2014 Saveur Food Blog Awards | The Dinner Special podcast

049: Julia Gartland: Being Self-Taught and Going Gluten-Free

June 15, 2015 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

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Sassy Kitchen

Julia is a self-taught cook and baker, photographer, food stylist and recipe developer. On her blog, Sassy Kitchen, she shares gluten-free seasonal recipes and is always on the lookout for the best gluten-free version of everything. Sassy Kitchen was a finalist in the 2014 Saveur Blog Awards for Best Special Diets Blog and is a finalist again in 2015 for Best Photography.

I am so happy to have Julia Gartland of Sassy Kitchen here on the show today.

(*All images below are Julia’s.)

On Her Interest in Cooking and Food:

I liked to always cook and bake as a kid, I think it wasn’t anything too crazy but I loved having independence, being able to do that. I got more seriously into food later when I had health and digestive problems and I had to find a way to feed myself.

I found out I was gluten intolerant and decided to go vegan at the same time, so my options were very limited and I felt kind of inspired by those restrictions. It gave me the opportunity to try so many new foods and stuff.

I was always into food. I liked eating really healthy. I was raised in California. I loved hippy food and Mexican and I was always really into it, but it took a turn when it became more about health.

I don’t know if I had any real cooking mentors in my early days. I definitely think I was inspired by the issues that I had with western medicine. I remember the first time I went to a western doctor with all of my issues and I had all these PDF printouts of everything I’d been eating. He didn’t even want to look at it and just said, “Here’s some medication. You have IBS,” and sent me on my way.

I just felt like there’s something bigger going on than this. I totally believe that food is an opportunity to heal yourself and that was what got me into it in a really real way.

On Learning to Cook:

I was definitely forced to learn to cook it a new way because of my dietary issues. But through that, I really fell in love with food and I wanted to be completely absorbed in it. That’s a really good way to learn anything.

I find such inspiration from cookbooks and food blogs. Like finding someone who’s really committed to a certain way of cooking, whether it’s a cultural or otherwise, someone like Ottolenghi who has a very specific sense of food that’s so seductive and wonderful but it’s also really easy when you’re really into it.

Obviously, most of us are trying to feed ourselves. I feel like a lot of home cooks are super worried. How do you cook it? What do you do with it? They forget the aspect of play, it should be fun. It’s also not that hard.

I think generally not taking yourself so seriously. It’s okay if you make something that’s a disaster although it probably won’t be. Don’t be afraid, try new things, read cookbooks, follow recipes, pay attention and cook as much as you can.

I’m a fan of things like give yourself parameters on certain nights. Have a taco Tuesday, so you’re like, “I know I’m making tacos tonight” and you can just decide what kind of taco and then that can be the fun aspect.

On Kitchen Experiments Not Going as Planned:

I have a really good infamous one.

The first time I decided I was going to cook a whole fish was for a pescetarian Thanksgiving that I was hosting. Martha and Ina are scowling at me right now because it’s the cardinal rule of hosting to never test a new recipe. But I decided to do it and I took the fish out. It’s perfectly cooked but I had no idea how to de-bone it. I was like, “I can’t serve this to people,” and I literally just left it on the stove top and I was like, “Sorry, guys. We’re actually not having fish tonight.” And I just went on.

I was just like, “Well, I guess it’s just vegetarian, so sorry about that.”

I mean, with gluten-free baking, there’s so many. It’s just like too many to know but it always happens. It happens to everyone.

On Some Go-To Resources for Learning to Cook and Bake:

When I first started cooking and baking, I was vegan and gluten-free so my sources were super specific. But in general, I think I would recommend sources like Bon Appetite, Epicurious, The Kitchn, and Food52. They seem to have really good articles that demystify cooking and they go over actual techniques in a way that teaches you the fundamentals.

A few of them have a lot of articles about cooking without a recipe and stuff like that. It teaches you how to cook on the fly. I just think those are really helpful resources for sure.

On Starting Her Blog:

When I first went gluten-free, the best and most helpful sources were definitely food blogs. That was where I was finding all of my recipes and information. They were such a godsend at the time and through the process of changing my diet and trying new things, I craved to have the same platform to share my experiences.

I went to school for photography. I went to Parsons in New York. I was not shooting food or even still life at the time. Food or food photography was not on my radar at all, in any professional way. But through doing the blog and loving it as much as I did, I found people were really responding to that work.

The first time I ever showed food work in a class at school, the guest teacher offered me a job shooting for a magazine. So I thought maybe I should pursue this a little further.

I started in photography but I will say food photography is completely different. I was not immediately good at it. I had to work. It’s a total learning curve and it’s a lot harder than it looks I will say.

On Gluten-Free Foods:

Well, I’m sure everyone’s heard of it by now. It’s a big buzz word since it’s on every product now, even hummus, which has always been gluten-free says gluten-free on it. But it’s technically the elastic protein in wheat, it’s what makes pizza and croissant so lovely and it can also be in all of these other products like soy sauce and dressings, which it doesn’t necessarily need to be there.

That’s when I think it gets tricky for people and they don’t understand what it is. But there’s also a huge variety of gluten-free grains and products to choose from. I just saw the other day a quinoa kale puff popcorn product.

Now is the time to be gluten-free because there’s just everything. Rice is gluten-free, all rice products are gluten-free. A lot of people don’t know that. I get asked that all the time.

When in doubt, a piece of meat is always going to be gluten-free unless it’s battered. It’s like there’s a certain aspect of logic to it, but it is tricky for sure.

I do feel a lot better than I used to. Eating this way definitely suits me. I have some moments where I’m reminded of all the pain and discomfort I used to feel all the time. So I’m definitely happiest when my diet’s pretty strict and pure. That being said, it’s still not perfect. I don’t feel absolutely amazing and energized every single day, but it’s constantly evolving with what I feel best eating.

On Gluten-Free Ingredients:

There are so many, especially with the baking. I’m obsessed with gluten-free baking flours.

My favorites of all time are definitely sorghum flour, which I discovered super early on. Brown rice flour, almond flour, buckwheat flour, garbanzo bean flour, anything like that. There are so many.

Even cornmeal, things that you wouldn’t think of as being gluten-free are so amazing to cook and bake with. And then things maybe you wouldn’t have heard of are things that you use kind of to mimic gluten like xanthan gum and potato starch and tapioca flour.

But they’re so fun. Even if you’re not gluten-free, baking with buckwheat or something like that, it’s just a new thing you wouldn’t maybe go towards.

Buckwheat is this dark grayish tint and it’s very beautiful when you bake with it. And I love almond flour. I buy five pound bags of it off of Amazon. I use it very quickly. I love anything with almond flour. It’s super good and they all have a very lovely different flavor.

On Some Good Gluten-Free Cooking and Baking Resources:

I love La Tartine Gourmande and Cannelle et Vanille are both really amazing sources of inspiration. I highly recommend both of their books, especially Small Plates and Sweet Treats by Aran Goyoaga. She’s a trained pastry chef and she has this amazing Basque influence on all her recipes. They’re super great.

Also, Bojon Gourmet. She’s another ex-pastry chef and she has a ton of super great gluten-free recipes as well.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

Well I don’t really watch any shows besides Ina obviously, but I need to stop name dropping.

But I’m the biggest podcast person, I love America’s Test Kitchen. I’ve such a soft spot for them and I feel like no one gets how great they are. I love Splendid Table and Heritage Radio Network and Good Food on KCRW, and obviously, The Dinner Special as well.

What are some food blogs or food websites we have to know about?

I am in love with Amy Chaplin. I recently got her book and went through like a food renaissance ’cause her recipes are just so lovely. I so recommend her and her blog is amazing.

And you know, I keep coming back to Heidi Swanson of 101 Cookbooks. She’s still so relevant and amazing and I’m always inspired by her essence. She’s living my dream life.

Who do you follow on Pinterest, Instagram, or Facebook that make you happy?

Well, I’m huge into Instagram. That’s my favorite thing. So on and Instagram, I recently followed the chicks from Broad City who are super fun.

I’ve mostly been loving non-food ones lately, like Sight Unseen and Academy of New York. And Niche is a great one where they just post quotes from creative artists and all that stuff. And Official Sean Penn, which is just funny and great.

What is the most unusual or treasured item in your kitchen?

I love everything in my kitchen.

I’m constantly trying to get rid of stuff because I live in New York and that’s just the life, but I love everything in my kitchen. My favorite things are probably . . . my boyfriend has gotten me ceramics as gifts over the years. That was one of the first things he ever bought me and they’re definitely my treasured pieces.

Name one ingredient you used to dislike but now you love.

Capers and olives I hated until I was probably 20 years old, but now, I almost always have them in my fridge. I love them.

I think I was not into that brininess and then I went to Spain with my family and they served green olives on every table like it’s bread. I kept trying, thinking if I keep trying it, maybe something will click and it did. So keep trying!

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

I love anything by Nigel Slater, Alice Waters, The Canal House Cookbooks. And as I mentioned before, Amy Chaplin and I love Mimi Thorisson’s new book.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

It’s gotta be something on the up-side.

There’s always music in my house. My boyfriend’s a musician. He’s constantly manning the record player. But for cooking, I think Elvis Costello always puts me in a good mood.

On Keeping Posted on Julia:

On my blog, Sassy-Kitchen.com and Sassy Kitchen on all handles I guess. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, I’m on it all.

046: Valentina Solfrini: Olive Oil and Italian Countryside Living

June 8, 2015 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

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Hortus Cuisine

On her blog, Valentina writes as she explores a more natural form of cooking and food, which is always real and locally harvested. She focuses on unprocessed ingredients from her farm and makes simple traditional Italian meals with a creative, modern twist.

Hortus Cuisine was recognized in the 2014 Saveur Food Blog Awards for Best New Blog Editor’s Choice.

I am so thrilled to have Valentina Solfrini of Hortus Cuisine joining me here on the show today.

On Where She Currently Lives, Writes and Cooks:

I am placed in between two regions in Italy, one is called Marche and the other one is called Romagna, and I’m right on the border.

So each region in Italy is very different but it’s really nice because I get the best of every world. I’m right at the seaside, and I have the woods next to me, and the hills, and the countryside. So I have a little bit of everything and it’s really a great place to live in, in my opinion.

On Moving to New York City:

I wanted to really explore the world and I felt like New York City had it all condensed in one place.

So especially back then, we don’t really have much internationality, so to speak. I really wanted to explore the Asian world and the Mexican world. I wanted to know what everything was all about. I had the chance to do this trip to New York and I fell in love with it.

It was amazing.

I knew that there was a lot that I couldn’t impossibly know about other cultures, about the world and everything, but it was so much and it felt so overwhelming but in a very good way. Every time I went out the door and I walked into the street, everything seemed just so huge and I loved it.

On What Drew Her Back to Countryside Living:

Life here is quieter. The pace is much slower especially compared to New York where everybody is super-fast. Everything here is quite laid back. Nothing is really a big deal for Italians.

So sometimes we help my grandparents tend the garden, the vegetable garden or when winter comes, we go to collect the wood for the fireplace.

I have a desk job but our life really revolves around this little moment when you have to plant a seed or collect some vegetables, or me to go forage for wild herbs and stuff like that. It’s all very, very close to nature.

On Her Interest in Food and Cooking:

Food was one of those things that fell into the realm of the things that I took for granted because it’s something that always happen in my house.

My mom and my grandmother, they were always cooking, always. I’m lucky because I was in one of those families where women can stay at home and take care of us and the kids, and they’d be cooking, making pasta or baking something or anything.

I pretty much always learned to appreciate good food. We never really had anything processed or we didn’t buy snacks or anything even as kids because we felt that we didn’t need them. We never liked candy or anything just because my mom made amazing sweets at home.

I love to look at my mom doing stuff. I wouldn’t always do something but I would always stay there and look or sometimes would maybe shape the cookies or shape the pasta.

I would help or sometimes I would eat when she was cooking or lick the bowls. I was always there watching and eventually it grew on me.

When I went to New York, I was surprised that nobody was cooking. It was, “Are you serious? What, you go and buy salad that’s already been cut?”

On What Natural Cooking Means to Her:

To me, natural cooking means cooking with ingredients that have not been processed too much. Sometimes, if you learn to read the labels, you’ll see that some foods have really unnecessary ingredients.

If you buy a jar of mayonnaise, you’ll find that it has preservatives and maybe food coloring or even sugar.

So to me, natural cooking is cooking with a list of ingredients that doesn’t have a list of ingredients.

On Her Blog:

So that was a very interesting process because when I got back from New York, I realized that I had absorbed so much of other cultures that I was starting to forget about my own.

I realized that Italian cooking is actually quite healthy by itself. It has always been full of legumes and vegetables and there were so many recipes that are Italian and perfectly vegetarian, so I thought it would be interesting to rediscover my own culture with natural food. And I thought of combining those two things and it worked wonders.

I started the blog as a way to explore my own country. I realized that I didn’t understand Italy because I was feeling so good in New York and I didn’t really feel Italian. And then in the process, I rediscovered cooking and I really started to learn about the foods that we used have as kids and to really, really fall in love with it.

On Olive Oil:

Once the olives are at a good ripeness point in November, it’s usually November, you lay huge nets below the trees and you have little rakes and you rake through the branches and the olives fall out. Then you collect those huge nets of olives and these olives are cleaned.

You separate leaves from the olives and this is quite important because if your leaves get into the olives, then the olive oil taste like grass, and that happens a lot. So you have to be careful with that process.

And then we take it to the mill. I call it a mill. It’s just basically this huge stone, you have two grinding stones, pretty much like flour, and that’s why it’s called cold pressed extra virgin olive oil. The very first layer of fat that you get out of this cold pressing, grinding between two stones, then the olive oil just filters out and you get this bright green beautiful thing but it’s actually murky. It’s not as clear.

Olive oil actually gets that golden and that clear when it’s about four or five months old. When it’s super fresh, it’s bright green and quite cloudy. And that’s it, that’s virgin olive oil.

Then you have other kinds of olive oil that are lesser quality. You can obtain by pressing what is left by pressing extra virgin olive oil.

And then you have another press which is regular olive oil.

What I’ve always seen in Italy was extra virgin olive oil. It might be very bad quality extra virgin olive oil, with olives they are not Italian that come from other countries, but we only cook with extra virgin olive oil essentially.

You have great quality extra virgin oil and you have so so quality extra virgin oil and you use the so so for cooking, for stir fries and for stuff like that, and the best quality for dressing.

That’s my experience at least.

I think that the best olive oil, it has to be quite a strong character. It’s really difficult to tell maybe by the color or the smell because it really depends on the kind of olive or on how old the olive oil is.

But usually the green sort of cloudy olive oil is really the best and it’s actually quite difficult to plant and sell because that’s going to be very expensive.

I saw that some supermarkets or some stores had a little sampler with bread that you could try, and at the end of the day, if it’s virgin olive oil, you should just taste it and see if you like it.

You can tell olive oil from extra virgin olive oil because regular olive oil is much clearer and it has a more pale color. So that’s how you tell.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

I love to watch Jamie Oliver. Just whatever he does, he puts such passion in it that I just love watching his enthusiasm.

What are some food blogs or food websites we have to know about?

There are so many. I love Green Kitchen Stories. They got me inspired to actually start a blog. They were probably the first bloggers that I started to follow seriously.

And then there is another one that’s called In The Making By Belen, which is a healthy food blog. She is a yoga teacher who shares vegetarian recipes. They are really awesome.

And then there is Beth Kirby from Local Milk. She is like pure aesthetics. I love her blog so much.

And then Skye McAlpine’s blog From My Dining Table. She talks about Venice in such a beautiful way.

Who do you follow on Pinterest, Instagram, or Facebook that make you happy?

I follow definitely Beth Kirby, again, on Pinterest. She has a well-organized Pinterest account. It’s so so beautiful.

And then I love to follow Japanese photographers on Instagram. I’m not sure about the names right now but just a bunch of Japanese people. I really love the bright style that they have.

My favorites to follow on Facebook are probably everybody who has something to do with healthy food and Mimi Thorisson from Manger, the French blog. She is amazing. She really has quite the sense for aesthetics as well.

What is the most unusual or treasured item in your kitchen?

My Vitamix. It’s unusual for Italy because actually when I bought it, it wasn’t available here and I had to buy it from Germany but I love it so much.

It’s probably the best spent money of my entire life. I use it every day, two times per day. I love it.

Some ingredients are really hard to find in Italy, so I have to make my own like almond milk.

Name one ingredient you used to dislike but now you love.

That has to be sesame oil or sesame in general.

I wasn’t into sesame probably because it’s not that known in Italian cooking. It’s not an ingredient that we use. But then I started to experiment with Asian cooking and Middle Eastern cooking and, of course, sesame is there.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

Actually, the cookbooks I cook from are those old cookbooks made from the 50s or from the 70s that have those very nice recipes that I love to reinterpret in a healthier way.

And then I have my favorite cookbook to look at is probably Isa Does It. It’s a vegan cookbook that is so so full of fun ideas. I don’t think it’s always healthy but it’s amazing.

I also love to read the Julia Child’s cookbook because it’s amazing. Just so well done. It’s my kind of cookbook.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

I don’t have a song in particular. I guess all French or Italian songs get me in the mood. There are a bunch of French songs that really getting me in the mood for cooking.

Old French songs, maybe like Edith Piaf. You know these people but maybe the happier kind of songs. Not the super romantic French songs.

On Keeping Posted on Valentina:

You can follow me on Facebook at Hortus Cuisine, Pinterest, then I’m on Instagram, and I love receiving comments of all kinds. I look forward to hearing from people who write in on my blog.