Podcasts about ruffage

John's guest this week is a woman of many talents, cook, foodie, farmer and author. Abra Berens is a part of Granor Farms, an organic food growing and retailing operation in South Western Michigan. She is also an award-winning chef and the author of such books as Ruffage, Grist and Pulp.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Find me on Instagram @COL_EZC   Midas - Groove Control (Eufeion Remix) VGT - Rainbow (Remix) BL & Impulse Riders - See The Rainbow  Geos Crew - Nobody UFO - Freefall (M-Project) RECORD OF THE WEEK  Eufeion - A Drop of Acid THREE IN A ROW DJ EZC - Hide U Catch U DJ EZC - Revenge Of The Cosmic Space Banana DJ EZC - Always POWER MIX 2009  Ruffage & Chwhynny - Intoxicate Me Breeze & Styles - Let Me Fly (Jamie Ritmen Remix)  Entity & Darwin - Movin' Over Entity - Tweak! Brisk & Vagabond - Drift Away

John's guest this week is Abra Berens, an innovative specialist in various organic foods, both in the growing and the preparation.They talk over how she came to be so consumed with how to find and prepare food, and now has written books, Grist and Ruffage about the history and use of various vegetables. She has received favorable mention in James Beards' annual ratings of chefs and restaurants.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

En este episodio # 410, Mario Mengoni hace un informe de la masacre en la fiesta “Supernova Sukkot Gathering” y nos cuenta la historia sobre “The war song”, la canción que la banda Culture Club compuso en 1984. En la sección “Las Pistas Mareantes”, Gustavo Lamas presenta a PANGAEA (aka Kevin McAuley) quien forma parte de la nueva escena de dubstep que se desarrolla alrededor de las noches Ruffage en Leeds (UK) de la que es Dj residente. El “discollage”, con climas eclécticos y grandes nombres del house mundial. Novedades y mucha data para los amigos de la música. Playlist: 01 - PET SHOP BOYS - Love Comes Quickly (Murias Remix) 02 - ALLIGATORZ - Pra Ver Você Sambar (Yuksek Remix) 03 - BILLY PORTER - Fashion 04 - PANGAEA - Hole away 05 - CULTURE CLUB - The War Song (Ultimate Dance Mix) 06 - ULTRA NATE - World on fire 07 - RISK ASSESSMENT - Someone like you 08 - LUKE DELITE & MICHELLE WEEKS - Give Me Your Love (Dave Lee Edit) 09 - ALASTAIR LANE - Disco Maléfico Locutores: Leandro Brumatti y Raúl Proenza. Asistente de Producción: Diego Hidalgo. Fotografía y video: María Arnoletto. Logística: Sergio Van Megroot. Operador Técnico: Charlie Rodríguez. Columnista invitado: Gustavo Lamas. Conducción, musicalización y producción general: Mario Mengoni. Sitio oficial: www.discorama.net Seguinos en nuestras redes y dejanos tu comentario: https://www.instagram.com/discoramabymario https://www.facebook.com/discoramabymario https://www.twitter.com/DiscoramaAR

This week, we're excited to welcome Abra Berens to Salt + Spine, the podcast on stories behind cookbooks.Abra is the chef at Granor Farm in Three Oaks, Michigan, and the author of two cookbooks: Ruffage: A Practical Guide to Vegetables and Grist: A Practical Guide to Cooking Grains, Beans, Seeds, and Legumes.START COOKING TODAY: Omnivore Books | Bookshop | Hardcover Cook. | IndieBoundGrowing up in Michigan on a pickle farm, Abra took an interest in food early on. She worked at the beloved Zingerman's Deli in college and, before long, moved to Ireland to attend the farm-centered Ballymaloe Cooking School. Coming back to the states, she ran her own farm—called Bare Knuckle—for awhile, before landing at Granor Farm, where she hosts regular farm dinners to showcase their farming practices and produce. (Michigan is the second-most agriculturally diverse state in the country, second to California.)Abra joined us remotely for this week’s show to #TalkCookbooks. We've got a great chat, including our signature culinary game. Get full access to Salt + Spine at saltandspine.substack.com/subscribe

Dubstep Originators

Why We Cook: Women on Food, Identity, and ConnectionBy Lindsay Gardner 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 and this is my first book, Why We Cook: Women on Food Identity and Connection.Suzy Chase: Why We Cook celebrates those who are dedicated to not only practicing their craft, but also changing the world of food for the better. You spotlight 112 inspiring women who are shaping the contemporary food world as professional chefs, farmers, journalists, authors, and more with essays, interviews, quotes, and recipes. Talk a little bit about the process of choosing each woman and how the book is organized.Lindsay Gardner: The book is an illustrated collection, and as you said, includes recipes, essays, profiles, as well as Q and A's with not only women in the professional culinary realm but also home cooks. It was a goal of mine from the beginning to make the book as inclusive and far reaching as possible in terms of selecting people to participate in it and also reaching out to people to see if they would even be interested in participating in it. I'm not in the culinary world. I am a home cook and an artist and I think saying that I feel like or I felt like an outsider would be maybe a little too strong for how I think about it but, you know, I'm not part of the culinary industry. So when I reached out to a lot of the chefs and food writers that are included in Why We Cook, to be honest, I had no idea if I would hear back from them. So every time I heard back from anyone at all, it was a thrill. And then on top of that, when people started saying, yes, it was like a double thrill.Suzy Chase: So you not only curated this gorgeous book, you illustrated it to such charming and thoughtful images. I would love to hear about that.Lindsay Gardner: Thank you. This has been the most creatively fulfilling project I've ever worked on let me start there. It has been such a joy to get, to make art in this context. It felt really collaborative and because I was involved in not only the writing process and the curating and working with all the contributors so closely, I felt so invested in everything that they were contributing to the book. So working with people over time to figure out what the topic was that they were going to write about. For example I got to know those stories so well, and by the time I actually came to the illustrations, I felt super invested in them and it felt super fulfilling to me because I, I just felt like I was really honoring their stories through illustration. So the book was actually really fun because with so much different kinds of content, it was kind of a puzzle to put it together.Suzy Chase: One of the great things about writing it and illustrating it was that as I was finalizing the manuscript in late 2019 and all of the various pieces from the contributors, I was also sketching all of the illustrations for each piece. And so when it came time to lay out the book, the designer that I worked with at Workman, her name is Sarah Smith. She was amazing and endlessly patient, she took all of my sketches and she took all of the manuscript. And with those pieces laid out the entire book, which as a first time author, I didn't know how that part was going to go. And it was kind of like overwhelming to think about how that would work, but she really laid it out. So that by the time it came time to make all the final paintings, which happened mostly in 2020, I knew exactly where the illustrations were going to go. I knew if they were going to span both pages of a spread or, you know, bleed off the left lower corner, we had worked together to sort of like map all that out already. It just felt so enmeshed with the actual words on the page and as an illustrator, that is so satisfying. Um, it was just such a joy from start to finish.Suzy Chase: I want to chat about Anita Lo and Carla Hall and I think your illustrations really captured their personalities. Like Anita, she's very artistic with her approach to food. And then Carla is like always upbeat and fun. And I think you really captured that in those specific illustrations.Lindsay Gardner: Thank you. You know, selecting imagery to work from for the portraits specifically was a really interesting process. I was in touch with all of the photographers that took the source imagery for those illustrations. But the personality that comes through in imagery is so clear sometimes. And I actually had the chance to interview Carla Hall for the book. And she was, I mean, her personality just emanates right through her voice. And so I felt like this image when I saw it, I, I felt like, well, I've never met her in person, but I've spoken with her and this is exactly how I picture her. Totally. And she is so joyful, so friendly and same with Anita. My interactions with her were all on email, but all of our, like there was personality in those emails. And when I found the image of her that I painted from, I was like, that is what it felt like, quiet and thoughtful. So I mean that relationship, I think that we can develop through imagery is really powerful too.Suzy Chase: To celebrate Women's History Month. I'm thrilled to chat with you about this wonderful book. So you cited a study in 2018 that said from 2003 to 2016 respondents who identified as women spend an average 50 minutes a day cooking. Whereas those who identified as men spent an average drum roll please of 20 minutes per day. Likewise women make up a large portion of the culinary world. Women often face racism, sexism, and harassment, which have been increasingly documented in the me too movement, which leads me to ask you, when did you have the first calling in your heart to put a book like this out into the world?Lindsay Gardner: It really hit me in 2018, early 2018. And of course I had been reading some of the me too stories that had come out at that time or the year before, um, and were still coming out and in the Bay area, that was also something I was reading about, but it also was stemming from a deeply personal place for me, which was really just thinking about my own role and balancing all of the different pieces of my life with my family and my profession and my partner. And I kind of just was thinking to myself, like, how does this all fit together? And why does it matter to me so much? It's something I care. So cooking is something I care so deeply about. And why do I spend so much time here? And why do I think about it so much? What is this all about? And I was also really thinking at that time about the overlaps between the creative processes in my life. So in what I was doing in my studio as an illustrator and painting and what I was doing in the kitchen when I was cooking and how those two things were related, because I felt that I felt deeply that they were. So I just started exploring that. And then as soon as, as soon as I started exploring that more deeply, I came across this research and I thought it was so interesting because of course in my day-to-day life with my, um, women friends in my life, I know these statistics to be true, regardless of the, of the good intentions of their partners. In many cases, the women that I know are the ones that are spending the most time doing the bulk of domestic labor, even if they love to cook, um, even if they don't love to cook. So that's kind of where it started for me. And that just really, when I found these statistics, it just really made me want to dig in. And I wanted to know more because I thought if this is happening in the domestic level, in people's personal lives, there's so much that ties that to women in the culinary industry. And how are those two things related? So it really all started there.Suzy Chase: Speaking of domestic, as a home cook, I was so very interested, your survey of over 350 home cooks on pages 10 and 11, it was comforting and dismaying at the same time to see that 90% of the women surveyed do the majority of cooking in the home. I now know for a fact that I am not alone. Another interesting stat was that 69% of the women invent their own dishes, use recipes and use cookbooks, all three, while 31% of the women were self-taught cooks. Do you see our roles in food preparation within the family evolving?Lindsay Gardner: I love that question. It's something that my husband and I talk about all the time in our own family. And I think that is something that has definitely been impacted by the pandemic and in various ways for various people because of different situations and levels of privilege. Really, we're very fortunate in our family that my husband and I are both available at mealtimes to help with cooking because of what our jobs are and that's not true for everyone, especially right now. I think that it'll be really interesting, you know, I'm not sure if your question was specifically related to the pandemic moment, but I, I also don't know that we can ever really go back after this. Like, I think that our habits as home cooks have shifted this year in a way that I at least hope sticks to a certain amount. I think that obviously I can't speak for everyone here, but I know that my relationship to shopping for ingredients has changed my understanding of the food system as a whole has changed. And the people who are putting their lives at risk to give us the food that is available to us. I feel like I have such a different perspective on shopping, eating, cooking, using the ingredients in my pantry. I don't know if I ever will be the same kind of home cook after this. And I think that has really impacted our relationship, not only to the food that we cook for ourselves, but how food functions in community and the food systems that are at work in our nation. So it's kind of like a web of levels and I think it is ever changing, but I think especially after this year.Suzy Chase: I'd love to chat about a few women you profiled. The first is Leah Penniman of Soul Fire Farm. She says everything from sunshine to plate needs to be infused with fairness and dignity and reverence. I would love to hear about her.Lindsay Gardner: Yes, Leah Penniman is a black Creole, educator farmer and food justice activist. She's also an author, and she founded Soul Fire Farm in upstate New York in 2011. Soul Fire is a black indigenous and people of color centered farm, and all of their work is dedicated to ending racism in the food system. So they run a number of different kinds of programs. They're all focused on food sovereignty and education and bringing groups of people who have been separated from the land over time, back in contact with the land and learning about historical farming traditions and all kinds of different youth programs. I mean, it's really, their work is so comprehensive and Leah co-founded it. So she has been doing this work for yearsSuzy Chase: On page 27, you have a recipe from Abra Berens for Buttermilk and Butter Lettuce Salad. So I had her on my podcast and the beguiling way she talks about peas and kohlrabi is compelling,Lindsay Gardner: Is so amazing. I think she has changed the way that I look at vegetables. Her book Ruffage is so comprehensive and I think gave me a different insight into using all the different parts of vegetables. With enthusiasm. Not because I feel guilty or something, I love the way that she writes. I love the way that she talks about food. It was really fun to work with her on this. And so she is actually the chef at a farm in Southwest Michigan. So she does these well before times she does these great farm dinners. And I know she's looking forward to getting them started up when it's safe to do so again.Suzy Chase: You tackle creative ruts, which I think we're all in right now. Can you share a couple of ways to overcome creative ruts?Lindsay Gardner: Definitely. I loved this question. It's something, if I had more time, I would've liked to take this conversation even deeper with more of the contributors in the book. I thought just as an artist, it was really interesting to hear how professional chefs deal with their own creative rats. And it was so refreshing to hear from them that a lot of the things that they do to overcome their creative ruts are the same things that I do to overcome mineSuzy Chase: Wine. Lots of wine and crying. hahaLindsay Gardner: Yea. Eating out when that's possible, of course, travel, going to museums. I think, you know, one thing that is sort of a thread between everything everyone has said, and something that I can identify with is when I'm in a creative rut, I expand my own horizon and everything that the five chefs included in the book on this question said is really about that. It's getting outside of your own bubble travel, going to a forest, walking museums, eating at someone else's restaurant, or even traveling through a cookbook, which is another thing a couple of people brought up, which I, I also found really refreshing because honestly, before working on this book, I hadn't really ever thought about how chefs also love cookbooks, which sounds so strange, but it just hadn't occurred to me in that way. And so I loved hearing Tanya Holland say that she loves to look at the work of other people and look through cookbooks when she's in a rut.Suzy Chase: One profile that I just adored was of Celia Sack. So she sees cookbooks as an especially important form of storytelling. And I do too. That's why I have this podcast. Can you tell us a little bit about Celia and her depth of cookbook knowledge, which I think is really deep.Lindsay Gardner: It is amazing. I've referred to her a couple of times as a walking library, Celia is such an unassuming person and she knows so so much. She was one of the first people I interviewed for why we cook. And she was so warm and welcoming and just like casually toward me around her personal library. That includes books that span literally centuries. I was just star struck by getting to meet and talk with her. And she just couldn't have been more friendly or relaxed about the whole thing. Of course. So she actually started her career as a rare book specialist and has a whole history in and knowledge base in modern literature. She opened her store Omnivore in San Francisco in 2008. And the experience of walking into Omnivore books is a little bit like walking into a jewel box or the way that I imagine that would feel it is a small shop, one room and every nook and cranny is covered in books about food. And it's super cozy and inviting. And Celia has over the years of having the store. Um, not only has she developed this vast knowledge of historical cookbooks and contemporary cookbooks and everything in between, but she's also developed so many relationships with everyday home cooks like me and some of the world's most famous chefs. And she has these relationships that I think she really is a part of in terms of building people's collections. And to me, she's like the hub of a great wheel between people and food and knowledge and history. It was totally inspiring getting to know her. And I definitely recommend trying to visit omnivore in person if you ever have the chance.Suzy Chase: So when I think about women in food, Dorie, Greenspan is one of the first women that comes to mind. You highlighted her in your kitchen portrait. So first describe the kitchen portraits that you included in this cookbook.Lindsay Gardner: There are 10 kitchen portraits in the book, and I included them because I really wanted to highlight some of the more well-known figures in the book, in their actual kitchen spaces. In my imagination, I thought I would really love to see these people in their kitchens because to me, the kitchen is such an intimate homey space. It's where all the magic happens. And it's where I imagine all of these particular women feel the most connection to what they're doing. So it was really important to me to be able to show them in that environment through illustration. So yeah, there are 10 of those throughout the book. Um, and that's what that little mini series is.Suzy Chase: So Dorie talks about two of her kitchens, the one in New York and the one in Paris. I will read her quote about her New York kitchen and can't help, but wonder how this resonates with so many other home cooks. She wrote "I've lived and worked in our New York apartment for decades. I learned to cook and bake in that kitchen. And I became a writer there too. This is where I would bake with our son and where the two of us would sit on the counters and talk over things that were important then, and still seem important. Now it's as though the kitchen and I are partners, we've been together so long that we know each other's moves." I mean...Lindsay Gardner: It really, it really couldn't say it all more succinctly when Dorie responded to this was in a series of emails going back and forth. And when she wrote that, I think my jaw was like, actually literally on my desk, it just was so touching. And for someone who has achieved so much in her career to bring her relationship to her own kitchen, back to that sentiment, which is really about all of the things that happen in a kitchen, including cooking, but also about all the other things and to sort of personify the kitchen that way. I just, I, yeah, it really, it really hit me. I spent times like Dorie describes in my kitchen growing up with my mom that feel that way to me, I think about my own kids now, and the time that we spend together in our kitchen and all of the things that happen there that are related and unrelated to cooking.Suzy Chase: I have this lamp will in my apartment. I have everything that I grew up with in Kansas, but that's a whole other podcast but it's crazy but I have this little red lamp that was on our kitchen table. And for example, when I would go out really late, my mom would keep that lamp on and I turn that lamp off and I'd, you know, tiptoe through the kitchen. So kitchens have so many memories.Lindsay Gardner: Absolutely. And I'm actually, I'm glad you brought that up because it reminds me of another page in the book about home cooks, identifying their most treasured kitchen objects. I loved this question. I loved asking this question. I loved hearing back from people, what they picked out of their memory banks and it was really, it was honestly one of the hardest sections of the book to edit and narrow it down because I could have chosen hundreds of things that people mentioned. But I think there is this relationship to that quote that you just picked out from Dorie, which is that objects in our memories and in our daily life become imbued with so much meaning over time that like that one ball jar really is that special because it was there when you were, you know, crying at your kitchen table as a teenager. And it was there when you made granola for the first time for your son. I mean, there are ways in which I feel like these objects become sort of like the silent observers in our lives. And I loved getting to illustrate them because I feel like illustration is so personal and lens this air of storytelling. And so it was really like bringing these sort of stories together through objects and illustrations. Um, on this part of, or for this part of the book was really, really exciting.Suzy Chase: Pamela said, "I have my grandma's egg beater, which I love. I also have a fondness for old kitchen gadgets. I love the design and high quality they all seem to have." I love this.Lindsay Gardner: And another one on that page that I adore is Kate from Maine who talked about bookmarking recipes with, um, postcards from loved ones. So that every time she opens a cookbook or flips to a recipe, she finds, you know, a postcard from years ago or a good friend. And she actually matches the person that wrote the postcard with a recipe that feels the most fitting,Suzy Chase: Oh my God, how much time does Kate have on her hands though?Lindsay Gardner: She has a couple of really beautiful quotes in the bookSuzy Chase: In terms of hope for change for women in the future. What did you take away from putting this book together?Lindsay Gardner: I have learned so much in the last three years over the course of making this book and I continue to learn by being in conversation with the women included in it. And honestly, in learning about women everywhere all the time who are doing this work, who aren't in this book, I think that the women included here are at the forefront of the changes that are unfolding in the culinary world, knowing their stories and getting to know them has changed the way that I think about food and cooking in my personal life. It's changed the kind of home cook I am. It's changed how I think about food traditions and it's changed the way that I think about ingredients and my impact on the environment and how I relate to my community mean it is endless. And I think it really, to me, when I sort of look back at the process of making the whole book, um, it really speaks to how there isn't a part of our lives, that food doesn't touch, it's powerful. And it gives me a lot of hope.Suzy Chase: Now to my segment called last night's dinner, where I ask you what you had last night for dinner.Lindsay Gardner: Well, I'm thrilled that you're asking me this question because I had the joy of being Abra Beren's Buttermilk and Butter, lettuce salad last night for dinner, for an event that we were doing together, but it was great because I actually had the chance to finally make that salad and eat it. And it was delicious. And Abra also offered a recipe for a wonderful spatchcock chicken that was baked over sort of a bread and tomato and garlic bread pudding, stuffing kind of situation. And the two things together were just really amazing.Suzy Chase : So where can we find you on the web and social media?Lindsay Gardner: So you can find out more about the book at WhyWeCookBook.com and you can also find me on Instagram @LindsayGardnerArt, and that is Lindsay with an A.Suzy Chase: Well wonderful Lindsay. Thanks so much for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast!Lindsay Gardner: Suzy, it's been so fun chatting with you today.Outro: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com. And thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

This week on the show, we'll talk about lunchtime leftover noodle bowls and review two flavors of Van Leeuwen vegan ice cream.We will also talk way too much about the 1995 film, The Net.Here's what else:Wart Junior is the frog we wanted for our Animal Crossing island. We did not get him, but we did get a cool cow!Muddy Buddies, which Dave will veganize for the familyRice Krispies Peanut Butter Logs, same thingHere's the super easy vegan hot cocoa recipe we made for our micro tree-trimming party.The Round Hill pub in Brighton winning Best Sunday Roastpasta cass made with spaghetti and broccoli, sauteed bacon from the Herbivorous Butcher tossed with vegan camembert from Herbivorous B, and bakedusing leftover broccoli and spaghetti with air fryer tofu and Amazing Sauce from Gu's Dumplings to make a quick noodle bowl. I accidentally called it Awesome Sauce on the pod, but it's Amazing.We got nostalgic for piescreams and brown sugar vanilla from Jake's Ice Cream in Atlanta.Thank you so much for listening. We record these episodes for you, and we'd love to hear from you. Got a favorite vegan treat that you think we should cover on the podcast? Send your suggestions to talkintofupod@gmail.com.

Sometimes the roughage of a vegetable is the most nutrition.

Rishi and Mason take the show on the road to visit Abra Berens ('04), the executive chef at Granor Farms and author NY Times bestselling cookbook "Ruffage: A Practical Guide to vegetables". Abra talks about growing up on a farm, cultivating her love of food at Zingerman's, and the path that led her to culinary fame. Learn more about Granor Farms: granorfarm.comFind out how to purchase "Ruffage" and meet Abra at a cookbook event: abraberens.com----Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts or Watch on: YouTubeSouth U Stories is sponsored by:State & Liberty - Visit our newest sponsor, State & Liberty, and use code SOUTHU for 10% off your next order.Underground Printing - Visit UGP for all your custom printed apparel and promotional product needs!Destination Ann Arbor - DA2's mission is to enhance the economy of the Ann Arbor area, and Washtenaw County in general.Follow South U Stories: Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | YouTube | LinkedIn

Rishi and Mason take the show on the road to visit Abra Berens ('04), the executive chef at Granor Farms and author NY Times bestselling cookbook "Ruffage: A Practical Guide to vegetables". Abra talks about growing up on a farm, cultivating her love of food at Zingerman's, and the path that led her to culinary fame. Learn more about Granor Farms: granorfarm.comFind out how to purchase "Ruffage" and meet Abra at a cookbook event: abraberens.com----Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts or Watch on: YouTubeSouth U Stories is sponsored by:State & Liberty - Visit our newest sponsor, State & Liberty, and use code SOUTHU for 10% off your next order.Underground Printing - Visit UGP for all your custom printed apparel and promotional product needs!Destination Ann Arbor - DA2's mission is to enhance the economy of the Ann Arbor area, and Washtenaw County in general.Follow South U Stories: Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | YouTube | LinkedIn

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.

From dad jokes to improv, comedy can be a wonderful thing. In this episode, C + D share some of their favorite standup specials, comedic films, and generally funny people to keep you cry-laughing all season long. Links To Give You Life: Manage your life and keep it color-coded with a 12-month whiteboard calendar Boost your diet with more vegetables in your pantry and the one book that will help you cook any of them, “Ruffage” by Abra Berens Listen to Abra’s theory behind pantry basics in this interview on the Nerdette podcast Enjoy the one-man Broadway show on your screen at home with John Leguizamo’s “Latin History for Morons” on Netflix Experience the ultimate laughter of relief with the epic awkwardness that is “After Life” starring Ricky Gervais Plan your next comedy binge with Simon Pegg films, including “A Fantastic Fear of Everything” What happens when a zombie apocalypse meets Lord of the Flies drama? “Daybreak” on Netflix is both asking and answering this question—watch to see how it turns out Ride alongside Jack Whitehall with his road trip film “Travels With My Father” Watch a real-life Google reviewer experience the Seven Wonders of the World with “An Idiot Abroad,” starring Karl Pilkington Watch funny people be naturally funny in “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee” Embrace your weird with the musical comedy of Reggie Watts’ Netflix special “Spatial” Take the plunge into more musical tangents that will make you laugh with Tim Minchin and Flight of the Conchords Put Obsessed to the (Taste) Test: Ingrained with traditional Scottish culture, Walkers crafts cookies, oat crackers, and other delicious treats with the same simple & buttery recipes. In this episode, C + D put their Shortbread Scottie Dogs to a taste test. Listen to find out what they thought. But at the very least, you know they’re cute. Episode Guide: (01:46) D’s obsession with whiteboards (09:10) C’s obsession with “Ruffage” by Abra Berens (18:18) C talks John Leguizamo’s “Latin History for Morons” (26:03) D talks why we laugh based on “Great Utopian and Dystopian Works of Literature” from The Great Courses (29:18) C talks “After Life” starring Ricky Gervais (32:09) C + D talk Simon Pegg films, including “A Fantastic Fear of Everything” (36:05) D talks “Daybreak” on Netflix (37:38) C talks “Travels With My Father” on Netflix (40:02) C talks “An Idiot Abroad,” starring Karl Pilkington (41:56) D talks “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee” (47:36) C + D talk music with comedy from Reggie Watts, Tim Minchin, and Flight of the Conchords (56:10) C + D put Walkers Shortbread Scottie Dogs to a taste test

This episode we welcome Abra Berens (http://www.abraberens.com/about/)into our kitchen for her new cookbook, Ruffage (https://www.booklarder.com/books/info/ruffage-a-practical-guide-to-vegetables). A former farmer now chef and writer, Abra chats with local restauranteur Linda Derschang (http://www.thederschanggroup.com/about) about her career path, relationship to food and creating her cookbook. Enjoy this talk and purchase your copy of Ruffage (https://www.booklarder.com/books/info/ruffage-a-practical-guide-to-vegetables) here. Ruffage https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/1/199050da-a97f-4b71-bd06-c02fc80ac185/uP3IBR6v.jpg Special Guests: Abra Berens and Linda Derschang.

Abra Berens is a Midwest born-and-bred farmer-turned-chef. And her cookbook, Ruffage, is a gorgeous A-to-Z guide to vegetables.The idea, she tells us, is this: You go to the grocery store, buy what inspires you and then you go home to look up meal ideas in her cookbook.Abra’s not a pretentious chef who poo-poos comfort food. Instead, she’s all about meeting people where they are (and encouraging you to enjoy your veggies).She talks with Greta about how she approaches cooking, why her book is called “Ruffage” and why cabbage is her favorite vegetable. (Weird, right?)

Hello summer, and hello vegetables! Michigan chef and cookbook author Abra Berens loves vegetables and has an inspiring new cookbook that presents them in the coolest way: braised, blistered, roasted, and raw. On this episode we talk about Ruffage, and Berens's journey from working the counter at Zingerman’s Deli to culinary school in Ireland to her current post cooking and farming in an exceptional way that recalls Dan Barber’s Blue Hill.Also on the show, TASTE’s Tatiana Bautista has a great conversation with Auria Abraham, the supercool founder behind Auria’s Malaysian Kitchen. They talk cooking with sambal and kaya, two amazingly diverse ingredients. And Auria makes the best around.

Culinary Historians of Chicago presents: Midwestern Food—What is it? Presented by Abra Berens, chef, farmer, author It is true that we are a region known for steak houses, pizzas and pot roast, but what exactly is Midwestern food? Could it also be a dinner at Alinea? Is it the German chocolate cake made by Stephanie Hart’s Brown Sugar Bakery on 75th St? Is it the melting pot that gives us Cornish pasties from Michigan’s upper peninsula, as well as the roast duck from Chef Kelly Cheng Sun Wah? Abra Berens, author of Ruffage: a practical guide to vegetables, believes Midwestern food is more than meat and potatoes. As a former farmer and current chef at Granor Farm in Three Oaks, MI, she knows that the Midwest has deep and diverse food traditions. Join Abra as she argues that the Midwest has deep-rooted food traditions while simultaneously being open to an ever growing and evolving food scene. Copies of her just-published book, Ruffage: A Practical Guide to Vegetables will be available for purchase and signing. BIOGRAPHY: Abra Berens started cooking at the storied Zingerman’s Deli in Ann Arbor, MI. She then went on to train in the garden-focused kitchen at Ballymaloe Cookery School in Cork, Ireland. In 2009 she co-founded Bare Knuckle Farm in Northport, MI, where she farmed and cooked for 8 years. She then left for Chicago to open the café at Local Foods. In 2017, she returned to Michigan to join the team at Granor Farm in Three Oaks, where she combines her love of farms and restaurants to create one-of-a-kind dinners celebrating the best of Southwest Michigan’s diverse agriculture. Recorded on June 8, 2019 at Weiss Memorial Hospital. http://www.culinaryHistorians.org

Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Pandora We're looking at trash from all different angles. Chef Abra Berens, author of Ruffage, rifles through Francis's kitchen to show him the missed opportunities. Visit with Homa Dashtaki of The White Moustache, a yogurt company based in Brooklyn. Homa is determined to turn her yogurt-making waste, whey, into the next kombucha. We discover why the French can't quite grasp the doggie bag. And, America's Test Kitchen recommends their favorite reusable items including storage bags, kitchen wrap, and more. Broadcast dates for this episode: May 31, 2019

If you’ve ever had trouble figuring out what to do with a bunch of vegetables, this episode is for you. Just in time for summer grilling season, Maddie talks to Abra Berens, author of the new cookbook Ruffage: a Practical Guide to Vegetables. Abra dishes on the link between how plants grow and how they taste, what to do about bland, squishy zucchini, and how to make summer veggies the centerpiece at your next barbecue.

RuffageBy Abra Berens Intro: Welcome to the Cookery By The Book Podcast with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.Abra Berens: My name is Abra Berens. I am the chef at Granor Farm and author of Ruffage: A Practical Guide to Vegetables.Suzy Chase: Vegetables can be exciting, delicious, and the star of the plate. In the introduction of Ruffage, Francis Lam wrote, "Yours is a smart way of cooking. A curious, thoughtful way of cooking, but most of all, a cooking of good spirit." What a lovely compliment.Abra Berens: Yeah, so I was lucky enough to meet Francis my final year of college at the University of Michigan. There is a program at U of M called NELP, which is the New England Literature Program. A handful of students go and you study transcendentalism while living in the place where it was written. It's a very immersive course, and so you're at this camp and you're cooking together and reading together, and there's a physical rigor combined with it.Abra Berens: The very first day that I arrived, you know, well before I was ever a cook in any sort of real setting, I of course found my way into the kitchen of the camp, and Francis was there making something for dinner. I just introduced myself and I was like, "What is that?" It was this beautiful red stem with the kind of purple green leaves that chard can have sometimes, and I had never seen Swiss chard before. I was like, "What is that?" He just gave me a taste of it. I distinctly remember saying something along the lines of like, "Oh, it's like if celery and spinach had a baby." Then he was like, "Yeah, pretty much."Abra Berens: I was like, "Okay, see ya. I got to go jump in the lake now," because one of the things the very first day that you get to NELP, spoiler alert for any future NELP-ers, is you have to so this swim test, which is really, like, a preposterous situation, because it's one of their kind of made up challenges where you arrive in this camp in Maine and then are immediately told you have to jump in this lake and do a swim test, and it sort of mimics the discombobulation that you feel at sort of being sort of plopped into this new environment. That whole day just kind of felt like a wonderland. I will always remember Francis just calmly being in the kitchen and feeding me fresh chard, yeah.Suzy Chase: In 2009, you started Bare Knuckle Farm in Northport, Michigan with your friend Jess. At the end of your first year of farming, you were as poor as you'd ever been, but you were eating some of the best meals of your life. Describe this.Abra Berens: You know, I'm sure anybody that started their own business can attest to the fact that, without securing outside capital, you're really putting all of your own resources in, and that includes time and money and emotional energy, all that stuff. By the end of the season, it was kind of this really quiet time. I had taken a side job just for some extra cash, and so I had a couple of weeks where I had committed to them before going back to Chicago, because we were done with the farm for the season and I was going to move back. I had always been based in Chicago, and then would move up to Northport for six months and then farm all summer, and then move back to Chicago and cook in the winter.Abra Berens: Yeah, I really just didn't have any money. We had some carrots that were still in the ground. We had planted these kale plants that had lived all summer, but then got super aphid-y in the fall, so we had cut them down to the nubs, but all the energy that was stored in those deep roots were putting up these little tiny baby kale leaves every day. We had some chickens that year, but they had moved to my business partner's wife's farm for the winter, but I still had some eggs left before they moved, and all those things.Abra Berens: It was really, you've got quiet nights, it was super cold in the cabin where I was living, but the meals were so great. It was, you know, every night, the carrots would get frosted over, so they would get sweeter and sweeter. It was kind of there that I realized, I was making all of these different meals, and so it never felt redundant even though it was the same primary ingredients.Abra Berens: For me, it gets to a little bit of this conversation about the value of food versus the worth of food, and how those are really simple ingredients, but the meals felt very celebratory each night. Maybe it's because they were the event of the day. I was just kind of doing other sort of closing up the farm tasks during the day, or kind of puttering around or reading, so it felt like an activity and it was such a nice time, despite being on the outside very underwhelming in terms of my financial time.Suzy Chase: I think all home cooks need to hear this. Ingredients can be repetitive, but meals need not be. In Ruffage, you have 100-plus recipes and 230-plus variations. Talk about not being redundant.Abra Berens: Again, it comes from seasonal eating in the northern Midwest, and the way that that sort of started for me was realizing there is a trajectory for the season that we go through every year, whether you're farming or just eating seasonally or just you have any sort of connection to the outdoors in this part of the country, and I think that's mirrored in other parts of the country as well. The point is that, every spring you get asparagus, and it's the same asparagus every year, but the ways that you present it can change and feel very new. It's really about having sort of creativity, with a slightly more limited palate.Suzy Chase: Give us some tips to change our thinking surrounding vegetables. In the book, you talk about equating decadent foods with sinfulness, and vegetables with moral fortitude. I know growing up in Kansas, I have a hard time changing my mind about vegetables.Abra Berens: I think there's two ways to think about that. One, the bit in the book about equating, there's a false equivalency between rich foods and decadence and, you know, piousness with vegetables, I think part of that is we live in a culture that is really full of shoulds right now. Like, you should eat that, you shouldn't buy this, that thing should give you heart disease, or something like that. I think that that's a lot of noise. That's well intentioned noise, but noise nonetheless.Abra Berens: I think there's an element of people choosing to eat a salad when they really want fried chicken because they think it'll make them feel better. I would say that it depends on the situation. You know, like, if you've been working outside all day, the reason fried chicken tastes better to you is because you have burned through those calories. At the same time, if I've had rich meals, a salad actually makes me feel better. I think it's about being honest with yourself about what you really want in that moment, and not feeling bad about your choices. Just make the best choices that you can, and kind of putting the shoulds on a shelf.Abra Berens: The other point that you were talking about is changing your perception of vegetables. I think that the Midwest still, for better or for worse, has sort of a meat-starch-veg plate. I think that's what a lot of people are still eating. I still cook that way, I still eat that way sometimes. I think that the way that things changed for me with vegetables was by both recognizing what each one had to offer, and then sort of letting go of that everything on one plate mindset, and taking inspiration from other cuisines that have vegetables more at the forefront.Abra Berens: Maybe instead of having three things on a plate and it feels like there's no star if there's not a meat based protein or an egg based protein or something like that, or even just a really fancy vegetable. I think that you can kind of decentralize the stars of the plate. If you have three, or really extravagantly five dishes, you're not doing any more work than you would do to have three things on a plate, but you're having three different textures. You could have like, a spinach salad with bacon and egg is a pretty classic spinach combination, at least around here. Then some roasted veg, like a big pile of roasted carrots with a slick salsa verde or something like that over the top.Abra Berens: What else would I put with that? Probably something really creamy, like a squash puree, or maybe in the summertime like, a creamless corn puree, and that gives you some richness and those [inaudible 00:09:15] to pair against the brightness of the greens. I think that it's that inter-play, to me, that has started to become more interesting than the excitement of a big piece of meat. But, don't get me wrong, I still cook big pieces of meat and I still eat meat and I like it. But, I think it's about kind of appreciating those different characteristics and what each ingredient is showing and letting it live its best life on your table.Suzy Chase: This cookbook is so easy to navigate. Talk about how it's laid out.Abra Berens: Yeah, it was really important to me to have Ruffage organized alphabetically, and there's a couple reasons for that. One, is that I really wanted it to be a reference book, and I find it confusing in books when things are organized like appetizers, main courses, sides, soups, all the different things, because my brain just doesn't work that way. I wanted it to be a way for people to kind of invert the way that they think about a dish, which parallels the inversion that happened for me when I was cooking at Bare Knuckle, which is look at your ingredients and then find something that you want, a recipe that you want to use to showcase your ingredients.Abra Berens: If that means that you're going to a farmer's market and you're super excited about the kohlrabi that's there, then buy the kohlrabi and know that you have some resources at your back to turn that into something. Or, if it means that you're tight on money and that asparagus is on sale in January and that's what's best for the family, buy that and know that you have these resources at your back. I wanted to kind of take the sourcing issue out of it a little bit. Then, also make it easier for people to find the recipes to link back to those ingredients.Abra Berens: The other reason I wanted to organize it alphabetically, I have a ton of respect for books that are organized seasonally, but I also remember the very first time I was reading, I think it was Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which is a great book, but Barbara Kingsolver was talking about having asparagus in early April or late March or something, and I remember being like, "Well, good for you. We don't get asparagus until June in northern Michigan." May, if we're lucky in Chicago and southern Michigan. I didn't want anyone to feel left out, and I think a lot of people think about the Midwest in terms of our winters, and people always say like, "Oh, you can't eat locally in the winter," and that is not really the case anymore.Abra Berens: In addition, I was just visiting some friends in Florida, and right now which is mid-April, it's the height of their tomato and strawberry season, and they were talking about their frustration that when all of the tomato recipes come out in the food magazines, their tomato season is over. By the middle of summer, they have okra and peppers and eggplant, and that's it. Fresh greens are gone, even corn isn't really there. Their winter squash season is like, I can't remember now exactly, but I think it's like, in May or something.Abra Berens: It's a funny thing, seasonality, because it doesn't account for the regions. While this book is Midwestern-based, because I am, I didn't want it to be Midwestern exclusive. I wanted to be sure that people in Florida or Arizona or the UK or Montreal could all find use in it.Suzy Chase: One of the best things about this cookbook is that you can either swap ingredients in and out from the base recipe, or you can evolve the original recipe into a totally new meal. For example, let's say a big squash. What are some variations on a big old squash?Abra Berens: When I was thinking about the variations, I wanted to really showcase kind of two primary branches of how to vary it. One is, if you take the ingredient and prepare it the same way, and then just swap out the flavor accessories, is it presents a very different dish. For me, the beet factor really represents that the best, where you've got steam roasted beets and the recipe is for a salad with smoked white fish and sour cream and sunflower seeds, and it's very classic eastern European. Then, the variations are you take the same steam roasted beets, and put them with oranges and feta and some mint, and that takes it to a very different place. Or, you could put it in a very Midwestern fall dish with apples and cheddar and walnuts and parsley. Those dishes present very differently, even though the structure is the same.Abra Berens: Then, the other way to look at that is how to use the same thing and make totally different meals with it. The beet puree or the squash puree that we were mentioning, you know, you're making this base of a puree. Then the recipe for that will be one thing. Like, for the beets, it's you take pasta and dress it in the beet puree. It makes this beautiful bright red beet pasta with pickled raisins and poppy seeds. Again, very eastern European. Or, you can take that same puree and blend it with white beans and a little bit of olive oil, and then make it like a beet hummus and put it with a crudite platter, like, a veggie platter.Abra Berens: Or, you could take that and cook risotto, and then bind the risotto with it and makes this beautiful pink risotto that is really lovely. I can't remember what the toppings are for that, but if I were making it today I would put walnut oil and some Parmesan and maybe a little bit of orange, because beet and walnut and orange go really well together. Or, you could thin it down and make a soup with it and make kind of a play on borscht. All of those things, and the same is true for squash. The same is true for any of the celery root puree, the cauliflower puree, all of those things. It's a little bit of a deeper dive into batch cooking, like, large batch cooking, which I think everybody has done the thing where they make a gallon of lentil soup, and by the end of the week they're like, "If I have to eat lentil soup one more time I am going to cry."Suzy Chase: Yeah, exactly.Abra Berens: Wanting to say like, you can dial that back a little bit and make it less specific of a prep, and then have more options. Maybe instead of making the gallon of lentil soup, you can cook up four quarts of lentils, and then you can make a soup with some of the lentils or you can add them to a salad or you could would do with lentils. You know, crisp them up in the oven to make like, crispy lentils for snacking, all those things. That was kind of the point of the variation.Suzy Chase: Let's talk about the word glug, G-L-U-G. This shows up quite a bit in the cookbook. Talk about the word glug.Abra Berens: Well, it's a little bit of a funny thing, because my first interaction with the word glug was my mom cooking from my grandmother's recipes and being so irritated by the word glug. It was literally, a glug is when you pour, often it was like a glug of milk in a batter. A glug was like, how long it took to tip the gallon of milk and have it literally go "glug" as it came out before it would hit the top and it would stop or whatever. My mom, it made her crazy because she's a very scientific person and so she like, measured out. She's like, "If you have a full gallon of milk a glug is much smaller. If you have a very empty jug of milk, it's much larger because it takes more time for it to hit the top of the container," or whatever.Abra Berens: For her, it was like, a quarter cup, that's what she would translate it to. In some ways, I wanted to return to that phrase, mostly to indicate that a lot of times measurements don't have to be super exact. I think there are certain realms of the cooking and baking world where you do need to have very strict proportions, and all of the recipes in Ruffage are very, very flexible in that way. The glug is sort of representative of that. Saying like, you're just trying to get some oil in the pan, so that's where glug comes from. It's been amazing to see how some people find it very liberating and some people find it moderately infuriating. Maybe that's how things should be.Suzy Chase: I love it. I found it liberating. I used it on my Instagram story on Saturday when I was making your peas.Abra Berens: Nice. Yeah, how'd the peas come out, by the way?Suzy Chase: Oh my gosh.Abra Berens: Were they okay?Suzy Chase: They were amazing. I made your recipe for peas with parsley, thyme, butter, and onions on page 319. They came out so sweet, and the butter gave kind of like a hint of saltiness and creaminess, and the herbs, and I had it again last night for dinner, I mean, as a side dish for dinner. It's so good.Abra Berens: I'm so glad, because one of the funny things about the book is, there's a handful of recipes that seem very, very simple, and I was like, "Are these too simple to go into a cookbook?Suzy Chase: No, it's really good. But, you don't like peas, do you?Abra Berens: Yeah, I know, I don't really like peas. It's funny, Francis told me that his first draft of the forward for the book was simply about berating me for not liking peas, and then he decided to go a different direction, thankfully. I feel like everyone loves them. They sort of infuriate me, because it's really difficult to know when they're ripe, because each variety shows differently, and they'll present differently on the plant.Abra Berens: You'll have from the same plant, one that is perfectly ripe, and then also one that's under-ripe and one that's overripe, and they all look exactly the same. Then you pick them, and there's such a short time period for when the sugars that are in the pea, for it to convert to starch. You basically have to pick them in the morning before market, which, when your market starts at 8:00AM means you have a very early day. Or, you have to pick them in the afternoon and then get them into cold store.Abra Berens: It's just this, I find them to be a very fickle plant. I love pea shoots and I really love frozen peas, because that, I think, is one of those times where the industrial model, especially the organic industrial model can work to our benefit. Where, they're being harvested. They're probably all harvested at the appropriate time of ripeness. They're immediately flash frozen. They're super reliable. They're really dependable, all of those things. I know, peas, I want someone to teach me how to like them more, but it hasn't happened yet.Suzy Chase: Those darn peas. What's your favorite vegetable?Abra Berens: Cabbage I think is, by far and away, and again, that's again a reliance on the sort of every day hardworking vegetable in my kitchen, as opposed to some of the "she-she-ier" darlings, you know, that are only around for a little bit of the time. I mean, I love tomatoes and I love sweet corn and all of those things, but cabbage is the vegetable that is in my fridge 90% of the time, and makes such different meals.Abra Berens: I really rely on purple cabbage in the winter to be eating something that's colorful. I really love making the version of golumpki, which are the Polish cabbage rolls. Unfortunately, I trimmed a bunch out of that cabbage chapter, just because the book is long enough as it is. Some of those slower cooked cabbage recipes or the cabbage rolls and stuff like that didn't quite fit into the structure of the book at that point. But yeah, she's such a versatile friend and I rely on cabbage a lot, so that makes her my favorite.Suzy Chase: I love cabbage too, but here's my problem with cabbage. I live in New York City, and I don't have the largest refrigerator. Cabbage always takes up so much room.Abra Berens: Kind of greatest strength/greatest weakness. There's so much food in those heads of cabbage, but then greatest weakness, there is so much food in those heads of cabbage and it takes up a lot of space, yeah. I mean, cabbage does hold up if you cut it and then store it in a plastic bag or something. Eventually, it'll start to brown on the cut side, so I generally leave it whole and just cut a little wedge off when I need it, but yeah, it can be a big beast.Suzy Chase: Now to my segment called my last meal. What would you order for your last supper?Abra Berens: Oh, wow.Suzy Chase: Peas?Abra Berens: Yeah, one last shot. In terms of the last meal that is the most representative of my life would probably be some sort of weird salad that I tend to make when it's just me home for dinner, and I eat it straight out of the mixing bowl, that I find a lot of comfort in. That would be something like Swiss chard that has some warm green lentils over the top, and then like, shaved cauliflower and roasted beets. Maybe some tuna mayo with that, or something like that. Something that's really representative of the food that I really truly enjoy and rely on on a daily basis.Abra Berens: But, if it's like a celebratory last meal, probably fresh pasta. You know, like a fresh pasta with maybe like a million different types of fresh pasta, like a filled pasta, a hand cut noodle with a really nice ragu and slow cooked sauce. I mean, I just got the chance to eat at Misi, Missy Robbins' restaurant.Suzy Chase: Yeah.Abra Berens: The pastas were so, so delicious. I've been really fixated lately on these daily luxuries, these things that, you know, like we were talking about living on a pretty tight budget means that I have kind of turned to find luxury in some of these more simple things, and a really beautiful plate of pasta is certainly one of those.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?Abra Berens: Every thing is @abraberens, which is A-B-R-A B-E-R-E-N-S. My website has the most up to date information in terms of book events and the dinners that we're doing at Greener and information about the cookbook. Then social media, I don't really use Twitter that much that I'm there, I guess. Then, Instagram is my preferred platform.Suzy Chase: Speaking of book events, I am so excited for our live cookbook chat at LizzYoung Bookseller in Brooklyn on Thursday, May 2nd from 6:00 to 8:00PM. I can't wait.Abra Berens: Oh, it's going to be so fun.Suzy Chase: Yes, and you can find all the details on my Instagram. Thanks, Abra, for coming on Cookery By The Book podcast.Abra Berens: Thank you so much for having me. Truly, it means a ton that you've enjoyed the book and I hope that your listeners will too.Outro: Follow Suzy Chase on Instagram @cookerybythebook, and subscribe at cookerybythebook.con or in Apple Podcasts. Thanks for listening to Cookery By The Book podcast, the only podcast devoted to cookbooks, since 2015.

2010 looks to be a promising year for Ramadanman having already racked up a number of critically acclaimed releases on a diverse selection of labels including Soul Jazz, Tempa, Aus, Critical Music and Hessle Audio, the label he co-runs with Pangaea and Ben UFO. Ramadanman has also remixed a variety of artists including the Ragga Twins, Scuba, Beat Pharmacy, Howie B, SpectraSoul and the Bulgarian group Wickeda. In 2009, Ramadanman mixed the seventh installement of the iconic Tempa Dubstep Allstars CD alongside DJ Chef He has enjoyed DJ support from the likes of Ricardo Villalobos, Skream, Mr Scruff, Craig Richards, Francois K, Kode9, Mala, Mary Anne Hobbs, Rob da Bank, Gilles Peterson and many more. He is also heavily involved in organizing the Leeds night Ruffage as well as co-hosting the now infamous Ruffage Sessions weekly internet radio show on Sub FM. Ramadanman DJs often both nationally and internationally including regular dates at the dubstep institution, FWD in London. Tracklist: 01. Timeblind - Space Cadet [Agriculture] 02. Rhythm & Sound - Why [Burial Mix] 03. Alix Alvarez - Boom Bip [Sole Channel] 04. DVA - Ganja [Forthcoming Hyperdub] 05. Untold & Roska - Long Range [Forthcoming Build] 06. A Made Up Sound - Sun Touch [Forthcoming A Made Up Sound] 07. Jam city - What I think about you [Unreleased] 08. Ikonika - dckhdbtch [Unreleased] 09. Ramadanman vs. Missy - Mir's a bitch [Unreleased] 10. Mos Wanted Mega - Diffrent Lekstrix [Unreleased] 11. Joy Orbison - So Derobe [Forthcoming Aus] 12. 2562 - Who are you fooling? [Tectonic] 13. Pangaea - 5-htp [Hessle Audio] 14. Ghost - Two Thousand [Ghost] 15. LV feat. Rubi Dan - Crossfire [Unreleased] 16. Bok Bok - Citizens Dub [Forthcoming Blunted Robots] 17. Ramadanman - Glut [Forthcoming Hemlock] 18. Pangaea - Neurons [Hessle Audio] 19. Icicle - Xylophobia [Unreleased] 20. Ramadanman - Bleeper [Unreleased] 21. Lil' Wayne - A millie (Harmonimix) [White] 22. Mala - Blue Notez [DMZ] 23. Ramadanman - Don't Change For Me [Unreleased]

Episode 26 is a dubstep mix by Ben UFO, showcasing the sounds of the Hessle Audio label and and unreleased material from across the genre Go to http://www.weareie.com/2007/09/blogariddims-26-ben-ufo.html for more info on the mix, or www.hessleaudio.com and www.myspace.com/freshben for info on Ben and Hessle Audio.