Podcasts about tamar adler

We welcome back Tamar Adler to talk about finding happiness in the kitchen. 800-348-2551. Ray Graf hosts.

Amy's book Happy to Help: Adventures of a People Pleaser is coming in January 2025. Pre-order your copy! How important is it to teach our kids the manners that we ourselves learned as children? Which social niceties should we keep up with and which ones should we discard? In this episode, Amy and Margaret discuss: How manners have sometimes been used as gatekeeping tools in the past What to do when you disagree with other grownups about the manners that matter for your kids Why we think the manners that center kindness are the ones that really matter Here are links to some of the resources mentioned in the episode: Tamar Adler for The New York Times: "A Manners Manifesto" Sophie Kiderlin for CNBC's Make It: "Americans are least likely to care about kids having good manners. Here's what they prioritize instead" Clare Finney for Vogue: "Gen-Z Doesn't Care About Table Manners. So What?" David Lowry for Parents.com: "22 Simple Manners All Kids Should Know" We love the sponsors that make this show possible! You can always find all the special deals and codes for all our current sponsors on our website: https://www.whatfreshhellpodcast.com/p/promo-codes/ mom friends, funny moms, parenting advice, parenting experts, parenting tips, mothers, families, parenting skills, parenting strategies, parenting styles, busy moms, self-help for moms, manage kid's behavior, teenager, tween, child development, family activities, family fun, parent child relationship, decluttering, kid-friendly, invisible workload, default parent, manners, kids manners, politeness, social cues Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Reposted from Let It Rip: The Bear 'Cast, which you can find and subscribe to at: podcastica.com/podcast/let-it-rip-the-bear-cast —Back home at last we are talking about intergenerational trauma, scurvy, our lack of knowledge about childbirth and the majesty of Jamie Lee Curtis.Lucy mentioned this recipe for Quick Shredded Chicken Ramen, and the book An Everlasting Meal by Tamar Adler.We spoke about this article by Erin Qualey at Den of GeekAnd this article on Medium by Heidi PriebeAll the music from The Bear can be found at this Radio Times articleMusic is Jump to the Top and Grizzly by Leva. Podcast artwork by the amazing Randy Stevenson.Next up: The Bear S3E09 “Apologies” and E010 “Forever”! Let us know your thoughts.You can email or send a voice message totalk@podcastica.comOr check out our Facebook group, where we put up comment posts for each episode, atfacebook.com/groups/podcastica

Reposted from Let It Rip: The Bear 'Cast, which you can find and subscribe to at: podcastica.com/podcast/let-it-rip-the-bear-cast —We are back south of the border to discuss blackberries, what an expo is and Josh Hartnett.We followed the blackberry cake recipe from Matty Matheson ‘A Cookbook'.You can read the full recipe here.Lucy learned all about beans in Tamar Adler's wonderful book ‘An Everlasting Meal'The amazing Glasgow vegetarian restaurant is Sylvan in WoodlandsThe AV Club article about Josh Hartnett can be found hereAll the music from The Bear can be found at this Radio Times articleMusic is Jump to the Top and Grizzly by Leva. Podcast artwork by the amazing Randy Stevenson.Next up: The Bear S3E05 “Children” and E06 “Napkins”! Let us know your thoughts.You can email or send a voice message to talk@podcastica.comOr check out our Facebook group, where we put up comment posts for each episode, at facebook.com/groups/podcastica

José talks with the James Beard-winning cook and writer about cooking more creatively and economically. Her latest book, An Everlasting Meal Cookbook, is an encyclopedia of leftovers, from banana peels to Dorito dust. (This episode initially ran in July 2023.) Sales and distribution by Lemonada Media.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week, cookbook author and leftovers lover Tamar Adler joins us to answer YOUR questions on cooking, hosting and eating. Tamar is the author of 'The Everlasting Meal' and 'The Everlasting Meal Cookbook: Leftovers A-Z.' She also writes the newsletter “The Kitchen Shrink,” where she regularly gives out culinary advice.]]>

This week, two of our favorite guests, City Cast Chicago host Jacoby Cochran and Not Sorry Productions faculty member Margaret Willison, stop by to play a game of Burden or Delight. We discuss wide-legged jeans, sourdough starters and a few other unhinged topics. Plus, we are super excited to introduce an upcoming segment with chef and cookbook writer Tamar Adler! She is bringing her expertise to Nerdette to solve all of your culinary quandaries. Tamar is the author of ‘An Everlasting Meal' and ‘The Everlasting Meal Cookbook.' She is now writing ‘The Kitchen Shrink' column, where she gives advice to home cooks. We're asking you to send us your cooking questions and mysteries. Then, we'll get you an answer in an upcoming episode. Send us a voice memo, an email, a DM, whichever method you prefer. We're at NerdettePodcast@gmail.com.]]>

What to do with all those leftovers? Our guest has more than a few ideas for you! We welcome Tamar Adler to take your calls. 800-348-2551. Ray Graf hosts.

Seems like a new book on climate-friendly cooking is constantly being released. Do they matter, or do they unfairly place the burden of political economy and social change on the lowly consumer? What type of cooking might actually be impactful, and why? Why do we even bother cooking anyway? In today's Reversing Climate Change podcast, Nori Cofounder and Director of Creative & Marketing, Ross Kenyon, is joined by Tamar Adler, a James Beard awardee and author of several books, including An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace, The Everlasting Meal Cookbook: Leftovers A-Z, and Something Old, Something New: Classic Recipes Revised. Tamar shares her unique approach to cooking which emphasizes the beauty of the endless transformation of ingredients, utilizing and elevating leftovers, and making food an enduring lifestyle rather than a collection of discrete meals. This focus on transformation, leftovers, and creatively utilizing so many of the parts we often throw away, has an obvious climate angle. But Tamar isn't convinced that's the best reason to pursue her way of cooking, and in fact, doing it for political purposes may make it hard to sustain for the same reasons that diets are hard to sustain: if it isn't joyful, it's a burden. And if it's a burden, it is so much harder to sustain. Do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of An Everlasting Meal, and subscribe to Tamar's new Substack, The Kitchen Shrink, where you can ask her all of the cooking questions you've kept locked in your root cellar. Connect with Nori ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Purchase Nori Carbon Removals⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Nori's website⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Nori on Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Check out our other podcast, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Carbon Removal Newsroom⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Carbon Removal Memes on Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Carbon Removal Memes on Instagram Resources Tamar's website An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace The Everlasting Meal Cookbook: Leftovers A-Z Something Old, Something New: Classic Recipes Revised The Kitchen Shrink The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection by Robert Farrar Capon The River Cottage Meat Book by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/reversingclimatechange/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/reversingclimatechange/support

Tamar Adler is the Kitchen Shrink. Sign-up for her Substack today! Tamar is the author of The Everlasting Meal Cookbook, Something Old, Something New and An Everlasting Meal. She's coming to Michigan later this month. ---February 27 (Traverse City, MI): https://www.farmclubtc.com/events-1/tamar-alder-everlasting-meal-cookbook-talk-w-nic-thiesenFebruary 28 (Grand Rapids, MI): https://www.cafemamo.com/February 29 (Three Oaks, MI): https://granorfarm.com/dining/book---Tamar was an editor at Harper's Magazine from 2001 through 2004. After cooking at Prune restaurant one summer, she became the chef of Farm 255, in Athens, Georgia. She eventually moved to California to cook at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California.Tamar has been writing full time since 2011. She has been a columnist for the New York Times Magazine, has reviewed various books for the New York Times and the New Yorker, and has been lucky enough to cover topics as wide-ranging as seaweed, hot dogs, baby weaning, and diet culture for Vogue Magazine. Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST---Wanna help Zak continue making this show? Become a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow---Share this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow

The new cookbook The Everlasting Meal Cookbook: Leftovers A-Z shows home chefs how to transform their forgotten leftovers into beloved meals. In today's episode, chef Tamar Adler talks with NPR's Mary Louise Kelly about how replenishing leftovers helps reduce food waste – and she shows her how to use an empty nut butter jar to create a delectable noodle dish.

Tamar Adler on what to do with leftover pizza, how to use the Marcella Hazan tomato sauce onion and how to take the moralising out of no-waste cooking.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for December 4, 2023 is: avoirdupois • av-er-duh-POYZ • noun Avoirdupois is synonymous with weight and heaviness, especially as related to the body. It also refers to the series of units of weight based on the pound of 16 ounces and the ounce of 16 drams. // The coach limited his recruiting to linebackers of a certain avoirdupois. See the entry > Examples: “... I find it hopeful that we've at least begun to dispense with the notion that only thin bodies are healthy and good. And to replace fantastical diet prescriptions with the common sense that healthy bodies eat all kinds of foods, depending on circumstance.... I will say Vogue's diets have been right at least twice. A little Champagne at lunch is a sound choice, regardless of the rest of the meal, and, as an anonymous writer put it in these pages in 1906, ‘There is healthy fat as there is unhealthy fat, and unless your avoirdupois becomes such as to make you uncomfortable ... you should leave it alone.'” — Tamar Adler, Vogue, 24 Feb. 2022 Did you know? When avoirdupois first appeared in English in the 15th century, it referred to “goods sold by weight,” which is also the meaning of its Middle English predecessor, avoir de pois. That term comes from an Anglo-French phrase meaning “goods of weight” or “property.” Today, avoirdupois most commonly refers to the system of weight measurement used for general merchandise, in which the pound is equal to 16 ounces, the ounce 16 drams, and the dram an ultra-specific 27.344 grains. (Some other weight systems are apothecaries' weight, used to measure pharmaceutical items, and troy weight, used for precious metals.) It was William Shakespeare, in his play Henry IV, Part 2, who first used avoirdupois to mean “heaviness”: “the weight of a hair will turn the scales between their avoirdupois.”

It's time for our 6th annual Best Cookbooks of the Year episode with Brian Stewart of the Salt + Spine podcast. This isn't your average cookbooks of the year list: we prompt Brian to curate a list specifically for busy home cooks. From the best cookbooks for tired parents to the best cookbooks to gift kids who love to cook (or teenagers who don't but really should), this list has you covered.LINKSBaking by Feel: Recipes to Sort Out Your Emotions (Whatever They Are Today!) by Becca Rea-Tucker https://amzn.to/49G1fwd Let's Eat: 101 Recipes to Fill Your Heart & Home by Dan Pelosihttps://amzn.to/3R2NzEj Knife Drop: Creative Recipes Anyone Can Cook by Nick DiGiovanni https://amzn.to/3G7TL7C Baking Yesteryear: The Best Recipes from the 1900s to the 1980s by B. Dylan Hollis https://amzn.to/47FKMGRI Could Nosh: Classic Jew-ish Recipes Revamped for Every Day by Jake Cohen https://amzn.to/47zrxyl Best Cookbooks for Tired Family CooksThe Don't Panic Pantry Cookbook: Mostly Vegetarian Comfort Food That Happens to Be Pretty Good for You by Noah Galuten  https://amzn.to/46dmd2R The Everlasting Meal Cookbook: Leftovers A-Z by Tamar Adler https://amzn.to/3T2l9fl Best Cookbooks for Inspired Family CooksStart Here: Instructions for Becoming a Better Cook: A Cookbook by Sohla El-Waylly https://amzn.to/3QQePWy Company: The Radically Casual Art of Cooking for Others by Amy Thielen https://amzn.to/49qBpMM Best Cookbooks for KidsCooking with My Dad, the Chef: 70+ kid-tested, kid-approved (and gluten-free!) recipes for YOUNG CHEFS! By Verveine Oringer & Ken Oringer https://amzn.to/477jIAq More Is More: Get Loose in the Kitchen: A Cookbook by Molly Baz https://amzn.to/3SF1LV8 Best Easy Baking CookbookSnacking Bakes: Simple Recipes for Cookies, Bars, Brownies, Cakes, and More by Yossy Arefi https://amzn.to/40x4IcD Best Project Baking CookbookBread and Roses: 100+ Grain Forward Recipes featuring Global Ingredients and Botanicals by Rose Wilde https://amzn.to/3QOWYiF Bread Baking With Kids Trusty Recipes for Magical HomemadeBread by Jennifer Latham https://amzn.to/3QuaA1A Best Single Subject Cookbook Chili Crisp: 50+ Recipes to Satisfy Your Spicy, Crunchy, Garlicky Cravings by James Park https://amzn.to/3QPPo6v Cookbook for Neurodivergent Cooks I Dream of Dinner (so You Don't Have To): Low-Effort, High-Reward Recipes: A Cookbook by Ali Slagle https://amzn.to/40K3eeQ  Veg-table: Recipes, Techniques, and Plant Science for Big-Flavored, Vegetable-Focused Meals by Nik Sharma https://amzn.to/3smYb7F Italy by Ingredient: Artisanal Foods, Modern Recipes by Viola Butoni https://amzn.to/3SKybh7 Let's Eat Paris!: The Essential Guide to the World's Most Famous Food City by François-Régis Gaudry https://amzn.to/3ug26n2 Best Cookbook for When You Want to Eat Your Emotions Tenderheart: A Cookbook About Vegetables and Unbreakable Family Bonds by  Hetty Lui McKinnon https://amzn.to/3FStn1M Our Sponsors:* Check out BetterHelp and use my code DIJFY for a great deal: https://www.betterhelp.com/* Check out Factor 75 and use my code dijfy50 for a great deal: https://www.factor75.com/* Check out Greenlight and use my code dijfy for a great deal: https://greenlight.com/* Check out Uncommon Goods and use my code DIJFY for a great deal: www.uncommongoods.com* Check out Uncommon Goods and use my code DIJFY for a great deal: www.uncommongoods.comAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

In High on the Hog's second season, producers Fabienne Toback and Karis Jagger continue to explore how Black hands in the pot influence what America eats. Screenwriters Seth Reiss and Will Tracy tackle issues of class, consumerism, and privilege in The Menu. With nearly 40% of the food bought in the US getting tossed, Tamar Adler finds delicious destinies for leftovers. Sisters Margaret and Irene Li crack the code for using wilted, nearly expired, and only-needed-a-tablespoon ingredients. The pandemic and an impulse to curb food waste led Balo Orozco to create Sunset Cultures, an artisanal kombucha and preserves company.

Thanksgiving is almost upon us, so it's time to get cooking! First, we ask chef Tanya Holland to share some fun, fresh ideas for the big meal. Tanya is the author of three cookbooks, including most recently the gorgeous ‘California Soul.' You can find the recipes for her stuffed sweet potatoes and brussels sprouts salad at our website! Since one of the best parts of Thanksgiving is the leftovers, we also talk to Tamar Adler about her cookbook ‘The Everlasting Meal Cookbook: Leftovers A to Z.' ]]>

We're pursuing some new interests this week including picking apart oral-care TikTok, attending monster truck rallies, and finding angry aunts that give incredible advice. OOOH, and don't forget to hit us up with your gift-guide requests—the phone lines are open!Need noise-cancelers for your next monster truck rally (or Eras viewing)? We're fans of Loop Earplugs. And! Zach Helfand on Monster Jam for The New Yorker.Highly recommend The Brooding column by Kathryn Jezer-Morton for The Cut, Especially the pieces "Raising Kids Is the ‘Best Job in the World.' Why Is Caring for the Elderly the Worst?" + "My Mom Is Selfish. Do I Still Have to be a ‘Good Daughter'?" + "Are Helicopter Parents Actually Lazy?" Kathryn Jezer-Morton is also behind Joanna Goddard's post-divorce Q&A and "What If You Just Didn't Clean That Up?" Related-ish: Tamar Adler's food scraps advice newsletter The Kitchen Shrink, Maddie Coleman's newsletter Wait Have Your Read This?, and the site Girlhood.For oral-care recs, we were inspired by this Claudia Sulewski TikTok, Curaprox toothbrushes (this travel set!), and the Slate Flosser. Which True Citrus are you? Did The White Gown traumatize you as much as it traumatized us? Please let us know at 833-632-5463, podcast@athingortwohq.com, @athingortwohq, or in our Geneva!Discover so many more natural diamond truths at naturaldiamonds.com/thankyou.Look into an MBA from The Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business.Join Book of the Month and get your first book for just $5 with the code SPOOKY.YAY.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

#29. Tamar Adler is a celebrated author and chef with James Beard and IACP awards. She is known for her book, "Everlasting Meal" where she discusses her talent in transforming leftovers into delicious meals. She has worked with renowned chefs like Alice Waters, Dan Barber, and Gabrielle Hamilton, in addition to her editorial contributions to magazines like Harper's, New York Times, Vogue, and New Yorker. In this episode, Tamar discusses the relationship between chefs and writers, the distinctions between chefs like Alice Waters and Dan Barber, her approach to mise en place in writing, the value of spontaneity, and the parallels between preparing restaurant family meals and cooking with leftovers at home.Where to find Tamar Adler: InstagramTwitterWhere to find host Josh Sharkey:InstagramLinkedInIn this episode, we cover:(01:20) How Tamar's time at Chez Panisse with Alice Waters and Dan at Stone Barns,  has shaped her as a writer(10:38) Tamar's opinion on if chefs make great writers(17:12) How Tamar preps for a book and if there is there a semblance mise en place when she starts writing(20:46) If Tamar writes every day(27:10) When to decide when a project is finished(35:02) How running helps with Tamar's thought process(38:23) How Tamar became inspired by leftovers(25:12) How Tamar's upbringing affected how she parents and if her kids eat leftovers (50:46) Tamar's favorite peanut butter (53:20) How Tamar would feel if she wrote her greatest work but no one else could read it

For years, cook and writer Tamar Adler's kitchen overflowed with leftovers: stale bread, leftover buttermilk, potato chip crumbs. Her mission was to figure out what to do with all of them. Her new book, The Everlasting Cookbook: Leftovers A - Z, has the answers. In this episode, she troubleshoots how busy parents can rethink leftovers – it's a meal with half the work already done! – plus offers advice on how not to let a picky child get under your skin. Sales and distribution by Lemonada MediaSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

José talks with the James Beard-winning cook and writer about cooking more creatively and economically. Her new book, An Everlasting Meal Cookbook, is an encyclopedia of leftovers, from banana peels to Dorito dust. Sales and distribution by Lemonada Media.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Tamar Adler on what to do with leftover pizza, how to use the Marcella Hazan tomato sauce onion and how to take the moralising out of no-waste cooking.

This week, we talk to two award-winning food writers about how to make the most of your vegetables and leftovers this summer. First up, award-winning vegetarian writer Hetty Lui McKinnon joins us to talk about her latest book Tenderheart, A Cookbook About Vegetables and Unbreakable Family Bonds. She talks to us about her father's influence on her early life and how it inspired her vegetarian cooking career. She walks us through some of her favorite Chinese-inspired dishes made with a vegetarian twist, like her Sesame Mushroom Toast and Eggplant Char Siu and she sticks around to answer your cooking questions. Then, Tamar Adler, author of The Everlasting Meal Cookbook, brings fresh eyes to leftovers, from super quick ideas to elevate your cooking, like adding coconut water to your rice, and even ideas on what to do with your overcooked fish and those Cheeto crumbs at the bottom of the bag. Broadcast dates for this episode: June 9, 2023 (originally aired)

Welcome to the first bonus episode in our mini-series on food and drink. Every Wednesday, as we inch closer to summer, we'll host a fun conversation with a different expert. Lilah's first guest is chef and food writer Tamar Adler. Twelve years ago, Tamar wrote the bestselling book An Everlasting Meal, which shared her philosophy that every meal you make can come from the meal before it. She recently expanded it into The Everlasting Meal Cookbook, an encyclopedia for cooking leftovers, with more than 1,500 little recipes. Tamar joins Lilah to talk through making second, third and even fourth meals out of what we have in our kitchens, from leftover pasta to wilting lettuce to an old deli sandwich.--------------Want to stay in touch? We love hearing from you. We're on Twitter @ftweekendpod and Lilah is on Instagram and Twitter @lilahrap.--------------Links:– Tamar's most recent cookbook is The Everlasting Meal Cookbook: Leftovers A-Z.– Lilah also recommends her original book, An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace– Tamar's recent piece for FT Weekend on her dream dinner party: https://on.ft.com/43pTres – Tamar is on Instagram @tamar.e.adler-------------We're still collecting your top summer tips: what's one small thing that you'd recommend people do this summer, that would make their summer 90% better? Record a message here: http://sayhi.chat/15xxg -------------Special offers for Weekend listeners, from 50% off a digital subscription to a $1/£1/€1 trial are here: http://ft.com/weekendpodcast.--------------This episode was produced by Zach St Louis. Mixing and sound design by Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco.Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

With nearly 40% of the food bought in the U.S. tossed out, Tamar Adler finds delicious destinies for leftovers. The pandemic and an impulse to curb food waste led Balo Orozco to create Sunset Cultures, an artisanal kombucha and preserves company. Expat Nancy Singleton Hachisu, an expert on Japanese home cooking, showcases vegetarian dishes in her latest cookbook. Bill Esparza espouses the mariscos life and shares two local recommendations for Sinaloan seafood. Professor Linda J. Seligmann illuminates the politics of quinoa, a minor crop that became a global foodstuff. At the farmer's market, Gather for Good walks the cake walk for reproductive justice.

Amy and David talk how to save time and money with Tamar Adler, author of Amy's favorite new cookbook: The Everlasting Meal Cookbook. Tamar describes how to turn yesterday's meals into something fresh, new and fabulous. Goodbye, sad leftovers! Hello to a more relaxed, affordable, and sustainable way to cook.Mentioned in this episode:Roast Pork ButtChocolate Peanut Butter Cookies (AKA Magic in the Middle Cookies)H&H Bagels, NY, NYShawarma Mia, Brooklyn, NYLeave us a message: https://leit.es/chat. Follow us on social @amytraverso and @davidleite.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Stephanie [00:00:15]:Hello, everybody, and welcome to Dishing with Stephanie's Dish, the podcast where we talk to people that are cookbook writers obsessed with food or otherwise food at Sent. And I'm very excited to talk to someone today. Her name is Tamar Adler and she has written this book called The Everlasting Meal Cookbook leftovers a to Z. And I first read about it, I think, in maybe the New York Times. And then I got a copy of the book, and you guys, people that know me know I'm obsessed with my freezer. I'm obsessed with Mason jars. I'm constantly repurposing things. I'm like an old housewife from the 1920s. I can't throw a thing away. And this book is like the guide to how to make sense of all this chaos, of all these leftovers and these little dribs and drabs that you have. I just am so impressed with you. Thank you for coming on the show.Tamar [00:01:13]:Oh, my gosh, I'm so happy that I'm talking to a soul sister and saving.Stephanie [00:01:18]:So how did you have you been like this since you were a little kid and finally just wrote this? I mean, it's a tome.Tamar [00:01:26]:And I wanted it to be longer. My publisher cut me off at some point. I haven't been like this. I mean, I've always liked saving things, and I've always been sort of into things that had age to them or stories. But I think that this actually came from being a professional cook, because I think, contrary to what a lot of people think would be true, professional cooks are amazing at using all of everything and both what is done. In restaurants and certainly what's done for diners but also what's done to serve the staff of a restaurant is always a version of either thinking ahead, so cooking something partway and then finishing the cooking or making sure that you're cooking something in a way that lets you use it over the course of days or making sure to eke all of the flavor out of anything that you have. So it was being a professional cook that kind of helped me realize that I could if I could put down on paper what so many of us already knew but from years of professional cooking, then I could kind of hand some of it off to home cooks.Stephanie [00:02:50]:Yeah. During the pandemic, many people sort of rediscovered cooking and certainly their pantry and maybe things that their mom did or dad that they hadn't thought about, that now all of a sudden you're at home and you can't run to the grocery store every day unless you're going to have the survival gauntlet. Because it was kind of a grim time. So we went back to some of this. Like an example in here, you talk about moldy cheese. Well, my mom just cut the mold off the cheese, and we just kept going. She never missed a beat with it. But you take it further in zest and different. Any ingredient that you have, you can literally look up in this book, you guys, and she tells you what to do with it.Tamar [00:03:42]:I mean, my theory was, if you have it, why not use it? And I think remembering the pandemic is a really sort of smart point of orientation for how to use this book and also how I wrote it, because that was a time during which all of our outlooks was, if I have something, I'm going to use it, because the stakes of going out to get a new thing are just too high. And so the stakes feel different now, and they are different, but they're still stakes, right? It still takes a lot out of every person to go to the supermarket. I find it takes a lot of energy, and it takes, like, personal energy and planning and gas for the car and the standing and the line, like, the whole thing. Plus, it costs money. So it's like, if you have it, why not use it? And that is what I was trying to help people do in this book.Stephanie [00:04:41]:And I'll just like an example that I talked about on this podcast a while ago that I overcooked quinoa for a TV segment I was doing, and I had all of this quinoa, and I froze it in these little cubes right in the freezer. And I've been making bowls, and I've still got all these cubes left, and I looked it up in your book, and I can make a savory tart with the quinoa crust. I would have never thought of that.Tamar [00:05:05]:Oh, yeah, that's great.Stephanie [00:05:07]:Yeah. And then obviously a quinoa salad, but you talk about making it crunchy by adding all of these other elements to it, and it just like I looked up quinoa, and I was like, who would have thought to make a crust with that? That's how useful your book is. And it is called the Everlasting Meal Cookbook. I just want to make sure I repeat it. When you thought about organizing the book so that somebody like me who's got a cup of white beans left, and what do I do with that? Or right now, I'm awash in ham from Easter and trying to get creative ways to eat ham other than a ham sandwich and pea soup, because I've already done those. How did you think about how to organize things?Tamar [00:05:50]:Okay, before I answer the organization question, I just want to shout out to Emma McDowell, who is the person from whom I got the quinoa crust recipe, just because I just don't want to take credit. I thought so brilliant, and I definitely got the idea from her. And she, I think, has a book out, and she has recipes on the Internet all the time, and she's super great. But I at first wanted to organize the whole book alphabetically. I thought that would be easiest. So just A to Z and you would look up quinoa under Q and beans under B probably, although then it's like or do you look them up under cannellini and ham under H? But I did that for the first draft. Maybe two drafts of the book were just purely alphabetical with no other organizing principles. And I had a friend who always reads my draft who said that it made for some really inflicitous neighbors. He didn't like reading the word anchovy next to apple peel. He felt like it just made him want to close the book up and just not worry about either the anchovies or the peels. Yeah, nothing. He was like, at first I sort of booked, and I was like, but the whole point is that it's like a reference book. And then I calmed down a little bit, and I thought, that's true. And that maybe a new it's also not. You do kind of want there to be a category that you're searching in, because that is often how we use reference books, too. And so I decided to create larger leftovers categories, which it still can be, I think, confusing to somebody because we're so used to searching any culinary text by what we want to make, not by what we have. And I have had to remind people, if you look up a roast beef sandwich, I am not giving you a recipe for a roast beef sandwich. I'm telling you what to do with the soggy half of roast beef sandwich you have left.Stephanie [00:08:06]:Yes.Tamar [00:08:09]:But creating those larger categories is how I ended up organizing it. So the first chapter is vegetables, and it's leftover vegetables. The second is fruits and nuts, and it's overripe underripe, et cetera. And leftovers of all, there's leftover bread, leftover rice and grain. I mean, rice and beans. Leftover stuffed dough's was kind of a hard category to come up with, but it kind of made sense to me. There's leftover drinks, leftover sweets. Oh, leftover snacks. So stuff like the dust at the bottom of a pretzel bag or cheetos.Stephanie [00:08:48]:Which that dust is amazing. If you're like going to bread something or put a little sprinkle on a little pile of soup that you're eating.Tamar [00:08:59]:It'S like extra good salt.Stephanie [00:09:00]:Yes, extra good spicy salt. And even like, I make Caesar salads all the time, and I like to use real anchovies in the dressing. How did I not think about using the anchovy oil? And I've just been throwing that away.Tamar [00:09:16]:I'm glad that you now have ideas for it.Stephanie [00:09:19]:Yeah, it's such an obvious one, like, oh, yeah, this is that delicious flavored oil. Why aren't you doing something with it? And also something I discovered during the pandemic is brine from pickle juice.Tamar [00:09:33]:Oh, yeah.Stephanie [00:09:34]:I was just not salvaging my brine, and now I'm hoarding it.Tamar [00:09:39]:Yeah, because if you're going to do a whole chicken or a bunch of pork chops, you actually need kind of a good amount right. You need to be saving the pickle juice from two jars because you need a lot.Stephanie [00:09:54]:And frying chicken and brightening the chicken before you fry it in. That pickle juice is a secret of many chefs. Was there something that you did not know what to do with it like pistachio shells. Let's use that as an example.Tamar [00:10:16]:Well, we have always used those for fire starters. Those are pretty good for starting, like a wood stove or a fireplace. No, that was okay. But there were a bunch I didn't I mean, cherry stems, a lot of them I had to look up and then do some experimenting with, and I hadn't known that one could use.Stephanie [00:10:40]:What do you do with a cherry stem?Tamar [00:10:43]:You make tea. And it's supposed to be really good for you. Yeah.Stephanie [00:10:47]:See, this is, like, the joy of the discovery of this book I've been reading. It like a Bible in bed at night, like, hoarding, ten pages at a time. I've never been so excited about a book before. I'm in love with it now. Where do you go from here? You mentioned that your publisher cut you off. Could you do a whole other?Tamar [00:11:14]:I don't know if I have enough for a whole other, but I'm still collecting the ones that aren't in there. So I wonder if they would ever let me do, like, a five if I could break up the letters so that each one could be a little bit shorter, like A through E or something like that. A bunch of volumes. That would be one thing. Another is I could just, at some point in the future, reissue it with everything that got left out. I don't know. Anything that seems outdated. I don't know.Stephanie [00:11:45]:When you go out to eat, like, you have a recipe or an idea for leftover French fries that I'm assuming you're bringing home from a restaurant. When you go out to eat, do you bring everything leftover home?Tamar [00:11:58]:Yeah, I think so. Let me think. Yeah, I do. I think. I was like, well, do I really? And I'm like, no, I totally do. Because everything is good in fried rice. Or everything is good in, like, a lunchtime, some constellation of eggs and rice. And I do I keep pasta for salad. And the other day, this was for a TV show, which I only mentioned because it's like you're doing it on the spot, so it really has to work. And I made Caesar salad stuffed boiled eggs, kind of like deviled eggs, but with Caesar salad chopped up. And then combined with the yolks and a little bit of anchovy and parmesan and garlic. And they were so good. And I had to make a bunch of them. It still looks beautiful on TV. And my husband and I just ate them all. They were so delicious.Stephanie [00:12:55]:It's so smart because leftover salad is hard because it gets soggy obviously pretty quickly. And some people love a leftover salad. I'm not a huge leftover salad person, but that's brilliant because the texture isn't necessary, but the taste is still carried through.Tamar [00:13:10]:Exactly. Yeah.Stephanie [00:13:12]:Oh, that is so amazing. Who inspires you? Like, do you have some cookbook authors that are your go to?Tamar [00:13:20]:I get the most inspiration from cooks from other cultures. So it's when I read, like, Thai Cookbooks and Indian Cookbooks, and there's a really beautiful I think it's Senegalese Cookbook I forget the name of. But I really like a big book of Indian pickle. Indian Pickles. That was self published. I think it's called usha's pickle. That's where I get the most sort of like, oh, my God, that's a great idea. And, oh, yeah, that flavor. I used leftover Caesar salad dressing to make something Thai recently because I realized that fish sauce is just pressed anchovies and garlic and everything, and it had lemon instead of lime. And I was like, oh. So I used it as the beginning of Yamun Sen, a Thai noodle salad. I just added all of the ingredients to that. And so that's the kind of thing that I think comes to me from flipping through those other cuisines recipes and.Stephanie [00:14:41]:Getting inspiration, too, because I think sometimes people just cook the same stuff and you want to branch out a little bit. Strawberry leaves. Who knew that you should be eating those in salads? I did not.Tamar [00:14:56]:I did not, either. My friend Wes told me that. He's like, that's what I always do. Yeah. I had no idea.Stephanie [00:15:01]:And so much of this, too, is forageable, like, a strawberry leaf. There's wild strawberries all over my woods, and I could not always get the strawberries because the bears get them first, but I could get the leaves and make something cool out of that. So that's fun.Tamar [00:15:17]:Yeah.Stephanie [00:15:19]:Well, I am just obsessed with this book, and I'm hoping that we can get you on our radio show, too, because we talk a lot about leftovers and how to repurpose things and just how to be a good home cook and good meaning not like, fancy. Good meaning just like, being able to get a meal on the table for your family in a reasonable amount of time that makes sense for your schedule and your life.Tamar [00:15:43]:There's just so many ideas. Totally. I would love to, and I love how much it seems like you're reading it.Stephanie [00:15:55]:I get it.Tamar [00:15:56]:I really found you. I'm so happy.Stephanie [00:15:57]:Thank you. It found me. There's more than 1500 recipes ideas in here, and it's economical, too. My daughter is a starving 24 year old person, and I was like, you have to look at this book when you come over. I'm like, you can't have it, but I'll get you one because you'll never waste anything again. And there's so many great ideas. Tamara, I just love it. Thank you so much.Tamar [00:16:21]:Thank you so much.Stephanie [00:16:23]:Absolutely. And pick up the book. The Everlasting Meal Cookbook. Do you have a newsletter, too? I think I saw.Tamar [00:16:28]:Maybe I don't. I just cookbooks on instagram.Stephanie [00:16:33]:Just books and Instagram is plenty, right?Tamar [00:16:36]:It's a lot to keep for now.Stephanie [00:16:37]:Yeah, exactly. All right. Thank you for being my guest today. I appreciate it.Tamar [00:16:42]:Thanks, Stephanie. Bye.Stephanie [00:16:43]:Okay, bye. Get full access to Stephanie's Dish Newsletter at stephaniehansen.substack.com/subscribe

Stephanie [00:00:15]:Hello, everybody, and welcome to Dishing with Stephanie's Dish, the podcast where we talk to people that are cookbook writers obsessed with food or otherwise food at Sent. And I'm very excited to talk to someone today. Her name is Tamar Adler and she has written this book called The Everlasting Meal Cookbook leftovers a to Z. And I first read about it, I think, in maybe the New York Times. And then I got a copy of the book, and you guys, people that know me know I'm obsessed with my freezer. I'm obsessed with Mason jars. I'm constantly repurposing things. I'm like an old housewife from the 1920s. I can't throw a thing away. And this book is like the guide to how to make sense of all this chaos, of all these leftovers and these little dribs and drabs that you have. I just am so impressed with you. Thank you for coming on the show.Tamar [00:01:13]:Oh, my gosh, I'm so happy that I'm talking to a soul sister and saving.Stephanie [00:01:18]:So how did you have you been like this since you were a little kid and finally just wrote this? I mean, it's a tome.Tamar [00:01:26]:And I wanted it to be longer. My publisher cut me off at some point. I haven't been like this. I mean, I've always liked saving things, and I've always been sort of into things that had age to them or stories. But I think that this actually came from being a professional cook, because I think, contrary to what a lot of people think would be true, professional cooks are amazing at using all of everything and both what is done. In restaurants and certainly what's done for diners but also what's done to serve the staff of a restaurant is always a version of either thinking ahead, so cooking something partway and then finishing the cooking or making sure that you're cooking something in a way that lets you use it over the course of days or making sure to eke all of the flavor out of anything that you have. So it was being a professional cook that kind of helped me realize that I could if I could put down on paper what so many of us already knew but from years of professional cooking, then I could kind of hand some of it off to home cooks.Stephanie [00:02:50]:Yeah. During the pandemic, many people sort of rediscovered cooking and certainly their pantry and maybe things that their mom did or dad that they hadn't thought about, that now all of a sudden you're at home and you can't run to the grocery store every day unless you're going to have the survival gauntlet. Because it was kind of a grim time. So we went back to some of this. Like an example in here, you talk about moldy cheese. Well, my mom just cut the mold off the cheese, and we just kept going. She never missed a beat with it. But you take it further in zest and different. Any ingredient that you have, you can literally look up in this book, you guys, and she tells you what to do with it.Tamar [00:03:42]:I mean, my theory was, if you have it, why not use it? And I think remembering the pandemic is a really sort of smart point of orientation for how to use this book and also how I wrote it, because that was a time during which all of our outlooks was, if I have something, I'm going to use it, because the stakes of going out to get a new thing are just too high. And so the stakes feel different now, and they are different, but they're still stakes, right? It still takes a lot out of every person to go to the supermarket. I find it takes a lot of energy, and it takes, like, personal energy and planning and gas for the car and the standing and the line, like, the whole thing. Plus, it costs money. So it's like, if you have it, why not use it? And that is what I was trying to help people do in this book.Stephanie [00:04:41]:And I'll just like an example that I talked about on this podcast a while ago that I overcooked quinoa for a TV segment I was doing, and I had all of this quinoa, and I froze it in these little cubes right in the freezer. And I've been making bowls, and I've still got all these cubes left, and I looked it up in your book, and I can make a savory tart with the quinoa crust. I would have never thought of that.Tamar [00:05:05]:Oh, yeah, that's great.Stephanie [00:05:07]:Yeah. And then obviously a quinoa salad, but you talk about making it crunchy by adding all of these other elements to it, and it just like I looked up quinoa, and I was like, who would have thought to make a crust with that? That's how useful your book is. And it is called the Everlasting Meal Cookbook. I just want to make sure I repeat it. When you thought about organizing the book so that somebody like me who's got a cup of white beans left, and what do I do with that? Or right now, I'm awash in ham from Easter and trying to get creative ways to eat ham other than a ham sandwich and pea soup, because I've already done those. How did you think about how to organize things?Tamar [00:05:50]:Okay, before I answer the organization question, I just want to shout out to Emma McDowell, who is the person from whom I got the quinoa crust recipe, just because I just don't want to take credit. I thought so brilliant, and I definitely got the idea from her. And she, I think, has a book out, and she has recipes on the Internet all the time, and she's super great. But I at first wanted to organize the whole book alphabetically. I thought that would be easiest. So just A to Z and you would look up quinoa under Q and beans under B probably, although then it's like or do you look them up under cannellini and ham under H? But I did that for the first draft. Maybe two drafts of the book were just purely alphabetical with no other organizing principles. And I had a friend who always reads my draft who said that it made for some really inflicitous neighbors. He didn't like reading the word anchovy next to apple peel. He felt like it just made him want to close the book up and just not worry about either the anchovies or the peels. Yeah, nothing. He was like, at first I sort of booked, and I was like, but the whole point is that it's like a reference book. And then I calmed down a little bit, and I thought, that's true. And that maybe a new it's also not. You do kind of want there to be a category that you're searching in, because that is often how we use reference books, too. And so I decided to create larger leftovers categories, which it still can be, I think, confusing to somebody because we're so used to searching any culinary text by what we want to make, not by what we have. And I have had to remind people, if you look up a roast beef sandwich, I am not giving you a recipe for a roast beef sandwich. I'm telling you what to do with the soggy half of roast beef sandwich you have left.Stephanie [00:08:06]:Yes.Tamar [00:08:09]:But creating those larger categories is how I ended up organizing it. So the first chapter is vegetables, and it's leftover vegetables. The second is fruits and nuts, and it's overripe underripe, et cetera. And leftovers of all, there's leftover bread, leftover rice and grain. I mean, rice and beans. Leftover stuffed dough's was kind of a hard category to come up with, but it kind of made sense to me. There's leftover drinks, leftover sweets. Oh, leftover snacks. So stuff like the dust at the bottom of a pretzel bag or cheetos.Stephanie [00:08:48]:Which that dust is amazing. If you're like going to bread something or put a little sprinkle on a little pile of soup that you're eating.Tamar [00:08:59]:It'S like extra good salt.Stephanie [00:09:00]:Yes, extra good spicy salt. And even like, I make Caesar salads all the time, and I like to use real anchovies in the dressing. How did I not think about using the anchovy oil? And I've just been throwing that away.Tamar [00:09:16]:I'm glad that you now have ideas for it.Stephanie [00:09:19]:Yeah, it's such an obvious one, like, oh, yeah, this is that delicious flavored oil. Why aren't you doing something with it? And also something I discovered during the pandemic is brine from pickle juice.Tamar [00:09:33]:Oh, yeah.Stephanie [00:09:34]:I was just not salvaging my brine, and now I'm hoarding it.Tamar [00:09:39]:Yeah, because if you're going to do a whole chicken or a bunch of pork chops, you actually need kind of a good amount right. You need to be saving the pickle juice from two jars because you need a lot.Stephanie [00:09:54]:And frying chicken and brightening the chicken before you fry it in. That pickle juice is a secret of many chefs. Was there something that you did not know what to do with it like pistachio shells. Let's use that as an example.Tamar [00:10:16]:Well, we have always used those for fire starters. Those are pretty good for starting, like a wood stove or a fireplace. No, that was okay. But there were a bunch I didn't I mean, cherry stems, a lot of them I had to look up and then do some experimenting with, and I hadn't known that one could use.Stephanie [00:10:40]:What do you do with a cherry stem?Tamar [00:10:43]:You make tea. And it's supposed to be really good for you. Yeah.Stephanie [00:10:47]:See, this is, like, the joy of the discovery of this book I've been reading. It like a Bible in bed at night, like, hoarding, ten pages at a time. I've never been so excited about a book before. I'm in love with it now. Where do you go from here? You mentioned that your publisher cut you off. Could you do a whole other?Tamar [00:11:14]:I don't know if I have enough for a whole other, but I'm still collecting the ones that aren't in there. So I wonder if they would ever let me do, like, a five if I could break up the letters so that each one could be a little bit shorter, like A through E or something like that. A bunch of volumes. That would be one thing. Another is I could just, at some point in the future, reissue it with everything that got left out. I don't know. Anything that seems outdated. I don't know.Stephanie [00:11:45]:When you go out to eat, like, you have a recipe or an idea for leftover French fries that I'm assuming you're bringing home from a restaurant. When you go out to eat, do you bring everything leftover home?Tamar [00:11:58]:Yeah, I think so. Let me think. Yeah, I do. I think. I was like, well, do I really? And I'm like, no, I totally do. Because everything is good in fried rice. Or everything is good in, like, a lunchtime, some constellation of eggs and rice. And I do I keep pasta for salad. And the other day, this was for a TV show, which I only mentioned because it's like you're doing it on the spot, so it really has to work. And I made Caesar salad stuffed boiled eggs, kind of like deviled eggs, but with Caesar salad chopped up. And then combined with the yolks and a little bit of anchovy and parmesan and garlic. And they were so good. And I had to make a bunch of them. It still looks beautiful on TV. And my husband and I just ate them all. They were so delicious.Stephanie [00:12:55]:It's so smart because leftover salad is hard because it gets soggy obviously pretty quickly. And some people love a leftover salad. I'm not a huge leftover salad person, but that's brilliant because the texture isn't necessary, but the taste is still carried through.Tamar [00:13:10]:Exactly. Yeah.Stephanie [00:13:12]:Oh, that is so amazing. Who inspires you? Like, do you have some cookbook authors that are your go to?Tamar [00:13:20]:I get the most inspiration from cooks from other cultures. So it's when I read, like, Thai Cookbooks and Indian Cookbooks, and there's a really beautiful I think it's Senegalese Cookbook I forget the name of. But I really like a big book of Indian pickle. Indian Pickles. That was self published. I think it's called usha's pickle. That's where I get the most sort of like, oh, my God, that's a great idea. And, oh, yeah, that flavor. I used leftover Caesar salad dressing to make something Thai recently because I realized that fish sauce is just pressed anchovies and garlic and everything, and it had lemon instead of lime. And I was like, oh. So I used it as the beginning of Yamun Sen, a Thai noodle salad. I just added all of the ingredients to that. And so that's the kind of thing that I think comes to me from flipping through those other cuisines recipes and.Stephanie [00:14:41]:Getting inspiration, too, because I think sometimes people just cook the same stuff and you want to branch out a little bit. Strawberry leaves. Who knew that you should be eating those in salads? I did not.Tamar [00:14:56]:I did not, either. My friend Wes told me that. He's like, that's what I always do. Yeah. I had no idea.Stephanie [00:15:01]:And so much of this, too, is forageable, like, a strawberry leaf. There's wild strawberries all over my woods, and I could not always get the strawberries because the bears get them first, but I could get the leaves and make something cool out of that. So that's fun.Tamar [00:15:17]:Yeah.Stephanie [00:15:19]:Well, I am just obsessed with this book, and I'm hoping that we can get you on our radio show, too, because we talk a lot about leftovers and how to repurpose things and just how to be a good home cook and good meaning not like, fancy. Good meaning just like, being able to get a meal on the table for your family in a reasonable amount of time that makes sense for your schedule and your life.Tamar [00:15:43]:There's just so many ideas. Totally. I would love to, and I love how much it seems like you're reading it.Stephanie [00:15:55]:I get it.Tamar [00:15:56]:I really found you. I'm so happy.Stephanie [00:15:57]:Thank you. It found me. There's more than 1500 recipes ideas in here, and it's economical, too. My daughter is a starving 24 year old person, and I was like, you have to look at this book when you come over. I'm like, you can't have it, but I'll get you one because you'll never waste anything again. And there's so many great ideas. Tamara, I just love it. Thank you so much.Tamar [00:16:21]:Thank you so much.Stephanie [00:16:23]:Absolutely. And pick up the book. The Everlasting Meal Cookbook. Do you have a newsletter, too? I think I saw.Tamar [00:16:28]:Maybe I don't. I just cookbooks on instagram.Stephanie [00:16:33]:Just books and Instagram is plenty, right?Tamar [00:16:36]:It's a lot to keep for now.Stephanie [00:16:37]:Yeah, exactly. All right. Thank you for being my guest today. I appreciate it.Tamar [00:16:42]:Thanks, Stephanie. Bye.Stephanie [00:16:43]:Okay, bye. Get full access to Stephanie's Dish Newsletter at stephaniehansen.substack.com/subscribe

Tamar Adler does such cool work with cooking - her new book, The Everlasting Meal Cookbook: Leftovers A-Z, outlines how to actually use all the food you have in your kitchen. It's extremely helpful and I really appreciate her point of view - there's a tendency in the US to be like "here are things to buy to be more earth-friendly.” No. That is not the vibe today. Also I bonded with Tamar over the dirty looks we get in the grocery store for doing something that is considered so gross - but it's not! The Everlasting Meal Cookbook: Leftovers A-Z   Listen to Smart Mouth: iTunes • Google Podcasts • Stitcher • Spotify • RadioPublic • TuneIn • Libsyn • Amazon Music   Check out all our episodes so far here. If you like, pledge a buck or two on Patreon.   Tamar IG   Katherine TikTok   Smart Mouth newsletter   Smart Mouth IG   Related: Home Economics with Shauna Sever   Music: Money for Nothing - Dire Straits   Sources: Encyclopedia Washington Post Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo Utah State University Vinny Thomas

This week, Slate's Rebecca Onion joins Julia and Stephen to talk about the Nike shoe story, Air. Then they discuss the new Netflix series Beef. Finally, Slate's Carl Wilson joins to chat about the first full album by supergroup Boygenius. In Slate Plus, the panel talks about leftovers and food waste, inspired by Tamar Adler's book The Everlasting Meal Cookbook. Email us at culturefest@slate.com. Endorsements:  Rebecca: The new memoir Don't Call Me Home by Alexandra Auder. Julia: Julia is endorsing the activity that is googling things with your kids, as inspired by her family's deep dive into the history of Fanta while on vacation. Stephen: Jazz pianist Brad Mehldau's album Your Mother Should Know: Brad Mehldau Plays The Beatles Podcast production by Cameron Drews. Production assistance by Yesica Balderrama. Outro music: "Jenny's Alright" by OTE. __ Make an impact this Earth Month by helping Macy's on their mission to bring more parks to more people across the country. Go to macys.com/purpose to learn more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, Slate's Rebecca Onion joins Julia and Stephen to talk about the Nike shoe story, Air. Then they discuss the new Netflix series Beef. Finally, Slate's Carl Wilson joins to chat about the first full album by supergroup Boygenius. In Slate Plus, the panel talks about leftovers and food waste, inspired by Tamar Adler's book The Everlasting Meal Cookbook. Email us at culturefest@slate.com. Endorsements:  Rebecca: The new memoir Don't Call Me Home by Alexandra Auder. Julia: Julia is endorsing the activity that is googling things with your kids, as inspired by her family's deep dive into the history of Fanta while on vacation. Stephen: Jazz pianist Brad Mehldau's album Your Mother Should Know: Brad Mehldau Plays The Beatles Podcast production by Cameron Drews. Production assistance by Yesica Balderrama. Outro music: "Jenny's Alright" by OTE. __ Make an impact this Earth Month by helping Macy's on their mission to bring more parks to more people across the country. Go to macys.com/purpose to learn more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, we're covering pressing and important moments in culture (the Scandoval), products of innovation (seam rippers), gifting strategies, a revelatory cookbook all about leftovers, and a topic we can not let sit any longer: cute postage stamps.     If you're new to the Vanderpump Rules Cinematic Universe, we highly suggest Sexy Unique Podcast as a viewing companion.    Message Monsters stamps by Elise Gravel, a children's book author, are available on foreverstamps.net.   Museum Gel will secure breakables from gentle earthquakes (toddlers running around the house included).    To have your leftovers world rocked, we recommend The Everlasting Meal Cookbook: Leftovers A-Z by Tamar Adler, which is a companion to Love An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace.   Do you have a gifting plan? Thoughts on the Scandoval? Share with us at 833-632-5463, podcast@athingortwohq.com, or @athingortwohq—or join our Geneva! For more recommendations, try out a Secret Menu membership.   This episode may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products and services. Individuals on the show may have a direct, or indirect financial interest in products, or services referred to in this episode.   Try out professional counseling with BetterHelp and take 10% off your first month with our link.   YAY. Produced by Dear Media

This week, Justin Richmond, host of the new podcast ‘Started From the Bottom,' and Bridget Todd, host of the podcasts ‘There Are No Girls on the Internet' and ‘City Cast DC,' stop by to talk about an AI-generated image of the pope, a party that only people named Ryan can attend, and the return of Succession for its final season. Then, food writer and chef Tamar Adler tells us about ‘The Everlasting Meal Cookbook: Leftovers A to Z.' In it, she argues that repurposing leftovers is not just about being frugal, but it is actually the way that great cooking is done.

Isabelle and Kieran read the same book! Stop the presses! In this episode we have an unplanned and unscripted "coffee shop chat" about Really Good, Actually, the bright orange non-rom-com that's taking readers by storm. We also talk about a couple of other books we recommend, Kieran makes himself hungry, and Isabelle calls something 'A kinky Heartstopper'. -- Books Mentioned -- Really Good, Actually by Monica Heisey -- An Everlasting Meal by Tamar Adler -- 100 Boyfriends + Since I Laid My Burden Now by Brontez Purnell Follow us on twitter @_backtothebooks and instagram @backtothebookspodcast

This week, Gilly is slowing right down for a meditation on cooking and eating in An Everlasting Meal by former chef at Chez Panisse, Dan Barber's researcher and Vogue journalist, Tamar Adler. The book which first came out in 2011 has clear echoes of Tamar's hero, MFK Fisher with its poetic message of resilience and personal power, and its gentle humour is particularly resonant in these challenging times. Her former boss, Alice Waters writes in the introduction: ‘It's a beautifully intimate approach in cooking as a narrative that begins not with a list of ingredients or a tutorial on cutting an onion but with a way of thinking. It's a book to sink into and read deeply'. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hudson Hall in Hudson, New York is hosting a book event for “Elegy for an Appetite” with local chef and author Shaina Loew-Banayan of Hudson's Cafe Mutton and food writer Tamar Adler on Thursday at 6 p.m.

On this week's episode of The Waves, Slate staff writer Rebecca Onion is joined by leftovers expert and cookbook author Tamar Adler, author of An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace, to talk about what to do with all your excess food. They start out by discussing why dealing with leftovers has historically fallen on women and the division of labor in their own homes. Then they shift gears and give ideas for new dishes to transform your leftovers into—from the gravy to the cranberry sauce.  In Slate Plus, Rebecca and Tamar talk about whether cooking for a date and “engagement chicken” is feminist.  Recommendations: Rebecca: Mowing, instead of raking, your leaves. Tamar: Making cleaning part of your work schedule and watching videos during your home exercise class.    Podcast production by Cheyna Roth with editorial oversight by Susan Matthews and June Thomas.  Send your comments and recommendations on what to cover to thewaves@slate.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this week's episode of The Waves, Slate staff writer Rebecca Onion is joined by leftovers expert and cookbook author Tamar Adler, author of An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace, to talk about what to do with all your excess food. They start out by discussing why dealing with leftovers has historically fallen on women and the division of labor in their own homes. Then they shift gears and give ideas for new dishes to transform your leftovers into—from the gravy to the cranberry sauce.  In Slate Plus, Rebecca and Tamar talk about whether cooking for a date and “engagement chicken” is feminist.  Recommendations: Rebecca: Mowing, instead of raking, your leaves. Tamar: Making cleaning part of your work schedule and watching videos during your home exercise class.    Podcast production by Cheyna Roth with editorial oversight by Susan Matthews and June Thomas.  Send your comments and recommendations on what to cover to thewaves@slate.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this week's episode of The Waves, Slate staff writer Rebecca Onion is joined by leftovers expert and cookbook author Tamar Adler, author of An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace, to talk about what to do with all your excess food. They start out by discussing why dealing with leftovers has historically fallen on women and the division of labor in their own homes. Then they shift gears and give ideas for new dishes to transform your leftovers into—from the gravy to the cranberry sauce.  In Slate Plus, Rebecca and Tamar talk about whether cooking for a date and “engagement chicken” is feminist.  Recommendations: Rebecca: Mowing, instead of raking, your leaves. Tamar: Making cleaning part of your work schedule and watching videos during your home exercise class.    Podcast production by Cheyna Roth with editorial oversight by Susan Matthews and June Thomas.  Send your comments and recommendations on what to cover to thewaves@slate.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this week's episode of The Waves, Slate staff writer Rebecca Onion is joined by leftovers expert and cookbook author Tamar Adler, author of An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace, to talk about what to do with all your excess food. They start out by discussing why dealing with leftovers has historically fallen on women and the division of labor in their own homes. Then they shift gears and give ideas for new dishes to transform your leftovers into—from the gravy to the cranberry sauce.  In Slate Plus, Rebecca and Tamar talk about whether cooking for a date and “engagement chicken” is feminist.  Recommendations: Rebecca: Mowing, instead of raking, your leaves. Tamar: Making cleaning part of your work schedule and watching videos during your home exercise class.    Podcast production by Cheyna Roth with editorial oversight by Susan Matthews and June Thomas.  Send your comments and recommendations on what to cover to thewaves@slate.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Inspired by a Tamar Adler quote in this Vox article, I explore the ways that greed and capitalism lead us to abandon our felt experiences and 4 Buddhist tools we can use as antidotes to greed. I also share quotes from Sharon Salzberg and Ruth King. 

D and L Coffee Service Inc. presents Small Bites Radio the #1 listed “Food Radio show Philadelphia” and #1 listed “Food Radio show South Jersey”. Small Bites on Wildfire Radio returns this Sunday, May 16th at 635pm EST with a fantastic lineup! #SmallBitesRadio has been named #14 out of the Top 30 Best Hospitality Shows on the planet for 2020 and 2021 as well as being named #23 Top Philadelphia Lifestyle Influencer in 2021. Warm weather has returned and #MemorialDay2021 is finally here with restrictions finally lifting in most places and now the sand and surf is calling our name. So where should we go? No one knows how to entertain at the VisitNJShore - Your Guide to the New Jersey Shore better than the world famous Do Atlantic City Boardwalk. With that being said we will be joined by Ocean Casino Resort SVP of Food and Beverage Warren Richards. With endless dining options at the resort they have something for everyone. From celebrity spots helmed by Mark Wahlberg to Chef Jose Garces to high end groups like LDV Hospitality to the really nice dining hall you can't go wrong and won't go hungry. Ocean Casino Resort has all the entertainment you could want also from Topgolf, HQ2AC with appearances from Cash Cash, Meduza, Fergie DJ, as well as Ovation Hall presenting Jeff Dunham, Melissa Etheridge, Alice Cooper, The Beach Boys, Jay Leno, and more all just steps from beach. We will also chat with Tamar Adler, contributing editor at Vogue and author of cookbooks Something Old, Something New and An Everlasting Meal from Scribner Books. Tamar has teamed up with Jewish Family and Children's Service of Greater Philadelphia's (JFCS) Nourishing Community events, a once-a-month virtual cooking series featuring top-area chefs, home cooks, and cookbook authors sharing recipes, and tips from their kitchens while raising funds to support JFCS food relief programs to battle food insecurity in the region with previous events having appearances from Frank E. Olivieri of The Original Pat's King of Steaks and Sara May of South Hill Cider. “Food insecurity across the region is at an all-time high,” said Pia Eisenberg, Sr. Vice President, Community Engagement, JFCS Greater Philadelphia. “We are grateful to the participating chefs for giving us this opportunity to come together in a fun and engaging way to raise much-needed dollars for JFCS' food relief efforts in support of the most vulnerable in our region.” Tamar will be appearing on Tuesday, June 8th at 6:30 p.m., preparing scones that you don't want to miss. Be sure to contact JFCS as registration is required to attend their virtual events and Zoom links are provided once registration is completed. Then joining us will be Jake Cohen a bright new star in the food world, most recently the editorial and test kitchen director of social media juggernaut the Feedfeed, and debut author of, ‘JEW-ISH: A COOKBOOK: Reinvented Recipes from a Modern Mensch' from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. When most home cooks think of Jewish food, a few classics come to mind: chicken soup with matzo balls, challah, maybe a babka if you're feeling ambitious. But as food writer and self-described “nice Jewish boy” Jake Cohen demonstrates in his stunning debut cookbook, Jewish food is so much more. In JEW-ISH, Cohen reinvents the food of his Ashkenazi heritage and draws inspiration from his husband's Persian-Iraqi traditions to offer recipes that are modern, fresh, and enticing for a whole new generation of readers. Imagine the components of an everything bagel wrapped into a flaky galette and latkes dyed vibrant yellow with saffron for a Persian spin on the potato pancake, plus best-ever hybrid desserts like Macaroon Brownies and Pumpkin Spice Babka. The hot days of summer are approaching so why not cool off with one of nature's greatest gifts – WATER. Who better to talk to then Angela Cooper the CEO of Soho Waterworks. Soho Waterworks, a water distribution company, has demonstrated that innovation in the bottle water industry can yield a better, higher quality product for consumers. They recently launched a national campaign with the bold goal of providing Clean Water for All™. Its campaign to promote Clear Alaskan Glacial Water is an example of how this plan is paying off for bottlers, consumers and communities. Soho Waterworks is building public awareness about the health benefits of naturally sourced waters, considered to be a game changer in the wellness movement. They also enhance food and drink. Like fine wines, naturally sourced waters have their own unique profile and can be paired with foods to elevate any meal. At the same time, these waters contain naturally occurring minerals that provide superior health benefits to consumers, which are lacking in commercial water. You say you STILL NEED MORE!!! Don't forget we still have our regular weekly segments from author, Courier-Post nightlife correspondent and The New York Times recognized blogger John Howard-Fusco for foodie news of the week, Chef Barbie Marshall who is a Chef Gordon Ramsay Hell's Kitchen Season 10 finalist and has appeared on Season 17 of FOX Hell's Kitchen #AllStars as well named Pennsylvania's most influential chef by Cooking Light will delight us with her observation of the week, highly acclaimed and respected Vegan Chef Christina Martin will delight with her ‘Healthy Bite' of week giving nourishing and wholesome advice, and a joke of the week from legendary joke teller Jackie "The Joke Man" Martling of The Howard Stern Show fame. D & L Coffee Services Inc. and Bluejeanfood.com hope you will use the TuneIn app to listen worldwide or also catch Small Bites Radio syndicated on KGTK 920AM, KITZ 1400AM, KSBN 1230AM, KBNP 1410AM, iHeartRadio, Salem Radio Network, ScyNet Radio, Stitcher Radio, PodOmatic, Indie Philly Radio, Player FM, iTunes, Pandora, and TryThisDish Radio which is the only independently owned and operated international chef-driven foodie and lifestyle radio network in the world. D & L Coffee Services has an expert staff of highly qualified, certified, and experienced office, technical, and sales personnel. D & L Coffee Services are able to provide your business, home, or special event the absolute best from the beans they sell, vendors they work with, Italian delicacies available for delivery, catering on-site for any sized affair, hands-on barista training, equipment available for purchase, and maintenance/repair services for your espresso and coffee machines. You can stop by their warehouse at 7000 HOLSTEIN AVE, SUITE 3, Philadelphia, PA 19153 during business hours or call the office at 215-365-5521 for an appointment, consultation, or any questions. #FoodRadioShowPhiladelphia #FoodRadioShowSouthJersey #TopHospitalityShow #TopPhiladelphiaLifestyle #TopListed #BestFood #BestPod

Concordia Podcast presenta un episodio breve que explora la conexión entre el olfato y la intuición. La intuición forma parte de cuatro aspectos que consideramos importantes en los procesos de fermentación, procesos que en nuestro laboratorio editorial no solo aluden a la preparación de alimentos sino también a la edición de textos. Los otros aspectos son la intención, el tiempo y la resistencia, que esperamos explorar en futuros episodios. Producción, edición, mezcla: Mahelín Rondón. Música: Cantos Campesinos.Libros recomendados: “Nose Dive”, Harold McGee; “The Left Hand Of Darkness”, Ursula K Le Guin; “Nuestro mundo muerto”, Liliana Colanzi; “Hecho en Saturno”, Rita Indiana; “Something Old, Something New”, Tamar Adler.

Listen now | Talking with the author and Vogue columnist about the limits of food writing and food media. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at www.aliciakennedy.news/subscribe

Newstalk Goes Green this September with thanks to Repak’s Team Green – join now and make the most of your recycling at Repak.ie We’ve been exploring all of the different ways we can help protect our environment and futureproof the planet. Sean talked to chef and Author of An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace; Tamar Adler about how we can make our cooking more sustainable.

Your pod docents are back with a What's Happening, What's Up that discusses the new Travis Scott meal at McDonald's, they also recommend the tv show The Vow, the documentary Class Action Park, the tv episode "Katie Holmes Day" from AP Bio, and the book "An Everlasting Meal" by Tamar Adler. We also launch Septemfruit, go eat some fruit!

Your pod docents are back with a What's Happening, What's Up that discusses the new Travis Scott meal at McDonald's, they also recommend the tv show The Vow, the documentary Class Action Park, the tv episode "Katie Holmes Day" from AP Bio, and the book "An Everlasting Meal" by Tamar Adler. We also launch Septemfruit, go eat some fruit!

Your pod docents are back with a What's Happening, What's Up that discusses the new Travis Scott meal at McDonald's, they also recommend the tv show The Vow, the documentary Class Action Park, the tv episode "Katie Holmes Day" from AP Bio, and the book "An Everlasting Meal" by Tamar Adler. We also launch Septemfruit, go eat some fruit!

Your pod docents are back with a What's Happening, What's Up that discusses the new Travis Scott meal at McDonald's, they also recommend the tv show The Vow, the documentary Class Action Park, the tv episode "Katie Holmes Day" from AP Bio, and the book "An Everlasting Meal" by Tamar Adler. We also launch Septemfruit, go eat some fruit!

We spoke with Paula Forbes of Stained Page News, a newsletter about cookbooks. For her, it's a place to geek out about cookbooks - where she can write about news, recipes, and upcoming releases. Paula has a multifaceted view of the culinary world. She worked as a professional cookbook critic for over a decade, writing for publications like Eater, Epicurious, Lucky Peach, and Food 52. She also has a background in cooking for restaurants, and in 2008 she published her own cookbook, The Austin Cookbook.We talked about the worlds of food blogging and cookbook writing, what makes a good cookbook, and what it was like for Paula to write her own cookbook after years of reviewing them. LinksStained Page News, Paula's newsletterPaula on TwitterThe Austin Cookbook, Paula's cookbook Highlights(2:23) Paula's writing journey, from writing cookbook reviews to blogging to starting her newsletter (12:38) Why people buy cookbooks, even though so many recipes are online now(18:42) How the 2008 recession coincided with the rise of food bloggers(25:44) Paula's favorite types of cookbooks, and the overall qualities that make good cookbooks (37:34) The process of writing a cookbook On similarities between cooking and writing:The feeling you get from cooking in a restaurant and writing a solid blog post that goes up really quickly is very similar to me. A very speedy, quick strategy is involved. You have to be very efficient.On having a community of newsletter readers:I think that in the grand scheme of things, you're never going to make it rich with a cookbook website or TV show. But being able to focus on a self-selecting audience who has said, "Okay, I'm interested in this topic. I'm interested in cookbooks. I want to hear what you have to say about them.” It amplifies what you're saying so much more.On the process of writing a cookbook:It's a hell of a process. You have to be so organized and you have to be just on top of everything. It's so much more data than just writing the text of the thing. Cookbooks are so much work and I have so much respect for anyone who tries to write one.TranscriptNadia (00:22):We see a lot of food writers on Substack, but your publication, Stained Page News, stood out to me because you're specifically focused on cookbooks - which just said to me that this person isn't just really into food as a broader topic, but you have this truly geeky obsession with cookbooks specifically that I really want to hear more about. How did you come to fall in love with this topic?Paula (00:44):Way back when I graduated from college, I originally thought that I wanted to go to grad school and go into academia. And what I wanted to do was ... This was not really a thing that existed then, but I wanted to look at food cultural history of the 20th century through the lens of books as a literature.Paula (01:19):I applied to grad school a bunch of times and didn't get in because people kept saying, "You're a great candidate, but we don't have anyone here who can help you study that." So, in the meantime, I started writing book reviews, freelance, for a Typepad blog because this was what, 2007, 2008? And then later for outlets and I've been covering cookbooks ever since.Nadia (01:52):Wow, this got me even more excited about this topic. So, you really are coming at it from a researcher mindset way back in the day of wanting to just understand cookbooks as a genre, it sounds like, before you got into writing. You mentioned writing on a blog in the early days and then writing professionally and now you have a newsletter on Substack - how does that experience of early blogging compare to writing today?Paula (02:23):That's why I started the newsletter, it's because I missed blogging. So, I started writing cookbook reviews and later just about everything else for a blog called Eat Meat Daily that no longer exists. And they looked at the liberal arts of food. It was art, it was film, it was books. And just generally weird stuff with a good sense of humor.Paula (02:52):So, I started there and that was a very late odds style blog. And then from there, I moved on to writing for Eater, which is a different style of blog.Nadia (03:13):So, for folks who haven't read Eater, can you tell us a little bit about how it's different?Paula (03:23):I can't really speak to their current style of blogging, but when I worked there, it was very quick hit news, re-blogs, everything with a sense of humor - sense of humor and a point of view of restaurant insiders. But the two were different and that one was very much ... Eater was very much volume-driven when I worked there, so it was very much get in, get out of the story. Get it up, have the best headline, that kind of thing.Paula (04:02):And I missed that. I also have a background in cooking in restaurants and the feeling you got from cooking in a restaurant and writing a really solid blog post that goes up quickly is very similar to me. A very speedy, quick strategy is involved. You have to be very efficient - so figuring out how to do that in my head scratches the itch of like, "Okay, now I'm working." And that doesn't really exist anymore in media, near as I can tell, at least not in my circles.Paula (04:48):So, I missed it. I missed talking about cookbook news which I didn't really see anyone doing. And I just started tweeting stuff. And then, people started picking up stuff I was tweeting and I was like, "Well, this is not great because I'm a freelance writer, and I would like to be making some money off of the scoops I'm finding." There is one in particular that was after Anthony Bourdain passed away.Paula (05:29):They announced that they were going to be publishing a book that he had been working on when he passed away. And so, I tweeted about it and everyone linked to the tweet. People magazine linked to the tweet. It was wild, and I was just like, "Why am I just throwing the stuff up on Twitter when I'd be writing it?" So, that's a very long way of saying that the newsletter scratches both the quick hit, how much information can you relay in one sentence thing that I got from blogging, and also fills the hole of the cookbook news that I wasn't seeing other places.Nadia (06:14):That makes sense. It sounds so simple but I feel like the addition of an email list really just changes that relationship. Even if you have a popular blog post and it goes super viral and everyone is reading it, you never really know who's on there and they kind of go off into the ether and do something else. But when you have a place for people to subscribe and get more of it, then it's you're actually building this relationship within an ongoing audience.Paula (06:41):Yeah, and especially with a topic like my topic which is so focused. I think that in the grand scheme of things, cookbooks are not ... You're never going to make it rich with a cookbook website or TV show or whatever but being able to focus it at a self-selecting audience who has said, "Okay, I'm interested in this topic. I'm interested in cookbooks. I want to hear what you have to say about them.” It amplifies what you're saying so much more.Nadia (07:13):I'm curious whether you feel like you've created a different sense of community because you're this independent writer at the center of your work versus writing about cookbooks and reviewing them on say Eater or Food 52's communities.Paula (07:29):Gosh, not really. I don't allow comments on my newsletter.Nadia (07:35):Oh, interesting.Paula (07:37):So, I actually did on today's newsletter but it's a rarity for me. The newsletter management for me is very much about the path of least resistance in many ways. And it came down to: did I want to spend a ton of time moderating comments? And I've decided that that was not for me.Nadia (08:03):I really like that. I respect that. Actually, I noticed that you started writing Stained Page News a few years ago and then you went on hiatus and then you brought it back. And I just thought it was great because a lot of writers struggle with getting into this rhythm and feel maybe over-obligated to do more or maybe respond to or moderate comments or write all the time and consistently. Do you have any advice or learnings from this experience of being able to step away and come back again?Paula (08:36):Yeah. Gosh, how did that happen? I mean, the money is the big part of that, not to get into the weeds about the money - but as a freelancer, you can only spend so much time on things that don't pay. So that was part of why I stepped away, just I couldn't excuse it anymore. I couldn't make the time and I wasn't about to give up weekends or anything. You know, freelancers deserve downtime too.Paula (09:07):So, having an outlet where I could make some money off of it was honestly a huge, huge deal for me. I priced it pretty low, I think. It's five bucks a month and I did that specifically because I know that things come up where you can't do it occasionally and I didn't want people to feel like we're paying her 20 bucks a month or whatever it is, and then she doesn't write. That's not to say ... I write pretty much every week.Paula (09:45):But things come up. You get sick. You want to take a vacation, whatever. It's not going to happen every week, but I do think that if you're consistent in your publishing week to week, you will see it in open rates and you will see it in click-throughs and you will see it in the number of people who respond to the newsletter and it snowballs for sure.Nadia (10:09):You mentioned one of the reasons for stepping away is that you couldn't justify it as a non-paid thing you're doing versus the other paid work you had to focus on. Had you considered doing paid subscriptions previously? I know you did end up adding them when you moved to Substack.Paula (10:28):I didn't. It hadn't really occurred to me as an option. I had tried to figure out how to do affiliate links. Amazon doesn't let you do affiliate links and emails as I'm sure you know and people listening might not know. But I was doing a thing where I would send the email and then I would put the text of the newsletter on my website, but I really have to completely reformat it just so I can put in the Amazon links and then no one was ever using that.Paula (11:01):So, it's this huge thing and I was just like, "There's just no way. There's no way I'm ever going to be able to make money off of this." You all made the paid subscription thing really easy honestly.Nadia (11:16):How has having paid subscriptions changed your relationship with your writing if at all - since I imagine it does allow you to focus a little bit more time on that?Paula (11:25):Yeah. I feel a responsibility to my readers even though I tried to price it affordably. I'm never, ever, ever going to take for granted the fact that someone would give me money to read an email from me. So, I definitely take that into consideration. For example, recently, I used to send my newsletters Wednesdays and Fridays because new cookbooks come out on Tuesdays so I wanted it to be when books would come out and also that there had been articles written about the books would run Tuesday or Wednesday when food sections publish also.Paula (12:11):So, the Wednesday articles are the free article and the Friday issue was the paid and I was noticing that the Friday paid issue was kind of skimpy. So, I moved it to Tuesdays so that there would be more time and more time for things to happen so that I could give my paid subscribers a meatier issue every week.Nadia (12:38):That makes sense. I'd love to just dive into cookbooks themselves since we've been talking about you and your publication a bit, but you also write about this really fascinating topic that you have a lot of insight into. I would love to just maybe kick things off by talking about why people buy cookbooks.Nadia (12:57):I think about the cookbooks I've received from my mother. She loves cooking. I do too, and so food has become this way for us to bond - especially when I was younger and making that transition from angsty teenager to a person that my mother can actually converse with.Nadia (13:13):And so, my experience of cookbooks has been that they bring us closer to other people or remind us of a sense of place. Does that align with what you've seen? Why do people buy cookbooks in a world where so much cooking now happens through online recipes?Paula (13:29):Sure. I mean, gosh, I think there are tons of reasons why people buy cookbooks. Where do I start? So, first of all, I think that there are two different ways that people react or interact with cookbooks, which is that some people are very recipe-driven. I'm going to follow this recipe. I'm going to panic if I have parsley and not basil. I'm going to frantically text my friend, Paula, to see if I can cut it down to serve four instead of eight, that kind of thing, because I do get these texts.Nadia (14:07):You must be that person for all your friends.Paula (14:11):And then the other people who just glance at it and, "Oh, kale, potato, sausage soup, great." And just do whatever they want. So, I think you start there. So there's just two schools of people. The people who are real sticklers for the recipes are the people who are buying very generalist cookbooks. I'm talking about The Joy of Cooking or New York Times Cookbook, those kinds of things, How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman.Paula (14:42):But also a lot of the books that are like weeknight dinners, the healthy food that still tastes good, basic pastas, those kinds of things, things that are very action-oriented. So, those consumers of cookbooks, people who are like, "I'm buying this book because I literally want to make this thing for dinner."Paula (15:04):Then you have the other people who are buying them for inspiration for ideas, launch pads, and those are people who are maybe buying more restaurant books, international cookbooks, books that are very visual. There's also professionals buying cookbooks and there's also people who are buying them to read them as literature. And there are people who are buying them as status objects to have on their coffee table.Paula (15:38):And there are people who are buying them as souvenirs. I went to this restaurant on my vacation and then now I want their cookbook as a totem of that time that I spent at that restaurant. So, I think there's a lot of different reasons that people buy cookbooks.Nadia (15:56):Yeah, sounds like it. You had a little brainstorm right there. Do you find that cookbook publishers nudge authors into appealing to one of these certain kinds of markets the way that we might expect an editor for someone who's writing in journalism to maybe nudge them towards certain kinds of audiences? Does that happen with cookbooks?Paula (16:21):Absolutely. I would even take it a step further and say those certain publishers tend to publish different books for different audiences. I mean, that's not 100% true across the board, but if you look at Phaidon for example, they are known for doing these big artsy chef and restaurant books from renowned chefs around the world. But then also they do these “food bibles” where it will be the big book of Irish cooking - or those are the most recent ones. That's not the title but it's called The Irish Cookbook.Paula (17:01):Anyway, they've done them for Indian, Thailand and Mexico and all these different countries. So, they gear that way, these big books. You got Ten Speed which does a lot of books with chefs. Each publisher finds their niche and cultivates that audience. Of course, there are outliers to all of that, that people will tell me about the second they listen to those.Nadia (17:29):I guess there are a lot of different types of cookbook authors as well, right? I'm thinking about the domestic brand types like Martha Stewart or Chrissy Teigen or chefs or food critics. And so, there's just like different publishers that appeal to different types of authors?Paula (17:49):Mm-hmm. There are so many more cookbook authors than you would ever even think of. There are a lot of people who write small volumes that are a book about jam, or a book about Jewish baking or a book about ... I don't know. I don't even cover the diet books but there are a whole thing of cooking for diabetes and all of that. So, there are all these wings of cookbook authorship that it's pretty endless. There's a lot to write about.Nadia (18:22):How do cookbooks intersect with the rise of food blogging in the last 10 or 20 years? You've got like Spin Kitchen or pioneer women types who've written their own cookbooks. Do you see food blogging as this democratizing force for cookbooks - of allowing you entrance into the market? Or did it negatively impact the demand for cookbooks?Paula (18:42):How do I put this? I think that the demand for cookbooks is not linked to food blogging. And the reason that I will say that is because I think that the demand for cookbooks was more tied to the 2008 recession which coincided with the rise of food bloggers for maybe the same reason, which is a very complicated way to answer that question.Paula (19:13):What I will say is that, like you said, a lot of the big names of that first generation of food bloggers have written cookbooks to great success. And also that people are still doing that. And then these days, you tend to see also YouTubers and Instagram influencers who write cookbooks as well.Nadia (19:41):I had no idea that the 2008 recession coincided with the rise of food bloggers. And as I'm hearing that, I'm just thinking about right now experiencing the COVID pandemic that we're seeing right now and how that is correlated with a rise in people writing on Substack and I'm wondering if it's similar forces at work. Can you tell us just a little bit about what that was like in 2008?Paula (20:03):I mean, that was mostly just due to the fact that people couldn't afford to eat out anymore so they were eating at home. There was also, at the time, cultural discovery. I was a young person then, and so, it just seemed like everyone I knew was 25 and teaching themselves how to cook.Paula (20:24):I'm sure that's not what it looked from the outside, but what I do know is that book sales started going up and then there was this real big boom in cookbook publishing and it's been chugging along ever since. Near as I can tell in the current crisis, cookbook sales are doing okay, maybe even up.. But anecdotally I've noticed - and I've been covering this for 10 to 12 years -Paula (20:55):I've noticed significantly fewer book deal news coming across my desk, so that's a little troubling to me. But hopefully, people are just being cautious and it will pick up again in the fall.Nadia (21:09):That's really interesting to think about. What is the role of narrative in cookbooks, because I mean, as we're just thinking about the different types of people that buy cookbooks and why, there is this tendency for me to initially think of cookbooks as essentially how-to books. But then, you can look at it through this narrative lens as well where then I start thinking about them in relation to this broader genre of food memoirs.Nadia (21:35):I'm thinking about Tamar Adler's An Everlasting Meal which straddled both genres of cookbook and memoir. Where's the line between something being a memoir about food versus a how-to sort of cookbook?Paula (21:50):Yeah, I mean, I don't know that there needs to be a line there. I think that what you're doing with the memoir is you're trying to evoke the feeling of being in a place and time. And you're trying to represent something you remember as best as you can remember it. And I think that a recipe does the same thing in a much more obviously tactile and real world way but that that can be part of the experience of evoking this memory, I'm thinking specifically about restaurant cookbooks.Paula (22:30):Restaurants aren't supposed to last forever. They're a business that is born and has a heyday and then probably someday end - hopefully with everyone retiring very happy and well off. But in the meantime, it's a feeling that can go away. I mean as we're learning the hard way right now, the atmosphere and the buzz of a busy restaurant and the food it cooks, it's not a forever thing. Gosh, I didn't mean to get this depressing. But that narrative follows that, can evoke that and can be a record of what that energy was while in existence.Nadia (23:22):It's just like, I mean, that just also makes the case for books more broadly. It's a really beautiful take, and I appreciate it because it just makes me think about how when we are talking about online food blogging versus cookbooks and how those two things can coexist. And similarly, just writing in general, there's a place to write tweets. There's a place to write blog posts and there's always going to be this place to write books just because it is like this more permanent record or a marker in time as you were saying to capture a certain sentiment that maybe a short form can't always do.Paula (23:59):Yeah, absolutely, and that it can look at it from different angles. You can have a cookbook where you involve the pastry chef and you have some sample playlists from the music that plays in the restaurant. You have the photographs of the space. And maybe you have a few testimonials from customers and that kind of thing and then all of it builds and adds to become as close as you can get to the restaurant itself.Paula (24:29):And I think that the recipes are a key part of that because you can say, "Okay, well, what about an episode of some TV show where they interview chefs and go to restaurants and things." But it's the food, the food is the thing. And so, when you have that recipe, you can understand how the food has been ... Even if you don't make them at home, even if you don't recreate it in your own kitchen, you can still read about it and say, "Okay, well, they made it with this brand of soy sauce instead of this brand of soy sauce because so and so was from here. But at this market, they only have this."Paula (25:03):And then, "Oh, they have this wild technique where they salt mushrooms two hours ahead," whatever. You read the thing and you learn all this stuff about what went into this restaurant in a way that you can't learn otherwise.Nadia (25:23):Yeah, that sounds like it's like the recipe isn't just a process or a list of steps but it's a peek behind the curtain to see what really goes into, especially as you're saying, with a restaurant cookbook. What's the mark of a good cookbook for you?Paula (25:36):What's the mark of a good cookbook? I don't know.Nadia (25:41):I mean, just what are your favorite types?Paula (25:44):Yeah, I was going to say there's a difference between a good cookbook and a cookbook that I get excited about. I like really weird cookbooks. I mean if something surprises me, that's going to get me excited. Weird art, weird design makes me excited. Sort of over-the-top writing makes me excited.Paula (26:12):But what makes for a good cookbook - that most people who aren't the crazy cookbook lady are going to think is good - is I want to be able to open to three separate pages and want to make one of the recipes, I would say, is big. I think that information beyond the recipes that you can use in multiple settings is important for me.Paula (26:42):A really good cookbook, if I'm going to keep a cookbook in my kitchen, I need info in it beyond the recipes that are useful to me in more than one way. So, say you have a book on sourdough and sourdough starters. I want to be able to read about how the starter can be applied to bread versus pizza versus muffins or whatever. And that to me is a book that's not just a one-off disposable cookbook. That's a book that has earned its keep on its spot on my shelf.Nadia (27:27):What are some styles or trends that you've seen in cookbooks over the years? Especially just comparing like modern, let's say post internet style cookbooks - are they really different from the cookbooks of the '50s?Paula (27:39):Oh, gosh.Nadia (27:39):We're going all the way back, maybe the '90s.Paula (27:44):I mean cookbook, you would be shocked how much cookbooks have changed. I bought this cookbook recently from 1999 and the photographs, if you didn't know it was from 1999, you would think from the '80s. You would not be able to guess.Paula (27:58):So since I've started writing about cookbooks, the big things have been most books drop the jackets. So we don't do jackets anymore. There was this big trend towards unfinished paper. So it was this matte finish that in my opinion made the photos look blurry as opposed to a glossy finish paper, which people like because the unfinished paper is thicker and it makes your book look bigger. But I think it made the photography look terrible and we seemed to be moving away from that a little bit, so that's good.Paula (28:40):The big trend recently has been the white covers with the photos with the white border around the photo. Alison Roman's cookbooks have that. What else? As far as topics go, there was a big restaurant push that we seem to be coming out of where it's just like, "Oh, if you're the big chef in your size town, you should have a cookbook." There's always been nerdy bread boy books. There are always men who write these like “my bread journey” cookbooks.Paula (29:22):Now, we're seeing more regional international cookbooks which I think is good. Like not just, I don't know, China but specific regions of China. That kind of thing I think is great.Nadia (29:37):I love it. I love the aesthetic ones, the changes that you mentioned. I'd love to just see your collection of cookbooks all lined up chronologically. I imagine you could just visually see how much they have changed over time.Paula (29:50):Probably, yeah.Nadia (29:52):Fun project. How does an author go about getting a cookbook published? Is it similar to getting books published in general? Is there anything special about the cookbook genre?Paula (30:01):How you get a book published, I mean it's about the same. It's similar to the nonfiction world where you write a book proposal and then you get the advance and then you write the cookbook with proposals. You need a whole list, all of the recipes listed ahead of time so you know what every single recipe in the book is going to be. And you also have to develop them.Paula (30:32):So, I'm working on a proposal right now and I think we have 12 full recipes and then five to eight sub-recipes that are real short. Here is the stock that goes into the soup kind of thing. And then of course, the cookbook publishers are often specialized publishers. They're not publishing novels and other things but they're part of those publishers.Nadia (31:01):How do they coordinate all that gorgeous photography? I mean, design falls under the publisher. Where do all the photography come from?Paula (31:10):Well, I can tell you how it worked on my book.Nadia (31:12):Yes, so I'd love to hear about your book.Paula (31:15):So, I wrote the Austin Cookbook. I wrote it in 2016. It came out in 2018. We shot the photography ... I worked with a photographer from Dallas-Fort Worth named Robert Strickland who's an excellent photographer, A+ to Robert. He came down for two long weekends when we shot all of the food where we worked with the food stylist for studio food shots. And then, I don't know how many weekends he came down to shoot the restaurants. And we shot some of the food in the restaurants also. So, the book is a collection of restaurant recipes from Austin restaurants.Paula (32:06):When all the photography was done, I sent that to the publisher. And I also sent them an email with a million links to Flickr and Instagram and all these things that I just thought looked Austin-y, murals and colors and just all kinds of random stuff I thought might be useful. And then they had their designer put it all together. They had a fun idea where some of the font for the headings of the recipes was inspired by old Tex-Mex menus and stuff like that. It's all very evocative of the thing, and I think that that's right that it should be like that.Nadia (32:56):It's kind of cool because as a writer, I imagine there aren't that many genres that are so photography heavy. Producing this cookbook is really an entire production process of not just writing the words but also having a vision for the visuals and knowing how you want to portray them.Nadia (33:17):And so, you're not just writing out words but you're also having to think in terms of imagery and layout, which just draws upon many more skills and maybe some of those other writers are comfortable with.Paula (33:29):You know though, it's not dissimilar from blogging.Nadia (33:32):In what way?Paula (33:34):If you're thinking about white space, you're thinking about how do I break this up with headers so that it's easily skimmable? You're thinking about how long are people's attention spans? It's not writing a novel. You're not going to have a wall of text. So how are you guiding the readers' eyes across ... I mean I didn't design the book, but how are you breaking up that information into these digestible little chunks.Nadia (34:06):That's a really good point. I guess I'd never really thought of that. I'm such a text-heavy person. I'm just like I can't do anything that involves images. The writing that I do doesn't really have any images in it and stuff. But you're right, I definitely think about the breaking up of paragraphs and texts. And there's sort of different styles too.Nadia (34:22):Some people really lean into the long rambling style and enormous paragraphs. And they make use or work for it. And then other people do that one line, one dramatic statement per paragraph. So, yeah, you're right. I mean even bloggers have to be thinking about how they visually lay things out to draw people in.Paula (34:41):Well, for my newsletter for example, certain sections I do bullet points. I always bold cookbook titles and cookbook author names. I'll bold a few keywords in a quote. And that's the same muscle. It's like, "Here's where I want you to look."Nadia (35:00):Right. You still need to draw people's eye in even if you're just writing text without photos. We talked a little bit about the fact that you wrote your own cookbook and you wrote that after being a cookbook critic for over a decade now. After years of reviewing other people's cookbooks, what prompted you to cross over and try to write your own?Paula (35:24):It was something I always wanted to do. And it was an opportunity that came up. It was not my idea to write the book. It was an opportunity that came up from my agent. And I was like, "Yes, absolutely." I wanted to experience the process of it because for example before that, I was reviewing cookbooks and I always ... Obviously, a lot more people than the author are going to the cookbook but I always use the author's name as sort of this authorial presence when I would talk about the book.Paula (36:04):But I think it was really useful in showing me how much of the process is actually totally out of the hands of the author. Things like a common complaint you'll hear about cookbooks if you go to an Amazon review is that the ingredients are on a different page than the instructions. You have to flip back and forth between the ingredients and the instruction. And often there's no getting around that but there's also just like 17 people who influenced that.Paula (36:37):So I think that going through the process of publishing a cookbook was really illustrative to me of just how many hands are in the thing. And this is not a shade on my publisher, Abrams - they were great. But just living the experience, I think, really informed my ability to review cookbooks. I'm probably going to do more. We'll see.Nadia (37:05):More cookbooks? They're addictive, book writing things. I just published my first book. It's a nonfiction book and it definitely had that same sort of takeaway as like wow, so many people go into writing this final thing. Unfortunately, your name appears as the author which means that if everything is amazing, then the credit goes to you and if there's anything wrong with it, then it also looks like something that you wrote which is this very weird experience.Nadia (37:34):I'm curious about your research process just to sort of trade notes. I love the book writing process now in retrospect - but during it, it was miserable in a lot of ways because you're just trapped in front of your laptop and you're typing all the time. And I have this very glamorous image of cookbook writing by contrast being this feast of the senses where you're cooking and you're hosting taste test parties. You're going out to eat for inspiration. Take me down a notch, what is the process of writing a cookbook really like?Paula (38:06):It's a little bit of that.Nadia (38:08):Damn it.Paula (38:08):It was a lot of sending emails. So, my book was recipes from restaurants. So it was a lot, a lot, a lot of emailing chefs and publicists. And chefs are not necessarily known for email etiquette or even having a computer in their office in their restaurants, so it was a lot of trying to track people down reminding them, "Oh, yeah. I'm Paula Forbes with the project where we're doing all the Austin restaurant cookbooks or recipes," and reminding them who you are and all the things. So that was probably the first four months of it.Paula (38:54):And then I did do a lot of recipe testing. I had a dinner party every Friday for about three months.Nadia (39:02):You're everyone's favorite friend.Paula (39:05):I don't know. A big thing with me was I didn't want to waste the food, but it got to be a lot of work and it got to some weird dinner parties when you started only having a few recipes left and you're like, "Well, these things don't really go together," but you'll eat it and you'll be happy.Paula (39:27):So, it was that and then very heavy on copy edits are huge in cookbooks - like you always want the ingredients in the order they appear in the recipe for example. What else? It's like that. We had to wait until my book was published in metric and then, what do you call it, imperial.Nadia (39:52):Imperial, yeah, I guess so.Paula (39:56):Cups and teaspoons.Nadia (39:58):Right, that one.Paula (39:59):So there was a lot of how do we translate this, figuring how much stuff weighed months after you had tested it, that kind of thing.Nadia (40:12):You had recipes in your book that were from restaurants but then you also had to test them out yourself. Are you adjusting their recipes at all or is it just to ensure that someone reading it could then replicate the same experience?Paula (40:30):I cut the size down. So, often, their chefs would send me just their actual recipe which made five gallons of enchilada sauce or whatever it was. And so, I would have to cut that down to the amount of enchilada sauce that would go on one lasagna pan of enchiladas and then also talk about how to make the enchiladas, because that would be different than how they would make it in the restaurant. But the recipes themselves I didn't change. So the amount of chili powder or garlic or the taste of the thing is the same but just at a home scale.Nadia (41:10):Got it. And so, it's like you're co-writing with the restaurants in a sense, because they're agreeing to give up their recipes for your book and you have to convince them of that, I assume. And then you're taking that and putting in this right narrative and context that people will enjoy them.Paula (41:29):And you know it's also a lot of interviews and telling their stories and that kind of thing, too.Nadia (41:38):Just to wrap up, you've had this privileged experience of seeing cookbooks on both sides, both as the author and as a person reviewing them. Did that writing experience give you more empathy for others writing cookbooks?Paula (41:55):Yes and no. A good friend of mine once told me that bad recipes are stealing. You are stealing money from people who spent that money on their food and they were expecting to be able to make X and if it doesn't work, and that's on you, that's stealing. So I still firmly, firmly believe that and I don't think anyone has any business publishing recipes that are not thoroughly tested and worked. So, that's what I'll say for starters.Paula (42:36):But yeah, I mean I think it's a scary thing to write a cookbook. I think I know every single weird thing in my cookbook that no one will ever, ever notice. And they don't keep me up at night but I know they're there. There's no mistakes in it or anything, just you know - you always know the weird thing like, “Oh, that condensation on that glass and that photo is slightly off," or that kind of stuff that no one cares about.Paula (43:06):Yeah, I have empathy for that. It's a hell of a process. You have to be so organized and you have to be just on top of everything. It's so much more data than just writing the text of the thing. It's so much work. Cookbooks are so much work and I have so much respect for anyone who tries to write one - unless they don't test the recipes. Thank you for subscribing. Share this episode.

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.

This week's book recommendation is An Everlasting Meal by Tamar Adler. A thoughtful book on cooking food without waste. Incorporating both creativity and technique in cooking, it is a guide to a more intuitive approach in the kitchen.

Book NotesAdam recommends: The Wild Book by Margarita Engle Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds Michael recommends: FantasticLand by Mike Bockoven Slash by Hunter Shea Carrie recommends:  History of the Rain by Niall Williams The Hearts of Horses by Molly Gloss Bite Notes For The Wild Book's bubbly, colorful story, make Fizz and Fruit Popsicles from Raquel Rabade Roque's The Cuban Kitchen Cuisine. Accompany the psychological turmoil of Long Way Down with “Eggs in Purgatory,” found in Questlove's Mixtape Potluck Cookbook. After a harrowing day spent at FantasticLand, whip up a batch of Grilled Cheese Dogs. There's nothing better than coming home to a hot bowl of Cholent after surviving a frigid night of being hunted by the Wraith in the ruins of the Hayden Resort. Pair History of the Rain with The Good Shepherd's Pie, a vegan update of the classic Irish shepherd's pie that you can find in Jae Steele's cookbook Get it Ripe: A Fresh Take on Vegan Cooking and Living.  Enjoy The Hearts of Horses with a meatless—or nearly meatless—soup made with whatever ingredients you have on hand. Tamar Adler's minestrone recipe offers lots of suggestions for seasonal substitutions. You can find it in her book An Everlasting Mealor on Saveur.com.  

Katie speaks with Taylor on the idea of cooking with sustainability and simplicity in mind. Katie’s food evolution takes us through the era of fast food to vegetarian and veganism, landing on cooking that is built from an ‘Everlasting Meal’. Katie is the food writer behind Cooking with Leeks where she shares stories of her creative process in the kitchen and maintains that mistakes enhance the journey. https://cookingwithleeks.com/https://cookingwithleeks.com/oakland-covid-19-food-restaurant-resources/Tamar Adler's 'Everlasting Meal'Elizabeth Gilbert's 'Big Magic'

Get ready to master your pantry, no matter what you've stockpiled. Tamar Adler, author of the book An Everlasting Meal, has tons of tips for home cooking with economy and grace: What to prioritize on your grocery list, how to stretch ingredients across meals and make use of your scraps, and how to keep your sanity while cooking with kids. Plus: The founder of Rancho Gordo talks about how the coronavirus has made everyone desperate for beans, and Tamar offers some tasty recipes that will give you courage to finally cook those dried beans you've been avoiding.

Bob reads the Egg chapter of "An Everlasting Meal" by Tamar Adler because what else can we do??

This week on the show we're joined by Tamar Adler, chef, food writer, and host of the podcast Food Actually. Tamar tells us about feeling like, despite being a straight-A student, she never really felt like she learned anything. But perhaps more importantly, she comes in to question some of the very assumptions and premises of this podcast. GASP! Listen as Tamar rearranges the way we think about food and drink, encourages us to discard received ideas about the meaning of eating, and explains why you can't fake it in a kitchen. Tune in and learn how to live that #NagaLife. Tamar Adler is the author of An Everlasting Meal and Something Old, Something New: Classic Recipes Revised. Her podcast Food Actually is produced by the Pushkin Network and is available only on the podcasting app Luminary. Episode edited by Eavvon O'Neal and Mark

Erin and Hannah made beans. Ben has a bad short term memory. Erin has a had long term memory. Everybody played a lot of Solitaire this week. Erin had been having a very philosophical book about cooking read to her even though she also checked it out from the library! Ben went to Wachusett for his long weekend! Hannah has been enjoying a family space adventure remake. HOMEWORK: - Check out An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace by Tamar Adler from your local library or get the audiobook - Go skiing, it’s fun - Go to bed - Watch Lost in Space on Netflix - CALL US AND TELL US YOUR OBSESSION! 774-326-0420 - Follow @Nicelyprovedben, @Hanthropology, and @TooBroadPod on Twitter - Watch Ben on twitch.tv/discogreg  - Follow WayTooBroad on IG - Email us at waytoobroad@gmail.com - Listen to So Dreamy - Visit ernbrn.com - www.waytoobroad.com for anything you want - www.ernben.com for anything you need - queerworksmap.com - Please leave us a rating/review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening!

Slate Money is obsessed with Succession, HBO’s wonderful drama about the lives of the superrich Roy family, so every Monday we’ll be discussing the previous night’s episode with spoiler-filled glee. For the finale, Felix Salmon and Emily Peck are joined by Tamar Adler and Episode 1 guest Edmund Lee to discuss Logan’s plate of chicken, Roman’s newfound gravitas and THAT LAST SCENE.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are you someone who thinks of eating and cooking as a chore, just another thing to do on your lengthy chore list? Don’t worry, you’re not alone! On this episode of Reawaken Right Relationship podcast, guest Jenny Mahan tells how to turn cooking and eating from a chore to a joyful experience. Jenny is a Registered Nurse, Certified Health and Wellness coach and owner of Pine Creek Wellness. She works with folks who have had a health wake up call to reclaim their health with Lifestyle Medicine, and facilitates online and in person healthy home cooking classes, group or one to one coaching to support folks to reach their health and life goals She is a Mom, author, avid gardener, and singer/songwriter who is passionate about promoting local sustainable agriculture and food justice.  Disclaimer Everyone is unique, has different health conditions, allergies, needs. Do what's right and works for you. Jenny does not advocate nor prescribe any specific diets or foods for health conditions. She DOES advocate simplifying our relationship with food— eating real, minimally processed food that is satisfying and nutritious, using common sense, moderation, and improved skills. If you have a chronic health condition or are making big changes in your diet or activities, it is always a good idea to talk with your health care advocate and/or dietician to start. Podcast Resources Find out more about Jenny www.JennyMahan.com “What the hell should I eat!?” free session with Jenny: www.jennymahan.com/sanefoodsession Further Reading An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace, by Tamar Adler (book) https://smile.amazon.com/Everlasting-Meal-Cooking-Economy-Grace-ebook/dp/B004T4KX9Q/r ef=sr_1_1?crid=2BMCVXUYRJHF3&keywords=an+everlasting+meal+by+tamar+adler&qid=155 4244041&s=books&sprefix=an+everlastin%2Cstripbooks%2C160&sr=1-1 Eating for Beginners: An Education in the Pleasures of Food from Chefs, Farmers, and One Picky Kid, by Melanie Rehak (book) https://smile.amazon.com/Eating-Beginners-Education-Pleasures-Farmers-ebook/dp/B003V8BD YU/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?keywords=eating+for+beginners+Melanie+Rehak&qid=1554244122&s =books&sr=1-1-fkmrnull Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch, by Michael Pollan (article) https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/magazine/02cooking-t.html?pagewanted=all The Botany of Desire, by Michael Pollan (book) https://smile.amazon.com/Botany-Desire-Plants-Eye-View-World-dp-0375760393/dp/03757603 93/ref=mt_paperback?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=1554243989 The Good Food Revolution Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILLLIcrmSDk
Book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B006OHEX38/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 Food Sovereignty Links: Overview of what Food Sovereignty is and its 6 pillars http://usfoodsovereigntyalliance.org/what-is-food-sovereignty/ http://www.nativefoodsystems.org/about/sovereignty Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance https://www.firstnations.org/projects/native-american-food-sovereignty-alliance/ https://nativefoodalliance.org/ Muckleshoot Food Sovereignty Project https://americanindian.si.edu/nk360/pnw-history-culture/muckleshoot.cshtml Bad River Food Sovereignty Project https://www.feastbythebay.org/bad-river-tribal-food-sovereignty.html “Detroit Aims for Food Sovereignty” https://dirt.asla.org/2016/07/08/detroit-aims-for-food-sovereignty/ “Detroit’s urban farms: engines of growth, omens of change” https://www.michiganradio.org/post/detroit-s-urban-farms-engines-growth-omens-change Food Justice info: Food First https://foodfirst.org/issue-area/us-food-justice/ Food Justice Glossary https://werepair.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Food-Justice-Glossary.pdf Health at every size info: “Weight Science: Evaluating the Evidence for a Paradigm Shift” https://nutritionj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1475-2891-10-9 Be Nourished https://benourished.org/ Isabel Foxen Duke https://isabelfoxenduke.com/

In this week’s episode of Eat Your Words, host Cathy Erway is joined by Tamar Adler, author of Something Old, Something New: Classic Recipes Revised. Tamar shares what she loves about vintage cookbooks: the physical artifacts, the poetry of cooking terms we no longer use, and the mystery of recipes without standardized measurements. Listen in to find inspiration in the history of home cooking. Eat Your Words is powered by Simplecast

 Manners have been around since at least 2300 BC, when Ptah-Hotep wrote on papyrus that one should refrain from “speaking evilly” and from staring at people. And as parents, we say manners still matter— to quote Margaret’s mother, no one likes a bratty kid. But which manners still matter? We think author Tamar Adler put it best in her “Manners Manifesto”: Perhaps the way to distinguish useful etiquette from frippery is to discern which rules help us be good rather than seem good… Whatever unites [us] merits keeping, and what divides can be folded and stored away with the linen too old and ornamental to use. Eating the food you’re served, saying please and thank you, holding the door? All that makes other people happy. So our kids should do it. Although getting them there? That’s easier said than done. In this episode we talk about   * why manners are all about context * why other people’s manners rule (even if they’re not yours) * whether it’s okay to expect (and perhaps forcefully elicit) good manners in your friends’ kids * why thank you notes suck but we have to make kids do them anyhow * why manners require constant reinforcement * why everyone should stop listening to videos in public places without headphones because that’s just absolutely the worst   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Litquake and Porchlight team up to bring you six stories from six different storytellers about putting the best spin on an impossible situation. Laugh with us as we listen to stories from comedians Michael Ian Black and Tom Rhodes, rapper Lyrics Born, authors Caitlyn Myer and Tamar Adler, and publicist (and occasional ghostwriter for Boo, the world’s cutest dog) April Whitney. Hosted by Beth Lisick and Arline Klatte. Recorded at the Verdi Club. 

This week on Let’s Eat In, Cathy is joined by author Tamar Adler, who’s latest book, “An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace”, is a narrative on cooking, convenience and eating. Tune into the show to learn more about Tamar’s inspiration for the book, and find out her thoughts on shoestring eating budgets, composting, gardening and more! And, of course, find out what Tamar’s ideal date meal would be. This episode was sponsored by Fairway Market.

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: As software developers, maybe we go towards building a GUI with specialized inputs and forms and controls too soon, because it’s so much easier to explain to the computer what the user means if they use a specialized input tool like a button check box and so on. But if that weren’t the case, if it’s easier for the computer to understand what you mean as you’re typing in your note, then suddenly text input is the primary thing. 00:00:32 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for deep work on iPad and Mac. But this podcast isn’t about Muse product, it’s about the small team, the big ideas behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins, joined today by Jeffrey Litt. Hey. And Max Schoening, great to be here. Now, the two of you are working together with some others on an ink and Switch project we’re gonna talk about today, but first, I understand that there’s some cooking adventures going on in the lit household. 00:01:02 - Speaker 3: Yeah, so I’ve been trying to make my own stock lately. I’ve been reading this incredible book that someone recommended to me on Twitter called An Everlasting Meal by Tamar Adler, and it’s all about how to use leftovers and just like random stuff in your fridge to cook both as a way of not wasting, but also just cause it feels good. So I’ve been, you know, throwing random like carrot tops and stuff into a pot, and it feels really fun. That’s my recent cooking adventure. 00:01:29 - Speaker 1: Inspired by, we’ll get into it a little bit later with the project too, but partially by Jeffrey’s cooking. I’ve also started taking cooking maybe a little bit more seriously than before. Like I think one of the things that sort of distinguishes the amateur from someone who’s more seriously involved in something is consistency and my cooking was never all that consistent cause the loop of how frequently you repeat a dish when you’re just cooking sort of for fun is very long, right? So the learning is slow, so I’ve been getting into sous vide cooking. And just eating way more steak slash anything you can sous vide that I would like, but at least the results are getting better. 00:02:11 - Speaker 3: I’m a sous vide fan as well. It’s a major cheat code, I find. Everything is perfect every time. 00:02:17 - Speaker 1: I wish that had been my experience too. 00:02:21 - Speaker 2: Yeah, consistency and repetition, yeah, short feedback loops. I was inspired by a book, I think it’s called the Food Lab, where basically the author does some, call it like. Amateur science in the sense of taking common cooking claims, like should you salt meat before cooking it, or is it better if you don’t flip it, or you only flip it once versus twice or something, it would essentially just cook several side by side, varying this one thing. And then do a little informal taste test with his, you know, housemates or whatever, and sort of like try to answer that question, and many times found out that, or at least had the finding, let’s call it, that things that people swore by didn’t really actually make a huge difference in the outcome, but that idea for myself, I think even our Mutual friend and colleague Peter Van Hardenberg introduced a version of that in the Hiroku offices when he would do a little coffee workshop and essentially like brew a cup of coffee with several different approaches, you know, here’s the Chemex, here’s the French press, here’s the, and then you could taste them side by side and have new appreciation for the way these different techniques change the taste of the same source bean. 00:03:34 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I love that mindset. I think what I see as the challenge at home cooking is, you know, to bring in some of that idea of getting better and being a little rigorous without making the whole thing too overcomplicated and kind of perfectionist. There’s some aspect of amateurism and just having fun with it, that’s sort of the whole point to begin with. So I think that’s a fun balance to strike. 00:03:57 - Speaker 2: So longtime listeners of Meta Muse will know that we’re shaking up the format a little bit here. This is our first time with two guests. It’s usually me and Mark as co-hosts along with one guest, and this is partially my theory that it’s a little hard for listeners to adapt to two new voices, but in fact, you two are not new to our guests potentially. Max, you are one of our very first guests all the way back in episode 8 when we talked about principal products. And Jeffrey, you joined us for somewhere around episode 34, where we talked about bring your own client. So, anyways, I thought it would be fun, especially because both of you work together on this research project to get you here together. So you can go back and listen to those episodes if you want the full backstory, but maybe you could each give a 32nd summary bio of yourself before we dive into the project itself. 00:04:51 - Speaker 3: Yeah, so I’m a grad student at MIT as well as a collaborator with the In and Switch Research lab, and my research mission is to figure out how to make software more customizable so people can edit the tools that they use and make their own software, and the project we’ll be talking about today has a lot of resonance with that theme, so excited to be here again. 00:05:12 - Speaker 1: And this is my first foray into research. I’m a software designer. I’ve worked on things like Hiroku, GitHub, cloud app, way in the past, and generally I like to summarize. My efforts as I like to make things for people who make where make is the developer build tool. 00:05:33 - Speaker 2: And our topic today will be dynamic documents, which indeed is what the potluck project that you both worked on and recently published about is all about. So we’re hoping to dive into the specifics of that project as well as some of the research process behind it. Maybe we could start out with a description, kind of the, I don’t know if elevator pitch is the right way to talk about a a research project, but a short summary. 00:05:58 - Speaker 3: We’re not raising funding, but I can give a summary, sure. So, Potluck is a substrate that we’ve been developing, where the goal is to turn regular old text documents into interactive tools that help you in your life. And so there’s this idea that you can just start by, you know, jotting a note on your phone like you might in an app like Apple Notes, and then gradually you start enriching that note with little bits of computation and interaction. And if you keep doing that for a while, you might end up with something that looks suspiciously like An app that you might download from the app store, but it’s not like someone else made it for you, it’s sort of organically evolved out of just a note that you started writing, and, you know, some examples of the kinds of things that we’ve thought about in the substrate are You’re writing down a recipe that your mom told you for how she makes her dumplings, and then you decide, oh, I’m gonna have a party, so I want to make 5x the recipe. What’s like 730 g times 5. That’s something that a computer should be able to help you with, right? But if your data is in a text note, how do you bring in the computer to play its role and help you out a little bit? We’ve developed these primitives where you can start injecting these little bits of computation as you need them into your text note. And so, that’s kind of the overall idea of the project. One analogy that I think is helpful to understand the general ethos of it is spreadsheets. I’m a huge, huge fan of spreadsheets. I think they’re a really empowering medium that people interact with pretty typically on a computer these days. And the cool thing about a spreadsheet, right, is that when it starts out, it’s just a bunch of numbers in a table. It’s just data sitting there, and it’s already useful in that state. And then gradually you might add a little formula, you might add a V lookup, and if you keep doing that, by the end, you might end up with this ridiculously complicated app that’s running your whole business, but it didn’t start out that way. It wasn’t planned to happen that way, it just started out as this little bit of data that you were storing, and it naturally evolved, right? So that’s kind of the general idea. 00:08:04 - Speaker 1: Yeah, there’s the well known meme of this insert startup could have been a spreadsheet, and I think in this case, you could probably make the same argument that this app could have been a note. And in fact, I would love to be able to do this at scale, but like if you just open the average users notes apps, what kind of notes do they take and, you know, throughout the course of this research project. That was sort of a grounding force of, oh, what kind of notes do people keep track of and so we started looking at, you know, like Jeffrey was saying recipes. At some point we did workout tracking and plant water tracking and like collecting your favorite hikes and so on, and they all have this sort of very innocuous beginning. You’re not planning to make something big, you’re just sort of planting a little seed as a note and What was frustrating for us is, at some point, if you then want a little bit more help from the computer, you usually have to move it out of the notes app, which is a little bit sad because it’s this big drop off, and so that’s kind of what we’ve been looking at, like, how do you make that go away. 00:09:14 - Speaker 2: And I love the diversity of use cases outlined in the essay. You focus on this cooking use case as a sort of a central one, even baked into the name of the project, but indeed all of these different kind of personal tracking stuff that tends to get scribbled down in notes and and in particular notes in your phone, text notes in your phone, that they’re not very structured, you’re trying to capture them in the moment and move on. And certainly many of those are things I have done, but also there is a whole industry is a way to put it, category of app which is trackers. So, yeah, hike trackers and run trackers and sleep trackers. And yeah, fitness trackers, step counters, weight trackers, you know, and sometimes that’s paired with, I don’t know why, you know, Fitbit has their Wi Fi connected scale, and when you step on it every morning, it automatically records the data, but then a weakness for someone who is both curious and has some light programming capabilities is actually getting that data out or doing something with it in a more flexible tool like a spreadsheet. is often pretty difficult. Actually, Fitbit, I think even famously had a little bit of pushback for the, you had to pay for the feature to kind of like download your data as a CSV and even then it feels like this very discontinuous, OK, I’m exporting now, the data, who knows what format it’s even in, and there certainly can’t be a continuous using of the app, inputting of the data, and then also I’m gonna put it through my own, call it personal analytics. 00:10:43 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think another weird thing about this ecosystem of trackers is that it sort of splits up your life into these very specific categories, right? So, for example, after my workout, what if I have a nutrition shake and I’m tracking my nutrition, I need to switch from my workout tracker to my nutrition tracker, and there’s this sort of world that each app considers its space that it doesn’t go outside of, you know? This also happens when, you know, We looked a lot at recipe apps because we were thinking about cooking as one of our main domains with this tool, and a lot of cooking apps start out very simple with tracking your recipes, but then there’s sort of a natural force to bloat them with extra stuff, so, You’ll add grocery list stuff, and you’ll add menu planning, and, you know, meal planning for the week, and all these. 00:11:29 - Speaker 2: All of your friends, what are they cooking? 00:11:31 - Speaker 3: Yeah, like social, you know, and I feel like we’ve all experienced this tool starts out nice and small and grows in weird ways. And what I think is important here is, I’m fine with it growing in the ways that I want it to be useful. What’s annoying to me is having 100 things crammed in there that I don’t need and can’t remove from the tool. And then on the flip side, the one extra thing that I do need, I can’t add myself, right? So, we sort of like, let the developer of each tracker decide what does cooking or what does workouts mean, like, what’s the scope of that activity, and it’s really hard to permeate that kind of boundary that gets set there, and so that’s one of the problems that we were thinking about in developing potluck. 00:12:12 - Speaker 2: So some of the key concepts here, dynamic documents is obviously a spreadsheet is a dynamic document, but the idea here is taking text, plain text, which is incredibly universal. Everybody’s phone has some kind of plain text notes app just kind of built in by default, but then you can use gradual enhancement to add some computation and make it something dynamic while keeping that same basic medium of just simple text you can manipulate. That you also talk a little bit of the essay about personal software, which I think is precisely this concept you’re just describing here, which is rather than my run tracker being an app that I download from the app store and I’m more or less just have to use it as intended by the developers, that I can use the computational medium to build a quote unquote application that just suits my needs, is truly personal. 00:13:05 - Speaker 1: Yeah, personal software is, well, first of all, I think it’s getting more mainstream in the sense that if you look at a lot of people’s notion, usage, and all the other insert, you know, personal knowledge management tool here where people are sort of aggregating all of this stuff in their life into a personal OS and I don’t know where the appetite comes from. I don’t know if it’s tied to increased computer literacy, at least some form of computer literacy, or it’s people have been burned by their favorite app changing either by adding too many features or just being deprecated, but there seems to be a lot of energy around it and so one of the things that is surprisingly Or rather, something that you wouldn’t think about right away is when you start building these apps from scratch from a note, you never really notice that you’re actually making a big complicated thing. You’re just starting out with some text and at some point you start adorning that text with some functionality and you just keep going and going and going, and at some point you wake up and you’re like, wait, this is actually quite complicated logic. Am I a programmer? And for us, that sort of was quite important, right, like embracing this notion of personal software that is truly yours, not from some team somewhere in Silicon Valley or wherever else deciding what’s best for you. And I think Jeffrey, you gave this analogy early on to like imagine our homes were Just furnished completely by other people, and all the objects in there just are sort of almost immutable, like we would not have that, and we do with software, and so I think nudging at that is super interesting. 00:14:53 - Speaker 3: This is one of my favorite ways to Open up my own mind to how weird software is, is to use analogies to other parts of the world, you know, I think we sort of have gotten so familiar with these metaphors of how software is organized. Like, in some sense, in this potluck work, what we’re doing is arguing against the idea of applications, right? Which is a really weird argument to make to a typical computer user, you know, it’s fish and water, like, what do you mean? I love apps. Apps are how we do things on computers, but It doesn’t have to be that way. I mean, Alan Kay, who’s responsible for a lot of the metaphors we use in personal computing, has, I think, said that apps were like the biggest mistake that was made in software ever, or something like that. You know, another analogy to bring it back to the food thing, I think, is restaurant versus home cooking. And the reason I like that analogy is that I think it gets that, I’m not trying to argue that we should ban restaurants. I love going to restaurants. It’s more like, if you imagine a world where All you can eat is restaurant food every day for every meal, and you think about what kind of society that would be, it starts to feel a little weird, right? When you go to a restaurant, you are putting a lot of trust in someone else to give you a good experience. You’re accepting kind of a restriction in choice, whether that’s like a full on oakcase, you know, meal, or even, you know, picking from a menu with 10 items is very different from going to the grocery store, right? But also, you’re acknowledging maybe that chef can do things I can’t, and maybe I’m tired today and don’t want to cook, whatever the reason may be, it’s nice. But it’s also a certain kind of limited experience, I think. And when I look at home cooking, I see a totally different set of trade-offs and values almost, where I’m not trying to become a professional, I’m not trying to make the best thing, I’m just trying to make something nice for myself that I like, and, you know, for my family, whatever. It’s a very different scale and and feeling, and I think that’s sort of the right way to think about, you know. There are always going to be tons of professionals making software, and I think that’s great. I love Apple products where someone in Cupertino has thought for a year about what the width of this button should be. I’m not against that, it’s just that I think there’s also this complementary role for a different way of thinking, especially in these more personal domains. And one last thing I’ll say about the home cooking analogy that I think is interesting is that it’s a very cultural thing. If you imagine a world where everyone always eats at restaurants and you tell someone, you know, why don’t you start cooking in your house? They might be like, well, I don’t know, that seems really hard, like, all these chefs have spent like years in school or whatever, and, you know, you can see the analogy here to, like, currently software is so professional and difficult, that it just seems unthinkable that everyone would be making this stuff themselves every day, but I think we can imagine a culture where that’s a little different, and, you know, try to promote that kind of Thinking and culture more generally, and I think that would be a good thing for software. 00:17:51 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think the restaurant versus home cooking comparison is a great one, and also just reflects the fact that in the scheme of things, computing is just so new, and we don’t necessarily know how it fits into our lives and our society and how to relate to it, and we’ve ended up in this, you can think of it as a local minima or just a particular circumstance of time, which is that software is built by these professionals who are typically far away and building for many, many users. That’s not where we started with computing, and I certainly don’t think that’s where we’ll end up, but hence the reason to invest in research to take us in this direction. Now one thing I think your project touches on that’s an interest of mine, obviously I would lump this under end user programming, something we’re all interested in essentially bringing programmability of computers to a wider audience, not necessarily in a professional app building context, but just in the sense of embracing the dynamic medium. But I feel one of the big unsolved problems of end user programming is really just getting it into a context where people can use it. There’s many, many really amazing research projects and prototypes and etc. where if you go into there, I don’t know what, here, launch this small talk browser and once you’re within that world, everything is malleable and composable and you have total power, but it’s not connected to anything you do in your life. And one thing I like about how your team went about this project is that You’re starting from text notes, which are on your phone. Now, it’s sort of an unanswered question is how exactly this computational medium gets into the notes app or whatever, that maybe it’s not a part that’s figured out, but very hypothetically, going from, I’ve got this text file or a series of text notes, and I wanna layer this dynamic medium on top of it, feels like a lot less of a jump than many of the other kind of programming accessibility research that I’ve seen. 00:19:47 - Speaker 1: Especially cause if you actually look, for example, Apple Notes, right, it already has hints of these data detectors. If you type a phone number and I don’t know, a few other dozen types of content, it automatically finds them for you and underlines them, and then you can, you know, tap and initiate a call and potluck just takes that notion to an extreme by saying, well, first of all, I can write my own detectors cause I don’t just want to find. A phone number I might want to find the quantity of a recipe and then it also just doesn’t limit you just to the oh I can tap and initiate a preprogrammed action. I can do something else with it, a calculation, fetch some different data and so on, but it’s a very gradual enrichment of the original note and it’s also already somewhat at home on iOS. I don’t know, Jeffrey, if you want to talk a little bit about the data detectors and the origin. 00:20:47 - Speaker 3: Yeah, totally. One of the more interesting kind of related work references that we found while we were thinking about this stuff was, what I think is the original paper describing the seed that has become these, you know, phone number recognition and stuff in modern Mac OS and iOS. But there was a research team at Apple in the late 90s, which included Bonnie Nardi, who’s sort of well known in the end user programming space. And it’s really interesting seeing the original rationale they had for how they got to this idea of data detectors. Their starting point was thinking about, OK, how can computers help us do stuff and be intelligent helpers, and they Sort of draw this distinction between two styles of how the computer can help you. One is the computer just does stuff for you, or like, you know, you sort of vaguely say what you want and it doesn’t, sort of more of an assistant metaphor, you can imagine, you might not even know it’s doing stuff, it’s just behind the scenes. And I think this sort of corresponds to some of the modern ways that people think about, oh yeah, AI will just do it for you type of thinking. But they realized that actually, both at the time that was totally infeasible. Computers weren’t good enough, weren’t smart enough to actually pull that off in a satisfactory way. And they also realized maybe it’s not quite what we want, and they went down another path, which is, let’s just have the computer find stuff for us that we care about, like, dig around in all the things on my desktop and find useful information, and then let me decide what to do with it. And You know, as Max was saying, I think their view of what you can do with the information was relatively like straightforward. You just right click on a phone number and you hit call this number, simple interactions like that. But still, this idea that the user was in control of what to do with the information. And so, I think that’s a really nice kind of design goal for these sorts of systems is carefully balancing what are the parts that we want to be automated versus where the moments that we want to be in control, you know. 00:22:49 - Speaker 2: And data detectors is the term from, I think that paper in the potluck essay, you call it extensible searches, is this a rebrand to be a little more familiar to current audiences, or do you see that as actually, it’s because it goes beyond these more automated kind of default types, like a phone number and address? 00:23:10 - Speaker 1: With a lot of the stuff, it’s very serendipitous about how it happens during a project, and we initially didn’t even start out with potluck having these continuously running searches. It was much more of a manual process. In fact, I think to this day, if you look at the code, it’s still like cold highlighters because we started out with this notion of, well, you have a note and then the sections that you care about, you’ll just highlight and you have different colors for highlighters to start imbuing those highlights with computation. And someone on the project at some point sort of said, oh, well, why don’t we just run a search against it? And at the time, I think we didn’t even call it search, it was just a pattern. But if you think about how mere mortals would maybe think about this as well, I have like a Google doc open. How do I target a specific word in the Google Doc? Well I hit command F and I try and find it, right? And so that’s where this notion of search comes from, which is sort of the Most maybe human way of thinking about these detectors. 00:24:11 - Speaker 3: Another small thing I’ll add is that one of the really cool parts of the original data detector’s vision that we share, but it’s kind of been lost in the modern Mac OS version, is this extensible part of extensible searches is also really important, the idea that you can define your own. You know, in potluck, this means that you can decide that these are the types of ingredients that I want to find in my document, and nothing else. I control the dictionary of what I consider foods, or I control the list of workouts. So if I write, you know, squat, my note will recognize that that is a kind of workout that I do, but all of it’s sort of very tailored to your life. And the original data detectors paper had this too. They had this idea of, for example, you would teach the system, here are all the names of the conference rooms in my office. So whenever I write the name of a conference room anywhere in my OS, the computer will just know that that’s what that means. And of course that doesn’t apply to every Mac OS user, it’s more of a personal data detector that’s tailored to exactly my context. 00:25:08 - Speaker 2: Maybe like adding a word to the dictionary so that it doesn’t show up as a spelling error because it’s some nickname for something in my life that wouldn’t make sense to add to a global dictionary. 00:25:20 - Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. 00:25:22 - Speaker 1: It’s funny to think about how frequently we have data detectors in the software that we use, right? Like on GitHub, if you want to reference an issue, you do pound 247, and that’s a data detector, famously like Twitter hashtags and at mentions were all not built into the software. They were just ways in which people invented small little microsyntaxes very fluidly. And there is no primitive in the operating system that is not super far down to actually do something fun with those, right? And so by making it super easy right in the context of the note to write a new data detector and super easy, we can get into that a little bit later, is obviously a spectrum. Ours still involves way too much knowledge of programming to be super easy. But the power of inventing those small microsyntaxes is super addictive. Like you just start coming up with small things that only you are familiar with, kind of like in a notebook, you would have some sort of notation, and it’s just flabbergasting to me that operating systems haven’t embraced that at a more sort of a cross app boundary level, right? Like, I think to this day there is a class in Some SDK from Apple NS data detectors where I believe developers of apps can write data detectors for you, but you as a user have no influence over them, which is fine, like I guess some developer could build an app that lets you write your own, but partially what gets left behind there is that the same data detector should run across many applications. If I have that, you mentioned a meeting room. If I have a meeting room name, then you should highlight it in iMessage in mail app in notes and my 23 other apps that I’ve just downloaded from the App Store, and that’s sort of lacking. If you read the paper, I highly recommend it. I’m a huge fan of BonnRD. It’s very sad that we don’t have that in our computers today. 00:27:24 - Speaker 3: And I think this brings it back to what Adam was talking about earlier around integrating with the rest of your tools, right? Sometimes. I think a really important point to make about this research project that we’ve made is that currently, just to be able to move freely, we’ve built this thing as it looks like an app. You open this thing called Potluck, it is, you know, a web app, there’s a text box and you can do all these fancy things with the text, but the final form of this that we envision being good is not a separate app, it’s deeply integrated with all your other tools. You could imagine any app that has text, you should be able to pull this panel of searches over and just start pointing it at any text in your system. And we actually built a little bit of that into our prototype where we do some things where we actually interopt with.txt files on your file system. So you have a little bit of being able to open these text files in the text editor of your choice, work with them, and then when you look at them back in potluck, you see the interaction appear on top, but I think that one of the interesting open questions that we haven’t quite figured out yet is, how does it really work for this to be embedded at more of an OS platform level? Like, where do these search things live? How do you share them with other people? How do you share them across apps? It’s just sort of an interesting design challenge to think about there. 00:28:43 - Speaker 2: I feel like there is a commonality across many research projects that I was involved in and I can switch in maybe in general in the research world, which is if you could do it just in an app, you would try that, but the whole thing that makes a research is really this is something that should probably be operating system level or just cuts across. This tech stacks or the tools you use or the devices you use in a way that isn’t really well supported by the current ways that things are divvied up or the way that we kind of compartmentalize the various elements of our computers and hence the only way to try them and see if they are plausible or good ideas in. or how they feel to use is to do them in this research context where you kind of have to hand wave and say, well, imagine this was built in your text editor or cut across all your apps or you know was there in the browser or you have a good way to share these things. Would we want that? Would we like it? Would that help us? And that doesn’t get you all the way to what it would look like in the real world, but it certainly is a fair sight further than just sketching it out on a whiteboard. 00:29:49 - Speaker 3: The first one is figuring out what we want, prototyping the experience with enough fidelity that we actually have some idea of what platform primitives we would like to have available. And then the second part, which I think is at least as hard, is how would you actually enact that kind of change in the world. If the thing you’re doing is not trying to add another app to the app store, but totally change the structure of the app store, and all the economic incentives and the technical interfaces between things, that’s a very different shape of challenge, and so, yeah, it’s a lot. 00:30:24 - Speaker 2: Now obviously I’ll link the essay in the show notes, and there’s also a live web demo that’s pretty workable, I think, or at least in my experiments with it got pretty far, which is saying a lot for a research prototype, which tend to be, you know, focusing on the learning rather than the polished product. So I’ll link both of those in the show notes and people should certainly check them out. I’d be curious to hear briefly. On the findings and what you learned from building this and trying to use it in practice. Was there anything that stands out as surprising or unexpected? 00:30:58 - Speaker 1: I think there was this distinct moment in time where the prototype was actually good enough, that inventing your own syntax for something was very trivial. You could just say something like find every line that starts with plant emoji, and then suddenly do something with it. And I still remember it having the feeling of why doesn’t all software work this way. And so to me it wasn’t super obvious that personal microsyntaxes should be a thing, and the idea that the same way you can scribble personalized notations into a paper notebook, that we could bring that into software. If you make it easy, right? If you don’t make someone go into some settings screen that’s 4 pages deep to say I’m going to change how this works, right, like usual programming, but just ad hoc, you’re like, oh, I’m just gonna start these next lines with, and, you know, famously look at markdown, like, I’m gonna start the list with asterisks. Well, I can just invent that. That to me was actually a very surprising finding is the ease of creation of a syntax and then the utility. 00:32:07 - Speaker 3: I think for me, one of the surprising things was just how nice it is to work in text. This might be sort of a bit of my programmer brain, you know, speaking, but I’m not typically one of these, you know, everything I do is in plain text kind of people, but I found that We’re so used to editing text. We have really strong muscle memory around, for example, things like, I can select some text, cut it and paste it somewhere else, or I can even paste it into another app, or I can undo, and I understand how Undo is gonna work. And all these little affordances are really mature in the systems we use, and they’re mature in our heads. They’re really strong conventions, and I think One thing we found is that when you build software on top of that really solid foundation that we all have, a lot of things just sort of fall out of that. So, for example, when all of the state of your application and all of its UI live in a text file, you can just snip parts, move them around. If you undo your app has undo for free because it’s state is stored in the text. You get all these things out of that. And I think there’s some lesson there it feels about, I guess it’s about using the same well developed tool for many different things. I’ve used the analogy before of, it’s like a chef’s knife, where it’s like, good at all these different things and someone put a lot of effort into making it really good and versatile. It feels like there’s something similar there going on with text, and It’s not a new insight. I think there’s lots of people out there who do Emacs or there’s all kinds of to do list apps, or, you know, budgeting apps based around text files. I think that’s a thing that some people have been experimenting with for decades, but it was surprising to us just how far you can push that into so many different domains. Of course, you can’t do everything with text. There’s lots of apps that would be ridiculous to even try making them potluck, you know, YouTube is not the target, but I think that’s fine, you know, there’s some Kernel of personal use cases that fits really well with this medium, I think. 00:34:05 - Speaker 1: Yeah, plain text, or just maybe text in general, is a surprisingly good layout engine in the sense that if you want to make personal software very frequently you’re gonna have to go and come up with your own layout. Oh, I’d rather actually have these things at the top and not at the bottom of the screen. And I think maybe because as professional sort of software developers, maybe we go towards building a GUI with specialized inputs and forms and controls and all that stuff too soon because it’s just so much easier to explain to the computer what the user means if they use a specialized input tool like a button check box and so on. But if that weren’t the case, if it’s just easier for the computer to understand what you mean as you’re typing in your note. Then suddenly text input is the primary thing. And if you think about what we do on computers all day, including people who are not sort of in the industry, yes, Emacs and so on, great, but you spend most of your time writing texts to people, right? So if you can’t type on your device, then you can barely use it, which means most people who use devices spend a lot of type typing. And I think we should encourage software designers and developers to lean into text way more than we do, and like you even see that possibly in this resurgence of the command K command lines that every app now implements, right? Like command palettes, which are also just text-based entry. And so I think potluck maybe takes this to the extreme of saying, look, just write whatever you want, and then we’ll just teach the computer with you how to interpret what you wrote, and then you can do awesome things with it, and that’s kind of exciting to me. 00:35:47 - Speaker 3: In some ways, it’s like even one more step towards messy than spreadsheets. Someone at the lab was computing a spreadsheet, I think, to sum up how heavy things would be in like a backpack for a hike, and At some point they realized, oh, I should just do this in potluck, because even the effort to put it in a spreadsheet table was just felt like a little bit of ceremony, like, spreadsheets are sort of clunky to edit on your phone, for example, whereas text, it just kind of, it’s one dimensional, so it resizes onto your phone, you just type characters in, it’s very low ceremony, and so if you can get the interaction you want out of such a messy data substrate, in some ways I think it’s like a good go to before you start adding too much structure. 00:36:29 - Speaker 1: Yeah, there is this, I think we link to it in the essay as well, a paper, deferred formalism, which sort of encourages you to not get into structure really early on, right? and text is great, like I can just put the cursor in the middle of a line, hit return and now I have two lines. And if you think about some of the tools that are extremely popular, notion and so on, they always make that distinction of are you inputting pros and making a list, or do you want more structure to do some computation, which is, oh great, now you have to think like a DBA and the notion of being able to move between those two modes fluently, I think is really cool. And at the same time, if you can afford to push the formalism as far back into the process as possible, right? Like, hopefully without the app hopping, right, of like, oh, I started thinking in Muse, and suddenly I want some more structure. Therefore we have to go get out a spreadsheet and at some point you’re like 6 level deep writing a rails app with a SQL light database and you just don’t, you know, it’s it’s not the way to go. 00:37:34 - Speaker 2: And now when it comes to structure versus free form, I do think there’s a feedback loop when you talk about microformats where you kind of are inventing your own little structure as you go, just naturally, even like writing in a notebook can be something like this. Yeah, some of the trackers you mentioned there, one use case that came to mind for me was in the early days of parenthood, we basically had a log for things like feedings and sleeping and diaper. because it’s very useful, especially with handoff between caregivers to just at a glance, be able to look at this and see when was the last time they ate, when was the last time they slept, because that tells you a lot about trying to figure out whether they’re crying right now, what need they’re expressing when they’re crying right in this moment, as well as other maybe slightly longer term analysis in terms of like, OK, are we getting enough sleep each day, for example. But there does tend to be a feedback loop if you do add the rigor of the computer trying to parse it, even if I’ve written that search for myself, then that is going to enforce as a strong word for it, but encourage me to use a format that can be easily parsed and to be consistent with that because I make my job on the called the programmer side or the adding the dynamic aspect to it a little bit easier. Did you see something like that in your user testing? 00:38:55 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think there’s a really interesting tension here where it’s exactly what you’re pointing out, where on the one hand, we don’t want it to feel like programming. So in textual programming, especially for beginners, you’re typing in characters, and there’s a very, very strict set of rules defining what’s valid and invalid, right? And if it’s valid, you get nice syntax highlighting and everything, it’s great, and if you have one comma missing, everything falls apart, and so we I thought that it was really important that you don’t start feeling that way in your text notes. It should generally have the sense that you can just type the way you normally would. But of course, on the other hand, we still need to figure out what you meant. And so you need patterns that are accommodating enough to let you write, but also rich enough to figure out what you meant and extract the meaning. I do think one thing we realized is that there’s a big difference between applying patterns later on to some text that’s already sitting there, versus having them being applied live as you type. Because in potluck, as you type, for example, if I type 5 minutes into a note, by default, potluck has this time recognizer built in, which will search for all the durations you add to a note. And when I type 5 minutes, this underline just appears and clicks into place, and I sort of get this live feedback that I’ve typed a duration that the system has understood. And we just found that that felt really good. It feels good to have the system give you that signal that it recognized what you did. And obviously, if you were expecting it to recognize something and it didn’t, then you realize that because of the lack of feedback. And so, what we found in our experience using this thing was that if you have the searches running as you’re inputting the data, it does have this natural nudging force of making you aware of the structure a little bit and maybe being a little more mindful of where you put. New lines or things like that, but again, shouldn’t be too rigid ideally. 00:40:45 - Speaker 1: Adam, you do bring up an interesting point. I think partially why notion is so popular and such a great tool is that it does invoke a little bit like this collector mindset of I’m just going to collect, you know, whatever you’re into and make a nice table so that I can actually reason about it as a collection instead of individual items, right? And like I always joke that sort of computers are really, really good at doing stupid math and for loops. And maybe one way of thinking about this is if you look at the user interface for potluck, on the left hand side you have sort of this messy, I’m just going to type stuff out, and as you write searches that match against the document, it populates a table and that table can have arbitrary metadata, right? So I can add a new column and say actually for this timer, I’m going to add a different property and The idea of having both, both this sort of reasoning about things in collections, large, you know, all ingredients or whatever, and the idea that I don’t have to do that from the beginning, or if I change my mind, it’s not such a big deal, is really appealing to me because I think we usually switch modes from reasoning about the individual thing to the collective thing and back and forth and back and forth and software today just makes you. Sort of jump through hoops if you’re switching between one or the other, and potluck tries to, as best as possible, sort of make that fluid. 00:42:12 - Speaker 2: One thing I wanted to ask about is, in the future work section, you talk about machine learning and language models, which is a pretty hot topic among certainly the tech world broadly and also in the tools for thought space. Since you are focused so much on text as well as detection, what role do you see that as having either now or in the future? 00:42:34 - Speaker 1: It’s really interesting timing because as we were writing the paper and like doing the research project, all these big language models and like stable diffusion and a bunch of other things sort of came out and became sort of accessible to like hackers, I would say. I mean they have been for a while. But at some point we were thinking about, well, we have these searches and the way we’ve implemented searches both sort of from a time perspective and maybe a little bit of a philosophical thing that we can get into, are all, I don’t know, like rejects, we have our own pattern language and so on, and you can if you want to write rejects. It’s obviously not super approachable to mere mortals. So how wouldn’t it be cool if I could just have a note and say, find me all things that are quantities of food. And then GPT 3 goes off and comes back and says, here are the ones that we found. And I think it is so obvious that the data detectors will get so much better the better machine learning gets, right? And you can kind of get a glimpse of that future in the photos app on, I forget the current photos app on on iOS, where if you take a picture of a recipe index card and it says 24 g of sugar. It’ll actually, you can tap and hold and it’ll do a unit conversion for you. Now, it won’t let you do anything else because somebody decided for you what you should do with those 24 g. That’s the part where we would hope some other, like some maybe some more extensibility, but that’s just machine learning, finding the 24 g for you and you don’t have to do it, right? And so I think it seems somewhat obvious to us that all the detectors that are currently patterns will just become much more human friendly ways to describe patterns. 00:44:16 - Speaker 3: I will add one interesting tension that we were thinking about a bit. We didn’t end up implementing AI based stuff in the project since we didn’t have time to get into it, but we thought about, you know, do you want the AI to find the stuff for you, or do you want the AI to essentially write a reject for you? And those actually end up being pretty different things because predictability and speed actually end up mattering a lot. When I’m typing, I wanna be able to learn. You know, if I type this string, is the computer always gonna see that as a food or not? And if you have machine learning in the loop for actually doing the detection, It’s probably pretty hard to get guarantees around, oh, you know, it depends on where it is in the sentence, or how the model’s feeling that day, whereas if you have a more deterministic pattern, that gives you something that you could learn as a human, like how it works, and sort of learn to wield predictably, but there is a tough tension there because the predictable thing probably is gonna miss a bunch of cases that the ML could have found. So, I think there’s an interesting design challenge there and how do you Get a system that does both of those things well. 00:45:22 - Speaker 2: And maybe an example of that from kind of an earlier phase of technology is autocorrect, which on one hand was this huge enabler to be able to type full sentences on a phone. On the other hand, is the source of huge running jokes, you know, it’s basically the butt of jokes, which is like autocorrect, does hilarious things all the time, people are used to that, it’s part of modern life in a way that, oh, I pressed the wrong key on my keyboard. I guess that happens sometimes, but it’s so infrequent for someone who’s a reasonably competent typist, that it’s just not a point of discussion, and, you know, it’s one thing to use autocorrect to bang out a quick text message to someone, but if you’re a book author and you can sit down and write your book, Autocorcrack is not the right solution for you. You’re gonna become a touch typist with a precise keyboard, maybe you get a mechanical keyboard with big chunky keys, because, yeah, you want precision from your tool and you’re willing to invest in that. 00:46:18 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it may have been Paul Shan on the team that came up with the funny analogy of, we were arguing about AI cause I think sort of just what role should it play in potluck and so on, and One of the things he referred to current AI models to is like, look, this is like the toddler stage, and if you go and say, hey, go toddler, find me the ingredients on this table, you’re probably not going to just blindly take them and then cook a meal. But at the same time, if you can send off 10,000 toddlers to try and find the ingredients on the table, and then you check their work, seems pretty reasonable, right? And so I think that the idea of having the ML try and suggest something to you. But then you check the work, commit that and say this is the correct thing that you found, then it’s a totally reasonable approach, right? Like, I think GitHub co-pilot does this for programming, like you’re not writing a method call that at run time. Goes to GPT 3 and says please sort this list. It gives you the text to autocomplete that then you commit and run. I say this as now there are examples where GPT 3 calls itself to do stuff, which is both super exciting, but at the same time, you probably wouldn’t want that to be part of your stack all the time cause you can’t rely on, you know, the model upstream changing and suddenly saying that the car is an ingredient and yeah, but I think that tension. is good. I think we haven’t really figured out what the user interfaces for AI and for that interaction looks like, right? Like right now, all these interfaces are just slot machines. Like stable diffusion is just, it’s addictive because it’s a slot machine. You type in a prompt, you have to wait 30 seconds and then you get the variable reward of nice picture or not nice picture. But for a tool, I think you would want something a much more fluid and fast, right? You can’t wait for 30 seconds and you probably also want something much more predictable. I think it’s a future research project waiting to happen to say, in an environment like potluck, what role does AI play and how would you go about designing that? 00:48:23 - Speaker 2: Well, it’s all super fascinating stuff. I highly recommend reading the essay, trying the project, but now I want to switch gears a little bit and ask you both about the process. What does it look like to, I guess, come up with research to work on in the first place and certainly within the can switch container, recruit the team and run the project and how long does it last and who’s on it. And I’m especially interested to get both of your takes cause Jeffrey, you’ve done a bunch of Ink & Switch projects at this point, as well as been in the research world for a while, and Max, this was sort of your first exposure. You’re very accomplished in the commercial world, but this was your first exposure to both the research world and I and Switch. So, yeah, give me the rundown. What does the inside of this box look like? 00:49:08 - Speaker 3: Yeah, totally. I guess I can speak to how the project originated as the person who kind of started bringing things together here. So I can Switch typically these days runs projects that are You know, around 10 to 12 weeks, which is pretty short from a research perspective, and what we try to do is bring together some small team of people for an intense period of time there and just really focus, you know, ideally everyone’s full time and just intensively work on some aspect of a bigger problem. And so, before that, there’s this phase that we call pre-infusion, which I think Peter talked about when he was on Metamuse, where there has to be some prep work to figure out, you know, who do we need on this project, what’s the question we’re asking. In this case, we knew we wanted to do something related to the themes of malleable software, you know, this personal tool stuff, but we spent a while kind of searching for, I think it’s important to have kind of a nucleation point of some kind, something you can latch on to as a place to start, especially, I’m a fan of having some concrete examples or use cases in the mix at that stage, because what I found is that if you start with your prompt being like, how can we reinvent the way people do work or something, it’s easy to get lost in the woods, basically, whereas if you can at least focus on one thing to start and then branch out from there, it makes it easier. And so, I think Peter, the lab director and I were having a conversation, and we’re both big fans of cooking, and so we just started talking about, you know, isn’t it kind of weird that recipe apps are simultaneously so popular and yet seem to do so little and have all these frustrating restrictions, and so we thought it’d be fun to run a project where the original prompt was kind of, could you make a recipe app yourself, and, you know, go from there. And a lot of the ideas that ended up emerging in pot, like, we didn’t really Set out specifically to answer that, you know, specific question, it just kind of more emerged from the original prompt. So that’s kind of on the idea side, and then on the people side, you know, I am a big fan of small teams where everyone can kind of do everything a little bit, generalists, especially in this case. I think one of the tough things about this kind of work is that there’s a lot of context you have to build up, and so I felt that it was important to get a team together that had at least been thinking about these general kinds of problems before. You know, if you bring a typical engineer onto a project and say, let’s get rid of apps, you know, that’s sort of a strange place to start, right? And so, anyway, that led to, obviously Max, as sort of a design focused person, and then Two other people, Paul Shen and Paul Sonnetta, who are both, you know, more engineering focused, but, you know, all four of us had previously thought about these themes, and so it was really fun to get this group together and kind of jam on, you know, each having a different perspective on what it means to make personal tools, but kind of find a way to blend them in a way that made sense. So, that’s kind of the general overview, I guess. 00:52:12 - Speaker 1: I think you had a comment early on when we were doing intros, because most people we hadn’t worked together yet, and I think you made the comment of, oh, it’s well, if any of the people on the team really wanted to, they could just make the whole thing themselves. And I would have actually loved to see a parallel universe where we all separately would have tried to make a malleable recipe app, cause I’m sure it would have been very, very different than what we ended up coming up with. But this idea that you don’t have to spend any time explaining basics and can just go into building right away is really important when you only have 10 weeks or so. And I mean, I loved working on this team, maybe my favorite team working experience I’ve ever had. 00:53:00 - Speaker 2: Wow. Now, how did you perceive Max, this kind of research angle where the end goal is not to ship something to end users, yeah, you want something usable, and even there’s a demo on the web, you can go try, but the goal here is not to build a product and iterate on that and bring it to market. How did that change the experience of building something for you? 00:53:22 - Speaker 1: It was both very refreshing and at times frustrating, so it was a little bit of a palette cleanser. Most of the time when I’m looking at, you know, building software, it’s like, OK, when do you get to product market fit and what’s the economic viability? How many users, how are you going to make money, whatever, right? And this is not the case with research projects. There, I think the goals are much more, can you find a novel take that maybe explicitly wouldn’t work. In the app store right away, because, well, either the tech’s not there yet, or you need to commit access to Mac OS and iOS to actually fix this thing, or Linux or whatever. And so I didn’t really have any notion of what it was gonna be like. The only thing I knew is that all the Ink & Switch essays are badass, and surely something about the way these projects are run contributes to it. And I think it’s that weird tension between both, well, we’re gonna think big and do something that might not be viable right away, and at the same time we’re gonna ground it in that use case of, in this case, Jeffrey’s idea of a, well, let’s just make a recipe app. That’s our use case. How would you make that malleable instead of much more generic and, you know, inventing something that maybe no one will ever want to use. 00:54:47 - Speaker 3: Another part of the research first product thing that I find important is the end goal of this project is kind of idea transmission, like, we succeed if we change the way people think. And so, the way you explain the thing and frame it ends up being super important, which I guess that’s also true of marketing a product or whatever, but I think it’s just When that’s the main artifact that you’re going for at the end, it puts a lot of pressure on that angle of things. So, one process that I think we all agreed was really helpful is typically on lab projects, every 2 weeks, there’s a demo day, basically where you just demo what you’ve been working on to other people in the lab, and I think it’s really important to take those opportunities to sort of practice the story and try to explain what the heck are we doing, what problem are we thinking about, what’s our prototype right now. And just rehearse that every 2 weeks. And if you can’t convince other people at the lab that this thing makes sense or is good, you’re never gonna succeed at convincing anyone else, right? This is like the most high context, sympathetic audience you could find. And we did have a couple demos where people were like, what are you doing? This doesn’t really make sense, we don’t get it. And that was really, really helpful for kind of refining both the way we explain what we’re doing, but also, you know, obviously the work itself and sort of guiding the direction of it. And I think that’s an interesting process question is like, what cadence do you work on? In some ways, 2 week cycles may seem pretty fast. A lot of researchers work on much slower sort of base cadences, but I find that I really like having an intense kind of pretty fast rhythm when you’re in this execution, or kind of intense momentum mode, and then Once you’ve finished this 12 week period, you can spend some time to like, walk around and think about what you’ve done, and think about what you wanna do next, and, you know, have a sort of on-off approach. 00:56:44 - Speaker 1: That tension or the 10 weeks, Jeffrey and I have definitely had some conversations about, is that too short? Is it too long for a research project and sort of, I think my view initially was. It’s like, 0, 10 weeks is too short to do any meaningful research, and I think that’s still true, except that you shouldn’t consider those 10 to 12 weeks as the entire research. It’s a season in an 11 season lost sort of show, right? And there’s this thread across all I can switch projects and Potluck will infuse other projects going forward, and I think if you bring that mindset, then suddenly the 10 weeks are really great because it’s this forcing function of just not wasting 2 years trying to see if there’s a there there. You have 10 weeks, go ship something, publish it, and have it torn to pieces because it’s not good enough, right? And if you’re not embarrassed, you’re shipping too late. I am definitely embarrassed by some of the UI and the UX and the Maybe complexity that exists and it’s not a product, but the idea that it kickstars, you know, a couple of other seasons of development, I think is a good framing, and in that case, the 10 weeks, the intensity, daily stand ups. I was only on it halftime, everybody else, which I do not recommend, everybody else was on it sort of full time, and the intensity is truly what leads to this pressure cooker environment of like building something that’s both good enough that you want to play with it. But not a thing that is ready for any kind of adoption by people outside of the lab environment. 00:58:24 - Speaker 2: I’m curious about the transition from that, yeah, 10 to 12 week more intense building phase to, OK, now let’s take what we’ve learned and turn that into a written artifact or it could be sometimes a talk, but in this case it was an essay. I guess some of the question is, is all the team involved with the essay or just the writing? How do you know when you actually have something good to write about? You’ve learned something useful, which maybe could happen halfway through that 10 or 12 weeks, or maybe you get to the end and actually don’t feel like you have a lot to say. How does that whole transition work? 00:59:00 - Speaker 3: I love the writing phase because it’s where you get to figure out what you’ve done, and I think it’s really funny. This is such a cliche, but like, you start writing and it’s like, wait, what do I want to say? And it can get really confusing, and I think in some sense, even once you’ve done all the work, you haven’t actually done the work yet of figuring out what you’ve learned from it. And so, on this project, what we did is we tried as we were going to Prototype the paper, kind of. We, you know, recorded little talks explaining the project or like, wrote notes of, like, here’s how I would explain it today. But even then, when we got to, you know, the end of this intense period, there was still a lot of mess to work through, and we’ve all been involved in co-writing the piece, and I think that’s sort of important to the extent that, again, the real value that this thing is trying to provide to the world is like, here is what we learned, and the writing process is where that gets clarified, you know. 00:59:53 - Speaker 2: Do you find you wanna go back and make changes to the software as a result of things you’re writing, or especially screenshots or videos you’re including? 01:00:02 - Speaker 1: Yeah, when I read the essay now, I’m like, OK, obviously an exaggeration, but this is all wrong. We have to start again. This is how we would design it, and it’s really not that it’s all wrong. It’s just that you want to do so much more to