chef, and had worked in many New York restaurants and had traveled around the world as a Navy man and a Merchant Marine. And he had taught himself Spanish and French.Alexander Smalls: So what they did to enrich my life is probably why life really turned out the way it did. My aunt was my piano teacher. My uncle essentially taught me the art of dreaming and creativity through food. And the two of them, I spent probably more time there, in some cases, than my parents or my sisters, for that matter. But they had me as a young boy reciting Shakespeare, reciting John Donne, Langston Hughes. I was listening to opera, Renata Tebaldi, Birgit Nilsson at such an early age, Leontyne Price, Marian Anderson.Alexander Smalls: This was really the language for me at an early age of seven that carried through and it was very early that I decided that I wanted to be an opera star. And my parents, who were horrified, they knew nobody that looked like me or them, they were frightened beyond measure. I mean they wanted me to become a professional, a doctor, a lawyer, something that was in the realm of understanding. But this idea of a classical musician, an opera singer, and they had nothing to compare that with, but they didn't say no. So this is how I evolved and basically won lots of classical music competitions, got scholarships to go to some of the best schools in the country. And that's how I started my career and my family was right there supporting all of it.Suzy Chase: So, when you think of your Uncle Joe, who was a chef and could also play piano by ear, but he couldn't read a note, do you think about him in your daily life? I feel like you've fulfilled a lot of his dreams.Alexander Smalls: Oh my, yes. You are absolutely right. I mean, I think about them all the time. They are so much a part of my life and they are part of my inspiration. I sit with the ancestors. I'm comfortable with the gifts, the knowledge, the sacrifices that they all made so that I have the platform that I have today and the knowledge and the passion and the belief that I can do anything if I put my mind to it.Suzy Chase: So, speaking of ancestors, Julie Dash's incredible documentary called Daughters of the Dust-Alexander Smalls: Oh, yes.Suzy Chase: ... shows us the Gullah culture of the sea islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia. Tell us a little bit about that almost forgotten culture.Alexander Smalls: What you'll have to understand is that while my father was born in Charleston, at Johns Island, and my grandfather, my grandmother from Buford, South Carolina, and this is all on my father's side. My mother's family was from what we call Upcountry and that would be Spartanburg, that area north of Columbia, north, northwest. I grew up eating very different things than my friends were eating. Their food was more like the foothills of Appalachia, the Piedmont. While our food was very Afrocentric, the influences of the Gullah Geechee people, the outer islands there, was the foundation of farm and culinary that influenced my life.Alexander Smalls: So, my father would, literally while I was still sleeping, put me in the back seat of the car along with my sisters and the caravan would leave Spartanburg for that journey to Charleston and Buford, South Carolina, Green Pond. It was like going, we used to say, to the old country. It was so different. A lot of farm land, but the life in Charleston was very interesting for me. It was very ritualistic. People told stories and they spoke with thick Gullah Charleston Geechee accents, made it very difficult for us as a child to really understand what they was saying.Alexander Smalls: But the food was just something unimaginable. You know, lots of seafood, we were on the coast, lots of stews. One of my favorite dishes is shrimp and okra stew, which in West Africa, it's shrimp and okra soup, stews are soups in Africa versus here they are stews. And this is how I grew up and this is how I understood life and the connection of the old country, which was the Lowcountry to Spartanburg where I lived with my family, my normal life. It was fascinating for me.Suzy Chase: By the end of the 19th century, South Carolina was the largest rice producer in America. The Gullah Geechee people were experts in growing rice, knowing the tides, how they flooded the fields, et cetera. One of the main dishes of the Gullah cuisine is red rice. Tell us about your Charleston Spicy Red Rice.Alexander Smalls: Well, the red rice is really a takeoff of Jollof Rice, which is the famous Jollof Rice that the Nigerians and the Ghanaians fight over all the time, who has the best. Well, interestingly enough, there's really no contest because it was kind of created by the Senegalese.Suzy Chase: Yeah.Alexander Smalls: We're not even in the conversation. But yes, the red rice is something that we grew up on, less spicy, I think, in America than it was in Africa and a main staple. You know, rice built South Carolina. When the slave traders were collecting enslaved people from West Africa, they understood exactly the type of workers that they need and they purposely looked for these rice growers, these people that had the expertise.Suzy Chase: Okay. So I want to love okra, but I just, I don't get it. What do you recommend for us folks that think we don't like okra?Alexander Smalls: Why don't you like okra? Do you know?Suzy Chase: Yeah. It's just slippery.Alexander Smalls: Fibrous?Suzy Chase: Yeah.Alexander Smalls: Slippery? Okay. So, what I recommend always for my friends who say they don't like okra is my okra fries and I fry them in rice flour, crisp, delicate, scrumptious. Now, if you don't like fried okra, something's wrong with you or you're not having it fried right. So I've given you a recipe in Meals, Music & Muses. Hopefully that will help you get over the hump. But fried okra probably is the best approach. The second best approach is charred okra, because that gets out all of the slicky part and it's charred crisp with a broiler on a grill. And again, it's a wonderful accompaniment. I, as a kid would eat okra sandwiches, okay?Suzy Chase: So, what was on it?Alexander Smalls: Well, a fresh sliced tomato, fried okra and something we call in the South, Duke's Mayonnaise, like your Hellman's Mayonnaise here, only better. And sometimes a slice of cheddar cheese. So I want you to try that recipe and tell me about it.Suzy Chase: Okay. So, last night for dinner, I made your recipe for Citrus Whipped Sweet Potatoes on page 86 and your Southern Fried Chicken on page 132. Can you describe-Alexander Smalls: And you did a great job.Suzy Chase: Thank you.Alexander Small...: I saw it on IG and I was so proud of you.Suzy Chase: Oh, thank you. Can you describe these recipes and talk a little bit about shoebox lunches?Alexander Smalls: Well, let me start with shoebox lunches. I had a restaurant in Grand Central Station for 15 minutes. Unfortunately, 9/11 happened and everything went to, I had just opened it. But the name of the restaurant was called The Shoebox. And The Shoebox was in celebration of the shoebox lunch, which was the way in which people of color during segregation made sure that wherever they traveled, they had something to eat.Alexander Smalls: It was very difficult finding black owned restaurants that they could go to. And this was also during the time when a very clever man from the South decided that black travelers needed something called a green book. And that book sort of identified black owned businesses or businesses that were accepting of black business when they traveled. So the shoebox lunch essentially was a discarded shoebox that was filled with food that traveled well, wrapped in waxed paper most of the time, and then tied with twine.Alexander Smalls: That is, this great story, my uncle often would go back and forth from South Carolina to New York, Harlem, on the train. Aunt Laura looked like a white woman. She was very pale and Uncle Joe was very dark, but he spoke French and Spanish and passed himself off as a diplomat. And so they would get to ride in the white car. Once Uncle Joe forgot the shoebox lunch that my grandmother had prepared him. Because I think what he normally did was take the shoebox and then kind of discarded it or put the food in a pocket book or something, a bag. It was too tale-telling for him to walk on there with a shoebox lunch. So my grandmother, realizing that he had forgotten this, runs to the train going, "Son, son, you've forgot your-"Suzy Chase: Oh, no.Alexander Smalls: And the conductor, horrified, threw my uncle out of, he was traveling without his wife, out of the white car and made him go back to [crosstalk 00:19:12].Suzy Chase: Oh, man.Alexander Smalls: My mother used to love to tell that story and so when I opened my restaurant at Grand Central Station, I thought how fitting to do something like that. And often times you would find that fried chicken that you enjoyed the other night, right in that shoebox. It was a perfect thing to travel because it's fried, the oil is like preservatives and you'd find say some corn bread, you'd find some cake, like a pound cake was a great traveler and, of course, there was always cheese sandwiches. And there would be carrots and celery, sort of crudités things. And if you were going to eat them quickly, you might find a few deviled eggs in there and that was kind of like the appetizer to have once you got on the train because they don't keep.Suzy Chase: Now for my segment called My Favorite Cookbook. What is your all time favorite cookbook and why?Alexander Smalls: Well, my all time favorite cookbook is Charleston Receipts. It is a cookbook that is a collection of Charleston Lowcountry recipes that was a constant companion in my home growing up. It really speaks to the food of the Lowcountry and the contributions of African American enslaved people who essentially were the hospitality and culinary practitioners. Because they were not allowed to read and write, recipes were are often collected by the various families and the family name went on them. But you knew in the details who was really making that food.Suzy Chase: Yeah.Alexander Smalls: But you know it really mirrors the roots of where I come from and so it has always been a constant companion in my home and I take great inspiration from it.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?Alexander Smalls: Well, I'm very active on Instagram. I have also page on Facebook that I don't attend to as well as I do Instagram. And then there is alexandersmalls.com which is my website.Suzy Chase: I am so thankful that you wrote this cookbook. Thanks so much for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.Alexander Smalls: Thanks for having me. I've enjoyed my chat with you and I appreciate all of the support and generosity that you've given me. Thanks a lot.Outro: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com and thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast Cookery by the Book.

Faith, Family & the FeastBy Kent & Shannon Rollins Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.Kent Rollins: My name is Kent Rollins and we are so proud and honored to have this cookbook come out, Faith, Family and the Feast. Me and Shannon worked hard for this one. We want people to know that we all need a little more helpings of this Faith, Family and the Feast in this world today.Suzy Chase: We could really use your insight and wisdom right now during this coronavirus pandemic. So out on the trail, naturally, you've been social distancing for years and you've also had to plan your grocery list very, very carefully because you go out on the range miles from civilization for what? Weeks is it?Kent Rollins: Yeah, sometimes five, six weeks at a time. Darling, we've always been people that learned how to improvise. When I was growing up, we were 14 miles from town and you didn't just go off to town and think, "Hey, I'm going to buy this," or "I'm going to buy that," because they might not have it. My mother taught me, "This may call for this in a recipe, but there's something that can take its place and you've already got it." And Shannon used to tell me that. She said, "I think that's why you did so good on Chop Grill Masters is because you learned to improvise and get by with stuff you didn't even know what it was. And it's that way today for folks. I know when in some places that there's stores that... I won't say they're not fully stocked, it's just that they've run out of stock and supply and demand sometimes gets a little of ahead of itself, but there's so many things that you can use to take the place of something else.Kent Rollins: One of the greatest ingredients that I ever found out that could help a lot was mayonnaise. I've put mayonnaise in many a recipe that called for eggs. And it's hard to fry mayonnaise for breakfast. Now, I ain't done that yet. If you're having mayonnaise and bacon, I thank them cowboys might've run me out at camp. But we made a lot of cakes with it, put it in a lot of bread. And that's another deal. We use a lot of sourdough and sourdough starter can take the place of any recipe that calls for milk or buttermilk so it's a time to get in the kitchen darling and just have a good time and we'll all get through.Suzy Chase: Now what about the cheaper cuts of meat? What could we do with those?Kent Rollins: There's a lot of cuts of meat that I'll call them value cuts and you can get some... for better lack of words, I'll just say tougher cuts of meat. And that can be some rounds, some bottom rounds, some top round. A lot of stuff that they might cube and make tender, you can still take that same slice of meat and go ahead and cook that down. Maybe stew it down if you need to make a stew, but it's really good if you can make you some mushroom gravy to put on that and just make a smothered steak. And you can lay that on a piece of that sourdough bread, cover it up with gravy and meat. I think you'd eat like a king.Suzy Chase: So food insecurity has to be weighing on people's minds right , with people losing their jobs and schools shut down and cities are basically closed. So give us five grocery items you think we should be buying if we're struggling financially.Kent Rollins: Well, I think to something that's non-perishable, if you can find them. There's a lot of ways you can use a can of beans and that's not just beans right out of the can. You can mix something with it; whether it be ground turkey, ground pork, ground beef and you can get by. But we're always trying to remember that we always have in our house is some type of protein and I prefer that to be beef, but we take what we can get and most of the time we're very fortunate to have it all. But also coffee, flour, sugar and if you can find dry beans, dry pasta, that stuff will keep forever. It'll stay on the shelf forever. And just today Suzy, there's a lot of folks out there that are looking for something they can make a recipe with and sardines is very plentiful in our little grocery store. So instead of using salmon to make a salmon patty, you can use that same can of sardines. Just make sure you drain that oil off of it good. And if you don't have an egg, put mayonnaise in there. It'll work.Suzy Chase: That's a good tip. So chicken is cheap and we can prepare chicken infinite ways. What should we be looking for in chicken? The whole chicken or pieces?Kent Rollins: Well, if you know how to cut a chicken up, you really, if you're trying to buy the whole pieces, it's cheaper just to buy a whole chicken and cut it up yourself. We usually try to buy chicken when it's on sale because it does freeze well it's... Thighs are usually pretty cheap. If you can buy some thighs and some legs, hey, them things, they make great chicken and dumplings also, which goes back to that sourdough starter and that sourdough bread.Suzy Chase: What are your thoughts on bouillon?Kent Rollins: Bouillon. I've used a lot of powdered stuff in my life and I do love some beef bouillon and chicken both. There's another one out there that I've come to be a fan of and that's con pollo, which is a Spanish version of some chicken broth granules. And it works well too, but you can make your own beef stock with that stuff or chicken stock and it's just good as gold.Suzy Chase: So rice combined with beans is a complete protein. How should we be seasoning this?Kent Rollins: Well, if it's at my house and we're having rice and beans and you can probably find them, I love to use some dried ancho chilies. And all you got to do to any kind of dried pepper like that is either crush it really good and use or just steam it really good, boil it in water and then take it out and run it through the blender or just mash it really well and put it back in there with them beans and rice, and it's better than Taco Bell.Suzy Chase: What do you recommend we cook big batches of to freeze?Kent Rollins: Well, if you can get an old tough cut of meat, and I don't mean old as an old age, but if you can just get an any tough cut of meat or maybe you can get the end of the chuck roast or maybe... there's a part of that on the hindquarter back around there that you can get. Stew is so easy to make and it doesn't have to have all the ingredients that we used to think we have. If you can just get by with throwing an onion in there with that, letting it cook, maybe some of them beans too. Peppers, jalapenos, it freezes really well. Chili's the same way. And you can make that out of anything. We're going to make it with beef or venison or elk, something like that. But it can be made out of turkey, it can be made out of chicken and it also freezes well. But we try to make enough big old pot of pinto beans or something like that, that we can freeze and they'll last us a long time.Suzy Chase: So your cookbook is called Faith, Family and the Feast. In terms of faith and hope, how are you dealing with this scary time?Kent Rollins: Well darling, ever day to us is a holiday. And we get up every morning, we give thanks to the good Lord for the breath we get to take in our lungs and the things that we get to do. I never take them for granted. And I'm not for sure what's going to happen with all this going around. And I know it affects a lot of folks and my heart goes out to each and every one of them. But you have to remember to, it will have a silver lining. I've never seen the darkness stay. The sun always shines. God's going to part them clouds and sunshine will rain down again. There will be smiles on people's faces. You won't be social distance. You be able to get around and visit folks. But Hey, there's a lot of you out there right now that's listening that you're, in a hotel room, you're at an apartment, you're at your house with your family, but you're surrounded with them.Kent Rollins: And that's family and that's friends. And there's phones and there's computers and you can stay in touch. And let's just all be smart, let's be safe, but count them blessings because there are a lot of folks out there putting their life on the line for us. We just need to be mindful of that.Suzy Chase: Well, I'm just so grateful for your advice. Thanks so much.Kent Rollins: Why thank you Suzy. It is a pleasure and God bless you darling, so much.Suzy Chase: You too. For more Cookery by the Book and to see what recipe I made out of this cookbook, head on over to Cookery by the Book on Instagram. Now on with the show. Back in 2015 you were my second cookbook podcast, with A Taste of Cowboy; another cookbook you wrote with your wife, Shannon. I think you and Shannon are the only cookbook authors out there right now, who can bring stories of the American West to life.Kent Rollins: Well, I was raised a ranching cowboy and we lived in a very small rural community that values were always strong and food was always good. And when I decided that I would make this my passion and my lifestyle, I was very blessed to have a beautiful young woman come along and tell me that, "Hey, I think we can do this together." And we try to create something that's in mother nature's kitchen that anybody can do inside or outside. But it's always been such a blessing, Suzy, for us to be able to go on big ranches and cook for working cowboys and see the things we've got to see because they will truly take your breath away from you.Suzy Chase: So a little bit of background on you. You were raised in the Southwest corner of Oklahoma, in a place called Hollis and do you still live there. You've been a cowboy all your life, but at a certain point you changed gears a little bit and started cooking for Elk hunters and you've been cooking ever since. Cowboys have played an important role in America's culinary traditions, dating back to the 1700s. Tell me about your mom. How did she encourage your love of cooking?Kent Rollins: We always told ourselves... I remember momma telling us when we were little, "We may not have much, but by the faith in God and the blessings that we have, we're going to put it on the table and it will nourish our bodies and we will think it is a feast." So I always took great pride in and what mama would try to teach me in the kitchen when I was young to cook. I can remember the first thing I ever made and the recipes in the cookbook, it was old fashioned chocolate cake. And I can remember standing on a stool Suzy, and stirring that batter with one of them old mixers. And I'm thinking, "This is the best thing ever. I like cooking." You can sort of dip your finger in there once in a while and get you a bite. But I didn't know at that time that you had to wash dishes also or I might have quit a little.Kent Rollins: But I seen my mother start with very little and make it into something great. I think that's one reason that I learned to improvise so well because we lived 12 miles from town at the time and if you didn't have it, you wasn't just going to run to the store and get it. You found out something that would work in its place.Suzy Chase: Was she born in Hollis too?Kent Rollins: No, she was born over about 70 miles from here, North of Granite, Oklahoma, or I'd say 60... probably in a little lake, creek community. And then she moved to Amarillo later on in life. And I can always remember telling the story. And this was the way my mother was. She said, "We were so poor that when we moved to Amarillo, they said you had to have shoes to go to school." And she told herself, "I've never had a new pair of shoes." Well, my mother never did go to school neither at that time, but she never let there keep that from her. She ended up getting an education, but it was one of them deals to where she always told me, "You have to put heart into everything you do, whether you're barefooted or got shoes on."Suzy Chase: As we talked about before, I grew up in Kansas and even though I live in New York city, my heart is still in Kansas. I love the Prairie more than any place else in the entire world. Describe stepping out of the cowboy teepee at 5:00 AM in the morning, or I think probably earlier, and the stars are close enough you can touch and the simplicity and beauty of it all.Kent Rollins: It's a great thing to me. And most of our mornings on a ranch do start very early; from 2:45 to four o'clock in the morning, depending on where you're at and what season it is; spring or fall. But when you can step out of that teepee and you're in 300,000 acres and there's no lights, there's no cars, there's no sound but what is the sound of mother nature and maybe horses or cattle stirring around somewhere and the night creatures; the hoot owls, the coyotes, but you when you can look up at them stars and they are so bright, it just sort of gives you a very peaceful feeling that you're in the right place. And I never take for granted any of them mornings that I get to see and I cherish every one of them.Suzy Chase: There aren't any grocery stores out on the range. I imagine you have to be so organized with your grocery list so you don't forget an ingredient, but you also have to be creative with ingredients. Right?Kent Rollins: Yeah. I can remember telling Shannon, one of the first big ranches she cooked on, we were 70 miles from the nearest town. And I told her, I said, "We will make a grocery list and we will make a menu. We're going to be there five weeks." The ranch people there buy the groceries, put it at headquarters when we stock up about once a week. But I said, "We will go over this menu time after time before we ever get there and we'll add three to four days to it because mother nature is really in control here." You don't know if you going to get rained out, blowed out. Something could happen to where you have to stay in four to five days more. So you take extra. So when you get out there and you're on one them recipes and you think, "Man, I ain't got no buttermilk. I wished I had some." Well that's when you learn to do that ol' milk and lemon juice or you can add a little milk and vinegar and you make your own.Kent Rollins: We got pretty close to running out of eggs one morning and we had just enough, but I can remember telling Shannon, I said, "If you'll look across there, it looks like it might be about four or five miles over there, there's a tree." I said, "We'll trot over there and see if there's a bird nest." And she said, "Are you serious?" And I said, "No. We do have enough eggs to get through on this one." But you do learn to what will take the place of some things or you get creative and you think, "Hey, I'm going to add this to this just see what happens." Cowboys were always great taste testers. And if their plate come back clean and they went back for third and fourth helpings, hey, you knew it was a keeper.Suzy Chase: You're known for mastering the historic way of cooking with the chuckwagon. The first time you ate off a chuckwagon was when you were 10. Can you describe this?Kent Rollins: We were across the river over... north of Quanah, Texas and I was just really thinking that I was in a land among giants. All of these old timers were my hero; my dad and all this old cowboys that he'd run around with. And they had a wagon parked out there by this branding pen. And I don't ever remember knowing the cook's name. He was sort of a little, overweight... His old back was pretty well-bent from all the years, I guess, he'd been bending over, picking up iron, but I can remember the smell of the coffee, one of the first things. Coffee was a staple that stayed on all day long, all night. The next morning, everything was there. But when you get in line, there was such an etiquette that went on to be at a place like that. You didn't go under the fly of the wagon, which was the tarp, unless you were asked.Kent Rollins: Everybody got in line, everybody took their hat off. You blessed the food and then you'd eat. And I was thinking, "This guy's a pretty good cook." I know you're not supposed to complain. He wasn't a good a cook as I thought my mother was. And I told my dad later that day that, I said, "This guy, he don't cook as good as momma." And I remember my dad smiling looking at me too, and he said, "He don't look good as momma neither." So, but it was something I learned. No matter what job that cook does, he's going to try to make it, if he's a good cook, edible, very nourishing and hot and on time if he can.Suzy Chase: How do you keep things hot?Kent Rollins: Well, we're pretty well blessed with old Bertha and that's a wood stove we got. She weighs about 345 pounds. And it's got sort of a lip on the backside, a folding tray that comes off, that's off the heat, but it'll still keep something warm for as long as you need it. Or if it's in a Dutch oven too, you can just sit it on a taller trivet, which keeps it off the ground and you just put a little heat under it and you can keep it warm. And I've always told Shannon and I always remembered too, when you're on a ranch and it comes time for that noon meal, you could be from 11:00 to 3:00, most of the time they're pretty good about coming in, but a cow don't own a watch and she don't care if she makes her enough trouble that you don't even get lunch.Suzy Chase: So in 1996 the governor of Oklahoma named you the official chuckwagon cook of Oklahoma. So you have an 1876 Studebaker chuckwagon. What's the story behind this?Kent Rollins: Well, I can remember looking for a wagon when I got through guiding elk hunters one year. I thought, "I think a man might could make a living going back and just cooking for some of them ranches that I used to visit and to work on." And I got to looking for a wagon. And at the time I was looking, they're not real plentiful in some places. And I found an old wagon that was in Spur, Texas and it was in pretty good shape. I ended up having to do some work on it, but it had come out of a barn and was reassembled. The origin was 1876 and it was a Studebaker chuckwagon. Studebakers were known for their great workmanship, but also they had a really, really good seat that had a lot of good iron work to it. And the old seat that was on this wagon had just rotted away.Kent Rollins: The iron was not even salvageable, which is sort of a treasurer if you can get a Studebaker wagon that has the original seat. But we rebuilt some of it, keep working on it. You can't just go down to Jiffy Lube and say, "Hey, I need y'all to change the oil on this and work on it." It's not like that, but it's one of them deals where if you keep it in good working order, it'll pay you back every time you use it. Just like cast iron.Suzy Chase: Are there any other Studebaker chuckwagons out there today or do you have the last one?Kent Rollins: No, there's quite a few really, when you get to looking. I have several friends that have some Studebaker wagons. There's two in Missouri that I know of and they were the Cadillac of wagons. Abraham Lincoln had a Studebaker wagon, a little carriage. When he got to the white house, he requested one. So they have been very popular for a long time.Suzy Chase: You enjoy writing and Shannon is a great editor. Talk a little bit about your process and collaboration.Kent Rollins: Well, I remember when we got together, Suzy, I was telling her all these old ranch stories. We'd be going down the road that we'd been catered in somewhere and I'd be telling her stories and she said, "You're going to write a blog." And I said, "I don't know if I know how to spell that or even know what it is." And she'd get me in there on the computer and I'd be writing these stories. And she'd say, "Okay, just email that to me." She'd be in another room and I had to send it in there and she'd say, "Okay, it's 1100 words. I really like where you're going, but now tell me the story like it really happened. I want to feel it from the heart." And I remember trying to write stuff in school and I made a D in speech class when I was in high school because I didn't like to get up in front of people. I didn't like to really write things down.Kent Rollins: But my dad fought a very long battle with cancer, which finally beat him. Writing was a way that I could deal with it. And when Shannon come along and would tell me, "I want to hear your voice in it. I want people to know they're sitting down right here beside you." And it is something that... I guess an old man told me one time we were cooking for them and then we had to do a little entertainment with it, he said, "You're the only person I know that can burn your food and your years at the same time and we still enjoy it.Suzy Chase: So I read somewhere that Rux Martin, your famed cookbook editor once said, "I'm looking for authors who have a lifetime of experience and have something fresh to say." That is you and Shannon to a T. How did you get hooked up with Rux Martin?Kent Rollins: Well first of all, let me tell you we dearly love Rux and she is a mess. She's funny as she can be. We did Chopped Grill Masters. It's probably been nearly seven, eight years ago now. I can't even remember when it came out. And we were in Shannon's hometown in Elko, Nevada. And we were sort of having a watch party. It'd come out on a Sunday. And the next day, the phone rang off the hook. There was producers calling here, there, right and left and wanting you to do something. But we had a message from a lady in New York city, Janice Danu, who was a book agent. So I called her and she was from originally, from the Nashville area and she sort of understood what I was and what it was sort of about. And she said, "Do you have a cookbook?" And I said, "We have a self-published book, ma'am, a paperback." She said, "What you need is one of them hardbound, full-color cookbooks. Because," she said, "I know it would be a treasure."Kent Rollins: And I remember she laughed at me. I said, "Ma'am, I can't afford one of them." And she said, "You don't have to." And we got hooked up with Rux the very first time that we went to New York City to present the proposal. And I told Shannon when we walked out of there, I said, "That Rux Martin is good people. She understands what this is about and I think she will do us a great job." I'm glad they got the bid. It's always been a blessing. We've laughed back and forth with Rux for a long time.Suzy Chase: I'm going to read the first part of your touching dedication at the beginning of this cookbook you wrote, "We dedicate this book to the little places; the ones you may have traveled through going somewhere else. Where Sunday socials after church offer not only five-star dining, but more importantly, fellowship." We don't talk much about fellowship much anymore. I'm curious to hear how fellowship shows up in your life.Kent Rollins: Well, it was always a central place was at a table, when we were growing up. You gathered family around that table. You had great food at that table. There was conversation at that table. Now when you go places, you go to a table, people seem to have a cell phone more in their hand than they do a fork. And I think it's time the world come back to a place to where, "Hey, let's sit down, let's visit, let's bless the food and let's talk about family. Let's talk about the good things in life." And fellowship is not only just around the table, we've done it around so many old camps that we were in, visiting with Cowboys and everything else, but the world could solve a lot of problems and be a better place if everybody just took time to sit down at a table and visit.Suzy Chase: A Cowboys day starts early and ends late. What are your evenings like after dinner, out on the range?Kent Rollins: Well, a lot of times the evening meal would be at 6:00 and especially if it's in the spring of the year, when it's light till 7:00, 7:30 anyways. So you get the dishes done and everybody's sort of just plumbed through by... we'll say 7:00. And it's really nice just to pull up a chair and me and Shannon can sit there. And sure, there's a lot of visiting that we do with cowboys, but to be able to just take that day in and say, "This was another great day above the grass that God has given us." But to hear the sounds, to watch a sun go down. It didn't go down behind a tree, it didn't go down behind a building. You got to watch it disappear, plum out of sight. The colors that are painted in them skies out there are some of the greatest things I've ever seen in life. And it just sort of takes your breath away every time you do get to see one.Suzy Chase: So jerky is a road warrior's survival snack. How do you make jerky without a dehydrator?Kent Rollins: Well, I can remember when we were young, especially if we raised our own beef. And at times, daddy and them processed our own beef. But there would always be those pieces that momma would think, "Hey, these would make stew meat," or, "These might make something. They're a little tough." But I can remember her making jerky the very first time in an old oven that... Well, it was a antique before she had it. But she always cracked that door just a little to let some of that moisture out of there. And the aroma that come through the house was some of the best thing ever. Because we hadn't been to stores and had jerky. We didn't know they had truck stops hardly.Kent Rollins: So we thought that was the greatest things; that my mother had probably invented one of the best things in the world. But as we got to going around and traveling, we didn't know they sold it in little cellophane packages that you could buy it. But you do not have to have a dehydrator if you'll follow this recipe in the book because it's so easy. The secret really is letting that meat marinade a long time, which is at least 24 hours. And hey, it is some good eating. And you can spice it up if you'd like change it, put more red pepper flakes in there. And it has got me down the road many a day.Suzy Chase: Earlier this week I made your recipe for green onion and ham scallop potatoes on page 136. Can you describe this recipe and what is the secret ingredient?Kent Rollins: This is something we always had on our table at any special occasion, especially... I would say most of the time it was Easter. But my mother would throw this out there and man, oh man, it'd be good. But Shannon, she sort of took this to a new level. My mother really never did put ham in hers and when Shan did this... but the secret ingredient to me, Suzy, is the dip. The French onion dip that goes in there makes this so much more creamier and the flavors that it brings out... This is a happy meal that don't come in a sack and to me, I don't need nothing else. If I've got a spoon and one of these in front of me, I can eat the whole panful.Suzy Chase: Totally, because sometimes scallop potatoes can be bland, but I think the dip really brings some zing to it.Kent Rollins: Oh it does. And when you can add the mozzarella, because my mother at times, wouldn't put cheese on hers and sometimes she did. It was mostly a milk and flour substance going along with salt and pepper and some onion. But when you take the ham, the green onion and then you blend that dip in there with it again, it is so good.Suzy Chase: And it's a full meal. You don't need anything else.Kent Rollins: Yeah. If you just sit the pan down in front of you and get you four or five big spoons and have everybody gather around, you're in pretty good shape.Suzy Chase: Now for my segment called My Favorite Cookbook. Aside from this cookbook, what is your all time favorite cookbook and why?Kent Rollins: I would say our first cookbook, A Taste of Cowboy, because it was the first one that we had put out, but my sister and... I guess I can call it a cookbook. We were mentioning Cindy before she was born of cerebral palsy and we ended up... Momma got her a typewriter. And an uncle of ours fixed her a cover that went on the keyboard and my sister could type with her thumb. And she typed recipes that my mother, she'd pin up there and she'd type them. And they were just in a little green binder Suzy. And it was just called Cindy's Recipes. And these were things that had been around our house forever, but also aunts, neighbors, people that had come to family reunions, stuff that just... you knew was a cherished dish. And to have that and still have it now that my sister's created it, it is a treasure.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web, YouTube and social media.?Kent Rollins: On that what thing I call the Google, you can just type in Kentrollins.com and it'll come up. We have a great website and Shannon has took me a long way into the modern age. We have a great YouTube channel and it's just Cowboy Kent Rollins as well. We were approaching a million subscribers now. We have a video that comes out every Wednesday at 2:30 central. And this is really where the title of the cookbook sort of stemmed from was from our YouTube family because we have such a large faith-based veteran America-supporting bunch of people that I've ever known. And I'm touched Suzy by the emails we get, the letters we get.Kent Rollins: We've got flags that have flew over aircraft carriers that service men and women have sent us. It's very touching. When I pay them tribute at the end of every video, I do it because I honor them, but they honor us so much in the sacrifices that they made. But when they send us something like that, if you want to see a cowboy cry... They have wrote some letters that touched my heart so much. We are proud to be on social media. We're there on Instagram, we're there on Twitter and all of it is just Cowboy Kent Rollins. It'll get you there.Suzy Chase: As your mother used to say, "In life and in cooking, we all require love and someone to ride along with." This has been so wonderful, Kent. Thanks so much for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast again.Kent Rollins: Well Suzy, you are like family to us, honey. And you are welcome in our camp anytime.Outro: Subscribe over on Cookerybythebook.com and thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

Open KitchenInspired Food For Casual GatheringsBy Susan Spungen Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City sitting at her dining room table talking to cookbook authors.Susan Spungen: Hi, I'm Susan Spungen and I'm here to talk about my latest cookbook, Open Kitchen.Suzy Chase: So here in New York City we just ended week two of the coronavirus quarantine. In Open Kitchen you have some recipes scattered throughout the cookbook that you call projects. Since many of us have lots of time on our hands right now, I thought you could walk us through your French beef stew recipe on page 101, and I bet we have these ingredients on hand.Susan Spungen: So, yeah, personally I've been definitely stocking up on the basic mirepoix vegetables, which is onion, carrot, celery, because I want to be ready to make soups and stews at a moment's notice. And I've been actually buying mushrooms too. So even if you can't get fancy hen of the woods mushrooms from your farmer's market right now or anywhere else, any kind of mushrooms are great in this stew. And you just need to get your hands on a nice big chuck roast and you're ready to go to make this really comforting stew that even if you're not going to be serving it to guests, you can share it with your family and you could also divvy it up and freeze some for later, which is what I've been doing a lot of batch cooking lately.Suzy Chase: So I started making this, this morning and I don't have pearl onions. White onions are okay?Susan Spungen: Look, you can always make substitutions, especially in … Like this. It has to have that onion flavor in it, but if you don't have pearl onions or can't even get a bag of frozen pearl onions, then just chop up a white onion and put that in in the beginning.Suzy Chase: Could I use stew meat too?Susan Spungen: Yeah, you could. I wrote the recipe to cook the meat in larger pieces, like if you got one big chuck roast. But if you buy stew meat, that's the same cut of meat just cut in smaller pieces. Either one is fine, a big roast or cut into, I think, four pieces I have it in the recipe. Or you can just use stew meat.Susan Spungen: The reason I did it with a big chuck roast and bigger pieces is because I just found the final product to be moister and juicier while you still got the flavor into the sauce from searing three or four bigger pieces of meat and then you pull them apart at the end and the sauce sort of bathes all of those wonderful craggy surface areas with delicious sauce. If you can just get stew meat that works perfectly well. Because when you cook it for two-and-a-half, three hours, it will get tender no matter what.Suzy Chase: So talk a little bit about the demi-glace concentrate.Susan Spungen: Yeah, that's something I always have in my kitchen and I think it came from working at one point in my career with a couple of classically trained chefs. I learned how to actually make demi-glace from scratch in giant kettles full. And it's just a really invaluable ingredient, I think, for making flavorful sauces. There are so many things you can do without that, making a quick pan sauce, whatever, but demi-glace is when you've cooked down veal and beef bones for many, many hours, strained it, reduce it again. It's rather labor intensive although it could be a once a year project for anybody that likes doing those kind of things.Susan Spungen: You can get some really good high quality demi-glace concentrates and it's a very hard jelly, because that is from all the collagen from the bones, and it really adds … A big spoonful of that in something like the French beef stew, it just adds so much richness and flavor that would be hard to get otherwise because a canned beef stock or a box beef stock, you might as well not even … In my opinion, it's just salt water. It doesn't really have a lot of flavor and it's mostly salt. So I tend to avoid beef stock in a box.Suzy Chase: So just quickly going down the ingredients, I think everyone has these in their kitchen. It's beef, butter, olive oil, garlic, red wine, beef stock, bay leaves. So easy. So you've had a lot of practice making this dish both in your real life and professional life. Can you tell us the story behind the recipe?Susan Spungen: Well, I have had a lot of practice with boeuf bourguignon, which this is loosely based on the classic French recipe. I worked on a little move called Julie & Julia, and this was the recipe that we cooked the most throughout the three months that I worked on Julie & Julia. It just came up again and again and again in different scenes and it was just to me the quintessential Julia Child dish. And it's so delicious and so good that I didn't mind making it over and over again.Susan Spungen: I've tweaked it and perfected it and made it my own by making the … It's a little more vegetable heavy than the classic. I roast the vegetables on the side and throw them into the sauce at the end rather than stewing them along with the meat the whole time because I really like … It makes it a little more vegetable forward. I found when I eat this dish, I like the sauce and I like the vegetables. I don't really need to eat a lot of the meat and I'm not a huge meat eater, so I like it but I don't want to eat a big, big portion of it. That's why I've tried to balance out the meat with a little more vegetable.Suzy Chase: Did you ever meet Julia Child?Susan Spungen: I did. I did. Back in my Martha Stewart Living days, when she was working on a book and companion TV series called Baking with Julia, Martha Stewart was one of the people that she had come up to Cambridge, along with lots of other different pastry chefs from all over the country on different days. Our day came and, of course being the food editor, I was the one down in the basement making the wedding cake and Martha was on TV talking about it. But it was a great experience.Susan Spungen: Of course now to say that I've been in that kitchen that's now preserved in amber in the Smithsonian is cool. I had a real experience there with Julia and our shoot went over two days, so she actually cooked us dinner in her kitchen. We ate out on her patio, it was summertime. The night that we stayed over in Cambridge and then we went back and filmed the second day. That was pretty cool.Susan Spungen: I had met her at a couple of different events. I actually went to her 80th birthday celebration, which was a big deal at the Rainbow Room. That was when I had first started working at Martha Stewart Living. And then about 10 years later we did this book project with her. And then I met her a couple other times too, at the IACP Awards I remember seeing her. I got an award for the Martha Stewart's Hors d'Oeuvres Handbook, which I was the co-author of, and on my way up to the stage to accept the award, she said … Should I do my imitation? She said, "It's a wonderful book. I got it at Costco."Suzy Chase: Were those awards the year that they had them in San Antonio?Susan Spungen: No. I don't remember but I've never been to San Antonio so it wasn't there. I can't remember which city it was, it might have been Portland. I'd have to look. I think it was 1999 that we won that award. I'd have to go back and do research to know which city it was in, but it was not San Antonio.Suzy Chase: Because I think the year before I went to the IACP Awards in San Antonio, and she was there. The room just stopped. When she walked in everyone was like, "My God, Julia's here."Susan Spungen: Yeah, I think she was one of the founders of IACP. She used to go every year. And then I saw her out here once in the Hamptons for the James Beard Awards. So I think those are all the times that I had met her.Suzy Chase: I love it. So on your Instagram you wrote, "Some good things. I'm achieving my goal of eating dinner earlier and it's getting lighter later by the day. It's hard not to find one's self happy to feel spring coming despite this world we're living in right now. Cooking is truly getting me through all of this."Susan Spungen: The truth is I've been having … I've barely been enjoying cooking. I always enjoy cooking, that's why I've made it my career, but I have been … I think a lot of people who cook already especially have been finding a lot of solace in cooking right now. And it's just the act of cooking, it's not about cooking for others, although it probably is about cooking for whoever's in your household. But I know there are people who are quarantining alone who are enjoying cooking too.Susan Spungen: But I just find that I've had a few strategies that have been getting me through. Which is really just about cooking more than you need for any one particular meal. I've been cooking a big pot of beans and then I'll make a soup with some of the brothy beans that are there and maybe a chili or maybe just rice and beans or incorporate the beans into a salad, or I might freeze some of them. I'll cook more grain than I need, like freekeh, and then I'm really trying hard not to let anything go bad.Susan Spungen: So we've had some planned dinners and then we find ourselves with a surplus of already prepared ingredients so we do what we call scrounging, where we just put together meals based on what's in the fridge. My husband and I sometimes just eat different things. It's like, "Let's scrounge," and we each make our own thing. We're not going hungry that's for sure. Definitely eating less meat than I normally do even though we have meat.Susan Spungen: Tonight we're having fish. We're here in Long Island and the fish market was full of wonderful fresh fish, so that seems like a treat right now. They had gorgeous, gorgeous halibut from Nova Scotia today, so that's what we're having for dinner.Suzy Chase: I thank you for your cooking inspiration and take good care.Susan Spungen: Thank you. You too.Suzy Chase: Cooking makes you happy and it's a way you can make other people happy, but you didn't start out cooking. You first started out as an art student, then you moved on to become the dessert chef at Coco Pazzo on the Upper East Side, then founding food editor of Martha Stewart Living and I can't leave out culinary consultant on numerous movies, including Julie & Julia and Eat Pray Love. You've been called the queen of food. This cookbook is called Open Kitchen. What does Open Kitchen mean to you?Susan Spungen: Well, when I was coming up with what's the hook for this book, after going through a few different ideas, I settled on this concept of an open kitchen. I loved the double meaning of that phrase. I had just finished renovating … I should say building a new kitchen in a newly renovated home and of course we wanted a big beautiful open kitchen.Susan Spungen: I never really even had a very good kitchen before, so I really started entertaining in earnest when I had this home. Entertaining more in a more grownup way. And I realized that when you have this open kitchen space and your friends are literally walking right into it and most likely hanging out there while you're getting ready to eat dinner or lunch, whatever it may be, they can see everything you've been doing and working on. It made me want to get ahead even more than I already naturally did. And when I say get ahead I mean it's really about prepping and being ready. If there's something I can do a day ahead, I'm going to do it. If I can do it two days ahead I'm going to do it. So it just streamlines the cooking of the meal and also lessens the mess in the kitchen that everyone's going to walk into.Susan Spungen: And then the other side of that meaning is just having it be a place to welcome friends and family and guests into your home and wrap them up in nurturing food. It's an open kitchen in that sense as well.Suzy Chase: And this whole cookbook is all about your get ahead cooking philosophy.Susan Spungen: It is.Suzy Chase: So in the introduction you wrote, "A few years ago I came across the word sprezzatura."Susan Spungen: Yup, that's perfect.Suzy Chase: Really? My God. You wrote, "Not only did I love the way it sounded, I was intrigued by its translation which, simply put, means studied nonchalance." What is it about that word that caught your attention?Susan Spungen: Well, like I said, I just love the way it sounded, but when I heard what it meant I thought, that's exactly what I strive for when I cook. I don't want things that seem fussy but, at the same time, I am willing to put some work in and I think you have to be willing to put a little bit of work in when you make good food. Let's face it, you have to shop, you have to plan your menu, you have to cook the food and pay some attention to how you're doing that. But the more you do it, the better you get at it.Susan Spungen: And I want it to feel nonchalant even if I make something super delicious. Maybe it's an amazing dessert that I spent a little bit of time making, it's just sitting there on the counter during dinner and people can't … Their mouths are watering waiting for it. But they didn't see me executing that. So it just feels very nonchalant. What can I say? I really want it to always feel nonchalant and I also don't want my guests to feel put upon. That's why I want to be done in the kitchen. You'll never find people saying to me, "Can I help? Are you sure you don't need help?" I think people only say that when they see you struggling.Suzy Chase: Yeah, I love that. Because I'm always like, "She needs help."Susan Spungen: Yeah, exactly.Suzy Chase: So you hear about chefs and you hear about home cooks, but this is a new one for me, professional home cook. What sets the professional home cook apart from the ordinary cook, which is what I am?Susan Spungen: Right, well I'm glad you picked up on that because for years I worked in restaurants, I worked in catering, I still work as a food stylist and a recipe developer, but as a recipe developer I actually do work at home. So I have the skills of a professional but I have the mindset of a home cook. So it's just maybe kicking it up a notch. I create recipes for home cooks, but I'm doing it from a professional's point of view. So I really have to get inside the head of a home cook and realize what their limitations are, but also I want people to have something to aspire to. And, like I said right on the cover, I want people to be inspired.Susan Spungen: And that's what I keep hearing from people over and over again about this book, how they feel inspired. Of course that is so gratifying. I'm so happy to hear it. Because that's what I want to do. I'm not about solving your every day problems. I'm about making you want to really spread your wings and fly.Suzy Chase: Can you talk a little bit about how the book is organized?Susan Spungen: So I start with simple starters and they are, as I say, simple. Really, really easy low effort things that you can put out for people to nibble on while … We call them nibbles in our house. Some of them are make ahead, like the dukkah crostini. I actually have this dukkah, which is a spice and nut and seed blend on hand from another recipe, and I thought, wow, that would be so good in crostini, which are those skinny breadsticks. That's a wonderful recipe.Susan Spungen: That requires making ahead but there are other things that are super spontaneous, like grilled peas in the pod, edamame-style. You could buy a quart of English peas, the season is coming up really soon. I'm too lazy to shell peas myself so I just throw them on the grill in one of those grill baskets and char them and the peas inside don't need much cooking. And then people can just nibble on them, they just have a little olive oil and lemon zest and flaky salt on top.Susan Spungen: Or there's a beautiful avocado tahini dip which I put out with all kinds of raw or slightly pickled vegetables. I think you get the idea. That's simple starters.Susan Spungen: And then I break the centerpieces, which I think is something you should actually start with when you're planning a menu. What's the main event of the meal? I have centerpieces that are meat, poultry, fish and shellfish and then vegetarian or nearly. Because I don't like to leave out my vegetarian friends and my vegetarian readers because I know there are a lot of them. And I myself eat vegetarian part of the time because I enjoy it. The whole book is very vegetable forward. So the nearly vegetarian chapter might have a little thing you can remove, like a little bit of pancetta for flavor, still going to be great without it.Susan Spungen: And then I have salads, which I think as side dishes because I like to have a lot of room temperature things when I do a menu because it doesn't really matter if things are hot. So I love a salad as a side dish. And then I have a vegetable chapter, a starchy side chapter and then a really big and robust dessert chapter.Suzy Chase: So some Saturdays I wake up and think, all I want to do is spend the day in the kitchen cooking and listening to NPR. Tell us about your project recipes that are sprinkled throughout the cookbook.Susan Spungen: I like to warn people. I don't want people to think, wow, that is really a lot of work, I wasn't expecting that. So I wanted to label them as projects and also as people, like you said, they sometimes want to embrace a project. I would say that all in all the projects are things that are really great things that can be made almost completely ahead. It just breaks down that way. A lot of things that are easy are more last minute things, but a lot of the things that are projects are things that you can make a couple days ahead of time and then serve the last minute, like the French beef stew, which I just saw someone making the other day and they loved it.Susan Spungen: Osso buco sugo with orange gremolata, this is one of my absolute favorite things to make ahead. It's a braise so it takes a good couple hours and it has a veal osso buco, you could use beef shanks if you didn't want to use veal. It makes the most delightful pasta sauce. You can make this completely ahead of time. All you have to do is boil the pasta and make the gremolata at the last minute. The vegetable lasagna that I mentioned before is another project, but I think there's about five or six throughout the book and they're all centerpieces.Suzy Chase: You approach cooking with an artist's sensibility, layering flavors, textures and colors. And one section of this cookbook that might be the definition of that is your toast section. Like your cassoulet toast recipe, can you describe this?Susan Spungen: I really, from the very beginning, wanted to have this specific toast section and I wanted it laid out the way that you see it on a double page spread, so that you could see the … Be inspired by the array of things that you could do. Depending on how good a cook you are you might not need a recipe for some of these and they also might inspire recipes of your own.Susan Spungen: The cassoulet toast I'd say is one of the more complex of the toasts, because you actually have to cook something. And when I first approached the book I wanted to do a cassoulet recipe because I thought that's such a great make ahead wonderful winter dish. And then I realized there is just no way to really streamline a cassoulet without really compromising on what it is. I just thought, what if I took the flavors of cassoulet and made them into a delicious hearty toast? You just have to caramelize onions, that's the most complex part of it, and then you take can of big butter beans and then you buy a duck confit leg at the supermarket, which if you look for it it's usually there with the bacon. D'Artagnan makes a great one and a couple other ones. It's almost a real shortcut to the very delicious flavors of cassoulet. And you could serve this actually as a lunch with a green salad, it would be fantastic.Suzy Chase: In your go to pantry list on page 14, you included preserved lemons. I bought my first jar of preserved lemons a few weeks ago. So what is your favorite way to use preserved lemons in a dish?Susan Spungen: Yeah. I think also mentioned that I also love preserved lemon paste, which I think is even easier. Now what you have to remember is that preserved lemons are preserved with salt. So what you're getting is … You actually only use the rind. If you're getting a jar of whole preserved lemons, you don't actually use the pulp. Just scrape out the pulp, which is very almost nonexistent by the time they're preserved. The pip part has been salted and it takes three months to make them, that's why I don't make them myself, I buy them.Susan Spungen: They have a very strong flavor, a little bit like Indian lime pickle if you've ever had that as a condiment, similar. It's quite strong, you don't need a lot and you should always hold back on salting other parts of the dish until you've put them in because they contribute a lot of salt. So I like putting them into dressings and vinaigrettes. I love just a little bit of that preserved lemon paste in maybe a vinaigrette that you might put over fish. Because I love fish with something really zingy. Super zingy, salty, absolutely delicious.Suzy Chase: Over the weekend I made your recipe for clams with chorizo and smoked paprika on page 155. Can you describe this recipe?Susan Spungen: Sure, and thank you for giving me page numbers. Very helpful. I think I might have seen that on Instagram.Suzy Chase: Yes.Susan Spungen: Clams are something that people might walk past in the supermarket or the fish store, and don't underestimate them. Because when you cook clams they release this incredibly powerful flavorful broth that is a little bit of garlic, a little bit of white wine and some clams and you have a flavor bomb. Yeah, I cook this on the stove but I have also done the same thing on a gas grill or a live fire grill. If you have a big cast iron pan you could cook these outside on your grill.Susan Spungen: These are Portuguese flavors really, mixing the idea of a spicy sausage like chorizo with clams. That's a very Spanish and Portuguese flavor combo. And how many ingredients do we have here? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Eight ingredients, quite a short list. Some cherry tomatoes, they help break down into a delicious sauce, and then just grill or toast some yummy bread and you have a great meal that you can stick in the middle of the table and have a messy feast with a couple of friends.Suzy Chase: And you can dip your bread in that broth.Susan Spungen: So good. Or let me give you another idea, another way to serve this, put a big piece of bread in four bowls and then spoon this over and let people eat the clams and then eat that soaked bread. Delicious.Suzy Chase: My gosh, okay, I'm going to write that down. Now for my segment called My Favorite Cookbook. Aside from this cookbook, what is your all time favorite cookbook and why?Susan Spungen: Well, lately I've been thinking about some of the books that I've kept over the years and I don't know if it's definitely my only all-time favorite, but a book that had a big influence on me early in my career was a book called Cucina Fresca written by Evan Kleiman, who's now on the radio, and Viana La Place.Suzy Chase: I love her.Susan Spungen: Yeah, and they had a series of books but Cucina Fresca was the first. And it was a revelation to me at the time because the recipes were so straightforward and simple and they were really based on mostly Tuscan ideas, and that's a sensibility that really appeals to me where less is more and true farm to table cooking. It just always inspired me. It taught me how to be simple.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?Susan Spungen: Well, my website is my name, so just type in susanspungen.com or just Susan Spungen, it should come right up, and that's S-P-U-N-G-E-N, I'm used to always spelling my name because it's a little hard to figure out. And on social media, same thing, @susanspungen on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, everything.Suzy Chase: Thanks so much for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.Susan Spungen: Thanks for having me.Outro: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com and thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

Dining On A Dime Cookbook By Tawra Kellam and Jill Cooper Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book, with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table talking to cookbook authors.Tawra Kellam: Hello. I am Tawra from LivingOnADime.com, the author of the Dining on a Dime Cookbook where you can eat better, spend less. I wrote it with my mom, Jill. We have sold over 500,000 copies, so we are considered a bestselling cookbook now, which is pretty cool.Suzy Chase: You are a friend in my head. I've been such a fan of your Facebook and YouTube videos for over a year now. I even went out and bought your cookbook, Dining on a Dime. So, supermarket shortages and job losses because of the Coronavirus pandemic mean lots of us are changing things up to make the best of scarce supplies and tighter budgets. You know a thing or two about leaving the grocery store with only necessities and we need your wisdom now more than ever. So let's kick things off with a little background about you and your mother. You are frugal before frugal was cool. Talk a little bit about that.Tawra Kellam: Well, we were frugal out of necessity. My mom was a single mom. My dad left my mom with $35,000 of debt that her name was on, so she had to pay it. She worked three jobs, got it paid off, and then we became sick with chronic fatigue syndrome and I also got fibromyalgia. My mom, my brother and I all got what we thought was the flu and we never got better over 30 years ago. So we did it out of necessity because my mom only had $500 a month to raise two teenagers. Even back in the late 80s, early 90s, $500 a month was not anything. I mean, that was most people's grocery bill, and that was our entire budget. We didn't have food stamps, we didn't get any assistance like that. That was just the $500 a month that we had. And right before we got sick, my mom had sold a business that her and my dad had started and that's what we were living on. Actually, for three of those years, we lived off of $8,000 total, not each year, but $8,000 got us by for three years.Tawra Kellam: So that's kind of where this came out of. I was on frugal living groups when I was pregnant and on bedrest with my first child and everybody kept asking me questions, "Well, how do I save money on this?" And I always had an answer for them. So that's kind of how it got started.Suzy Chase: How did the Dining on a Dime cookbook come about?Tawra Kellam: So while I was still in that same bed rest, I was reading The Tightwad Gazette by Amy Dacyczyn, really kind of the first book of its kind. Miserly Moms was out too, but Amy's was the first big so to speak book on how to save money. I was reading her book, I was like, "Man, we do all this stuff and more." And at the very end of her book, she said everybody keeps asking her to write a cookbook but she didn't like to cook, and she knew that in order to write a good frugal cookbook, it needed to be really comprehensive and she didn't want to do that. And just right then and there, I thought, well I can do that. Well, did I know what it would turn into? When I told my husband, he was like, "Oh, she's going to make a nice little collection of recipes that we'll give to the family or whatever" He had no idea.Suzy Chase: So on page eight of the cookbook, you have some useful basics of frugal living. One suggestion is don't get discouraged. I feel like we're all discouraged right now.Tawra Kellam: Well, don't be. Here's the thing, I know it's bad right now, but I'm a suck it up kind of a person. A lot of people say I'm too harsh, but the reality is, Americans are extremely fortunate. I mean, we are extremely fortunate. I went to the grocery store just yesterday... as of yesterday, it'll have been two weeks since this whole thing kind of started, and there is a lot, still a lot of food on the shelves. There may not be toilet paper, there may not be flour, there may not be sugar, but there's still a lot of food on the shelves and we really need to be thankful for what we do have.Suzy Chase: So for the folks that have lost their jobs, what is one thing they can do immediately to cut their grocery bill?Tawra Kellam: Stop spending it on junk. So immediately, the majority of alcohol consumption needs to stop. That's a huge expense. If you want to have a glass of wine or something, that's fine, but really need to cut those alcoholic beverages out, they're super expensive. The next thing, sodas. All of those beverages that are like soda and kids' juice boxes, all those kinds of things, that's another huge expense. The convenience food items that don't have any nutritional value, all the fruits, snacks, jello type things, all of those don't have any nutritional value. So go for things that are like granola bars. Even Pop-Tarts are better than some things. I know there's people out there saying uhhhhhh, but if that's all you have on your grocery store shelf, a Pop-Tart is like eating a doughnut for breakfast. That's really better than nothing. So go for things that will fill you up and not just things that are empty calories.Suzy Chase: Another suggestion is to drink water with your meals. Talk a little bit about that.Tawra Kellam: So I was really shocked when I went to the grocery store that all the bottled water was completely sold out. I was like, "What is-Suzy Chase: Why is that?Tawra Kellam: I don't know, because here in Colorado, we have really good water here in Colorado. So I'm like, "What is the reason for that?" There's literally no reason in Colorado unless someone has an allergy to chlorine or something. I get that. But here's the thing, 98% of the country and 98% of people can drink tap water. I get it. I have lived in Texas and Kansas where I literally had bad water that I could not drink. I get it, but that is not the majority of the country and those are not the people that I'm talking about. Now, if you just don't like the taste of tap water, one of the best tips that my mom has used for years is she will fill up a jug and let it sit overnight in a refrigerator with the lid off and the chlorine evaporates. The number one reason people don't like tap water is because of the chlorine taste. Then you don't have the chlorine taste in the water anymore.Tawra Kellam: So that's the number one tip for making water taste good without adding anything, is just to leave it sit overnight in the refrigerator with a top off and the chlorine will evaporate.Suzy Chase: You make it a habit of cooking what you have on hand. I read that you make 10 meals on a regular basis. Can you describe this?Tawra Kellam: Okay. So people make meal planning way too complicated. As a matter of fact, we've kind of had problems with our website because people ask for meal plans all the time and I'm like, "I don't do meal planning." My mom wrote a whole bunch of meal plans that we have on the website, and they're great, but really mom and I don't meal plan. What we do is we cook from what we have on the pantry. So I keep a consistent supply of things in my pantry, my refrigerator, my freezer. So I always buy chicken, I always buy roasts, I always buy green chilies, I always buy applesauce, peaches, pears, those kinds of things. Then instead of planning a meal for the week, I plan by the day on what I have on hand and what I need to use up. So let's say I have cucumbers that are getting ready to go bad. Well, I would make my side dish around those cucumbers instead of what I had planned because I need to use up those cucumbers.Tawra Kellam: So what I do is I have 10 meals that I consistently make all the time, or variations of those meals, and I always keep those ingredients on hand. Eating the same food three times a month really is not that often. And I throw in a new recipe once or twice a month. So it's really two to three times a month, you're eating the same thing. Kids love tacos. It's okay to eat tacos twice a month. We love green chili. It's okay for us to eat green chili two or three times a month. People think that you're going to get tired, but what I do is I rotate a fall winter menu and a spring summer menu. So I basically have 20 separate meals divided up between the four seasons, so spring and summer, and then fall and winter, and then I just rotate around those. My family doesn't complain, they love it, and it keeps my dinner planning easy. I don't spend an hour a week planning meals and I really don't spend more than 20 minutes cooking dinner every night.Tawra Kellam: And usually, more nights than not, it's like literally five minutes cooking dinner, because what I'll do is I'll make a roast on Monday, which takes me three minutes to prepare, and then I'll save that roast and use it Monday as roast and potatoes and carrots. Then on Tuesday I'll make beef and noodles. So it takes as long as five minutes to boil the noodles. Then the next day I'll make beef stew out of it, which takes me five minutes to cut up the carrots and potatoes and throw it all in the pot. So really, I have chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia, I do not have the energy to be spending half an hour or an hour in the kitchen. I just can't do that.Suzy Chase: What's green chili?Tawra Kellam: It's a Colorado thing, but it's really good. It's probably my favorite. I would say it's probably my favorite main dish. So it's chicken broth, onions, green chilies and garlic, and then salt and pepper of course. And then you just simmer it and you thicken it with corn starch and scoop out the meat and put it in the middle of a tortilla, wrap up the tortilla, like a burrito, and then you put the sauce over the top and you serve it with sour cream and lettuce and cheese. It's really yummy.Suzy Chase: That sounds amazing.Tawra Kellam: It's really good, yeah. It's in our Dining on a Dime cookbook. I won't give you the page number because we have several versions out there, but it's in our Dining on a Dime cookbook and on our website livingonadime.com.Suzy Chase: What are some good ideas for sweet treats that we can make from pantry items?Tawra Kellam: So you can make pretty much anything. Right now, everybody's going crazy on our Facebook page over our fudge brownies. That recipe is at Living on a Dime too. So many people have been saying over and over, "I always thought I had to have a brownie mix to make good brownies." They were like, "Your brownies are delicious." So, in Dining on a Dime, what we did was we went through and we tested every single recipe to make sure that it had ingredients that were on hand. Most people have all the time, easy to get cheap ingredients. So we have, how to make a white cake. We have, how to make fudge brownies. We have, how to make donuts. Any of those basic recipes, homemade tortillas, all of those, even taco seasoning, homemade taco seasoning, homemade ranch dressing, all of those are in there. We have people, they said, "My family will not eat any ranch dressing but yours. Yours is the best."Tawra Kellam: I'm not trying to sound prideful, but it really is the best ranch dressing I've ever had. But that's what I do. We go through and we find recipes and we use them as a place to start. But then we go through and we tweak them and change them until they really are the best recipe, because there's nothing more frustrating than going into a cookbook and making a recipe and having it flop and you've wasted all that time and all those ingredients. So we really make sure that the recipes do taste good and people can make them. Even if you're not an experienced cook, they're really simple.Suzy Chase: So your latest YouTube episode is so informative. It's called, What to Eat When They Buy Out All the Food! - Surviving Panic. You talked about what to do when bread is all sold out. Is there a hope if the bread is sold out?Tawra Kellam: Yeah. So here's the thing with bread. People panic about bread, but there are so many more things that you can use instead of bread. So first of all, when you're at the store, the bread aisle may be sold out, but go check your bakery. Here I've been to four different stores, and every single one, the bakery was completely filled, but the bread aisle wasn't. Now, those breads aren't going to last quite as long as the regular loaf breads, but you can freeze bread pretty easily. So if you bring home a loaf of French bread... like yesterday, they didn't have anything but French bread at my store. So I got a couple of loaves of French bread. And then just slice it up, take out a few pieces, put the rest in your freezer. It's freezes really, really well. But now I know I'm going counter to pretty much every single YouTuber on the planet, but now is not the time to be learning how to make bread.Suzy Chase: Really?Tawra Kellam: Everyone keeps saying, "Oh, I'm showing you how to make bread." And I do have a super simple foreign ingredient, no need bread recipe that I'm getting ready to do a video on. But here's the thing, if you don't already know how to make homemade bread, now is not the time when you can't find flour to be experimenting with a little bit more difficult recipe of making bread. If you've never kneaded bread or anything like that, it can be intimidating. So what can you use instead? Use some rice. You can use potatoes, you could make muffins, which are super easy. You could make biscuits, which are fairly easy. You could use pretty much anything that's a starch, like corn tortillas, flour tortillas, if you can find those. So don't get just stuck thinking you have to have bread, you don't have to have bread. I know bread is what sustains life, but there are so many other options out there that right now really if you've never made bread before, I would not suggest wasting valuable flour on bread.Tawra Kellam: Another thing on that is, homemade bread tastes really good. I mean, it tastes really good. So what happens in my family, they will just eat the whole entire loaf right away. Where my muffins and biscuits, they're tasty, they're really tasty, but they don't eat them quite as fast. So make foods that your family will be able to eat, but they don't just eat it all in one sitting and it's gone.Suzy Chase: I remember growing up with a single mom making many a sandwich out of a hot dog bun.Tawra Kellam: Yeah, hot dog, hamburger buns are really great. We use those all the time. If you have them leftover, you can put some butter and sprinkle some cinnamon and sugar or garlic powder on there and broil them and they're super tasty. Yeah, you can toast them and use them instead of hoagie buns tooSuzy Chase: In your grocery store, it was crazy that the lunch meat was all sold out, but the deli was all stocked full of meats and cheese.Tawra Kellam: 10 feet away. I know. I was just like, "What is wrong with you people?" Right now, we're in the middle of a crisis, but any time. That's one reason why my family isn't panicking, because I have never just done one thing. When prices went up several years ago from... What's it? I think it was 9/11 maybe. Grocery prices went up. Everybody was totally freaking out. I wasn't freaking out. I just didn't buy boneless skinless chicken breasts. I used other things. I used chicken quarters. We didn't eat chicken. We ate beef because beef was cheaper then. We ate ham because ham was cheaper then. So I've always been one of those people that, when you don't have one thing, what can I use to replace this instead? That's where people need to start turning their thinking, is, "Okay, what can I make instead?Tawra Kellam: I don't have bread, but there's something else that I can make instead." It's actually very easy. You just need to get into the habit of thinking that is more what it is.Suzy Chase: There's one particular supermarket tip in the cookbook that caught my eye. It's buy the smallest packages. What exactly does that mean?Tawra Kellam: Well, so everybody says, "Buy in bulk." Mom and I think that's probably some of the worst advice you could have, because here's the thing, you go to these big warehouse stores, that mom and I are not fans of, let's say you get this huge package, five pounds of cheese. Okay, that's all well and good, but can you really use five pounds of cheese before it spoils if you're an average three to four person family? If you can, that's totally fine. But the majority of people don't. So what we have found is that people actually save more money when they don't buy in bulk because they're not wasting food that spoils. They're not dealing with packages that are big and bulky and heavy and they're dropping them and wasting food from dropping them because they're hard to handle. I mean, those two, three pound, I don't know how many pounds they are, containers of peanut butter at the big places. It's like, "Seriously, who has room in their cabinet to store that?"Tawra Kellam: And the price, actually now a lot of times the big bulk ones are actually more expensive than the cheaper ones, especially if you want for sales. So we don't recommend buying in bulk. We recommend actually buying smaller packages. And if you want to stock up for times like now, that's fine, but I'll tell you, all my peanut butter is in little one pound containers because I don't buy great big packages of food because I don't want it to spoil.Suzy Chase: With boxes of pasta overflowing in so many cans of beans, I'm thinking about flavor more than ever. How can we save money on herbs and spices?Tawra Kellam: Well, first of all, if you're thinking of prepping for situations like right now in this pandemic that we're in, stock up on salt and garlic powder and onion powder. If you get just those three spices, that will take care of 90% of your seasoning meat. Get garlic powder and onion powder instead of garlic salt and onion salt, because you can always add salt and the garlic powder and onion powder go further. Don't think that you have to buy these great big, once again, massive things of spices. I see people who have two people in their family and they have a one pound jug of taco seasoning, and there'll be dead before everything else is. It's just like, okay, this is crazy. People buy these humongous things but it's actually not cheaper. And I'll the honest, I get all my spices at Walmart or Dollar Tree, they're a lot cheaper.Tawra Kellam: I get them once again in the small little containers, but they're a quarter of the price. That's the way I save on spices. I don't have a lot of spices. There's no reason to have 50, 60 spices in your spice cabinet? I have more than I normally would use because I'm recipe testing, but I normally have about eight, maybe 10, maybe not even that many, closer to eight I think, spices that I use on a regular basis and that's it. Then the three, salt, garlic, and onion powder, those three I use 90% of the time. When we were at the store yesterday, I was shocked that really people aren't buying salt. Guys, if you are going to be going through something, you need to have seasoning, and salt is the best seasoning that you can buy to make your food taste good.Suzy Chase: You have recipes for everything in this cookbook. It's more than a cookbook, lip balm, window cleaner, laundry soap disinfectant, and even skunk smell remover. I love it.Tawra Kellam: I wanted to make sure it was comprehensive. And it's over 600 pages, but it's still not comprehensive enough to the point where we have volume two coming out in a couple of months. But I wanted to be sure that if you could get basic items, you could make whatever you needed to help you get by. So that's kind of why we put lip balm and laundry detergent and all yogurt, all those things in there. That's to help you make it at home when you need to.Suzy Chase: How are you testing recipes for your new cookbook and can you tell us a little bit about it?Tawra Kellam: Well, so thankfully, I got 90% of my recipe testing done before this pandemic hit. But I will tell you, I am having a little bit difficult time because I don't want to waste ingredients right now. So I'm being very careful. Instead of testing five to 10 recipes a day, I'm only testing one or two that we are actually using to eat with our dinner. If the recipe doesn't quite turn out like we had thought, we're still eating it, I'm going to doctor it up. I made a pizza crust the other day for my gluten free dairy free cookbook that's coming up and didn't really taste that great honestly. But I was like, "Boys, we are not wasting food."Suzy Chase: Dig in.Tawra Kellam: Yeah. It wasn't horrible by any stretch of the imagination, but it wasn't the wonderful fluffy pizza that everybody's used to. So right now, I'm just testing with things that I already have. As I go to the store, if I happen to see it, I have something, I will pick it up. But it is a little bit harder right now, but I'm still getting one or two recipes tested today, which is pretty good.Suzy Chase: Now for my segment called, My Favorite Cookbook, aside from this cookbook, what is your all time favorite cookbook and why?Tawra Kellam: I'll be perfectly honest, it's my cookbook. I'm not just saying that, I truly do not use any other cookbook at all. I don't even have them in my kitchen. This is the only cookbook I have. And I wrote it because it had all the recipes that I wanted to make on a regular basis. So I truly don't use any other cookbook. When I'm recipe testing, I have a question about something, I will go to Betty Crocker. If I need to look up and cross-reference and see, okay, wait, these directions don't sound right, how did Betty Crocker do it? If I didn't have Dining on a Dime, I'd probably do Betty Crocker. But I truly I don't use any other cookbooks. I don't want to have any others that I use. I don't.Suzy Chase: I love it. That's a good testament to your cookbook. So where can we find you on the web and social media and YouTube?Tawra Kellam: We're all over. We're livingonadime.com. You can go get our Dining on a Dime cookbook there. We are on YouTube, Living on a Dime To Grow Rich. We are on Facebook, Living on a Dime. We just recently changed our name because we want people to be encouraged that you're not living on a dime to wallow in your misery, you're living on a dime to move yourself forward to financial freedom. My husband and I are completely debt free. Our YouTube videos or Facebook page or Pinterest page, we have a huge Pinterest page, and our website are all geared to help people get out of debt and become financially free so that they are not stressed out about money.Suzy Chase: Oh my gosh! Thanks, Tawra. We needed you. Thank you so much for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.Tawra Kellam: You're welcome. I appreciate you having me. Thanks so much.Outro: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com. And thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

Dinner in French: My Recipes By Way Of FranceBy Melissa Clark Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table talking to cookbook authors.Melissa Clark: Hi, I'm Melissa Clark. I am a food reporter for the New York Times and a cookbook author and my latest cookbook is called "Dinner in French: My Recipes By Way Of France."Suzy Chase: You are the most prolific cookbook writer I've had on the podcast with more than 40 cookbooks under your belt and you write for the New York Times Food Section in addition to your weekly column called, "A Good Appetite." This conversation is going to be a two-parter. First let's chat about your new cookbook, "Dinner in French." Then I know we're all desperate to hear some clever ways to use our pantry items while we're at home during the coronavirus quarantine. You first fell in love with France and French food as a child thanks to your great aunt Martha and great uncle Jack. Talk a little bit about your annual summer vacations and how that came about?Melissa Clark: It was a really crazy childhood. My parents were both psychiatrists and this was back in the 70s and 80s. In those days when you were a psychiatrist you had the whole month of August off. If you had any kind of mental issues in August you were stuck, you had to wait until September but it was great for us as a family because we took the month and we would travel. My parents fell in love with France before we were born thanks to my great uncle Jack and my great aunt Martha who took them to France when they were graduating from medical school. They fell in love with France and they took us, they took my sister and me, every single summer. What we did, and this was really unusual back in the day, was we house exchanged. Now people think, "Oh house exchange, Airbnb," they're used to it but especially this was in the early 80s. There was no internet so just imagine typing out letters to strangers in France. There was a directory so you would find these people who were willing to exchange houses but that was all. There was just a list of names.Melissa Clark: We would send these letters and then we'd wait a few months to get letters back. Then we would arrange a telephone call and eventually arrange an exchange but it was this leap of trust and faith, which I don't think, I mean it was strange back then and even now can you imagine if you were going to exchange houses with someone you would Google them and you would find out everything you could about them and you would see aerial pictures of the house. We just went in blind but despite that it was amazing. So there we were, out family of four living in these French people's houses and the French would come to our house and they would take care of our cat, we would take care of their vegetable garden or whatever it was and it was great. It was this really immersive cultural experience every single August. What we did as a family when we got to France was we cooked. We did not cook at home in Brooklyn together. We did not have time. My parents were professionals. As psychiatrists they worked late into the evening. My sister and I were kind of on our own for dinner most of the time.Melissa Clark: In France we ate every meal together and we cooked it together and that's where I learned how to cook. For me, cooking, my first memories and my first love of cooking, it all happened in France.Suzy Chase: In the cookbook how do you pair the way you ate growing up in Brooklyn with French cuisine?Melissa Clark: To me it was the same thing. I didn't have a division of, "Okay this is Brooklyn food and this is French food." To me it was all the same. It was all, "These are the flavors of my childhood" and the flavors of my childhood were my grandmother's food and when my parents did cook. I grew up in a Jewish household so my grandmother's food to me is very Ashkenazi Jewish. I remember baked apples and Shabbat dinner with brisket and latkes and kugel and gefilte fish, you know? That was all very much part of my childhood and not to mention the Brooklyn flavors that I was having and Brooklyn was diverse even back then. I mean, Brooklyn is way diverse now but back in the 80s we were still going out, we were going out for Chinese food, we're getting dim sum, we were going to Lundy's, which Lundy's was this great old fish seafood shack, or not shack, restaurant in Sheepshead Bay and we would get these amazing biscuits and DiFara's Pizza which now is a cult place but back then it was one of our local pizzerias that we would go and get this incredible Sicilian grandma pies.Melissa Clark: It was this mishmash and then French food was just part of that. It's like, oh, we would go to France and we would eat crepes and it was all part of the same thing. So when I develop recipes and think about cooking I'm using all of those flavors from my childhood to create something and I've never really written about it in an organized way until Dinner in French, until this cookbook.Suzy Chase: What made you decide to write this cookbook?Melissa Clark: I spent most of my life a little bit embarrassed about the French connection in my past mostly because I am embarrassed to tell you that my French is terrible. Any time I would tell someone, I'd say I spent every August in France they'd say, "Oh you must speak French" and I even spent a semester in college in Paris and I could never master it. I'm not great at languages, I'm also not great at music. I don't have the ear. I study and I study and I study and I speak passable French. I get around, I'm fine, but I'm not fluent and that lack of fluency, especially because my husband is actually fluent in French which kind of makes it worse, makes me not want to admit to being as close to French food as I am.Melissa Clark: It's a funny thing but as an adult, finally I've grown up and I've decided, "You know what? This is actually part of me and part of my childhood and I'm going to get over the fact that I don't speak it very well" because you know what I realized? I can cook in French. I cannot conjugate but I can, give me a French kitchen and any French ingredient and I can cook with it and make it my own. When I'm cooking, I call it "Cooking in French" you know? I can do it by feel, I can do it by sensory, it's just part of me. Because I am who I am, I'm also very practical. Whenever I think about cooking in French I'm also thinking about how to do it a little more easily. I'm not thinking about classic technique. You know what I'm thinking about? I'm thinking about we forget that French people make dinner every single night for their families, you know? It's not just fancy restaurants and that's, when I say I "Cook in French" that's the food I'm cooking. French home cooking through this like, Brooklyn lens of even more practicality and making it, so streamlining the dishes, making them very accessible so I don't have to do a lot of cleanup after all.Melissa Clark: I'm always thinking, "Can I eliminate a pot? Can I do this a little more easily?" Then I'm adding different flavors in from Brooklyn but also just from my life, from my travels. Cooking in French, it's a very broad definition of what I consider this kind of French food to be.Suzy Chase: It's kind of like your autobiography.Melissa Clark: Yeah in a way. It's all the different parts. It really is. Although maybe we're going to leave out the Swedish first husband because he doesn't really factor in. There's no Swedish recipes in here.Suzy Chase: Yeah.Melissa Clark: Except for that.Suzy Chase: Yeah, we don't need him.Melissa Clark: We don't need him.Suzy Chase: No. I think this cookbook, probably more than your others, really highlights your lighthearted exploration of flavors and cuisines. So many cookbooks I find, especially foreign ones, are so serious, right?Melissa Clark: Yeah it's true. Well you know when you're writing about a foreign to you cuisine, so maybe you are writing about someone else's culture or maybe it's your culture and you're trying to present it to people who are not familiar with it, I think there is actually a big weight on your shoulders because you need to do justice, right? That's important and that is, especially right now in this age of learning about cultural appropriation in food, this is a really important issue. You want to take culture and people's culture and your own culture very seriously but I kind of get a pass on France because it is something that I learned in my childhood and it's also something that I'm not trying to be authentic. That's not my goal here. I'm not trying to present French culture. I would never, ever have undertaken this book if I was trying to do that. I'm trying to give you a sense of who I am as a cook and I am a lighthearted cook to be honest. I love to play with ingredients, I love to play with flavors.Melissa Clark: One thing I read about in this cookbook is I remember when I was a kid, right, we'd come back to Brooklyn and my parents would make these amazing Julie Child type gourmet dinners. They were using Julia's recipes and they were very like, serious about following the recipe. Or maybe they'd use Jacques Pepin, but then the next day with the leftovers I think my dad had made the coq au vin and my mom was taking it and she was slathering it on challah. I think my dad was maybe adding some soy sauce. They were so free in what they did as cooks and I really adopted that. I'm not afraid to play with flavor, I'm not afraid to play with technique. I will take a dish apart and put it back together if I like it better that way but again, I'm not trying to represent French culture. I'm trying to let other cooks know how I do it.Suzy Chase: Dinner in French, I love your introductions to each recipe. Especially the one for Grated Carrot Salad with Preserved Lemon and Coriander on Page 71. Can you talk a little bit about that?Melissa Clark: Basically when you go to Paris and you order a plate of crudités or really anywhere in France and you get all these different little composed salads and I ate a ton of crudités when I was a student in Paris during college because I was also eating a ton of Croque Monsieurs and ham and cheese sandwiches and I was eating a lot of baguettes and boy, was I eating those Pain au Chocolat, right? I was a little worried about balancing my day. I was always concerned about my weight. I mean, this is just something that as a woman you grow up with and I took it in. Also members of my family are heavy so I knew that if I wanted to eat well I needed to eat carefully. This was just always something on my mind. When I was a student and I was in college I would say, "All right if I'm going to eat all of this cheese and oh my God did I eat the cheese? I'm going to have to have crudités a lot. A lot of vegetables." But I fell in love with it because salads in France are so delicious.Melissa Clark: There's so much, especially better than the salads I had in the 80s in New York. We were still kind of gearing up as a food culture. Especially in an every day, you know, fancy restaurants had great salads but when you were a student and you went to get a salad in a diner in New York you certainly didn't get the same kind of salad that you got when you were a student and you went to get a plate of crudités in a café in Paris. You got grated carrots with this delicious vinaigrette, you got sliced beets, you got potatoes, you got lettuce with a bright mustards dressing. It was all so delicious. When I got back I started making this crudités salad, which is what I called it, which is basically grated carrots with a mustardy, yummy dressing. I put herbs in it like coriander, coriander seeds and also cilantro but it was so great. It didn't even feel like I was dieting it just felt like I'm eating something that I really, really love.Melissa Clark: That recipe, which is very evocative to me of my student days is in this book and I absolutely think everybody should make it and then you should go eat the Croque Monsieur casserole because that's how I would do it. It's like a little bit of vegetable, a little bit of ham and cheese and then it all kind of balances out.Suzy Chase: Speaking of Croque Monsieur, I made it the other day, it's on page 42 and can you talk a little bit about that recipe?Melissa Clark: Yeah so Croque Monsieur are, this was the sandwich, I ate so many Croque Monsieur when I was in Paris. It's a ham and cheese sandwich but it's toasted and then they put bechamel on top. So bechamel, a white sauce, cheesy white sauce on top of your sandwich and then they broil it and it gets all golden. It's so good. I mean, I'm sorry, our grilled cheeses are good, I love a grilled cheese any which way but Croque Monsieur might be my favorite. What I did was I took those flavors and I put them into a casserole. So you make little ham and cheese sandwiches and you line them up in a casserole dish and then you pour bechamel over the whole thing and cheese and yeah. It's really good. Bubbly, hot, cheesy, hammy, the perfect brunch dish. I mean, I think it's perfect for supper, too. I mean, it's all a light supper but it's kind of one of those easy, everything goes in the oven casserole suppers. Then all you do is serve it with a big green salad on the side and you've got the best dinner. Glass of Beaujolais wouldn't hurt.Suzy Chase: Also I think this is a good recipe for right now so we can still find the white sandwich bread around at our bodega, you can still get sliced ham and I think this is great for our pandemic situation right now.Melissa Clark: Yeah, it's one of those pantry staple recipes that we need, everybody needs to really start thinking about clever ways to use pantry stable items. I'm thinking about that a lot myself. I mean, right now I'm really lucky. I'm in Brooklyn, you're I don't know how it is in the West Village, grocery store lines are long but we still can get everything and hopefully that will remain. At the same time, we don't want to go shopping too often. You want to use up all these pantry staples that you stocked your kitchen with.Suzy Chase: Your mother taught you how to get dinner on the table fast and make it taste good with what you had in the house. This is what we're grappling with right now as many of us are stuck in the home during the coronavirus pandemic. In your home in Brooklyn how are you dealing with the idea of potentially cooking three meals a day for weeks with limited access to the outside world?Melissa Clark: I'm pretty prepared. I did stock my pantry. I wrote about it for the Times and I practiced what I preached. I have a lot of beans and pastas and rice and canned fish. I'm very lucky in that I have a separate freezer in my basement. I know it's extremely lucky so I've got meat in there-Suzy Chase: So lucky.Melissa Clark: I know, I know, it's like if I just had a little freezer, I know you're in the West Village with a small freezer-Suzy Chase: Yep.Melissa Clark: That's much harder. I feel like I'm actually ahead of the game a little bit but at the same time we all have the same limitations on, "Okay all right now what? We've got our pasta and our rice and our tuna and now what are we going to do with our pasta and our rice and our tuna?" I think my job going forward is to help people think of creative ways to use everything so that we don't end up getting bored. Cooking can be a very calming process, especially right now when things are scary out there. Cooking calms you, at least it does for me, and it's also very creative. I'm hoping that people will come out of this more eager to cook, a little less afraid to try something new and I mean, also you're not cooking for entertaining, which is very different. I think most of us spend a lot of our time cooking for friends and we're thinking about what other's are going to think of what we're making but it's just for us, it's just for family. I'm hoping that people are going to use this time to experiment, get comfortable cooking things and I'm going to be there. I'm here to help.Suzy Chase: So much tuna.Melissa Clark: So much tuna.Suzy Chase: So much tuna. I don't think I'm alone when I say I have over 10 cans of tuna right now. How about that tuna dip of yours? I think it's in your dinner cookbook?Melissa Clark: Yeah. Oh, see tuna dip is great. My mother used to make this salmon mousse recipe when I was growing up. I think it was a Julia Child recipe. She would take, I think she would use canned salmon actually and put it in the blender with mayonnaise and she'd set it with gelatin and cream and it was this beautiful thing. My version of that is almost more like an Italian tonnato sauce. I take a can of tuna, I put it in the blender with olives and capers and yes, some mayonnaise and herbs and garlic and I make this tuna dip, which if you put it in the fridge it gets cold and firm and you can spread it on bread like a pate but you can also use it as a pasta sauce, you could put it on top of rice. It's fantastic if you add a little extra oil, so you make it very, very runny and you use it as a dip for veggies. It's just so versatile and so flavorful and it's like when you're getting tired of tuna casserole and tuna salad sandwiches, this is the dip to make you ... It has so much flavor in it you're like, "Oh, right. This is why I love tuna." It also has anchovies.Suzy Chase: Let's say we have a big tub of steel cut oats. What can we do with them?Melissa Clark: Steel cut oats are great to have. Not just for breakfast, either. Yes, you can make them for breakfast. I've been baking them lately which I really like. I wrote about this in The Times recently of baked steel cut oats. It's pretty much the same as if you do them on the stove except that you throw them in the oven and then you don't have to worry about them. You can season the cooking water, well first of all you can use milk if you have some but you can also add spices and I added some almond butter recently to the cooking water. Your general proportions for steel cut oats is one to three. So one cup of oats to three cups of water and you just bring it to a simmer either on the stove or you add boiling water to a casserole dish, cover it with foil and throw it in the oven for an hour. Either way but just think about what you can season that water with, different toppings but also don't forget oats are fantastic savory.Melissa Clark: If you think about polenta, we love savory polenta, oats can be used in the exact same way. Try cooking them in broth or maybe with a couple of garlic cloves and a bay leaf and then use that yummy savory kind of mushy starch as you would a bed of polenta and just throw lots of stuff on top of it. It absorbs, it's just like a great sort of bed for yummy other flavors. Or like mashed potatoes, same kind of thing, mushy, comforting, savory, add lots of butter and salt. It's just, oh, and Parmesan too. Risotto, think of it as risotto except it's oats.Suzy Chase: We all have tons of pasta on hand. Help please.Melissa Clark: I know right.Suzy Chase: So much.Melissa Clark: Yes, I mean, pasta never gets old. I'm never tired of making pasta. When you think about, I mean, all of those wonderful dishes. You can go to Italy for a month and eat pasta every day and not get tired of it and you can do the same thing in your kitchen except you're not, unfortunately, in Italy which is I guess right now good but in general bad. Think about the simplest Cucina Povera recipe, right, which is just things that you have in your pantry anyway. Maybe you have a can of anchovies, maybe you have some bread crumbs. Right now this is a time to be saving those bread scraps and making bread crumbs if you don't already. Saute’ them in garlic with some Parmesan and that with some olive oil is a fantastic pasta topping. I use little bits of leftovers as the base for pasta sauces all the time. Those left over roasted veggies I'll chop up, saute’, add some butter and throw them on top of pasta. You probably have cans of tomatoes if you love pasta you should have some plum tomatoes on hand and simmering those into a sauce of course is just the most basic, elemental thing you can do.Melissa Clark: If you have access to a sunny windowsill I would say now's the time to get some basil seeds and start planting and even if you don't-Suzy Chase: That's so smart.Melissa Clark: Maybe you'll have pesto in a month. My neighbor works at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens and unfortunately they closed, which I was hoping I'd be able to walk outside in their gardens but we can't. However, she did bring me some basil seeds before they closed so I'm about to embark on a whole exciting little gardening trip here in my Brooklyn spot, see if I can grow. I have the brownest thumb. People, it's funny because when people call me up, my friends call me and say, "Okay I'm looking at a chicken. What do I do?" Because they have no idea how to cook and I get those calls a lot from my good friends. I'm going to do the same to my friends who garden. "All right I've got the basil seeds. Now what do I do?" So I'm very sympathetic if you can't make a chicken so please be sympathetic and teach me how to grow something.Suzy Chase: Tell us about your sardine and tomato toast recipe on page 135 in Dinner in French.Melissa Clark: Sardine toasts are my, I mean, they're my go to dish. We probably eat sardine toast once a week under normal circumstances. Not even when we're eating from the pantry, just on a normal week because we love sardines. This sardine toast recipe in Dinner in French is almost provincial in feeling because it has tomatoes and garlic and basil and sliced onions but I want to start with the basic sardine toast for people out there who are listening and they've just got their sardines and their bread and what do you do, right? You toast your bread, and this is important to use the best bread you can. Crusty like a baguette or any kind of country bread if you've got it. Toast it until it's crisp and then take a halved garlic clove and rub it all over and the garlic will get in the bread. Then you season the bread with some kind of fat. I think I used olive oil in the cookbook but you can also use butter and the fat helps spread the flavor.Melissa Clark: Then you add a little salt and if you have a tomato that's decent you can cut the tomato in half and rub those tomato guts all over that bread, almost like a Pan Con Tomate like a Catalan bread and tomato dish. We're bringing Spain in here, we're bringing France in here, we're bringing Italy. This is a very cross cultural dish but you don't even need the tomato. Just, you've got your garlic and your fat, your oil or your butter, you lay your sardines down with some thinly sliced onion or scallion or shallot and maybe some herbs if you have it or maybe some sliced tomatoes if you have them. Even if you don't, the elements are bread, garlic, fat, so say olive oil, sardines, some kind of thinly sliced onion material, salt and pepper and another drizzle of olive oil. It is divine.Suzy Chase: Eggs. Should we be stocking up on eggs?Melissa Clark: Yeah, eggs last forever. I mean, not forever but they'll last a month. They last a really long time. Get a lot of eggs, put them in the fridge. You can also leave them on the counter for about a week they'll be fine.Suzy Chase: Really?Melissa Clark: Whenever we make eggs in our house we boil them and we start with room temperature eggs so I always have about half a dozen eggs sitting out in a basket on my counter and we use those eggs for soft or hard boiled eggs. When my fridge is crammed I will keep a carton of eggs out and again, like I said, they will last for at least a week out of the fridge. Especially if you keep them in the carton. So don't worry. Don't freak out about eggs. Eggs are not like milk and butter. Even butter lasts a few days out of the fridge. I mean, we in America tend to get really nervous about perishability but in these moments when you're actually eating everything you're buying because you're cooking at home you're going to use this stuff up. So eggs and butter can be out of the fridge. Eggs for a week easily, butter for a few days. Milk unfortunately does have to go in your fridge unless you get shelf stable milk, which is another thing that we should stock up on if we drink milk and we like milk. Get some UTH shelf stable milk and that will keep in your pantry for a long time.Suzy Chase: You love a good sheet pan recipe. Could we do something with chickpeas on a sheet pan?Melissa Clark: I love a sheet pan recipe. I love chickpeas on a sheet pan. So roasted chickpeas are delicious, a great snack. Toss them with olive oil, salt and whatever spices you have around. I like to use garam masala but you can also just use cumin or a little bit of cayenne and there are different ways to do it. I like to do it in a hot, hot oven. I do 425 or 450 and when you start to see them sizzle, it takes like half an hour sometimes depending on how wet your chickpeas were, before you even do that take your chickpeas out of the can, dry them off with a kitchen towel and then coat them in oil and spices and salt and blast them in a hot oven. They're so crispy you can't stop eating them. I just love them. [inaudible 00:23:29] to that basic thing, if you've got a chicken, chicken parts or a whole chicken, throw it right on top. Just right on top of that sheet pan full of chickpeas and the chicken fat will season the chickpeas even more and make them even more crunchy and delicious. Chicken and chickpeas is one of my favorite sheet pan meals. I have a recipe for that in my dinner cookbook.Melissa Clark: Again, they can also be he bases for a vegetable dish. You can have chickpeas and you can put all kinds of veg for roasting along with them like sliced carrots and maybe cherry tomatoes if you have those little non-seasonal cherry tomatoes right now that I know that I have, just throw them on the sheet pan. They get so much better when they're roasted in spices along with some chickpeas. Potatoes are great there, too. There's a lot you can do. Just think of the chickpeas are the base and then you're going to add either a protein or more vegetables.Suzy Chase: In terms of fresh fruits and vegetables what are some varieties that keep for a while?Melissa Clark: Think about root vegetables and boiled vegetables. So aside from you know that you can keep onions and garlic and potatoes in the pantry for months, they keep for months, and sweet potatoes but then think of the ones that you might want to keep in the fridge like radishes keep for a month for sure, I've kept radishes in my fridge for a long time. Turnips, which turnips when they're fresh and juicy are delicious raw. I like to slice them into salads. Fennel is another thing that keeps for a long time, carrots of course, celery. Stock up on those things, keep them in your fridge and then if you can't get lettuce at least you can make a salad from all these juicy, crisp vegetables that you have lying around.Suzy Chase: So bars are closed in New York City. No more happy hour for us. Do you have a delicious quarantine cocktail idea?Melissa Clark: Yeah we're big Campari drinkers so we've been making Negronis that and Boulevardiers and the thing about a Negroni and a Boulevardier is it's the same drink with a different booze sort of as the center of it and it's such an easy drink. I don't really mix cocktails very well because I'm a little bit sloppy, I'm not precise. My husband bakes the bread and he mixes the cocktails and he does both of them much better than I do. I can make a Negroni or a Boulevardier. This is how you do it. It's equal parts which is so great because equal parts, right? That means for me I can eyeball it. I just put it all into my little rocks glass, equal parts Campari and then for a Negroni it's gin and for a Boulevardier it's whisky, like usually we use rye whisky but you can use bourbon, then sweet vermouth. Then you just take some orange zest and squeeze the oils into it. You do a twist, is the cocktail word for it, see I'm bad with cocktails, and some ice cubes and that is it. It is the perfect drink that even I can make.Suzy Chase: Now for my segment called "My Favorite Cookbook." Aside from this cookbook what is your all-time favorite cookbook and why? And I can't wait to hear this.Melissa Clark: Okay so I can't name a favorite because I can't have a favorite child even though I do have a favorite child because I only have one child but if I had two children I couldn't name a favorite. I can't name a favorite cookbook but the one I'm reading right now, I'm reading a lot of Jane Grigson and Jane Grigson is a British author who wrote a lot of cookbooks back in the 60s and 70s and 80s. She's fabulous. Her stuff is fresh, seasonal food that is really simple in it's essence but that she shows you how to make your own. She shows you how to adapt it and I love all food writing that is adaptable and open hearted in that way. I love people who teach you how to make things delicious in the way that you like them and Jane Grigson absolutely does. Any of her cookbooks, she has a book called "English Food" which I love but any of her books are great.Suzy Chase: Well that's what you do for us.Melissa Clark: I try. I try, darn it.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?Melissa Clark: I am Instagramming like a fiend these days because I'm trying to share recipe ideas for people who are cooped up. So find me on Instagram primarily at Clarkbar. So Clarkbar like the candy, which is not good branding because on Twitter I am Melissa Clark.Suzy Chase: James Beard said, "Food unites us. It brings us together." Thank you for all that you do to bring us together and thanks for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.Melissa Clark: Thanks for having me, Suzy.Outro: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com and thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

Take One Can: 80 Delicious Meals From The CupboardBy Lola Milne Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table talking to cookbook authors.Lola Milne: I'm Lola Milne and my latest cookook, which came out last week is called Take One Can.Suzy Chase: Canned food seem really relevant right now. We have the Coronavirus making its way around the world, natural disasters, and God knows what else is coming down the pike, so I will weave some preparedness questions throughout this cookbook chat. Now on with the show.Suzy Chase: The UK version of this cookbook is called Take One Tin and the US version is called Take One Can. I love that. Also, the brilliant thing about this cookbook is anyone can find canned goods anywhere, the grocery store, the convenience store or Target or Kmart, and even the rest stop off the highway; and they're inexpensive. Can you talk a little bit about that?Lola Milne: When I was kind of coming to the idea of doing this book about cans or tins, I sort of realized that actually I cook with them all the time and probably most other people do too. The other great benefits about them, one of which being that they are super cheap and delicious, meaning that really anybody can cook something great from a can. You don't need to have a huge budget or a huge kitchen or anything like that.Suzy Chase: There's not another cookbook out there like this. Did you research cookbooks about tins and cans?Lola Milne: Well, I didn't even like see the whole book, but I've got this box of cookery book cover postcards and one of the cookery book covers is a book of canned cooking. I think it is an American book.Suzy Chase: Oh, cool. From back in the day?Lola Milne: Yeah, from back in the day. That's the only thing that I really saw that was really all about cans.Suzy Chase: I know you say there's snobbery and silly perception around food that comes in a can. Why do you think that is?Lola Milne: I feel like people see cans as quite an old-fashioned way of eating, kind of reminiscent of rationing or hard times where you couldn't afford to buy fresh. And I feel like there's a perception that because it is technically not fresh because it's cooked, it's not good, and there's a real focus now on like fresh eating, fresh food. Actually, a lot of the fresh food that we have now has traveled halfway across the world. It probably isn't actually that fresh. Canned food is picked and processed within an hour sometimes, and so in some ways it's kind of fresher than fresh, which I don't think people realize.Suzy Chase: How can buying canned foods help out with a huge food waste problem?Lola Milne: Well, a major factor is that they don't go off for ages. The supermarket isn't chucking out all of the cans at the end of every week because they've gone out of date and you're not going to do the same either. The classic bagged salads that you open and the next day it's wilting and smells really dodgy, you don't have that problem with cans. And then I feel like the way they're made is also quite a lot less wasteful because with fresh, a lot of vegetables or fruit that are grown are discarded because they don't meet the perfect image that the consumer expects or the supermarket thinks the consumer expects.Lola Milne: Whereas with canned, I think they can use a kind of broad, visual range of vegetables. Like with a tomato you're going to peel it and chop it. You're not going to see what it looked like originally. And with canned tomatoes, specifically, I know that they use the slightly green ones to make tomato juice so I feel like it's just a less wasteful process in general.Suzy Chase: I also liked that you didn't include canned meat. All canned meat is gross, right?Lola Milne: Yeah, I mean, I did consider it briefly, but the scope for that isn't super broad. Yeah, I threw that by the wayside.Suzy Chase: If we're looking to spend a little more on ingredients, what do you recommend as a splurge?Lola Milne: I think that tin fish is, if you can afford it, worth spending a bit more on. Slightly more expensive tuna definitely has a better texture, a better flavor, and I love that it comes in nice olive oil so you can actually use that to maybe dress your salad or use as the oil to cook your onions or garlic in if it's going to be in a sauce. I mean, a good tin tuna, I think, is just so delicious.Lola Milne: And then another thing that I kind of spend a bit more on is tin pulses. I normally buy organic if I can. I think they tend to be slightly tender, like they've been cooked a bit longer than like [bullet 00:04:59] chickpeas often, and the liquid they come in definitely is more flavorsome. And that might sound a bit odd, but I use the water they come in as a sort of stock replacement, so I just add the end if I'm making a soup or stew.Suzy Chase: A surprising ingredient for me in this cookbook was canned figs, so interesting. Tell me about those.Lola Milne: They're one of the tins that I was kind of bowled over by when I was developing the recipes. They are super, intensely figgy and juicy. I would say a hundred zillion times better than a fresh fig that's not at its best. I mean, sure if you're in Italy on holiday and go and buy figs from the market and they've just been picked that day. But in the UK when I get fresh figs, they're just always disappointing and a bit under ripe or dry or something. Canned figs are great alternative.Suzy Chase: Right now, as we speak, the Coronavirus is spreading across the world and government officials warn that things may get worse before they get better. The virus went from 230 cases two days ago to 546 here in the US. Some of us will have to work at home. Some of us will have to go into isolation for a few days. And if we're asked to stay home for a period of time, I'd love to hear your suggestions for stockpiling canned goods.Lola Milne: I did given to the stockpiling slightly last week. I bought some different lentils, chickpeas, cannelloni beans. I got some black beans. I also got some tinned whole plum tomatoes, more flexible then the pre-chopped ones. You can use them in any recipe basically that calls for tomatoes. And then I think it's great to have a few different fish like anchovies are just an amazing one for adding extra savoriness to a multitude of things like pastas and sauces, and making it into addressing. Just always good to have on hand. Tuna is just one of my all time favorites to have, and then sardines are a wonder fish because you can just open the can and jazz them up a little bit with whatever you've got around, and sticking them some toast and got yourself a great supper.Lola Milne: I don't know, based on the fact you want to be able to go out for a few days, few weeks, it's always good to have some fruit in there, so maybe some peaches, some figs, pineapple. Make sure you get all your vitamins and minerals. And then another thing, that is not a can but it's a jar, is sauerkraut. I like to put sauerkraut on everything and it's just really great to have as a kind of thing thrown into like salad if you haven't got anything fresh around. Especially on cheese on toast. Put it in like pasta sauce with lentils. It's just often a really good thing to add a bit of crunch and a bit of tart balance to things.Suzy Chase: I feel like I have lots of cans sitting in my pantry, but I have no plan for recipes. I'd love to chat with you about two of the recipes that caught my eye. First, you have a super simple classic tomato soup recipe on page 62. In case you don't want to stock up on Campbell's tomato soup, you can use canned tomatoes instead. Can you describe this?Lola Milne: It basically starts with sweating the classic trio of onion and celery and carrot, which are the building blocks to lots of sauces and soups and stews. Cooking the vegetables really slowly creates a delicious mellow sweetness and then you chuck in your tomatoes. You can use chopped or whole canned tomatoes with a little teensy bit of sugar, helps with the tomatoes acidity. And then it's a super quick one, you just cook it for 20 minutes or so, blend it and add just a touch of red wine vinegar, which just really helps the tomato's sweetness to pop.Suzy Chase: I have about 15 cans of tuna at the moment. I can only think of maybe two things to do with a can of tuna. For your creative to cook with canned tuna, let's talk about the roasted potato and tuna niçoise on page 103. Can you tell us about that?Lola Milne: That's actually one of my favorite recipes in the book. It's a cheeky to call it a niçoise because it's not very classic. But I hope I haven't offended any niçoise purest out there. I basically have a real love for potatoes. Roasting them just make some soft and creamy inside with a lovely crest outside. There's the crunchy gem lettuce and some beans that you've just taken the edge off. Those textures with the soft potato is delicious. And then the tuna, which is kind of boosted by a load of anchovies in the dressing, and it's got some tangy Dijon mustard and then salty capers and garlic. White wine vinegar, just add a bit out of acidity. You could you use red wine vinegar or cider vinegar as well, and it's just a super simple party solid.Suzy Chase: I love the small size of this cookbook combined with the darling illustrations and the photographs. Talk a little bit about those.Lola Milne: Me and my editor, we thought it would be really great if the book kind of echoed the format and size of the can, so that's why it's kind of like that short little book and I wanted it to be really usable. And so this format really feels like an accessible kind of size and shape.Lola Milne: And then the illustrations, I'm in love with these illustrators. They're called We are Out of Office and they're based be out of office and they're based in Holland. And I just found them on Instagram basically, and I just loved what they do. I felt like the illustrations needed to be reminiscent of the kind of beautiful old illustrated cans like the beautiful Portuguese tins of fish and things like that but with a kind of more modern, more graphic style and color palette. I think they really nailed that in their design. They also needed to work well with the sort of pared back, colorful images inside.Suzy Chase: And you can carry this book in your bag when you go to the grocery store to get your Coronavirus cans.Lola Milne: Yeah, absolutely. You can take it anywhere. It's great.Suzy Chase: Yesterday I made your recipe for crab fried rice on page 88. Can you describe this recipe and talk a little bit about canned crab?Lola Milne: This recipe eventually came from my love of egg fried rice, which I always make when I'm sort of like using up bits that I've got around. You just need some leftover rice and then flavorings like chili oils, sesame oil, soy sauce, garlic, and then in this version I've added canned crab, which is delicious and so much cheaper than fresh crab.Suzy Chase: Now for my segment called my favorite cookbook, aside from this cookbook, what is your all-time favorite cookbook and why?Lola Milne: If I had to choose one, it's probably The Book of Jewish Food by Claudia Roden. I just always go back to it and I love reading all of the stories and the history that is intertwined with the recipes and I'm always really fascinated by things about food which is bound up with identity and all of the stories that people have found out with food and memories and all of that. That cookbook is a really good one for that.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?Lola Milne: Find me on Instagram, Lola_Milne; and on my website, which is lolamilne.com.Suzy Chase: Cheap, long lasting and time saving, the humble can deserves it's place in your pantry. Thanks, Lola, for coming on Cookery by the Book Podcast.Lola Milne: Thanks so much for having me.Outro: Subscribe over on cookerybythebook.com, and thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

Beyond the North Wind: Russia in Recipes and LoreBy Darra Goldstein INTRO: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table talking to cookbook authors.Darra Goldstein: I'm Darra Goldstein, and my latest book is Beyond the North Wind: Russia in Recipes and Lore.Suzy Chase: For more Cookery by the Book, you can follow me on Instagram. If you enjoy this podcast, please be sure to share it with a friend. I'm always looking for new people to enjoy Cookery by the Book. Now on with this show.Suzy Chase: The first time you traveled to Russia was in your imagination at five years old when you discovered a small wooden cup in your parents' closet. What was it about that cup?Darra Goldstein: I'm not sure exactly what it was, but it was so different from anything else I had ever seen. It was wooden and engraved with woodcuts and painted, and the scene was of onion domes. So, Russian Orthodox churches although I obviously at age five couldn't say that it was a Russian Orthodox church. But I sensed that it was something very exotic, and then I was told that it had been my grandmother's, and she came from Russia. And so I created this whole narrative, this whole story about it. A couple years later, my beloved little brother did a chemistry experiment right in that cup and destroyed it.Suzy Chase: No.Darra Goldstein: Yes. I was devastated because the cup somehow represented everything that my grandmother would never tell me about her life in the old country. And when I was putting together the burnt pieces of this cup, I saw on the bottom that there was a stamp that said Made in USSR, and I realized that I had just created a fiction. That it wasn't from the old country. She hadn't brought it from her childhood to the United States. It was a souvenir that somehow had ended up in my parents' closet.Suzy Chase: So let's fast forward to 1972. Can you describe what it was like to immerse yourself in Soviet Russia?Darra Goldstein: Yeah, it was kind of frightening but at the same time exhilarating. I had tried to go there to study. It was in the depths of the Cold War, and as a young American it was quite difficult to get there. And I was accepted in the one program that would have allowed for a semester of study there.Darra Goldstein: So I went to University of Helsinki instead to study Russia and went on a weekend jaunt with a group of Fins to Leningrad. They liked to go there because the alcohol was cheaper in the Soviet Union. My first impression after crossing the border, and the bus was very thoroughly checked by Soviet guards going into a building in what had been part of Finland but was now Soviet Union called Vyborg. And just smelling cabbage and onions.Darra Goldstein: So my first experience was one that was perhaps not so pleasant. Cabbage and onions smell fantastic but only when they're well cooked, and this smelled old. The world seemed gray on the other side of the border, and people seemed closed up. But there was also something intriguing. I met a group of young disaffected Russians, and they took me under their wing. And I saw a completely different side. One of joyousness and hilarity and also delicious food.Darra Goldstein: There were wonderful hot donuts. This was in November, so it was already cold and snowy. And there were fresh donuts coming right out of these big vats in little kiosks by the railroad station. There were Crimean meat pies called chebureki that also were fried, and quite luscious, and just exploded with flavor in my mouth. There were little shops that sold the Siberian dumplings known pelmeni. Where you could go in and get a steaming bowl. I really had flavors I had never encountered before.Suzy Chase: And wasn't this around the time that it was dangerous for Russians to interact with Americans?Darra Goldstein: Yes. They wouldn't have been arrested, but they were often called in and harassed and made to feel very uncomfortable. So the people who did open their homes to me were taking certain risk. But there's this hospitality that people are warm, the tables are filled with all kinds of food that you wouldn't necessarily have seen in the stores during the Soviet years because they wanted to do whatever they could to honor guests.Darra Goldstein: That generosity of spirit is something that I think is deeply Russian and that I have wanted to convey to Americans. Especially now when things are once again so fraught with Russia.Suzy Chase: So this cookbook is filled with your stories of Russian culture and spectacular recipes from obscure to well known. Would you say Russian cuisine is defined by geography?Darra Goldstein: I think originally it was. Again, today the world is very different and you can go there and find food and produce from many parts of the world. And so it's not as limited as it once was. What I wanted to do with this book was try to go back to discover the elemental flavors, the foods that people have been cooking for a good ... Well, in terms of Russian history, Russia accepted Christianity in 988. So that is sort of the beginning of Russian history. So 1,000 years.Darra Goldstein: And these are foods and ingredients that now we consider very healthful. There's a lot of fermentation, a lot of whole grains, a lot of cultured dairy products, root vegetables. All of these things were what they had to work with because of the cold climate. And beautiful, beautiful fish.Suzy Chase: According to you, what's the true heart of Russian food?Darra Goldstein: I would say that it has to do with a taste for the sour. A tanginess that you get from fermentation, from culturing, from curing. There is a lot of salted fish. There's smoked fish. There are pickles that are done through lacto-fermentation where you just layer them with salt and you get these wonderful probiotics. Russian style pickles don't use vinegar. Mushrooms are salted. A lot of the vegetables are very slow cooked. One of the distinctive things about traditional Russian cooking is that they had big masonry stoves. There was a lot of wood. That was one thing that was in abundance in the Russian north, and so people didn't have to spare fuel as they did in other parts of the world.Darra Goldstein: These stoves were heated to very high temperatures at which point Russia's wonderful pies could be baked to get beautifully browned crusts. You could bake bread. And then as the temperature fell, you would put in slow cooked stews or vegetable dishes. One of the revelations for me was just taking turnips, which I think in the States turnips aren't a go-to vegetable the way say broccoli might be. And you just layer these turnips in a casserole and cook them very slowly with a little bit of water and a bit of sunflower oil. They turn out melting in your mouth and are really delicious.Suzy Chase: As I've said many times on this podcast, my favorite types of cookbooks are ones that are part travel log and part recipes. In Beyond the North Wind, the photographs make us feel like we're meandering around the countryside. Tell us a little bit about the photos.Darra Goldstein: The photos are extraordinary. I wanted the photographer to be the same photographer who had shot the pictures for my previous cookbook, Fire and Ice: Classic Nordic Cooking. His name is Stefan Wettainen, and he's a Swede of Finnish background. He just captured the landscape photography so beautifully in Fire and Ice as well as the food shots that I knew he was the one I wanted.Darra Goldstein: But when I first asked him if he would participate in this book, he hesitated. He had grown up with his mother's stories of really severe hardship and loss during the so-called Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union 1939, 1940. And he had heard this phrase in his childhood, "Never trust a Russian even if he's been fried in butter."Suzy Chase: Oh, wow.Darra Goldstein: And so even though Stefan knew that was just a phrase, it had resonance for people who had experienced very difficult time, he still had some hesitation. He'd never been to Russia. But he agreed to do it, and he was really the one I wanted for another reason, too. He had been in the equivalent of what was the Swedish Navy SEALs. So he's this very hardy, strong, intrepid person, and I feel like he's the only photographer I know who would have gone 200 miles above the Arctic Circle in February to stand on the edge of the Barents Sea for over two hours at midnight in I don't remember what it was, probably -20, -30 plus wind chill factor to catch the Northern Lights, and that photograph appears in the book. So he was a wonderful travel companion.Suzy Chase: I'm interested to hear about the allure of the Arctic for you.Darra Goldstein: I was just there last week. There was a wonderful festival in Kirkenes, Norway, just across the border from Russian that is called the Barents Spektakel. It's a yearly arts festival that celebrates the return of the sun to these far northern places, and I presented my book there. And once again, I was struck by the quality of the light.Darra Goldstein: So there's the sea, and there is snow. In the summer there is the midnight sun. So even though we think of Russia and the far north as a dark place, a perhaps grim place where not a lot of vegetables or other things might grow, it is incredibly beautiful in a very austere kind of crystalline way. The flavors that you get because of the nature of the soil, and then in the summer the short growing season but constant sun, means that the flavors are quite intense. Everything just feels magnified to me there. You feel as though you are on the edge of the world, and that to me is quite thrilling.Suzy Chase: The photos to me look like it's quiet. It looks very silent.Darra Goldstein: Yes. That was another thing I was just reminded of. We went out after midnight to chase the Northern Lights, and I live in a pretty quiet part of the country here in The Berkshires in Western Massachusetts, but there's always a little bit of residual noise from a highway that's actually across the border in Vermont, but you get sound. And there, unless you're right by the sea and of course you hear the sound of waves, but if you're away from it, it is absolute stillness. And you feel that there's still wilderness in the world. You can go to places where you don't see human trace.Suzy Chase: My all-time favorite episode of Parts Unknown was when Anthony Bourdain and Zamir Gotta drank lots and lots of vodka. In the book you wrote about Russians' love of vodka, can you talk a little bit about that?Darra Goldstein: It is in the summer very refreshing. You drink it ice cold right out of the freezer, and so it chills and cools. In the winter when you're cold, that initial taste is chilling, but then as it slides down your throat and gets into your body, it warms you up. So it's a very functional drink in that regard. It also is really wonderful with salty things like caviar or different kinds of smoked fish, salted pickles. It is a perfect accompaniment to the appetizers that Russians call Zakuski which are these small bites that you have to whet the appetite before the meal proper.Darra Goldstein: What I like to do is take plain vodka and infuse it with different flavorings. My favorite is probably horseradish. That's another stereotype about Russian food, that it's very bland. They really love horseradish and strong mustard. So it is not a palette cuisine. You add some horseradish to vodka, let it infuse for 24-48 hours, and it has this beautiful kick, or you can make pepper vodka. Another one I like that is quite subtle is you smash some cherry hits and let those infuse. It is a pale, pink vodka that is quite delicate and lovely.Darra Goldstein: You always have to toast when you drink vodka. You're never supposed to just drink it, and you toast to your friends, you toast to peace, you toast to people's accomplishments. You toast to people who are no longer with us. It is a real art to be poetic with the toasts that you give.Suzy Chase: So on the other hand, I don't think of honey when I think of Russia, but early travelers wrote of great pools and lakes of honey in Russia's forest. It became one of Russia's most valuable exports. Over the weekend, I made your recipe for sour cream honey cake on page 260. Now sour cream and honey, those are two flavors I wouldn't ever think about putting together.Darra Goldstein: That, to me, is a wonderfully Russian combination. Because the honey, the Russians do have a sweet tooth, and they always used honey until sugar became more widely available and less expensive in the late 19th century. So that isn't really that long ago. Sour cream mitigates the plain sweetness of honey and gives it that tiny bit of tang that the Russians really like. So you put the two together, and I think it's a pretty brilliant combination. That cake is so ... Did you enjoy it?Suzy Chase: Yeah, it's so light and lovely and so different.Darra Goldstein: The chef who gave me the recipe came from Murmansk to demonstrate this cake for the audience, and it was every bit as good as I remembered it in her hands.Suzy Chase: Now, did she make it square?Darra Goldstein: No, she made it round.Suzy Chase: Okay. Because in the cookbook it says to make it in a square, but I couldn't do a square so I did round.Darra Goldstein: Yeah. You can do it square, round. The reason I did it square was so that I could do these freeform shapes on a baking sheet, but you could make the rounds using a tart ring or a cake pan. The main thing is to have the honey cake layers with the sour cream in between that you allow to soften the honey cake layers, and then the whole thing becomes one delectable whole.Suzy Chase: Yesterday, I made your recipe for classic cabbage soup. Can you describe this recipe?Darra Goldstein: This recipe is really awesome. You know how I said at the beginning of our conversation that my first smell of the Soviet Union was of cabbage and onions, and it wasn't good?Suzy Chase: Yep.Darra Goldstein: I discovered old recipes for what is known as 24 hour soup. So it's not a quickly made cabbage soup where you just sautée some onions and garlic and then perhaps you would have a beef broth, and then you would add the cabbage, and you cook it, and there's your cabbage soup. The classic Russian soup is made with sauerkraut, and again it is that taste for the sour that differentiates the Russian cabbage soup from others, and the brilliant thing about the 24 hour one is that you take the sauerkraut and you bake it in the oven. That caramelizes the sugars that are in the cabbage, and so you get this really ... I'm actually starting to salivate as I think about it. You get this really wonderfully richly flavored sauerkraut that you then freeze.Darra Goldstein: Of course, in old Russian in the winter you just stuck the pot outdoors and it froze. Now I take it and put it in the freezer. And from that previously frozen sauerkraut which also mellows the flavor of it so that it's not so sharp, you make this cabbage soup. It is really beautiful, and it completely upended my ideas about what cabbage soup is. And now I love it.Suzy Chase: It was so multilayered, and you're right. I think the roasting of the sauerkraut mellowed out the sour part.Darra Goldstein: Yeah.Suzy Chase: It's so good.Darra Goldstein: So it has a bit of a sweet edge, but it's not cloying.Suzy Chase: Now for my segment called My Favorite Cookbook, aside from this cookbook what is your all-time favorite cookbook and why?Darra Goldstein: If there's one cookbook that I keep going back to and still discovering new recipes from, it's Richard Sax's classic home desserts, and it's a compendium of a baking and other kinds of desserts with some historical recipes with copious headnotes, but the main thing is that all of his recipes work beautifully, and one of my favorites that I make all the time is chocolate cloud cake. It's a flourless chocolate cake that sort of sinks like a crater in the middle, and then you fill that crater with whipped cream, and it just melts in your mouth.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?Darra Goldstein: So my website is DarraGoldstein, that's one word, DarraGoldstein.com. Instagram which I love is Darra.Goldstein. Twitter is Darra_Goldstein.Suzy Chase: Wonderful. Well thanks, Darra, for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.Darra Goldstein: Thanks so much for your interest, Suzy, and enjoy your cabbage soup tonight.OUTRO: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com, and thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

Cool BeansThe Ultimate Guide to Cooking with the World's Most Versatile Plant-Based Protein, with 125 RecipesBy Joe Yonan Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book, with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table talking to cookbook authors.Joe Yonan: Hi, I am Joe Yonan. I'm the food editor of the Washington Post and my latest cookbook is called Cool Beans.Suzy Chase: For more Cookery by the Book, you can follow me on Instagram. If you enjoy this podcast, please be sure to share it with a friend, I'm always looking for new people to enjoy Cookery by the Book. Now, on with the show. You're the food and dining editor at the Washington Post. You have multiple James Beard awards and an ICP award, and you're the best thing to come out of West Texas since Buddy Holly. So I met you last April when I was at WaPo meeting Bonnie Benwick, and we chatted briefly about this cookbook and I'm so excited to talk with you about it today on my podcast.Joe Yonan: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.Suzy Chase: So when you started writing the first drafts of this cookbook, could you see the bean trend on the horizon for 2020?Joe Yonan: I mean, I felt something coming together, but I can't say I knew exactly and was incredibly confident that it was going to come true. I certainly have been in love with beans for so long, but I certainly felt that with the growing interest in plant-based cooking and then with the exponential growth of interest in a little appliance called the Instant Pot and then continued interest in Heirloom Beans companies like Rancho Gordo. I did start to sense that the timing might end up being really good.Suzy Chase: I love that beans are starting to play a starring role in American dishes.Joe Yonan: Yes. I mean, I feel like one of the reasons that maybe beans have the reputation or have had the sort of fusty reputation that they have had here has been that, in our own cooking, they've been associated a lot with the past and with maybe with the '60s and '70s and maybe the health food movement. Whereas in other countries, of course, they've been the bedrock of cuisines for centuries.Joe Yonan: And I think we in America sometimes have historically paid more attention to the really high-end cooking from other countries. The classical cooking, the celebration cooking. And beans have for so long been really an everyday ingredient or they've been the source of sustenance for people who were trying to make ends meet, but who knew that they could depend on this incredible shelf-stable source of nutrition and they knew how to cook it in really delicious ways. And I think we've been paying more and more attention to that kind of cooking over the last few years.Suzy Chase: You wrote in the cookbook, "My own bean journey took a turn about a decade ago." What happened then? It sounds so mysterious.Joe Yonan: Right. A little fork in the road. It actually was very gradual. I started realizing that I was... It's like that horrible song from a couple of decades ago, I think I'm turning Japanese. I started realizing that I thought I was turning vegetarian. And it caught me off guard a little bit. I remember I was planning dinner, a dinner party over the weekend and I was trying to decide what to make and I opened up my freezer and fridge and was looking through my pantry, like you do, and I noticed that in my freezer there were all of these pounds and packages of really beautiful, humanely raised meat that I hadn't been cooking at home.Joe Yonan: I had been waiting for the chance to make for other people because I wasn't really cooking meat at home for myself. And that's when I started realizing that I was really moving toward a plant-based diet instinctively and I was feeling better and better as I did. So I just kept moving in that direction. And beans were always part of it. I also write that I'm not sure I would have actually continued along that path if was not for discovering beautiful heirloom beans by Rancho Gordo. Really they changed the way that I thought about beans.Suzy Chase: You touched on this a few minutes ago, but in Cool Beans you teach us home cooks how to cook beans in a slow cooker, on the stove, and in the Instant Pot. Can you talk a little bit about that?Joe Yonan: I'm just puttering around the house. Certainly, I will just put a pot of beans on the stove or even in the oven and cook them really gently. I like to bring them to a boil for 10 or 15 minutes at the outset and then lower the heat as low as it can go and cook them really slowly. And that's beautiful. The house fills up with that beautiful smell of beans cooking and it's wonderful. I'd sometimes even cook them in this clay bean pot that a friend gave me and that's an incredible way to cook them as well.Joe Yonan: But on any given weeknight when I really want a pot of beans pretty quickly and I should say more and more, even on the weekends, I do turn to my trusty Instant Pot. There's nothing easier than the whole set it and forget it thing. You don't have to wait and watch until it comes up to pressure and then adjust the heat, you don't have to set a timer to know when it's done and then turn the heat off or down or whatever you're doing. You just set it. And what happens is, you get these really nicely cooked beans, but I do think that the key with an Instant Pot is to cook them uncovered for maybe another 10 or 15 minutes after you cook them. It concentrates the broth. The Instant Pot, like other pressure cookers too, is so sealed up tight that there's no evaporation of liquid when the beans are cooking.Joe Yonan: So unlike when you have it on the stove top or in the oven where it's cooking slowly, the water just stays in there. And so it can be, the broth can be a little more lackluster than when you cook it on the stove top. As Steve Sando of Rancho Gordo puts it, "It breathes life back into the beans." The instant pot proves that you don't really have to soak beans. There's reasons why you might, which I'm sure we can get into, but you really don't have to and it makes beans a product that you can, an ingredient, a fabulous ingredient that you can make any day of the week.Suzy Chase: Speaking of broth, I always thought that you needed to throw in a ham hock or some chicken broth to make beans flavorful. So you're saying the beans make up the flavorful broth on their own?Joe Yonan: Absolutely. You need salt, of course, like you do with any good cooking. But yeah, the beans, especially I would say, if you haven't soaked the beans, soaking, there's lots of reasons why you might want to soak, but if you soak you definitely lose some of that flavor, especially with a thinner skinned bean like a black bean. Try them side by side. Soak a pound of black beans and cook it next to a pound of black beans that you did not soak and just be prepared to marvel at the difference. One is inky black and full of flavor and one is grayish, pale lavender and not as much flavor.Joe Yonan: Yeah, I really wanted to prove to people in this book that you don't need that ham hock. That I think that when beans are cooked from dried, especially if they're high quality beans, but even really good supermarket beans, I talk a lot about Rancho Gordo and companies like Camellia, but I also really like Goya if you're getting supermarket beans. And if you cook them from dried with salt and with kombu, which I like to use, it's a dried seaweed from Japan and it helps actually soften the beans and maybe a bay leaf, an onion and garlic and you cook them until they're really tender.Joe Yonan: I think that that broth rivals anything that you can get from a chicken. Honestly. I mean I've cooked with chefs who might cook with this fabulously talented Mexican chef, Mexican-American chef, Christian Arabian here in DC. And the first thing that he did after he cooked this incredible pot of black beans, before he did anything else with it, was pour out two cups of the cooking water, the cooking liquid, and we sipped it like a soup. That's how delicious it was. There was nothing else in it.Suzy Chase: So the USDA categorizes beans as a protein and a vegetable.Joe Yonan: Yeah.Suzy Chase: And even the folks living in the blue zones where people live the longest and eat the healthiest eat one cup of beans per person a day. Can you talk a little bit about the nutritional aspect of beans?Joe Yonan: People know the song, right? Good for your heart.Suzy Chase: Why don't you sing it?Joe Yonan: I'm so sorry to inform you that I happen to be coming down with a cold so I won't be able to fulfill your-Suzy Chase: Oh shoot.Joe Yonan: singing request Suzy today, any other day.Suzy Chase: Okay.Joe Yonan: Well, they, so what I find most amazing about beans, I mean certainly the nutritional benefits include antioxidants and fiber really is the big one. But yes, they also improve our gut health. There's some school of thought that the very thing that we find difficult to digest, the oligosaccharides also is feeding our gut biome. So maybe when it comes to flatulence, we should all just give each other a break, open some windows and get used to it. The page in which I talk about this in the book, I headline, let the music play. With the idea being that it's really not that big of a deal unless you find it uncomfortable.Joe Yonan: And I know some people certainly find it actually uncomfortable. And for those people I want, certainly want them to try to do what they can do to reduce it. But beans also, they help stabilize your blood sugar. They might lower your cholesterol. One of the most interesting things that I came across in my research for the book was that there have been studies published that meals based on beans are actually more satisfying than meals based on animal proteins, meaning that people were full longer and reported a higher sense of satiety.Suzy Chase: I find that too, don't you?Joe Yonan: Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely.Suzy Chase: And you don't feel as weighed down.Joe Yonan: Right. They're simultaneously satisfying and, and yeah, I mean, to me they're energizing, so I always feel great when I eat them.Suzy Chase: So I can't get into aquafaba.Joe Yonan: Okay, want me to help you?Suzy Chase: Yes please.Joe Yonan: Well, I would say you should try a recipe like the chocolate mousse recipe in Cool Beans. It's really easy and shows off how easy it is to use aquafaba the way you would use egg whites. It's based on Julia child's classic chocolate mousse recipe and I wish I could tell you that I labored and tested and retested and tweaked and all of this to make it work. But the fact is it worked the first time, it's just, aquafaba was "discovered" by a, I believe it was a French vegan pastry chef who was looking for something to substitute for eggs and had canned chickpeas around, as you do and realized that the liquid and the viscosity of the liquid reminded him of egg whites. So he just thought, "Oh, I wonder if they wouldn't whip up like that." And they do. I mean you can whip them and add sugar to them and they turn silky white and glossy and they'll hold stiff peaks.Joe Yonan: Especially if you use a little cream of tartar, which I did in the mousse recipe. It stabilizes them the same way it stabilizes egg whites. I only use it in a couple of places in the book for that recipe, and then I make a margarita. That's sort of a twist on one that Jose Andre serves at a restaurant here in DC that has what he calls salt air on top, which is this layer of salty foam that I'm sure they're putting through a nitrogen canister or CO2 canister or something to get the foam, but I do it with the aquafaba.Suzy Chase: Yesterday I made your recipe for Texas-Style Bowl O’ Red Beans.Joe Yonan: Excellent.Suzy Chase: On page 112. Can you describe this?Joe Yonan: I am a Texan and when you're a Texan, then you find yourself telling people all the time, "That's not real chili, that's not real chili." Because real Texas chili doesn't have beans. It doesn't have tomatoes. It's really just chili con carne ne, right. It's chilis with meat. Well, when you are a Texas cook, who used to be a purist but find yourself not eating meat anymore, you have to give all that up. Don't you, Suzy?Suzy Chase: You aren't really giving anything up.Joe Yonan: No. I guess what I'm mean is you have to give up the purism.Suzy Chase: Yeah.Joe Yonan: That's the only thing you're giving up is the sense that like this is the only way to cook a pot of Texas chili. But then when I was researching the book, I thought, I really love the straightforward nature of that Texas bowl of red they call it. It's just so complex in flavor, but it's so straightforward and you just treat the meat in that recipe so wonderfully that I thought, "Why don't I just all of that same technique and ingredients but use beans?" So that's what I do in this recipe. It's mostly kidney beans, red kidney beans, and a smaller amount of black beans. I like the combo together.Joe Yonan: I don't usually cook different varieties of beans together. But this is one where I thought that it worked and you cook them for so long, either on the stove top or you can certainly do it in the pressure cooker for a much shorter period. And they just get really, really tender packed with flavor. I like to mash a little bit of them in the pot and leave some of the other ones whole. And then you've got this incredible flavor and it's all beans. And you do the same thing you would do with a purist Texas chili and serve it with those simple accompaniments on top.Suzy Chase: So I was nervous about using dry beans and I thought it wouldn't be as creamy as canned, but oh my goodness. After five hours of simmering, I had the best pot of glorious beans. I can't wait to put it on my eggs tomorrow too.Joe Yonan: Great.Suzy Chase: I'm so excited. Yay. Now for my segment called my favorite cookbook. Aside from this cookbook, what is your all time favorite cookbook and why?Joe Yonan: Wow, that is a question. All time favorite?Suzy Chase: All time.Joe Yonan: All time. All time. All time. There's been a lot. I've had a lot of time. Well, I'll tell you, I'm a huge fan of Amy Chaplain's work. She wrote Whole Food Cooking Every Day, and I think her recipes are stellar. And whenever I cook out of a book, I met, I know Amy, she and I are friends and I'm so jealous of, I don't know, her effortlessness in the kitchen. She's Australian and she's got that incredible palette and everything she cooks is incredibly bright, flavored and everything comes together so wonderfully and it feels so, I don't want to say healthy, it feels nourishing, which I think is a different feeling. But God, there's so many others that I feel like I could mention. I mean Madhur Jaffrey's books. I'm a big fan of Anna Jones, the British Vegetarian Cookbook author. Oh God, I'm leaving out a million, million people.Joe Yonan: But I would say off the top of my head, if I had to pick one, even though it came out recently, it would be Whole Food Cooking Every Day.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?Joe Yonan: I make it so easy for people. So everything about me is just Joe Yonan. So it's www.joeynan.com. It's Twitter handle @joeyonan. It's Instagram, Joe Yonan. It's Facebook Joe Yonan. No fancy names. Just me.Suzy Chase: This has been so much fun. Thanks Joe, for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.Joe Yonan: Thank you for having me, Suzy. I loved it.Outro: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com and thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

Keep It SimpleEasy Weeknight One-Pot RecipesBy Yasmin Fahr Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table talking to cookbook authors.Yasmin Fahr: Hi, I'm Yasmin Fahr. I'm the author of Keeping It Simple, which is full of easy weeknight one pot recipes.Suzy Chase: If you enjoy this podcast, please be sure to tell a friend. I'm always looking for new people to enjoy Cookery by the Book. On with the show. You're on trend for the new year if you're cooking at home more than you used to. Today, 82% of the meals Americans eat are prepared at home, a much higher percentage than a decade ago. With Keeping It Simple, we will have dinner on the table in the time it takes to drink a glass of wine or two. Tell us about that.Yasmin Fahr: Well, first, I came up with the recipes because I was writing a column for Serious Eats that was easy weeknight dinners in one-pot. At a time I was writing it, I was working as a hotel inspector, so I was traveling all over the world for two to three weeks of every month, so I needed to make recipes that were easy enough to do because I was super tired from traveling, but also were good for me because I've been eating out all the time. I took that same approach to the book because even if you're not traveling a lot, I think we're all really busy and want to make delicious, fun, beautiful meals, but don't always have the time to do so. That's really the need I was trying to meet with this book.Suzy Chase: Okay. Before we get on with the book, what is a hotel inspector?Yasmin Fahr: Yeah, so it does sound like an interesting job-Suzy Chase: I'm sure everyone asked you.Yasmin Fahr: ...and it was. Yeah, it's definitely unusual. Basically I was working as a luxury hotel, restaurant and spa inspector. I would travel to these properties, stay there, and then evaluate them and then write a report. We were trying to figure out if they were five or four star properties. That's why I was going. It was kind of an amazing job to be paid to travel the world and eat and stay in incredible places. Definitely a dream job.Suzy Chase: These recipes in this cookbook are faster than delivery. Can you talk a little bit about that?Yasmin Fahr: Yeah. I think going back to that same idea of people wanting to make really good meals, but not having a lot of time, I was thinking, okay, so delivery probably takes what, 30 to 40 minutes by the time you figure out what you want and order, and then I want these recipes to be ready in that same time to be really simple and approachable, but also fun and beautiful.Suzy Chase: Describe the four recipe icons sprinkled throughout the book.Yasmin Fahr: Yes, I really love these. Thank you for asking. We have four and the first one is the efficiency moves, which is basically tips on how to approach the recipe. I think a lot of times when you have something you haven't made before, it's kind of overwhelming to know where to start and what to do. This really tells you how to approach the whole thing, what to do during downtime, whether it's drinking a glass of wine or cleaning up. You can totally ignore this if you don't like to be told what to do. I get that, but it's meant more to be helpful.Yasmin Fahr: Then there's recipe notes which are just small tips on good things to know for the recipe, and then we have swap out some variations, which are for seasonal ingredients or if something is kind of hard to find or let's say you hate cilantro, you get tips on what to switch it out with. The last one is leftover notes. A lot of times you may have some extra [inaudible 00:03:27] the recipes, so it's ways to be kind of creative and use them for lunch or dinner the next day.Suzy Chase: Let's talk meatballs.Yasmin Fahr: Yay.Suzy Chase: Tell me the story about how meatballs got the better of you.Yasmin Fahr: It's kind of embarrassing. I love meatballs, so I guess it first started when I went to the Little Owl in New York City in the West Village, and they have these amazing gravy meatball sliders that are so good. I even wrote an article or a research paper at NYU about spaghetti and meatballs because I wanted to figure out how the dish come to be because it's a very American thing because in Italy they have them as two separate courses. Obviously I've been obsessed with meatballs for a while and I went to this event at the Food & Wine Festival called Meatball Madness. Obviously I was super excited and I tend to get... I mean, I love food, but I tend to get really excited. When I saw it was meatballs, I was like, "Oh my God."Yasmin Fahr: I just ate so many in a really short amount of time. While I love them, I don't eat that much meat all the time. I think my body was like, what did you just do? I definitely didn't feel great after. The meatball recipe in the book is a little bit lighter than the ones I was eating at that time.Suzy Chase: Okay. The Little Owl is around the corner from me, and I've never had their meatballs. What is so special about those meatballs?Yasmin Fahr: Oh, you have to go. I'm obsessed with them. They're made veal pork and beef, and they have this incredible kind of lightly spiced tomato sauce, and they're on... I think it's a Parmesan bun and then with a little bit of [inaudible 00:04:57] You just bite into it. The sauce kind of drips down and they're like the perfect size. They're more sliders, but small and bite size. They are so good, and that restaurant is just one of my favorites. It's super beautiful. I love the show Friends, so the fact that it's in the Friends building, all of it. I was like, oh, this is meant to be. Yes, I highly recommend them.Suzy Chase: It seems like everyone has a go-to meatball recipe. I would love to discuss your baked chicken and ricotta meatballs on page 41. What's the backstory of this recipe?Yasmin Fahr: Yeah, so obviously I have a thing for meatballs, but during the week night I want something that's a little lighter and not quite as heavy. I made ones with chicken, which tastes a bit lighter, and ricotta, which is super flavorful and adds a really like creamy and light texture to the meatballs, and then serving it with broccolini and lemon slices. It's really bright, tons of vegetables, and it's really easy to eat and make on a week night.Suzy Chase: What's the first step? What's the first thing we do?Yasmin Fahr: First, we take the sheet pan and toss the broccolini with the lemon in olive oil and set that aside, and then we make the meatball. In a mixing bowl you, beat the egg, add the garlic, ricotta, the seasonings like parsley and pepper, breadcrumbs, and meat, and then gently mix it together. Something for meatballs to always know is you don't want to squeeze it really tough or tight or it makes the meat really dense and tough at the end. You want to use your hands to mix it and just make sure that the ingredients are kind of all intermingles. You'll still see bits of meat, but just kind of lightly colored with the herbs.Suzy Chase: I didn't know that. I always tried to squeeze my meatballs together like a golf ball.Yasmin Fahr: Yeah, no, that's fine, but you want them to be kind of like loosely tapped, so not like super dense and tight.Suzy Chase: What does ricotta bring to the flavor profile? I know you said it brings some creaminess, but what does it do for the food?Yasmin Fahr: Well, I think the flavor is really light and mild, but soft. I think it adds kind of an airiness to the overall bite of it, and also it's really nice because you don't really overcook it when you have ricotta in there because it won't get quite as dense or tough as it would if you didn't have that. But if you didn't like ricotta, you could also add some Parmesan anyway or some chili flakes because meatballs are like really personal, so you can kind of make them your own.Suzy Chase: I noticed that you didn't use any onions in this recipe. How come?Yasmin Fahr: I was like, why didn't I use onions? But I think you actually could use some red onions on the sheet pan if you wanted to. They'll get really silky and soft and be really delicious. I think that's a great idea. Next time I'm just going to call you for recipes. I'll be like, "What do you think about this?"Suzy Chase: Oh god. I'm just here to learn.Yasmin Fahr: Right. You're doing great. Good question.Suzy Chase: Then we nestle the meatball. I love how you wrote nestle. We nestle the meatballs between the broccolini and lemon slices for how long and at what temperature?Yasmin Fahr: You want the oven to be hot at about 425, and you're just cooking them for about 15 to 20 minutes until they're cooked through and just turning them over halfway. You can always take a meatball and cut it open to see that there's no pink inside and it's done, but it's a really quick recipe and you want the broccolini also to be crispy. But yeah, it'll be ready really, really fast. Faster than delivery. There you go.Suzy Chase: In the recipe you wrote, use this time to clean up and set the table and have a glass of wine if this stressed you out in way.Yasmin Fahr: Yeah, I know. Well, I think sometimes cooking can be stressful for people and I really want it to be fun and enjoyable. Yes, I'm all about having glass of wine and enjoying yourself during the process.Suzy Chase: How do we freeze these and how can we use leftovers?Yasmin Fahr: Yes, you can definitely freeze them in kind of an airtight container, and then for leftovers, there's so many ways. I love taking a broth or a stalk and then adding some greens like kale or chard and then some noodles and then putting the meatballs and at the end to warm up, or you can eat them over like cooked greens or quinoa, rice with some maybe spinach stirred in and then the meatballs on top with some lemon zest. Yeah, there's a lot of ways that you need them, but they're great.Suzy Chase: In the cookbook, your philosophy says, "Pantry staples will pull you out of your cooking rut."Yasmin Fahr: I definitely believe in that. In my fridge, I have a ton of pastes and condiments like miso, Thai curry paste, dijon, and then outside I always have different rice and noodles, and then I also have fresh herbs and lemons, garlic, onions, these kinds of things. Because I think especially with pastes and condiments, they are such great tools to add a ton of flavor without a lot of time. In cooking, you really build flavor over time and that's a beautiful thing, but we don't always have that time on weeknights. These really do the work for you, which is what's so wonderful about them.Suzy Chase: I've heard you say you can't live without your microplane. Talk a little bit about that.Yasmin Fahr: Yes, it's such a great tool. You can use it for so many things. In the book, I use a lot for grading garlic because it's really quick. You don't really need to mince it or your hands will get smelly, but it's wonderful for lemon zest, Parmesan. You can even use it for ginger. I've also used it for like nutmeg or chocolate to finish like wintery boozy cocktails. Just a really great tool. It's about $15, so it's not super expensive, and it'll will last a long time.Suzy Chase: If we search your recipes online, we will find a common theme. What is that?Yasmin Fahr: Definitely feta. I feel like if you even read some of the comments, if there's a recipe that doesn't have feta, someone's like, "Wait, Yasmin, there's no feta in this recipe?" Clearly people have picked up on it. Yeah, there's an essay in the book called, "I have a thing for feta because I just grew up eating feta and I love it so much." Definitely it's in a lot of the recipes in the book, but I had to take it out of some because my editor was like, "Yasmin, this is not a feta cookbook. You can't have feta in every single recipe." But yeah, so definitely feta.Suzy Chase: That's hilarious. Too much feta. Enough with the feta.Yasmin Fahr: I know. Exactly. Stop.Suzy Chase: What's your favorite kind of feta?Yasmin Fahr: I love Bulgarian feta. Bulgarian feta... Greek feta is technically a protected designation of origin, so it's kind of like champagne that can only be made in champagne discerned specifications. Anything other than Greek feta is supposed to be called a feta style cheese. But the European laws don't really apply as much here, so we still call them Bulgarian feta. Bulgarian feta is always... Oh, can be a mix of sheep's, cow, and goat's milk, but it's usually mostly sheep. It's really creamy and tangy and often found in the brine, which is the kind of salty like murky liquid you see it in. Greek feta is a least 70% sheep's milk and no more than 30% goat's milk. I don't know. I think the flavor of Bulgaria is just something that I grew up with and I really love.Yasmin Fahr: I feel like it adds so much to the dish, like it really can add the creamy component, but it's also really light, and it has a ton of flavor. I say go Bulgarian, but if you can't find that, feta in the brine is equally as good.Suzy Chase: Is Bulgarian easy to find?Yasmin Fahr: I mean, it's going to be at Whole Foods. It'll be at like Cheesemongers, but sometimes in supermarkets you tend to only find those kind of packaged like cryovac feta that's really dry and caky and doesn't have that creamy crumbly texture that you want. I would say try to avoid those if you can.Suzy Chase: What's your favorite recipe in the cookbook with feta?Yasmin Fahr: Oh, that's so hard. I would say the baked feta is one of my favorites. It's in the oven to table chapter. Everything's made in a sheet pan. You put it in, walk away, and then it's ready. This is one that's cooked with kale and chickpeas, some spices, and then blocks of feta. Kale gets really crispy, so do the chickpeas, and then the feta gets even like creamier. It's really delicious. I don't even know how to fully describe the taste of it, and it makes for wonderful leftovers that you can mix it with eggs, again, with grains. This is one I make all the time and even swap out the kale for broccolini, broccoli, mushrooms, and you can change some of the spices for cumin. Just a really easy, simple dish. Once you master the technique, you can definitely make it your own.Suzy Chase: On Monday night, I made your recipe for Miso Ghee chicken with Roasted Radishes on page 28. Can you describe this dish?Yasmin Fahr: Yay. I'm so happy you made it. I love that one. Basically I make a miso-ghee like compound butter. That's when you take a butter and you mix it with herbs or spices. I'm using ghee set of butter in this one. You make it and you put it outside of the chicken, and you kind of lift up the chicken skin and make this little pocket and tuck it in there, so it infuses the chicken with this incredibly intense aromatic nutty flavor. It's just so wonderful and it makes the skin really crispy. You cook it in there, and then halfway through, you add radishes. What I love about radishes is that they taste like potatoes when they're cooked. You get that tasty delicious flavor, but it's a little bit lighter for the weeknight.Yasmin Fahr: Then you can finish it under the broiler and you top it off with some scallions and sesame seeds, and you have a really easy dinner.Suzy Chase: Yes, I don't love radishes, but they totally turn into potatoes when you roast them.Yasmin Fahr: Right?Suzy Chase: It was crazy.Yasmin Fahr: It's so cool. I'm always on the fence about radishes too and someone told me about that and I was like, "This is incredible." Yeah, I've definitely become a fan ever since.Suzy Chase: The miso ghee combination made it so crispy.Yasmin Fahr: It's so good. It just smells so incredible too. If you even take miso and ghee and toss it with soba noodles and some spinach like wilt in there with some scallions on top, it's such an easy weeknight meal and it smells unbelievable.Suzy Chase: My 13 year old said, "miso good." He was trying to be funny.Yasmin Fahr: No, that's cute. Did he like it?Suzy Chase: He loved it.Yasmin Fahr: Oh my God. I feel like having a 13 year old like it is huge.Suzy Chase: Yes.Yasmin Fahr: That's fantastic, right?Suzy Chase: You've done your job.Yasmin Fahr: That's a big compliment.Suzy Chase: Yeah.Yasmin Fahr: Yeah, exactly. Job well done.Suzy Chase: What does this recipe have to do with your holistic facialist?Yasmin Fahr: That probably sounds sort of funny. I started seeing this holistic facialist in Brooklyn about seven or eight years ago and she's so incredible. She really is someone who look at your skin and say, "Oh, you're not..." For me, she was saying, "You're not eating enough meat at this time because you don't have enough minerals." She basically tell my diet just by looking at my skin. She was the one who told me to start drinking bone broth about seven, eight years ago before it kind of became a thing. She says that ghee and butter are really good fats for your skin to kind of keep them plump, and so I began cooking with ghee. Now I use ghee probably as much as I use olive oil. That's how I got hooked on ghee.Suzy Chase: Now for my segment called my favorite cookbook. Aside from this cookbook, what is your all time favorite cookbook and why?Yasmin Fahr: Pellegrino Artusi, Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well. It's from the late 1800s. The way he writes is just so funny and beautiful, and it's really interesting just to read how recipes were written back then.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?Yasmin Fahr: My Twitter and Instagram are Yasmin Fahr, so Y-A-S-M-I-N F-A-H-R, and then my website is my full name dot co, rather than dot com.Suzy Chase: Well, thanks, Yasmin, for chatting with me on Cookery by the Book Podcast.Yasmin Fahr: Thank you so much for having me. This was so fun.Outro: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com, and thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

Rage Baking: The Transformative Power of Flour, Fury, and Women's VoicesBy Katherine Alford & Kathy Gunst Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book, with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table talking to cookbook authors.Kathy Gunst: Hi, I'm Kathy Gunst, the author of Rage Baking, the Transformative Power of Flour, Fury and Women's Voices, which I co-wrote with Katherine Alford.Suzy Chase: For more Cookery by the Book, you can follow me on Instagram. If you enjoyed this podcast, please be sure to share it with a friend, I'm always looking for new people to enjoy Cookery by the Book. Now on with the show. "And then late one night I found myself in my kitchen pulling flour, sugar, butter and baking powder out of the pantry. I decided to bake a simple almond cake topped with late summer fruit. I scooped out the flour and made sure it was perfectly level in my measuring cup. I softened the butter. I listened to the whole almonds growl as I chopped them in the blender. I peeled ripe peaches and caught every last drop of their sweet juice in my batter. I scattered the last of the tart wild Maine blueberries on top. And a few hours later I had a gorgeous cake and a calmer heart." Can you sort of take us through that experience and what led up to it?Kathy Gunst: Sure. It's nice to hear you read it. It was during the Kavanaugh hearings, when Dr. Christine Blasey Ford was giving testimony about her experience as a teenager and what she alleged occurred between herself and Brett Kavanaugh. So I was listening to NPR, I had the TV on for a while, I became a bit obsessed with this trial. And every night when it wound down, I was wound up. I was filled with rage, it really set something off in me. And I found myself in my kitchen, as you just read, baking, but it wasn't really very normal, in that I would bake that almond cake you just described, then I would bake a batch of cookies, and then I would make a pie all in one night. And then the next day I listened to the entire trial again and baked obsessively that night. And it actually took several months before I understood what I was doing and why I was baking like that.Kathy Gunst: It was not about rage eating. I sort of had no interest in eating these gorgeous things I was baking, it was more about the science of baking. I think I found it soothing and grounding. The thing about baking is that if you weigh your flour and if you level your sugar and if you follow the rules as they're written in a recipe, you will be rewarded with a cake or a tart or a pie. And I felt like when I was watching this trial, all the rules were being broken. I felt that I was listening to these men, primarily men, pretending to listen to Dr. Blasey Ford, pretending to have their mind open to voting for or against Kavanaugh, but what became increasingly clear to me was that they were not listening to her and they had already decided how they were going to vote and the trial was a charade.Kathy Gunst: And I was remembering Anita Hill, and I was remembering so many brave women who have come forward to say, "I know something about this man that you're about to put in this powerful office," that should convince you that maybe he's not the right person for this job. And it just, it really made me full of rage. And so this rage baking began, and I started posting pictures of the results of my baked goods on social media, #RageBakers. And I got a lot of response from a lot of women saying, "I'm doing the same thing," or, "I'm rage knitting," or, "I'm rage sewing," or, "I'm lying on the couch sobbing, maybe baking would be better." And I thought, "Wow, there's really something to this." And then I talked to my friend Katherine Alford whose been in the food media business for as long as I have, which is quite a while, and one day she said to me, "We should write a book." And I thought, "Wow, we should write a book. We should absolutely do something called Rage Baking." And it was born.Suzy Chase: The definition of rage, is violent, uncontrollable anger. I found it interesting that you use the word, rage, in the title. It's a very emotionally charged word. Why do you think female rage is so off-putting to men?Kathy Gunst: I guess that first of all, I'd want to take exception with the use of the word, violent, in a definition of rage, because for me, and I can only speak for myself, there's nothing violent about it. I mean, if I can pound on bread dough and feel calmer, that's the extent of my violence. But to get to your larger question, I mean, you think about Hillary Clinton and everything that went down during that election, and that's a whole other conversation, but one of the things that came out about her was that she was, "Shrill," and that she was, "Angry." And there is something about being a woman where people, men in particular, don't like us to raise our voices, don't like us to act like them. And I, you need to talk to a psychologist, I don't understand the root of that or why it's so threatening, but women raising their voices goes back a long, long time.Kathy Gunst: It is the anniversary, the 100 anniversary of a woman's right to vote this month, right now, right here, and when you think about that a hundred years ago we weren't allowed to vote, and here we are in 2020 still fighting for our rights to control our own bodies and what happens with it, women have had a long fight. They will continue to have a long fight. And if we don't speak up, and whether that takes the form of anger or rage or speaking loudly, we have to own it. One of the contributors to this book, Rebecca Traister, wrote a brilliant book called, Good and Mad, and we have one of her essays in the book, and she talks exactly about this, "Don't let anyone tell you that you can't speak up and be angry." She's essentially telling women, "Own this. Use it. Work together." And that's the message of this book.Suzy Chase: In terms of your #RageBakers, I feel like you inadvertently started a movement to rebrand the word rage.Kathy Gunst: You see references to rage and rage baking, particularly as early as 2012, I think it was originally an offshoot of the #MeToo movement, of the women's movement. I can't own it, nor can anybody, it's really about... you can find references to rage baking as early as 2012 in literature, in journalism, on social media. And historically women and rage, we wouldn't be voting today if women didn't have rage and were angry and said, "We are equal to men. We have every right to get out there and vote." So it has a long, long history. This book, Rage Baking, has clearly touched a nerve. We've had incredible response. I keep getting emails and photos and comments on social media, from women all over the country who are showing me pictures of things they're baking, or talking about how they responded to the Kavanaugh hearings, or how they've responded to the recent impeachment trials. And for many women baking, which is a very traditional woman's activity has been grounding.Kathy Gunst: It's also really important for me to say that the message of this book is not, "Hey ladies, get back in the kitchen, start baking, and you'll feel so much better. Everything will be okay." Hell no. That is not what this book is about. This book is about empowerment. It's about creating beautiful baked goods. It's about women sharing community and voices. And ultimately, I hope by the time you look through the book, cook through the book, read that recipe, read the essays, read the interviews, you'll be left with a sense of hope.Suzy Chase: Among the ranks of the contributors are enthusiastic, amateur bakers and James Beard winners. This book has recipes for bakers of various skill levels. Tell us a little bit about the contributors.Kathy Gunst: We have the most incredible group of women in this book. When Katherine Alford and I decided we wanted to do a book, it felt really important to us that we have a diversity of women's voices. So we reached out to food writers that you've probably heard of, wonderful bakers like Dorie Greenspan, Ruth Reichl, we reached out to musician Ani DiFranco, we reached out to Jennifer Finney Boylan, a writer for the New York Times editorial page. We reached out to so many different women, and almost everybody answered our emails extremely quickly with a, "Hell yes, we want to be part of this." And the book kind of came together in a very organic way.Kathy Gunst: There's some wonderful, wonderful essays by young writers, Hali Bey Ramdene, who is based in Albany, New York, wrote this gorgeous essay, Hurricane Beulah, about her grandmother, about the drive she took as a child every year from Albany to North Carolina, and the foods that they would be greeted with by her grandmother. And how as she aged, she understood that part of putting together this meal was her grandmother just releasing the rage of various things from her life. There was another incredible essay by a writer named Osayi Endolyn, called Typing is a Kind of Fury, about being a young African American girl and watching her mother and grandmother type letters when they felt that she was being discriminated against or somehow people were taking advantage of her, they would voice their rage on the typewriter. So it's a huge variety of voices, some of whom you've heard of and some of whom you'll probably discover for the first time.Kathy Gunst: And then of course, they're the essays Alice Medrich, a great cookbook author who writes about chocolate, her chocolate pudding, it's just, there's a wide range of voices as well as recipes. And you touched this earlier, it's important to say that this is a baking book for a home baker, that you do not have to have gone to baking school or feel like, "Oh, I know how to bake anything." Ruth Reichl's oatmeal cookies are five ingredients and they take about 15 minutes to make?Suzy Chase: Eight.Kathy Gunst: Eight?Suzy Chase: Yeah, I made them over the weekend.Kathy Gunst: Aren't they great? They are these lacy, crunchy oatmeal cookies that a friend of mine made with his two and a half year old last weekend. And then there's a chocolate cake with raspberries and whipped cream that might take you an entire afternoon to make, and everything in between.Suzy Chase: Part of the proceeds from this cookbook goes to Emily's List. What is Emily's List?Kathy Gunst: Oh, it's such a great story. So we also knew that we wanted to give some of the proceeds of this book to an organization that felt relevant and that we could relate to. So we started researching Emily's List, and I'm from Maine, and what we learned is that Emily's List, I always thought it was a woman named Emily that started I, it's actually an acronym that stands for Early Money Is Like Yeast. And the woman who started Emily's List was once upon a time a baker in Maine, and it is an organization that gives money to women candidates that want to run, and help seed their campaigns so that they can move forward, everyone from small local state races up to the presidential candidates.Suzy Chase: The chapter titles are so good, one of my favorites is, Bake Down the Patriarchy Cakes. Talk a little bit about the chapter titles.Kathy Gunst: We did have fun with them. We really wanted them to say something, it felt like an opportunity. So, you picked a great one, the title of the cookie chapter is also a favorite of mine, it's called, Sugar and Spice and Done Being Nice, Cookies, Bars and Bites. We also had fun with some of the recipe titles, rage and women and activism, these are kind of heavy topics, so we wanted to have some humor and lightness in this book. There's a fabulous recipe by a Hollywood writer named Tess Rafferty, called The Revolution Will be Catered, that will have you absolutely howling. And some of the recipe titles are pretty great, we have, Don't Call me Honey Cupcakes, we have, No More Sheet Cake, and then one of my personal favorites is, Pigs in the Blanket, which I dedicated to the men of Alabama who are working so hard to take away women's rights. So we had fun with this.Suzy Chase: Yeah, what are some of the recipes that you contributed to this cookbook?Kathy Gunst: Well, let's see. Katherine and I each contributed, I would say over a dozen. My chocolate pistachio butter crunch is a perennial favorite for everybody that thinks, "Oh no, no, no. I can't make candy, that's hard." Your mind will be blown. I have chocolate raspberry rugelach, that beautiful Jewish pastry that's got cream cheese in the dough. What else are mine? Oh my favorites, the chocolate chip tahini cookies, I am not a fan of peanut butter in sweets, which I know is blasphemy to many people, but I adore tahini. And I found that if you add tahini to a chocolate chip cookie, it kind of does what peanut butter does, it adds a nutty richness and a creaminess, but I think it's better. And you make the dough and you sprinkle on white sesame seeds and bake them till they're just crisp around the edges, and then when they're still warm, you sprinkle them with coarse sea salt. Those cookies are amazing.Suzy Chase: So, did writing this cookbook influence your ideas about women and political change?Kathy Gunst: When I started the book, I really think I was coming from a place of rage and anger, and I really ended up by reading the essays these women wrote by making these recipes, by interviewing various women from Ani DiFranco, the musician, to Marti Noxon, the Hollywood producer who wrote Sharp Objects and many other brilliant TV and movie scripts, I came away with a sense of hope about how when women pull together, create a community, and use their voices, how powerful and hopeful that can be. So, I think it energized me. I feel deeply passionate about the book, about the recipes in the book, but even more so about the voices in the book and the power that these women's voices have, particularly when they're all pulled together.Suzy Chase: As an avid, avid, avid, NPR listener, I have WNYC on all day long in my kitchen, and I've been dying to talk to you about NPR. So for the last 20 years you've been with WBUR's, Here and Now in Boston, and I'm curious to hear about that.Kathy Gunst: Well, it is the joy of my life. Talking on the radio about food is one of the most challenging and fulfilling things that I've ever done. Challenging because of the obvious, that food is such a visual medium, it is so much about how it looks, how it tastes, how it presents on the plate, the textures of it. And there you are on the radio with only one sensory element going on, which is audio and sound. And so, my job is to weave stories and talk about food in a descriptive way where you almost feel like you can taste it and see it. And one of the most rewarding things over the years are getting letters from listeners who say, "I was in my car, I was headed to run errands. I heard you talk about this dish. I made a U turn, I went straight to the store, bought the ingredients and we're having it for dinner tonight."Kathy Gunst: And I thought that's what it's all about. That's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to get people back into the kitchen, back at the family dinner table, and getting excited about seasonal foods and regional foods, and the joy of shopping and the joy of cooking and trying to get rid of this constant refrain of, "I don't have time to cook." I hear that from so many people, particularly people with young children, and I just have kind of made it my life's work to try to motivate people that in the time it takes for you to get out the menu for the takeout, pick up the phone, put in the order, wait for the order, go pick it up or wait for them to deliver it, you could have dinner on the table. So I very much use my role as the resident chef on Here on Now as a platform to show people how simple it can be to make delicious food, and to try to educate people about ingredients that are in season and are within their region, that are going to make their taste buds awake and happy.Suzy Chase: I remember when you used to cook on the air, what happened with that?Kathy Gunst: Wow, it's so cool that you remember that. Yeah, the first few years I used to do live cooking. This is in Boston, so the host would be in the studio, I would be in what was essentially the WBUR cafeteria. We'd kick everybody out, I would start a dish at the beginning of the show live, and I always tried to pick very sound rich dishes, never boiling pasta, lots of chopping, sautéing, shallow frying, things that had a lot of sound, and then at the end of the show, before they signed off, they would run back into the kitchen, I would finish the dish and they would taste it and we would talk about it. And it was so much fun, and it got very complicated and it got very difficult to segue from wars that were going on, horrible news stories, to going back and forth into a kitchen. So now I do my best to use words and images to try to make the cooking come alive.Suzy Chase: And now you have a new female CEO and general manager at WBUR. That's exciting.Kathy Gunst: This is very exciting. I mean, and when Here and Now started, it was just heard in Boston, and then I believe it was heard on 15 networks, and now it's an NPR show that's heard on over 550 public radio stations. And I just love doing it. The host, there are now 3 hosts, Jeremy Hobson, Robin Young and Tanya in L.A. and they're just fabulous to work with and it is a great joy.Suzy Chase: Now for my segment called, My Favorite Cookbook. Aside from this cookbook, what is your all time favorite cookbook and why?Kathy Gunst: Wow, that's kind of like asking me which of my children I like better. Marcela Hazan's, The Classic Italian Cooking, the very first book she did, because she showed me how picking the right ingredients and following simple recipes was the key to having delicious food. I'd have to mention Julia Child, because I remember being a teenager and discovering that book and having my mind blown open. I did not grow up in a home where my mother loved cooking and shared the joy of food and cooking, so in a way that book, I was, "Wait, what? You can make French food in New York? You can make French food anywhere?"Kathy Gunst: Those 2 women were huge influences and I could name 5,000 others, but you asked for one. I was lucky enough to meet Marcela Hazan and go to Italy with her. And she really did have a huge influence on me for the reasons I said, for understanding how to shop, and the joy of shopping, and the joy of finding foods that are in season. So, okay, you've pushed me, I will pick Marcela Hazan's, The Classic Italian Cookbook, I believe that's the correct title. Her first book.Suzy Chase: Okay. Yay, I did it.Kathy Gunst: You did it. I did it. Wow. And the 4,000 others I love.Suzy Chase: So where can we find you on the web and social media?Kathy Gunst: Well I'm at kathygunst.com, K-A-T-H-Y-G-U-N-S-T, for this new book Rage Baking. We have a new website which is www.ragebakers.com, and you can find all our events there and find out where we'll be talking and doing cooking classes and demonstrations. And I am at mainecook, M-A-I-N-E-C-O-O-K on Twitter, and I'm on Instagram under my name, Kathy Gunst.Suzy Chase: Wonderful. Thanks so much Kathy, for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.Kathy Gunst: Thanks so much, Suzy. This was really lovely.Outro: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com, and thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

Menus That Made HistoryBy Vincent Franklin & Alex Johnson Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York city, sitting at her dining room table talking to cookbook authors.Alex Johnson: I'm Alex Johnson and I'm the author of Menus that Made History: 2000 years of menus from Ancient Egyptian food for the afterlife to Elvis Presley's wedding breakfast, which I co-wrote with my friend Vincent Franklin.Suzy Chase: For more Cookery by the Book, you can follow me on Instagram. If you enjoy this podcast, please be sure to share it with a friend. I'm always looking for new people to enjoy Cookery by the Book. On with the show.Suzy Chase: So, you and Vincent Franklin delved into the world's 100 most iconic menus, which reveal not just the story of food, but periods of history, famous works of literature, notable events and celebrity figures; from prehistoric times up to the modern day, with over 40,000 years to choose from. How did you whittle down the menus?Alex Johnson: Well, actually is quite difficult really. I mean, it's an embarrassment of riches, as you say, but what we were really trying to do was pick menus that tell stories. So, I'm a journalist by training and Vince is an actor, so we're both very interested in the storytelling aspect as much as the food element. What we didn't want to do was fill it with feasts that were to kind of turn a penny, although things like the George IV Coronation is astonishing, just because of the vast amount of food that was on offer.Alex Johnson: We also wanted to make it international, we didn't want to make it... Although we're both based in England, we didn't want it to just be an English book of menus. So, there's things from India and America and Australia, South America, all over the world. And really, it's the kind of intriguing tidbits that you want to use to astonish people in the pub or in the bar, and just something to chat about really.Suzy Chase: So each menu provides an insight into its historical moment. You're a longtime journalist and you've written eight books that range from books in reading to sheds, so what was it about historical menus that caught your interest?Alex Johnson: Well, I'd love to be able to claim the idea was mine, but actually it was Vince's. I'd written a book two or three years ago called A Book of Book Lists and that was a list of things, not like 50 books you have to read before you're 30 or anything like that, but more lists that told stories. So things like what was on Osama bin Laden's bookshelf, that kind of thing, with little mini essays.Alex Johnson: Vince read it and he liked it. And we were at a party and he said, "Well, you know what would also work very well as lists? The ultimate lists: menus." And I think he said it partly is a joke, and he said, "Well, what do you think about that as an idea?" And I said, "Actually, that's a cracking idea," and it really went from there. We both like food, we both know each other very well; we play snooker together every week and our children were at school together. So, the idea of working together was very pleasant.Suzy Chase: I saw that you play snooker. Is it snooooker or snuuuucker?Alex Johnson: Snooker. Definitely snooker, yeah.Suzy Chase: So it's like pool, right?Alex Johnson: It is like pool in a way, but the table is much bigger and it's... I mean, the table is two or three times the size and so the games go on much longer. So yes, it's similar and there's some crossover. I mean, the best player in the world, Ronnie O'Sullivan also plays a bit of pool, and I think he's pretty pool in America as well. But yes, we only play snooker. We're very hoity-toity about pool.Suzy Chase: So, the word menu itself comes from a French term indicating something small or detailed. Talk a bit about where you found the first menu in ancient history.Alex Johnson: The earliest ones go back 30,000, 40,000 years to ice age people, and we also have early ones from early Roman and Greek history. They're not, in a sense, some of these aren't menus. They've had to be put together from bits and bobs from what people have discovered and our research, but I think they... we always felt they still counted as menus because that was part of the actual diet.Suzy Chase: You wrote that this is not really a book about food. What does that mean?Alex Johnson: Yes, that sounds right. Rather an odd statement, isn't it really, when you're writing a book about food? But yes, it's not so much the individual elements to it, I suppose. It's going back to what I said earlier about the idea of telling stories, the idea that we are what we eat. So, rather than just recipes, although we do have recipes in the book, or just talking about individual items of food, which we do as well, it's more about the stories.Alex Johnson: So for example, the Captain Scott failed to get to the South Pole first, was partly, largely because he wasn't as good a planner as Amundsen. He just wasn't as good at planning everything, and that's reflected in his food choices. He didn't have enough fat or calories in what he ate and what his men ate, down to smaller things like all his men had white bread, whereas Amundsen had special brown bread made. It's those kinds of stories, as well as the food elements. So it's how the food reflects the times and reflects the people.Suzy Chase: It would have been easy to just write a book of a collection of recipes, but you categorize them into 11 chapters. Tell us about that.Alex Johnson: We're not professional cooks, either of us, so just putting recipes together wouldn't have worked so well. And we did it, yes, with... there in 11 chapters. So things like travel and adventure, war and peace, faith and belief, and that was really... We did think about just going straight through all the menus, but we felt that cutting it up into chapters where they're naturally fitted into anyway, makes it easier to dip in and out of. It's not really a book that's meant to be read straight through. It's very much something that you can pick up, read for a bit and put down again, once you've marveled at the stories.Suzy Chase: Although I did read straight through.Alex Johnson: Did you?Suzy Chase: You're welcome.Alex Johnson: Quite right. That's thought I should've said. It's meant to be read straight through.Suzy Chase: Some of the menus are linked to an unforgettable event like the Titanic. Describe the distinction between the three classes on the menu.Alex Johnson: Well, one of the main distinctions is actually the wording in them. So, they're quite social distinctions. So things like dinner, tea and lunch are different depending on your class, which is something still very true today. I mean in England, supper, for example, could be your final meal of the day or it could just be a little sandwich before you go to bed, depending on your social class.Alex Johnson: So, in actual physical terms, what you've got in first class is obviously the finest things, you've got your oysters. Whereas in third class, you're down to gruel and what they describe as cabin biscuits. And cabin biscuits sounds not too bad, but actually that's what's known as hard tacks, which were made out of flour and water and salt and a little bit of fat, which is great in terms of lasting. I mean, they lost donkey's years, and they've been used on boats for hundreds and hundreds of years, but not the most delicious thing around.Suzy Chase: And even the times, the dining times were different?Alex Johnson: Yes. I mean, it's all very different. I mean, it shows you what a massive operation it is and how everything was very stratified on board the boat.Suzy Chase: Third class was the only menu that gives instructions on how to complain about the food or service?Alex Johnson: Yeah. It's strange that that... we looked at that and we researched it, and we couldn't see any particular reason why they... It's very specific on the third-class menu. I suppose it's probably an element of being patronizing, the first and second class they thought knew how to complain. And maybe the food was just absolutely terrible in third class, so they were more likely to complain. Or maybe it was just that they wanted to suggest to the people in third class that it was best to complain rather than to go absolutely barmy and start wrecking the place.Suzy Chase: It's so odd to think that the Titanic had a high capacity cooling unit for ice, but I guess it kept the oysters fresh for the first class?Alex Johnson: Yes, absolutely. Yeah, I mean that's... I think that's probably the beauty of the book is that, things like that which are quite ironic, which we didn't know. I mean, we were both reasonably familiar with the Titanic menus, but once you actually delve into it, they're the little tidbits, as I've mentioned earlier, they come out. And you just think, "Blimey, that's a bit strange really."Suzy Chase: So even today, restaurants are recreating the first-class Titanic meal. Have you ever had one of those?Alex Johnson: I haven't, no. I mean, it's interesting though, a lot of these meals become quite iconic. So we also include the meal from Babette's Feast, from the film in there, and the Independence Day meals are from India, and there's a lot of this recreation. I was talking to somebody early today, in fact, who runs dinner clubs and he was looking to do Babette's Feast and also the Titanic one.Alex Johnson: I think they're very popular. I think you also get the same kind of thing with Lord of the Rings fanatics as well, that they're very keen to actually reproduce what they see on screen.Suzy Chase: July 20th, 1969: four bacon squares, peaches, three sugar cookies, pineapple-grapefruit drink and coffee. That was the first menu on the moon. Who ate this and how was this menu chosen?Alex Johnson: Well, these are the astronauts who are the first men on the moon. People like Neil Armstrong had it, I mean, Buzz Aldrin. Neil Armstrong's actual favorite from all their food was spaghetti with meat sauce, followed by pineapple fruitcake, and Buzz Aldrin liked the shrimp cocktail.Alex Johnson: And generally, it's interesting what foods have been popular in space. Bacon was very popular for a long time, I think partly because of its strong flavor. But also, there's some doubt about whether this was the first menu on the moon because Buzz Aldrin actually brought a communion wafer and communion wine, and celebrated a little private communion before that meal. So, there's probably two answers to that question if you ever get it in a quiz.Suzy Chase: Oh, I bet that communion wafer was as awful in space, it's so dry.Alex Johnson: Yeah. It's gone a long way. It's got a long way.Suzy Chase: King George VI was the first reigning British monarch to visit America in June, 1939. President Franklin Roosevelt hosted the King and Queen at their private home in Hyde Park, New York. So instead of a ceremonial banquet, they had sort of a buffet situation. The New York Times wrote, "King tries hot hot dogs and asks for more, and he drinks beer with them." This made me laugh. So, describe this menu.Alex Johnson: Yes. I mean, it's a very down-to-earth, no-nonsense, straightforward American food menu. You've got Virginia ham and hot dogs and cranberry sauce, cranberry jelly I think, and then coffee, beer. There's nothing fancy-pantsy about at all. Very good, no-nonsense stuff.Suzy Chase: The queen was unsure how to eat a hot dog with a fork and knife, and FDR said, and I quote, "Push it into your mouth and keep pushing it until it is all gone."Alex Johnson: Yeah. Yes, it's maybe not what you would recommend today, especially in the days of YouTube and videos. That would be quite a sight, wouldn't it?Suzy Chase: So why do you think they chose such an informal setting for the King and Queen?Alex Johnson: Well, the whole thing really was designed as a kind of cover for Roosevelt to align the US more closely with Britain as they were heading towards war. And there was a strong isolationist lobby at the time in the US, so... and like I say, he wanted a slight, not exactly incognito, but a cover story. And his argument really, what he wanted to do, it was key to show the Royal family we're the kind of approachable people you could do business with, the kind of people you'd have a beer with.Alex Johnson: I suppose you'd describe it maybe as gastro-diplomacy, which we mention it in a couple of other places in the book. For example, the historic Peace Summit between North and South Korea in 2018, and there's a huge amount of symbolism in all aspects of that. So, especially things like fillings, which came from the hometowns of former presidents and that kind of thing. Everything is very carefully sorted out and worked out to make it look like actually, it's very relaxed. It's a very clever piece of work by Roosevelt really.Suzy Chase: What is your favorite menu in the book?Alex Johnson: I really like the one for the 1870 Siege of Paris on Christmas Day. The Prussian Army had been besieging the city for a while and they were getting really low on food. They'd eaten all the normal food, they were eating a lot of the animals, pretty much all the dogs had gone. And on Christmas Day, one of the big restaurants, Voisin, wanted to serve something special. So essentially what they did was, they went to the zoo and started taking the animals out and serving them.Suzy Chase: No?!Alex Johnson: So yeah, it was remarkable, I don't know whether... So you have on the menu, you have things like stuffed donkey head, elephant soup, cat fringed with rats, but they went for everything. Well, they didn't go for monkeys because that's a bit too close to home, bit too much like cannibalism. They don't go for anything too dangerous like the lions or the tigers, and there were some things like the hippos that they didn't know what to do with. I mean, how do you cook a hippo? How do you serve that? So, but that seemed remarkable to me. It was again, one of those things that I've just not heard of until you start doing the research for and you think, "That's extraordinary, really."Suzy Chase: I must talk about Elvis and Priscilla Presley's wedding breakfast at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas on May 1st, 1967. The ceremony lasted only eight minutes with 14 guests and a buffet lunch for 100 guests. That menu was: ham and eggs, fried chicken, Oysters Rockefeller, roast pig, poached and candied salmon, lobster, Eggs Minnette, no idea what that is, a six-tiered wedding cake and champagne. You wrote that Elvis only liked ham, eggs and fried chicken. Was this wedding a publicity stunt?Alex Johnson: Absolutely. I mean, this is all down to his manager, Colonel Tom Parker. I mean, it was a very, as you'd mentioned, it was a very, very swift wedding. There were hardly any guests; in fact, even the ones that Elvis had invited personally weren't allowed in. And he didn't like a lot of the food there, especially the oyster and the lobster. A lot of their business associates were invited. It was all a bit... Like a lot of things that Tom Parker did, very much a stunt. I'm sure Parker actually sorted out the menu himself and picked it.Suzy Chase: So, last weekend I made the recipe for buttermilk fried chicken with apple slaw from Elvis's wedding buffet. It was pretty darn delicious. And might I add that there are recipes throughout this book? Talk a little bit about that.Alex Johnson: When we sat down to write it, we were very much looking at the history of the recipes. And when we talked to the publisher, they felt that it would be nice to also include some recipes, as well as the menus. And they asked us for suggestions and the ones that we came up with are all the absolutely ludicrous ones, like roast narwhal or stuffed swan's neck, and they picked ones that would be a bit more approachable really, and it was all done in house. There's about a dozen where people can read about the menu and then make something quite easily from it. Well, I hope it's quite easily. How did the... how was it? You said it was tasty. Was it quite easy to follow?Suzy Chase: It was really easy to follow. You just-Alex Johnson: That's good.Suzy Chase: ... marinate the chicken; I did it overnight. It was really good, and the apple slaw was great too. I'm sure Elvis would've loved it.Alex Johnson: Let's hope so.Suzy Chase: Wait, I need to get back to stuffed swan's neck.Alex Johnson: We did some of the Tudor Elizabethan recipes, which included peacocks and things that are just not really available anymore, and a 13th century funeral for a Bishop as well. So that was interesting, looking into just the different names and what they're eating at different times.Suzy Chase: Yikes almighty.Alex Johnson: Yeah.Suzy Chase: So, now for my segment called My Favorite Cookbook. What's your all time favorite cookbook and why?Alex Johnson: I really like, there's a chap here called Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, who has written lots of cookbooks and he's a big campaigner for ethical eating and healthy eating. He's in the series called River Cottage Cookbooks and there's a very good family one, which has recipes in which are good for children, cooking with children. Well, not with them.Alex Johnson: And Gary Rhodes was probably... who sadly died at the end of last year, was a marvelous cook. He did one called Rhodes Around Britain, which was probably about the first cookbook I bought as an adult, which has a lot of fairly classic British dishes, but with a slight twist. He has a very, very good bread and butter pudding recipe in there.Alex Johnson: But I would have to say that probably my favorite is the Delia Smith's Complete Cookery Course. Delia Smith is a real [inaudible 00:18:27] of cooks. And for somebody of my age, I'm 50, she used to have a slot on a children's television show on Saturday mornings when I was about eight or nine, and I've kind of grown up with her. She had lots of television series and produced lots of cookbooks, and they're all very good, safe recipes. So if there's anything you really want to do... They're not fancy recipes; they're nice and tasty but they're really reliable. And I think that's the one that I go back to the most.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?Alex Johnson: Well, you can find the book... We're on Twitter, @FamousMenus. Personally, my website is TheAlexJohnson.co.uk. And on Twitter I'm @ShedWorking because one of the other things I do love writing about is sheds. Yeah, Vince is just all over the place because he's an actor. Type in his name, you'll find all sorts of him everywhere.Suzy Chase: So, sheds, are you talking about tiny houses or really sheds that you put your gardening tools in?Alex Johnson: It's somewhere in between, really. What I write about is garden offices, so the kind of sheds that you'd have in your backyard, your back garden, that you use as a home office. Which is a slight distance away from your home, but still very close. And yes, that's one of the things I've been writing about now for about 10, 15 years.Suzy Chase: Have you heard of the term she shed?Alex Johnson: Oh, absolutely yes. No, a big thing, especially the last five or six years. It shows us... And that's the nice thing about shed working and garden offices, is that the old traditional idea of sheds, especially in the UK has been that it's for older men on their allotments and a, "No women allowed," kind of thing. But shed working garden offices is very much an equal gender approach, so it's fantastic that I get to write about lots of women who are interested in sheds and garden offices too.Suzy Chase: Hillary Clinton once remarked, "Food is the oldest diplomatic tool." Well, isn't that the truth? Thanks so much for coming on Cookery by the Book Podcast.Alex Johnson: Lovely. Thank you very much, Suzy.Outro: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com. And thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

The Last CourseBy Claudia Flemingwith Melissa Clark Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.Claudia Fleming: Hi. I'm Claudia Fleming and I'm here to speak about the rerelease and my cookbook, The Last Course.Suzy Chase: For more Cookery by the Book you can follow me on Instagram. If you enjoy this podcast, please be sure to share it with a friend. I'm always looking for new people to enjoy Cookery by the Book. Now, on with the show.Suzy Chase: Personally, the thing I love about The Last Course is it speaks to everyone, perfect for home cooks like me. You are acclaimed for having set an industry-wide standard at New York City's Gramercy Tavern with your James Beard Award-winning desserts. Gramercy Tavern is my all-time favorite restaurant here in the city. Danny Meyer said it so accurately in the cookbook, he wrote Gramercy Tavern strives to combine luxury with warm, down-to-earth hospitality. The New York Times called The Last Course a cult out-of-print cookbook. I'm not alone when I say I'm thrilled you've rereleased it. It's rare for a cookbook to be rereleased, so I'm curious to know why you chose to rerelease it now.Claudia Fleming: It wasn't my choice. The publisher reached out to me and asked if I'd be interested in reissuing the cookbook, and of course I said yes. It was so many years later. Yeah, I mean, I get weekly requests for books and I didn't have books. People were always wanting to buy the book and I guess the demand got back to them and they decided to rerelease, thankfully. Good for me, yay.Suzy Chase: Yeah, good for all of us. Before we dig into the book, I'd like to do a little walk down memory lane.Claudia Fleming: Okay.Suzy Chase: 1984, on 79th Street, you're working at Jonathan Waxman's ode to California cuisine, Jams. Then, Danny Meyer brought you to Union Square Cafe. Then Drew Nieporent hired you as the pastry assistant at Tribeca Grill in 1990. 1994 Tom Colicchio brought you on board Gramercy Tavern. Those are four visionaries in the restaurant business. I mean, what a star-studded list. Can you think of one takeaway that you learned from each of them? Jonathan, Danny, Tom, and Drew?Claudia Fleming: Oh, sure. Well, Jonathan did bring a revolutionary style of cooking and cuisine to New York and it was my first exposure to luxury dining. Every single thing you touched in that restaurant was the very best, the Ginori china, the Hockney paintings, the Italian tiles. Then of course, all the ingredients that he used. I remember there being towers of FedEx boxes that came from California with all those baby vegetables, the likes of which I'd never seen before. It was so incredibly exciting. So I think from Jonathan, it was just his approach to cooking. It was very California, it was very light and laid back. In those days we were still immersed in the French style of dining and cooking and eating, and this was just a whole new world. It was incredibly exciting and I just felt so honored to be in it and part of it.Claudia Fleming: Danny, of course as we know, is just Mr. Hospitality. Danny, I think, brought respect to those of us who worked in the industry that before that time it wasn't a job for educated, ambitious people. It was, and I think still is, a little bit of a place for lost toys or broken toys. The restaurant industry definitely attracts a different kind of personality. But still, Danny gave working in the restaurant industry respect, not to mention his brand of hospitality, which is just warm and inviting and ingratiating and a delight to be around. I mean, he really had a knack for seeking out people whose, I think, driving motivation is to please people.Claudia Fleming: Let's see, Drew. Drew, I have never met a person who remembers names, numbers. He was just the ultimate maitre d'. Of course, he got so much larger than that. He was just more of an entertainer I think than Danny was, but still that same kind of loving people who came to the restaurant and wanting to do anything to make them happy. If you met Drew once, he remembered you forever. I mean, I remember years after working for him, calling him and him calling me back within five minutes. There was no one he didn't get back to. He was amazing that way, or is amazing that way. Follow up, I would say is one of the things that Drew has taught me. Never let a phone call go on answered or a request unintended to.Claudia Fleming: And who was our last name?Suzy Chase: And Tom Colicchio.Claudia Fleming: Oh, Tom. Oh, my mentor. Tom taught me how to cook, taught me how to think about food, taught me about seasonality and locality, and informed the way I cook and create desserts to this day.Suzy Chase: In between Tribeca Grill and Gramercy Tavern, you jetted off to Paris to study pastry. Talk a little bit about that.Claudia Fleming: Jetted off. Wow, that sounds glamorous.Suzy Chase: Doesn't it?Claudia Fleming: It was a little less glamorous. I think I was living on like $20 a week. I would make a pot of lentil soup on Sunday and eat it all week long. Buying myself a piece of cheese was a luxury. Luxurious, it was not. I worked in bakeries, because after having worked in restaurants I wanted a more technically-driven education as opposed to the stylized creations that one learns when you work in a restaurant. I chose bakeries because they are so basic and traditional and technically oriented.Suzy Chase: Growing up, you didn't cook with your mother or grandmother, and you were a dancer. Needless to say, food wasn't at the forefront of your passions or thinking.Claudia Fleming: No.Suzy Chase: When did that pivot?Claudia Fleming: Once I started working at Jams I think, but make no mistake, I mean, my family, Italian-American family and my mother and her sisters were food obsessed. I think from the time they woke up until the time they went to bed, all they did was talk about food or what the next meal was going to be or how to enhance this or make this better. This is so great, but if we just did this, it would be that. I mean, it was never ever far from the forefront of their minds. My mother was an excellent cook, so we always had great food, never a frozen vegetable or a canned vegetable. I remember begging for iceberg lettuce because we had escarole and chicory and I just wanted plain old boring iceberg lettuce.Claudia Fleming: So food was very, very important in my family. I guess as a dancer it was kind of the forbidden fruit, which is perhaps why I was attracted to it. But I would have to say at Jams is when it really became something that I was attracted to as a creative outlet, because it was food cooked and presented in a way that I had never seen or imagined before.Suzy Chase: Do you think because your training wasn't as structured as that of many other pastry chefs, you can come up with interesting flavor combinations, like roasted pineapple with pink peppercorns, by thinking outside the box?Claudia Fleming: I think that's fair to say. I also was very influenced by the cooks in the kitchen. I kind of wanted to do what they were doing and I wanted to sprinkle and saute and not necessarily measure exactly and play with mis en place. So yes, I was open to experimenting and Tom was open to having me do that.Suzy Chase: Speaking of experimenting, one thing I used to love about your desserts at Gramercy Tavern was that it wouldn't be just a slice of cake or a piece of pie. There would be at least three components on the plate that I could tell were so carefully thought out and mind-blowingly delicious. Lucky for us, the last chapter in the cookbook is a collection of your signature composed desserts. Talk a little bit about that.Claudia Fleming: Again, to go back to watching the cooks compose a plate, it's what I wanted to do. I wanted to have a primary element, whether that be the tart or the cake, and then enhance it with something cold or something hot, something crunchy, something tart, an herb, a spice. I was just always looking to make things more complicated than they were. In retrospect, it was such an incredible luxury to be afforded that time to just immerse myself in flavor combinations that weren't necessarily part of the sweet kitchen. I was borrowing from the savory kitchen. I saw chefs and cooks borrower from the sweet side of the kitchen, so I thought, well, why can't I borrow from them or find complimentary things from the savory side that would be equally complimentary to desserts? That was just how I started to approach things.Suzy Chase: You use hard boiled egg yolks in your biscuits. I have never heard of this before. Can you talk a little bit about that?Claudia Fleming: It was something I learned from a woman that I worked with. It is a tenderizer and it's very Austrian. You can find it in a lot of linzer recipes.Suzy Chase: So interesting.Claudia Fleming: I know.Suzy Chase: What does the boiled egg yolk do? Does it make it fluffier, or?Claudia Fleming: It makes the dough more tender or softer.Suzy Chase: Tell me about the North Fork Table and Inn that you opened with your husband, Gerry Hayden, and Mike and Mary Mraz.Claudia Fleming: Yep. Well, let me start by telling you, I sold the North Fork Table and Inn. Last week we closed.Suzy Chase: Congratulations.Claudia Fleming: Thank you, yes, very happy. 15 years, it was a wonderful, challenging, bittersweet time. We went out there to realize a dream. It was very, very hard, but such an amazing experience to work so closely with farmers and fishermen and just all the local purveyors that we used, building relationships, people coming to the back door whenever they had something special that they wanted us to use or try, and being in a small community where everybody is just there to support everybody else. The food community out there developed or evolved so much over the years that we were there, and there were just so many likeminded people wanting to live a kinder, gentler life. It was lovely, albeit incredibly challenging and ultimately not sustainable.Suzy Chase: For the listeners who may not know your husband, that you met at Tribeca Grill, who was a pioneer in the farm to table movement, sadly passed away in 2015 from ALS, and I am so sorry.Claudia Fleming: Thank you.Suzy Chase: Could you talk a bit about cooking and grief? Has baking, cooking, and being in the kitchen helped your heart heal, or has it made it more excruciating?Claudia Fleming: I think it's different at different times. But I have to say, although I'm in the kitchen every day doing production, running a restaurant eclipsed that aspect of being at the restaurant. It's very hard to be creative when every day is crisis management and it was mostly about getting it done most of the time so I could move on to, I don't know, working on PR or solving problems or trying to figure out why we weren't doing more business this Saturday this year than we did last Saturday last year. I mean, it was just constantly evaluating the business and trying to figure it out and rationalize and reason why things were changing so dramatically all the time.Claudia Fleming: I think being busy, I'm not sure that it helps in the healing process, but it's certainly a great distraction. I kind of feel somewhat like I'm waiting to have some time to mourn, frankly, now that the restaurant is closed and I can look back at all the wonderful things we accomplished, but when you're struggling, it's very hard to recognize all that. So I look forward to being able to appreciate what we accomplished now that the struggle is subsided.Suzy Chase: Now that you've closed the inn, what are your plans to start a new chapter in your life?Claudia Fleming: Well, there is a new cookbook in the pipeline. I imagine I'll be consulting. I'm staying on with the new owners of the restaurant to do some consulting on the dessert menu. Hopefully, there'll be some travel in my future and discovery and exploration.Suzy Chase: Over the weekend. I made your recipe for individual chocolate souffle cakes on page 217. Can you describe this dish?Claudia Fleming: These are actually a Nancy Silverton adaptation from a thousand years ago. When something is this simple, the most important thing is to use the best ingredients you can get. In this instance, of course, you want to use high quality butter and farm fresh eggs, but the chocolate is really where it's at. In those days, Valrhona was where it was at. Not that it isn't anymore, but there are so many other chocolates that that one could explore with.Suzy Chase: Now, for my segment called My Favorite Cookbook, other than this cookbook, what is your all time favorite cookbook and why?Claudia Fleming: Nancy Silverton's dessert book, her first dessert book. It launched me into my passion for dessert and pastry in 1986, maybe it was. I devoured that book. I was living in Aspen that summer and the person I was staying with had a copy of the book, and I read it backwards and forwards, forwards and back. It was very classic, but with lots of twists and her interpretations. I just loved it and I love her still, after Tom is probably my greatest inspiration.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?Claudia Fleming: I'm @chefclaudiafleming on Instagram and the same for Facebook.Suzy Chase: It has been so lovely chatting with you, Claudia.Suzy Chase: Thanks so much for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.Claudia Fleming: Thank you for having me, Suzy, great to talk to you.Outro: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com, and thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

HungryEating, Road-Tripping, and Risking It All with the Greatest Chef in the WorldBy Jeff Gordinier Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.Jeff Gordinier: My name is Jeff Gordinier and my latest book is called Hungry: Eating, Road-Tripping and Risking It All with the Greatest Chef in the World.Suzy Chase: For more Cookery by the Book, follow me on Instagram. If you enjoy this podcast, please be sure to share it with a friend. I'm always looking for new people to enjoy Cookery by the Book. Now on with the show. Before the holidays, Pete Wells wrote about you and new year's resolutions on his Instagram. He wrote, "Realize that this book is not just a bunch of weird encounters with a famous chef, but actually a very convincing argument for moving into the unknown, entering dark rooms. Even though you stub your toes, fighting complacency, knowing you can do better, painting yourself into corners, so you'll have to invent a new way out. Why, potential resolutions are strewn over every page of this book like pine needles on the sidewalk on January 2nd." Do you see this book as a sort of an ode to resolutions?Jeff Gordinier: Yeah, I do. And I was very grateful for that post as you can imagine. Pete Wells is a close friend of mine. We worked together at Details Magazine years ago before we were both at The Times. And yet he hadn't tweeted or posted anything about my book all year. So I was kind of like, "Okay, that's fine, you do you." But then at the very end of the year, he put up that incredibly gracious post about Hungry and I really felt, and this is no surprise to anyone who knows Pete, but I just felt he got it. Actually there were three things that happened around the end of the year in the beginning of 2020 which is Helen Rosner, from The New Yorker, put up a nice tweet about Hungry. Pete Wells did that Instagram post and Publishers Weekly named it one of the team's favorite books of 2019. And the person who wrote about it at Publishers Weekly echoed, sort of said something similar to what Pete Wells said, which is like, "This isn't really a book about food. It's actually sort of a book about self-discovery and change."Jeff Gordinier: I think that Hungry is about my friendship with connection to Rene’ Redzepi, who's the Chef at Noma in Copenhagen, which a lot of people over the past decade have considered the best restaurant in the world. I mean that's always debatable. But it's certainly the most influential restaurant of the last decade around the world. I think most chefs would agree with that. I struck up a friendship with Rene’ about five years ago, actually, I guess we're coming on six years ago now. It changed my life, which sounds kind of cheesy to say, but it's true. And I think that Rene and I were both at periods in our lives where we needed to shake things up. We wanted to change things. So we sort of dovetailed in 2014. It was kind of a random thing. I met Rene Redzepi for a coffee in downtown Manhattan and this kind of awkward conversation led to a friendship and led to pretty much four years of traveling around together.Suzy Chase: So what did you think when you got that phone call in 2014 saying, "Hey, I want to meet with you and chat at a coffee shop in the village." What were you thinking?Jeff Gordinier: I felt like I had to do it as an obligation. That sounds really lame in a way, but it's true. I was a journalist, I am a journalist. I was a reporter at The New York Times on the food section and I felt like, "Well, I ought to do this as part of my job." I mean, this person is considered the most influential chef of our time. And obviously as a reporter, I have to do my due diligence. Right. But I was, he actually reached out to meet the very week I had moved out of the house with my first wife and my two older children. It was a very sad period in my life. I was in despair, frankly, and I didn't want to talk to anyone. I'm just being honest. Like, it's just so bizarre and serendipitous that Rene happened to reach out to me that very week. Okay.Jeff Gordinier: And I was very vulnerable and kind of like just wanted to go home on the train, frankly. So to this little sad sack, bachelor apartment, I was renting down the street from my former house. So, most people Rene’ Redzepi reached out, they'd be pretty excited. I wasn't actually up for it, but as soon as I met him in this coffee house, it was like there was a kind of electricity in the air. There are certain people who give off this intoxicating charisma. I mean, one thinks of Beyonce’. You think of a person like Steve Jobs, you think of people who change the world and change the course of culture and have this kind of vibrancy. Almost like you can see the electrons when they enter the room. Right?Suzy Chase: I've heard you say he's a bit Tony Robbins-esque.Jeff Gordinier: Yeah. There's a little bit of like, "Will you walk on coals with me?" Within a few minutes. We weren't talking about his manifesto. We weren't talking about his new cookbook. He was asking me questions, which I will tell you, as a reporter, it's fairly rare. I mean, I've interviewed rock stars and movie stars and film directors and poets and politicians and chefs. And it's very rare that they start asking you questions. Right? And Rene’ Redzepi did that. And he was like, "Oh, you're from LA. Do you like tacos?" And I was like, "Dude, yes. Tacos are-"Suzy Chase: Life.Jeff Gordinier: ... "very important to me." Yes, tacos are life. I live for tacos. And I was like, "Why are you asking me about tacos? You're from Denmark. What could you possibly know about that?" I mean, look ... and it turned out that he'd had this longterm ongoing love affair with Mexico, which was news to me. And it turned out to be news to most people in the food world. And I'm not talking about, he would just go to Cancun for vacation. I mean, he would spend weeks, if not months, in Mexico every year. He was obsessed with the history of the country, the people, the food, the ingredients. So he said to me like, "Why don't we go on a trip to Mexico together?" And I was like, "What? You and me? We just met." And that started a series of trips.Jeff Gordinier: I didn't intend to write a book originally. It was just first for an article. But then I started going on these trips on my own dime, just because I found that being around Rene’ Redzepi and being around the Noma team was kind of, it was kind of changing me.Suzy Chase: So, let's back up and talk about when you landed in Mexico City with Sean Donnola, a photographer, and you were immediately summoned to Pujol, perhaps the best restaurant in Mexico City and who was sitting at the table with Rene?Jeff Gordinier: Danny Bowien, who is the chef of Mission Chinese Food in New York and in San Francisco.Suzy Chase: So crazy.Jeff Gordinier: Yeah, that was my first sign, Suzy, that we were on a bigger adventure than I realized. Because, as you see in the book, everywhere Rene Redzepi goes, there was this kind of orbit of other famous chefs, right, who he's friends with. So it's sort of like that Bob Dylan movie, the documentary Don't Look Back like, "Oh, Donovan just shows up." You know, like, "Oh, there's Joan Baez." People would just show up all the time. Which of course enriched my narrative in our experience. It turned out that Rene’ Redzepi had become sort of a mentor to Danny Bowien from Mission Chinese Food. Danny had been through hell because the original New York Mission Chinese Food had been shut down by the health department, which was very humiliating and embarrassing. And he felt like his whole career was falling apart.Jeff Gordinier: And in that moment of fear and weakness, Rene had reached out to him and kind of rescued him. So in a weird way, Danny and I were in a similar position. We were people who would become part of this cult because Rene’ had reached out to us. So in that room you have like arguably the greatest chef in Mexico, Enrique Olvera from Pujol, and then you have Danny Bowien and then you have Rene’ Redzepi, we're all at a table together. I mean, Enrique was bringing the food, but we were all hanging out together. Yeah. And there were other famous people in the room as well. It was just like, where am I? Have I just landed in the circus? It was as if there was some incredible documentary about the food world that you were watching. And then suddenly you opened your eyes and you were in the documentary. You were in the middle of it.Jeff Gordinier: There's something kind of irresistible about his invitations. And I am not alone in saying yes to them. I mean, many people have been sort of sucked into his orbit in this way and it always ends up being kind of life changing.Suzy Chase: So how long did you stay in Mexico?Jeff Gordinier: The first time was a week, I guess, but then I went back many times. Basically, as you've seen, like most of the book takes place in Mexico, which is maybe a little odd when people pick it up because they think, "Wait, isn't this a book about a Danish chef? Why are we in Mexico the whole time?" It's because Mexico was sort of the crucible of his transformation and my own really, and he was building toward this meal, which happened three years after we met.Jeff Gordinier: It was called Noma Mexico. It was a pop up in Tulum. Now when you hear the words pop up, a lot of people think, "So it was one night and they just cooked Noma food in Mexico." No, that's not what this was. This was seven weeks in Tulum. He flew the entire Noma team to Mexico. They spent months looking for the best ingredients and months and really years working and working and working at these recipes.Suzy Chase: After you came back from Mexico, you wrote the article and then he called you to Tulum, right?Jeff Gordinier: After I wrote the article, I figured that was the end, that's how it is for us journalists. You meet someone and you have this kind of fling, you meet the individual and then they go their merry way. But email sort of popped up on my Gmail. It said, "You have a table at Noma." Now, it's impossible to get a table at Noma. There's like 30,000 people on the wait list on any given night. Okay. And I had not asked for one. So it was confusing. I thought it was a mistake, because also the table was like a few days later, it was like lunch at Noma later that week, I texted him, I said, "Chef, I think you made a mistake. I think somebody typed my email in by accident and I have a table at Noma." And this is the Tony Robbins quality that Rene has. He basically said, "Take it or leave it." And I was like, "Oh wow."Suzy Chase: What do you do?Jeff Gordinier: Oh, it's a test. Like he's testing my will to live. So he's testing my sense of adventure and I thought, "Well, God, I mean, this chance is not going to come again." It's impossible to eat at this restaurant, and it's supposed to be the best restaurant in the world. So you know what? Damn the torpedoes. I just like went on one of those websites where you get a cheap flight and I found a very cheap flight. It turns out there are a lot. I booked it without attending to logistics first on the home front, shall we say. I just sort of threw myself a curve ball and I didn't even know who I would eat with. But it was, that was the beginning. So then there were all sorts of texts and invitations. I mean, that was-Suzy Chase: Wait, tell me who you took.Jeff Gordinier: This seems to be everybody's favorite part of the book.Suzy Chase: Well, I have a funny story, so tell the story first and then I'll tell my funny story.Jeff Gordinier: Oh cool. Well, I asked everyone, I mean everyone. I asked, I studied with John McPhee in college, The New Yorker writer and I asked him, because I feel like I owe him. And being John McPhee, he was actually pretty close to going, I mean he's in his 80s but he was like, "I might just do it," but he couldn't work it out. I asked my brother, I asked my father, I asked every wealthy friend I knew thinking that maybe they could help cover the costs. And I'm just being practical and it turned out that no one could do it. Everybody said no. And Suzy, it was such, it was so illustrative. Like I really learned a lesson from that. Like before this everyone said, "Oh wow, you met Rene’ Redzepi. If you ever get a table at Noma, let me know. I will do anything. I will move mountains."Suzy Chase: Then crickets.Jeff Gordinier: Yeah, exactly. Crickets. When you finally get the table, they're like, "Oh, well, I forgot my son has a soccer practice, or I forgot I have a haircut appointment and I can't change it." I'm not kidding, like people were saying stuff like that. And I was like, "Yeah, but this is Noma, dude." So anyway, to answer your question, I ended up going with a random guy from the office at The New York Times. I did not. His name is Grant. A very talented web designer, very talented artistic type guy. But I did not know him at all. I mean, I met him once at an office party. And he heard that I had a table ... those who pick up Hungry, this led to a very bizarre comic sequence because Grant didn't exactly show up for the meal. He did buy a ticket to Copenhagen go and hang in. He did agree to share the meal with me, but he kind of messed up with the time. He had a very wicked case of jet lag. So that was totally unforgettable.Suzy Chase: So, I have a funny story. I was at my neighborhood nail salon over Christmas vacation and brought your book to read while they did my nails. And I'm friendly with the gals at the salon and they're always saying, "What cookbook are you reading?" And they want to talk about recipes. So that day I said, "There aren't any recipes in this book, it's just a book about a well known chef." So there was a girl who's getting a pedicure next to me and she goes, "I overheard what you were saying." And she said, "Have you gotten to the part where the guys sleeps through the meal at Noma?" And I said, "No, I just started it." And she goes, "That's a really good friend of mine. And now because of the book, he's known as the guy who slept through the meal at Noma." And I was like, "Oh, poor Grant Gold."Jeff Gordinier: I feel for him. Yeah, I feel for-Suzy Chase: So that was fun.Jeff Gordinier: ... That's amazing, that's satisfying as a writer to hear that. I do feel for him. I mean, I didn't intend to cause him any pain, I like the guy. I really just thought it was amusing that-Suzy Chase: Totally.Jeff Gordinier: ... this happens to us, that we accidentally sleep through important events, shall we say.Suzy Chase: So in terms of thought experiments, you described the sea urchin hazelnuts a simple dish, you wrote, you tasted what it was and yet you tasted the micro tones, the flavors between the visible and the obvious. I'm curious to hear about that.Jeff Gordinier: Yeah, thank you for asking that. That's really crucial because I think sometimes people hear about Noma, Rene’ Redzepi's restaurant or they hear about this book and not all of us will have the opportunity to eat at Noma. So people are confused, a little bewildered as to why it can be so good. Like what is so good about the food at this restaurant? I mean, restaurants, I've been to restaurants, restaurants serve good food. What's unique about this? And the way I've described it to people has to do with things that are delicious that you've never encountered before. People have their favorites, like pizza, pasta, sushi, et cetera. With Noma, you're tasting things that are equally delicious, maybe even more delicious than those favorites and yet your palate has never encountered them for the most part.Jeff Gordinier: It's like if you went into a museum and you saw a painting and the painting was particularly beautiful because it involved colors that you had never seen before. Like you know blue, green, red, yellow, et cetera. What if there were colors in the spectrum that for some reason, because of our DNA, the human eye had never apprehended, and then all of a sudden you could see those colors, like you would be, your mind would be blown, right? It's the same with the flavors at Noma. It's like they are finding little pathways of flavor, little micro tones, as you put it, which are like the notes in between the notes that not only blow you away because they taste so good, but because it's the first time.Jeff Gordinier: So they do that through the foraging. They find all these wild herbs, greens, mushrooms, sea grasses, seaweeds, all sorts of things that you've probably never tasted. Even people in Denmark had never tasted them or didn't even know they were edible through the fermentation. So they have a whole fermentation lab at Noma that goes beyond what you'd find at almost any restaurant. You know how people will say stuff like, "Human beings only use 10% of their brains or 20% of their brains."Suzy Chase: Yeah.Jeff Gordinier: I think in part what the Noma enterprise is arguing is that we only use 10% of our pallets.Suzy Chase: When thinking about Rene’, I was wondering if you can be a perfectionist if you're restless.Jeff Gordinier: I think he manages to be both restless and a perfectionist. It's just that his definition of perfection keeps changing. So, like he achieves perfection and then he blows it up. As soon as he achieves perfection, he's bored with it. So, he's not interested. He's the opposite of a lot of the food artisans you find in Japan for instance, people who simply, like Jiro, of course, who's famous from the documentary, making sushi day after day for decades, getting better and better and better with each passing meal, you know. Rene is different than that. He likes to create a whole menu and at the moment he feels it's achieved perfection. It's achieved radiance. It's just what he wants to express. He's done. He's like, he actually will blow it up at that point.Jeff Gordinier: So this means that the team has to create something like hundreds of new dishes every year. Hundreds. It's an impossible task. And each time Rene’ wants that menu to be an example of perfection, to answer your question. So the challenge there is just extraordinary. This is one reason I was drawn to the guy. I'd never met anyone like that. He could've just coasted. He could've just said, "Okay, we've got the perfect Noma menu. We're done. Let's just keep serving this for 40 years." But no, he just blows the thing up every three months.Suzy Chase: So, speaking of perfection, you wrote in the book, "Moles are all negotiation, but tortillas are non negotiable." You never saw Redzepi master a tortilla. The whole female population of Mexico has mastered the tortilla. How come he couldn't?Jeff Gordinier: Yeah, that was so interesting to me. That was like ... because we went to Mexico many times and I would see Rene’ try at the comal to create a perfect tortilla. And tortillas are very simple. You have the masa dough and it's a matter of ... I'm patting my hands right now. It's a matter of patting them correctly in your hands, the right texture, the right density, et cetera. And for cultural reasons, historical reasons throughout much of Mexico, I'm sure Diana Kennedy would tell you, the women make the tortillas. It's a cultural thing. The more traditional the village, the more likely it is that the men never even touched the masa. So there are many men in Mexico who can't really make a good tortilla.Jeff Gordinier: But Rene’ being Rene’ and the greatest chef in the world, et cetera. I sort of thought, "Well, he'll figure it out." But he never did it. It's really about dexterity and it's kind of about muscle memory, you know? And many of these women have been doing it since they were little girls and it just becomes second nature. They just become very natural at it. And I mean, in this one village on the Yucatan peninsula, this Mayan village called Yaxuna. I mean, I couldn't believe the deliciousness of the tortillas, just absolutely perfect.Jeff Gordinier: And they're using local corn, these kind of heritage strains of corn that are from the region. It was actually a point of slight friction between me and Rene’ because I'm not a chef, as my kids would say, I'm not even a very good cook, but I could master the tortillas. I actually made them-Suzy Chase: What, really?Jeff Gordinier: Yeah, yeah. When we were in Yaxuna he got a little annoyed with me because he said, "Well, why don't you give it a try LA boy?" And I did, I grabbed some masa and I just patted it in my hand, I put it on the comal and instantly it started puffing up, which is a sign that you made it, right. The women of the village were all kind of cheering for me. They were kind of surprised that I was able to do it. And I was like, "Wow, amazing. I did something better than the greatest chef in the world."Suzy Chase: That's hilarious.Jeff Gordinier: Yeah, it was funny. I mean, Danny Bowien never got it either. I mean, and so, when we went to Oaxaca, he kept trying to figure it out and he never really could nail the tortillas either. I have a picture on my phone of Danny Bowien and Rene’ Redzepi at a comal in Oaxaca with all these Mexican ladies sort of surrounding them as they ... it's actually a series of photos as they try to figure it out. And their tortillas looked terrible. They're all clumpy, they're uneven. They're not puffing up.Suzy Chase: So funny. So, by the end of the book I realized that this journey coincided, and this isn't funny, with the breakdown of your marriage and it felt to me like you and Rene’ were meant to travel this bumpy road together and come out learning to, as you wrote, keep moving because it's the only way.Jeff Gordinier: That's sort of Rene’ Redzepi's philosophy, it's just keep moving. To get back to your first question, when you were talking about resolutions, we always feel life can be better than that. There must be something I'm doing wrong. What can I do differently? How do I live the optimum life? How do I create everything I want to create and love people the way I want to love them? How do I be a better dad, a better partner, a better friend? And we never really get the moment to sit and think about that.Jeff Gordinier: The Buddhists have this concept of Samsara, Samsara, which is like the cycle that we're trapped in. You know? Where we keep gnawing on the past and we keep making the same mistakes. And we're almost like in a Mobius strip, like this feedback loop that we feel we can't get out of. I felt that way when I met Rene’ Redzepi. I felt that way because of my marriage coming apart and I was in that point of drift and malaise that sometimes we get into, we get caught in. I felt intoxicated by this philosophy of Rene's, which is just like just keep changing and keep moving and keep seeking out new experiences and keep learning and it will kind of shake you out of this rut. He was right and that's what happened.Jeff Gordinier: God, I feel weird saying this, but I sometimes feel when I'm doing something or I'm thinking about the next steps in my life, I hear a little Rene’ Redzepi voice in the back of my head saying like, "Take the chance. Risk is good. Change is good. Jump off the cliff, do it." I don't know if that's the angel voice or the devil voice, but it's always saying that we have to embrace change.Suzy Chase: Now to my segment called My Favorite Cookbook. What is your all time favorite cookbook and why?Jeff Gordinier: My all time favorite cookbook is one that I anticipate a lot of your listeners and a lot of your guests would also a name. It's The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters.Suzy Chase: No one's named that yet.Jeff Gordinier: That's crazy. That surprises me.Suzy Chase: But you're the first.Jeff Gordinier: Really?Suzy Chase: I swear.Jeff Gordinier: Well, okay, well, I mean Alice Waters is a goddess of course. And I'm in California and so I have that kind of built in produce worship that a lot of West coasters have. And if that's where you're coming from, then Alice Waters is sort of your queen of course. But I mean, to me, I actually have the book here and it's like all I have to do is float through the table of contents and I start to feel this sense of warmth. Like I start to feel comfortable and at home and ready for dinner just from looking at the table of contents. Like it's just, it's The Art of Simple Food. So there's this simplicity even in the way each section is listed.Jeff Gordinier: I often write about these fine dining places. It's part of my job at Esquire Magazine. And I admire what the chefs do with those Michelin starred spots. But in my heart of hearts, when I'm at home, whether it's at my parents' home in Laguna Beach or it's at home here in the Hudson Valley, this is what I want to cook and this is what I want to eat. Like it gets back to the basics.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?Jeff Gordinier: The best place to find me is on Instagram. I'm known as TheGordinier on Instagram, or I guess we would say TheGordinier.Suzy Chase: I was just going to say that.Jeff Gordinier: Yeah, no, just TheGordinier. So the best place to look for me is on Instagram.Suzy Chase: Well, thanks Jeff for telling this incredible story and thanks so much for chatting with me on Cookery by the Book Podcast.Jeff Gordinier: Thanks so much, Suzy. It has been fun. And it has been an honor.Outro: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com and thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

All About Dinner: Simple Meals, Expert AdviceBy Molly Stevens Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table talking to cookbook authors.Molly Stevens: Hi, I'm Molly Stevens and my newest cookbook is All About Dinner: Simple Meals, Expert Advice.Suzy Chase: For more Cookery by the Book, follow me on Instagram. If you enjoy this podcast, please be sure to share it with a friend. I'm always looking for new people to enjoy Cookery by the Book, and now on with the show. You are a two-time James Beard award-winning cookbook author; and fun fact, All About Dinner popped up on NPRs list of their favorite books of 2019, plus many other Best of 2019 lists. And I don't know if you know, but I had Becky Krystal of the Washington Post on for my 2019 recap and we chatted about you there too.Molly Stevens: Oh, I didn't know that.Suzy Chase: Yes, you'll have to listen.Molly Stevens: I will. Great, thanks.Suzy Chase: You've spent your working life teaching others how to cook. I would have to say you're the originator of the idea that cooking is not about perfection. Talk a little bit about that.Molly Stevens: I think this gets even harder and harder, Suzy, because in our Instagram, everything looks so good. There's so many wonderful images out there. And when we cook at home... I mean, this even happens to me, I've been doing something side by side where I cook a dish and I'll compare it to the one... Even in my own cookbook, I'm like, "It doesn't look the same," but it still tastes great. And sometimes I make mistakes and we all do. And I think when we set up perfection, what is it? Perfection is the enemy of good or something. But if our expectations are too, too high, I think you can get in the way of just the enjoyment of cooking and the enjoyment of the meal as well.Suzy Chase: Gosh, I get it because I take a picture of everything I make out of each cookbook. And sometimes when I make it in my kitchen, it's dark and the lighting is awful and it looks just horrific. And I'm just like, "But it tasted so good."Molly Stevens: Right or we didn't spend this time styling it. And it's not all just about the visual too. I think that one of the things, especially around the past couple of months with the holidays and everything, a lot of people call me or I get these messages saying, "I'm doing this and I don't have this ingredient, or this happened while I was working on this recipe." And more and more, I want to tell people it's going to be okay. It's usually going to be okay. I mean, if you burned the heck out of something, well, maybe it's not going to be okay or if you've over salted it. I mean there are a few things that it's really hard to come back from. But in general, we can use a workaround or a fix it. Just to relax a little bit and say it's going to be fine. It helps a long way for me, I think.Suzy Chase: Well, on that note, how can we be present when we're in the kitchen?Molly Stevens: I talk about this being like a domino effect. If we're already uptight and nervous and worried about the outcome and when we worry about the outcome, it's really hard to pay attention to the process because you've jumped ahead. And so if we can slow down and pay attention to the process.Molly Stevens: I wrote this essay about picking up a lemon and squeezing the lemon and feeling how juicy it is, and then digging your thumbnail into the rind and letting yourself just smell that citrus aroma for a minute, and just take a minute and breathe that in. And for me, it's a reset almost where I was like, "Oh, it's me in the lemon right now." And then think about, well, maybe this lemon, I can turn it into something or add a little bit to whatever I'm making.Molly Stevens: And it's just paying attention to what we're doing while we're cooking makes us better cooks. And it also helps us relax in the process of cooking because there's a certain enjoyment that comes from that. And the more we can pay attention and the more we can relax, the better cooks we become. And so that's why I call it sort of a domino effect is that the more we can be present and pay attention, the better we get at cooking.Suzy Chase: God, those are some wonderful words of wisdom.Molly Stevens: It's hard and I get it. I mean, our lives are busy and crazy and the kitchen is often the center of activity, so it's hard to clear a space both mentally and physically. But even just again, back to not being about perfection. It doesn't have to be completely quiet, it doesn't have to be completely clean. But if you find a little bit of mental space and a little bit of counter space, take a deep breath and start chopping onion.Suzy Chase: Tell me about the photo of the handwritten recipes to the right of the dedication at the beginning of the cookbook.Molly Stevens: Yeah, those are from... That's one of my favorite pages in the whole book, and those are a collection of pages out of a series of notebooks that I have, my grandmother's, my mother's, one of my aunts. And I love that because what I was trying to sort of message there is that I come from a long line of home cooks, and it's really where we as a family come together and where I learned my love of the table and the kitchen. I didn't grow up going out to restaurants. We had dinner at night together as a family and we celebrated the holidays around the table.Molly Stevens: And I love that tradition of passing on recipes. I mean it's really, Suzy, it's what you're talking about here with the Cookery by the Book is that cookbooks are a way of doing that, whether they're family cookbook or cookbook we go to the store and buy.Suzy Chase: Speaking of home cooks, I love that after all of your training and years of experience, you still think of yourself as a home cook. Not a chef, but a home cook.Molly Stevens: Well, yeah. I mean for me, and I spent some time in professional kitchens and I spent a lot of time around chefs. To me the linguistics of it is a chef who's someone who's chief, who's in charge, and that means in charge of a staff or running a restaurant or in a professional capacity. And I don't do that right now. I cook at home and I write recipes for home cooks.Molly Stevens: I mean there are a lot of wonderful chef cookbooks out there that are incredibly inspirational. But I also know that some of them can be frustrating for home cooks because we don't have teams of prep, cooks and dishwashers, and the recipes that have all these sub recipes because you have a whole prep kitchen cooking things for you. I am a home cook. I really am.Suzy Chase: Talk about your reluctance to let people in when they ask you what you cook at home.Molly Stevens: Before we were talking about the difference between a chef and a home cook, and for years I was a professional chef instructor teaching in a vocational situation. And so that's where my reluctance came was to talk about being a home cook to people who are aspiring chefs. But over the years, I've realized that really for me what we cook at home is such an expression of who we are and how we relate to the world, and also that's who my audience is for this book. And I've been writing for magazines for a number of years and a lot of that audience are home cooks. And I just realized that really that is what people are looking for is that the simple answer to the Tuesday night, Wednesday night, Thursday night supper.Suzy Chase: You include steps and believe that knowing why we do something helps us remember how to do it. Talk a little bit about that.Molly Stevens: Right. This goes back to being a cooking teacher. And so if you cook with someone who is a good cook, they may not be using recipes. In fact, they're probably not using recipes all the time, but they still have a roadmap in their head. They kind of know where they're going with something and they know the direction a dish is going to take.Molly Stevens: And say I'm making a simple stew, if it's a protein-based stew, the first step is going to be to brown the meat. That takes a little bit of time to brown the meat. It a can be a little bit messy if splatters some, so I guess you could see it as a nuisance to have to brown the meat. But if you know that browning the meat is going to develop a deeper flavor in that stew, then you're more apt to really take time. Because as you're browning the meat, it goes back to paying attention, being present. You're browning the meat.Molly Stevens: And for me, and I'm thinking about, "Ooh, the flavor of this stew is going to be a nice... It's a beef stew. It's cold out. I want a nice beef and carrots stew with maybe some red wine and broth in there. And so I'm browning the meat and I'm thinking about all the flavor that I'm developing that's going to balance out the sweetness of the carrots. And so knowing why I'm doing something, you're more apt to take the time to do it right or to just incorporate that into your understanding. So next time you're making something, maybe you don't need the recipe, you can just do it because it's habitSuzy Chase: In All About Dinner, you list 15 habits of highly-effective cooks. Tell us about number eight, which says "Take advantage of fat's ability to carry flavor."Molly Stevens: Right. Yeah. Cooks often like to say that fat is flavor and it is. I mean, there are a lot of really flavorful fats out there when we think about it, olive oil and duck fat and a lot of good, delicious butters more and more. But the other thing about fat is that a lot of flavorings and seasonings are fat soluble, meaning they're only really fully expressed when they are warmed up in a little bit or blended with a little bit of fat. If you try to make a dish without fat, say it's a pasta sauce or something and you're trying to cut way back on fat, if you don't have some amount of fat in there to help those flavors really express themselves and really come out, the dish will fall flat. Having a little bit of fat makes a big difference in getting full flavored.Molly Stevens: Now if you are trying to cut back because that certainly carries a lot of... It's got more calories than proteins and carbohydrates. I understand why people want to cut back and don't want things too, too rich. It's a really good idea if you can to at least include a little bit of fat because it's going to go a long way bringing out the full flavoredness of all those great ingredients you're putting into food.Suzy Chase: Is this why you included a pat of butter at the end of your recipe for pasta with chard and Italian sausage?Molly Stevens: Exactly. It just adds a little bit, certainly richness obviously, and sweetness from the butter, the flavor. But that single pat of butter just helps bring all those flavors into concert so you'd get this full-flavoredness. There's a little bit of liquid in there, water from the pasta because it's not strained, it's just pour in the... I should say scooped into the pan. And so that little bit of butter just rounds everything out.Molly Stevens: And the other thing that fat does is it helps the way it behaves in the mouth gives us a feeling of fullness and richness that you don't get without it. Even a little pat of butter and say, you're like, "Oh that pat of butter looks like too much," then use half a pat of butter. It's still going to make a difference.Suzy Chase: On to number 13, you wrote, don't rush hot food to the table. Now that goes against everything I was taught.Molly Stevens: I know, and I catch some flack for this one. I get it, Suzy, because certainly if you're in a restaurant setting, they call them runners for a reason because they take the hot food to the table. And I think this goes back to talking about perfection again, is that there's a certain amount of pressure that especially if you're making a couple of dishes at once and you feel like everything has to get on the table at once, it's a real juggling act. And so I don't mean to imply that you should let your food sit around before you eat it, but just to take a little bit of the pressure off.Molly Stevens: And also with this insistence on hot food, I think we do miss out sometimes, especially if you're looking at roasts or even stews, but roasts in particular. If you roast something and carve into it right away, you can ruin it. I mean it needs to rest for a time before you take it to the table. A casserole, you want to let it settle a little bit.Molly Stevens: It's more, I think of being a little provocative with this one in that I'm not saying let your food cool before you serve it, but to just relax a little bit. Think about a little more room temperature food. I love room temperature food. Plus hot food, if it's too hot, temperature hot, it actually is harder to taste all the elements of the... Just like spicy food can numb your taste buds, temperature hot food can also do that.Suzy Chase: You've said you owe your cookbook career to Maria Guarnaschelli, your original editor. She's legendary. Can you tell us about her?Molly Stevens: Maria Guarnaschelli, she's retired now. She retired actually part way through this book, through All About Dinner. We started it together and then she retired, but she... Incredibly brilliant, very demanding. The list of authors that she has shepherded onto the marketplace, I mean, Lynne Rossetto Kasper, Marcella Hazan, Julie Sahni, Rose Levy Beranbaum, the list goes on and on. The Food Lab, Kenji López-Alt, Fuchsia Dunlop, some of our greatest voices in cookbooks, maria was the editor to get their work onto the page and she was my first editor. I did the my All About Braising book with her, and I learned so much from her and I wouldn't be the writer that I am without her.Suzy Chase: What was her special superpower?Molly Stevens: She was brilliant. She was brilliant. I mean, she is still brilliant. Before she even got into cookbook, I think, she had a PhD is from Yale. She was incredibly demanding. She would stop everything to take it to the next level. You never knew when it was finished because there might be more work to be done. And so her special superpower was just her insistence on excellence. She didn't just do cookbook, she did a lot of other nonfiction. But she combined that the writing had to be good and the recipes had to be good. I should say more than good. She pushed, she pushed really hard.Suzy Chase: Last week, I made your recipe for Pasta with Chard and Italian Sausage on page 93 that includes the pat of butter at the end of this recipe. Can you describe this dish?Molly Stevens: Oh, that's one of my favorite dishes. This dish is skillet pasta. I'm so glad you chose this dish. Because what this book does a lot of is, it'll be a recipe and then following the recipe is a description on the basics of the dish and how you could riff and improvise and turn it into something else. It's basically your sauteing onions and vegetables in a skillet and then on the burner next to you, you're boiling a pot of pasta. And when the onions and vegetables are tender and flavorful and ready to be eaten, you scoop the pasta out of the pot. It's cooked by then. You scoop it out and put it into the onion and vegetables, and then you let it all heat together and then tossing and tossing and adding a little pat of butter. By the time it takes the water to boil to cook the pasta, you made a skillet pasta dish.Molly Stevens: And it's one that's endlessly open to improvisation because you could just change out what those vegetables are. You could add a little bit of crumbled sausage. You could change the cheeses, all the different things that you could do to make a weeknight supper.Suzy Chase: Now for my segment called My Favorite Cookbook. What is your all time favorite cookbook and why?Molly Stevens: Oh, this is the hardest question, and I think it does change. But the book that I've chosen is the Zuni Cafe Cookbook by Judy Rogers. I didn't realize this when I chose this book, but this is actually a book that Maria Guarnaschelli edited as well. And the reason is because it is just one of the most eloquent, intelligent, beautiful cookbooks. It talks about the art of tasting and seasoning, and it talks about shopping for ingredients. The recipes go from very, very basic to more sophisticated, but there's something in there for a cook at any level. It's an absolutely beautiful book cover to cover for every reason. And I just love how it's written and it's one, it's filled with more bookmarks than any other book of my entire library, I think.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?Molly Stevens: So my handle on Instagram and Twitter is mstevenscooks and my website is mollystevenscooks.Suzy Chase: Well, thanks, Molly, for taking us through a virtual cooking class today, and thanks for coming on Cookery by the Book Podcast.Molly Stevens: Thanks so much, Suzy. It was really fun.Outro: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com and thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

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Fire Islands: Recipes from IndonesiaBy Eleanor Ford Intro: Welcome to the number-one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book, with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City sitting at her dining room table talking to cookbook authors.Eleanor Ford: I'm Eleanor Ford, and my latest cookbook is called Fire Islands: Recipes From Indonesia.Suzy Chase: For more Cookery by the Book, you can follow me on Instagram. If you enjoy this podcast, please be sure to share it with a friend. I'm always looking for new people to enjoy Cookery by the Book. Now on with the show. First off, congratulations on winning two Gourmand World Cookbook Awards. Tell us about these awards.Eleanor Ford: Well, I'm delighted that Fire Islands has been chosen as a country winner in two categories. One is international cookbook, and the other is spice, which is particularly pleasing as Indonesia is a land of spice.Suzy Chase: Indonesia is a traveler's paradise with cuisine as vibrant and thrilling as its scenery. You give us a personal, intimate portrait of a country and it's cooking through your unique lens. During your childhood, you went back to Indonesia year after year because your father was an architect and built hotels in Bali and Java. Describe the magic of the Indonesian archipelago.Eleanor Ford: As a child, it was the most magical place to go because, perhaps, the diversity that comes with such a large and extensive set of islands. I'd spend time on the beaches, of course, but also in palaces belonging to sultans and in temples with amazing festivals and ceremony and gamelan music, and then at night markets eating the incredible food. It was a really exciting place to spend a lot of my childhood.Suzy Chase: Now, how often did you go back? Did you go back a few times a year or once a year?Eleanor Ford: Oh, we'd be there quite a lot. I spent about three or four months every year there. Sometimes I took homeschooling with me and, other times, it was during the holidays, but it was a big part of my childhood. I lived this dual life between London and the city and then this amazing tropical idyll of Indonesia.Suzy Chase: How did your mom like it?Eleanor Ford: Oh, she loved it. She was immersed fully in the culture. She learned the language. We felt very lucky and be privileged to be there and made a lot of friends. It was a great life for all of us.Suzy Chase: Then let's fast forward to one particularly gray winter in London when you and your husband decided to move to Indonesia with your young children. Why did you want to make that move, and what was it like coming back now as a mother?Eleanor Ford: It was this book that spurred our move there. I had grown up eating these incredible flavors of Indonesia. They were just part of my upbringing. I realized that they haven't traveled far outside of the country. People don't tend to know about Indonesian food unless they spend time in the country. I realized that I wanted to share these flavors that I knew so well. I wanted to share them with my own children in the way that they'd been a part of my childhood. I wanted to share them in my writing as well, so we, yes, made a decision as a family to move there when the children were still young enough not to have started school and we had the freedom to explore and travel.Suzy Chase: How did the children like it?Eleanor Ford: Oh, they couldn't have been more excited by this new world that they entered, sort of running barefoot through the grass and on the beaches. They had a completely new outlook on life, and I was very happy, as a mother, to see that for them.Suzy Chase: Wow, that's so dreamy. Are you living there now?Eleanor Ford: No, no. We're back in London now. It was a full-month move that was spent intensively researching as much as I could about the food and the recipes. Then I wanted to bring them back and test everything in my London kitchen to make sure that the methods and the ingredients translated to a Western kitchen and that this could be food that anyone could cook, not just ingredients that sound exotic and wonderful but are out of reach.Suzy Chase: Nearly 18,000 islands make up the world's largest archipelago covering the distance of Britain to Iraq. That boggles my mind that it's one single country.Eleanor Ford: It's an extraordinary country. Unity in diversity is one of the national mottos because there is such huge diversity. There are certain things that unite people, people of different religions, different races, different languages. Yeah. There's something about the food, I think, that's a unifier. One thing that crosses all of these different islands is a love for chili sambals, the fiery sauces that you put alongside food so you can adjust the heat and spice and sourness of your meal as you eat.Suzy Chase: First, let's talk about the chapters. How did you choose to divide up this cookbook? I thought it was so very interesting.Eleanor Ford: Well, what I wanted to do was show the necessity for balance within an Indonesian meal. Rather than having a starter or a main course, that's not really how food is eaten, I've divided the chapters by texture and by flavor. To put a complete Indonesian meal together, you might want to choose a different dish from different chapters, something that's rich and creamy, maybe a coconut milk curry that's slow cooked and unctuous, and then maybe something that's quickly fried and aromatic, like maybe some grilled chicken satay with some peanut sauce, and then a salad that's fresh and bright with grated coconut and spices. Finally, you might want a sour element, something like prawns cooked in a chili sambal with lime leaves so that you've got different flavors that all balance each other out and compliment each other in one meal.Suzy Chase: For example, Chapter One, Crunchy Snacks and Street Food on page 24 with ingredients for fragrance on page 38. What are some ingredients to add fragrance?Eleanor Ford: To add fragrance to the food, there are those typical ingredients from Southeast Asia, like lemongrass and lime leaves. Then there's also the roots, the galangal and turmeric and ginger, so you've got all of the... and then the lime leaves I mentioned earlier as well as the actual kaffir lime fruit. All of these are bringing that kind of bright, aromatic, centered note to the food, and they work so well together. Often, they're combined in a different dish, lots of these different flavors, but they work off each other and each kind of lift the other.Suzy Chase: Then we move on to Chapter Seven, which is entitled Awakening the Senses. You wrote that Indonesians love to add an element of crunch to food, and the crackling sound as you eat is said to stimulate the appetite. Tell us about that and the family-owned food stalls highlighted in Chapter Seven.Eleanor Ford: Yes. Well, one of the things I love about Indonesian food is that crunch has such an important element. Every meal, along with the different textures and kind of rich levels of richness and levels of spice that I was talking about earlier, every meal should have something crunchy, something that crackles in the mouth, something that makes your mouth excited. There's a word in Indonesian, enak, which is delicious, but it's more than delicious because it's something that's appealing for all the senses. It could be a music could be enak or a massage or definitely food because it's more than just the taste. It's how it looks, and it's how it feels in the mouth. Crunchy elements, there's always something on the table which you can sprinkle over your food. It might be a serundeng, which is grated coconut that's been fried with spices until it becomes crunchy and dry, and you can scatter that over. It might be rice crackers, or there are melinjo nut crackers called emping, which are a little bit bitter, but anyone who's eaten them knows how addictive they can be. Yes, adding something, even if it's just a scattering of those fried shallots that you can buy, crisp fried shallots in a tub, it always adds a little extra element to the dish.Suzy Chase: Is a meal a meal if it doesn't have rice?Eleanor Ford: Ah, that's an interesting question. Quite a lot of Indonesian... Well, no. An Indonesian will say that they haven't eaten unless they've eaten rice, but then a quite lot of snacks can be very substantial in their own rights. There might be a large dish of noodles, but it's not a meal unless rice is there as the core element. Rice is sort of the center. It's the canvas on which the other flavors are painted, but rice is said to be, yeah, the core part of any meal.Suzy Chase: Street food makes up about a third of the daily food in Indonesia. Would you say street food is the most authentic depiction of Indonesian dishes?Eleanor Ford: I don't think I'd necessarily say authentic. I'm a home cook myself. I'm drawn so much to home cooking. I think that it's in the home you often get the sort of simplest dishes that make the most impact. I think street food is hugely important. Everyone loves it. It's very much part of daily life in Indonesia because you can go out, you can grab a snack. There are wonderful different things to try. I think that it's nice in giving you the variety of different things, different flavors, different texture to choose and to eat in a single day, to choose something that someone else has cooked, but I'm always gravitating to what's cooked at home. I think that those are the dishes that I enjoy the most.Suzy Chase: Would you say that home cooking and street food are two different types of cuisines?Eleanor Ford: I think that there's a difference in how people cook at home as opposed to a street stall. A street stall vendor tends to have one dish that they've perfected. They've been cooking that same dish in the same way for years. They've got their own methods. Often, it might be something a little more technically demanding. It might involve deep frying. There might be a hot grill where you've got satay smoking and being turned with flames crackling at the satay sticks. It might be something where a lot of different sauces and ingredients are added to noodles and adjusted according to the person buying its taste. I think that home cooking tends to be a little slower perhaps. It doesn't have that same drama of a street food theater. It's something that is made for a family. It's made with time and attention, so kind of slower in it's cooking that's not that fast stir-frying. Indonesian stir-frying's different to Chinese in that you don't have that blazing-hot wok where you've got to move quickly. Things are done more slowly, more measured, and there's more food in the wok so that flavors have time to develop.Suzy Chase: Describe the sights and sounds of the street food scene.Eleanor Ford: Yes, sounds is an important thing because when you have roving street vendors with their perambulating carts, they often are making a sound to draw customers out from the houses, out from their places of work. They might be banging a piece of bamboo, which might signal one dish or clanging a bell for another. The carts that they're pushing are called kaki lima, meaning five-footed. That's from the three wheels of the cart and the two of the vendor that are pushing them. Each vendor will have that own wares that they're selling. So often, that will come with this cacophony of noise and smells. It's a very exciting place to eat.Suzy Chase: It all starts with bumbu. For us home cooks, describe the spice pastes that are the foundation of most of the recipes.Eleanor Ford: Well, what's interesting about Indonesian cooking is it relies so much on fresh spices rather than dried, particularly this coming from the original spice islands where so many of our dried spices come from. Indonesia, after all, was the only place where cloves and nutmeg once grew. In the daily cooking, it tends to be the fresh spices that are ground together to form a spice paste. This typically will start with shallots and garlic, the red and white sisters they're called as they come together, ginger, perhaps galangal, chili, and often, lemongrass or lime leaves are in there. These will be ground up, and different adjustments, different additions can really change the foundation of a dish, but it's a similar palette of ingredients. This is ground up together, either in a food processor or a pestle and mortar, and then fried to release the fragrance into the dish before other ingredients are added. This really is the kind of foundation of so much of the cooking.Suzy Chase: In the cookbook, you give us an in-depth look at an Indonesian kitchen.Eleanor Ford: Well, I wouldn't say that there's one particular kitchen. I saw a huge variety. I tried to go to as many as I could to learn from as many people as I could how to cook the food. Traditional kitchens tended to be outside the main house in a separate building so that they could become smoky from the cooking fires, and then people would sit outside them on the floors or a terrace chopping and preparing the food. I think that one unifier across every kitchen, regardless of how modern and gleaming or how traditional, is the use of an ulek, which is the pestle and mortar used in Indonesia. They're a lovely looking thing. They have a sort of wider shallow bowl, and they're made of volcanic rock, which is a little textured and gritty. If you are using it to make a bumbu, the texture really helps break down the ingredients quickly to a paste, and you do it in a kind of pleasing rocking movement. That you'll find in every kitchen.Suzy Chase: Indonesia is the third-largest producer in the world of rice, yet it's still imports rice. How come?Eleanor Ford: It's just such an important part of the diet. There are some islands that eat rice more than others, those that tend to grow rice themselves. As you move further east, less rice is grown, and there's a more of a reliance on starches, sweet potatoes or cassavas, corns, but still people love rice. It's a foundation of the cuisine and, despite these beautiful rice-terraced islands, there's not enough to meet with the demand.Suzy Chase: Cooking is said to awaken the spirit omerta. Is that how you pronounce it?Eleanor Ford: Yes. I think this is in Balinese and some Javanese culture.Suzy Chase: Which the omerta is held in grains. Apparently, chatter disturbs the omerta, and children learn about eating without talking. That's a really good parenting tip. That made me laugh.Eleanor Ford: Yes, some people told me about nursery rhymes they'd learned as young children where it was talking about respecting the rice and not talking when you're eating. I think there are lots of different, of course, different ways of eating in Indonesia. Sometimes it's a big communal event, huge festivals with amazing spreads of foods where people gather. Other times, perhaps on a more day to day, where someone will just take the little food that's been prepared earlier in the day and sit somewhere quietly without talking, without reading, without being distracted by something else and really concentrate on the food that they're eating. I like that.Suzy Chase: What's your favorite Indonesian dish in this cookbook that takes you back?Eleanor Ford: Oh, goodness. What takes me back, it would then have to be the pancakes. They're stained green by pandan leaves, lovely crepes, very easy to make. Inside, there is a filling of palm sugar and fresh-grated coconut. It's so addictive. That is just the taste of my childhood.Suzy Chase: How are the leaves worked into the pancake?Eleanor Ford: Well, you can do one of two things. You can whiz up a couple of fresh pandan leaves, which have got the most lovely scent. They're sort of often described as a vanilla of southeast Asian cooking because they're usually used in sweet cooking. Sometimes they're added to rice as well. If you can get the fresh leaves, you can whiz them up with the liquid, and then you strain that lovely dark green liquid and add it to the batter for the pancakes. Alternatively, you can buy pandan essence rather like vanilla essence. It's got a lovely flavor that it brings, very subtle but distinctive.Suzy Chase: The other day, I made your recipe for Turmeric Jamu on page 224. Describe this.Eleanor Ford: Ah, so Jamus are a tonic, ancient tonics originated in Java over 1,000 years ago. Princesses were said to drink Jamus to keep them young and vital. It's something that's continued.Suzy Chase: That's why I made it.Eleanor Ford: Did you feel young and vital?Suzy Chase: I'm feeling so young and vital.Eleanor Ford: The turmeric one is lovely because it's very fresh. It's that bright orange, and then it's mixed with... is it with ginger, I think it's got in that one?Suzy Chase: Yes.Eleanor Ford: As well and lime juice.Suzy Chase: And honey.Eleanor Ford: And honey. There are lots of different variants all using leaves or herbs. There's one I make quite often with tamarind, which is sweet because of palm sugar that's added, and that's got the pandan leaves as well. Just something about it rather than reminds me of Coca-Cola, that sort of spices infused with a sweet liquid. There's something like an early cola about it. Some of the Jamus can be very taxing. They can be very bitter and green, particularly those with extra health-giving qualities, but they can be delightful to drink as well. I've gone for the less excruciating versions in the book, the ones that are a real pleasure.Suzy Chase: Now to my segment called My Favorite Cookbook. Aside from this cookbook, what's your all-time favorite cookbook and why?Eleanor Ford: Oh, this is such a difficult choice because I'm an avid collector of cookbooks. I've got far too many. I think a really favorite author of mine is Gill Meller who writes about English ingredients in a very beautiful way. He's a real master class in using flavors and seasonal cooking.Suzy Chase: What's the name of the cookbook?Eleanor Ford: His first cookbook's called Gather. That's a favorite of mine.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?Eleanor Ford: I am on Instagram, EleanorFordFood.Suzy Chase: Thank you so much, Eleanor, for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.Eleanor Ford: Oh, thank you so much for having me. It's been a delight talking to you.Outro: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com, and thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

TheGTruth by Giovanni Canales 0:00 - Intro 1:11 - 49ers v Packers 7:45 - Chiefs v Titans 16:47 - Milwaukee Bucks 22:40 - Giannis' Jumpshot 34:11 - OKC Thunder 38:07 - Shai Gilgeous-Alexander's 43:04 - Outro ---------------------------------------- SUBSCRIBE to TheGTruth on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDzs0j_14QNh82ov8tRxHlg ---------------------------------------- SUBSCRIBE to TheGTruth on iTunes https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/thegtruth/id1446663407 ---------------------------------------- SUBSCRIBE to TheGTruth on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/38NrOCgJB54tPLJtmSCqOg ---------------------------------------- LISTEN to TheGTruth on SoundCloud https://soundcloud.com/thegtruth ---------------------------------------- Follow Me On Instagram https://www.instagram.com/gio_canales/ ---------------------------------------- Follow Me on Twitter https://twitter.com/gio_xcanales ---------------------------------------- --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/thegtruth/message

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American Cuisine: And How It Got This WayBy Paul Freedman Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York city, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.Paul Freedman: I'm Paul Freedman. I teach history at Yale University and my latest book is called American Cuisine: And How It Got This Way.Suzy Chase: For more Cookery by the Book, you can follow me on Instagram. If you enjoy this podcast, please be sure to share it with a friend. I'm always looking for new people to enjoy Cookery by the Book. Now on with the show. I'm thrilled to have you back on my podcast to chat about this extraordinary followup to 10 restaurants that changed America. Before we start, I have to tell you that after I chatted with you about 10 restaurants, we were driving our send to sleep away camp and I stopped at Bookbinders in Philadelphia to get the Terrapin soup just to see what it was about. So I was like, this is for Paul, the Terrapin soup. Paul Freedman: What was your verdict? Suzy Chase: Oh, the broth was amazing, but it's weird eating turtle, I guess, because I'm not from the 1800s but.Paul Freedman: Yeah, indeed. Right, right. But you're not like fazed with a turtle steak or something like that. So it's not too intimidating I hope. I once had Terrapin the way it was served in the 19th century when it was the height of elegance in America at a club in Wilmington, Delaware. It was in a kind of cream and Sherry sauce, and here it wasn't steaks either, but little pieces of Terrapin meat, which is sort of pink, and it was absolutely delicious, I have to say. I saw the point of the enthusiasm of two centuries ago. Suzy Chase: So there's so much in this new book as you trace the entire journey of American food. Question number one, drum roll, please. Does American cuisine exist? Paul Freedman: It does. It does in a kind of special sense because when we say cuisine and apply it to things like Italy or India, there are a number of dishes that we expect. So if you were told that you're going to go to an Italian restaurant, you'd be pretty sure that some pasta dishes would be on the menu. An Indian restaurant in the United States, there would be curries, even if that's not exactly an authentic reproduction of what people eat in India. This is a set of dishes that meets an expectation of a particular cuisine. For the United States, you don't have that. So my argument is that cuisine here means three things. One is an inheritance of certain regional dishes. The second is an early and fierce infatuation with processed food. The third is a love of variety. Suzy Chase: So in the introduction you wrote as far back as the early 19th century, European travelers were appalled at how quickly Americans wolf down their food. 10 minutes for breakfast, 20 for other meals according to one [Hottie 00:03:21] British visitor in 1820. The first thing I thought about when I read that were the American farmers whose days were jam packed with chores and they didn't have much time for dining unless it was Sunday after church. What is your take on that observation from 1820?Paul Freedman: I think that these travelers were in cities and they were observing people who were more affluent. I mean there were farmers all over the world. In the early 19th century, the vast majority of people in Europe, Britain anywhere would have been farmers, so they're under the same constraints. It's people who have some choice and who choose to get the meal over in a hurry. The other thing that Europeans said was that Americans don't like to talk. They don't see the meal as an opportunity for conversation. This is still true today in the sense that many people eat alone, even in families, everybody has their different schedule. People eat with their phone on the table, looking at their phone. Many people regard meals particularly, but not exclusively lunch as a kind of necessary waste of time that they multitask and do other stuff during it. There was a survey of attitudes in France versus the United States and it really shows that in France the meal is a small pleasure that banishes other preoccupations and that people who have to get something and kind of like eat it at their desk because they're very busy will say they haven't had lunch even if they had enough calories because lunch is an actual meal consumed in some kind of fashion that is not part of the rest of the day. That's in France at least. Suzy Chase: What's American culinary internationalism? Paul Freedman: That's the kind of syndrome where you say, "Oh, I don't want to have lunch at a Thai restaurant because I had Thai food yesterday for dinner." It is the availability of a variety of cuisines and the feeling that you want to experiment among them. This is now international. In Barcelona where I do a lot of my work as a medieval historian, you now can get sushi, panini, pizzas, hamburgers, the whole gamut of Indian bubble tea, international kinds of foods, but this is really recent. For most of my 40 years as a professor going to Barcelona, they just had the food of Catalonia or Spain or the Mediterranean. So Americans, by contrast, started experimenting with foreign foods with the food of immigrants really as far back as the 1880s when chop suey and Italian dishes first became popular among people who were, of course, not just Italian or Chinese. Suzy Chase: Do you miss that in Barcelona having so much variety and not really the "traditional things"?Paul Freedman: It depends how long I'm there. The easy answer is no, because first of all, the repertoire of the local food is pretty extensive and secondly in the quality is so good. So one of the problems with variety is that it distracts from actual quality. I will say that this summer I was in China for three weeks. There, the variety is infinite. I mean, I seldom had the same dish even though we had like 20 or 25 dishes per meal. On the other hand, after a couple of weeks, I really did start to miss what I was accustomed to, not so much American food in the narrow sense of say burgers or steaks, but food that was not Chinese. I admired it, it was marvelous, but it was kind of overwhelming.Suzy Chase: Let's talk about the fascinating 1796 cookbook, American Cookery by Amelia Simmons. Can you describe this cookbook? Paul Freedman: Like many cookbooks, it, let's say, uses the legacy of the past in order to avoid saying it's a plagiarized affair. It is based a lot on English cookbooks, but it has a certain number of American characteristics. I sort of dismiss Simmons as really not a very American, but it's mostly taken from other, deliberately it says new receipts adapted to the American mode of cooking is the Hannah Glasse Art of Cookery made Plain and Easy, the US edition of this.Suzy Chase: I love that you have a whole chapter about community cookbooks and you talk about how these reflect time and class and you wrote that they offer a representation of actually what was being cooked when it was published. When did they first appear?Paul Freedman: Around the Civil War. So they are cookbooks of recipes by ladies, as they put it, of various communities submitted to form a volume. So they're like favorite recipes of Zanesville, Ohio or something like that and they were to raise money for veterans or wounded soldiers, and after the civil war they keep often that charitable or institutional purpose.Suzy Chase: So I think it was kind of like Amelia Simmons. Something I learned was that the community cookbooks often ripped off existing published recipes. Paul Freedman: Yes, yes. Or they were adaptations, let's say, of recipes often that were pretty widely circulated in women's magazines and in other books. If you consider what they're doing, I had originally thought that such an enterprise would be a wonderful reflection of regional cuisine that a community cookbook in Boise, Idaho or Waco, Texas or Jacksonville, Florida would show you the cuisine of the region. But they really don't because the women of these communities want to be up to date and modern. They don't want to be rustic, rural and have recipes for random animals that you could get in the countryside. They want to have if jello salad is the thing or if green goddess salad dressing is the thing and they want to have something that's up to date. They also want to have something that's not too difficult for other people to make. The thing you have to balance, if you're thinking of what recipe are you going to contribute as if it's too difficult, if it calls for esoteric ingredients, then you're kind of breaking the curve. You're spoiling and you're a show off. What you want is something that's convenient, not too expensive, delicious by whatever measurement that means, so you get them a very good view as you said of time and of class. You don't get such a good view of where this is taking place of regional cuisine. Suzy Chase: So was there ever a vibrant set of regional cuisines in America? Paul Freedman: There was, but it starts to be undermined much earlier than anywhere else in the world because of the development of canned, powdered, processed and later on frozen foods which seduced American cooks. It's fair to say beginning pretty shortly after the Civil War.Suzy Chase: When it came to desserts until the late 1950s, baking from scratch was expected. I feel like we've come full circle on this, don't you think? Paul Freedman: I do. In this as in many other things, the convenience products of the past, which you find in the middle aisles of the typical supermarket, the way of the typical supermarket has set up is to make sure that you've got to go through everything and to look at everything. So the middle aisles are suffering. Just in today's Wall Street Journal, there's all sorts of stuff about Campbell Soup still the soup part of it, despite their proclaimed insistence on better quality, people aren't using canned soups as much. They're not using cake mixes as much. That doesn't mean that convenience products are at an end. In fact, if you expand the definition of convenience to include takeout or delivery or meal kits, we're using the more than ever so that in the 1950s however different the food was from our taste, however infatuated they were with convenience products, they did almost all their cooking at home, whereas we spend more money dining out or on meals that other people have prepared than we do cooking at home. Suzy Chase: Well, what we eat is radically cheaper than the past. This stat blew my mind. In 1900, more than 40% of an average family's income was spent on food, and in 2016 it was 12.6%. How come? Paul Freedman: This is the best argument for technology and for the kind of a processed food and national distribution networks that you can device. The fact that we don't have to spend nearly half of our income just to feed ourselves, that's an historic change. That is all of the rest of human history except for a tiny fragment of an elite, an aristocracy. People had to expend a huge amount of effort and money just to feed themselves so that the reason for this change and the diminution of how much as a percentage of what we earn we have to spend is because of better agricultural yield, better fertilizers, better transport, the ability to freeze, powder or to preserve food more quickly and the industrialization and centralization of the food supply. That doesn't mean that that comes free of adverse consequences, environmental consequences, health consequences. But for many people, you could argue very easily that the bottom line is that the average person is spending radically less on food and therefore has much more money to spend on phones, cars, houses, clothes, travel, music, whatever.Suzy Chase: The Settlement Cookbook was first published in 1903 and the subtitle was The Way to a Man's Heart. Then a Mademoiselle article from 1990 was entitled Refriger-Dating: Putting Guy Food in the Fridge. Talk a little bit about getting a man with food and the perfect wife. Paul Freedman: Well, the tradition was that the way to a man's heart was through his stomach. That is part of a kind of eternal argument about what are men looking for in women and addressed to women by things like that cookbook, but with more elaboration by things like women's magazines article, magazines like Mademoiselle, which was by its very title directed to an adult but unmarried woman. But the assumption of Mademoiselle's history was that it was addressed to an unmarried woman wants to be married real soon. So yes, a lot of these involve strategies to get men in the early 20th century by being a good cook. In the later 20th century, beginning in the '50s by seeming to be a good cook because you actually don't want to spend a whole lot of time cooking because the contradictory advice or the, let's say, compatible advice, complementary advice of these magazines is yes, men want you to be a good cook, but they don't want you to be a drudge. They want you to be a good companion. They want you to be sexy. They want you to be fun. So what they're trying to navigate in the late 20th century especially is the woman as a good sport and the woman as a good provider of meals and that's tricky, let alone- Suzy Chase: That's a lot.Paul Freedman: Yes, let alone the whole idea of subordination, implicit in the notion that it is you, the woman, who has to please the man. It also assumes that the man is kind of a something of an automaton. He responds to good meals, he responds to sexual allure. He doesn't do a whole lot of thinking or strategizing about it. Suzy Chase: My mom, she's passed away, but she was born in 1929 and she drilled it in my head like, "You should always cook Bob a meal." I can't get it out of my head. Paul Freedman: Right, right. So, I mean, you know what I'm talking about. I think that the chapter on women and food and food and gender and the way cookbooks address women is alien to what many young people think. When I teach this material to my students at Yale, they're amused, but it's like I was describing the Crusades in the Middle Ages or something like that. Yeah, okay. I saw this on Game of Thrones but it doesn't exactly speak to my experience. Was your mom saying otherwise he's going to be discontent or-Suzy Chase: Yes.Paul Freedman: Yeah. So a lot of this is the lore of older women addressing younger women or moms addressing daughters is that you may think that your convenience or your attractiveness is more important than providing a good meal. But, so the extreme, as you will have seen in my book, is someone who wrote to Betty Crocker, the General Mills icon who accepted mail and responded to it. So they had various people who had the job of responding as Betty Crocker. I mean, everybody knew she was a fictional character, but nevertheless, that was their advice kind of a correspondence. One woman wrote in in the 1920s and said that, "I make vanilla cake because I like it and my husband prefers fudge cake and my neighbor I noticed has made fudge cake a couple times. Is she trying to steal my husband?" Here again, it assumes that the guy is just like something that can be directed by remote control, oh, fudge cake. I'm going to go for it.Suzy Chase: I'm going next door.Paul Freedman: I'm going next door. See you. The whole situation comedy TV era was predicated on the notion that the woman actually thinks about stuff and the man just kind of like goes to work, comes home, eats his meal, watches TV, says, "Did you have a good day?" and that's about all he's good for. Suzy Chase: Gosh, we've come a long way. Paul Freedman: Maybe. So I do include this New York Times tongue and cheek to be sure piece of a few years ago about advising women to, or at least saying that women themselves spontaneously on first or at least early dates, dinners with guys they've just met, will order steak in order to show that they're not a food faddist, that they're not too health conscious, that they're not going to insist that he changed his diet, that he started eating kale or quinoa or something like that because that's what he fears. So again, she shows she's a good sport by ordering the steak. Suzy Chase: In the book you wrote, the difficulty of defining American cuisine makes it hard to identify a typical American restaurant serving typical American food. Talk a little bit about the term ethnic in terms of restaurants. Paul Freedman: Well, ethnic is not a popular word for the good reason that it implies that that's the foreign or the strange and that there is a kind of normal or normative, let's say, generic white person's American cuisine or restaurant. So I use the word ethnic nonetheless in the book because that foreignness or that exoticness is the appeal of such restaurants. Because the fact that you patronize restaurants does not make you necessarily more tolerant or more inclusive, it's perfectly possible to have a hard or paranoid attitude towards immigration and eat at Mexican restaurants all the time. There are people in many states who are doing this even as we speak. Suzy Chase: So true. Paul Freedman: So the ethnic though, the ethnic restaurant as a category, you can really see this as an American phenomenon if you compare say a guidebook to New York restaurants from the 1960s when the New York Times in particular started publishing its series of guidebooks and the Guide Michelin for France. The New York guide books divide the book into categories. Some of the categories may just be things like steakhouses or elegant restaurants, but most of them are Chinese, Indian, Italian and so forth. They're divided by international country or ethnicity. In Paris, in the 1965 Guide Michelin I bothered to count the restaurants. I can't remember now, but it's something like 300, roughly 300 restaurants are listed for the Paris Guide Michelin 1965 of which only half a dozen are not French. There's like two Chinese restaurants, a Vietnamese restaurant. Basically dining out in France might mean great variety of regions, for example, an Alsatian restaurant, an Alsatian restaurant, Provencal restaurant, but they're all within France.Suzy Chase: It's interesting that you wrote Jonathan Gold preferred the term traditional. Paul Freedman: Yes, because I don't agree because traditional like if you go to Louisiana, traditional means Cajun or Creole according to some old tradition. So traditional can mean anything. If I had to choose a word, I'd say maybe international. But the problem with that is that if you look at the, and this gets back to your earlier question, what is a typical American restaurant? If you go to a typical American restaurant, often it has pasta dishes on it, it has Crudo or Sashimi of some sort or it has empanadas or small plates like tapas, it could have all sorts of foreign influenced and unacknowledged elements.Suzy Chase: You said that diversity actually blurs the culinary authenticity, for example, chicken fajitas in Vermont.Paul Freedman: Right. You get these things like in guide books where they have pecan pie as a specialty of Vermont or Iowa or all sorts of places that are outside the South, which is what people normally think of as pecan pie's natural home. But this is genuine. You got chicken fajitas everywhere. The contrast that I try to draw may be most obvious in an anecdote about an experience I had in Italy where you have the reverse kind of fanatical devotion to local and regional identity. So the meal I had in Bologna with a professor of medieval history and her husband, so I'd been invited to give a talk at the University of Bologna and they took me out to dinner. Bologna is a famous food capital of Italy and one of their specialties is tortellini. So we had tortellini at this restaurant and without a doubt, these were the best tortellini I've ever had and it was obvious. My host's husband said, "In other places in Italy, other towns, they make tortellini with different fillings like spinach or cheese and these were actually meat tortellini." I asked the normal American question, which was, "Oh, do you ever get tired of meat tortellini and just have cheese tortellini instead just for variety?" He looked at me like I was crazy, like I suggested putting maple syrup on red snapper. He said, "No, no. In Bologna," we're in Bologna, "In Bologna, we eat meet tortellini," and it turns out that the blend of what kind of meat it is in the tortellini is fixed also. It's very different from Modena where they also eat meat tortellini and Modena is maybe 70 miles away, but there's a different kind. There's more prosciutto or more mortadella whatever the difference is. So it's not as if people are competing to see what kind of tortellini you can come up with. In America, you can go to the supermarket and buy 10 different kinds of tortellini no problem. Pumpkin squash tortellini, porcini mushroom tortellini, sun dried tomato tortellini, but they're not as good. So here the emphasis is on a very narrow dossier of variation, but on a fanatical attention to making it as good as possible. That is something that we've started to do again and it's something where you see in things that people don't cook at home. So I teach in New Haven, a city famous for pizza, and so people really have an idea of how pizza is supposed to be made. Or you get this with barbecue in the South. In North Carolina, they're not going to say, "Oh, maybe I'll have some Texas barbecue just for variety," smoked beef rather than that kind of vinegary shredded pork that they go for. But apart from such exceptions, the American tendency has been to prefer variety to intrinsic quality. Suzy Chase: In chapter nine you wrote about how the 1970s marked the total eclipse of regional cuisine. I would love, these are two people who I love, I would love for you to talk about Jane and Michael Stern. Paul Freedman: So actually I just published an article in the Wall Street Journal that is in their series, each weekend they have five best books or most important books in various topics. So it might be in warfare or the five best books on sleep and mine was the one they assigned me was on American food. I mentioned the Sterns' road food guide, which has gone through 10 editions, I believe, the first was in 1978. So yeah, Jane and Michael Stern in the 1970s set out to find restaurants, not so much of regional authenticity, but simply places where they didn't use frozen food, where they made their own pies, where they made their own chili, where they didn't just dump a Campbell Soup thing into an institutional pot, but actually made their own soup. So it's not intended originally as a guide to regional specialties as just to rescue the traveler from the necessity of depending on a fast food and it's very dear to my heart personally because I taught at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee in the 1980s and traveled a lot to New York because my wife lived in New York city, as did my parents. So going from Nashville to New York, I depended on the Sterns' guide to find barbecue places for example, or just lunch counter kind of places that had pot roast that they'd actually made in their kitchen rather than some kind of a food delivery service that they'd clawed out. So pre-GPS, finding some of these places was really hard, but it certainly was worth it. Suzy Chase: Yeah, that's what I thought about with them. They didn't have Google Maps. You could see them sitting there with the big map splayed out front of them driving. They're so good. Paul Freedman: There's a de-skilling. It did take, there was a place called the Ridgewood Barbecue, one of the best barbecue places in the East and it's in Eastern Tennessee, very near the Virginia and Kentucky borders and in a place called Bluff City. I would go to that maybe once a year and that was just enough time to forget how to get off the highway and find a place. But I actually knew how to read a map, a skill that I am slowly losing. Suzy Chase: So on page 281, you have a list of food fads and fashions from the late 19th to early 21st centuries. In the 1980s section, you included ranch dressing invented by Steve Henson who marketed it as Hidden Valley Ranch. I didn't realize ranch dressing is a relatively new thing. Paul Freedman: I think this is true of so many of these. I'm glad you asked me about that list because that's my very favorite thing in here. We think that a lot of dishes just have gone back since, have been around since time immemorial. I mean some of them, it's not that they were invented in the way that a ranch dressing, really you can point to a date when it was invented, but say quiche. I mean quiche Lorraine, you could get at French restaurants before the 1970s. But it completely takes over certain kinds of entertaining and cookbooks in the 1970s. Squid [inaudible 00:31:06] was available in Italy but unknown in the United States until the 1980s. So I'm fascinated by the way in which things that are pretty new turn out to be regarded or get dressed up as age old things. Key lime pie for example, people think it goes back to the origins of Florida, the first hearty settlers in the Florida Keys, but in fact it's based on Borden's condensed milk recipe from the end of the 1940s.Suzy Chase: What?Paul Freedman: Yeah, I know. Disappointing in a way but originally it was for some kind of ice box quick lemon pie and then some clever person thought of applying it to these admittedly regional Key limes. But the actual recipe, it's not as if people in 1900, when Key West was first developed as a resort were talking in Key lime pie, they had no idea of what it was.Suzy Chase: Now to my segment called my favorite cookbook. What is your all-time favorite cookbook and why? Paul Freedman: The choice is narrow. I would say my all time favorite cookbook is Pierre Franey's 60-Minute Gourmet. Suzy Chase: Yes. Paul Freedman: So on the one hand it's amusing because it's idea and it dates from, what, about 1980, late '70s, early '80s then it was followed up by More 60-Minute Gourmet. So on the one hand, the notion that 60 minutes is fast is now amusing. So for Pierre Franey, a French trained master chef, nobody could dream of wanting to produce a meal in less than 60 minutes. Less than 60 minutes, you might as well put something in the microwave from his point of view. But it is actually exactly what it says it is. These are wonderful meals. They're easy. They're easy in the sort of Julia Child sense. Of course, like everybody else, I admire her because all you have to do is follow the instructions. The instructions may be a little bit extensive. They're not as extensive as Julia Child's recipes, but each step is pretty simple and it produces lovely meals. There are a lot of cream sauces. There's a lot of stuff with scallops. My wife, when we were just married, made fun of these recipes and have my producing meals based on them by saying, "What will it be today? Scallops or scallops substitutes?" But I'd say that my second choice, I mean, you didn't ask me for a second choice, but my second choice is called Cucina Fresca. Point of it is that it's Italian food, but it's food to be served at room temperature, which allows you to make it in advance so that you can greet and entertain your guests without frantically checking things on the stove. Suzy Chase: The guys at Kitchen Arts and Letters here in the city.Paul Freedman: Mm-hmm (affirmative).Suzy Chase: That's one of their favorite cookbooks. Paul Freedman: Oh, I didn't know that. That's good to know. That also my copy is in lovingly cherished bad shape because it's been used so much. Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media? Paul Freedman: I'm at Mornayphf, Mornay like the sauce, M-O-R-N-A-Y-P-H-F on Twitter, and I have a website that's available through the Yale history department. So if you Google Yale University History, you'll see under faculty my name and my sign.Suzy Chase: Now to the very last line of American cuisine, it's in the what's in and what's out section. Okay. Here it goes. Microgreens, it has been discovered that they have no flavor. Thank you.Paul Freedman: It’s in what’s out.Suzy Chase: Amen. I've always hated microgreens. Paul Freedman: Yeah, well, I've developed more dislikes or phobias as I've gotten older, which may be because I started out pretty eclectic and ecumenical. But if I may mention another pet peeve, it's wraps and this is brought up by we have a lot of candidates for jobs in our department this semester and the lunch is so often served at their talks to accompany their talks. The candidate has to give a job talk based on their research. Our wraps, I go to these, this free food is set out and I don't like any of it.Suzy Chase: But they see you coming. Paul Freedman: Well, people will say other things like, "Oh, well. You choose the restaurant. I wouldn't dare choose the restaurant for a meal with you," as if I have some real expertise in New Haven restaurants that they don't, or as if I'm someone who can't stand to eat an ordinary meal, which is totally untrue. I am not in my own picture of myself a foodie, a food fanatic, a gourmet, a gastronome. I just happen to be interested in food.Suzy Chase: That'll be your next book. It will be entitled I Like Ordinary Meals. Paul Freedman: Right. No kidding. Suzy Chase: So thanks for writing yet another thought provoking book. I could talk to you for hours and thanks so much for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast. Paul Freedman: Thank you for having me, Suzy. It's always a pleasure talking to you. Outro: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com and thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

11 cookbooks that inspired us in 2019 according to The Washington Post.Photo credit- Stacy Zarin Goldberg Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors. Becky Krystal: I'm Becky Krystal. I'm the lead writer for Voraciously at Washington Post. Voraciously is a part of the Washington Post food section where we are aimed at beginner and intermediate cooks. We try to take the mystery out of cooking, teach a lot of basic recipes, interesting recipes, and really try to walk people through all kinds of ingredients and things we think are really helpful to know in the kitchen. Suzy Chase: For more Cookery by the Book, you can follow me on Instagram. If you enjoy this podcast, please be sure to share it with a friend. I'm always looking for new people to enjoy Cookery by the Book. Now, on with the show. So Becky, you're the lead writer for Voraciously at Washington Post Food. How long have you been with the newspaper? Becky Krystal: I've actually been here for 12 years, not the whole time with food. I started out actually writing about TV, which was really fun, and I've kind of been food and food adjacent for the past 10 years, but Voraciously has been my full time gig for about the past two years. I'm actually a home-taught, self-taught cook. I didn't go to culinary school. It's been the school of culinary hard knocks, if you want to call it that, but I've learned a lot and I think everyone else can teach themselves how to cook too.Suzy Chase: I just read an article in Fortune Magazine yesterday that was all about discovering the allure of cookbooks. Why do you love cookbooks? Becky Krystal: I love being inspired by cookbooks, obviously. Of course, making new dishes out of new cookbooks is a very obvious thing to do, but I also just like to read cookbooks, kind of like I do novels, looking at the photos and learning about new ingredients. I think a lot of, actually, my reading is kind of recreational, as opposed to, I'm going to make something out of every book, because I don't necessarily have that kind of time. I love looking at the photos, seeing what other people are doing in terms of art direction in photos because we do a lot of that here at Voraciously, and just learning about ingredients and dishes that I have not cooked before.Suzy Chase: The article in the Washington Post is 11 Cookbooks That Inspired Us In 2019. Each of these 11 cookbooks are handpicked by a staff member. You can read the whole piece over on washingtonpost.com. Could you take us through the process of putting this article together? What was the criteria you had to work with, if any? Becky Krystal: Yeah, it's a very scientific process. Actually it's pretty casual. We had a couple ... We have a weekly staff meeting, and so over the course of a couple then we sort of threw out ideas about what each of us are interested in. Obviously we want to make sure that we don't have a ton of overlap. Not everyone's cooking the same cuisine or not everyone's doing baking books. But really we just talked about books that inspired us, books that we cooked out of, books that we just saved on our desk. That's a major criteria, because we get so many that come and go, and if you have even just held onto a book, of probably hundreds we get a year, that's already a good sign. Yeah, we just all kind of picked one and it ended up working out well. We got a really good diversity of types of food and authors. Suzy Chase: What are some cookbook trends you saw this year? Becky Krystal: It's almost like there are too many trends to be any trends, because there are so many different types of books, and the common themes, there's been a lot of the specialty diets, keto, paleo, gluten-free, vegan, low sugar, stuff like that. Obviously Instant Pot multi-cookers are still a huge powerhouse. I'm just looking at our closet right now and there's Mexican Instant Pot, Mediterranean Instant Pot. Basically any type of Instant Pot is going to be out there. We saw a lot of deeper dives on global cuisines. We featured Island Kitchen, which was about cuisine from some of the Pacific islands, Mexico with Oaxaca, Sichuan food, a lot of immigrant-based cuisines, which are very timely with what's going on in our country. And then a lot of, there are people who are experimenting with more personal and casual approach to recipes and cookbooks, so people are kind of pushing the boundaries.Suzy Chase: Let's go for a few of these cookbooks on the list. First, All About Dinner by Molly Stevens. One thing that makes this cookbook stand out for me is that you get Molly's teacherly voice on the page. It's easy to follow the directions and succeed with every recipe you make of hers. Becky Krystal: Yeah. Molly, I've interviewed Molly a few times for stories and looked over some of her cookbooks, and like you said, she's a great teacher, and not intimidating. She's not going to give you imposter syndrome. She really wants to teach you, and that's what we liked a lot about this cookbook. She has lots of these sidebars where she pulls things out on the side of the page, or she throws in a few pages on perfecting pilaf for example, or boiling rice, or the difference between red and green curry paste. She doesn't want to just throw things at you, she wants you to understand either the ingredients or the methodology. The food in there is really approachable. It's not necessarily overly complicated. It skews a little bit towards comfort, but interesting. There's a pork loin with a miso glaze on there. And my colleague Emily Heil who chose this book, the book got her really into sumac, which is one of my favorite flavors. So you can learn a lot but also make very approachable dinners that you'll probably just keep making over and over again.Suzy Chase: Now to Vietnamese Food Any Day by Andrea Nguyen. I like that Andrea focuses on ingredients that are easily accessible. You don't need to go to the Asian market. Becky Krystal: Yeah, a lot like Molly, Andrea is someone else I've talked to and she also is a really great teacher and, like you said, the accessibility of the ingredients in this book is awesome. Her family came from Vietnam, and when they ended up in California, they obviously didn't have access to the types of ingredients they had where they came from. And so it was this combination of couple hours trip for one big shop, and then we're going to deal with whatever our local grocery store has. Obviously stores have come a long way since Andrea was young, so you walk into Trader Joe's, Safeway, Harris Teeter or whatever your local grocery store, and you're actually going to find probably a lot of Asian ingredients that she would not have been able to find at stores. But even then, she makes some fun and interesting substitutes. She uses French's fried onions, which we all know from that green bean casserole at Thanksgiving instead of fried shallots, which is a popular Asian ingredient, and it's a brilliant swap. She wants to streamline her recipes but not dumb them down, so that obviously get the spirit of Vietnamese food without having to go to a specialty store. Suzy Chase: Milk and Cardamom by Hetal, Hetal? How do you pronounce her name? Becky Krystal: Hetal Vasavada. I haven't actually heard her say it, but.Suzy Chase: Okay, we're going to stick with that one. Now, this was your personal pick. I had never heard of this cookbook before. Why did you pick this one? Becky Krystal: I love to bake. It's really my forte and my passion, and it's just if I have free time, that's really what I want to do. I also absolutely adore Indian food and Indian cuisines, so Indian desserts naturally are of interest to me. Indian desserts are not, you can't just go to the supermarket, so I think they're kind of underappreciated in America still, and people aren't familiar with them, so immediately I was intrigued by that. What I also like about this book is that she gives you both quote-unquote, "Traditional Indian desserts." But she often combines them in interesting ways with American ingredients, or American foods, so it's this cool mashup. She does this peanut ladoo, which an Indian dessert, but she sort of rifts on buckeyes, which are a, Ohio, Midwest staple. So she combines those, she puts pomegranate curd in the brownies. She uses more common Indian spices jaggery in her monkey bread. I just wanted to make everything out of the book, and to me that's always the sign of a book that got my attention. My favorite recipe, and the one that I ended up featuring in the story was a gulab jamun Bundt cake. Gulab jamun is, they're basically fried dough balls, so they're a little bit like donuts, they're smaller than golf balls and they're soaked in this rose and cardamom, this saffron, very aromatic syrup, and formed them into a very classic American Bundt cake. Phenomenal flavor, it's beautiful. It's way more interesting than your typical Bundt cake and people here really went bonkers for it. Suzy Chase: Now, moving onto one of my faves this year, Ruffage by Abra Berens. I call this the vegetable bible. This is the book you need if you have a membership to a CSA or just if you're strolling through your grocery store. Becky Krystal: One of the reasons Matt Brooks, who's the Voraciously editor who picked this book, was he has been a long time CSA member, and of course with CSA it's a little bit like, "We're letting you get what you get and you have to figure out what to do with it." So what's nice, she includes buying information and fridge information, and she really lets the vegetables shine rather than burying them under other ingredients. Suzy Chase: Whole Food Cooking Every Day by Amy Chaplin was another cookbook that I wasn't familiar with this year. What's her take on vegetarian cuisine? Becky Krystal: Joe Yonan, who's a food editor just absolutely raved about this book, and she obviously wants you to focus on eating seasonally. She is really great about offering base recipes that you can riff on, depending on the event, or your taste, or whatever you happen to have on hand. Again, it's gluten-free, it's low refined sugar, but she is not preachy about it. She kind of makes everything feel off the cuff and it's relaxed and she's not making you feel guilty. She just wants you to learn how to cook like this, and make dishes that appeal to you, and that are as close to the original state of the ingredients as possible, so it's kind of refreshing in that way. Suzy Chase: This next cookbook moved me. It's one of my personal favorites this year. I was so happy to see it on the list. It's Midnight Chicken by Ella Risbridger, from the watercolor illustrations in the book, to Ella's stories surrounding despair and mental health, to the homey recipes, it sounds odd just saying it like that, but there's something oddly brilliant about this cookbook. I just loved it. Becky Krystal: Yeah, it's a really good combination of cookbook and memoir. Like I mentioned earlier, it's sort of this less traditional approach to cookbooks and recipes. You mentioned the watercolor paintings, there are no photos, which is really different from a lot of cookbooks you seen now. It really lets you focus on the words and she's very lyrical in her recipe writing. There's a lot of kind of short, almost poetic sentences, and then there's these longer stretches where she's talking about kneading bread and you see the sunshine, and it's beautiful, and it's casual, without being cutesy. It's going to let people feel free to cook and relax and admit that there's a lot of connection between feelings and cooking too. Suzy Chase: What cookbooks are you excited about coming out in 2020?Becky Krystal: Well, I would not be a good employee if I didn't mention Cool Beans by Joe Yonan, the food editor, but I'm actually genuinely excited. I cook a ton of beans, especially now that I have an Instant Pot. I cook beans every week, I love that. I'm really looking forward to Rose's Ice Cream Bliss by Rose Levy Berandbaum, whose books are, I mean they're airtight, so many great recipes and I actually talked to Rose for a story I did on ice cream earlier this year, so I know that she's got some amazing flavors that are going to be in there. Also really excited about Erin McDowell's High book, that's coming out next year. You can see there's a common theme here, I like baking a lot. Erin's an awesome teacher, so smart. One other one I'm really looking forward to is Healthy Indian. If you're a Great British Baking Show fan, you probably remember Chetna who was on the first season it aired in the US. I love her, I think she's so fun, and really nice to see her doing things well beyond baking. And like I said earlier, Indian is one of my favorite cuisines, and I really like eating a lot of vegetarian food, so I think this is one to look out for. Suzy Chase: What can we look forward to with Voraciously in the new year? Becky Krystal: That's a good question. I think maybe we're going to try to do maybe a couple more slightly more involved recipes, not too much. We're in year three and we want to keep giving people the fundamentals of cooking and basic recipes. But I just got an email from a reader who said, "I am on the hunt for the perfect baguette recipe. That could be fun." Give people something that's a little more projecty, but it's still kind of this approachable dish. And yeah, I think I'm going to try to do more of my own recipe development. And it's going to be an unexpected mix I hope. Suzy Chase: Now to my segment called My Favorite Cookbook. What is your all-time favorite cookbook and why? Becky Krystal: You're going to make me choose. That's really hard as someone who collects cookbooks. If I had to, had to, had to pick, I would probably say The Gourmet Cookbook. Actually one of the first cookbooks I owned. It's just a nice all around book, and I think especially for people who haven't cooked a lot, it will encourage you to go a little bit outside of your comfort zone. Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media? Becky Krystal: I am at voraciously.com. On Facebook I'm @BeckyKrystal, all one word. And on Instagram I'm @becky.krystal.Suzy Chase: Wonderful. Well thanks Becky for coming on Cookery by the Book Podcast. Becky Krystal: All right, thanks Suzy. Outro: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com, and thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast Cookery by the Book.

Welcome back to the Homeless Boys' Podcast. On Episode 15, we talk to everyone's favourite recurring guest GreenMario about YouTube, including the disappointing Rewind 2019 and copystrikes. Tune in every week for new content. Hope you enjoy it! __________________________________________________________________________ Music Used (in order of appearance): 1 Podcast Podcast Podcast Instrumental by Papa Angus, Lyrics by Z113 Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzwEi3P03tY 2 NF - When I Grow Up Instrumental Remake by H3 Music Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqOXbJ4P6bM 3 Moonbeam by Jordan Maron Video link: https://youtu.be/ABs49waOliw __________________________________________________________________________ Timestamps 00:10 - Intro 01:46 - YouTube Rewind 2019 04:17 - Clean Your GPU with Clorox Bleach Everyday 05:11 - Who is Juice Wrld 8:18 - Back to YouTube Rewind 24:41 - LTT vs Markass Brownlee 27:08 - The Copystrike 32:11 - Where we actually start talking about the copystrike 36:35 - Top 10 Top 10 Lists 40:37 - Meme of the Day 46:46 - Outro __________________________________________________________________________ Subscribe to our channel (Get us to 100 subs): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfXDB7azda0wp6qn56z5lbg?sub_confirmation=1 Subscribe to JunLCS (Help him beat Pentamity's channel): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxqhOFdXuG-GbltB4O-aVDA

Baltic: New & Old Recipes: Estonia, Latvia & LithuaniaBy Simon Bajada Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table talking to cookbook authors.Simon Bajada: It's Simon Bajada speaking on my new cookbook, "New and Old Recipes: Estonia, Latvia & Lithuania.Suzy Chase: For more Cookery by the Book, you can follow me on Instagram. If you enjoy this podcast, please be sure to share it with a friend. I'm always looking for new people to enjoy Cookery by the Book. Now on with the show.Suzy Chase: The Baltic States were named among New York Times' 52 best places to go in 2018, so on to a little geography. The Baltic region encompasses three Northern European countries to the east of the Baltic Sea. Apparently Estonia is more Nordic of them all and Latvia and Lithuania are more Russian-influenced. Could you give us a little overview of the three different countries and where they're located?Simon Bajada: Certainly. Estonia is in the north, most northern part, and I think that's why it gets some of its Nordic influence just geographically being there under Finland and with Sweden across to the west. Underneath Latvia is, yeah, one-quarter of the population today is still of Russian origin, and below that to the south, just north of Poland is Lithuania.Suzy Chase: so here's a little factoid that I found out. Estonia has a huge startup culture, and thanks to them, we're chatting today on Skype.Simon Bajada: Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I understand. Yeah, I understand that it was developed there. I'm not sure if they're all still operating out of there.Suzy Chase: Probably not.Simon Bajada: And also it's actually one of the first countries to offer in the world digital citizenship, so you can run a business out of a Estonia without actually being there.Suzy Chase: Oh, that's shady.Simon Bajada: Yes.Suzy Chase: Latvia is where the most Russian families have remained post-independence. What's a classic Latvian Russian dish?Simon Bajada: There's quite a few that that are still eaten there in the cuisine. Certainly, actually, there's one in the book that we could talk of where I've done a little modern adaptation being Rasols. It's a salad that was developed a long time ago, a cold salad, which uses boiled root vegetables, generally likely beets and potatoes, and it has a real assortment of other ingredients through it. It can be chopped ham, peas, even a smoked fish or cured fish, also chopped egg in there and it's all bound together with a mayonnaise. So everyone has a different recipe, and it's adapted a lot over the years, but it's certainly the origins are from Russia, and it's still eaten there today.Suzy Chase: So Lithuania was once one of the largest European powers with a territory that extended from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea close to the Ottoman empire. What happened to all that land?Simon Bajada: Yeah, I find that fascinating in the historic research I did. I mean, it's a huge area. And also interesting is that it's always been a very multicultural place. Like as far back as the 14th century, a lot of royalty were invited from around Europe to set up there. To your question about what happened to it, I never actually found the answer to that, but I would assume that at some stage, Russia ended up encompassing the region because it was geographically a similar region, but the Russian empire came and and took over that land.Suzy Chase: Speaking of the Russians, after 50 years of Soviet rule, what exactly is post-Soviet cuisine?Simon Bajada: I think post-Soviet cuisine is the Baltic countries' answer to new Nordic cuisine. The young chefs realized that they could identify with their culinary roots rather than looking at other countries like Italian, French food, everyone loves. They thought, "Well, what's our food?" And that's certainly what happened in the Nordic countries, and they developed it into something hugely successful and modern. Everyone's felt the effects of that around the world. And I think the Baltic countries, being in a similar geographic region thought, "Oh, their produce is similar. Our techniques are similar." And so the young chefs have now been looking to what the foods were ahead of the Soviet times to identify more closely what their country's cuisine was, and they're making modern adaptations on that.Suzy Chase: Can you describe the Baltic Way?Simon Bajada: Yeah. That was also fascinating to read of in research because I actually didn't hear about it in the '80s, but I think it was around three million people across the three countries came together to unify and join hands and form a physical line of people in protest to Soviet occupation. And you saw the picture in the start of the book, perhaps.Suzy Chase: Mm-hmm (affirmative), I sure did.Simon Bajada: I think it speaks to the three countries working together as they do today, and yeah, I think it's a proud moment for them.Suzy Chase: What are the smells in kitchens alongside the Baltic Sea?Simon Bajada: Admittedly, I'm going to say that I'm not the most romantic writer, so I, actually, for the book turned to a local, and she was very generous to give some introductory text for the book. Yeah, [Sandra 00:00:05:50], a local in Latvia. But yeah, she, she talks about it. She talks about the ocean. She talks about all the smells coming from the forest, the mint growing wild, the smoke coming from smoke houses, I believe.Suzy Chase: Yeah, the blue cheese and hemp butter.Simon Bajada: Oh, yes, yes. She talks about the hemp butter. That's a really interesting ingredient to find being used there, actually, because it's not so common in many cuisines. The farmers used to use the oil from the hemp seed to condition their hands because of all the hard labor, and they also started to realize that the oil could be used in salads and crushed to go in butters, et cetera. And I think through the Soviet time, the farms were closed down, and they stopped the production. Since the '90s, it's experiencing a bit of a resurgence, and now there's been leniency on the laws so people can grow the hemp again, and it's a product you'll find in the supermarkets.Suzy Chase: I read that you said there's no personal backstory to this book. What prompted you to write it?Simon Bajada: I've always loved foreign cuisines, and when I visit places, it's all I'm looking for, those little nuances about something that's unique or a technique that's unique. And I first visited Latvia in 2008 and visited a restaurant, which is still there today. They're actually a small chain where the local Latvian food is served on a buffet every day. I just couldn't believe it. When I walked in and saw these dishes, I was taking notes immediately.Simon Bajada: One of the first things I saw was the chilled beet soup, which is also eaten in other countries, Poland, Russia. But that was the first time I saw it. And then all of a sudden there's this assortment of cabbage dishes and pickled dishes and everything. And it just grabbed my attention.Simon Bajada: And since 2008, I visited over the years, living here in Sweden and went on some press trips. And every time I visited I just dug a little deeper and deeper every time. And I started to realize that a lot of the recipes of the things I wanted to eat, they weren't appearing anywhere. So I thought, Oh, I'll make a little collection. And, and then I started to look for books, and I realized that some of the books were like very country-specific or a bit older. So that's when I came up with the idea to, to write the book and correlate the recipes.Suzy Chase: That's so cool. I love foreign cuisines, too. And I'm so into cookbooks being part travelogue. I like to learn about the culture along with the cuisines. And this book is just dreamy and perfect for your bedside table. I adore the photos so much. Did you take these photos?Simon Bajada: I did, yes. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, I've had some great feedback from some Baltic people who are living abroad and they in a way, in one way or another, they've said they've been waiting for this book and that when they got it and saw it, it really took them home and that it represented the landscape they were familiar with in their childhood, if it was their childhood they left or... So I'm really happy that as a writer and a photographer, that that's made me really happy.Suzy Chase: Oh, my gosh. That's the best compliment you could ever get.Simon Bajada: Yeah, it's fantastic. Yeah. You know, It's a daunting task to write about another country's cuisine. There's no doubt. And I think having an outside eye looking in sometimes can help. But you know, I got some really interesting information from chefs and local people who helped for the whole project and, and there's been some great feedback. So that makes me really happy. I mean, all I want to do is share the food with people around the world because they're little-known countries, and there's not much out there about their food. So it's, it's great to see that it's doing the job.Suzy Chase: Why do you think this is a little explored culinary region?Simon Bajada: They're not countries that everyone visits. They're small countries. We hear very little from them and a lot of people would assume that the food is similar to the neighboring countries, and in a way, at times it can be very similar, but there's also those little differences that make each country's cuisine unique. So it's exciting to dig and have a look at that and share it.Suzy Chase: In the cookbook, the first chapter highlights the Baltic love of dairy. Talk a little bit about that.Simon Bajada: They've always been agrarian societies where they rely on the land and eat from the land. And I mean, you can go into the Riga Central Market and just see the love of dairy. There's huge selection of cheeses, a lot that are very unfamiliar. We were talking about hemp seeds. There's hemp seeds through cheese. Then you might have different consistencies of the cheese with hemp seeds, and there's ingredients and different forms of dairy that we are not familiar with. You might have sour milks with various sourness or different fat contents.Simon Bajada: Also the fresh cheese, which is then turned into curd cheese. Cheese ends up in chocolate ,as you might've seen in the book. You know, and the first recipe in the book is an ode to that. The summer milk soup is just so simple, and yeah, I think it speaks volumes of the love of the dairy to have a soup that's just from milk.Suzy Chase: What else is in it?Simon Bajada: They use spring vegetables, which lovely and sweet in the middle of summer, and that's it. The most simple seasoning, salt and pepper, and yeah, I think it's a classic recipe that represents the region really well.Suzy Chase: Another interesting recipe I read was on page 123. It's the Piragi?Simon Bajada: Oh, yes, the Piragi, yes, from Latvia.Suzy Chase: Yes. And it's a form of bragging rights. Talk a little bit about that.Simon Bajada: Yeah, I came across that in research that historically that would be something that you would bring. I think in mid-summer all the communities get together and celebrate midsummer. It's also a time to celebrate the harvest and what the farm is yielding, et cetera. And it's said that if you were to bring a huge tray of those being filled of pork and made from wheat flour, it's served as a bragging right that things were going well.Suzy Chase: Would you say rye bread is a staple in all three countries?Simon Bajada: Yes, definitely. And it gets called black bread for some reason, and it's not always black. It can be a little more what we know as rye, but certainly in Lithuania, I noticed the way that they cook it, they make huge loaves, so it gets cooked at a lower temperature for a longer amount of time so that the heat can get all the way through the loaf, and this develops a really dark crust and that's why the bread turns black, whereas the inside actually isn't black. So I understand how it gets called black bread. And that's actually quite interesting because the loaf gets divided up into portions. So instead of buying your own individual loaf, you'll be at the market and it'd already be cut up and it will all be weighed and priced accordingly. So bread by weight essentially.Simon Bajada: And you know there's there, there's a fantastic restaurant in Tallinn called LEIB, and that that name is the Estonian word for "bread." And I remember the first meal I had there, the chef, he always came out and spoke about the food. It's a fantastic restaurant. And I remember being quite surprised when he came and mentioned that dessert was going to be black bread ice cream. I'll never forget it, and it was delicious.Suzy Chase: So what was that like?Simon Bajada: Yeah, really good. I mean, all ice cream's fantastic. Everyone's had a million different flavors.Suzy Chase: But how did they morph the bread into the ice cream?Simon Bajada: I didn't ask him. I never got the recipe. I have since read a recipe. I'm trying to remember now, but I imagine that they... In the book you'll see a recipe for bread soup ,and that's a sweet dish where you cook down the rye bread with sugar and water, and it becomes like almost like a porridge. So my guess is they use that with an ice cream base to churn it together with freezing it at the same time. And then you have an ice cream. But it was lovely, sweet. It had the depth of almost like a beer or an ale.Simon Bajada: And I must say that that recipe in the book for sweet bread soup really took me by surprise because I had had it in the countries, in Latvia in particular, and it's not the most beautiful-looking thing. And while I was reluctant to include it in the book, you know, I made a few times and every time it surprised me. There's something about it being chilled and sweet. It's a very interesting flavor and, and really, really nice paired with anything tart like a tart fruit and then a little cream. So I think that that would be very similar to what they did to make that black bread ice cream.Suzy Chase: So last week I made your recipe for chilled beet root soup. Chilled beet root soup. That's hard to say. On page 26.Simon Bajada: It's easier to say than the Lithuanian, though.Suzy Chase: Yes. Describe this dish and how it was popular in Soviet times and how it epitomizes the flavors of the region.Simon Bajada: The dish is essentially boiled beets, which have sweet earthy undertones, and then you mix through that some cucumber, but the predominant other ingredient is sour milk, what we also know is kefir, which creates the perfect balance between the beats and the and the dairy there. And then there's, yeah, the cucumbers, some chopped egg. You also add some more acidity through lemon juice if you like, and horseradish is also popular to have with it. And they all come together and make something really stunning.Simon Bajada: I mean, I sat in the square at Vilnius last summer, and that's all I wanted. And it was hot. It was 30, which is not that common in that neck of the woods. And I just remember sitting there, having that soup as if it was having a gazpacho in Spain. I mean, it was so refreshing, and everything always tastes better than when you're there. But I must say I came back to Sweden, made it at home again, and on a hot day in love with it, I think it's something that people should take into their chilled soup repertoire, definitely for next summer.Suzy Chase: Now to my segment called My Favorite Cookbook. Aside from this cookbook, what is your all-time favorite cookbook and why?Simon Bajada: I've always been impressed by Escoffier the book, but I think given we're talking about Baltic cuisine, I'll mention one which listeners might not know of, and it is stunning. It's one of my favorite. It's called Proud of Lithuania: A Fairy Tale by Sweet Root, and Sweet Root is a restaurant in Vilnius that it's been, oh, I don't know how many years, but certainly been a very successful restaurant for maybe around five years, longer. And they have a book, which is mammoth. It's 350 pages. But it's just stunning. It's beautiful photography, amazing minimal design.Simon Bajada: And yeah, when you're reading through it, the prose is great, and it really takes you to Lithuania and gives you a really strong understanding of the cuisine, and yeah. I mean, there's just a lot to like about it. I think it comes in with like 10 different sleeve options on the outside. So you can pick which sleeve you would like. And yeah, just talks a lot about the identity of Lithuanian cuisine. So it's beautiful. And there's not many. I think it's a limited run.Suzy Chase: So is it newer or older?Simon Bajada: It came out maybe two years ago.Suzy Chase: Okay.Simon Bajada: And when I look at it, yeah, the author is just by Sweet Root. So I think it was like a team effort. It's not actually written by them one particular chef or food writer. It's more they came together as a group, and a lot of the recipes are from the restaurant, but there's also really nice words about Lithuanian food culture, so yeah, love it.Suzy Chase: So where can we find you on the web and social media?Simon Bajada: I'm on @simonbajada on Instagram, and I also have a website, just simonbajada.comSuzy Chase: It is indeed an exciting time for Baltic food. And thanks so much for chatting with me on Cookery by the Book podcast.Simon Bajada: Thank you, Suzy. Thanks for having me on the show. Thanks.Outro: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com, and thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

Lateral CookingOne Dish Leads To AnotherBy Niki Segnit Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table talking to cookbook authors.Niki Segnit: My name is Niki Segnit and my new book is called Lateral Cooking: One Dish Leads to Another.Suzy Chase: And here's the followup to your hugely successful 2010 book, The Flavor Thesaurus. This is a cookbook full of open-ended recipes, a dense... and that's a bit of an understatement... 610 page cookbook. Lateral Cooking is organized into 77 starting point recipes divided into 12 chapters, reducing the variety of world cuisine down to its bare essentials. I can't stress how unique this cookbook is. Can you talk a little bit about how one dish leads to another?Niki Segnit: The book was originally conceived as a book about how to flavor lots and lots of different kitchen classics, so that was a very common sense follow-up to The Flavor Thesaurus. It would just be here's how to flavor ice cream or risotto or gnocchi in countless ways. It would be a kind of interesting directory for anybody who just wanted to maybe be a bit more ingredient led in their cooking. But in the years that I was researching it and going through, I mean thousands and thousands of recipes, I started to take notice of all the, if you like the patterns of how different recipes that we, you know, things that we might have thought of being very different to each other actually were very similar. And what happened was I suppose I ended up deconstructing loads and loads of dishes from all over the world. I mean just, I guess there are thousands in the book and putting them into family groups. It's like a family tree of recipes. And what you get when you tuck into the reading of it, is that you'll see how lots and lots and lots of things are connected. And not only is that quite interesting if you like reading about food, but if you like cooking and you've always thought that maybe something was out of your confidence zone, when you see if it's quite close to something that you've made dozens of times before you can start to feel like, "Oh yes I can do that. It's close to something that I can make. So why wouldn't I give it a go?" My overriding mission, as I got later into writing the book, was to also create a book that people could read if they wanted to learn to cook without using recipes. And so the whole book is written with that in mind, with that aim of people who want to become intuitive, who can just tug down a bowl from the shelf and get going on something because they know what to do.Suzy Chase: In the early stages of Lateral Cooking, you drew up a list of the best things you had ever eaten. What were some of the items that were on that list?Niki Segnit: So yeah, I mean so many of the things that are on that list are a broth and stock base, so they were butternut squash risotto, which I ate in a restaurant in London. A kind of sausage-y pasta I ate when I was on a business trip to North of Italy. A fantastic coq au vin that I once made, and in fact ended up putting in sandwiches, and that is a meal that my husband maintains is the best thing he's ever eaten. coq au vin sandwiches if you can believe it. Things like a chicken... I think you call it pollo con arroz... just chicken with rice which I ate in a beach in the South of Spain, that was just made with the darkest chicken stock I have ever, ever seen. That wonderful red braised Chinese pork. It just kind of came to me that so many of the really, really wonderful, deep, memorable things that I've eaten in my life are to do with starting with a good stockpot.Suzy Chase: You have some obscure or counter-intuitive suggestions. Talk about one example with ice cream.Niki Segnit: Yeah, I mean it's really funny. I think when you think of writing a book like this and you're thinking about flavoring different classics, ice cream is one of the things that has been really pushed to the limit everywhere. Don't you think? I don't know if there's any flavor that you haven't heard of. I mean I chose mainly 10 different examples of a lot of the classics and the olive oil one I chose to include because I ate it in a Spanish restaurant after having an argument with my husband, which I think I recount in the book because the book has quite a few stories and it's quite a chatty book. I mean but all you have to do to make an olive oil ice cream is to make a typical ice cream base and then whisk some good olive oil in it. I think there's a description of it in the book that says something like it was the whole thing because it's so fruity and grassy, it tastes like a frozen picnic. It's absolutely fantastic. But you do have to choose a really good olive oil before you do that. So you just taste it on a spoon and if you think oil before you think olive then you had to choose another olive oil.Suzy Chase: So yeah, oftentimes I find cookbooks to be so serious. And I love that you brought humor into this process and your stories.Niki Segnit: It's the only way I know to be really. I have a slightly privileged position as a writer of cookbooks and this was the case for The Flavor Thesaurus as well, which is I'm just an amateur cook. In fact I'm a very keen amateur cook and I've cooked a lot of things and I've tested all the recipes but I'm not a chef. I'm not somebody who can preach on high or feels the need to take a very serious authoritative position. I do think, as you know, I'm talking to somebody who's in my kitchen who likes cooking like I do, who considers it a really good fun thing to do. There's never anything in my book that's trying to cajole people into making things or persuade them that, "oh come on, you can do this." I know that the people that I'm writing for, this is quite... this is a book for keenies . This is a book for cooking geeks and people who just, who think about cooking all day. So I can talk to them about irritating incidents with cooking equipment or like where to get certain ingredients and stuff with a chatty flourish, I think.Suzy Chase: Using bread as an example, talk a bit about committing a formula to memory as opposed to trying to remember 10 recipes.Niki Segnit: This goes for quite a few of the chapters in the book, but bread is one of the smoothest as far as this is concerned because when I put in all the recipes together in continuum so they're linked up, what I've tried to do is not only keep the quantities the same wherever possible, but also to keep the language that's used to write the methods the same so that things become super familiar rather than it feeling like doing something different every time. So with the bread continuum, the first starting point on that line is unleavened flatbread which is just as simple as adding enough water to flour and a bit of salt in order to make a dough. And that's a very basic thing, but the flavors and variations in that section take you into so many interesting different places. So actually it's the same thing to do if you want to make matzo crackers or if you want to make Scottish oatcakes. If you mix up that and grate a coconut you can make a Sri Lankan flat bread called pol roti. Or if you put some chickpea flour and actually some chopped up spinach and nigella seeds then you can make missi roti, which is a popular bread in Rajasthan. You can even make buckwheat Japanese noodles with the same dough. Okay, but we start with two cups of flour and about two thirds of a cup of water. And from there you can make so many different things and that's before you even kind of open the cupboard up and start looking at all the different flours that you've collected over the year because you've been buying all these kind of wonderful and interesting different flours from around the world. And then as you progress along the bread continuum, the next thing we go to is biscuits and Irish soda bread and cobbler. And they're all made with the same formula. But again, I use the same two cups of flour and about two thirds of a cup of water so that it stays consistent. And in fact it stays consistent all the way through breads. So the next thing we have is leavened bread, so using yeast instead of using a chemical leavener. And then you have buns where you use milk instead of water and maybe a little bit of egg so you are enriching the dough. But in fact when you look at the proportions of those things, you're still using the same amount of liquid to flour. It's just that you're using it in beaten egg rather than water and milk in some places. And then the same with brioche. And then finally that continuum ends up with babas and savarins. And that is where you take that too and you use some milk on top of water and you end up with a batter instead of a dough. But when you see all the different formulas written next to each other, so similar that all you have to do is just learn the little tweak that makes one thing another. So it's my contention that anybody can learn to make pretty much every bread from around the world in a week or less.Suzy Chase: God, that's so clever.Niki Segnit: It's always so interesting. I just thought it has revolutionized my cooking because when it comes to standards like that, when it comes to things that are like custards or breads or cakes and cookies, just being able to say, "Oh I want to make that so I'm going to get started," and don't have to consult anything. I cook like somebody who knows how to cook. Whereas previously I really was a recipe robot. Even as I was writing The Flavor Thesaurus I was someone who learned to cook by following recipes and cook like someone who learned to cook following recipes, because I didn't have any flexibility in me. I didn't have any confidence in my intuition and it hadn't occurred to me that actually you can learn to have intuition. It sounds, I know of course it sounds ironic, but that's exactly what you'd do if you were a musician, you learn how to play the notes and then you can improvise, and that's what got me so excited about writing Lateral Cooking. It took eight years, which is a phenomenal amount of time to work on one project very deeply every day, but it was never boring because it's just such a fascinating thing to find all these amazing little connections between all these things that you want to eat or you want to try.Suzy Chase: I don't know anyone who doesn't love a homey chicken or vegetable stock, so I would love to drill down on your brown chicken stock recipe that's on page 208. I made it over the weekend and I have so many questions. First off, what's the difference between stock broth and consomme?Niki Segnit: I don't know if there's a really definitive difference between a stock and a broth, but I think there's a very useful one that comes up quite often, and it helped me decide how I was going to position them in the book. And that is with stock you throw the ingredients that you're using to flavor the water away and with broth you eat them. So that one's clear. With consomme of course you're doing that incredibly magical thing where you take the stock or broth, it's probably more likely to be a broth but it could be a stock, and then you clarify it and make sure it's flavorful enough in order to serve it as a soup on its own. I mean sometimes with consommes they're layered with... you'll make a stock and then you'll actually add some more flavors to it and then you might add something else because you're aiming for something that is, if you like, perfect in itself, you're not going to be serving it with anything else. Just that zinging clear soup.Suzy Chase: So next to the ingredients are tiny letters that correspond to leeways. Tell us about leeways.Niki Segnit: This came up as I was coming up with all these different flavor variations of recipes because I was collecting dozens of recipes for each of the starting points. I also started to note down, well what happens if I want to make this cake and I don't have that many eggs or I've only got baking soda and not baking powder, well those kinds of things came up. And so what I've done for each of the 77 start points is put little notes by all the ingredients, or some of the methods as well, just saying look if you don't have this, you can do this. This is how to make a buttermilk if you don't have any buttermilk. This is a standard amount of sugar but it would be absolutely fine to cut it down to a certain level or whatever you want. So it's full of practical tweaks as well, if you like. I mean, I'm sure if you're a professional chef you never run out of anything. But of course for most of us home cooks, we don't necessarily have a perfectly stocked larder. So it's useful to know how to change things up if you're short of something or if you have certain dietary requirements. I try and talk about where the gluten is important and where it doesn't matter, that kind of thing.Suzy Chase: This stock recipe starts off with browning the chicken pieces. Why brown?Niki Segnit: Because it's a brown chicken stock we're going to brown them, so we're going to create more flavor. It's just as simple as that. So lots of people in some dishes, like our risotto, sometimes will call for a White chicken stock where you just don't bother with the browning at all. But this is just about adding depth of flavor.Suzy Chase: And this calls for one onion but we shouldn't peel it. Why leave the peel on?Niki Segnit: Again it's flavor and color. I mean, I think one of the great things about making a stock, and getting used to making stock, is that you realize that this is not like making a casserole or a start dish. It's about just kind of getting it in and getting it going, so. And the onion, if you ever made just an onion stock or vegetable stock, you know the onion peel adds a nice kind of brownie, appealing, flavorful looking color.Suzy Chase: Then we can add tomato paste, wine or vermouth. What does this bring to the flavor profile?Niki Segnit: Tomato puree, you're certainly going to to get some sharpness, and some umami in with the wine and vermouth. The Vermouth in particular, very aromatic. So if you're making something kind of Frenchy, chicken maybe, a blanquette if you know that dish, then something like vermouth is going to add some herbal flavors, some like very light floral flavors, a touch of bitterness in those instances. You can leave them out if you don't know what you're actually going to be doing with your chicken stock. If you're just making it maybe for a chicken noodle soup or you don't know kind of quite what you're going to do that yet, you might leave it plain, but I think if you're taking it a certain direction, you might want to add some of those kinds of different taste profiles.Suzy Chase: So why should we start off with cold water as opposed to hot?Niki Segnit: Down to the scientific side of things, if you put cold water in and you bring it very slowly up to a simmer and then don't let it boil, just keep it at a very slow simmer whereas just one bubble breaking every now and again, then you get that beautiful clarity that you see sometimes in chicken stock. For most of us when we're making chicken stock, if we're using it for risotto, using it for a soup, chicken noodle soup, or just distilling it down to use it on pastas, it really won't matter because you're not going to see that. It's really only if you've got something in mind where that clarity is going to be particularly beautiful.Suzy Chase: So talk a little bit about the scum that rises to the surface.Niki Segnit: So, I mean this is just the impurities coming off the chicken and the bones. So your job is to skim and skim and skim and-Suzy Chase: Skim again.Niki Segnit: And skim again. But if you're fussy, I mean again, it's not essential to do that. It's not going to cause any problems with your stock for most of the things that you use it. But if you skim it, if you were to sort of be more along the lines of a Larousse and you skim it, then you can then add a little bit of cold liquid, maybe a bit of cold water to the stock and that will actually create a bit more of the impurities; help them come to the top and then you can skim them off and you skim it off. So if you're making a consomme you're going to go through those kind of very sort of professional French kitchen kind of steps if you want to do that. And if you're making like a few steps along the continuum where you've got veloute, then you might, again, you might do that in order to make the sauce a little bit more refined.Suzy Chase: It was interesting to see that there's an option to simmer uncovered, which we're all used to doing, but you have another option where you can pop it in the oven at 200 degrees for three to four hours. So does that have the same outcome as simmering?Niki Segnit: Well, I mean it will have a fairly similar outcome. You get a much more beautiful stock. I mean in terms of the uncloudiness, that is one way if you do want something to look sort of crystally clear, if you put it in the oven. Just because I suppose you manage to achieve that low heat. You will still of course then end up with a big stockpot full of heat and you'll probably need to reduce it because you've managed to keep that heat quite low and you're not going to reduce it as much as you would do necessarily on the hob unless you're using a diffuser, which I don't think most people do. If it's the choice, I would always put it in the oven instead because it just comes out just looking so glorious.Suzy Chase: I liked it because you can walk away from it. You don't have to hover.Niki Segnit: It's the same with bread. I feel like this about bread, that I now know because I know so much about how to make bread, you know, how simple it can be. I know when I've got the 10 minutes to throw it together and get that dough going and let it do its thing. Like let it do its rise maybe in the fridge very slowly, so that you don't have to be there for when it's kind of taking it's hour and a half or two hours to get to twice its size. If you put it in the fridge to do that, then you can come back to it in six or seven hours and then continue. I try and keep those things included in the book because it's great. I love cooking but I also have to fit it into a real life.Suzy Chase: Describe clarifying stock. What does that entail and why would we do it?Niki Segnit: That's a good question. Why would you do it? [crosstalk 00:18:44]. Are you getting the impression I'm actually quite a slutty stock maker. I very rarely need beautiful clear stock so I'm always, you know, I'm the person who makes the roast chicken on Sunday and then I make my stock the next day just with one carcass, and then have chicken noodle soup the next day. It doesn't need to be really beautiful. But if you want to clarify your stock or you want to scare your children because it looks so kind of repulsive actually, you can whisk up some egg whites and then stir them into the stock. And what happens is they congeal, and they rise to the surface bringing with them all the little bits and bobs that have been floating around the stock. So they make a raft that floats on the top and then you should be able to lift it off and then underneath you have a beautiful clear stock. There's a lot of ways of trying to make your stock clear when I'm saying you don't really need it, you probably don't need to do it. But there is a downside as well with doing that. So you can, unfortunately, you can take a bit of flavor off the stock if you do that clarification thing. You lift off some certain amount of flavor with the egg. So if you're a fussy French chef what you might do is you might mix that egg white with some of whatever the flavor of your stock is. So you might use some minced chicken with the egg white and then so that's actually going to cook into the stock and replace some of the flavor that's going to disappear, and just enrich it a bit further which is always... a really rich stock is a wonderful thing.Suzy Chase: What's great about this cookbook is you've thought about all of these steps to put into making stock that I have never thought about.Niki Segnit: It's options, it's options along the way. I mean the thing is is that you'll see that the method for all the starting points is written bigger. And then underneath there's a little aside. Sometimes it will say you're doing this because of this, or the reason that you're doing this, or you don't have to do this. So you kind of, as you use the book a bit more often, which you don't need to necessarily read the little notes because they're just telling you, they're kind of an aside.Suzy Chase: Well if you love to read cookbooks, you're going to want this cookbook because it's a really great read too.Niki Segnit: Well I mean, thank you. The thing is, is I say I'm not a professional chef. I'm somebody who loves to cook, but I write these books because I like to write. When I decided that I wanted to write The Flavor Thesaurus and give it a go, it was because I love MFK Fisher, and I love Elizabeth David, and I like Nigella Lawson's How To Eat. I like those books that you can sit down and read and that kind of give you a bit of an opening onto the context of the food. Where did you eat it? Where did you try it? A little story around it. Sometimes I might do something that you don't normally do in cookbooks, which is to say I'm not crazy about this. I don't particularly like it. So it's very subjective. It's very chatty. Yes, I don't hold back on when I think something is funny. I work hard to describe things. So certainly that was the thing when I wrote The Flavor Thesaurus is I set myself the task of never saying it's mysterious or it's hard to put your finger on or anything like that. I had to get in the ring and describe what something tastes like. And so the same as with Lateral Cooking, it's not just sketchily thrown off. It's a very written book. There's a lot of consideration gone into what's being said and overall the idea that if people are going to read this much about food and you want to pick up all this interesting stuff, it needs to be entertaining in order for people to sit there with it on their lap and get stuck in. It's got to be rewarding.Suzy Chase: Now to my segment called My Favorite Cookbook. So aside from this cookbook, what is your favorite cookbook and why?Niki Segnit: Well, I'm a serial monogamist when it to favorite cookbooks. Am I allowed to choose a piece of writing that would definitely be my overall ever, ever favorite, and that is from MFK Fisher. I think it's from The Art of Eating and it's called, I Was Really Very Hungry. It was what was in my head when I was writing The Flavor Thesaurus, is something that would be a beacon to what I would like to achieve. And it's a piece about her going to a restaurant in France where she's on her own. She's in Burgundy, it sounds like she's been out for a long walk, and then she goes to this rather fancy restaurant at lunchtime and she's the only person in there and she's having a meal. But she's constantly being talked to by the waitress who is just a food fanatic. And there's this chef in the kitchen who I think is called Paul, and she just keeps kind of, the waitress keeps coming in and saying, "Oh, he's got this, and he made this." And it's just the most wonderful piece because it's very, very appetizing. The food sounds fantastic, but it's also a really great character study. What was great about it was that she takes us into this passion she has to food, and this scenario where she's really enjoying this incredible meal. So she really sets the table for you. You're there. That is, I would say, by far my favorite piece of food writing as far as food books, cookbooks are concerned. Well you know, it's terrible isn't it? But I just end up with such a flirtation for a while with one and then another.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?Niki Segnit: Okay, so I believe I have a website called nikisegnit.com. My name is N-I-K-I S-E-G-N-I-T. But the place that I use the most is Instagram. So I sometimes Instagram things that I've been making, things I've been doing. And that is just Nikki Segnit.Suzy Chase: Thanks so much, Niki, for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.Niki Segnit: Thank you so much for having me.Outro: Subscribe over on cookerybythebook.com and thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

MoorishVibrant Recipes from the MediterraneanBy Ben Tish Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table talking to cookbook authors.Ben Tish: Hello, my name is Ben Tish. My latest book is Moorish, Vibrant Recipes from the Mediterranean.Suzy Chase: When doing my research about the Moors, I found so much confusing information. Even though they ruled Spain for 800 years, Wikipedia says the Moors are not a distinct or self-defined people. I understood the term more was used by Europeans to refer to anyone of Arabic descent. What does it mean to be a Moor?Ben Tish: The term Moor is a bit of, it is quite a gray area. I think it's right that there wasn't one distinct kind of nation or country where the Moors came from, but it was a mix. It was from all over North Africa. It was probably a collective word for that back in the day. But I think now, for me, this is my understanding of it, is that the influence, the Morrish, to put it, is to be a Moor, doesn't exist anymore. It's basically, it's the influence of a collection of people from all over North Africa that basically invaded and occupied either Spain Andalucia, but also Sicily, Portugal and a lot of the southern Mediterranean.Suzy Chase: You wrote about how they combined indigenous ingredients with their own imported techniques, flavorings, ingredients and spicing.Ben Tish: Yeah, exactly that. So yeah, it was how they adapted the recipes, their own recipes, the Arabic recipes and as you say, techniques, ingredients and then yeah, with a lot of the local techniques with a lot of the local indigenous products and produce and yeah. And then how that then kind of manifested itself over 800 years was very clear. It was a big push on the Arabic side of things. But then I think where it became more interesting was when the Moors left, okay? So when the Moors were kind of expelled, they left. And then how then the locals, the locals in Spain, the locals in Sicily then carried on using the techniques and then kind of morphed into this Moorish influence of food. That's, I think, where the most interesting part was, is when the Arabs had actually left.Suzy Chase: Yeah. So their influence on Spain exceeds the mere ingredients and cuts to the very core of some of the most-Ben Tish: Yes, yes.Suzy Chase: Important flavor building techniques.Ben Tish: Yeah, yeah.Suzy Chase: For example, they combined sweet with savory.Ben Tish: When the Moors invaded and when they occupied there, one of the key dishes that was developed there that was eaten widely was what's known as Pinchos Morunos, which is essentially a kebab. It doesn't get more kind of Arabic than the kebab. And they use any meat that they could get their hands on, usually lamb. And they introduced lamb into Andalucia, there and then marinated this meat with spices, smoked paprika, cumin, vinegar, lemon as a preservative, as well as a flavoring, because of, of course, the lack of, no refrigeration in those days. And then cooking over charcoal. Now this dish then has, when the Arabs were there, it was lamb, of course. Then soon as the Arabs left, this dish stayed. But the meat that it morphed into was Iberico pork.Ben Tish: This dish is still one of the most popular dishes in Andalucia, Pinchos Morunos. They still skewer it, they still cook it over over charcoal or an open fire, but he's with Iberico pork. But they still use those spices that the Arabs, and that for me typifies how the influence was stamped originally, and then it's kind of morphed into what the locals would like.Suzy Chase: And spices have become a passion of yours too. Right?Ben Tish: It's a passion in the sense that I love using spices. I have been just using them more and more at work now. But I've always thought that I'd never be an expert with spicing because it's not my natural classical training to abuse spices. I'm very much a kind of a European and classic trained chef. My wife is half Indian, so we cook a lot of Indian food at home. And so spices there, but I just recently opened a restaurant which focuses on Sicily and the Moorish influences on Sicily which is equally as important as Andalucia. And we are using a lot spicing in the cuisine, which is surprising for a lot of people, because people associate Italian, essentially southern Italian food with spicing. But in Sicily, it's prominent. So yeah, we're surprising people with that.Suzy Chase: And let us not forget the very influential spice of saffron. It's the quintessentially Moorish spice that's used so often in Spanish cooking.Ben Tish: It's very much so. And indeed in Sicilian cooking as well. I think it's very much so in Spain with the paellas and things like that. But also in Sicily, saffron is very, very popular. In fact, at the restaurant that we have an arancini rice, which is hugely popular.Suzy Chase: And cumin is the one spice that epitomizes the influence of Moorish cuisine. As home cooks, what interesting things should we be doing with cumin?Ben Tish: I mean, I suppose there's a few things really. I mean, I would always recommend with spicing [inaudible 00:05:34], even if you're doing grandish too, is if you can, is to buy the whole cumin seeds. Make sure your spices are as fresh as possible. And if you want ground cumin, then grind the spices yourself. If you've got the facilities and means to do that. It's just so much better. It's astonishing how different it is from the bags or jars of pre-ground spices you get. So that would be the first thing I would say.Ben Tish: I mean, other things I like to do are with marinades. If you're using cumin is to use ground and whole cumin seeds. And then when you grill something, it's got the whole cumin seeds on, they kind of crisp up if you like, and add a really beautiful flavor, but also really interesting texture. It's cumin. Whole cumin has a different effect to grand cumin. Ground cumin's much more intense, the flavor hit. But yeah, if you put cumin seeds in a slow cook dish, they just kind of really, it's got much kind of slower, more subtle flavor. There's two very different things there with ground cumin and a whole cumin seeds.Suzy Chase: So your love of food developed when you were a young boy growing up in a fishing village on the North sea. Tell us about that.Ben Tish: That does sound quite a romantic notion that it was a small village and fishing port. In fact, it's definitely by the sea, but it's kind of a seaside town. So how could I describe it? It's kind of a, it's a big tourist destination for amusement [crosstalk 00:07:03]Suzy Chase: It looked to me like Coney Island does here in New York City.Ben Tish: Yes. Exactly that. Coney Island, but much smaller and probably not as fun. I'm not really selling it, am I? No, it used to be quite a buzzy place, but it's not so much anymore. But yes, it was all kind of fish and chips. And to be honest, there wasn't really any fishing going on off the coast of there,it was a bit low rent Skegness But nonetheless, my parents had a business which was amusements, and also catering. And they had a big cafe that did fish and chips and all these kinds of British seaside food. So I did a bit of work there as a child, as a young boy helping out. And I suppose was the food we were cooking was not of the best, highest standard and quality. I mean, it probably did get me into cooking a little bit from an early age.Suzy Chase: The Moors introduced watermelon to Spain towards the end of the 10th century. That's funny because I never put any thought into where watermelon originated.Ben Tish: Originally, I think it was kind of like Tunisia. Tunisia is a big watermelon growing place. So I think that was probably brought over from there.Suzy Chase: One recipe in the cookbook that I wasn't familiar with is the Calabrian style sea bream. Can you describe this?Ben Tish: Yeah, yeah. That's actually one of my favorite dishes. So that is a bit of a spin really on kind of crudo. Essentially raw, very, very lightly cooked or cured fish dishes. So that dish was really a creation of mine. But yeah, raw, essentially raw sea bream very, very fresh. And then tossed with very spicy pate. Two things that are very specific to Calabria are bergamot and Nduja. Nduja was originated in Calabria, and bergamot are grown, there's a few, I'd say 90% of bergamot are grown in Calabria. There's a few grown around Southern Italy and elsewhere, but mainly there. And bergamot is a citrus that has most kind of wonderful, centered kind of exotic aroma and flavor.Ben Tish: It's not for everybody. I have to say. It's quite floral and if people are eating it or going to eat thinking it's going to taste like an orange, then they're going to be quite mistaken. It's very different, but it works brilliantly with the Nduja. And those two elements as well because they're sharp and fiery and kind of cure the fish. So essentially you can lightly cooking it with those ingredients added.Suzy Chase: What's the flavor profile of sea bream? I've never had it before.Ben Tish: Wild sea bream I would akin to wild sea bass.Suzy Chase: Okay.Ben Tish: Probably a bit earthier. That's my kind of go to fish, I always have that on my menus.Suzy Chase: So the Moors played a big part in the development of food throughout mainland Spain. The method of cooking in clay pots came from the Moor's, as did wood-burning ovens. The Moor's in North Africa introduced spicing and complexity into slow cooking, which was the precursor to the tajine. What is your favorite tajine dish?Ben Tish: It would have to be fairly traditional really, but I love lamb with a apricots and almonds. Very fresh almonds and a little cumin spicing. tajines are kind of traditionally dry, but I've had it where almond milk as well as almonds are added to the tajine. And to give it some moisture, something like lamb neck is great for tajine because you've got a nice fattiness to it. Yeah. Cumin and yeah, apricot's. Apricot's probably dried, the semi-dry Apricot's amazing tajine.Suzy Chase: So in the cookbook, there is a slow cooked squid recipe. I don't think-Ben Tish: Yes.Suzy Chase: I've ever seen a slow cooked squid recipe. I've always seen grilled or fried. Talk a little bit about this.Ben Tish: You can either cook squid very, very quickly or very slowly. And yeah, I just think it makes for the most meatiest, robust of kind of braises or [raggers 00:11:10] if you like. I think it's one of the best things to eat in in the winter. It's a fantastic thing to do.Suzy Chase: So in the same vein, talk a bit about the ceremonies celebrated in Granada, Spain called, I think it's called the Christians and the Moors.Ben Tish: Yeah, no, that's right. And well they've created this dish. There's kind of different versions of the dish around. And I don't know how politically correct the dish is, to be honest with you. But-Suzy Chase: Yeah, it's weird. In the cookbook it's octopus and smoked paprika with black beans and rice.Ben Tish: The octopus and smoked paprika is kind of my addition. Fundamentally, it's most basic form, it's black beans, which represent the Moors-Suzy Chase: That's what I thought.Ben Tish: And the rice represents the Christians.Suzy Chase: That's awful.Ben Tish: So yeah, I know. So, yeah, I mean, that's what it is. And its celebrated and they use a stock to, very basic level, they'll use a fish stock or an octopus stock. But I think I've tried to elevate it. So the octopus piece is probably a more luxurious version that you then you would find at these festivals and so on. You might get an optical stock, but the whole, that I slice pieces of octopus in it and lots of smoked paprika. I've tried to make it a bit more luxurious and exciting. But yeah, it's a very popular thing around this festival time, certainly. And yeah, they're still doing it yet, year after year.Suzy Chase: Wow.Ben Tish: Yeah. And I, yeah.Suzy Chase: So those Moors, they were really smart. Talk about their influence on infrastructure of the Iberian peninsula.Ben Tish: When they originally invaded, they built inroads into the land, which was kind of hugely undeveloped. As they were building the roads. They planted citrus trees all along the roads as they went for multiple reasons. One being that obviously they wanted the citrus. So all those citrus trees that you find in Seville now, they were originated by the Arabs. One, because they wanted the fruits to us in cooking and perfumes and so on and things like that. But also because of the smell. When they arrived, the smell was unpleasant. So they wanted to mask that smell. So hence created these pits where they planted all these citrus trees. So that was one thing that they did.Ben Tish: Or they distilled alcohol. That was another thing they did. And that wasn't to drink, obviously, because Arabs do not drink, but they created perfumes and really developed how we now experience perfumes and things. So that's one of the things they created there. The distillation of the alcohol then the locals took to, and started to kind of drink spirits. That's how that bit came about. But yeah, it was the Arabs, they actually created distillation of alcohol when they were there.Suzy Chase: Tell me about your restaurants, Norma and The Stafford.Ben Tish: Okay, so The Stafford is a hotel in St. James's, so both in London and then in St. James's. It's an old hotel, old five-star hotel, which has lots of history and royal connections and heritage and it's a beautiful place. It's got a huge wine cellar that runs the length and breadth of the hotel in the basement. And there, we have a restaurant in there called the Game Bird, which is kind of, I suppose a contemporary British restaurant, but we do a lot of British classics in there that have well. That elevated, so British classics such as fish and chips and steak and kidney pie, and those kinds of things. Whole dressed crab, lobster cocktail.Ben Tish: But things have done really, really well. And there are also, the service and the style has a modern fresh element to it rather than being stuffy and pompous.Ben Tish: But Norma is a relatively new restaurant. We opened five or six weeks ago. Which is a bit further, I think, North of there. And it's in Fitzrovia. It's a Sicilian restaurant. Sicilian with North African Moorish influences smattered through it in terms of the menu and the decor. And yeah, it's exciting. So we've been open five weeks, and it's very busy. We've been well received and it's going well. Extremely busy, which is good.Suzy Chase: So last weekend, I made your recipe for gordal olives on page 180. Describe-Ben Tish: Yeah.Suzy Chase: This dish and what gordal olives are.Ben Tish: So yeah, gordal olives are, they're beautiful big juicy olives from Seville or around Seville. Yeah, gordal is essentially fat. There's such a great olive, one, because they're very tasty. But two they're ideal for stuffing. Yeah, we stuffed these ones with a whipped goat's curd or goats cheese, little pieces of orange, and then a little bit of salt and cumin. We make a little mix of cumin seeds and salt, and just sprinkle that on there as well and drizzle with olive oil. And that just make the most amazing tapa I suppose. Or just pre-dinner. With pre-dinner drinks, it's absolutely perfect. Such a delicious dish there, actually.Suzy Chase: Now for my segment called my favorite cookbook. Aside from this cookbook, what is your all time favorite cookbook, and why?Ben Tish: I could spend hours on this. So I really am a [crosstalk 00:16:41].Suzy Chase: I'm sure.Ben Tish: I am, I've got so many cookbooks at home. It's ridiculous. My wife hates it because we're kind of, everybody's groaning with it. But I suppose just thinking straight out loud, would be The Moro Cookbook, which is by Sam Clark, and it's the original Walden, which is from a restaurant called Moro. I don't know if you're familiar with it.Suzy Chase: No.Ben Tish: It's in London. Yeah, it's still there, which is great. It's probably been open about, I'd say, probably about 15 or 16 years now. And they explore Spain. and there's a Moorish element to it. They go further afield though, rather than staying in Spain and focusing on the Moorish influence there, they go further afield and go into North Africa. And it was a groundbreaking book. The book came out probably about 12, 13 years ago. And it's most definitely, even now, it's a book I go back to, and just get some little hints and tips. And you know a cookbook's good when all the pages are kind of grubby and thumbed and greasy and from cooking-Suzy Chase: Totally.Ben Tish: And that is that book. And it's the first one. And yeah, I've got no problem saying that that's my favorite cookbook.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?Ben Tish: Ben.Tish, @Ben.Tish. I'm kind of mostly found on there, in terms of food. And the normal website is www.normalondon.com I think they're probably the two main places you'd find me.Suzy Chase: Well, thanks for writing about this interesting fusion of flavors, and thanks so much for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.Ben Tish: Great. Thank you very much for having me on.Outro: Subscribe over on cookerybythebook.com, and thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

The Bucket List: Beer1000 Adventures, Pubs, Breweries, FestivalsBy Justin Kennedy Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book, with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.Justin Kennedy: I'm Justin Kennedy, and my latest book is The Bucket List Beer.Suzy Chase: Whether you're planning a pub crawl, a weekend in the country or a long vacation, this book is chock-full of ideas for exploring the world's best beer destinations. I have to call attention to how comprehensive this book is. Over 400 pages, it's so heavy.Suzy Chase: You list 1,000 of the best beer experiences around the world, so what's your background in beer and where did you begin to dig into this beer exploration?Justin Kennedy: My background in beer probably predates my college days, unfortunately, but, in college, I really started getting interested in beer and maybe beyond your usual sneaking your dad's six packs or whatever, but I started really getting into beer when I went to grad school in Cleveland, Ohio, and there was a bar around the corner called Le Cave De Vin which... it's a weird little bar that opened... I think it's... It opened at eight o'clock and stayed open until about 4:00 in the morning, and there was this subterranean space that had all these crazy nooks and crannies, and there was vintage beer and fresh beer from local breweries, and I was just amazed by all the different stuff that was going on.Justin Kennedy: After that, I moved to Washington, D.C., and it's another great beer-drinking town with a lot of great bars, at the time, not a lot of breweries, but it was a good place to get into beer, and I started writing about beer when I was living there, freelancing for the Washington City Paper, which is an all-weekly that came out, a free little paper, and I was covering beer for that, and then I moved to New York about a decade ago, and I enrolled at... in the NYU food studies program and, from there, I started traveling a lot and writing more and more about beer as a real thing, so that's my background in beer exploration.Suzy Chase: You mentioned vintage beer. What's that?Justin Kennedy: Vintage beer is beer that's aged somewhat. It can be aged for a few months. It could be aged years. It could even be aged decades. Typically, it's aged in a bottle. It's aged on purpose most of the time, but sometimes there's vintage beer that's discovered in the back of someone's closet or something like that, and then not all beer is meant to... I would say 99.9% of beer is meant to be consumed fresh, but vintage beer is beer that has some kind of characteristic, either high alcohol or high acidity or something like that that can preserve it for a long period of time.Suzy Chase: I've never heard of that, so talk about the numbers of breweries in the United States now.Justin Kennedy: The early 1900s, there were about 2,000 breweries in the US, and that number slowly declined up until Prohibition and, for 13 years, we had no breweries at all, and then, after Prohibition, people started making beer again, but there were only about 700 breweries, and then, from post-Prohibition up until 1979, it slowly declined until the number dropped to 89 in 1979, so there were fewer than 90 breweries in the entire country, and then, in 1979, Jimmy Carter repealed the ban on homebrewing, and that got a lot of people interested in making beer themselves, which then meant they were taking their hobbies and making them a profession, so, between 1979 and then the mid-'90s, it got up to about 1,500 breweries. From the mid-'90s until now, it's more than tripled, and the number today is 7,000 breweries.Suzy Chase: In terms of styles, let's say German-style beer, can you get that in the Midwest? Can you get that everywhere?Justin Kennedy: You can get pretty much any style of beer anywhere. A good example of a German-style brewery in the Midwest is a very called Urban Chestnut, which is in St. Louis, and they make some of the best German-style lagers in the country, and it's the type of beer I would put up against any actual German beer. It's really that good.Suzy Chase: I love that in each description you state why this pick is important. Why did you include that?Justin Kennedy: I think we wanted to highlight why each entry was in here in the first place. It's a thousand small entries. They're short descriptions, but we really wanted to highlight why this place is better than the other places in its region.Suzy Chase: Let's go over some terminology. What's the difference between microbrewery, craft brewery, and a brewpub?Justin Kennedy: This is a little bit of a gray area, but most of those terms are defined by the Brewers Association, which is the craft brewers sponsor agency or whatever you want to call it, so, a microbrewery... It's all based on production numbers. A microbrewery makes a certain number of beers. I think it's 100,000 barrels or less, something like that. A craft brewery is defined as an independent brewery that doesn't have much outside investment, so a good example for a brewery that used to be a craft brewery and is not anymore is something like Goose Island, which got acquired by Anheuser-Busch a few years ago, and then brewpub is, strictly speaking, a brewery that's on-premise at a restaurant, so it serves food and it makes beer under the same roof.Suzy Chase: When beers like Goose Island get acquired, does the quality go down?Justin Kennedy: That's a really good question. In some ways, the quality is improved because it's more consistent, but a lot of the character is washed away from that, so it's hard to say. I think the reputation definitely is somewhat lowered, but it's a tough call, and there's been a lot of these acquisitions over the last few years mainly by Anheuser-Busch, but also by some other companies. MillerCoors has a couple.Suzy Chase: Can or bottle?Justin Kennedy: For me, a majority of beers I like in a can, but a few beers I just can't drink from a can like traditional Belgian ale. Saisons, Trippels, things like that I think have to be in a bottle.Suzy Chase: Same here. I feel like the can is colder.Justin Kennedy: Yeah, that's one thing. It does get colder. It feels colder. It feels better in your hand. It's easier to recycle. It's lighter. I do a lot of bikepacking and camping, and it's easier to transport that stuff than bottles.Suzy Chase: Yeah, I love Saison Dupont, and I would never think of drinking that in a can.Justin Kennedy: Same. A lot of those beers have... They've tried to put them into cans, and even like Rodenbach is now available in cans, and I just think it's not the same.Suzy Chase: I wanted to chat about a couple of spots in this book. First is McSorley's, the oldest Irish tavern in New York City. They have two beers on tap, dark and light, and it was a men's-only establishment up until 1970 when Barbara Shaum, owner of a leather goods store right down the street, sauntered in for the first time. Talk a little bit about McSorley's.Justin Kennedy: Yeah, it's this traditional Irish tavern along East-7th Street between 2nd Avenue and 3rd Avenue, and it's just a storied place that's... It's weathered. It really looks haggard, but it's also like one of the coolest places to drink. Instead of a single beer, you're served two mugs, two eight-ounce mugs, which I think is really a cool, quirky little thing. There's a great cheese and onions plate that they serve. That's strange, but also just fits in perfectly, and it's like this touristy spot, but also has some real history to it. It was one of my favorite places and the first... one of the first places I drank when I moved to New York 10 years ago.Suzy Chase: It's funny, because I moved to New York in '96 to do cookbook publicity, and I was looking around for an apartment, and my real estate agent showed us apartments, and then he said, "We have to go to McSorley's," and I was like, "What?" It was awesome.Justin Kennedy: Everybody loves it. It's one of those places that brings everyone together. It's not just a certain type of clientele. Everybody goes to McSorley's, and it's awesome.Suzy Chase: You also include the Blind Tiger Ale House, one of New York's first craft pubs, which was on Hudson and West-10th for years and years, and now it's on Bleecker. The space to me doesn't feel right because, over on West-10th, there's a Starbucks where the old Blind Tiger used to be, but the new place just doesn't feel right to me.Justin Kennedy: I'm sorry to hear that. When I moved to New York, the Tiger had already moved, so I had never been to the original spot. The new spot, it's just consistently a great place to drink. They always have some of the newest beers that are available in town, and they also have this deep cellar of vintage beers and other special kegs that they put on pretty much every week, so, every time you go in there, you're bound to find something new and also something really special, and I think it's evidenced by their regulars. They have a huge regular crowd there, and it's a gathering place for a certain beer geek of a certain age in New York City.Suzy Chase: My husband and all of his squash friends that play squash go there.Justin Kennedy: That's great. To me, the Tiger is one of those places where everybody goes. I started going there because I was going to NYU and it was right down the street, and we would gather there and it was just... It's an awesome place to drink.Suzy Chase: Now to Fraunces Tavern, way downtown in New York City, can you share the George Washington story?Justin Kennedy: Sure, so Fraunces Tavern is way down the tip of southern Manhattan. It's one of the oldest buildings in the city, and it was a tavern and a... It's like a restaurant-and-inn type of place, and, as the story goes, I think it was in 1783, George Washington was hosting a dinner for his officers of the Continental Army, and they were having what was called a turtle feast, so it was a dinner that was based around lots of turtle dishes, and it's a legendary spot, and it's where he said farewell to his officers of the Continental Army, and so now it has this. It has a museum. It has a Tavern, and there's even a brewery that's associated with it called the Porterhouse Brewing Company, which is, oddly enough, actually based in Ireland, but it's their outpost, their American outpost for their beer now.Suzy Chase: I didn't know that.Justin Kennedy: Yeah, it's a very strange setup.Suzy Chase: Yeah, I'm part of the Daughters of the American Revolution, and we used to have our DAR meetings down there, and I would always...Justin Kennedy: Cool.Suzy Chase: ... sit and think, "Did George Washington sit here and drink or did he sit over here and drink?"Justin Kennedy: I mean, it's a great place to drink, too, because it has a huge whiskey selection. It's on the Whiskey Trail. It's a really cool bar, but the Brewery Association is... It's a little bit of a head-scratcher, but I think it's an ownership thing.Suzy Chase: Lots of good beers coming out of the Midwest. Talk about Boulevard beer in Kansas City, my favorite.Justin Kennedy: All right, so Boulevard is one of the original Midwestern craft breweries. It was founded in the late '80s, and it makes some of the most totally reliable, what I call crushable beer, so beers that are easy to drink, but they also have this line of really interesting barrel-aged beers like Tank 7 Saison, which is one of my favorites, and the brewery is actually... Speaking of acquisitions, it was actually sold to Duvel Moortgat, which is a Belgian company, a few years ago and is now part of this umbrella company that includes Ommegang here in New York up in the Finger Lakes and also Firestone Walker in California.Suzy Chase: I know. I'm kind of bummed that they got acquired, but good for them.Justin Kennedy: To me, that's one example of a brewery that has... The quality has not gone downhill since acquisition. They've continued to do the same cool stuff.Suzy Chase: Prairie Artisan Ales is out of Tulsa. I love them, too. Describe the crazy Bomb! Imperial stout.Justin Kennedy: Bomb! is... It started off as a specialty release, and now I think it's year-round, but it's this huge Imperial stout. I think it's about 12 or 14% alcohol. It has all kinds of ingredients added to it, spices, cinnamon, I think even chili peppers, and it's just this big, thick, viscous beer, and they have a few different iterations that are sold throughout the year, including Christmas Bomb!, which is one of my favorites, and it comes into this short little stubby bottle, and it has a really funny artwork on it.Suzy Chase: See, my problem with the 12 or 13% alcohol is you can't drink that many.Justin Kennedy: Now, it's a sipping beer, so, I think, a few ounces, even a small bottle like that, you're supposed to share with friends.Suzy Chase: Oh, no one told me that. That's good to know. Oregon seems like a good beer-drinking state. Talk about them, how do you pronounce it, LABrewatory...Justin Kennedy: LABrewatory I think is how you say it.Suzy Chase: ... in Portland.Justin Kennedy: Yeah, so LABrewatory is a nanobrewery, which is they're making beer on a keg-by-keg basis, so it's really small production, and they're also known for never making the same beer twice, so each batch is different. It's maybe not necessarily a new beer, but it's... It has a different hop and a different yeast strain or something like that, but it's a small brewpub in Portland, and, you're right, Oregon is by far one of the best states, if not the best, beer-drinking states in the country right now and has been for a long time.Suzy Chase: Now to outside of the United States, describe the fermented maize beverage, how it's made and where you drink it.Justin Kennedy: All right, so I think you're referring to chicha, which is fermented blue maize that's a specialty of Peru and a couple of other parts of South America, and, traditionally, it's chewed by humans. The maize is chewed and then spit into these communal vats like little balls, and it's said that an enzyme that's in human saliva is what activates the maize and makes it... convert it to fermentable sugars, so it's not really a commercially available thing, but what you can do is, if you're visiting especially like a touristy area like Machu Picchu, there's these houses that have red flags or flowers lining the area outside, and, typically, these are what are known as chicha bars, but they're not really open to the public, so you'll probably need a local guide to help you get in. It's like going into someone's house and drinking what they've made, the home brew that they've made straight from their tanks, and, what I've been told, it doesn't really taste like beer at all. It's more like a cold corn soup.Suzy Chase: No, thanks. No. No. No.Justin Kennedy: Yeah, it's a little strange.Suzy Chase: That's gross. Is that the grossest beer you know of in the book?Justin Kennedy: That's probably the gross beer right now I feel.Suzy Chase: The Middle East section really piqued my interest. You call the Birzeit Brewery, or Shepherds Brewery, which is north of Ramallah, Palestine, one of the Middle East's most exciting breweries. How come?Justin Kennedy: I think, there's not a lot of breweries in the Middle East in general, and this is one that's really doing modern craft beers there. They have modern technology. They're making pilsners, lagers and other things, but they're also doing beers like stout with coffee, and they do a Christmas ale that's infused with cinnamon, so they're really doing what I think of as more modern styles rather than just your traditional pale ale and blonde ale and all that stuff, and they also do what's become this kind of big beer festival. It's a two-day fest, which is one of the only beer festivals that I know of in the Middle East.Suzy Chase: The term African Guinness caught my eye. What's that?Justin Kennedy: It's very different than the Guinness that we know from our local Irish pub. It's really boozy. It's about twice the alcohol content of regular Guinness, and it's also made with sorghum and corn, so it has this bitterness, but also has a real smooth mouth feel, so it's like high ABV stout, and it's not nitrogenated like the Guinness that we have here as. It's like a totally different beverage, but it was originally brewed to be exported to these countries, to Africa and also to some parts of the Caribbean here, and it's just this big, boozy stout that you wouldn't think of as being very thirst-quenching in these hot regions, but that's why the... The exporting is why it was originally sent there.Suzy Chase: Over in Tokyo, they have karaoke haunts and record bars. Describe those.Justin Kennedy: Record bar is like stepping into someone's house. There's typically only one or two people that work there, and it's your bartender who's also your DJ, and they spin records, the actual vinyl, and they can get really niched. I mean, some of them are jazz and blues bars, but others only play hiphop from 1986 to 1989 or something like that, and then there's others that focus on a certain subgenre of heavy metal or something, so there are all these kind of really niched places, and they typically serve one or two beers, and it's really about the experience. With the cover charge, it's a small operation, and you're supporting one or two people. It's a really cool, unique experience, and then karaoke bars are the opposite of that. They are these big, massive halls where you get pitchers of cheap, cheap rice lager and just drink all night long and sing, and they're just a lot of fun.Suzy Chase: You include a North Korean microbrewery, one of the last frontiers of the craft brewery world. Talk a little bit about this.Justin Kennedy: There's a lot of beer that's made in North Korea, but most of it is not the type of... it's mass produced adjunct lagers, but there are... This is one of the things. I haven't been there myself, but I had one of my freelancers that worked on this, and he said there's a hotel, a few hotels that have brewpubs on premise, and it's like McSorley's in some way. Your choices are either yellow beer or black beer, and that's all you're given, but it is fresh beer and it's made right there on premise. I would say, compared to... especially compared to South Korea, there's no real comparison, but there is a small microbrewery scene in North Korea itself.Suzy Chase: Now, I want to hear some of your personal opinions. What do you look for when you hit the pub?Justin Kennedy: I like places that have a tightly curated selection of beer. I don't like walking in and seeing a hundred different choices because, if you see that, you know that most of the beer or maybe half of it is probably not going to be very fresh. I like a place that is doing a lot of the picking for me ahead of time.Justin Kennedy: I also like places that are more fun. I don't like a lot of pretension when it comes to beer. I like places that you can go and hang out and actually talk to your... the people that you're there with, have a conversation that's not overly loud, not overly crowded. I'm a dad. Lately, I've been hanging out at a lot of places with other families, other dads, so it's really changed for me over the last few years, but that's what I'm looking for when I go to a pub these days.Suzy Chase: What's your favorite bar in the book?Justin Kennedy: Let's see, my favorite bar in the book is probably a bar called Novare Res up in Portland, Maine. It's a geeky beer bar that's off this little alleyway. It's hard to find. It's in downtown Portland, but it's not something you would just stumble upon. You have to go down an alley and then you come upon it after you make another turn, so it's... but it's this cozy little space, and they always have local beer from Portland, but also some really cool imported beers. They have another vintage list with just some really bottles that you're probably not going to find anywhere else. That's probably my favorite bar in the book.Suzy Chase: What's the quirkiest bar in the book?Justin Kennedy: I think the quirkiest bar in the book is... It's really hard to pronounce. It's in Belgium. It's called In de Verzekering Tegen de Grote Dorst, so it translates to-Suzy Chase: Close enough haha.Justin Kennedy: It translates to in the insurgence against great thirst, so it's a bar in Belgium. It's only open on Sunday mornings and then on certain church holidays. It's associated with the church. It was built in the mid-1800s and it's been operational ever since, but it specializes in something called lambic, which is traditional to the region. It's this spontaneous fermented beer, meaning, there's no yeast that's added. It's just whatever is in the air is inoculating the beer and creating the beer, so they specialize in that. There was a woman that owned it for 50 years, but she tried to retire in the '90s and sell it off. Two brothers took it over, and today it's run by them, but it's just this quirky little, weird place. It's only open for a few hours every week, and I think people go there after church and drink lambic and hang out on the town square. It's really cool.Suzy Chase: The sober curious trend is so big right now. Are there any nonalcoholic beers that you like?Justin Kennedy: Yeah, so, earlier this week, I actually had the first ones I've had of the new wave, and it was from a brewery in Connecticut called Athletic Brewing, and I've got to say the beer was pretty good. It wasn't great. It had a tea-like quality. Some of it did, but they had a coffee stout that was really good, and it's completely nonalcoholic. I think it's interesting. I don't think it's something that I'm personally going to pursue, but I think it's also part of this trend of wellness and looking more towards low calorie, low ABV, low carb "beer."Suzy Chase: Now to my segment called My Favorite Cookbook. What is your favorite all-time cookbook and why?Justin Kennedy: This was a hard question for me, so I have hundreds of cookbooks in my house, and I love a lot of them, but I think, my favorite cookbook, it's a book called Honey from a Weed by Patience Gray. Do you know her?Suzy Chase: No. What is that?Justin Kennedy: Okay, so it's this strange little book. It came out in the '80s, and Patience Gray was this kind of an English food writer who ended up marrying later in her life a Belgian sculptor, and they lived all over the Mediterranean part of Europe, so they were in Provence, they're in Italy, they were in Catalonia for a while. They were on a couple of Greek islands, and then they finally settled into this abandoned farmhouse in Apulia in Southern Italy. They spent the rest of their years there, and she started working on the book I believe soon after they moved there in the '70s, and it's like a document of every place they lived and recipes that she'd gathered, and it's also like very of-the-moment at this point because it's about foraging and wild edibles and stuff like that.Justin Kennedy: It's just a very strange, esoteric book. There's no photographs in it. It's all just drawings that she did of plants and fish and other animals. It's more of a document than anything else. I keep a copy on my bedside table and just flip through it a couple of times a week. It's so interesting.Suzy Chase: I love that. That's so cool.Justin Kennedy: You got to get a copy. It's really cool.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?Justin Kennedy: I'm on Instagram, @justinxkennedy, and you can find my website. It's www.justin-kennedy.com.Suzy Chase: Thanks, Justin, for chatting with me on Cookery by the Book podcast.Justin Kennedy: Thanks for having me.Outro: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com, and thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

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Joy of CookingBy Irma S. Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker, Ethan Becker, John Becker, and Megan Scott Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.John Becker: Hi, I am John Becker, I'm joined by my wife Megan Scott, and we are the most recent coauthors of the Joy of Cooking.Suzy Chase: I'm so happy you said the Joy of Cooking because I've always called it "The Joy".John Becker: It's come up a few times, and you know, we've always said it that way. The definite article was dropped, I think in the 60s, just at least on the cover.Megan Scott: Yeah. It's from the old books, and then the new one is just, it's Joy of Cooking now, but I definitely know a lot of people call it, "The Joy."John Becker: Including us, I mean, you just have to add that. Maybe that was the whole idea is like, if people are going to say the anyways, so I don't know. I'm not sure what the rationale is for that.Suzy Chase: It's crazy to think that it's been nearly 90 years since the first 3000 copies of the Joy of Cooking came out. Your great-grandmother, Irma Rombauer, was not known for her skills in the kitchen. She was a socialite, not a domestic goddess. John, tell us the story of how she decided to self-publish this cookbook in 1931.John Becker: Well honestly, it's a bit mysterious that she undertook it. So, her husband unfortunately passed away, and both of her children, Edgar and Marion, at that time they had moved out. She had her savings and very little prospects professionally. I mean she was part of a generation where women were kind of... There just wasn't as many opportunities or professional training, available for women. So she, on a whim, she took half of her life savings and decided to embark upon writing a cookbook. Then had it privately printed and sold it by word of mouth, as well as just hand selling it to booksellers. It resonated with a lot of people. She had a very conversational, witty tone, that was I think a little bit... It was definitely unique in cookbooks at the time, which were either written by people that had come from a home economics background, or maybe from a more chefy perspective, as in chef of a great house perspective.Suzy Chase: So when did you decide to embrace this family tradition?John Becker: I mean it was always emphasized to me, that it was not expected of me, that I should follow my dreams wherever they took me, and blah-bidy-blah. So I did that for a while. I ended up, really contemplating going to graduate school for literature. Then I just had a kind of an epiphany moment, where I came across the dedication that Marion wrote to the 1963 edition, and it was her first edition solo, without the help of Irma. They had both worked at that point on the 1951 edition. It's a really poignant, at least for me, dedication, and the ending of it really kind of got me right in the gut, was, "I hope that my sons and their wives continued to keep joy a family affair, beholden to no one but themselves, and you." "You" being the readers, our readers. Which is really, I don't know, it was the first time I ever felt like I had been called to do something. It changed my life, it really did. It was the first time I really felt a really deep connection with Marion, and I decided that after all my messing around with publishing and kind of the literary academic arena, that I actually had something to offer to joy, and to my family's multi-generational project.Suzy Chase: I feel a kinship to your great-grandmother, because cooking really isn't my passion either. I'm just trying to be a good home cook for my family. It's interesting that she incorporated joy into the title. Do you have any backstory on the title?Megan Scott: We don't really, we don't know why she decided to call it that, but I think it's an interesting choice and I almost feel like it's perhaps a little tongue in cheek, because Irma was not... I think in some ways she enjoyed certain types of cooking. Like we know she loved to bake and decorate cakes, but I don't think she enjoyed just the day to day, like having to cook every day for people. So I think maybe it was a little bit of a, not a joke, but just kind of a-John Becker: There might've been a twinge of irony there. But on the other hand, I feel like she really tried in that first edition, and subsequent ones, to lessen the burden, to kind of be a friend in the kitchen. To have that kind of casual intimacy with her readers. You know, I mean, it's hard to read that title with a straight face sometimes, because she does have a lot of witticisms in the early editions. She just had a really sharp sense of humor.Megan Scott: Yeah, I definitely agree with that assessment. Also, the cover illustration on the 1931 edition, if you've ever seen it, it's a paper cut. It's a woman who has a broom, and there's a dragon next to her, and she's fighting this dragon. That's the story of St Martha of Bethany, who is the patron Saint of Home Cooks, fighting off the medieval dragon called a tarasc. So in Irma and Marion's minds, it's like the home cook is fighting off the dragon of kitchen drudgery, with this friendly cookbook.John Becker: Well, and a broom, and what looks to be a pretty menacing purse.Megan Scott: Yeah.Suzy Chase: So Megan, you and John developed more than 600 new recipes for this edition. What other changes are in this edition?Megan Scott: There's so many things. So when we first started to think about doing this revision, we created this... So we went through the book line by line, and created a huge outline, where we detailed everything that we felt needed to be fact checked, or changed, or improved upon, or things that we felt were missing. Recipes we thought were outdated, or ones that we felt maybe needed to be revised in some way. So we started out with a pretty good idea of what we wanted to do, but some of the changes include, like everything from the actual trim size of the book. So the book is actually wider now, it's the same height, but kind of a wider format. So it lays flat when you open it, basically to any page, which we love. We brought back paper cut illustrations for every chapter heading. We added new sections on fermentation, sous vide cooking, new ingredients.John Becker: Yeah. Speaking to what you started talking about, we really did... I mean, joy is a cookbook of many parts, and we basically examined each one of those parts, just to see where we could improve. If there was anything lacking in our coverage, either of culinary technique, or ingredient information, or actual recipes that we felt like, "Oh my God, I cannot believe that this isn't in joy." A lot of that response we had to "classic American recipes", like a Chicago style deep dish pizza, or say the St Louis specialty gooey butter cake. Those were ones where we were kind of scratching our heads like, "Oh, I cannot believe that we do not have this now." But also including more international recipes, things that really kind of, I wouldn't say that they capture the changing demographics of America, but it's a gesture towards that. We really tried to be as inclusive and respectful as possible, with that aspect of things, adding new international recipes that have been brought here.Suzy Chase: Did you retest existing recipes?John Becker: Oh yeah.Megan Scott: We did. Yeah. We had tested, by the time we actually started the revision process, we had probably tested 1500 existing recipes, and then we continued to test more as the process went on.Suzy Chase: So Megan, tell the story of the pancake batter, and the difference you found between 1975 and 1997.Megan Scott: Yeah, Well this happened when we were very new working on the book. So this was probably 2010 or maybe 2011, and we were just testing the-John Becker: Well didn't we get a... We received a complaint from a reader about our pancake recipe. It's like, Oh!Megan Scott: Yeah we did. But I think I had tested the recipe before, and I thought the batter seemed runny, but in my naivety I was like, "Oh, I'm just going to add more flour and get on with it." But then we got a complaint from a reader who was like, "This pancake batter is way too runny." Then I was like, "Okay, well this is obviously a recipe problem that we need to fix." So we have all these recipe test notes from when the book was professionally tested back in 2006 and 1997, and we found probably about half a dozen test notes for the pancake recipe alone. It was really interesting because they found the same problems that we had, in that the batter was too runny. The 1975 edition recipe for pancakes was better, but for some reason the change was never made in the manuscript. So we, in this edition, we took the pancakes back to the 1975 quantities, and have restored it to its former glory.John Becker: That's basically one of the reasons why we wanted to do all of the testing in house, and wanted to kind of take it back to the methodology that Marion and Irma used, to produce what are best-selling classic editions. There's very little opportunity for something getting lost in communication, when the same people that are testing the recipes are the same people that are writing them in the book, or in the manuscript. I think that the distance between kitchen and manuscript, was kept to an absolute bare minimum. I think it's very important, especially for a book of this size, where it definitely seems like something that you need to live and breathe in order to do right.Suzy Chase: What sorts of recipes did you remove and why?Megan Scott: It kind of runs the gamut. There were some recipes that we tested them, and we're just like, "This is just not very good." For example, there was a sweet potato stuffing, it was called a stuffing, but it was really just mashed sweet potatoes with sugar and some stuff in it, and baked in a dish, and it was just kind of gummy and not very good. So we cut that. Another example is that we did try to streamline some things. So for example, again in the stuffings chapter there were six different variation recipes on the basic bread stuffing. So what we did was we made the basic bread stuffing kind of the master recipe, and then we include a list of editions that people can play around with, to add to the stuffing, instead of providing six different specific options. Then there were some recipes that just kind of felt outdated, kind of like the golden glow salad. We had to get rid of that one.John Becker: Yeah. Something about, what was it? Pineapple, lemon gelatin and chicken stock.Megan Scott: Yeah. It was like chicken broth. So it was like a sweet and savory gelatin. I don't think that... I mean cool if you like that kind of thing, but I don't think it's as relevant to these days.John Becker: But then there were even some more contemporary recipes that were added later, that were not like 1950s jello mold throwbacks, that we felt like just had to become a little dated. For instance, this edition, we don't have any recipes in the sandwich chapter for wraps. We don't have, there was a pesto cheese cake that was added in the '97 that we decided, you know, this feels a little, I don't know, we just-Megan Scott: Yeah, it felt dated.John Becker: It felt dated.Megan Scott: Also that we got rid of the recipe for tequila shots, because first of all everyone knows that, also there's a lot of really great tequilas and mezcals, on the market that you can just sip and you don't need a chaser. Like not everything has to be a shot.Suzy Chase: I read that you took out shrimp wiggle. What's that?John Becker: It's an odd one, it was actually brought back. So our last edition, the 75th anniversary edition that was released in 2006, there was a concerted effort made in that edition to bring back some of the recipes that had disappeared pretty early on from our publication history. Ones that were taken out by the 60s even, so shrimp wiggle, I want to say that it's a bechamel that has been fortified with ketchup.Megan Scott: ... and clam juice.John Becker: ... and clam juice.Megan Scott: ... and it has peas, green peas in it, and obviously shrimp, and then it's served over toast.John Becker: Yeah.Suzy Chase: Oh!Megan Scott: Yeah, exactly.John Becker: Yeah, that did not test well.Suzy Chase: Irma fought tooth and nail, not to publish photos in this cookbook. How come?John Becker: Well, at the time, so this was in the lead up to the 1951 edition. At the time the person that the publisher at the time, Bob's Merrill, had decided that they wanted to do the pictures, had absolutely no experience with food photography, and actually happened to be, I think a brother of one of the editors that was working on that edition. So that was definitely part of it, is that they felt maybe this wasn't the right guy to do it. But also, they resisted it later. Marion especially resisted it later, just because she felt like it would date the book. I mean, you look at older Betty Crocker editions, and you can kind of see the validity of that concern. I mean even in the 90s, well in the late 90s early 2000s, we actually did come out with a series of single subject books called the All About series. There was food photography done for those, the smaller volumes. Even that photography it's still fairly decent. The color temperature seems a little off. You could definitely tell, even books that are really not in the large scheme of things, that old, that the aesthetics of food photography, or even of props and all of that stuff, it changes so fast. We only publish every 10 years or thereabouts, I mean, ideally every 10 years. So it definitely seems like by the time a new edition rolls around, that food photography is probably going to be looking a little stale. Plus, we have so much to communicate.Megan Scott: Yeah. If we did have food photography, which we did actually, we talked about for a hot minute for this edition, but we ultimately decided against it because it would have been just a couple small sections of the book, with a handful of photos that can in no way represent an 1100 page cookbook like Joy of Cooking.Suzy Chase: When you're out and about, what are some fan favorites that you hear over and over again?Megan Scott: Well, definitely the pancake recipe is a big one. We actually have a friend who has memorize the pancake recipe when he was a kid, and still can do it from memory. But yeah, we hear about that one all the time. Then the chocolate chip cookies, the brownies. What are some other things that we hear about?John Becker: For some reason, the pot roast and the beef stew recipes have a big following. I'm really happy that people enjoy those recipes. But yeah, it definitely seems like, people get really excited about the basics. Oh yeah, the banana bread.Megan Scott: Oh yeah banana bread and carrot cake.Suzy Chase: I was wondering why this edition was so massive. It's much larger than past editions. Then I read about the task of your father, Ethan, updating joy in the mid 90s, and the regrets after that was released. Talk a little bit about that.John Becker: So Ethan had been wrangling with publishers, primarily McMillan, for years. He actually in the mid 80s I think that he had a manuscript for a new revision, that was pretty close to being finished, but was unable to publish it because of disputes with the publisher. This kind of thing continued for quite a while, and I'm sorry to say, so I guess it was the cookbook section of McMillan. I'm not exactly sure how, unfortunately I was really young at that point, so I'm not exactly sure what the machinations were, but we ended up with a new publisher, Simon & Schuster/Scribner imprint. Our agents at the time were really trying to make sure that the book got the revision that it deserved. So a very well known, well-connected, very talented editor was brought on, Maria Guarnaschelli, and she commissioned quite a few of food writers that she knew, up and coming as well as established food writers, to help revise the book. It was a massive undertaking and they really tried to, let's just say that they started from scratch in some areas, where they just made it very hard for... They set themselves a very difficult task. By the end of it, the manuscript had just ballooned to a ridiculous length, and a lot of stuff got lost when it had to be edited down. The real problem was that we lost the canning chapters, we lost the frozen dessert chapters, we lost the cocktail chapter. Which is really sad, because the first recipe in the first edition, was actually for a gin cocktail. Irma published during prohibition. A little bit of the spirit of the book was lost there and then-Megan Scott: Essentially it was just, it was more of a rewrite than a revision. So I think a lot of joy readers were really disheartened, because the book seemed to have lost its personality, which is something that really resonated with a lot of folks. So I think there were just a lot of disappointed people with that edition, in spite of the fact that a lot of really talented people worked on it.John Becker: A lot of the recipes that were added during that edition are some of my favorites. You know, it was a necessary update. The book hadn't been given any TLC in over 20 years by that point. A lot of the international recipes that were added in the 90s are really, really wonderful. So with the 2006 edition, the last one, Ethan and the editorial team, tried to bring back the best of the '97, well to incorporate the best from the '97, but also bring back a lot of that older legacy material from the 1975, for the 75th anniversary edition.Megan Scott: But something we tried to do in this edition was, we didn't want to rewrite the book, we wanted to modernize it without making it too... We didn't want anything to be too trendy or of the moment, we wanted it to be what the older editions of joy are, which is really classic and kind of timeless. We want people to be using this edition, you know, 20, 30, 40 years down the road. So we tried to update it in a really thoughtful, measured way. We weren't interested in going back to a bygone age, nor were we interested in doing something so trendy that it will be a little bit out of date in five or 10 years.Suzy Chase: In 2017 Bon Appétit wrote an article entitled, the obsessive sport of shopping for a vintage Joy of Cooking. People obsess over finding old editions, a first edition can fetch anywhere from $1500 to $15,000. Do you have a particularly interesting story of a first edition that someone found, or has been handed down over the years?John Becker: Actually, my father Ethan recently visited, and brought with him two first editions, first printing, the original printing. One of which was signed by everybody, it's signed by Irma, by Marion, by Ethan. Really did feel like kind of a passing of the guard moment. It's just something I'll treasure forever. But yeah, I mean we really don't have too many stories regarding first editions, because they are super rare, as their prices would seem to indicate. Yeah, I mean finding one with a dust jacket intact, is extremely difficult. In fact, we have a fragment of a dust jacket for only one of our copies. Luckily, there was a facsimile of the first edition that was published in 1998. So for those that are curious as to what Irma put into the original edition, those are available for a much more reasonable sum. I mean most of the interesting stories that we have about older editions of joy, are not like the collector's type stories. They're more like, for instance, I think it was maybe last year or the year before, we received a paperback edition, which it's the 1963 edition. That was the one that was turned into a paperback, a two volume paperback as well as a single volume. It was in a Ziploc, I mean it was just completely destroyed. It came with this incredibly sweet note from someone. She was about ready to go into the nursing home, and she wanted us to have the book because she said that it had seen three marriages, and help her raise six children. She just detailed what this book had been through with her.Megan Scott: She was worried that her children wouldn't know the value of it, and they would just throw it away. So she wanted us to have it. That was a really, that was an amazing thing to receive.Suzy Chase: This week I made two recipes out of the cookbook. Wanda's Stewed Cranberry Beans on page 212, and Rombauer Jam Cake on page 732. Can you describe these recipes and the inspiration for them?Megan Scott: Well the Wanda's cranberry beans, Wanda is my grandmother. So I have come from a farming family, and my grandmother and grandfather grew cranberry beans every year, and they would shell them. We would all get together in the late summer, and shell them and freeze them for the winter. So she would cook these beans every single Sunday for as long as I can remember. It's really just a ham hock in it. Really, really, really simple, but kind of one of my favorite things to eat. Then the Rombauer jam cake is an older recipe, and it's kind of like a spice cake, but it has raspberry jam in the batter. Usually when I make it I like to use, there's like a brown sugar icing that you can make to drizzle over it, that I really love.Suzy Chase: Now to my segment called my favorite cookbook. And this, it's crazy asking you this, but what is your all time favorite cookbook and why?Megan Scott: I don't know if I can pick one because there are a few that I'm thinking of, that were some of the first cookbooks I ever bought, and that really taught me a lot, or that I just really loved reading through. One of them was Wild Fermentation by Sandor Katz. That is an amazing book, and I think it was just recently revised, like maybe last year. But also I remember getting A Platter of Figs by David Tanis, and that kind of... I grew up in the South, so I didn't really have any experience with California cuisine, and that book was really influential for me.Suzy Chase: And John?John Becker: You know I, again, our cookbook library is gigantic and it's really hard to pick a favorite, but I am going to have to say A Super Upsetting Book About Sandwiches, just because it's really, really funny. Obviously the recipes are fantastic, but yeah, by Tyler Kord of No. 7 Sub. Is it No. 7 Subs?Megan Scott: Yeah.John Becker: I remember, not knowing what to expect when I picked it up, but it was definitely one of those ones that I kept on going back to, to read.Megan Scott: Yeah, it's pretty delightful.John Becker: I'm surprised you didn't say Joy of Cooking for your favorite cookbook. Oh, I thought that, that was off limits. Otherwise I would have to say that, because not only family loyalty, but it's also the one I know. I mean it's obviously we know that book really well. I guess we didn't touch on this, but when we were testing recipes when we first started, we were doing for each one that we tested, we did these genealogies for each one to see like what edition it was added to. Yeah. I mean it's definitely our favorite. I mean, it's my favorite cookbook because I just have so much invested in it, and I know it so well. But yeah, for some reason I thought that was off limits.Suzy Chase: Well, I usually say, what's your favorite cookbook other than this cookbook? But I thought, come on. I mean.Megan Scott: Yeah, I didn't think we could say Joy of Cooking, but joy was one of the first books that I ever bought for myself, and I did not grow up in a Joy of Cooking family. So my mom never had, she didn't have the book. I just kind of, when I moved out, I knew that Joy of Cooking was this amazing kitchen resource, that I just needed to have. So I bought it for myself, and yeah, loved it. That was before I met John.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?Megan Scott: We are on Instagram at The Joy of Cooking, and Twitter The Joy of Cooking, and on Facebook it is just Joy of Cooking.Suzy Chase: What a treat it was chatting with you about the most popular American cookbook. Thank you so much for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.Megan Scott: Thanks so much for having us.John Becker: It was a pleasure.Outro: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com, and thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

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365: A Year of Everyday Cooking & BakingBy Meike Peters Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York city, sitting at her dining room table talking to cookbook authors.Meike Peters: My name is Meike Peters. I live in Berlin and my latest book is 365: A Year of Everyday Cooking and Baking.Suzy Chase: This cookbook has solved the age-old question, what shall we cook tonight with a recipe for every day of the year. All of this started with your blog, Eat In My Kitchen, in 2013 where you shared one dish every day for a year. Tell us about that.Meike Peters: So one day I decided I'd like to find out a little bit more about blogs. At that point I didn't know anything about blogs and seeing that I love cooking, I love writing, I love photography, my boyfriend at one point just said, "Why did you don't you just start a blog?" I had been working in the music industry for 15 years and I felt ready for a change. So I decided, okay, I'm going to share one recipe every day on my blog, Eat In My Kitchen, and really I had no experience. I didn't know anything about it, so I really just jumped into it.Meike Peters: I thought it can't be that difficult. We cook every day or I cook every day anyway, so I might as well just share the recipes. It turned out to be a bit more time-consuming than thought because it's one thing to cook, but it's something totally different to take a picture, to write about it. All of this took relieve much, much longer. So in the beginning we, we always ate cold food because we had-Suzy Chase: Okay, I get that.Meike Peters: So I changed a few things. Then I decided, okay, the recipes I share on my blog, I have to cook a little bit earlier. I also shoot just with daylight. I just had to adjust my cooking, my shopping, my timing a little bit. But in the end it was an amazing experience that led to two cookbooks already.Suzy Chase: You say the kitchen isn't a place where we have to perform. If we're a home cook who doesn't love love love to cook, how do we take the pressure off and unwind in the kitchen?Meike Peters: I think we shouldn't go into the kitchen with any expectations. I mean obviously we all want to eat good food, but it's kind of like with everything. If we put pressure on us, we will never perform as well. If we just see it as an experimental space where we can try out new things where we are totally free of any expectations. We just do what you feel like. We give our best and hopefully it will taste good. If it doesn't taste good we just tried another time. I think that's the most important thing. And then I think food is something it should be just enjoyment. It's nothing where we have to prove something to other people. So there's no need to choose complicated recipes, for example. That means we might have to spend more time in the kitchen than we actually have or it might stress us out.Meike Peters: For me, that is not what cooking and food is about. It should make us feel happy. It should relax us. It is something that we share with other people and the people around us want us to be happy as well. They don't want us to cook something super complicated that might taste amazing, but we are totally exhausted after we've done it. So I think it has a lot to do with just winding it down. Maybe sometimes cooking something that's a bit more simple, adjusting it to our mood and also to our schedule. If we have a very, very busy day, we can just go for a more simple recipe and just looking at what do I actually feel like, and then take it from there.Suzy Chase: I do like how simple and quick these recipes are in the cookbook. Talk about your approach in developing a recipe for every single day of the year.Meike Peters: So first of all, I believe in good produce. That's always a starting point. When you have good vegetables, tasty fruit, you don't actually have to do much with carrot, with a zucchini, with an eggplant. You don't have to do much with it. But it's super important that the quality's actually good and therefore we have to stick to the seasons. Ideally we go for produce that comes from the area where we live. So that is always my starting point. And then sometimes I feel like experimenting and adding maybe one or two different flavors, playing with spices or herb or just for example, adding fruits to a savory dish. That was something that I started to enjoy a lot in the last few years that I just combined things sometimes that are maybe it's not the first combination that comes to mind, but it adds a bit of excitement.Meike Peters: I mean we all love a bowl of warm pasta sometimes just with olive oil and Parmesan. And sometimes we just feel like something that excites the taste buds a bit more and that is a bit more something new. So very often it starts that I just go to the market and I see a vegetable, for example. And then all of a sudden, ideas come up what I can do with it. Where it exactly comes from, I can't really say. I think sometimes I think it's a bit like a composer who can't explain to you where a song or where the lyrics come from. Ideally, they're just there and it's good. Luckily with food comes quite naturally to me. It's just when I'm in the right mood it just comes.Meike Peters: And then I have certain ideas in my head and I try them out. But it's something that comes very intuitively. I think maybe it has a lot to do with the fact that I've been kind of cooking all my life. I spent a lot of time in the kitchen with my mother. Being surrounded by food all the time, by people who play around with ingredients, it just inspires me very intuitively.Suzy Chase: So you're German and you grew up in Germany, but what is your connection to Malta?Meike Peters: My boyfriend is half American, half Maltese. He lived most of his life in Malta and we got together 14 years ago. When we are in Malta, we live with his family and that gives you a very deep insight into the culture. I always say when you are a part of a Maltese family and when you visit them, it's like a wave. It sucks you in. It just spits you out again when you leave the country. So it's a very, very intense experience. We spend a lot of time there. We live with this family.Suzy Chase: You live in the same house?Meike Peters: Yeah.Suzy Chase: Wow. Is it big?Meike Peters: It's a big house, but he has three siblings. Family lives very close by. You do a lot with the family. It can easily happen that you go to a restaurant with a family three times a week. Two times a week you would go to the beach with them. It's a lot about family. But I'm lucky he has a beautiful family, many women. There are a lot of women in his family and we always have a good time. We all love to eat well. It is a different kind of family concept in the Mediterranean to Germany, for example. It is very close. There's a lot of love that is shared and shown really. Love is shared very openly. And I was welcomed.Meike Peters: It still overwhelms me sometimes how much they made me a part of this family. But this really gave me the chance to have a very, very deep insight into this culture that is so different to what I grew up in. I mean I'm quite German and it influenced so much of me. My humor changed totally. My cooking obviously was influenced. But I think I also slowed down down my pace a little bit, so it had a big effect on me as a person.Suzy Chase: Talk about how Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays call for different recipes.Meike Peters: There is something I experienced a little more through the blog even, that we all have certain desires, long for different recipes during the week. What I noticed very often that everybody hates or often people hate Mondays. But I really thought that, man, that poor day of the week. It deserves a bit more and the easiest way to create a bit of happiness is obviously food. And I thought, yeah, let's just create a dish that you can easily prepare after a stressful day of work on a Monday, but that gives me this feeling of like a bit of dolce vita. So pasta is the best example. You just throw together a simple but nice pasta dish and maybe it wakes up some holiday memories.Meike Peters: It just creates something special. You have a glass of wine with it maybe. An exciting salad during the week that is super easy to prepare, but it has a lot of color, it has a lot of flavor, and it excites us. Or on Wednesdays, for example, on the blog I introduced a series many years ago, which was called the Sandwich Wednesday and people love that. It's just, okay, on a Wednesday I make a very special sandwich creation. I tried to include this rhythm that I experienced on the blog. I tried to follow that also in this book.Meike Peters: So these are all very simple things that are easy to plan, but that can add a bit of excitement or relaxation to our weekly rhythm. And again, it can also take this pressure off cooking and replace it with, wow, I actually have something nice to look forward to in the evening. I'm going to prepare something that tastes good. That looks nice, that it is fun to prepare.Suzy Chase: 365 is dedicated to the investigative Maltese journalist, Daphne Caruana Galizia. Tell us about her.Meike Peters: So three years ago when my last book came out, Eat In My Kitchen, I was interviewed by Daphne in Malta because Daphne was a political journalist, but she also had her own food magazine. So she interviewed me for her magazine and we clicked immediately. It was strange because people had kind of warned me almost of her. I think people were scared of her. When I met her I was so surprised. There was this woman that was so soft, almost shy and sweet. She was the warmest person. It was totally different to what I expected, and we stayed in touch. We often exchanged emails about our culinary work.Meike Peters: Then in 2017, she dug a bit too deep in the dirt of some people and she was assassinated. That hit me extremely hard because never before in my life someone was killed in my environment. Never before had I imagined that this could happen in Malta. I think I still need some time to find my way to deal with it. Also too, it really defined my relationship with Malta. it really changed a lot. When it happened, shortly after that I decided to work on a new cookbook. Somehow Daphne was on my mind the whole time while I was working on this book, on 365. When it came to the question, who am I going to dedicate this book to? For me, it was obvious that I would dedicate it to her because somehow it is deeply connected to her. She loved food so much. She was a woman that was very close to my heart and who's not here any more.Suzy Chase: I could see why people were scared of her because she investigated several high profile figures, including the prime minister and other Maltese officials and politicians and they planted a bomb under the seat of our car. It's like the Mafia. I read that three men are facing trial for the killing, but the people who ordered it have not been identified.Meike Peters: The whole family is trying very hard. People outside Malta and also a few people in Malta, they try very hard to push the case and to find the people behind, but it seems like that at the moment there is still a lot of people who don't want the truth to come out. But I believe that the truth always comes out at one point. Maybe I want to hope that this will happen here as well. But it's a very, very, very hard time. For example, there isn't even an official memorial at the moment. There is opposite the court in Valletta, Valletta is marked as capital. There is a place where people put down flowers and letters and pictures for Daphne every day.Meike Peters: So it became of a place to remember her, to remember Daphne. This place is being cleared every day. There are always people who take the flowers and everything away. This is just very painful to see, for the family especially. I really hope that at one point, maybe the pressure from the outside has to become stronger, that the truth comes out.Suzy Chase: Well, I think there's a little hope now because I read a recent BBC article that said Malta is finally going to hold an inquiry and they've enlisted a retired forensics expert.Meike Peters: We have to see what all of this will lead to, what people say, what they're going to do, and how much they actually allow to come out. I'm not sure.Suzy Chase: Well, we'll be watching. So back to the cookbook.Meike Peters: Yes.Suzy Chase: Last week I made these recipes, roasted grapes with Burrata and prosciutto on page 228. This dish impressed by husband. Can you describe it?Meike Peters: I just thought, okay, I love the combination of cheese and fruit. So it was basically, okay, I have the nice Burrata. What can I add? There were the grapes. It's possible that I just saw a plate of grapes in front of me and I thought, "I might as well roast them." The flavors become a bit more concentrated. It becomes a bit more candy-like even, and then the roasted rosemary adds a bit of a woody note. That is basically how I often come up then with these recipes. It's just these two, three, four elements in my head and it's like at one point they find together and it makes sense. This dish, it can be a beautiful starter for dinner party or in summer this can ... You just have a nice loaf of bread and a bottle of wine and that's dinner.Meike Peters: I love it when these flavors, a few, just not many, a few flavors come together and they make sense together. You have this also visually really beautiful dish that doesn't take very long to prepare it. These roasted grapes also taste good, so you can just prepare a bigger bunch and you can also add them on top of polenta. That's also very, very nice. We had that at the book launch. There's one recipe where I add them on bruschetta with a bit of Stilton. So that's also a good way to take the pressure out of daily cooking. You just prepare bigger portions of something and then you use it for different dishes. Or on top of soup, the roasted grapes are also great on top of a hearty parsnip, pumpkin, or potato soup. So you can really play with these elements and use it for different recipes.Suzy Chase: I also made your mashed sweet potatoes with coriander on page 228. I mean those were so easy and delicious.Meike Peters: It's funny. We're going to make that tonight. I just bought the sweet potato for this.Suzy Chase: It's Friday.Meike Peters: It's Friday, exactly. You can have it on its own. You can add, of course, a German fried sausage to it. We love that sometimes. These kind of mashed potatoes, mashed sweet potatoes, it's a technique that ... Technique, you can't really call it a technique. But it's a kind of recipe that my mother makes very often because traditionally mashed potatoes in Germany are made with milk and butter. One day my mother made mashed potatoes with olive oil and she just chopped up the potatoes very roughly. And then I decided, okay, it might be nice to add a bit of lemon zest or some fennel seeds or coriander seeds and instead of having the normal yellow potatoes, I just used sweet potatoes.Meike Peters: I think cooking is when you go through the world with open eyes. There are always people around you who prepare something that you might have not thought of before or they just use it in a different way, and then you just play with it a bit.Suzy Chase: So the last thing I made was from page 230, and that was your recipe for Trout al Cartoccio. Is that how you pronounce it?Meike Peters: Cartoccio, al Cartoccio.Suzy Chase: Cartoccio, with artichokes, parsley, and juniper berries. Talk about how trout has a lot of character.Meike Peters: Trout is, because they live in lakes and they have a very, or in rivers, and they have a very earthy taste. It's not like seafood, fish that lives in the Mediterranean. It can even be a bit sweet sometimes. It's very fresh. It's totally different to the fish that I grew up with because I grew up in the countryside. So for me, fish was very much fish that lives in rivers and lakes. Seeing that it has this earthy taste, it can really deal with other flavors, with strong flavors very, very well. Very often when I buy trout, I just see, hey, what do I have in the fridge? What do I have in the pantry? And then one day there were artichokes, olives, parsley, and then I just felt like I'm going to throw that together and it tasted really, really good. It's a fish that can deal very well with a lot of flavors.Suzy Chase: Now to my segment this season called My Favorite Cookbook. Aside from this cookbook, what is your all-time favorite cookbook and why?Meike Peters: This book is not really one of these pretty cookbooks where it's about pictures. The pictures that are in there are really very practical pictures. You see how the dish is going to look, but it's not about, wow, is this a mouth-watering picture? It a different kind of cookbook where it was really just about having good recipes. The techniques in this book, all the recipes are very precise, the way the meat is cooked, the way the vegetables are cooked. It's all very precise. It all works out. It's not very experimental, but it's really the basic. When you understand this, then you can play with it and add your own things to it. But this book is it combines all that I love.Suzy Chase: What's it called?Meike Peters: This is How South Tyrol Cooks. The German title is, and I think there's just because in this region, in this area, they speak German and Italian. This is How South Tyrol Cooks and the three authors are called Heinrich Gasteiger, Gerhard Wieser, and Helmut Bachmann.Suzy Chase: Well, thank you so much for coming on Cookery by the Book Podcast.Meike Peters: Thank you very, very much for having me.Outro: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com and thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

TheGTruth by Giovanni Canales 0:00 - Intro 1:27 - Minshew Benched 4:36 - Dalton Benched 10:10 - Top of the Line (Week 10) 19:18 - Kawhi Resting 24:35 - Celtics Balling 28:49 - Outro ---------------------------------------- SUBSCRIBE to TheGTruth on iTunes https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/thegtruth/id1446663407 ---------------------------------------- SUBSCRIBE to TheGTruth on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/38NrOCgJB54tPLJtmSCqOg ---------------------------------------- LISTEN to TheGTruth on SoundCloud https://soundcloud.com/thegtruth ---------------------------------------- Follow Me On Instagram https://www.instagram.com/gio_canales/ ---------------------------------------- Follow Me on Twitter https://twitter.com/gio_xcanales ---------------------------------------- --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/thegtruth/message

TheGTruth by Giovanni Canales 0:00 - Intro 1:55 - Chargers Luck Into Competence 5:40 - Chargers to London Thoughts 9:03 - NFL Power Rankings (Post Week 9) 19:26 - Suns are Winning?! 27:10 - Eric Paschall and the Warriors 31:04 - Outro ---------------------------------------- SUBSCRIBE to TheGTruth on iTunes https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/thegtruth/id1446663407 ---------------------------------------- SUBSCRIBE to TheGTruth on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/38NrOCgJB54tPLJtmSCqOg ---------------------------------------- LISTEN to TheGTruth on SoundCloud https://soundcloud.com/thegtruth ---------------------------------------- Follow Me On Instagram https://www.instagram.com/gio_canales/ ---------------------------------------- Follow Me on Twitter https://twitter.com/gio_xcanales ---------------------------------------- --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/thegtruth/message

The Saltwater Table: Recipes from the Coastal SouthBy Whitney Otawka Intro: Welcome to the #1 cookbook podcast Cookery By The Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table talking to cookbook authors.Whitney Otawka: My name is Whitney Otawka and my most recent cookbook is The Saltwater Table, Recipes from the Coastal South.Suzy Chase: There's nothing I love more than a cookbook that inspires me to visit a destination, and this is one of those cookbooks. I am dying to hear about the story of Cumberland Island, Georgia and why you up and moved there in 2005.Whitney Otawka: Okay, so I didn't move to Cumberland in 2005, I actually moved... Well, I moved to Georgia in 2005, and so I actually moved to Georgia with an ex-boyfriend. I was living in California, and when I got to Georgia, it was sort of love at first sight with the food. I instantly fell in love with the culture of food, the history of the food here, and sort of part of my natural exploration of place beyond cuisine was also visiting... This is how I get to know a place. Anyways, I was visiting a lot of the state parks. I came across Cumberland Island, actually on a PBS series on the national seashore here. I was living in Athens, Georgia at the time. I was so curious about it, so I traveled to the island, stayed a night at Greyfield Inn and just fell in love with it.Whitney Otawka: It's very remote, very removed, very unique. As my culinary career evolved in Georgia, I kept going back to this island, this place that mesmerized me early on in my discoveries in the South. At the point in which I was ready to become an executive chef, I just couldn't get this place out of my mind, so I wrote the owners a letter. I really saw this place as a unique culinary destination. I saw something that could be built here. I wrote them a letter and I came down. I cooked a dinner and they hired me as their executive chef.Suzy Chase: Oh my gosh. So you moved to Georgia in '05, when did you move to Cumberland Island?Whitney Otawka: So the first time I moved here was in 2010.Suzy Chase: Oh.Whitney Otawka: Yeah.Suzy Chase: Interesting, oh my gosh. When you got there, what was the thing that you did, or saw, or ate, that made you think this is my spot?Whitney Otawka: I talk about... Well, first of all, it was the nature. This island is... There's something sort of mysterious and also balancing about it all. If you work in professional kitchens, that you don't have windows. You don't know what time it is during the day unless you look at your watch. There's no natural light. Oftentimes, you're working 15 hours. You're not stepping outside. You're not in touch with the things that you're cooking. So here is this really unique opportunity to be around the things that you're cooking, and to be inspired by the place.Whitney Otawka: There's a window in the kitchen, however small it may be. When we grill, when we cook over wood, we step outside to do that. If we want shrimp, it's coming out of the intercostal waterway, which is literally 25 paces from my kitchen door. I mean this place is an incredibly dreamy place to create food. That will always inspire my approach to creating a menu. There's just endless sort of opportunity to be creative and have access to your ingredients.Suzy Chase: Now do you see wild pigs and horses?Whitney Otawka: Yeah, so there's wild horses all over. The herds stay in different parts of the island. We a very specific herd on this property, and there's a ton of them right now, and tons of babies. The pigs are very skittish. Oftentimes, I'll most likely see a pig when I'm jogging, especially away from the main properties. They tend to stay away. It's very rare that you see one on the Greyfield property. I've seen maybe one mama with maybe a couple of little piglets on her side.Suzy Chase: In your opinion, what are the most iconic southern meals? No pressure.Whitney Otawka: Well, I mean for my region it's a lot of the low country, right? My book touches on two areas that I combined into the idea of the tropical south. Most people think of the low country, right, as being the dominant flavor profile of the Carolinas and Georgia. We have dishes like shrimp and grits, which are incredibly, incredibly iconic. I do a spin on my book on fish and grits, which I think is equally iconic and maybe not as known, but I do a play where it's shrimp and fish and rice grits. You have pello's. You have Hoppin' John, which is a rice and a pea mixture. You have ingredients like okra. I mean, gosh, tomato sandwiches, those are so very southern. There's just a million iconic dishes I can think of off the top of my head that fall in southern food.Suzy Chase: What exactly is The Saltwater Table?Whitney Otawka: One thing that I noticed pretty early on is how salt infuses into everything when you live on the coast. It's heavy in the air. When you sweat, it comes out in your skin. It's sort of part of the food. The saltwater is where we get our fish, our seafood. That is sort of what the saltwater table is. It's that infusion of the environment and what it brings and how it influences the way we cook.Suzy Chase: "Early spring 2015, I found myself staring out at the vast Atlantic ocean. I had waded out into the choppy current to collect seawater. I wanted to make salt." You wrote in the introduction. Talk to me about that moment.Whitney Otawka: Sure. I mean, I really like that story of coming back here, so I worked here, like I said, in 2010. I came back. I left after I did Top Chef and I came back in 2015. Let's see, they closed two restaurants and coming here, and I was a bit of a wounded animal, I would say. As much as I didn't want to talk about it or feel that, out of my own control had lost two restaurants. I came back to this place that I'd always been in love within the first place. I'd taken over as chef and I wanted to do something fresh. I wanted to approach this island with a different perspective. And so I took on this project of making sea salt. I talk about in that introduction about how incredibly therapeutic it was because it was this crazy process.Whitney Otawka: When you read about a project like making saltwater or salt, you're like, oh, I can do that. But the realities of the situation, first of all, there's not a lot of cars on this Island, so lugging saltwater over sand dunes, getting gallons and gallons of saltwater back to a place to even be safe to dry, is its own crazy challenge. It was this process of distilling the saltwater, cleaning it, laying it out to dehydrate. It took weeks and weeks and there was times when, rain would blow in because I didn't have it protected well, and it would get washed out or all the sand gnats around here with land in it. It was this process of renewal for me. Taking on and being able to create something again, it was sort of therapeutic, so it was very important.Suzy Chase: You said in the book, "What truly great adventure goes as planned?" Isn't that the truth?Whitney Otawka: I mean I just spent a whole summer traveling and my favorite moments are the times when everything goes wrong. Not in the moment, but afterward, they make the best stories.Suzy Chase: I find with most of these southern cookbooks, the authors are from the south and you grew up in the Mojave desert. What sorts of foods did you grow up eating?Whitney Otawka: The Mojave desert was literally a food desert. It was not a place where there was visible locality. I didn't grow up near anything that was farmed. I didn't see agriculture, which is maybe one of the reasons I fell in love so very quickly with southern cuisine. My family didn't have a lot of money, but my mother was a good cook and my mother took on cooking from scratch for us. She would make bread. I grew up loving packaged hollandaise on my broccoli.Suzy Chase: Didn't we all.Whitney Otawka: She cared enough to put a lot of effort into that. The one thing, there wasn't amazing restaurants around us. There was no fine dining. I thought Olive Garden was the greatest thing ever. But there was from scratch Mexican cooking around us and that's one of the things that really I loved to eat. It influenced how I thought about food. You could get freshly made tortillas in the desert. You could get homemade salsa. I tasted mole at a very young age growing up in the Southern California Mojave Desert, which was really intense for me. But to be able to be exposed to from-scratch cooking of such quality was really important and shaped my palette, I think early on.Suzy Chase: You're the first chef I've met that tells a story of being taken by surprise that you were becoming a chef. Talk a little bit about that.Whitney Otawka: Yeah, I mean so I originally was going to be an archeologist. I had decided that pretty early on in my childhood that I wanted to be an archeologist. I wanted to go to Berkeley for my undergrad. I wanted to go to Brown. Egyptology was what I was most interested in. I also was in love with the French culture. I think a lot of young women, especially a woman like me that grew up in a very isolated environment, the idea of living in Paris and France, I just was obsessed over it. At Berkeley, I was taking some French classes. I wandered in and found a flyer for a little French restaurant and that's how I made my way into restaurants.Whitney Otawka: It wasn't intentional. I didn't intend to go work in that restaurant and work in a kitchen. They put me in the kitchen because they didn't think I had any front of house experience, but I was really good at it. From the beginning. I was really good at it. I loved taking care of ingredients. I loved thinking forward as in like anticipating the needs of what Eric Laroy, who was the owner, and he wouldn't have called himself a chef, but very much was a chef. I loved anticipating the needs of when an order was called, what he needed, being ahead of it. I would do everything from prepping the food to washing the dishes, to being the barista, to dropping the check to clearing the table.Whitney Otawka: I was sort of like, I did everything in that restaurant and I loved being active in that way. I loved running around. I loved sitting down to talk about food at the end of the night. I got sucked into restaurants and I kept denying that this is what I was going to do. I kept denying it until I think I was 26 when I finally admitted it to myself. It was the move to the south when I finally sort of realized that I was all along the way, was discovering food through the lens of this love of history, and anthropology, and archeology, but it was sort of morphing me into becoming a chef.Suzy Chase: Speaking of archeology, buried in Cumberland Island soil, are relics of at least 4,000 years of human history. What's the most interesting thing you've dug up?Whitney Otawka: So we, and when I say we, it's my husband, Ben and I. We have found two Spanish coins. Those are some of our treasures that we love, that we've personally found, but there's really amazing treasure hunters is what I call them, but they're family members. They've grown up on this island and they know where to look. Gogo Ferguson in particular, she's an amazing jewelry designer, and she goes out, and she finds amazing pottery shards from the Timucua Indians that lived here. She has found dinosaur bones, like a wooly mammoth molar.Suzy Chase: That's so cool.Whitney Otawka: Yeah and megalodon teeth, like extinct giant sharks. I'm in awe every time I see these amazing because I don't have the eye. My husband has a better eye than I do. You know, the people that can walk and be like, "Look at that." I'm like, "Rock, rock." I literally was standing on an arrowhead one time and somebody else was like, "What's under your foot?"Suzy Chase: Your culinary exploration of the south was combined with love and friendship. Talk a little bit about Ben.Whitney Otawka: Ben and I met working at Five & Ten under Hugh Acheson in Athens, Georgia. We started working together. He started actually a month after I did. He had worked at Blackberry Farm. He came in, and he actually moved to pastry. I was a day prep person because I was going to culinary school at night. In the kitchen during the day time, it would literally just be the two of us or maybe one other prep cook in there. He grew up in the south. He grew up in a small town, Washington, Georgia, in a much more... He was younger than me too. He had a much more traditional southern family. Their family had been in the same town since maybe the 1820s, so he had this very traditional upbringing.Whitney Otawka: I was from California, and a little more wild, and I had gone to Berkeley, but we just instantly became best friends. It was just, I don't know. I can't put words into it, but we were best friends immediately. We had this great year and a half of building an amazing friendship and then we along the way were falling in love. We've been working together, gosh, what? 13 years now in the same kitchen. We've lived most of our relationship on a deserted island, where we only have each other's company, but he taught me a lot about southern cuisine. You can learn a lot in a restaurant, but I think you learn so much more in the home from the people's traditions. The way that they eat. The way they celebrate. The way they mourn. The food that they serve on these occasions. I think those things have really crept into the soul of how I understand southern food. It's that gathering point around the table, the conventionality of it all.Suzy Chase: I went to a Hugh Acheson dinner the other night here in New York City. It's like you, he's from Canada, but he sort of embraced the south.Whitney Otawka: Yeah. He was an interesting mentor to have. He's very intelligent, very witty, very dry.Suzy Chase: Yeah. He was fun to listen to.Whitney Otawka: Yeah, he was always fun to listen to in the kitchen for sure. I mean it was a very close-knit team those early days at Five & Ten because he was still in the kitchen. It was before he'd gained fame. It was a great place to grow as a cook, honestly.Suzy Chase: Tell us the story of Greyfield Inn, which is the only commercial establishment on Cumberland Island and it has such a rich history.Whitney Otawka: It was in the 1880s that Andrew Carnegie's brother Thomas Carnegie and his wife Lucy Carnegie, first visited Cumberland Island. The Golden Isles became this interesting location for these northern industrial tycoons to come down and get away from the cold northern winters. Cumberland sort of struck Lucy's fancy. It was Lucy that really fell in love with Cumberland. They bought, I think it was like 80 or 90% of the Island. On this original hunting lodge, they built Dungeness. So Dungeness was the first house that's located on the north end of the Island. Lucy, being a very Victorian aged woman, wanted to have her children as close to her as possible.Whitney Otawka: So, for her married children, she built each of them a home on Cumberland Island. One of those houses being Greyfield. It was originally Grazefield. So Greyfield became the house she built for her daughter Margaret, who became Margaret Ricketson in marriage. It was passed down through their family. In the 60s, there came a point when a lot of these beautiful old homes that were so large and so hard for the families to keep up, were sort of run down. It was the family that convinced Lucy Ferguson in the 60s to turn it into an inn. I want to say it was 1965 that they decided to make Greyfield an inn. It started really small. I think they only had four rooms. It was all of Lucy's grandchildren who sort of took the charge and it's evolved over that time.Whitney Otawka: I mean it's been open for a good number of years now. It's really changed with the times. Yeah, that's Grayfields history, but there's some of the old houses still, as well, that are located here. Plum Orchard is now in the park system. Dungeness unfortunately, is in ruins now. It's The Dungeness Ruins. It was... This is an interesting story. Supposedly, in the 50s, there was a caretaker who had shot at someone that was poaching and hunting near the house. Supposedly, that man came back and set the house on fire.Suzy Chase: Oh my gosh.Whitney Otawka: The person was never caught, but the person is still in Fernandina, and alive, and brags that they were the one that set the house on fire. The Dungeness is in ruins. There was a house near there called The Grange. I believe it was also part of the original five houses. Yeah, it's amazing. I mean you drive along this dirt road on this nearly deserted island and you come across these 100-year-old mansion. They're just so striking and a bit spooky in their own way too.Suzy Chase: The only local produce you have access to is Grayfields two acre garden. What grows in your garden?Whitney Otawka: Oh man. We grow a lot of beautiful produce. Right now we're in between seasons because it's so hot in the months of August and September that we hardly could grow anything. We still have a little bit of okra coming in. We oddly get to bring back a little bit of summer produce when the intense heat settles down. We're looking for a second crop of tomatoes and cucumbers to come in right now. Leafy greens. We can grow everything from broccoli to cauliflower, kale, mustard greens, sweet potato greens. We had some beautiful sweet potatoes come out this summer. We have [inaudible 00:19:37] carrots, high curry turnips, beautiful fairytale eggplant, arugula, little gem lettuces. I mean it's absolutely stunning what we can grow in this amazing garden.Whitney Otawka: That credit really goes to the different teams that have come through and farmed. It's usually a couple, sort of like Ben and myself. I think couples do well in this isolated environment, but they're out there every day like we are in the kitchen. It's great too because we can go out there and be picky about things. Like, "Oh this is perfect the way it is now." We see it a different way sometimes then a farmer does. It's being involved and being able to walk out into the garden and know that it's being produced specifically for your kitchen. It allows you the opportunity to really choose when it should be harvested.Suzy Chase: Like a lot of cookbooks, you break up the chapters by season but your seasons are different. Can you tell us about those?Whitney Otawka: Sure. Yeah. It was an interesting process. It was funny. It was literally the first thing I thought of. It's based on the ecology of this island. It's based on the most prolific feeling of each season. The first chapter is Oyster Season. We have wild oysters that grow here on the island. We do oyster roast in the wintertime. It's the cold water. The water doesn't get super cold here, but the coldest waters produce really delicious oysters, as far as their briny and wild. The second season is vegetable season. That's a really great time for us for growing in the garden. It's that early spring to late spring, where we have so many amazing crops that run together. We still have tender [inaudible 00:21:19] carrots running into the first harvest of cherry tomatoes. It's pretty amazing the combinations we can get, so that's the second chapter.Whitney Otawka: The third chapter is Shrimp Season and shrimp is, I mean if you've been to the coastal south, shrimp is king, especially on the Georgia coast. It's a main part of the economy here. We still have shrimp festivals, we have the Blessing of the Fleets. It's one of the things that you can find easily that's caught locally. I mean everywhere you drive, there's a guy that's selling shrimp on the side of the road. And then there's heat, which is if you've ever been to the south in summer, you know what I'm talking about. It's this heavy blanket of humidity that drapes over everything. The sun is so saturated. The light is so bright. It dominates how you cook, how you feel. You have to take breaks in the afternoon. It's just really intense. And then we celebrate the breaking of the heat with smoke and cedar and that's when you can go back outside. That's the idea of preservation. That's when you're building fires again and sort of celebrating the years. That is the seasons.Suzy Chase: On Sunday night, I made your recipe for Low Country Boil on page 176. Can you describe this recipe?Whitney Otawka: Oh sure, yeah. I mean low country boils are so very popular in this region. I really think in the coastal south, everywhere from Louisiana to North Carolina, there's a version of a low country boil. For us here, like I said, shrimp is the king of our low country boils. We throw in shrimp. We throw in corn. We throw in potatoes. It's just this one-pot meal. I think it's pretty easy. Did you find it pretty easy to make?Suzy Chase: Yeah. What was interesting was I thought that the orange and then the tomato juice were surprising ingredients. Are they normally in low country boils? I'd never made one before.Whitney Otawka: I grew up making Frogmore Stew, which is a low country boil when I worked for Hugh Acheson and we always had tomato broth in ours, which I loved that flavor. And then the orange is for us here. We have a lot of citrus trees that grow on the island, so it was natural for me to reach for an orange as opposed to a lemon, which would be the obvious go-to. I love that addition of the orange to it. It was just that Cumberland Island feeling that I brought forth in the book. One last thing about that is that I love that you just throw it down and you eat it with your hands. There's not the pomp and circumstance of needing a knife and a fork.Whitney Otawka: I think the joy and I try to express this in a book a lot. There's something about eating with your hands that I just love. I love that feeling. Washed hands, I think I say in there, but I love that. It's just there's this casual nature. People instantly relax when they're eating with their hands, as opposed to at a table, with a white tablecloth, perfectly set with silverware. It just creates a different atmosphere. That's one of those meals that really creates a cultural memory and sort of gives you a sense of real people.Suzy Chase: Now to my segment called, My Favorite Cookbook. Aside from this cookbook, what is your all-time favorite cookbook and why?Whitney Otawka: I'm madly in love with the Hartwood Cookbook. It is one of those books that takes you to a destination and I just love everything about it. The storytelling, the writing, the food, the photography. It's so rich and so lovely. I call it sort of my little guidebook. I would keep it around when I was working on my book. I know the books are very different, but it was such an inspiration for me. Even the story Eric Werner and his wife. The story of going away and running away from New York to Mexico and to Tulum to open this project, I just love it. I love everything about that story. I love adventure and the food is beautiful, and the culture of the food there is incredibly impressive. Yeah, that's got to be one of my favorites.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?Whitney Otawka: I mean, everything's my name spelled out. I'm on Instagram. I'm on Facebook. I have a website, which is just whitneyotawka.com and I have a lot more recipes that I put on there. I have great intentions to do so many things, listing more of our travels. I do travel frequently. A lot of people ask me where to eat when I travel, so I'm trying to get those posted online as well. So, whitneyotawka.com.Suzy Chase: Thanks for giving us a glimpse into your life and for chatting with me on Cookery by the Book Podcast.Whitney Otawka: It was my pleasure. Thank you so much.Outro: Subscribe over on cookerybythebook.com and thanks for listening to the #1 cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

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Bigger Bolder BakingA Fearless Approach to Baking Anytime, AnywhereBy Gemma Stafford Intro: Welcome to the number one Cookbook Podcast, Cookery by the Book, with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.Gemma Stafford: Hi, I'm Gemma Stafford, and my new cookbook is called Bigger Bolder Baking: A Fearless Approach to Baking Anytime, Anywhere.Suzy Chase: So I have to start off by saying a huge congratulations to you. You have a bun in the oven, so to speak.Gemma Stafford: Thank you.Suzy Chase: That's so exciting. When are you due?Gemma Stafford: I'm due early February.Suzy Chase: Oh my God, that's right around the corner.Gemma Stafford: I know. I know. Tell me about it. At the time, at the beginning, time stood still, and now it's going really fast, so I don't really know where I am.Suzy Chase: Yay. I'm so excited for you.Gemma Stafford: Thank you.Suzy Chase: So, you have a line in the cookbook that goes, "I watched my mom create spectacular desserts from just a few simple ingredients." I feel like this is your philosophy, too.Gemma Stafford: Yeah, absolutely. You know, I worked as a professional chef for 10 plus years, and I trained, I studied professional cookery in college. I went to two different cookery schools, and definitely the more, especially as I look at the book, my biggest influence and my first teacher was really my mom.Suzy Chase: Now what exactly is bold baking?Gemma Stafford: So being bold is about taking risks, and it's about trying something different, and it's about being fearless. And that's what I do in my recipes. I try and take away the unnecessary steps that people don't need that might confuse you, that sometimes, in baking, people can have very long winded recipes.Gemma Stafford: And what I like to do is just get straight to the facts and show you how you can make over the top desserts, but still using very simple techniques and very simple ingredients.Suzy Chase: Long winded recipes are so much fun to read, but so hard to follow.Gemma Stafford: Yeah. I can't. The reason we've had such great success with Bigger Bolder Baking is because bold baking is about taking risks and it's about being fearless. And I really try, and with my millions of fans all around the world, try and give people the confidence to bake anytime, anywhere.Gemma Stafford: And in the book, it's a collection of recipes where you can do that using simple ingredients. The majority of recipes are less than 10 steps. They're really finely edited just to give you the exact information that you need, and anytime, anywhere baking really ... We heard this from our audience.Gemma Stafford: We have 5 million bold bakers all around the world, and we heard from them that they want to bake, but they're students in a dorm. They want to make a cake for somebody, but they live in, maybe, an older facility, and they don't have access to a kitchen, or they only have a microwave, and things like that. And we didn't, I didn't want that to restrict people from baking.Gemma Stafford: So in the book, I broke the chapters down into different pieces of kitchen equipment that you would need, and tools. So there's a whole section in my baking book where you do not need an oven to make frozen desserts, to make mousses, to make chills desserts, to make chocolate Tiffin cake, all of these sorts of things, and trifles you don't need an oven for, and just really make it as simple for people as possible to make, to be able to bake no matter what their equipment or their circumstance.Suzy Chase: Your bold baking journey started at Ballymaloe Cookery school. That is incredible. Tell us about that, and what skills did you learn there?Gemma Stafford: I hold Ballymaloe very close to my heart. I had a really lovely time there. When I was young in the 80s, we used to watch, my mom and I used to watch Darina Allen on a Monday night on TV, and she was ... This was a long, long time ago, where she was the only chef, really, on TV, and then she was Irish, and she ran this cooking school, and I was just fascinated by her.Gemma Stafford: And my mom told me that when I was older, I could go to the cooking school. So after college, I studied professional cookery in college, and I was in my first job, and the opportunity came up to go to Ballymaloe Cooking School, and it's really special.Gemma Stafford: I don't know if I can describe it well enough. It's a really amazing experience. It's such a special place. For people who don't know, it's a cooking school on kind of like, almost like now, a farm, because I know that they have a lot of their own animals and bees and and things like that. But they have ... It's a little cooking school down in East Cork in a place called Ballymaloe.Gemma Stafford: I'm sorry, the school is called Ballymaloe, and run by a lady called Darina Allen, and her whole ethos is very, I would say, typical of a lot of Irish people, which is good ingredients in, and amazing out. And so the thing about Darina is that she does recipes from all around the world.Gemma Stafford: It's not, as people often say to me, meat and potatoes from Ireland. It's a little bit of everything. And just to be there, to be at the school, and to be with students who come from all around the world to do her courses, it's really incredible.Suzy Chase: Did a Diane Keaton movie really inspire you to move to America?Gemma Stafford: It did.Suzy Chase: Which one?Gemma Stafford: I know, it's crazy. So, a lot of people have seen, or are big fans of us, baby boom in the late eighties, like '87 or so. So I was ... I would have been ... We always get everything later. At that stage, we got everything like a year later than America did. So it was on TV in Ireland in maybe '88 or something like that. So I was only a child.Gemma Stafford: And I saw it, and for those of you who haven't seen it, it is about, long story short, about a kind of high powered exact woman in New York. She has a really busy lifestyle, and she gets landed this baby, and she has to move out of the city.Gemma Stafford: She buys a farm in Vermont, and she, her lifestyle totally changed, and she starts making applesauce and selling it in local shops in Vermont, and it becomes really big, and I just, I was fascinated by it. I just thought that this was the most amazing thing ever. That this is what I want to do. I wanted to move to Vermont and make applesauce.Gemma Stafford: And you know, it always, it stuck with me. I must've been like six or seven when I saw it, but I made kind of a promise to myself then and there that when I was 25, I was going to move to the United States, and I was going to marry an American man, and I was going to be in America for the rest of my life.Gemma Stafford: And yeah, it was. I was 25, actually, when I did end up moving here. But yeah, it always stuck in my head, and the thing about it is, I never told anybody, which was so funny. So when I was in my twenties later, and I decided to go to America, I think they were kind of surprised, but I always knew in the back of my head that this was part of the plan. I was going to do this.Suzy Chase: It was your vision.Gemma Stafford: Yeah.Suzy Chase: Wow. So, for busy home cooks, you also have a few mug cake recipes in this cookbook. Describe these.Gemma Stafford: So the mug cakes are some of my most popular on Bigger Bolder Baking, and they are really, they're little tiny single serving, I shouldn't say tiny, but they're a small single serving cakes that ... This is where kind of anytime, anywhere bacon comes in. We heard a lot from people who, like I said, don't have kitchens, don't have ovens, but still want to bake.Gemma Stafford: And there's a whole world of microwave recipes out there for cakes that I have in the book, and then savories that I have on my website for things like pizza, mac and cheese in a mug, and things like that that can all be made in the microwave.Gemma Stafford: So in the book Bigger Bolder Baking, I shared three recipes of some of my most popular, and they're an amazing ... They're really great recipes, because there are only a handful of ingredients. So even if your kitchen is bare, all it is is a little bit of raising agents, some flower, a little bit of oil. You might need an egg, but not even all of them need an egg.Gemma Stafford: Most of it is just standard cupboard ingredients. And you can have a mug brownie, a funfetti cake in a mug, or even a donut in a mug, which is a really popular one. And they're just a really amazing way for somebody to make a single serving treat fast with very little wash-up. And then you're not left with cake or cookies or whatever it is. You got to just have exactly what you wanted, or what you needed.Suzy Chase: I do love how you've included so many microwave recipes in this cookbook, because I feel like the microwave is a little passe right now. But it's so convenient.Gemma Stafford: Yeah. You know, the thing I explained, because I get asked this a lot. I've been a professional chef for many years now, and a lot of, when I first started doing microwave recipes, I talked to myself, "Should I be doing this? Because I've worked in [inaudible 00:09:41] restaurants now. Should I be making recipes in a microwave?"Gemma Stafford: Because people question you. And the thing about it is, it's not about the microwave. It's about, it is, these recipes are another way for some people to feed themselves, to make something from scratch, what I like to call real food fast, not fast food, with just a few ingredients, with very little waste.Gemma Stafford: And when we started making them, we were doing the cakes, we heard from a very much younger audience. Then when we kind of ventured into savory, and we started doing things like ramen in a mug and pizza, which was one of my favorites, pizza in a mug, and lots of different things like that, we heard from all around the world.Gemma Stafford: And heard from truckers, we heard from people living in elderly facilities, people who had been widowed. I just got an email from a man in Australia yesterday, 87 years of age, who was asking me about ... He just got the same microwave that I did, and he was asking me about the recipes so he'd be able to feed himself.Gemma Stafford: So it's much bigger than making food in a microwave. It's giving the people independence and confidence to be able to create their own meals, and that satisfaction and pride that you take in that.Suzy Chase: Gosh, that's so smart. Good for you.Gemma Stafford: Thanks.Suzy Chase: You also included mug net. What's that?Gemma Stafford: Yes, that's a donut in a mug. is a little kind of a cinnamony, kind of a cake with a little bit of jam in the middle, and eaten all together, tastes just like a donut sprinkled with some cinnamon sugar. It's just a fun little take on a donut.Suzy Chase: If I'm going to teach people to bake, why not online Guess who said that. Your YouTube channel has almost 2 million subscribers. Tell us about your channel, and how was your husband involved?Gemma Stafford: My husband is the driving force behind us. So, we started Bigger Bolder Baking five, five and a half years ago, as a YouTube channel. Long story short, myself and my husband, I still worked in food. I worked, I had a catering business. My husband worked in tech. Sorry, he did marketing for a tech company, but he also had a lot of experience in the entertainment industry, because he'd worked for Lucasfilm and Pixar.Gemma Stafford: And we got married, and we joined forces. We decided, how can we come work together to join both of what we're passionate about, which is food and entertainment? And Kevin said that he wanted to do more of the production side of entertainment, because he always did the marketing side.Gemma Stafford: So we came up, he said, "Why don't we create a cooking show?" And you know, five and a half years ago, YouTube was very much a different playing field. There wasn't a saturated ... There wasn't as many baking channels, and it was just a different ballgame. And you know, we quit our jobs in San Francisco.Gemma Stafford: We left behind paychecks and healthcare, and we moved to a city that we didn't know anybody, down to Santa Monica in LA, and we just started creating videos out of our kitchen. We went all in. We financed it. All of our time, all of our effort, we were working around the clock.Gemma Stafford: And the thing about it is, we didn't doubt ourselves. We knew that we were kind of crazy for doing it, but we never doubted ourselves. We knew that we were onto something good. And it took some time, and blood, sweat and tears, but it started to pay off really fast, and slowly but surely, we started to garner this audience of what we call, and what they call themselves, bold bakers.Gemma Stafford: And within a few months, we had some videos go viral. Our subscribers just doubled. And from then on, we've just, in the last, sorry, five and a half years or so, we've gotten to 2 million subscribers on YouTube. And then with our Facebook and Instagram, and our website included, we're around 5 million people all around the world.Suzy Chase: What's the most popular recipe on your channel?Gemma Stafford: Most popular recipe, I would ... So there's two that are kind of tied. The mug cakes are some of my most popular, it's kind of what I'm known for. And then also, what's actually, I had to include this in the book, is my no machine ice cream. It's just a few ingredients, cream, condensed milk, and some vanilla extract.Gemma Stafford: And you can make a base of kind of a vanilla ice cream. But then you can add any flavor you want. And I actually think, Suzy, you tried one of the ice creams.Suzy Chase: Yes.Gemma Stafford: And so it's just a really fun recipe. But that was another one that resonated with our audience, going back to it's not about the microwave, it's not about the utensil. It's the fact that you were able to make something without the traditional methods.Gemma Stafford: So the ice cream is made whisking together, you can do it by hand, or you can do it with a stand mixer, but you don't need an ice cream machine to make ice cream. And that video was just huge for us. So we had to include that ice cream and some different flavors in the book.Suzy Chase: Yeah, I made your raspberry swirl cheesecake ice cream on page 239.Gemma Stafford: Yeah, that's one. I love cheesecake ice cream.Suzy Chase: Ice cream has always been so intimidating for me.Gemma Stafford: Yeah. And because you have to make a custard base, and you have to, there's different steps, and it just, it can be laborious. And there's a chance that you curdle your custard, and then what do you do? But this is, for want of a better word, it's foolproof. And it's really, it's awesome, because also, we don't, we have a large audience.Gemma Stafford: It's kind of funny, but we have a large audience who are, who don't eat eggs, for dietary reasons, for religious reasons. So this ice cream doesn't include any eggs. It's only cream and condensed milk. And so it really ticks a lot of boxes for a lot of our fans. So that and the mug cakes are some of my most popular recipes with tens of millions of views on YouTube.Suzy Chase: For Christmas, are you going to be doing your 12 full days of cookies again?Gemma Stafford: I am.Suzy Chase: Oh, yay.Gemma Stafford: Yeah, we're doubling down on cookies this year. I started making them in August.Suzy Chase: Oh, my gosh.Gemma Stafford: So we're planning. We're getting kind of our team, we have a team now. At the beginning, it was just Kevin and I, my husband. And then, a few years in, we were able to start building out a team, and so our team are working on those campaigns. So 12 days of Christmas, and all the things around holiday baking.Gemma Stafford: We're also going to do a holiday baking hotline where I go live. It might be on ... One time we did a hotline on the website, on biggerbolderbaking.com, where I was, what do you call it? I popped up and I answered people's questions live, the day of Thanksgiving.Gemma Stafford: And then we also use an app called [inaudible 00:16:59], where ... It's like a voice mailing app where people can leave me a voicemail, and then I answer them back straight away. And it's just a really fun way to do it. And the holidays can be, it can be challenging. And you face, you come across things in the kitchen that you didn't know were going to happen and you need help fast. So we also do that and that's a lot of fun.Suzy Chase: So I also made your recipe for 10 minute vanilla refrigerator cookies on page 44. Can you describe these?Gemma Stafford: Those cookies are, they're one of the first cookies I remember making, and they're really simple, because they're a plain vanilla cookie. It's a little bit crisp, it's also a little bit soft. But it's a recipe that, since the book has come out, I'm just, I know what recipes mean to me.Gemma Stafford: They have certain nostalgia to me, but I keep on getting photos on social media of these cookies, and it just, I don't know what it is about them, but they really resonated with people. But they're just a plain little cookie. And the best thing about it is, is you keep the dough in the refrigerator, in a log, and then you can just slice it whenever you want to bake some off.Gemma Stafford: And it also is kind of a good blank canvas. If you wanted to add in chocolate chips, orange rind, different flavors, some knots, it really is versatile, and you can add anything you want to it.Suzy Chase: Now to my segment called My Favorite Cookbook. Aside from this cookbook, what is your all time favorite cookbook and why?Gemma Stafford: Oh my gosh, that's a really good question. I'm going to have to say there's not a lot. I have a huge collection of cookbooks, as I'm sure you do as well, Suzy, and I treasure them. But there's very few that I've read kind of front to back, and the one that my mom ...Gemma Stafford: My mom used to get me cooking books or cookery books for Christmas, and one year, when I was a student in my teens, I was probably 17 or something, she got me the Ballymaloe Cookery School three months course in a book, because Darina's course at Ballymaloe, her longest one is three months, and they compiled what you learn in that course into one big, thick book.Gemma Stafford: And I went through that book like nobody's business. I tried recipes, everything from salads to dressings, to cookies, to cakes, to breads. I went through it page to page, and I still use it as kind of my go to Bible of today. I still go to it for my Asian pork salad, and she has a Tennessean citrus cake, and it's just, it has a little bit of everything. And I just absolutely adore it, and it brings me back to that time of Ballymaloe as well.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?Gemma Stafford: So you can find me on my website, biggerbolderbaking.com, and then on Facebook and Instagram, it's Bigger Bolder Baking.Suzy Chase: Wonderful. Thanks, Gemma, for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.Gemma Stafford: Thank you, Suzy. It was lovely to talk to you.Outro: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com, and thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

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Nothing Fancy: Unfussy Food for Having People OverBy Alison Roman Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book, with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.Alison Roman: Hi, I'm Alison Roman, a cookbook author of Nothing Fancy: Unfussy Food for Having People Over.Suzy Chase: I was trying to sum up your job description. It's very multifaceted, you have cookbooks, a biweekly column in the New York Times, and a monthly column in Bon Appétit magazine. Talk about how cookbooks are the truest expression of how you are.Alison Roman: Yeah, so with having so many recipes in so many different places, I always say that cookbooks are the truest expression of myself. Because, while every recipe is pretty true to myself in terms of flavor profile, and effort, and visually speaking, I feel like each of my columns is sort of tailored to the publication, and that includes voice, writing style, and type of recipe. It's got to fit where it's being published.Alison Roman: But my books are just being published with my name on it, it's my own column for my own publication, and I feel a little bit more free to just have it be exactly tailored to myself. And so I can be a little bit more personal, I can be a little bit more casual, I can be a little bit more relaxed when I'm writing my own books.Suzy Chase: The busier you got, the less complicated your food got. I think you've found the recipe sweet spot for all of us home cooks out here. Talk a little bit about that.Alison Roman: Well, I feel like I am trying to get people to cook, and I realize that time and effort are probably the biggest hurdles for people deciding whether or not they want to cook something, just basically for having people over or just for a weeknight for yourself. And so I just use my own life as a real good measure for what I think people are willing to do, just because I also am busy, and I have a small kitchen, and my resources can be limited. So if I'm willing to put in the time to produce something, I think that you will be too.Alison Roman: And I think the biggest difference for this book versus the columns is that the book is really a good mix of things that require zero prep but maybe take two to three hours of hands-off time, and things that are ready in 30 minutes but maybe require a little bit more effort on your part during those 30 minutes. So rather than just cut and dry sheet pan dinners or weeknight meals, it feels a little bit more elevated, a little bit more interesting, a little bit more mixed. But I'll never ask you to take a long time and do a ton of work at the same time. I feel like it's always one or the other for me.Suzy Chase: And we thank you for the substitution recommendations.Alison Roman: Oh yeah.Suzy Chase: We thank you. So it's "having people over", not "entertaining". When was the first time articulated exactly what you wanted this cookbook to be about?Alison Roman: I feel like it was when I was writing the proposal for it, which is really ... I mean, the book was already sold, so it was really just an exercise for me to articulate what I wanted the book to be about. But I think it was just becoming so overwhelmed with people, because I knew that I wanted to do this book, and my publisher was like, "Entertaining books don't sell well," and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. "It's very Martha Stewart, people get stressed out." And I was like, "Well, what if people weren't stressed out? What if we just called it something else?"Suzy Chase: Well, did you tell her you're allergic to the word "entertaining"?Alison Roman: I did, well she knew once she read the introduction for sure. But I feel like just rebranding it as something else ... People are okay with cooking for one or two people, but as soon as you're like, "Oh, you're having people over," it's like, "Oh, red alert." Well, it doesn't have to be different, it can just be something a little bit nicer. The things that I cook for other people are hardly anything that I would just cook for myself. So for me, it's just rebranding. I have two styles of cooking, I'm either cooking for myself alone or I'm cooking for other people.Suzy Chase: Describe how this cookbook is organized.Alison Roman: So this book is a bit different from Dining In in that I've organized it by how I like to put a meal together, rather than by topics. So it starts off with snacks, and there are little subsections within each chapter, but snacks or dips, and vegetables, and crunchy things, and salty things, and cheeses and stuff like that. And then it moves into salads, there are crunchy salads, there are sort-of salads, there are leafy salads.Alison Roman: And then there are the sides, which I find to be definitely distinct from salads in that, to me, sides can be grains, beans, pasta, chickpeas, roasted vegetables, things with cheese in them, maybe something a bit hardier, something more comforting and substantial. And then there are the mains, and that includes all the proteins and then some pastas and vegetarian dishes.Alison Roman: And then sweet stuff, which is a pretty slender chapter in this particular book, because I feel like dessert does not have to be a part of having people over. But to me, it's a really good mix of dishes that are excellent for serving to groups.Suzy Chase: And you can even serve fruit on ice.Alison Roman: You can, you can literally just put fresh fruit on ice, and serve that for dessert. I've done it a million times, people love it.Suzy Chase: So you have three helpful things at the beginning. One, ask for help; two, pick your battles; and three, which is the hardest one for me, a typical home cook, never apologize. So let's discuss. What if you're a control freak? How can we ask for help? Not talking about myself.Alison Roman: Well, that's a huge lesson that I'm still learning all the time, but I think it's learning that things don't always have to go your way, that you don't always have to have control over everything, lessons that I'm still trying to teach myself. But understanding, would you rather be stressed out, or would you rather relinquish some control? And after years in the kitchen and having people over, I realized that I'd rather not be stressed out. So, that is the choice, and to me, letting somebody else do something is the easiest way to achieve that.Suzy Chase: I heard Julia Turshen say one time she makes one person take out the garbage.Alison Roman: Oh yeah, I make everyone take out the garbage. I make everyone bring ice, and I make everyone take out the garbage.Suzy Chase: Don't apologize, because you're not running a restaurant. It won't be perfect.Alison Roman: You go to a restaurant to have a certain level of service, and to have things go well, and to have things be perfect, and you know what to expect. And that's not your home, you know what I mean?Suzy Chase: Yeah. But what is it with people that come over, and they expect it, and you expect it, to be perfection?Alison Roman: That's the thing, I don't think people expect it, I don't think anyone expects it. I think that we project that, I think that we-Suzy Chase: Yes, it's in our head.Alison Roman: "People are going to judge me if I don't have matching plates, or they're going to judge me if I don't have the right silverware, or if my house looks a little messy, or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." But we're not. And if you think that you are going to be judged for any of that stuff, you probably shouldn't have them over for dinner.Suzy Chase: You wrote, "I do love New York City's farmer's markets, but getting through a subway turnstile and riding a crowded train with produce for 14 people is not a chill experience." I feel the same way. So what do you do?Alison Roman: So I like to kind of approach my shopping in the same way that I approach my fashion sense, which is I'm a very high-low person, I like to mix and match, and I like to get my things from a lot of different places. So for the farmer's market, I will absolutely get certain specialty items from there, like really in-season vegetables, I always get my salad mixes from there, my good bread, things like that that I know are going to be best when purchased at the farmer's market.Alison Roman: And then kind of for everything else, staple items, I just either get from the grocery store, sometimes I'll use an online delivering service if I'm really in a pinch. But yeah, I feel like doing that, when you live in a city where you have a car, it's obviously a bit different, you can just go from the market to the car to your home. But for me, I have to consider the things that I'm actually traveling with, and so I really need to make them count.Suzy Chase: What's your thing with Eastern European dairy products?Alison Roman: Oh, I love them. If you've ever been to an Eastern European grocery store, the selection of sour cream and butter is unbelievable. And they also have a crazy selection of yogurt and other cheeses, but the sour cream and butter selections are mind-blowing. They have 40 different types of each, and then 40 more in a different flavor profile, or salted or unsalted, or sweet or savory, or whatever. It is just nuts. I am overwhelmed, and the packaging is amazing, and the quality is really great, and they taste different, you know what I mean?Suzy Chase: I always thought sour cream was sour cream was sour cream. I understand butter, but sour cream?Alison Roman: Yeah. It's fat content, tanginess, how long was it soured for, it's a lot, there's a lot of difference. And the only way you'll ever know is if you buy every type of sour cream that's on offer at the market, which I have tried to do.Suzy Chase: Do not confuse snacks with hors d'oeuvres or canapés. Let's talk about anchovies, one of your snack essentials. Describe your spicy marinated anchovies with potato chips.Alison Roman: Mm, they're so, so good. So this is basically a snack that I had in Italy. We were sitting eating ice cream, and they brought over these anchovy snacks, it was just a little dish of anchovies with potato chips with toothpicks, and we were like, "Well, I guess we eat them on the potato chips." And even if that wasn't the intention, which it may not have been, that's how I did it, and it was so good that I came back from my trip and that's all I wanted to serve to people.Alison Roman: And you might think, "Oh is that too salty? It's like salt on salt." But when you douse the anchovies in vinegar and add some chili or fresh peppers, then it takes it to a completely different place, and it's just so, so good.Suzy Chase: What are the best anchovies and the best chips for this combo?Alison Roman: I feel like the anchovies depends on the brand that you are able to find. I like Ortiz, which is a pretty widely available brand. And then for a potato chip, you definitely want a sturdy, kettle chip style chip, nothing that's going to be flimsy. I think kettle chips are really good, Cape Cod are really good, Zapp's are also good, North Fork potato chips, those are also excellent. Any sort of ... You know what I mean, it's like a sturdy chip.Suzy Chase: Hardy, yeah. Do you think there's going to be a recipe in this cookbook ... I know everyone's going to ask you this too.Alison Roman: I don't have an answer.Suzy Chase: Do you think there's a recipe in this cookbook that catches on like wildfire, like those darned salted butter chocolate chunk shortbread cookies, or the stew?Alison Roman: I hope so, but I never know what it's going to be. I just hope the whole book does as well, my hope is that everything in the book does as well as any of those recipes. It's tough, because when you release things like the stew, the recipes come out one at a time, so they can really be highlighted. But with a book, you're releasing 130-something recipes at one time. So it's going to take a while for people to work through it, and get a sense of what everybody's cooking. I won't know for a while, but I think it'll be great.Suzy Chase: I can't wait. So I've heard you say you don't really consume any food media, you don't read magazines, you don't read cookbooks. Where do you get your recipe inspiration?Alison Roman: Mostly travel, to be honest. I love getting out of New York. Travel can mean going a few hours upstate, or leaving the city, or leaving the state, or leaving the country. I think just getting out of your comfort zone and getting out of your usual rut is a really helpful way to get new inspiration. And that doesn't mean necessarily exotic ingredients, just cooking in a new kitchen with new equipment can inspire you.Suzy Chase: You have one cookie recipe in this cookbook, Tiny Salty Chocolaty Cookies, and you almost cut it?Alison Roman: I almost cut it, because I was almost like, "I don't even want to give people another cookie to talk about." It felt like I was setting myself up to fail. People will always compare it to the other cookie, and I almost just didn't even want to give anyone to compare anything to.Suzy Chase: Yeah, no comments.Alison Roman: Yeah, no comments.Suzy Chase: Over the weekend, I made your recipes for Celery Salad with Cilantro and Sesame, that's a tongue twister, on page 100. How is this your humble homage to New York City?Alison Roman: It feels like I was inspired by the salad that I eat a lot of times at this place called Xi'an Famous Foods, which is a Western-style Chinese, fast casual ... I guess it's a chain at this point, there are quite a few of them in New York. But I eat there are a lot, I love their hand-pulled noodles, I love their soft tofu. But I really, really love their tiger salad, which is a very, very vinegary salad made with lots of cilantro stems and celery and scallions, and it is so delicious.Alison Roman: My version's a little bit different, it's a little less cilantro-heavy, more celery-heavy, and it doesn't ... I forget, there's one main difference, I forget what it is. If I ate them side by side, I could tell you. But for me, it's being inspired by something, and I want people to know where I was inspired by so they can actually go try the original, because it's different from mine, but also worth eating. And yeah, that was something that was burned into my brain, of a type of salad that I want eat all the time with so many different things.Suzy Chase: I also made your Sticky Chili Chicken with Hot-and-Sour Pineapple on page 196. Now, you don't love sweet with savory, but this dish is an exception.Alison Roman: Yeah. I feel like, for whatever reason, and I don't even know where I had the idea for this dish, but I had a craving for it. I was like, "You know what I really want? Just a deeply sticky, savory, sweet pineapple with chicken." I just thought that sounded so, so good. It probably comes from my love of al pastor tacos, although this flavor profile is definitely more Asian-ish because it's got fish sauce and chili paste and brown sugar. There's something about hot temperatures and hot and sweet food that goes really well together, so I think I must've come up with it in the middle of summer when I was just wanting that style of eating.Suzy Chase: So I also made your Lemony Turmeric Tea Cake on page 309, the ultimate house cake. Talk a little bit about this recipe.Alison Roman: Oh, this is my favorite, favorite little cake. I love the idea of having a cake when people come over, even if they're just stopping by, or if you're going to somebody's house, or whatever. But this is a one-bowl cake, you don't need a mixer. It's really bright and cheery and yellow, and it's lemony and buttery. I don't know, it just is such a happy little cake. And it's pretty foolproof, I'm pretty sure you just can't mess it up.Alison Roman: It's good to have one thing that you're kind of known for. And there was a period of time where every time somebody would come over I was making this cake, just because I wanted to have some on hand. And it's not that sweet, so you could kind of eat it as a breakfast cake if you wanted. But it's also sweet enough to where you could serve it for dessert, and it's just kind of a good, all-purpose little house cake.Suzy Chase: I also made a better garlic bread, Caramelized Garlic on Toast with Anchovies. The anchovies gave it a crazy, salty, briny touch. It was so good.Alison Roman: Yeah, it is super, super good. I feel like that one comes from my love of caramelizing garlic in general, and just having things to put it on. But I also just realized that, with garlic bread, I think the biggest problem is that people use raw garlic, and they chop it and they put it in the butter, and then they spread it on the bread, and then they char it or they broil it or toast it, and those bits of garlic either don't cook enough, or they burn.Suzy Chase: They burn, yeah.Alison Roman: Yeah, so my solution was to kind of cook them into a paste beforehand, so that way there are never bits that have the opportunity to burn. So you can also use a lot more of the garlic, because it mellows out through caramelizing. And so what you end up with is this kind of salty, really savory, almost sweet flavor because of the way the garlic cooks. That's just so crazy good to me, and every time I make this garlic bread for people, they absolutely lose their minds.Suzy Chase: Now to my segment called My Favorite Cookbook. Aside from this cookbook, what is your all-time favorite cookbook, and why?Alison Roman: Probably the Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook, I love, love, love that cookbook. It's just a ... I haven't ever cooked anything out of it, but I love reading it for the recipe inspiration, and the names, and the stories behind it. It's a really wonderful a mix of narrative and good ideas for menus. But what I like about it is that it's personal, and the stories about the recipes and the menus are more about where they took place, why they took place, than a head note. Sometimes you want to provide service, but sometimes you also just want to provide context, and I really enjoy reading the personal parts of the stories.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?Alison Roman: You can find me on social media @alisoneroman on Instagram and Twitter, and I think Facebook, and pretty much every platform. I try to streamline, just because having more than one name is annoying. And my website is alisoneroman.com.Suzy Chase: It's life the way we live it, it's messy as hell, and it's nothing fancy. Thanks so much, Alison, for chatting with me on Cookery by the Book Podcast.Alison Roman: Of course, I'm so happy to be here. Thank you for including me.Outro: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com, and thanks for listening to the Number One Cookbook Podcast, Cookery by the Book.

Honey & Co. at Home Middle Eastern Recipes from our KitchenBy Sarit Packer & Itamar Srulovich Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.Sarit: Hi, I'm Sarit Packer.Itamar: And I'm Itamar Srulovich. We both together have the restaurant Honey & Co. in London as well as Honey & Smoke, and Honey & Spice.Sarit: And we've just written our third cookbook Honey & Co. At Home.Itamar: Which is about what we eat at home, what we cook at home.Suzy Chase: You were born in Israel, grew up in Israel, and met your husband, Itamar, by mistake in a restaurant kitchen. Tell me about that.Sarit: I'd actually trained in London, and then moved to Israel, and was working and had no intentions on being romantically involved with everyone, I was very-Itamar: With anyone.Sarit: With anyone.Itamar: Yeah.Sarit: What did I say?Itamar: With everyone.Sarit: With everyone. Definitely not with everyone. I was not romantically involved with everyone, nor anyone at all. I was very career focused and very minded and I had this plan about how I was going to run a kitchen, a Michelin star kitchen by the time I was 30 and relationships were not part of that plan. But then I worked in this kitchen and this guy came in, and he was extremely annoying at the beginning, and we became really good friends first. No?Itamar: Yes, absolutely.Sarit: You might not think it was good friends, but we became good friends first and then somehow things happened. Then we ended up getting married and it wasn't the plan at all.Suzy Chase: So this cookbook is very home cook friendly, you even divide up the chapters in an interesting way, beginning with for us two, then moving on to for friends. Describe how you organize this cookbook.Itamar: Well, we had a lot of debates about how to go about it. We knew what recipes we wanted to put it in, because we knew what we cook at home, and what we thought we'd want to share. But we didn't know quite how to slice it up, and we felt that the regular divide of starter, main, dessert just doesn't work, because nobody really eats like this at home. Do they? Do we?Suzy Chase: No, you're right.Itamar: Unless you have very fancy guests, you wouldn't have starters, mains, and desserts. You'd just have whatever you're having.Sarit: Also sometimes you just want a snack, or you want to nibble on the sofa or you just want something that is in your freezer. My kind of favorite thing is cookies that are just in the freezer that you can slice a few off and bake. So, we started to play around with this idea of what do we cook for when. What recipes actually, how do they appear in our lives? And this made the most sense to us because they are things really that we just eat when it's the two of us and these kinds of staples that we cook for dinners if friends come and that was a natural way to divide the book.Suzy Chase: In the for the weekend section you have recipes like honey and spice cookies, fig and feta pide, Jerusalem sesame bread. So what sorts of dishes do you like to make on the weekend?Itamar: Well, I think the weekend is kind of... You don't really... The weekday cooking is you just want to get some food on the table, you don't want to be too involved, but you do sometimes want to geek out and really take on a kitchen project. And baking I find is something that you do more on the weekend then in the week. So there's a lot of these things, especially the baking recipes that you take time and enjoy the process and you know?Sarit: Also, that you can kind of go back to and nibble a bit at different times of day, if that makes sense? If we make a big loaf of aubergine bread, then you slice a bit, and you eat it, but then later in the afternoon you can have another slice. It's very approachable in the way you can eat it, but takes a bit more time to prepare.Suzy Chase: So one of the things you always wanted to do was travel and taste all kinds of foods you couldn't get in Israel. How did you land in London in 2004?Itamar: You'll be sensing a theme here, we didn't plan to stay in London for a long time. We just thought that we will come for a couple of months.Sarit: Yeah. The idea was to move on, and do all of Europe, because I had the English passport and once we had married it meant Itamar could work all over the European Union. We thought we would do London for four to six months and then go to France and then do Spain and then maybe-Itamar: Italy.Sarit: Yeah. And that was the plan and we really believed that was what we were going to do, but it's quite hard to settle in London. It takes time to get apartments, to get proper jobs. Actually we loved it and we didn't feel that we were ready to leave it yet. Yeah. So it happened that it was a year then it was two years, but we do a lot of traveling. We just do it as a holiday rather than working. We try and go to as many different places as we can, and taste as much food as we can everywhere.Suzy Chase: It's kind of like living in New York City, I came here and I was like, "I'm just going to live here two years. It's really expensive." And then I've been here for like 20 years now. It's so funny.Sarit: Yeah.Itamar: Yeah.Sarit: It's really strange, these big cities, they suck you in. And also, there's always another part of the city that you don't know.Itamar: To discover. Yeah.Sarit: Yeah. There's different cuisines in the city, and you can travel like an hour and be in a completely different place, and that never stops in London. We still don't feel like we know it all. So it's been 15 years.Itamar: Yeah. I think we very much are in love with London now, I don't think that we be able to live anywhere else. Would you?Sarit: I don't think so.Suzy Chase: The first step in your food journey was realizing that the food of your homeland was pretty terrific, and you didn't have to look west. Talk a little bit about that.Itamar: We had a very clear line drawn between the food that we like to eat and cook at home and the food that we cook for work. We were very much looking to cook Italian food, or French food, or European food. We didn't quite even think about serving the Middle Eastern food that we love so much in a professional capacity. So when we started realizing, and this is, something that London is very good at taking on different traditions and celebrating them. When we arrived to London and we suddenly started to see that yeah, this is actually just delicious food and people want to eat it and we certainly want to eat and cook it. So why the hell not?Suzy Chase: Isn't it interesting that Israeli food wasn't a thing 10 years ago?Sarit: It completely wasn't though. It really was just what we had at home. We would sometimes go in London, there's a few restaurants that do beautiful Lebanese food, and we would go to that as a reminiscent thing. But they're not very popular, or they weren't very popular in London at the time. It was kind of like an obscure thing to go and eat this food. It had a complete shift in people's understanding, and in people's relationship to the kind of cuisine. But it's good, it's good that people know more about it now.Suzy Chase: Sarit, for you growing up met chop salads at every meal, like a condiment almost. When making a chop salad, if you get good cucumbers, you're halfway there. Talk about the difference in flavor between a good cucumber, and an okay cucumber.Itamar: Oh my God, how long have you got?Sarit: I know it's like the biggest subject. We still, when we go back home, or if we go to Jordan or anything like that, we come back with suitcases full of cucumbers. I mean, it's ridiculous. But there's something about the crisp... First of all, small cucumbers. Which they keep a sweetness, and a freshness, and a real kind of crispiness to them. It's just something we don't get in the UK. The ones in the UK come in singles and plastic bags, you know? Individually-Itamar: They're shrink-wrapped.Sarit: Individually shrink wrapped. They're huge. They're full of water and seeds, and they just don't have that crispiness. It's almost like somewhere between a marrow or zucchini and a cucumber. It's not what we call cucumbers. So, kind of for us everything is about those tiny fingerling ones. Thin, crisp, hardly any seeds, very little juice.Itamar: Very sweet.Sarit: Yeah. It just makes a huge difference to a salad.Itamar: No, but it's true what she said. If one of us would go either back home to Israel or if we travel, we would come back with like three, four kilos of cucumbers, fresh green ones in the suitcase. And this is you know how when you travel you bring candy to work, we just bring cucumbers and placed them in the kitchen. Everyone just digs in.Sarit: But they dig in, people love them.Suzy Chase: Is there anything we should look for at the grocery store when we're buying cucumbers? Can you like visually see it?Sarit: If you can find ones that still have the tiny yellow flower attached and it's still yellow, that's the best thing because it means there's so recently picked that that flower hasn't had a chance to, wilt and die, because they can keep quite well in the fridge for a while. What happens in the supermarkets is you never get to see that produce that still has those tiny little yellow flowers. And if you do, that's the freshest you can find.Itamar: They want to be really, really tight and taut. They shouldn't have any give when you press them. That's kind of what I look for and they should be nice and unblemished, if possible.Sarit: And quite light as well. Because the water, that heaviness that comes from water, they should be very light to toss.Suzy Chase: One recipe in the cookbook that I wasn't familiar with was shatta? Is that how you pronounce it?Sarit: Yeah.Itamar: Yeah.Suzy Chase: Can you describe this and what do you put it on?Itamar: What don't you put it on?Sarit: Yeah. It's kind of our version of, I suppose, any kind of chili sauce that you would get, like a Sriracha or anything like that. It's a fermented chili, salted, leave it to kind of semi-pickle, semi-spice it. It kind of makes it spicier but mellower as well. I can't explain. Because it loses-Itamar: The harsh.Sarit: ... the harsh bite on your tongue and it's just delicious on anything that you want to add a bit of spice to, that's a thing to add.Itamar: This is something that you'd make in the summer when you get loads of a fresh chilies, then the excess, you just chop it up and put it in salt and leave it and that would be your condiment for the winter. But you can do it whenever you have extra chilies, or even red peppers, you can make yourself a nice little condiment.Suzy Chase: What is one recipe in this cookbook that immediately takes you back home?Sarit: Potato and feta fritters.Itamar: Yeah. I was thinking that as well.Suzy Chase: For both of you?Sarit: Well, it's just because it's different things. It is, but you know what, because we have this in Hanukkah, in the Jewish tradition you fry a whole load of things. Yeah? I don't know how you could have a holiday that just celebrates frying lots of food, but it just is. And I'm not a massive doughnut fan but fried potatoes with a bit of honey on, that I can definitely prescribe. So it comes from this kind of culture of latkes and onions and potatoes fried. But then if you just add a bit of feta for salt and a bit of honey on top, it's just the nicest thing.Suzy Chase: Tell me Honey & Co., Honey & Smoke, and Honey & Spice.Itamar: Honey & Co. is the first one, it's the-Sarit: Baby.Itamar: Yeah. It's the baby. It is the baby. And it's tiny. It's very, very small. And it's 10 tables. So it sits 25.Sarit: Yeah, 25 people. It's very intimate and it's very home cooking of the Middle East. Yeah, stews and slow cooked meats and meatballs and you know?Itamar: Salads.Sarit: Salads. It's very, very comforting food.Itamar: And then Honey & Smoke is a big restaurant. It's a proper grill house. It's inspired by the grill houses and kebab shops of the Middle East that we love. And this is very big, very buzzy. The food is very robust. Everything's on the grill. Lots of mesa, beautiful bread, and sweets. And Honey & Spice is a deli, really. We always say that it's the most fun, because we can sell everything that we want. Beautiful tahini that we get from Lebanon and olive oil, that we get from Israel and from Spain and from Greece. We make loads of jam to sell there, and cookies, and biscuits, and breads, and crackers, and cookbooks.Sarit: But also we buy these amazing knives that are handmade and we buy pots and pans that we like. So it's like our fantasy shop of everything we would want to have in our kitchen, but we don't really have space because we have a London flat. So it's all in the deli.Suzy Chase: And these are all in London Proper? All three of these?Itamar: Yeah.Sarit: They're all five minutes walk from each other. So it's really funny. But we always wanted to be able to be in all of them all the time. And the only way to do that, is to make them walking distance. So they're less than five minutes walk from each other.Suzy Chase: Last night I made your tuna dip with broccoli, potato, and eggs on page 70.Itamar: Did you like it?Suzy Chase: Oh gosh. You know what? This dip is perfect for a quick weeknight meal.Itamar: Yeah.Sarit: Yes. That's exactly [crosstalk 00:13:59].Suzy Chase: It was actually filling.Sarit: This is when we forget we have people coming or if it's just the two of us and we're running back from work and [inaudible 00:14:08]. And the one thing that you're guaranteed to find in a London supermarket is broccoli and potatoes and some eggs. We always have good tin tuna, because it's one of our favorite things. It's just so quick to make it. It's from everything that you have at home with whatever vegetables are in season as well, because it's great in summer when you have all the produce, just eating anything with that tuna dip is delicious.Suzy Chase: I'm interested to hear about the Portuguese deli in Brixton that served this dish.Sarit: They're sadly closed.Itamar: Yeah they closed. I know it's a big deal here in the States, gentrification. Certainly it is in London, but in a slightly different way though I feel.Sarit: It is, but it definitely fell victim to gentrification that deli, because it was there for years. I used to go to it first time I lived in London more than 20 years ago and we started going there together, because we lived just around the corner. But you know? It used to be the place where you get the best tuna and the best cured Spanish meats and stuff like that. But sadly no more.Itamar: Yeah. And also it wasn't fancy because now you think about these European delis. We do have a beautiful Spanish one, but it's so expensive that it's like a special treat, but there you can just go and buy some decent ham and good tuna and stuff like that for... It wasn't a special occasion. It was just very good everyday produce. I miss that. And they were such nice people as well. They were always so nice to you.Suzy Chase: Yeah. That's happening everywhere in New York City. It's really sad.Itamar: Yeah.Sarit: It is because these kind of local places where you know it's just the family and this is their food and they try and keep the prices reasonable and everything like that, instead of just marking everything up in a huge way. It made all this kind of food accessible, and where we live as kind of little Portugal in London, if that. You know that area where a lot of the Portuguese community lives. And there's still some other delis around, but this specific one that we would go to all the time is-Itamar: Yeah. That was the best one.Suzy Chase: Now to my new segment, this season called my favorite cookbook. Aside from this cookbook, what is your all time favorite cookbook and why?Sarit: Wow. This is like an impossibility isn't it, to ask those questions? Can you choose them by times in your life? Because different times call for different things, don't they?Itamar: I think you need to give us at least three.Suzy Chase: Okay.Sarit: There's two of us so maybe we can-Itamar: We live with something like over a thousand cookbooks at home, I think. We have cookbooks everywhere, literally everywhere. When we were in the West Coast in the summer on the bit of the book tour and, I think, we came back with so many cookbooks. So, it's giving a new definition to the term book tour.Sarit: Yeah. Book tour, buying all the buying all the books. Let's see.Itamar: Can I tell you... I'm going to say which one is my favorite now. Right now.Suzy Chase: Okay.Itamar: My two favorites-Sarit: You can't choose two. [crosstalk 00:17:26].Itamar: No, I said three.Sarit: No, but what about me?Itamar: Okay. So you say-Suzy Chase: Okay, you each get one.Itamar: Yeah. We each get one and then there's a bonus one.Suzy Chase: Oh my gosh. Okay.Itamar: Okay. You start.Sarit: Well there's a book that really got me into this career, or let's say, cemented my existence in the career in the first place, which is called Niko's. Which was the first British chef to get three Michelin star and he writes this great book. He was self taught, ex-banker I think, or insurance broker or something completely unexpected. He taught himself how to become a chef because he loved food so much. His restaurant, at the time when I started to become a chef, was seminal in bringing London into food. It was just so inspiring for me. The food is amazing and it's probably slightly dated now, but it was the reason I got so passionate about this fine dining, which is not the food I cook nowadays. And I will never probably do it again, because I don't feel that way about it now.Sarit: But the book in itself was a huge part in my career. It's very English, you know? And because he was over time in England and that first really proper fine dining restaurant. It's an amazing book and he writes so great. He did not give a hoot about anything. He was rude to... He was one of these chefs that would ask customers to leave if they didn't appreciate his food. He was kind of crazy. And the first one he opened was in South London in a really bad neighborhood. I think, it burned down. It was really a big thing at the time. And for me, that whole story was inspiring.Itamar: Mine, I have to say... I love all cookbooks really, but I think my current favorites. I'm going to split it between two new American purchases that we like. One new American purchase, which is the Slanted Door cookbook from San Francisco and that is Vietnamese food which I started cooking from. It's so nice. The food is so nice. And the other one that I love is the Squirrel cookbook. It's really good.Suzy Chase: And they have a restaurant, right?Itamar: Yeah.Sarit: Yeah.Suzy Chase: Okay.Sarit: We could talk about cookbooks really forever.Suzy Chase: I know. Me too. That's why I have this podcast. So where can we find you on the web and social media?Sarit: Everything's at Honey & Co. honeyandco.co.uk is our website. And then on Instagram we're honeyandco, or you can find honeyandsmokerestaurant, or honeyandspicedeli. And then there's... What's the other one? Twitter, it's also just @honeyandco. A-N-D.Itamar: The podcast is wherever you get your podcasts. That's Honey & Co. The Food Talks.Sarit: Honey & Co. The Food Talks.Suzy Chase: In Honey & Co. At Home you wrote, "Life is complex, but cooking is easy and something good is guaranteed to happen if you just follow the recipe." I love that. Thank you so much for coming on Cookery by the Book Podcast.Sarit: Thanks so much. Thanks for having us.Itamar: It's a pleasure. Thanks for having us.Outro: Subscribe over on cookerybythebook.com and thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

TheGTruth by Giovanni Canales 0:00 - Intro 4:59 - Northwest Division in NBA 15:10 - Top of the Line 23:26 - Dak Prescott Film v Packers 54:15 - Outro ---------------------------------------- SUBSCRIBE to TheGTruth on iTunes https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/thegtruth/id1446663407 ---------------------------------------- SUBSCRIBE to TheGTruth on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/38NrOCgJB54tPLJtmSCqOg ---------------------------------------- SUBSCRIBE to TheGTruth on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDzs0j_14QNh82ov8tRxHlg ---------------------------------------- LISTEN to TheGTruth on SoundCloud https://soundcloud.com/thegtruth ---------------------------------------- Follow Me On Instagram https://www.instagram.com/gio_canales/ ---------------------------------------- Follow Me on Twitter https://twitter.com/gio_xcanales ---------------------------------------- --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/thegtruth/message

TheGTruth by Giovanni Canales 0:00 - Intro 6:05 - The Patriots Are Fine 20:36 - NBA Atlantic Division 37:37 - Everything I Got Wrong 45:58 - Outro ---------------------------------------- SUBSCRIBE to TheGTruth on iTunes https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/thegtruth/id1446663407 ---------------------------------------- SUBSCRIBE to TheGTruth on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/38NrOCgJB54tPLJtmSCqOg ---------------------------------------- SUBSCRIBE to TheGTruth on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDzs0j_14QNh82ov8tRxHlg ---------------------------------------- LISTEN to TheGTruth on SoundCloud https://soundcloud.com/thegtruth ---------------------------------------- Follow Me On Instagram https://www.instagram.com/gio_canales/ ---------------------------------------- Follow Me on Twitter https://twitter.com/gio_xcanales ---------------------------------------- --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/thegtruth/message

Apple: Recipes from the OrchardBy James Rich Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table talking to cookbook authors.James Rich: Hi, I'm James Rich, and I'm the author or Apple: Recipes from the Orchard, which is out now.Suzy Chase: Apple is a celebration of this humble fruit. What inspired you to write this cookbook?James Rich: That's quite an interesting question, actually. My family, we have a cider farm in Somerset in England, where I'm from. It's been going for generations, and even before we had the farm we were working on the land and working within the fruit and vegetable industry in Somerset for centuries before that. So for me, it represents home, and the inspiration behind focusing on apple in the book is because... it's to link back to my family. It has multiple meanings for me, but also for us as a culture as well. I think it has a number of meanings for us in culture through history and religion, even. It's got multiple meanings, but for me it's something that represents home.Suzy Chase: Did you include any old family recipes in this cookbook?James Rich: Yeah, I did actually. The cider farm back at home, we actually have a restaurant there, as well, so the idea for the cookbook came to me many, many years ago when I worked there as a teenager. We'd use the produce from the farm, the apple juice and the cider, the hard cider it would be called in America, we used those, obviously, in the dishes that we served. We used to have customers come in and ask us about how we used the produce from the farm in the dishes, so we thought about maybe writing out a leaflet or some information about the recipes and sharing them with customers.James Rich: When I actually started writing it a couple of years ago, I was able to go back to the farm and talk to them about those dishes years ago, and include some of them in the book like the stews, pies and things like that. They're slightly, slightly edited versions to what we used to put in the farm, but there's some old recipes in there that we've updated for 2019.Suzy Chase: Wait, you call our hard cider your apple cider?James Rich: Hard cider in the US is just cider in the UK. So, when I say cider, I'm talking about the alcoholic beverage. When I say cider in America, you're talking about apple juice, right?Suzy Chase: Yeah.James Rich: Yeah, non-alcoholic. Cider in the UK has got alcohol in it. It's very confusing.Suzy Chase: So, what do you call the non-alcoholic one?James Rich: Just apple juice.Suzy Chase: Okay.James Rich: Yeah.Suzy Chase: I'm taking notes.Suzy Chase: So, a little history. Where did the apple tree originate?James Rich: Interestingly, the apple tree, originally, is from an areas that's known as Kazakhstan. Out there, they actually have forests. They still do, apparently. I'd love to visit it. Hopefully will be able to one day. They actually have forests of apple trees out there, and if you go out there this time of year, obviously all of the trees are covered in the glorious fruit. The smell must be amazing.James Rich: It originated in that part of the world, and then, through various empires and things, the Roman Empire was crucial in moving the trees around with them as they conquered various parts of the world. Much of the spread of the tree happened during the Roman times. They figured that the apple was, obviously, a very hardy fruit, it's very nutritious, and it was easily stored over winter. So the uprooted some of the trees, I imagine, moved it around their ever-expanding empire, and helped share the fruit to new groups of people and embed it in our everyday life. You can find apples in every single country in the world now, they're so far reaching.Suzy Chase: As you said, you're a master cider maker's son, and your family has been making a living off the land for centuries in Somerset, England. Tell me about one of your fondest memories growing up around the apple trees.James Rich: Oh, I have loads. If you ever get to visit Somerset, I would really encourage you to. We live on the Somerset Levels, which is a very flat part of the country. They Levels are below sea level, so they tend to flood quite easily. In the winter, it's quite a wet environment, but because of that and because of all the water, it's absolutely vibrant green. It's just such a beautiful place, and we're surrounded by all of these wonderful apple trees that grow really well in that part of the world.James Rich: Lots of memories. My dad, obviously, he would be, this time of year in the last part of the year, he was pressing the apples, but in the early parts of the year he was pruning the trees. So, when I was younger, I have many memories of me and my sisters going with him to work and running around an orchard while he's pruning trees and digging, ferreting in ditches and thickets to find little animals, toads and things like that. Having a whale of a time getting lost in this magical world under the trees. It's very evocative for me. This time of year, as well, if you go around September-October when the apples are being pressed, the farm smells of that beautiful crushed apple smell. I've got very found memories of that as well.Suzy Chase: I don't think I know anyone who doesn't like apples, do you?James Rich: No. Funny story. When I was writing the book, I haven't met anybody who doesn't like apples; however, I do have a friend who, when I was testing the recipes... I don't know about you, if you've ever tested recipes, but I can only test them so many times before I lose the ability to be critical or even taste them, which is obviously quite important if you're writing about food. So, I went on social media, spoke to some friends, and said, "Look, if I send you some recipes, can you test them for me?" Obviously, I'm writing an apple cookbook and it was known then that that's what I was doing.James Rich: I sent one to one friend, it was the tumeric and apple soup, and I said, "If you could just give it a test. Let me know, be as critical as you want when you come back." So she made it. She got back in touch with me and said, "Oh, I've made the soup." I was like, "Oh, brilliant. What did you think?" She said, "It was okay, but I don't really like apples in savory dishes." So, I was like, "Oh. I'm not really sure what we can do for you, then." It was very good. She did like it, but she wasn't so keen on apples in cooking, so I suppose the book's maybe not for her.Suzy Chase: I get that, because I love raw apples, but I don't love apples that have been cooked. It changes the crunchiness, it changes the consistency of it. I get it. I'm with her a little bit.James Rich: Yeah. There's a recipe in the book, which I've made a couple of times as I've been doing events launching the book, which is an apple, coconut and ginger curry, and that generally is one dish in the book that people really question. They're like, "Oh, really? How does apple work with a curry sauce?" That recipe, specifically, has its roots in the Caribbean and in Sri Lanka, where they use a lot of fruit and spices together. I personally think it's delicious, but it is one of those, we would say in the UK, a marmite meal where you either love it or you hate it.Suzy Chase: Yes. So, this is a really good story. Tell us about the drinking water situation in Somerset.James Rich: Oh, yes. As I was saying, Somerset is below sea level, and when we have a lot of rainfall that often means that the land floods. In centuries gone past, it would result in the water stagnating and not being incredibly healthy to drink. And actually quite dangerous; it could kill you if it was mixed with something not very friendly. In the very old days, the local landowners and farmers would make cider and beer as a form of payment for the landworkers, and they would take that as payment because it was a form of healthy hydration. So, you'd be allocated an amount you could drink every day. I don't think it was, probably, quite as alcoholic as the hard cider we have today, but the fermentation process and mixing it, it kills all the bugs and the bad things in the water. It brought it back round to being a healthy form of hydration for people.James Rich: So, apples and cider, it's not just a fruit and a drink that we enjoy today at our leisure and we have a great time sitting in a nice square or in the beer garden in a pub, enjoying it on a nice hot day. It actually has roots in that part of the world as being something that was really, really fundamental to society. So it's an important thing.Suzy Chase: I feel a little badly for the apple because it's been labeled a forbidden fruit, and lots of other negative connotations.James Rich: Yeah, it has. It goes well back into religious culture, and I think it's a really unfair label. It's super healthy, it's packed full of vitamins. Yes, of course, it has natural sugars. It's much better. I think that we should revisit our love for this fruit because it would be much better if we snacked on things like apple and other fruits, rather than reached for our refined sugar snacks that we tend to have today or fizzy pop and things like that. So, I think it's an unfair label, but I think people are getting it again now. I think it's having a bit of a resurgence, hopefully.Suzy Chase: Growing apples is no easy business. Describe how they're selected and picked.James Rich: The tree is grafted together. If you need to make a new variety, you'll make a parent stock and you'll graft those two stock together to formulate a new type of apple. So, you can find trees that have multiple different types of apple on them. You can have one tree in your garden that has, say, a cooking apple and an eating apple, an apple fruits in very late August and an apple that fruits in, maybe, October time. Just on one tree because of the way that you draft the young tree to an older version of it. It's a very technical way of growing fruit, but it results in really hardy trees and really hardy fruit stock, which is really important.James Rich: Then, the farmers or the cider makers will go out and assess the types of apple that they want to use. There are absolutely thousands of different varieties in the world. I think it's about 7,500 globally, different varieties of apple. I think, in the US, it's about 4,500 that you grow there, and I think we're about 2,500-3,000 in the UK. There are so many to pick from, and there are constantly new varieties being added. Whether there's some with a higher sugar content for a juice, or whether it's something that's a little bit more bitter-sharp for cider or even cooking, there's an apple for everything. There are apples that have pineapple notes, or even a tobacco taste or strawberry, and there are others that are just very, very sharp, standard apple flavor. It's a very interesting topic, and if you spoke to my dad, who is the master of this, he would talk for hours on how you propagate and grow apple trees.Suzy Chase: So, how are they picked? Is there a machine?James Rich: It's actually better for cider if the apples drop. They drop to the floor, which means they're super, super ripe, and they can then be picked up by a machine or handpicked, depending on the size of the orchard. My family source the apples all from local orchard owners. We obviously grow some ourselves and have our own orchards, but there's never enough to fulfill demand so they always buy them in from other sources, from other orchards. But because a lot of these orchards in that part of the world are super, super old, you sometimes can't get machinery around the trees, so you have to go and handpick, which obviously takes a bit longer. Generally, you'll wait until they drop to the floor, and then you'll pick them up by machine or by hand, or give the branches a little shake to make the ripest apples drop and pick them that way. But yeah, it takes a long time.Suzy Chase: You were talking about all of the varieties. Is there a market for all of these different varieties of apples?James Rich: No, and it's a real shame. When I started writing the variety section in the book, I wanted to try and include as many different varieties, and as many weird and wonderful varieties, as possible, but there are so many, it was practically impossible to do. There are specialists, and I really encourage people to speak to their local farmers market or do some research and find some local growers, there's some amazing ones in the US, who specialize in heritage varieties, older varieties, and something that's a little bit different because you've kept the integrity of the apple that's been there for such a long time. The taste is amazing, it really bursts in your mouth, the juice is often much better. They'll always be seasonal, as well, so you can only ever get them at the time that they're available.James Rich: I put a note in the book just encouraging people to go out and find local growers and sources for different types of varieties, because you can really have a play with those within your food. Like I said, they have multiple different flavor notes in the different varieties, so you can have a play with what works better for the dish that you're creating.Suzy Chase: What's your favorite apple in the US?James Rich: What I see a lot of there is the Macintosh, which is quite a standard variety that's available in supermarkets. It's a good generic apple and, I think, will work really well in salads as well as baking them for a desert would be delicious as well.Suzy Chase: What's your favorite in the UK?James Rich: My favorite in the UK is the Cox's Orange Pippin, which you obviously have in the US as well, so maybe I should have said that.Suzy Chase: What's it called?James Rich: It's called a Cox's Orange Pippin, and it is a very, very old variety. It's quite small, red-green color, quite sharp, but it's actually a parent apple to many of the more popular apples on the market now. If you go up the family tree of the apples, you'll often find the Cox's Orange Pippin there. It's a great apple for dicing up and throwing in a salad, very hardy, but packed with flavor.Suzy Chase: You were talking about the weird and wonderful, and I read about the Knobby Russet, the ugliest apple in the world. That made me laugh.James Rich: Yeah. Awful. That's an awful description of it because I think it's one of the most wonderful apples in the world. You don't tend to see them very often, even over here, because they have quite a hard, textured, brown skin on, and people get turned off by that. They like to see what we've been shown as being the more-preferred varieties, those shiny red- or green-skinned apples that are obviously, clearly very crispy and juicy, whereas these are rough to touch, they're a little bit brown, and they don't last as long as the other varieties do. But they are absolutely delicious, they've got a beautiful, sharp, almost creamy juice to them, and they're great in a whole variety of cooking. Actually, I love juicing them in a smoothie or something because the flavor is so distinctive.Suzy Chase: So, I love using apple cider vinegar, and I've never thought of making it at home. You have a recipe in the cookbook. Can you describe it?James Rich: Now, this is an unfiltered cider vinegar, so you will get the mother, the sediment that will collect at the bottom. So it's not as clean and crisp as the ones that you'll find in the supermarket, but it's very easy to make. What I tend to do is keep the cores and the skins of apples. So, if you're cooking, when I've cored and skinned the apples that I'm cooking with, I'll throw the cores and skins into a little bag and pop it in the freezer until I have enough to make a big batch.James Rich: Then, you add filtered water to the skins and the cores, and a little bit of sugar. What that helps do is helps ferment it. Just leave it in a dark, dry place for about... keep on checking it, but it can take anything from a couple of weeks to three-four weeks for it to ferment. It just sits there, really, and will gradually turn to vinegar. Then, once it's done, around three-four weeks, take it out, strain the apple pieces out of the liquid. Some of the sediment will still come through, so unless you have a proper filtration system it's never going to completely remove the sediment. It's fine, it's not going to hurt you. Then you have your own apple cider vinegar. Very easy, it takes a minute.Suzy Chase: As you wrote, "A book about apples wouldn't be complete without the king of apple deserts, the apple pie." Talk to me about your hunt for the perfect American apple pie.James Rich: I'm very nervous about this.Suzy Chase: Hit it!James Rich: When I was talking to my publisher about the recipes that we were looking to include, I thought, "Oh, I can't include an apple pie because everybody knows how to make that or they have their preferred recipe that's been handed down through the years," but we decided that we should make an attempt to celebrate the American apple pie. I'm very fortunate and have some friends in the US who I talked to about their recipes for apple pies, and their mothers' recipes and grandmothers'. To be honest, you're very protective of your recipes! You didn't want to give away the secrets very much, but I could glean some insight into what people like about it and what people don't like about it. I think the crust is something that you are very, very keen on.James Rich: I also did some research into... I was like, "Right. What's epitomizes America and American apple pie?" I was like, "Well, the kitchen at the White House. Let's see what they use." There was an interview done many years ago, I think it was Obama who was in the White House, so maybe not that long ago... There was an interview by the head chef at the White House who talked about the apple pie that he serves there that, apparently, Obama was very keen on. It talks about using the lard and everything in the pastry, and using a nut so it's like a nut crust in the pastry. So I thought, "Oh, brilliant. I'll try that."James Rich: I tested a recipe with some different varieties of apple. You've got Bramley apples, cooking apples, as well as things like Granny Smith in there, which help give that sauce-and-apple-pieces texture to the sauce. There's a little bit of spice in there too. The key thing, I think, is the crust. We make a hazelnut crust on my pie, so I just make a very basic short crust pastry with some hazelnuts in, as well, and some extra sugar, and bake that. The crust becomes almost like a kind of biscuit, so it's very tasty. I'm hoping that it's a kind of ode to the good old American pie and that people like it, but we'll see.Suzy Chase: Yesterday I made your recipes for the all-American apple pie and the apple and rosemary cake. Describe your final version... Well, you kind of already did this, but give us little bit of overview of the American apple pie.James Rich: The American apple pie, it has a filling that's made up of a variety of different apples. The nice thing about it is that you can, like I was saying earlier, go out and find apples that are potentially new to you, try them out, and decide what your preferred combination is. In there I've got cooking apples, which I think are essential for an apple pie because they break down and they give that lovely, gooey sauce, which I love. I've also got Granny Smith in there, a hard eating apple, which will cook but it keeps its shape. It won't lose it, so you can get that nice... when you cut into a pie and you get that segment, you can see the layers of the apples. Then, I sometimes also put another, red eating apple in there. I sometimes have three varieties, which is quite nice. So, a mixture of varieties in there with some sugar, some cinnamon; got a nice, spicy mix.James Rich: Then, the crust is the hazelnut crust. A short crust pastry mixed with some ground hazelnuts, a little bit of extra sugar in there, which creates a kind of biscuit-like texture to the crust, which I think is lovely. Pastry can be a little bit more tricky to work with because of the hazelnuts, but if you master it then it's definitely worth it. I promise.James Rich: Then, the rosemary cake is an apple loaf with rosemary in. It was a recipe I actually make accidentally. I was making some standard apple loaves and testing the different varieties, and then randomly put in a sprig of rosemary on top of one of the loaves I was testing. It came out and it tasted really delicious, so I upped the rosemary in it, I think I added some almonds on top, and we have our final rosemary cakes.James Rich: Those are actually two of my favorite. The rosemary cake, I think, is actually really good. I like it a lot.Suzy Chase: Oh my gosh, it smells as good as it tastes.James Rich: Yeah, it does, doesn't it. It fills the kitchen.Suzy Chase: Oh my gosh. There's quite a bit of lemon in it, so the rosemary-lemon-apple combination is delicious.James Rich: I wish that was me planning it and being very strategical in the way that I was writing, but it was a total fluke!Suzy Chase: Well, we're thankful for that fluke.Suzy Chase: Now to my new segment this season called My Favorite Cookbook. Aside from this cookbook, what is your all-time favorite cookbook and why?James Rich: Oh, that is such a hard question! Okay, I'm going to give you two or three, and then I'll pick my favorite.Suzy Chase: Okay. Drum roll. Here we go.James Rich: Okay. I grew up in the UK, and over here, I don't know if you're aware of someone called Delia Smith.Suzy Chase: No.James Rich: She is absolutely huge in this country. She basically helped a whole generation of home cooks learn how to cook. She's similar to Mary Berry on Bake Off, that ilk of general icon. Anyway, she released a book called Delia's Cookery Course, I think it's called, which she broke down into three or four volumes, when I was about 10 or 11. I remember getting those books as gifts for my birthday and Christmas and absolutely devouring them, loving the way that she wrote and the pictures. She really stripped it back, so she was teaching you how to boil everything, from an egg to make a stew, as the books progressed. I really love those, and I've got very happy memories of reading those books.James Rich: My two favorite food writers, one is Nigel Slater, who I absolutely love. It's not a cookery book, but I've recently re-read his book Toast, which is about his life growing up with food. Which I love, I love that. Then, his later cookbooks as well, which I think are amazing.James Rich: Then, my ultimate favorite is Diana Henry. I'm a huge Diana Henry fan. I think that the way that she writes... I don't think there's anybody else like her. Her book A Bird in the Hand, the chicken book as it's known in my house, I think that's my all-time favorite cookbook. I just love that book. I think it's so interesting that she's taken one topic, one ingredient, and she's created about 80 recipes, and they're just a whole ton of ways that you can cook with chicken. The way that she describes her early memories of roasted chicken and things like that is just amazing. So, I think that is my favorite all-time cookbook.Suzy Chase: One last question before we wrap up. I wanted to ask you about apple cider donuts. So, in the fall, our farmers markets sell these delicious apple cider donuts, and I didn't see it mentioned in your cookbook. Do you have these in England?James Rich: No, that's not something we have. I think, correct me if I'm wrong, it's the glaze, isn't it, that's apple cider.Suzy Chase: No, I think they work the apple cider into the mix too.James Rich: Oh, right. Okay. No, that's not something we actually have here, hence why I didn't include them. I have got some apple fritters, which are very similar. It's kind of like a donut dough.Suzy Chase: Yes, we know what those are.James Rich: Yeah. That's the closest I've got to it, but I'd love to try one of those. I haven't tasted one. I'm going to be back later on in the year, so I might go and find them in the farmers market.Suzy Chase: Yes! Definitely.Suzy Chase: So, where can we find you on the web and social media?James Rich: You can find me on Instagram, james_rich, and also my website, which is brand-new and I'm trying very hard to keep it updated, which is jamesrichcooks.com.Suzy Chase: Thanks, James, for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.James Rich: Thank you so much for having me. It's been really fun. Thank you.Outro: Subscribe over on cookerybythebook.com, and thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

Saffron in the SouksVibrant Recipes from the Heart of LebanonBy John Gregory-Smith Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors. John: I'm John Gregory-Smith, and my new cookery book is called Saffron in the Souks. It's packed with vibrant recipes from Lebanon. Suzy Chase: The first line in this cookbook says, “When I was writing my first cookbook in 2010, I went to work as a chef in Beirut.” Let's go back for a minute, and tell me how you got to that point in 2010, in Beirut? John: So, the landscape was very different then. Social media was a completely different beast back in 2010, I think. I don't even think Instagram was really a thing back then. I was more like Facebook and Twitter. I'd read an article on a restaurant, very old school, like in the newspaper, that was like a community kitchen. The guys set up this place called Tawlet in Beirut, where they had a really good front of house, really good chefs, and they would invite people from local regions of Lebanon to come and cook their local cuisine. The landscape there was a bit, let's say, challenging outside of the city. It was still a bit dangerous. A lot of the people with the money who were living in Beirut weren't traveling anywhere. What you wanted to do was encourage people to come and cook, they could take home a bit of cash. Just do good things via food. I thought it sounded incredible, and I also thought it sounded like a very smart way to go to one place and learn about all the regional cuisine of the country. Lebanon is not a huge country anyway, but it wasn't a great place to be traveling around. You could just go to the city and stay there. I emailed them and they got back to me and said, “Yeah, come out. That would be great, we'd love to have you.” I basically was there for a couple of weeks. I'd go in every morning and do the morning shifts, and help the guys prep for lunch service. The way they eat in this restaurant is just beautiful. You go and you pay a set price, I think it's about $30 or whatever. You have this ginormous banquet laid out for you of hot and cold [mezzes 00:02:21], and then amazing stews and meats, and amazing vegetarian food from the different regions. The ladies who would come in from the regions would spearhead what they wanted to cook, and then the chefs would help them prepare it. It was really quality food, really interesting menus, and it was changing all the time. The desserts, oh my God, they were so delicious! They'd have this huge counter laid out, with opulent desserts. It was just incredible. I learned so much. Really, really enjoyed the city as well. It was a very vibrant place to be, there was a lot happening, it felt like it was really exciting. I was very much advised to just stay in the city, for my own safety. I don't speak Arabic, and that was ... When the locals tell you to do something, you tend to do it, do you know what I mean? Suzy Chase: Yeah. John: So, I had this incredible time, kept in touch with everybody in the restaurant. They were saying, "Oh, you know, the country is changing, it's really opening up, it's a lot safer now. You should think about coming back." I did, I just decided that's what I wanted to do. I went back, hired a car, and drove around for a few months on my own. Tapped into these lovely ladies who'd helped me originally. It was so nice, going to revisit them, and going to stay in their homes. Spend time with them properly, and cook with them on their own terms. It was just phenomenal. Suzy Chase: Now, years later when you went back, did you go thinking about writing a cookbook, or did you just go back, just to revisit it? John: Absolutely writing a cookbook. I got the green light that I could ... Basically, I said to the guys I'd stayed in touch with in the restaurant, if I come back, the way I write books is I need to drive around, I need to be on my own, I need to soak things up. I need to feel that I can go anywhere, do everything, meet everyone. Is that doable? They were like, “Absolutely.” So, I spoke to my publisher. I felt if I could do it, go for it. They were quite supportive. Suzy Chase: Did you have a translator? John: Yes. My Arabic is dreadful. It's a really hard language. Suzy Chase: Yes. John: I'm very bad at languages, anyway. I can speak three words of French. Arabic is a very different beast. I can say hello, and thank you. Most of the times when I say that, people don't really understand what I'm saying. I would very much have a translator. Actually, what I found when I was there is that most of the guys would speak a bit of English. I could get around it quite easy. It was nice when I did have a translator, because I could get the beautiful stories, and the nuances of the food quite a lot better. Suzy Chase: Tell me about the title, Saffron in the Souks? It just rolls off the tongue. John: So, what I like to do is, when I go to these countries, I get incredibly overexcited. I'm quite an excitable person. I charge around, full of energy. I see everything, do everything, and I tend to just love it all. What I want to do is communicate that to everybody, really. It has to be through the recipes, through the writing, and the title. What I was trying to come up with was something really evocative, and beautiful, and that would inspire how the country had inspired me, really. Saffron in the Souks just felt like it had that lovely hint of something exotic. It felt perfect for it. Suzy Chase: It's nice. You could even name a restaurant Saffron in the Souks. John: Yeah, it's gorgeous. I love it. Suzy Chase: It's really pretty. John: Trademarked, by the way, so you can't. Suzy Chase: Oh, darn. I was going to do my new Twitter handle, Saffron in the Souks. John: Funny. Suzy Chase: What is typical Lebanese street food? John: So, the really good stuff would be kebabs. Amazing kebabs, they eat them meat over fire. You wouldn't cook it at home because you don't have a huge fire pit. That is served everywhere. Any town you go to will have a really good kebab shop. They make everything from chicken sheesh, which is the very basic marinated cubes of chicken, to more elaborate lamb kebabs, and ground meats. The other thing is, again, because they don't have ovens, you use communal bakers. Even in the tiny villages, they'll have a local baker. The baker will obviously cook the bread, but they also do these really wicked things called manouche, which is a flatbread that's cooked fresh with zaatar. Zaatar is a spice blend of different dried herbs. Sumac, which is a red berry that grows in dry areas. It's ground and it's got a very tart flavor. Then, finally, sesame seeds. It's quite a sucker punch of flavor. They drizzle oil and put the spice mix over the raw dough and bake it. You eat that as breakfast on the go, and it's just divine. Suzy Chase: Tell me about picking fresh zaatar in Nabatieh? How do you pronounce it? John: Nabatieh. Suzy Chase: Nabatieh. John: Yeah, that was really interesting. Actually, that was right in the south of Lebanon, by the Israeli border. I was advised not to go there. I think people just felt it could be a bit risky, basically. Anyway, I was with the guys who I'd been working with the whole time, who ran this kitchen. I was say I really want to go down there, but I've been told not to. They went, “Listen, we know this brilliant farmer there. He's really lovely. Let's call him and see what he says.” We called this guy, he's called Abu. Abu was so lovely. He went, “Look, it's completely fine at the moment, it's really safe. It feels like it's been safe for quite a while. Why don't you come down to the farm?” I went with a friend of mine, she actually drove me. Now, I did drive everywhere in Lebanon, and it was only out of laziness she decided to drive. It also meant that the journey, which probably would have taken me maybe four hours, because I drive so slowly, took about an hour because they drive ... She drove so fast. We went there, and it was exquisite. It was a really vibrant, green part of Lebanon. Beautiful, it was springtime. Wild flowers everywhere, and this herb called zaatar grows there. If you buy this blend called zaatar, say in America, it will probably have thyme or oregano in it as the herb. In Lebanon, they actually have a herb called zaatar. It's native to their country, and it's got this incredible perfume. Abu was this wonderful man. Really just so much energy and life, he was gorgeous, grew this herb commercially. When he first started growing it, everyone was like, you're insane. This just grows wild everywhere, we can just pick it. He basically knew that he had found the best zaatar plants. He had the last laugh, because now is zaatar is very coveted all over Lebanon and beyond. Suzy Chase: Mm-hmm (affirmative).John: I think he even stocks some restaurants in London now with it. He was just so lovely. We strolled around his farm, and he took me down to this incredible river that was in this gorge. It was just so beautiful. I was thinking I was so lost in the whimsical beauty of this place. I was like, my God, we're actually in a really dangerous part of the world. Who would have thought this kicks off here? It's just too beautiful. He developed ... He was such a canny old man. He developed this technology, this machine that could spin the herbs. He would dry it and spin it, and it would remove all the little bits of grit, and separate the lovely top bit of herb from the grit. I'm like ... the journalist in me was like, I want more information. Tell me about this? How does it work, what does it do? He was really funny, because it was all through a translator. I could just see his face, he was very serious while she was talking. Then, he'd just roared laughing. I even understood what he was saying. He was like, “There's absolutely no way that I'm telling you how this works. This is my trade secret. Back on your horse.” It was just so wonderful, it was such a lovely experience. I'm really glad that I went down there. I felt completely safe, and it's great for me to be able to report back on it. I'm not saying everyone should run down there immediately, but if you choose to and it's right for you, it's pretty fabulous. Suzy Chase: I love the photo of him on page 139. John: Yeah, it's amazing. Suzy Chase: There's just so many stories in that face of his. John: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, he's amazing. Suzy Chase: Describe the Lebanese seven spice? John: Lebanese, they do use a lot of spices, but actually it tends to be, in general, quite herb heavy and fresh. It's more the old, Arabic dishes that they use spices in. One of the blends is called seven spice. It's typically more than seven spices, that's what I came to realize when I was there. I was like, that's not seven, that's about 12. People would just look at me, very blankly. It tends to be quite heavy, woody spices. Cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, those sorts of things. They add in this incredible spice called mahleb. Mahleb is actually cherry stones, so the pits or the seeds from a cherry, and they're ground, which sounds disgusting. You'd just be thinking, why would you want to grind a gross old stone after you've eaten it? But it has the most incredible sweet perfume. Actually, in Syrian cuisine, they use it a lot in desserts. Lots of pastries and baklava, they'll add it too. It goes into some seven spice mixes, and you can smell the ones that have it. It can be quite hard to find. I think America is very similar to the UK, in if you order it, you get it, but that can be a bit of a faff. I think you can get a mix called [baharat 00:12:17]. I know, for example, in Whole Foods, you can buy baharat. That's a sort of similar style blend. I've tried to put that in. Everywhere I've said seven spice, I've put that in, just so you can stay on top of the cooking. Suzy Chase: How do you spell that, if we want to look for it at Whole Foods? John: Oh, let's try. I'm quite dyslexic, but I'll give it a go. Suzy Chase: Okay. John: I think it's B-A-H-A-R-A-T.Suzy Chase: Okay.John: That's it. Suzy Chase: So, it's spelled like it sounds? John: Yes. I think so. Maybe check on Google just in case-Suzy Chase: Yeah. John: -I've got it completely wrong. Suzy Chase: Well, just look in the Bs. John: Yeah, exactly. Suzy Chase: I found it interesting that Beirut used to be called The Paris of the East. John: Yes. Suzy Chase: Talk a bit about that? John: So, Beirut was originally a very Liberal city, a coastal city. Beautiful beaches, beautiful people, beautiful drinks, beautiful food. It was a French doctorate for quite a long time, Lebanon. It had a massive French hangover, almost. The architecture there was very Parisian, beautiful wide streets, very unlike typical Arabic. It would have wide balconies, beautiful French windows. Things were very open on the facade, whereas if you go to a very Arabic city, everything's very closed because they like to do things behind closed doors. So, it had this beautiful architecture, really good art scene, and it was known as being a quite decadent city. There's a city outside of Beirut called Baalbek, which is an extraordinary city near Syria. Baalbek used to have ... It's famous for Roman ruins, actually. It's got the most incredible Roman ruins. The temples look like the Acropolis. It's the Temple to Dionysus, which is the God of Booze. They used to do these incredible festivals there in the forties, where all the Hollywood greats would go. It was a real roaring place to be. Unfortunately, just because of politics, and religion, and strife, it took a massive turn for the worst. The people who live there remember that, and they hold onto that, and they treasure that. What's really lovely now is that people are like, “We want that back, and we're going to get it back.” You really feel that when you're there now. Beirut has so much energy when you're there. Really amazing, all along the coast, really rocking beach bars where you just hang out all day. Really creative artsy side of the city as well, so lots of poets, and musicians, and artists, and they're really injecting life back into it. Fingers crossed that they can do it, because it's certainly a cool place to be. Suzy Chase: Speaking of Dionysus, when you think about an Arabic country, you would assume no one drinks or parties. John: Exactly. Boy, do they drink and party there. Lebanon is a very small country. It's near, obviously, Jerusalem, so it has ... During the Crusades, it was always quite a hot spot. That coast was very dominant. That whole area has always been ... What's a nice way to put it? A slight tussle between the different religions, let's say. Suzy Chase: A tussle. John: Yeah, really top line way of saying it. When you're there, there's obviously a massive Christian community still there. In this small country, you've got big Christian community, there's a big Arabic community. They've got Drus, they've got Jews, they've got loads of different communities there. A lot of those communities are very happy. Arabs do party, but they just party in a very different way. There's a lot of them there who certainly like to party with a good drink in hand. The interesting thing about Lebanon is they have, to the east valley called Becker Valley. Becker Valley is the wine region, so it's filled with vineyards. They make some exquisite wines there. Suzy Chase: So, describe the sour tang that the Lebanese palette is so partial to? John: Yeah, right. It's extraordinary. They love sour. When you're cooking with Lebanese, there're certain ingredients that their eyes light up, and they love the taste of sour. Pomegranate molasses, which is essentially just pomegranate, which we know are full of those pits with that lovely bejeweled bit of fruit around each one. They just squeeze the juice out and simmer it down. The natural sweetness turns it into this very sticky molasses. They will shove that in salads, stews. They'll make vinegarette and sauces out of it. It gives this very sweet sour tang. The lemons there are incredible. They are tart, but they're not like really horrid, bitter lemons that make you wince. They're more like Amalfi lemons. They're huge, slightly sweet flavored. They're gorgeous, and they will really go for it with that. The other ingredient, I think I mentioned earlier, is the sumac, which is the ground red berry. Quite often, they'll use all three. For example, when they make fattoush, which is a classic Lebanese salad, which is essentially chopped ingredients with bits of crispy fried bread. Just deeply pleasing. They'll make the dressing with pomegranate molasses, lemon juice, and sumac, and then they put in their gorgeous olive oil. It's very, very sour. It's interesting when you're cooking with someone who's palette's a bit more developed in that direction than you. I'd be like, oh, just a little hint. They're like, "What are you doing? Keep going, keep going." Actually, it does work. When you're using really lovely fresh ingredients, they can quite often take a sour that's lovely. Suzy Chase: When I think about Lebanon, I don't think about exciting produce. Talk a bit about that? John: Yeah. It's a funny old place. Again, for such a small country, it's got the most incredible different terrain. You've obviously got the Mediterranean Sea to one side, so you get all the coastal food. Then, you've got the mountains in the North and the South. Really, you've got a band of band mountains in the middle, and then a valley on the other side. It's very fertile, it's incredibly fertile country. They grow everything from fruit and vegetables to amazing herbs. Really, really amazing herbs. Rice grains, everything grows there. They get really good seasons. You get really long, hot summers. You get good autumn, good spring, where it's a lot cooler. Then, cold winters so things can regenerate. You do get this incredible, incredible turnaround of produce there. What's lovely is they don't have a culture like, say, mine or yours, where we're so used to going into the supermarket and you get whatever you want, whenever you want. There, they do have supermarkets in the cities, but everything is just seasonal. You just get what you get, and it is really lovely. They'll be certain things at certain times of the year. For example, strawberries. Well, they'll just go bad for it. Or, in the spring, when the green beans come, farva beans. They just love it. You see little stalls popping up everywhere, selling just one ingredient. The farmers will come, we've got a glut of them. Everybody gets really excited about it, it's so sweet. They may only be around for a couple of months. I don't have that. I've just grown up in London where you go to the supermarket and get what you want. I just love being around that excitement over something so simple. It's really gorgeous. Suzy Chase: One recipe that was surprising in this cookbook is the Garlicky Douma Dumplings. Is it Douma? John: Oh! Yes! They're so good. Suzy Chase: Tell me about those. John: Douma is this beautiful little Christian village. It looks like you're in Tuscany, it's in the hills before you get to the mountains. It is so beautiful. Really, it's extraordinary. I took my parents there, and they couldn't believe it. You've got these little villages with huge churches in. Everything is dome, tiled roofs. It really looks like Italy, it's really weird. All the olive trees going around. In the villages there, they make these dumplings. They almost make a pasta dough, and they fill them with meat. They actually look even like little tortellini. They serve them in a yogurt sauce. When I first got given this bowl of joy, I was so overexcited. Because I'm such a geek, the first thing I wanted to do was take a photo. The light was really bad. I was in this beautiful old house, with this amazing kitchen, and these lovely women cooking and chatting. I got given this bowl of food and yelped, and made a run for what had been the door to go outside. I hadn't realized that someone had actually closed the glass door, so I just ran into it, into the glass door. Suzy Chase: No!John: Luckily, nothing bad happened, but the whole bowl of food just flew all over me. I was like, turned around covered in these dumplings dripping down my face. They were all just in utter hysterics. Suzy Chase: Oh, my. John: They thought I was weird enough anyway, and that was definitely the cherry on top. Suzy Chase: Just pushed you over the top. John: It was so funny. They are absolutely dreamy. They're quite easy to make, because the dough is ... There's actually no egg in it. Unlike pasta, there's no egg in that dough, so it's super easy to work with. They are delicious. Suzy Chase: Last weekend, I made your recipe for Beirut meatballs on page 111.John: I saw! Suzy Chase: Now, this is a traditional recipe named after an Ottoman name Daout BashaJohn: Yeah. Suzy Chase: How have you adapted this recipe, and how did this guy get a dish named after him? John: So, funnily enough, the woman who told me this story, it was really funny. She was this incredible woman, she was so glamorous and cool. I met her in the restaurant in Beirut. I didn't meet her 10 years ago, I met her this time around because I kept going to the restaurant for lunch. Whenever I was in the city, I'd always pop in to say hi to everyone. I met her. We got on like a house on fire, and actually went to her house. She showed me how to cook these. She was like ... You know how when you meet some people, you're just naturally drawn to them? Suzy Chase: Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah. John: They've just got something about them. She'd been through really bad cancer. She was so full of life and energy. Her son was an opera singer. They were just really cool. I'm a bit obsessed with pasta and meatballs, and for some reason we were talking about that. She was like, “Oh my goodness. There's this dish that I've got to teach you.” She showed me how to make them. They're sort of like sour meatballs in a ... There's a lot of onions, and pomegranate, and it's very perfumed. I was asking her, where is this recipe from? She gave me that story, that this Turkish guy had come. This was named after him. I said, why? She just went, “Well, it just is.” That was the end of the story. Suzy Chase: Okay. John: I was like, oh. Can you give me any more detail than that? She's like, “No, they're just named after him.” I've Googled it, and spoken to other people, and they all said the same thing. Whoever he was, came over, and left this dish. That's it. Regardless of the slightly stunted story, they are delicious. They're really, really nice. Suzy Chase: I even made my own pomegranate molasses, which was so easy. John: Wow. That's really top marks. You win. That's amazing. I would never do that. Suzy Chase: It was really easy.John: Really? How long did it take to cook down? Suzy Chase: About eight minutes. Not that long. John: That's so good, that's amazing. Suzy Chase: I didn't need that much. John: Is that because you couldn't find a bottle? Suzy Chase: Yeah, I couldn't find-John: Oh. Suzy Chase: I used pomegranate juice. John: Oh, that's great. How intuitive of you. Suzy Chase: Yeah, look at that.John: Look at you. Suzy Chase: Look at me cooking. I also made the recipe for roasted carrots with tahini and black sesame seeds on page 51. John: Yeah, that's nice. Suzy Chase: Describe this dish. John: Obviously I said earlier about the way the produce works, and the way things are just eaten in season. They have an innate love of vegetable. They just love veggies. They do them really, really well. Most meals you go to, actually, will have ... Actually, quite a lot of people will eat vegetarian food quite a lot of the time, certainly in the more rural areas where they've not got so much cash. Even if you eat a big meal, it will tend to be a little meat or fish, then loads of veg. This was just one of those dishes that was very simple, and it makes the vegetables sing. What you want is ... Do you have the word ... You do have the word heritage for vegetables in America, don't you? Suzy Chase: Yes. We call them heirloom. John: Okay, so heirloom carrots. Suzy Chase: Mm-hmm (affirmative).John: You want the nicest carrots that you can get. All different colors, all different flavors. You just roast them up with a bit of cumin. The lovely bit is the tahini. Carrots have that deep sweetness that you get from a root veg. Tahini is almost like a peanut butter, but it's made with sesame seeds. It's a ground sesame seed paste, and it has a wonderful, rich sweetness that just compliments the carrots. It's just two ingredients that work so well together, and I just love it. Suzy Chase: I also made the Akra smashed Lemon Chickpeas on page 16. John: Whoa. Suzy Chase: How is this different from hummus? John: Okay, hummus is chickpeas, tahini, garlic, and lemon. That's how you make classic hummus. This recipe, it's called Akra Smashed. Akra is the name of the restaurant in Tripoli. Tripoli is this fabulous, old Venetian city on the coast, north of Beirut. It really is buzzing, it's brilliant. I think, actually the best street food in Lebanon is in Tripoli. There's this ginormous restaurant called Akra. It opens really early in the morning, like six o'clock, maybe even earlier, and it stays open until about two. All they serve is hummus. It's got about 350 covers, it's packed the whole time. The point being, you basically get a whole bowl of hummus for yourself, with a little bowl of pickles, veg, and some pitas. That's a snack or a light meal. Actually, it's not that light because you eat so much of it. They serve the classic hummus. They serve a thing called hummus ful, spelled F-U-L. That's made with fava beans. It's quite an acquired taste, actually. Then they make this other style of hummus that I copied in this book. It's basically the same ingredients. You've got your chickpeas, your lemon, your garlic, and your tahini, but it's blended so that it has a bit more texture. It's more lemon juice than you would normally serve, so it tastes a bit fresher, a bit lighter. It's got a lovely texture to it. It's not that silky smooth complexion of hummus, it's a bit more chunky. Like a guacamole or something. What was so nice about it is you get that sort of texture, and almost dryness from the chickpeas. It feels like it's gagging for something. What they did is they drizzle it with a chile butter, a very rich chile butter, and then loads of roasted nuts. You get all the things in it missing, and it's just divine. Suzy Chase: Now to my segment this season called my favorite cookbook. John: Right.Suzy Chase: Aside from this cookbook and your others, what is your all-time favorite cookbook and why? John: Oh, all-time favorite book, that's really hard. Can it only be one? Suzy Chase: Yes. John: Yes, because that was the question, wasn't it? Oh my God, that's really hard. What would be the one book that I would hang onto? I would be Delia Smith, How To Cook. Delia Smith is a stalwart British cookery writer and TV chef from the ... She was really massive ... She's still huge here now, but she was really big in the seventies and eighties. It was before cookery was cool, so on telly. It was a bit like a school teach telling you how to cook. Her recipes really worked. It was everything from how to make an omelet to how to make a roast chicken. I taught myself how to cook with that book. My mom had a copy. The cover, Delia has the most extraordinary, coiffed 1970s haircut you've ever seen. It looks like someone's put a weird bowl over her hair, tilted it backwards, and cut around it. Suzy Chase: I love it. John: It's extraordinary. If you Google it, it will just make you roar with laughter. That book, I learned how to cook from it. I think that would probably be the one book I feel so nostalgic about and hang onto. Suzy Chase: In interviewed James Rich, who wrote the cookbook Apple yesterday. John: Oh, yeah, right. Suzy Chase: He said the same thing! John: Did he? Suzy Chase: Yes! John: That's so funny. That is so funny. Suzy Chase: Okay, so you've done Turkey, Morocco, and Lebanon. What's next? John: I'm entirely sure, actually. I came up with a brilliant, very hair brained idea. I like really weird and wonderful, I love weird and wonderful a lot, and I my publisher thought my idea was way too weird, and perhaps not so wonderful. They've asked me to rethink. Yeah, I definitely want to continue with the Middle Eastern thing. I feel that I want to dip into another country there, because I just love it around there. I've got a trip coming up, actually. I'm going to Gaza in a couple of weeks, which is going to be very, very interesting. Suzy Chase: Oh my gosh. John: Yeah, I'm going with a charity to look at child nutrition out there. It's all quite intense. I think it will be incredible, I think it's going to be really extraordinary going to pretty much a war zone to see how people eat. Yeah, it's going to be quite an intense trip. I would love to go somewhere ... I love the Eastern Mediterranean, it's beautiful. I'd love to do a book in Iranian food, but I don't think now is the time to be going to Iran. Suzy Chase: What does your mom say? Is your mom freaking out?John: Yeah, completely. When I said the G word, they made that teeth wincing noise. She went, “Oh, my baby. What are you doing? Why are you doing that?” I said, I want to go because it's this amazing charity and we're going to help children. It means this tiny thing I can do to contribute could be a really good thing. She was just like, “But why there? Why don't you pick somewhere nicer?” I'm dead excited. I think it'll be great. Suzy Chase: So, where can you find you on the web, and social media? John: So, I use Instagram an awful lot, much to the annoyance of my family. My Instagram handle is @JohnGS. I've got a lot of content on there, I do a lot of free content. I'm trying to stick a couple recipes out every week for people to copy. Then, everything on my website, which is just JohnGregorySmith.com.Suzy Chase: As the Lebanese people say, Sahtain, which means double health. Thanks so much for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast. John: Loved it, and love you. Outro: Subscribe over on CookeryByTheBook.com. Thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

Pecans: Recipes & History of an American NutBy Barbara Bryant & Betsy FentressRecipes by Rebecca Lang Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery By The Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York city sitting at her dining room table talking to cookbook authors.Betsy Fentress: Hi, I'm Betsy Fentress, and I am the coauthor of the just released Pecans: Recipes and History of an American Nut by Rizzoli Publishers.Suzy Chase: First things first, I need to settle a running, heated debate between my husband and me. Is it pecan or pecan?Betsy Fentress: That is a great question. There's a sidebar in the book about all the different ways that people say it, depending on what part of the country they're from. I say pecan, and I think a lot of farmers say pecan. So, I guess it depends whether you want to consider yourself city or country. Are you the city mouse or the country mouse? I don't know.Suzy Chase: That's what I told him. He grew up in a suburb and upstate New York. I said, "Where are you getting pecan from?"Betsy Fentress: I don't know, because I actually grew up in Iowa in not a huge town, but we owe it ... My mother was from Philadelphia. Maybe that's why. But I only knew it as pecan, and then I started hearing pecan. My husband's from the South and I thought, "Well, okay, I guess there is more than one way to say this." But I worked on a book on almonds, and we actually had the same issue. A lot of the people, the agriculture people in the almond world say [ahmond 00:01:38]Suzy Chase: What?Betsy Fentress: Mm-hmm (affirmative).Suzy Chase: They take the L out?Betsy Fentress: They take the L out. It's kind of like they put an H in there.Suzy Chase: That's weird.Betsy Fentress: It's the old Cole Porter song, "You say potato. I say potato." I guess it's up and running here in 21st century dealing with nuts.Suzy Chase: It's nutty. So, what would Thanksgiving be without pecan pie, New Orleans without pecan pralines? Southern home cooks would have to hang up their aprons without pecans. The pecan is the only tree nut native to North America, tracing its origin to the 16th century. Can you give us a short history?Betsy Fentress: One of the reasons I really fell in love with this project is that the two main groups of people responsible for the pecan are the native Americans and the African Americans. And the native Americans use the pecan for medicine. They used it for bartering. They used it in all kinds of ways. And because it was portable, they could take it as they settled along the southern coastal regions and also in Texas. And there was one Spanish Explorer named Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, and he was actually captured by a group of Native Americans in Texas, and really came to appreciate them and their culture. And they settled along the riverbanks of Texas. And there he learned how they used pecans. And so he was the first person that wrote about pecans in his journals in the 1500s.Suzy Chase: So, Native Americans used pecans for so many things. The leaves were dried and ground to cure ringworm. The bark was boiled down to treat TB and used to make tea to soothe upset stomachs. And it even had a role in currency. Can you talk a little bit about that?Betsy Fentress: Well, yes. They would travel with these attached to their belts sometimes or their garments. They were considered even more precious than freshwater pearls, which they also used. And that's about all I know on that particular subject, what was in our introduction.Suzy Chase: It was shocking to read that they were more valuable than freshwater pearls.Betsy Fentress: Exactly. What happened with this book, I was ... There's so many ways that you can go with learning about this. As we've gone to publication and with the whole 1619 supplement to the New York times, it made me want to go back and go to Texas, go to Georgia, go to libraries there. A lot of this stuff was not available online. I did reach out to some African American people about learning more of how pecans were central in their culinary history. And all of that is really coming to light with Michael Twitty's The Cooking Gene that I'm reading. I'm just riveted by it. And I feel like there's a lot more to learn about how pecans were part of African American and Native American culture. I think there's a lot of history that still needs to get uncovered in both of those areas.Suzy Chase: Speaking of 1619, which is incredible, I would love to recognize a slave named Antoine on a sugarcane plantation in Louisiana for successfully grafting pecan trees and forever altering the crop. Describe grafting for us.Betsy Fentress: Well, grafting is a process where if you want a root stalk to be somewhat more hardy and less susceptible to disease, they take these different root stalks, and they take a slice, and they grow them to each other in labs. And that story is the one that I really wanted to know more about. The fact that Antoine didn't even have a last name was just so disheartening to me because he was working at Oak Alley Plantation as an enslaved man. And they received a root stalk from a neighbor. And it was he who successfully grafted what is now called the Centennial pecan tree, which was the perfect combination of these various varietals of pecan trees. And I just can only imagine now what would happen if a scientist became known for something that central and what their monetary reward would we, what their professional rewards would be. And here we only know that his name was Antoine.Suzy Chase: I have no words. It's just-Betsy Fentress: I know. It's ... And I went back to the graphic designer and said, who is a very, very thoughtful person, and said, "Can we have illustrations in the book that represent more about this? And she said, "Betsy, I spent a lot of time on this and ... " And I think that maybe some of this isn't there. It's not easily found digitally. And so I was reading recently about that there was a flurry of cookbooks after the Civil War that were published because largely in the South, white people had African American enslaved people as their cooks, and the white women didn't know how to cook.Suzy Chase: Yeah.Betsy Fentress: And I just thought, "There's so much to uncover here." I wanted photographs of people harvesting pecans, but we couldn't, in our limited time and production, get more of that material in the book. But I thought, "Maybe there should just be another book."Suzy Chase: I would love that.Betsy Fentress: I would too. I think that the time is ripe for us to re-examine. I love so much food that came from African Americans. I would like to have them more represented in culinary history in this country.Suzy Chase: George Washington fell for the first pecan during the revolutionary war, and he planted the first pecan trees at Mount Vernon in 1775. Are they still there?Betsy Fentress: The biggest one had to come down, but I do believe that ... I think they replant them. I'm not aware that they have any of actual original ones. In the 2010s, the oldest known pecan tree at Mount Vernon had to come down.Suzy Chase: And then while serving as ambassador to France, Thomas Jefferson was sent fresh pecans from Philadelphia. Then in 1790, he planted two hundred pecan nuts at Monticello over a five year period. Was he the first to grow trees as an orchard?Betsy Fentress: That is my understanding. There was someone in Upstate New York who I believed tried to do some of this, but Jefferson is the one who really put them on the map. He loved them, and he gave them to a lot of people. When he was away from home, he had them sent to him.Suzy Chase: I noticed that sometimes pecans were called Illinois nuts in the book. Why was that?Betsy Fentress: Well, it was, I believe an Indian chief whose name was Chief Pacnne, P-A-C-N-N-E. And he was ... The literal translation of that word, I've read about it. I read it two ways. One says that it's just ... The translation is nut, from the Illinois word. And the other is that it means that it needs a stone to crack it. So, either one of those, but those are related to Chief Pacnne.Suzy Chase: Oh, so that's where the word pecan comes from?Betsy Fentress: Correct.Suzy Chase: Huh. That's interesting. So, is there a special skill or tool you need to harvest pecans?Betsy Fentress: In the South, some of the old fashion people, they just take two nuts and put them both in their hand and crush them against each other to pop them open. And then there's your basic nutcracker. And then there are other ones that almost look like a lathe, where you put the nut on, and you turn it, and you crank it, and it pops them open. But the people have devised all kinds of ways to do it. And I think it's a little bit of an art to get them out whole, quite frankly.Suzy Chase: And I think there's so pretty whole. There's something aesthetically pleasing about a pecan.Betsy Fentress: Absolutely. They're just ... I know sometimes when I chop them, I feel like I'm degrading them.Suzy Chase: Yes, me too. These days where are most pecans produced?Betsy Fentress: Well, in the United States, it goes Georgia, New Mexico and Texas. This is statistics from a couple of years ago, 76 million in Georgia, 67 million in New Mexico, and 61 million in Texas. We export a lot to Canada, and the Chinese have really fallen in love with the pecan. And we're exporting a lot to China now. It's still a much smaller industry than almonds. The last book that I worked on was devoted to almonds. 280 million pecans produced in the United States per year versus two billion almonds.Suzy Chase: Wow. Well, hopefully pecans are catching up.Betsy Fentress: I think they are. I was looking, their nutritional value ... I was comparing them to almonds the other day. They have a higher fat content, and they don't have as much protein, but they have antioxidants in them. They have all kinds of vitamins and thiamine. And I think a lot of nutritionists are really ... They're willing to call them a super food, which I think is kind of new.Suzy Chase: You have a whole section called Creative Reuse of Pecan Shells. Talk a little bit about that.Betsy Fentress: Oh gosh. Yeah. I lived in Louisiana for a little while, and I remember people using shells for their driveways. I thought, "Why?" I always thought that sea shells were kind of these precious things that people didn't do anything but display them, but pecans can be used in that way. In landscaping, they provide acidity to garden soil. Pecan wood is great for grilling and for providing smokey flavor to your barbecue. The inner lining of pecan shells can be used for tanning leather. And the ground shells, they are used in resin to produce a wood-like effect. They can be used to clean jet engines. And probably one of their most famous uses in recent years was that pecan wood was used for torches from Greece to Atlanta for the Olympics. I'm sorry, I also should add that they're used in beauty products, finely ground for cleansing scrubs.Suzy Chase: I also read that fermented pecan powder is thought to be the first nut milk. Who knew?Betsy Fentress: Yeah. I know. I think it's really wonderful for all of the people that are vegetarian, vegan, have health allergies that both pecans and almonds, just the explosion of using their flowers and their milks for really new and inventive ways for substituting traditional dairy and gluten products in cooking. I just think it's a lot of fun to take recipes and sub things out and see how the textures and the flavors change.Suzy Chase: My only issue with pecans is that they aren't particularly inexpensive. So, if we're into foraging, where would we look for pecan trees to harvest?Betsy Fentress: That is a really good question. You run into people that will just say, "Oh yeah. We used to out into the country and my grandma had a pecan tree on her farm." I think people have planted them historically in the South, partly because of their shade factor. And then the harvest was kind of lagniappe, as they say down in New Orleans. It was something that you didn't expect, but you got. And so I think that there are people that planted pecan trees, just the way somebody plants an oak tree, except that, unlike acorns, you can actually eat the fruit when they fall off in the fall.Suzy Chase: There are so many delicious looking recipes in this cookbook. I have never thought of making pecan flavored butter. Tell us about those.Betsy Fentress: I think it's a really fun way to have a pancake, or a piece of toast, or even on your hors d'oeuvre platter. They're just really good. They go really, really well with honey. And what I like about this cookbook is we've added a lot of spices from the South, especially New Mexico which has a large presence of pecans. But the chili pecan lime butter, that's a great one to have. If you have a Mexican themed party or dish, you just add a little bit of that. You can put it on a tortilla before you wrap up your burrito. I mean, there's just a lot of fun things that you can do with it.Suzy Chase: Yeah, that one caught my eye because it wasn't sweet. It's more savory.Betsy Fentress: Exactly.Suzy Chase: So, over the weekend, I made your recipes for banana pecan quick bread on page 53 and pecan-studded blue crab cakes on page 116. Describe the crab cakes.Betsy Fentress: They start with the pecan remoulade, which again is nodding our hats to New Orleans, which has mayonnaise and mustard and chives, so you've got a little bit of bite on there. And then with the crab cakes, green onions, garlic, chives, again dijon for that bite, eggs, panko, which has that nice crust. And then of course you're topping them ... You're including toasted pecans. And it's just kind of a fresh way to have a crab cake that has more interesting ... And like I said, has a little bit of bite to those flavors. How did you find them?Suzy Chase: It made for kind of an interesting texture.Betsy Fentress: Rebecca Lang developed these recipes for us. She is an Athens, Georgia based recipe developer, chef. And she brought so much fun to this project. And she is a southerner, and she loves fish. And so what we did with both our almonds book and with this is we would take a lot of kind of classic recipes or staples in American cuisine, and then we would work together and say ... We would look at the overview of the whole book and say, "What are some of the flavor profiles that we think would be interesting?" And so this was I think one of her most unique ones.Suzy Chase: This week, I'm going to make my favorite classic Mexican wedding cookies.Betsy Fentress: Oh yeah?Suzy Chase: I didn't have time over the weekend, but I'm making them this week. They're so good. I can't wait.Betsy Fentress: They're really, really good. I have to tell you, if I were to pick my favorite entrée in this book, it would be roasted poblano chili stuffed with quinoa, corn and pecans. It's to die for. I think Rebecca just also did an amazing job of that recipe, and all the melted cheese, and the quinoa ... Another really old food that goes back to Native Americans, and the corn ... I mean, you could really have a lot of fun with this cookbook at Thanksgiving.Suzy Chase: Now to my new segment this season called My Favorite Cookbook. Aside from this cookbook, what is your all time favorite cookbook and why?Betsy Fentress: One of my favorite cookbooks is ... Well, I think I learned to cook with The Joy of Cooking. And the other cookbook I learned to cook with was the new New York Times Cookbook. And Craig Claiborne taught me a lot. But I am always buying cookbooks and trying new ones. I was in Philadelphia with my vegan daughter over Labor Day, and we cooked out of Ottolenghi's Plenty, and I loved it. The flavors, the brightness, the freshness, that's not a way that I started out cooking over 30 years ago. But, The joy, I love the voice of Irma Rombauer. I just think there's something really wonderful about the kind of bossy way that she says how a pie crust has to be. She things like, "'Tis a poor pie crust that requires extra water." And I love that confidence in her. I really do. But I was going to say that the first book that Barbara and I did together, The Bryant Family Vineyard Cookbook, we had over 40 chefs in that cookbook, Daniel Boulud's chocolate mousse, Larry Forgione's strawberry shortcake. There's just so many classic recipes in that cookbook. There's one from Charlie Trotter, Thomas Keller. If I'm doing a really fancy party, I know that every recipe in that cookbook is going to work. And all the recipes on that one were developed by Denise Landis, who was at the time the New York Times' recipe tester. To me, it's ... And I just saw, she was interviewed by someone in England for, I think a blog. And she named it ... And she has a thousands of cookbooks. She's a cookbook collector, and she said that it was one of her top three cookbooks in her whole collection that we worked on together. I was so excited to read that.Suzy Chase: That's great.Betsy Fentress: How about you? Do you have one?Suzy Chase: Mine would be my Girl Scout cookbook that I had when I was really young, as hokey as that sounds.Betsy Fentress: I don't think it's hokey. And now I'm embarrassed because my sister put a family cookbook together that I actually do use, and I probably should've said that.Suzy Chase: Oh, you're going to hear it.Betsy Fentress: I know, exactly.Suzy Chase: Okay. So, your all time favorite cookbook is?Betsy Fentress: I think it's The Joy of Cooking.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?Betsy Fentress: You can find us on the web at PecansCookbook.com. Twitter and Instagram, our handles are @PecansCookbook. And our Facebook page is Pecans: Recipes and History of an American Nut.Suzy Chase: This has been so interesting. Thanks, Betsy, for coming on Cookery By The Book Podcast.Betsy Fentress: Thank you for having me, Suzy. My pleasure.Outro: Subscribe over on CookeryByTheBook.com. And thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery By The Book.

Made in MexicoThe CookbookBy Danny Mena with Nils Bernstein Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book, with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table talking to cookbook authors.Danny Mena: My name is Danny Mena and my cookbook is Made in Mexico, The Cookbook.Suzy Chase: Anthony Bourdain wrote, "And as much as we think we know and love it, we have barely scratched the surface of what Mexican food really is. It is not melted cheese over tortilla chips." Now when you opened Heche en Dumbo on Bowery and Fourth Street, you didn't offer lettuce, cream, or cheese on the tacos. Talk to me about your particular view on authentic Mexican cuisine.Danny Mena: Born and raised in Mexico, there is a sensibility about what is and what is not Mexican food. And so when I moved to New York, there were a few places they were doing things pretty spot on. But by far and large, there was really, the idea of kind of the Taco Bell taco was still king. And so when we opened Hecho in Dumbo, my whole impetus was to try to really showcase a side of Mexico that I think people in New York or another parts of the United States had really not seen. And so we kind of started off and we were very opposite of most restaurants where whatever the question was, the answer was probably no. And it was like, we didn't do any silverware because we were serving tacos and they're intended to be with your hands, no lettuce, no cream, no cheese. And so it was, at first it was a bit of a struggle or just a bit of a fight, people started accepting and started to understand and start to appreciate that the dish is better without those sorts of other ingredients. And so that was kind of the beginning of Heche en Dumbo.Suzy Chase: What was your take on Mexican beer at the restaurant?Danny Mena: So it was kind of that same sort of idea. I mean there was a lot of Mexican beers out there and there's more and more craft. At the time, 10 or 11 years ago, there weren't really any craft beers in the U.S., Mexican craft beers in the U.S. But what we wanted to do also was to showcase something different. So we never had tequila, we never had Patron, beer we never had Corona. And that doesn't necessarily mean anything wrong with either one. We wanted to educate people on the other things. So we pushed always like a one of my favorite beers was Bohemia. And so all of our enchiladas and everything, we started with the Bohemia. And it was something of trying to, once again, that same sort of ethos with the food, with the drinks of saying you're probably ordering it because that's what you think you should be ordering. Well let me show you something else that might be much nicer and educate you a little bit more on what are, what other people consume or what else exists in Mexico. And it was that same sort of idea.Suzy Chase: You've said no self-respecting Mexican would ever by store bought salsa.Danny Mena: I hope I'm not too harsh with that one. But in Mexico only if you're going to go camping and of course you have to have salsa and that is an important part of every meal. Every dish really. But if you have any ability to make a salsa, whether it's just a knife and some ingredients like you would always make it yourself or have it. You never, once it gets store bought and all the additives and everything for preservatives and whatever you have to do to give it a shelf life. It just, it's no longer anywhere close to a decent salsa.Suzy Chase: It's kind of like hummus. You buy that stuff at the store and then you make it at home and they're two completely different things.Danny Mena: 100% and once you do it then it's really hard to kind of go back to that.Suzy Chase: Yeah. So you wrote in the introduction, besides arguments among friends about where to find the best tacos al pastor, food is a lens through which Mexicans discuss class, politics, agricultural, economic and social issues. In 2019, almost 2020 what are Mexicans discussing over food?Danny Mena: Right now we have, I mean definitely I think politics has really been the number one conversation in Mexico and it really comes a lot from we have a new president in Mexico that has a very high approval rating, a much more kind of socialist sort of view. But also is not getting the, because of the kind of the views, are not getting much investments. Mexico's about to go into a recession and so it's a very polarizing president. So there is a lot of conversation right now going on about where you stand and what line and what side of the presidency do you fall on. And there's a lot of the pre has been kind of dethroned and really was annihilated in a new party called Morena is kind of taken over. So there's a lot of conversation around sort of that, which is really interesting.Suzy Chase: Your parents separated when you were 16. Now how was that a pivotal point in how you started to look at food?Danny Mena: My mother was a very loving and wonderful mother and cook and because she had the ability to cook a lot of things, in a sense I was kind of coddled and so I was allowed to be picky. I was allowed to, and not as a negative to my mother because she did amazing. But once she left my father who was not a cook at all, we had very little choice and kind of what to eat. And I started cooking it. This was my first foray into the kitchen and I had some recipe books and I started cooking a little bit. And of course a 16 year old, I was following every recipe as best as I could and the food never came out to that good on the first round. And of course if you copy a recipe, there's very few books that is cooking for one or cooking for two. And so I had all this leftover foods as well. If day one did not taste so great by day three I never wanted to eat again. So I decided to start going out with my friends. And so, I go to a friend's house and then I'd go to another friend's house and every day of the week. And luckily I had a good amount of friends they were willing to take me in. And so for the next two years, five days a week, I would eat out at a friend's house, at a different friend's house and I would always go around whatever they're home cooking or making. And I was forced at that point that I'd go to someone's house and all of a sudden they're like, there is, I didn't like mushrooms. And so they're like, okay, well we have these mushrooms with steak sauce. And I was like, treat the mushrooms. I was like, wow, this is really good. And then I was like, oh, this type of pozole or this type of dish. And it was just one after the other. And then I really started that at that point is kind of was a come to Jesus of how great Mexican food was and how great just ingredients are. And it still was the beginning kind of into my love for food, but I didn't really, I still up until I was about probably 30, I still enjoyed cooking more than I enjoyed eating. And it wasn't until now these past 10 years that I think, I love cooking, but eating is really where it's at.Suzy Chase: So then you went to Virginia Tech and you threw huge dinner parties. Tell me about those.Danny Mena: We had a nice little apartment and a good group of friends that liked to eat and drink. And so I don't know exactly how the first one came about, but one of my friends, I think for my first one that I kind of did, it was a friend of mine he cooked a chicken Parmesan and it was in his mom's special recipe and everything. And that was like my first dish that I was cooking full-on. And then of course I started cooking Mexican food and one of the dishes that's so easy to do but so much fun and so different is called a sope. And it's basically like a masa round that's a little thicker than a tortilla but smaller and it gets fried. And then usually you put beans and then it can be chicken, it can be chorizo, it can be any kind of steak, lettuce, cream. And then of course a nice salsa. So we used to start doing these kinds of dinner parties and so we'd have people over. And at that time my cooking timing was always off. So people would start coming over around six or seven and then dinner would probably start around 10. And so everyone was very hungry and by then slightly inebriated. So the food was always very well received, which only gives you confidence. It's kind of when I started to really appreciate and what Mexican food really is all about. Is kind of people coming together and the food was almost secondary to everything else that's going around in the dinner party.Suzy Chase: Did that confidence prompt you to apply to the French Culinary Institute?Danny Mena: At the time I was studying industrial engineering and so I decided to change career paths right then and there and go to hospitality tourism because that's the closest thing they had. And then at that point, my father passed away so then I had to deal with a lot of I stayed at home and everything. And so I kind of really didn't even think much about culinary school. I got a job in North Carolina working as an engineer and then after working there for like six, eight months, it was a short term contract. It's like where do I move to? And I had some friends in New York and I was like, I'm going to move to New York. And then I started doing dinner parties again in New York and that's when I read Kitchen Confidential, which is funny you brought up Anthony Bourdain. And really was kind the point of you know what, if I'm going to do this, I should do this now. I quit my job. I was working at a manufacturing company here in the city and I applied and went into the FCI.Suzy Chase: So then you got an internship at Blue Hill. Did you realize how special that restaurant was at the time?Danny Mena: No, unfortunately it was not the one in Stone Barns, it was the one here in the city. But even then, it's still like, I didn't realize, I mean it was an amazing experience to understand because when I was there, it was a chef Cuevas and he was the one day in and day out every in the morning, every night. He was the one who really was doing it, but what Dan Barbara does and understanding the role. Then he came only once. And I remember when we were there, they got reviewed or re reviewed by the New York Times and they barely mentioned the chef de cuisine. And they really mentioned all about Dan Barber. And I was kind of disappointed, but really as I understand everything that Dan does and I've had now the pleasure of going up to Stone Barns and I mean just a true savant. I mean, and the ingredients they are doing and I mean, the best chicken in my life. And of course what they were doing in that little kitchen was such an amazing sort of education that really was kind of a wonderful way. And now in hindsight I appreciate it that much more.Suzy Chase: Your first official culinary job was at the Modern, at the Museum of Modern Art. There is nothing I love more than eating at the Modern.Danny Mena: It was amazing. I was looking at restaurants and someone just asked me, why would you go to a French restaurant if you're like, we were, I was looking for the best restaurants that I could in the city and where I thought I could learn the most. And so the Modern of course Danny Meyer just has a way of making great restaurants and hiring the right people. And I met the chef and he was great. And the sous chef was amazing and the guys and a couple of people in the kitchen seemed fun and I got the job offer and I was super excited. And a little by little I started off with the salad station. Then I kind of moved to the fry station that I moved to the grill. Ended up in sauté and just had a wonderful opportunity to learn entire line and the food that they're doing. It was so good. I mean learned to appreciate a really good pickle, which is a, it goes a long way.Suzy Chase: Yeah. So this whole time in your career you were solely focused on American cuisine. Was there something in your head saying go back to Mexican cuisine, the food of your home?Danny Mena: Yeah, I mean at the same time, as much as I learned about all of that and learning about all these kinds of cuisines that I knew kind of little about that. Of course the French Culinary Institutes, which is now the ACC, but very French focused on the dishes and the sauces and all that. And so it was a new world that was really exciting to me and I really loved it. But whenever I cooked at home, one of the things that I always kind of say like 99.9% of Mexicans will tell you the best food in the world is Mexican. And it just every cabinet, everybody, you go to any Mexicans house, you open a cabinet and there's going to be, there's some Valentina or Cholula or some sort of hot sauce. There's just certain addictive quality to Mexican food. Then at the end of the day, that's what I started out with cooking more and more at home because I was doing less and less away from the away from home related to Mexican food. But the reason why we quit the Modern was to try to open a taco truck. So before taco trucks were were cool and were really nice, that was our idea. It was going to be called taco truck and we were going to get this really cool and get it super decked out and painted. I was going to get the spit and actually make tacos al pastor properly. And it was the first set of idea that kind of really spawned everything on trying to make the Mexican food that I know and love and the real deal. Something started calling me to kind of go home.Suzy Chase: Born and raised in Mexico City. You wanted this cookbook to be a cookbook plus a travel guide. Talk a bit about that and the map in the back of the book.Danny Mena: One of the things that I really wanted to talk about was kind of like the authenticity of our food at the restaurant and what we're doing at Hecho en Dumbo, what we were doing there, and what we're doing at La Loncheria. We wanted to kind of, to capture that to where sometimes I talked to a chef and I was like, you know what you never see on a Mexican menu in the United States? Is broccoli. But broccoli exists throughout the markets. People eat broccoli probably, maybe not as much, but somewhat close to it as much as the United States. It is an ingredient that exists. But because we don't find it to be Mexican, therefore we don't really see it, then people are kind of scared. So I was like, so what I wanted to do with this cookbook is also to show kind of what we rooted in authenticity and kind of in tradition with the recipes. And so the best way to kind of go about it was to talk about how restaurants in Mexico that are all, of course, if you're in Mexico and you have a restaurant, it's automatically kind of Mexican. You don't have to prove it's, unless you're doing an Italian restaurant or anything. And even then they always put salsas on the table. So that's kind of what we wanted to do is there's so much great food coming out of Mexico. Every time we go down, we always go out to a new restaurant that's opening up. And so I really kind of wanted to kind of showcase the quality and the vast array of food that exists in Mexico City. And some of the some of the recipes were, let's say like carnitas, which is a simple in general, a pretty simple recipe. We tried to stay true to that in the way that it gets cooked. And then certain things where like cochinita pibil or barbacoa that typically cooked in a pit underground. I don't have a pit here in New York and I can't do it at my restaurant. So of course we had to find a way to do it in an oven.Suzy Chase: Mexican food is interesting because you can have most of the dishes for breakfast, lunch or dinner. I can't think of any other cuisine that's like that.Danny Mena: Tacos for breakfast are very commonplace. I mean, you could have tacos three meals a day for three weeks and never, no one would think anything of it. That's just the normal way of going about. Tamales easy always. It's a big breakfast dish but also tamales are big for dinner. And really I think eggs is the only thing that is kind of only for breakfast. And then other than that you could have anything else you went to at any time.Suzy Chase: On Saturday night I made your recipe for costras. How do you pronounce it?Danny Mena: Costras, yeah.Suzy Chase: With quick pickled onions on page 45. First off, why is this recipe called costras? Because it looks like a darn taco. And how did this dish come about?Danny Mena: So this is a really fascinating one. So costra means a scab. And so what it is, you have your tortilla and then on top of that you have a piece of cheese. But what you do is you caramelize the cheese on one side. So if you look at the other side of it, it looks like a scab. There was this place in kind of a nicer neighborhood in the northern part of the city and it's called Bosques. These guys who had a little stand outside and they were the first people that they started making this type of taco and then probably it was an accident. I might go cook the cheese and realize how tasty it was. They were able to have enough money to move from this outside little stand inside this mall where really this kind of like high end nightclub was and people would come from all over to get the costras. So people leaving the nightclub or people just coming to eat the costra would go down. And for like 10 years it was a huge phenomenon and it was really kind of them. And then the club closed down and then they had to actually move out of the mall and they're back on the street right now. But now you see costras in almost every taqueria in Mexico City. They really, I'm almost a hundred percent sure it spawned from this one place. So it's typically on a flour tortilla, it's a caramelized cheese and then you can put kind of any topic on it. So it is a taco, it's just a little different of a taco. So why it actually has a different namesake.Suzy Chase: It's funny because while I was making it, I was thinking about how long those cheese disks take to make and I was thinking about them serving all these up to the massive crowd coming out of the nightclub, hungry and drunk. How did they make these quickly?Danny Mena: Yeah, so they had shredded cheese that they would make it but it took some time. I mean they had like three guys in the back there, they were working hard, they were sweating. But one of the things about about these costras, they're also kind of big typically. So you only needed like one or two. A friend of mine I think once ate four, which was almost probably in the Ripley's believe it record book.Suzy Chase: That's a bad decision.Danny Mena: Yeah, it was like that. Of course they had a bunch to drink. But yeah, like what we say at our book to do grated because that's what you need actually. If you do fresh cheese and grate it yourself or anything like that, even even then it doesn't actually, it's not, it's too much liquid content. So it actually doesn't caramelize well. So if you have the grated then it will because it's kind of drier and it will caramelize and crisp up really nicely. So in the time that you're doing that, you can heat the tortilla and then you can add the, and then usually, if you do tacos al pastor, that's cooking kind of separately. So you basically have your tortilla, you caramelize the cheese on a hot griddle and then you add the meat on top and have yourself a quick costra.Suzy Chase: Yeah, you can see mine on Instagram. It's beautiful.Danny Mena: Nice. Beautiful. Nice, nice. I'm excited.Suzy Chase: Now to my new segment this season called my favorite cookbook. Aside from this cookbook, what is your all time favorite cookbook and why?Danny Mena: Eric Ripert. Return to Cooking it's called. So it's my favorite cookbook. Not only is the, just everything so beautiful, but it's all about seasons. And so he kind of goes around and he's in Puerto Rico and then he's in Napa and all these kind of different regions in different areas and what's kind of in season and the food is so, it's so much about that kind of, the area. I love a lot of Mexican foods and everything that we like about Mexico. But to have a cookbook where it kind of captures the essence of the place and then also a certain time. And I actually when I bought this cookbook, I didn't even know who Eric Ripert was. And now of course understanding him much better. It makes much more sense why everything is just so beautiful. It was the first cookbook that I really bought those kind of high end that I was trying to kind of make some of these dishes. And so it was a lot of lot of fun. And so we had a shrimp here with black pepper and terragon and brandy. That was just amazing. It was the first time that I cooked something that was out of my realm of kind of knowledge of ingredients that was, it was something that I think is pretty special. So I don't know if to me it was this is the one that kind of really I guess captured my imagination of how beautiful food can look and taste.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web, social media and in New York City?Danny Mena: So New York City. A lot of times I am at the restaurant that we have called La Loncheria. 41 Wilson Avenue, which is in Bushwick. On the web that you can find me on Instagram at @dennyhecho and also at La Loncheria B.K. restaurants. TSuzy Chase: Thanks so much Danny for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast. Danny Mena: Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure.Outro: Subscribe over on cookerybythebook.com and thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast Cookery by the Book.

The Deep End of FlavorRecipes and Stories from New Orleans’ Premier Seafood ChefBy Tenney Flynn with Susan Puckett Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table talking to cookbook authors.Tenney Flynn: My name is Tenney Flynn. I'm the chef of GW Fins fine dining seafood restaurant in New Orleans, where we have just started our 18th year business, and we're going to talk about my cookbook, The Deep End of Flavor.Suzy Chase: Inspired by vibrant flavors of New Orleans and tropical climates, you have included your favorite techniques for creating fabulous seafood-centered meals in this cookbook. So let's dive in. Get it? Dive in?Tenney Flynn: Okay. I do like to dive.Suzy Chase: I know. Yeah, we're definitely going to talk about that. But I'm so happy that you're talking about looking beyond salmon and tilapia. I think it's safe to say we're all slightly sick of salmon and tilapia, right?Tenney Flynn: Well, I'm not sick of tilapia, because I don't eat it. I don't recognize its existence, but that's easier for me to do in New Orleans. And I think I say something in the book like, "There's always a better choice than tilapia, no matter where you are," either in the frozen or the fresh section. Salmon, I like salmon, and if I lived in the Pacific Northwest I would have nothing but wild salmon, but it's my experience that even if I'm willing to pay the money for these wild varieties, by the time they get east, they're not really worth it. I'm perfectly happy with high-quality, farm-raised Atlantic salmon. We usually buy it from Ireland or Scotland. And I've got recipes... I've got a recipe in the book that's great for that. It's cold-smoked and grilled, and it's made believers out of a lot of people. But 70% of our menu at Fins is out of the Gulf of Mexico, and the Gulf of Mexico supplies 66% of the edible fin fish varieties in the U.S., which, you know, you can tell it right away if it's 66%, then it's more than the East Coast, the West coast, Alaska, and Hawaii put together. Alaska has more tonnage, but we certainly have more varieties.Suzy Chase: I don't like fish, but I like your fish.Tenney Flynn: I was about to say, "You're telling me you don't like fish. I take that as a personal challenge."Suzy Chase: No, that's a quote that you hear so much.Tenney Flynn: I do, and I like it. And usually those people come from places where fish isn't readily available. Certainly I grew up with bad fish. It used to come in these oblong boxes. I actually thought fish was oblong. And my mother would thaw it out, and then she would, you know, ruin it one way or another. And it wasn't that good. I defy anyone to not like any number of recipes with just a simple sauteed meunière, which is one of the first recipes in the book. Just a little salt and pepper, dust in flour, saute in a little oil and butter mixture, pour a little brown butter over the top. I mean, there's nothing not to like. I've enjoyed, you know, making believers out of people, and I think people are much more adventurous in trying new species than they were, you know, 20 or 30 years ago.Suzy Chase: So, you're an avid diver and spearfisher, and you even have a recipe for ceviche lionfish in this cookbook. Describe this.Tenney Flynn: Well it's a very simple ceviche. I don't like the kind where, you know, it's highly acidic and sort of tastes pickled. So this particular recipe is basically half lime juice, half orange juice, a little shallot, a little salt, a little hot chili. And then I smash the fish out flat. Lionfish is a very tender fish. It's rather neutrally flavored. And then just sort of pour that sauce over it, let it sit for a minute or two, rather than, you know, letting it sit in the acid for long, long periods of time. We also have a deep-fried lionfish recipe in there that's very, very good. It's a great fish that lends itself to a quick saute and tempura-frying very, very handily. And then sticking them is considered good citizenship. You're supposed to kill everyone you see, and the only way to harvest them so far is recreational divers hand-spearing them.Suzy Chase: Where can you find them?Tenney Flynn: They're basically, they're moving up the East Coast. They're good at depths that humans can't go to. They can't take anything much under 50 degrees, so that's going to keep them out of New York, probably. They're very adaptable. They have 14 venomous spines that surround their body. They're beautiful fish. You might've seen them in aquariums. They're aquarium escapees. They're not native to this hemisphere. And they escaped, and they eat everything, and nothing eats them. A couple of months ago, there was a lionfish rodeo in the Florida panhandle. They got 15,000 fish.Suzy Chase: So your roots are in Stone Mountain, Georgia. Tell me about your father's restaurant.Tenney Flynn: Well, it's... even the name of my father's restaurant is unusual in 2019, but you have to realize this was the '60s. It was a different world. It was still a segregated society, and it was called The Plantation Restaurant. There were also, in Atlanta at that time, there was Mammy's Shanty, Aunt Fanny's Cabin, Pittypat's Porch. I mean, it was a genre of restaurants. And, you know, having gotten past that, the restaurant itself was this giant, sprawling entity, and we fried enough chicken to fill the Superdome. Part of it was family dining, and then there was another side of it that... It was a dry county, which meant that there was no alcohol sold anywhere there, but you could get a state charter that enabled you to have a private club. You could sell liquor, you know, to the club members. So that was kind of an unusual thing at the time, and that end of the restaurant was more of a chop house kind of menu, slightly more upscale. But I started working in the kitchen there when I was about nine years old and worked in the kitchen until I was 15. I wanted to go out on the floor and make tips. And then I started working as service bar when I was 16, because nobody could see me.Suzy Chase: Tell me about GW Fins, where you cook now.Tenney Flynn: GW Fins is a fine-dining seafood restaurant kind of on a steakhouse frame. We just started our 18th year in the French Quarter. Even at 18 years, we're always going to be the new guy on the block, because we're across the street from Arnaud's, which is 100 years old, and around the corner on the other side of the block from Galatoire's, which I think is about 105 years old. It's a modern restaurant. It's a big space with a big warehouse space. We have about 220 seats, and since I had spent 10 years in the steakhouse business, it's not real surprising that the kitchen design was kind of modeled after a steakhouse. We don't use heat lamps or plate covers. There's a lot of open space, so all the food has to come up and go out immediately. So we use a timing system, kind of like a steakhouse. And fish is, you know, when it's cooked to point, when it's ready to go, it has to go. We drop first course in five minutes and entrees in 20 minutes, and the cooks are all cooking for that 20 minutes. We typically have 12 to 14 fin fish on the menu. As I mentioned, 70% of those come out of the Gulf of Mexico, and we have a variety of preparations. Very little fried stuff. I deep-fry softshell crabs. I think that's the way to do them. And we have some fried garnishes, but most... it's pretty much divided between sauteed, wood-grilled, broiled. And the executive chef, Mike Nelson, has been with me for 14 years. He's been executive chef for the last two years. He's a very inventive cat. He's much more creative than I am, and we've evolved some of the simple items over the years. We've done a kitchen remodel. We're able to do some things we couldn't do before. So it's a pretty exciting kitchen, and one of the most exciting things about it is that we print the menu every day about four o'clock. We receive all our fish in the whole state, and we kick them back, and we call up, and, you know, it's... We still reject a lot of fish from people we've been buying from since we've opened, because we look at every fish, and they buy it in vats. Everyone always sends us the best of what they have. We have full-time butchers every day, and Chef Mike has kind of made it his shtick to go nose to tail. One reason is respecting the animal. He's really done some very, very interesting things with using whole whole carcasses.Suzy Chase: John T. Edge, author of The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South, wrote about how you talked trash fish early on. What is trash fish?Tenney Flynn: Just an under-utilized species that people don't, you know... it's sort of out of their comfort zone, their field of knowledge. We'll buy anything, you know, that we can, by-catch, small amounts of things, and things we've never heard of before. We had conger eel the other day. I'd never tasted conger eel.Suzy Chase: What's that?Tenney Flynn: It was just a huge sea eel. The bone structure was challenging, but the meat was really, really good.Suzy Chase: So when you see something like conger eel that you've never seen before, what does that mean?Tenney Flynn: Well, it's just the... I mean, the ocean is full of, you know, thousands and thousands of different species, and these are things that are caught... By-catch just means it was caught accidentally. You know, they're targeting one species, and then they caught another. They don't usually want that, because they have to stop and throw it over the side. And long as it's fresh, we'll buy it. We'll see what we can do with it. And that's a lot of fun.Suzy Chase: Let's talk about conservation. You say think sustainable, buy domestic. As a home cook, what sort of fish should I be buying at the grocery store, and what should I stay away from?Tenney Flynn: Well, different states have different laws governing country of origin. In general, all the way across the board, the United States has good fishery laws. You know, nobody likes regulations. The commercial fishermen don't like them, the recreational fishermen don't like them, the various green groups don't like them. Nobody is perfectly happy with the regulatory process, but that's why we have a healthy fish population. And I've been diving places that either had no rules or the rules were not enforced, and there's no fish. There's a seafood contest here every year where chefs from coastal... actually 25 or 30 states, so I think there was some freshwater fish involved, too. Anyway, there was a chef from Guam whose dish was parrot fish, and I've dove in Guam, and the only reason anybody eats parrotfish is they've eaten everything else. I was a little bit perturbed at that. Certainly in BVI, in Honduras, they have very lax or easily-circumvented regulations.Suzy Chase: While I was looking through the cookbook for something to cook, I saw on Page 133 that you have a recipe for frog legs. I just can't understand the appeal. Please explain.Tenney Flynn: I don't understand what your objection to them is. Do you like... Are they cute little frogs, or are they gross frogs, or why don't you like frogs?Suzy Chase: I just can't imagine, first of all, that there's any meat on the leg. It just seems like... how many frog legs do you have to eat to get a decent amount of meat for, let's say, an appetizer?Tenney Flynn: Well, the ones I prefer are pinky finger sized, so I'd give you about six or eight of them, or about three or four pairs. The ones that are thumb and first knuckle or the base of your thumb sized you have to cook a little bit longer. You have to braise them. I think in the book, too, I talk about a particular customer that I cooked frog legs for who also cooked a lot of other much weirder stuff than frog legs, which is... recently passed away, mac Rebennack, Dr. John. He was convinced to the core of his being that the reason why he was alive and kicking was he only ate wild food.Suzy Chase: Well, he's not alive and kicking anymore, so I don't know.Tenney Flynn: He was a 77-year-old rock 'n' roll musician that shot heroin for 40 years, so that's like dog years with... for the normal population.Suzy Chase: Yeah, he had a good run.Tenney Flynn: And we love our characters in New Orleans, and he certainly was one.Suzy Chase: On Saturday night, I made your recipe for shrimp sauteed in barbecue butter with goat cheese grits and warm sourdough bread to sop up all the buttery goodness. Describe this dish.Tenney Flynn: Well, calling it barbecue shrimp is in New Orleans thing. It's not really barbecued, but it's a... And our recipe is a compound butter, which makes it easier to standardize the level of seasoning. So you get domestic shrimp, season them, saute them lightly, deglaze with a little beer, and then mount this compound butter in there to make the creamy sauce, and then dip your bread in, and eat them up. How did you enjoy it?Suzy Chase: It was amazing. And I don't like grits, I have to admit, but the goat cheese brought it to a whole different level.Tenney Flynn: Well, I think hominy grits, the long-cook variety, it's a neutral medium, and you can... There's a recipe in the book for a risotto made with the pozole instead of rice, kind of a riff on some stuff that I ate in Oaxaca, and that's the... Dried pozole ground up is grits, and that's the same flavor that's in your corn tortillas, your taco chips. You know, it's a underlying flavor in a tremendous amount of Mexican cuisine.Suzy Chase: So how was it working with Susan Puckett?Tenney Flynn: Susan's a hoot. We're both from the South, which New Orleans is not really the South. It's kind of like the northernmost outpost of the islands. It's a whole lot more like Dominican Republic or Haiti than Mississippi or Alabama. Susan is from Mississippi. She's very Southern. She was the food editor of The Atlanta Journal, and we know lots and lots of people in common. And I think Susan is a much better cook than she was when we started. She tested a lot of the recipes, and that's a point, too, that that was a very tedious process. But these are all tested recipes for the home cook. I think if somebody goes to the trouble and expense of buying the cookbook and buying the ingredients for the recipe and if they follow the recipe, you know, it should work. And there's certainly a lot of untested recipes out there that don't work, so hopefully all these do, you know, and they're... you follow the steps, you'll come up with a good result.Suzy Chase: Now to my segment this season called "My Favorite Cookbook." Aside from this cookbook, what is your all-time favorite cookbook and why?Tenney Flynn: There's a canning, pickling, and preserving cookbook that I use a lot called Putting Food By, which is a reference book that I use a lot. And a lot of books I just like to read for... not so much for recipes but just for, you know, the stories and the... and that's why I enjoy putting stories in our book.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?Tenney Flynn: Chef Tenney, T-E-N-N-E-Y, at Facebook and GWFins.comSuzy Chase: You've shown us that cooking fish can be as easy as frying an egg. Thanks so much for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.Tenney Flynn: Well, thanks so much for having me. I can't wait to listen to myself.Outro: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com, and thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

Today on Screenside Chats, we’re playing Innagadadavida’s interview with LittleKuriboh. Recorded in 2017. http://www.voodoomoose.net/ ▽▽ Timecode Navigation Below ▽▽ 00:00:00 – Intro 00:02:38 – Interview 02:09:42 – Outro Subscribe to Voodoo Moose for more podcasts and videos ▶ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjyEkKmscLfk-ZBsGq0ULuA?sub_confirmation=1 Subscribe on iTunes ▶ https://itunes.apple.com/az/podcast/kind-soundwaves/id965620937?mt=2 Pokemon: Legend of Thunder Abridged (Feat. LittleKuriboh & PurpleEyesWTF) Voodoo Moose […]

Season 1 – Episode 12 – Podio Design for Business 2: "The Power of Asking 'Why?' in Your Designs."Discussion Outline:Introduction – SUBSCRIBE (do it!)The importance of starting from "Why" in your Podio solution designs.1st Principle: There are Choices and Results in your solution design2nd Principle: Make the process the easiest path to follow3rd Principle: Understand Management's requirement versus the End-Users' RequirementsAudience Engagement: Solving Podio Gaps – Podio Developers and Power users – Submit your gaps!Outro: SUBSCRIBE and Thank you.Follow us on social media (@PodcastPodio) to stay up to date on all Podio Podcast news.Support the show (http://www.brickbridgeconsulting.com/podcast)

Podcast Outline – Season 1 – Episode 11 – Solving Podio Gaps #2Discussion Outline:Introduction – SUBSCRIBE (please)Single AWS Lambda for the community, a payoff from Episode 101st Discussion: Filter View with Text FieldsProblem: Why Cannot Filter w/Searchable TextIssue: Indexing - Who & Why3 Possible Solutions/Work aroundBonus: Searchable Null Dates2nd Discussion: Sharing just an App but not a WorkspaceProblem: Giving access to a full App but not the whole WorkspaceIssue: Business Case & Podio Entitlements4 Possible Solutions/Work aroundAudience Engagement: Solving Podio Gaps – Podio Developers and Power users – Submit your gaps!Outro: SUBSCRIBE and Thank you.Follow us on social media (@PodcastPodio) to stay up to date on all Podio Podcast news.Support the show (http://www.brickbridgeconsulting.com/podcast)

Show Outline:Introduction to interviewTopic: – Interview with Andrew Cranston, CTO at GameChangers [http://www.WeAreGameChangers.com]1st Discussion: Andrew's background and a discussion of his progress as a Podio solution developer.2nd Discussion: Boost PM [http://www.boostpm.com] and its technical philosophy3rd Discussion: Don't be afraid to move from Globiflow into other tools like ProcFu, SaaSsafras, and the Podio API itself!Audience Engagement: Solving Podio Gaps – Podio Developers and Power users – Submit your gaps!Outro: SUBSCRIBE and Thank you.Follow us on social media (@PodcastPodio) to stay up to date on all Podio Podcast news.Support the show (http://www.brickbridgeconsulting.com/podcast)

Podcast Outline – Season 1 – Episode 7 – Podio Design Considerations for Sales & Marketing SolutionsDiscussion Outline:Introduction – Welcome to the Series - Podio Design for Business TypesTopic: "Podio Design Considerations for Sales & Marketing Solutions"1st Discussion: Business Case - Marketing Agency needing a CRM to "install" for clients2nd Discussion: Theoretical Solution Work outDeep Dive: Driving metrics through Podio-based CRM systems and the power of the dataUp Next: Audience Engagement: Solving Podio Gaps – Podio Developers and Power users – Submit your gaps!Outro: SUBSCRIBE and Thank you.Follow us on social media (@PodcastPodio) to stay up to date on all Podio Podcast news.Support the show (http://www.brickbridgeconsulting.com/podcast)

Podcast Outline – Season 1 – Episode 6 – Solving Podio Gaps #1Discussion Outline:Introduction – Welcome to the SeriesTopic: "Solving Podio Gaps" -- a new series on our Podcast1st Discussion: What this series is about.Hot Topic: Extending Podio Platform2nd Discussion: Example Gap -- 2-way Sync with Google CalendarDefined Business ProblemExplore Technical LimitationsOutline of Potential SolutionsDeep Dive: Theoretical workout of the solution on the Podio APIUp Next: Audience Engagement: Solving Podio Gaps – Podio Developers and Power users – Submit your gaps!Outro: SUBSCRIBE and Thank you.Links:https://help.podio.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/200519848-Two-way-sync-with-Google-AppsFollow us on social media (@PodcastPodio) to stay up to date on all Podio Podcast news.Support the show (http://www.brickbridgeconsulting.com/podcast)

Show Outline:Introduction to interviewTopic: – Interview with Jordan Fleming of Game Changers1st Discussion: Jordan's upcoming Podcast, “Supercharged! with Jordan Fleming” [http://wearegamechangers.com/en/podcast/] *HINT: SUBSCRIBE*2nd Discussion: Game Changers [wearegamechangers.com] and its business philosophy and historyShop Talk: Jarett and Alex dive into some "shop talk" with Jordan about Podio solution design and two big sticking points when working with clients.3rd Discussion: smrtPhone [smrtPhone.io] -- its history with swiftpod.io, the explosive growth in users (especially in the REI space), and the new “smrtDialer” product add-on.Audience Engagement: Solving Podio Gaps – Podio Developers and Power users – Submit your gaps!Outro: SUBSCRIBE and Thank you.Follow us on social media (@PodcastPodio) to stay up to date on all Podio Podcast news.*** Note: interview contains some loose language ***Support the show (http://www.brickbridgeconsulting.com/podcast)

Season 1 – Episode 4 – How we built mPact Pro: Developing Wide-Scale (Part 3 of 3)Discussion Outline:1. Introduction – Welcome to Part 3 of 3 -- How we proceeded from a Closed and Open Beta into a Commercially Viable Product (CVP) and the implications of distributing/implementing/support a mass-market, Podio-based product.2. Topic: What were the steps to from Closed/Open Beta to a CVP? What did we learn from that experience?3. 1st Discussion: Closed & Open Beta selection and its impact on the CVP4. Hot Topic: Customer Acquisition & Pricing/Marketing Strategies5. 2nd Discussion: Distribution Model (technical-side) and Other Considerations of Wide Scale, Podio-based Solutions6. Real Talk: Limitations of Podio App Marketplace and GlobiFlow Auto Copying7. Deep Dive: Controlling the Implementation Process -- Deployment, Training and Support Considerations8. Next Episode: Interview with Jordan Fleming of Gamechangers: His new podcast and a spotlight on smrtPhone.9. Audience Engagement: Solving Podio Gaps – Podio Developers and Power users – Submit your gaps!10. Outro: SUBSCRIBE and Thank you.Follow us on social media (@PodcastPodio) to stay up to date on all Podio Podcast news.Support the show (http://www.brickbridgeconsulting.com/podcast)

Season 1 – Episode 3 – How we built mPact Pro: Developing Wide-Scale (Part 2 of 3) Discussion Outline:Introduction – Welcome to Part 2 of 3 -- How we proceeded into Beta and the technical side of building a wide-scale Podio solution.Topic: What were the steps to building a Beta in 14 months? How was that experience?1st Discussion: Consulting & DevelopmentHot Topic: Why was software like Globiflow, Zapier, etc not able to fit the use cases needed?2nd Discussion: SaaSsafras Service DesignReal Talk: Limitations – What was the limitation of Podio's API that impacted the design?Deep Dive: Controlling the Development Process – Why is the “Discovery” portion so critical in Podio development?Up Next: mPact Pro – Diving into CVP and the "business" side of this 3 part series.Audience Engagement: Solving Podio Gaps – Podio Developers and Power users – Submit your gaps!Outro: SUBSCRIBE and Thank you.Follow us on social media (@PodcastPodio) to stay up to date on all Podio Podcast news.Support the show (http://www.brickbridgeconsulting.com/podcast)

Season 1 – Episode 2 – How we built mPact Pro: Designing Wide-Scale (Part 1 of 3) Discussion Outline:Introduction – We are going to tell a story on how we designed a national product with a 6-figure budget on Podio.Topic: What were the steps to building an Alpha in 90 days? How was that experience?1st Discussion: Consulting & DesignHot Topic: Why do people DIY Podio builds (or not)? What are some of the pitfalls in not using an agency?2nd Discussion: Workspace/App Break-out Design & Data FlowReal Talk: Limitations – What was the limitation with Podio/GlobiFlow/Zapier that impacted the design?Deep Dive: Controlling the Discovery Process – Why is the “Discovery” portion so critical in Podio design?Up Next: mPact Pro – Diving into Beta and the technical side of this 3 part series.Audience Engagement: Solving Podio Gaps – Podio Developers and Power users – Submit your gaps!Outro: SUBSCRIBE and Thank you.Follow us on social media (@PodcastPodio) to stay up to date on all Podio Podcast news.Support the show (http://www.brickbridgeconsulting.com/podcast)

Tasting ItalyA Culinary JourneyBy National Geographic & America’s Test KitchenForeword by Jack Bishop Intro: Welcome to the Cookery by the Book podcast with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cooking New York City sitting at her dining room table talking to cookbook authors.Jack Bishop: My name is Jack Bishop and my cookbook is Tasting Italy: A Culinary Journey.Suzy Chase: You're the Chief Creative officer of America's Test Kitchen. How did the collaboration between America's Test Kitchen and National Geographic come together for Tasting Italy?Jack Bishop: Editors were just chatting, believe it or not, at a publishing conference. We thought, wow, as we were talking, if we teamed up National Geographic and America's Test Kitchen we could create a unique book. You think about National Geographic photographs, maps, travel essays to take you there, and then to be able to bring Italy to life in your own kitchen with recipes from America's Test Kitchen, it seemed like a really unique way of bringing the cuisine of Italy to life in a book.Suzy Chase: The beautiful photographs in this cookbook really transport us to Italy. Talk to me about your relationship with Italy and its food.Jack Bishop: I have a very long relationship with Italy. It began as a child. My Italian grandmother, who is the most talented home cook I ever knew. I grew up eating a lot of Italian foods, Sunday suppers. I lived in Italy when I was in my early 20s. I've traveled throughout Italy. Could we just say, they have the best food on the planet in Italy, at least in my opinion. The book is also just a personal passion because the food of Italy is really tremendously different than what we think. I still recall my first trip to Italy. I'd taken an overnight train from Germany and had gotten off the train in Florence, and went to the first restaurant, and there was nothing recognizable. None of the dishes that my grandmother had made were on the menu, which makes sense, once you think about it. Which is that my grandmother's relatives were born in Calabria in the south. Like many of the immigrants that came to the U.S., they came from the south and brought that cuisine with them. The rest of Italy has very different dishes. The climate's different, the geography, the history. The cuisine is different. The food of Florence is very, very different than the food of Calabria.Suzy Chase: How did you figure out the recipes for this cookbook. Did the locations dictate the recipes?Jack Bishop: We decided that we were going to structure the book in three large areas. Northern Italy, Central Italy and Southern Italy. Then within each of those, do a chapter on the administrative regions in Italy. They're kind of the equivalent of a state in the United States. Tuscany would be an administrative region, which is the area where Florence is. For each chapter you begin with an essay and photographs that brings you there. Tells you about the history, the topography, the major ingredients, the food traditions. Then we selected what we thought were the distinctive regional dishes. That was really hard. We ended up with a hundred recipes. The original list had 400 recipes. We really had to pare it down and say, "What are the dishes that really define Veneto or Liguria or Sicily? Most of the sections of the book have five or six recipes that really give you a taste of the unique, authentic local cuisine. Some of them are dishes that will be familiar to Americans. In the Lazio chapter, where Rome is from, you see spaghetti carbonarra, which is a classic Roman dish. But a lot of these recipes are things that frankly I'd never seen because I had never been to that particular part of Italy. So I wasn't familiar with the dish.Suzy Chase: So this cookbook is structured from north to south. Let's start off with northern Italy. The one word in the book you use to describe the food of Italy's northern region is rich. Why the word rich?Jack Bishop: The climate in the north is more like the climate perhaps in the northern United States. It's cold and snowy. I think of maybe the great plains. In the summer it's very fertile, so there's a lot of dairy, a lot of cattle. There's a lot of cheese. The fresh pasta is made with eggs. The influences are really Germanic or Austrian, as a way of describing it. So you see dishes with savoy cabbage, with speck which is a German ham. It is done in an Italian way, but it is a very rich, hearty cuisine. When you get to the far north, you're in the Alps, so it is hearty cuisine that makes sense in that cold weather. Buckwheat, polenta, they're used throughout this region. It is in many ways the most undiscovered part of Italy for many Americans because this cuisine isn't that well known in the United States, isn't really well represented. Most Americans don't end up going to this part of Italy. Lots and lots to discovery in northern Italy.Suzy Chase: Moving on to central Italy, the most significant influence on foods in central Italy comes from the Etruscans. Talk a bit about them and the influences on the cuisine. Jack Bishop: This is the region that sort of spans from Florence to Siena, further south down towards Rome. This is probably, for Americans that have traveled to Italy, the region that they probably spent the most time in. The interesting thing here is how many of these dishes really have their roots in the Middle Ages or earlier. One of the great shifts in Italian cuisine occurred in the 1500s after Christopher Columbus's voyages to the New World and all of these ingredients that came back to Italy and then influenced the cuisine. So, for instance, tomatoes didn't exist in Italy until roughly 1500. Older dishes that have their routes in Etruscan culture, which is really from nearly 1,500 years ago, 2,000 years ago, don't have tomatoes. They're spices. They're beans. They're lots and lots of ancient grains that end up influencing the local cuisine.Suzy Chase: Almost every part of Italy grows olives. But a few locales are famous for the aromatic, rich, extra virgin olive oil. Tell me about Lucca's liquid gold.Jack Bishop: Lucca is in Tuscany. I would say that Tuscany and Umbria, which is the region just to the south, make my favorite extra virgin olive oils. They're often very green and peppery. They're big, bold, exciting olive oils. There are a lot of small farms, which means that they're growing the olives, pressing the olives, and bottling the olives all on site. Which is really a premium extra virgin oil, that it is a boutique product, rather than the semi industrial product of a lot of the extra virgin olive oils that end up in the supermarket, where they're mixing oils from, it could be a dozen different countries. It's a commodity. They're really choosing oils based on price. In Tuscany and particular in the Lucca region, they're just some of the most beautiful olive oils that are made on the planet. They've been growing olives in Italy for centuries and entries and they make amazing oils.Suzy Chase: Now Samin Nosrat has her new Netflix show, and the fat episode was totally focused on olive oil in Italy. Does that surprise you that she chose olive oil over butter for her fat episode?Jack Bishop: No. Let's say this, first of all, olive oil is 100% fat. Butter is fat and water. It's not that I don't love butter, but I think olive oil has way more flavor. You think about the cuisines of the entire Mediterranean basin, not just Italy but Spain, Greece, the eastern Turkey, north Africa. Olive oil is the fat of choice. Those cuisines are remarkably diverse and fabulous. Southern France it is olive oil. I think it is the fat of choice in my home, and certainly in most parts of Italy it is the primary fat that is used in the kitchen.Suzy Chase: Now onto southern Italy and the islands. The air is hotter, the conversation is hotter and the cooking is hotter. The three pillars of southern Italy's diet are oil, wine and grain. Talk a little bit about that.Jack Bishop: The climate is more like it is in perhaps North Africa. It's hot and sunny. It's wonderful for growing olives. There's a lot of oil that is produced in southern Italy. It's more rocky, hilly, mountainous in places. Not great for cattle. So there really isn't a whole lot of dairy, and certainly not a lot of butter, and really not a lot of cheese in this region. It is the sunny south, the land of olive oil. It is also where a lot of grains come from. Sicily has an amazing tradition of growing wheat, a lot of ancient varieties of wheat that we aren't that familiar with. The agriculture there is hard scrabble, but it is diverse and quite different than in central or northern Italy.Suzy Chase: Despite the wealth of food in southern Italy, poverty has been persistent. Even after the foundation of the Italian nation, the south was neglected leading to emigrants to form little Italies all over the United States. As many of these Italian restaurants and various Little Italies cropped up, they put things on their menu that you never see in Italy like garlic bread, fettuccine alfredo or caesar salad. How did that happen?Jack Bishop: It's funny. You can't find spaghetti and meatballs in Italy. They make meatballs, but they usually don't serve them on spaghetti. A couple of things happened. People who emigrated from southern Italia, Naples, Calabria, Puglia, Sicily were generally leaving because of poverty. They were hungry. While they brought their traditions with them, suddenly in the United States there was a wealth of ingredients. There was much more affluence. Meat which was scarce was plentiful. Many of the immigrants went from being quite poor to, in a matter of a generation or sometimes less, being fairly affluent. There was the ability to afford things they couldn't afford. The availability of ingredients was different. For instance, many of the traditional cheeses would've been sheep's milk cheeses of southern Italy. 125 years ago, when my relatives emigrated from Italy, you couldn't really find them here. So there were substitutions. The fact that the ingredients were different in the United States, and suddenly the level of affluence had changed, meant that the cuisine changed. So you got things like the Sunday supper which my grandmother would prepare, which is a very traditional Italian-American celebration with pasta and meatballs and braised sausages and braciole. They don't really eat that way in southern Italy even today.Suzy Chase: Calabria, the rugged toe of Italy's boot is Italy's poorest region but finds respite in the joys of food. Bread has been the antidote for hunger for centuries. Describe the filling Calabria dish called mirstew.Jack Bishop: It's amazing what they're able to do with bread in Italy. Left over bread gets recycled in many, many different ways. For instance, bread salad in Tuscany gets created from basically something that we would throw out in the United States, which was stale bread and rehydrated with tomatoes and vinegar. In the south, there's a lot of flat breads in Calabria. They're more what we would call pizzas in a sense that they are lightly topped, perhaps with some tomatoes, some chilies. They love their chilies in Calabria. They might sometimes be folded and filled, more like what we would think of here as a Calzone.Suzy Chase: Why does the tomato salad taste so extraordinary in capri?Jack Bishop: The climate is great. The volcanic soil has something to do with it. The fact that it's a local tomato. The tomatoes that we generally eat most of the year in the United States are grown far, far away. Tomatoes really don't well with travel. I think it's mostly about the climate and the fact that they are local tomatoes grown and enjoyed within one region.Suzy Chase: Now to my segment called My Last Meal. If you had to place an order for your last supper on Earth, what would it be?Jack Bishop: I think I want my grandmother's lasagna. She made this beautiful lasagna, it was a tomato based lasagna that had teeny little meatballs tucked between the layers with a lot of ricotta cheese and parmigiano. I make it once a year. The smell of lasagna takes me back 50 years, 45 years, and I'm a kid again, sitting on a stool in my grandmother's kitchen. It's just an amazing way to bring family history back to life.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?Jack Bishop: We're at americastestkitchen.com. You can come to our website and learn more about what we do here at America's Test Kitchen. You can learn more about Tasting Italy. You can also find us on Instagram, our Facebook pages and see the work that I do and that my colleagues here to on America's Test Kitchen. You can also watch our shows on public television. America's Test Kitchen and Cook's Country are both shown on stations all around the country.Suzy Chase: Wonderful, thanks Jack for talking Italy with me. And thanks for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.Jack Bishop: Thanks Suzy, you have a great day.Outro: Subscribe in Apple podcasts, and while you're there, please take a moment to rate and review Cookery by the Book. You can also follow me on Instagram @cookerybythebook, Twitter is #IAmSuzyChase, and download your kitchen mix tapes, ‘music to cook by’ on Spotify at Cookery by the Book. Thanks for listening. `

On episode 136 of the BSP, I talk about Google Project Dragonfly which ties individuals searches to their phone numbers (in China), The announcements from the September 2018 Apple Event and why the Apple Watch Series 4 was the best announcement, The EU Passing a new copyright directive which seems detrimental to content creators, and a lot more! Subscribe to the full audio podcast at http://www.bandrewsays.com Twitter: @bandrewsays Ask Questions: AskBandrew@gmail.com Merch; https://teespring.com/stores/podcastage-store Discord: https://discord.gg/dXQUc7v 00:00 - Intro 01:00 - Creator Case Study Plug 02:00 - Google Project Dragonfly (Censorship & Spying) * https://theintercept.com/2018/09/14/google-china-prototype-links-searches-to-phone-numbers/ 07:23 - Apple September 2018 Event Announcement 21:50 - Dr. Disrespect Shot At! 23:05 - The EU Passes a New Copyright Directive * http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//NONSGML+TA+P8-TA-2018-0337+0+DOC+PDF+V0//EN 27:49 - New Dynamic XLR/USB Microphone from RODE!!!! 29:30 - Theory About Long Form Content Hurting Your YouTube Channel 32:42 - There’s No Reason to Buy a Mic That’s More Than $400 36:11 - You Should Be Using Cheap Microphones! 39:40 - Ask Bandrew 39:56 - Email 1 41:26 - Have you Read Jasper Fforde or Matthew Reilly? 41:55 - Do I Prefer Fiction or Non-Fiction? 42:38 - What’s on my Current Audio Book Playlist? 45:18 - Email 2 45:53 - Will You Give Me Feedback on My Podcast? 46:23 - What’s Your Favorite Movie Genre? 47:37 - Email 3 48:31 - How do I Become a YouTube Partner? 50:50 - Outro Subscribe to the full audio podcast at http://www.bandrewsays.com Twitter: @bandrewsays Ask Questions: AskBandrew@gmail.com Merch; https://teespring.com/stores/podcastage-store Discord: https://discord.gg/dXQUc7v