Cookbook Author | The Dinner Special podcast

138: Alanna Taylor-Tobin: Behind the Pages of Alternative Baker

September 7, 2016 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

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Alternative Baker cookbook

I am so excited to welcome Alanna Taylor-Tobin of The Bojon Gourmet back to the show today. The last time we talked was over a year ago. And Alanna has been busy working on a bunch of awesome stuff. One thing in particular is her cookbook called, Alternative Baker: Reinventing Dessert with Gluten-Free Grains and Flours. I’m super psyched to have her here today to chat about her labour of love. And to learn about the process of putting her book together.

(*All photos below are Alanna’s.)

On Her Cookbook, Alternative Baker:

I really wanted to write a cookbook about rustic fruit desserts because that’s my favorite way to cook. It’s like using what’s in season and how do you take those perfectly ripe peaches and make them even better than they are on their own? And I’m gluten sensitive so I’ve been playing with different flours for the last decade or so. I think actually the thing that made me really want to write this book was my gluten-free pie dough, which I’m really proud of. It’s so delicious. I just wanted to really highlight that in the book. And how you can create these great flavours and textures from these alternative flours. The publisher was really excited about the alternative flours aspect of it so we sort of put the two together and we came up with this concept of alternative grains and flours, but also seasonal fruits and vegetables. It makes for this really vibrant, colourful, fun cookbook.

In October, it will be two years since the initial e-mail exchange. I started working on the book actually right when we had talked the last time in January of 2015 but it was brand new and I hadn’t told anyone about it yet. I had eight months for the recipes and manuscripts and then an additional month for the photographs after that. And then it was tying up things and doing editing. Then it’s been at the printer being printed.

So it will be almost two years from start to finish.

On Creating a Cookbook for All Skill Levels:

I didn’t really think about that at first. The thing that really made that become important to me was when I started sending my recipes out to testers. I ended up with I think 60 or 80 recipe testers, just volunteers or friends or readers. I really wanted to get each recipe tested by at least two different people because gluten-free baking is so finicky. And so I just really wanted to make sure at least two people could make each recipes before they went into print and went out to the masses.

When the testers started making these recipes I really realized like, this isn’t just a hypothetical person who I don’t know, who’s anonymous and who buys the book years in the future. This is my teacher from pastry school making this or this is an old friend of mine, this is a reader who I have a nice rapport with. I want to make this recipe really easy for them and make it as good as possible, and as streamlined as possible. I realized I was already asking a lot for people to go find these obscure flours to use and also seasonal produce that maybe was not in season or was hard to find. So I started to try to simplify things.

On an Instant Household Classic for a Beginner:

I have a few recipes. And actually, I have a full section in the book that lists the simpler recipes or the more complex ones. If you’re a flour child, F-L-O-U-R, then you can make these simpler recipes that don’t use many flours or these easy to find flours. Up to you. If you’re a grainiac then you can make these crazy recipes with more obscure flours. And so one recipe is a brownie recipe that is adopted from Alice Medrich who’s the goddess of baking, gluten-free baking and alternative flour baking. And her brownie recipe is just…it’s amazing. You whip the eggs with the sugar so you get the light and airy, but they’re really dense and fudgy, and chocolate-y at the same time. But it’s totally easy to make and you can use pretty much any flour in there. There’s so much chocolate and eggs to stick it together. The ones in my book have chestnut flour in them. It makes an extra earthy, rich brownie with this delicious buttery texture.

On Probably the Most Challenging Recipe in the Cookbook:

There is one recipe. I think it’s probably the most challenging recipe in the book. And it’s not necessarily hard to make. But it’s just sort of a pain in the butt. And it’s this trifle… When you make a chiffon cake, just add like a citrus flavor in the chiffon cake… And the chiffon cake is like, it’s just really easy to make. It just takes a little bit of technique that you have to whip the egg whites and then fold them into the batter so you have to know how to do that. And then you make a Zabaglione… Zabaglione is such an annoying dessert because first you have eight egg yolks and what are you going to do with those egg whites. That’s annoying just to begin with. And you put sugar and I put Lillet Blanc in it. It’s that aperitif…It’s a wine base that has these citrus, honey flavors in it. So delicious. So you put that with the egg yolks and then sugar. And you put it in a hot water bath. You have to whisk it and you have… You’re sweating and there’s steam coming up from the pot and it’s burning you, you have to just keep whipping and whipping, mixing by hand with the whisk until it get’s really frothy. And then you have to chill it. Then you have to fold heavy cream into it. It’s such a pain to make it but it’s just like nothing else. It’s just this super silky, fluffy, light sort of custard that is layered with the chiffon cake and soaked with more citrus juice and more Lillet, and then layered with winter citrus fruits, like oranges and grapefruits and tangerines. It’s this amazing really impressive looking dessert. But it’s really a pain to make.

On a Surprising Challenge That was Different From Blogging:

The thing that snuck up on me was that when I’m photographing for my blog, first of all, I do those process shots. And so I get to warm up…you don’t just go sprint out the door. You stretch and you start slowly and work up to it. When shooting for my blog, I realized shooting these process shots was kind of a warm up to get the final beauty shots at the end. And then with the book, it was only the finished shot. It kind of surprised me how much it helps me when I’m shooting for my blog to have this warm up period to the beauty shot. Also, just being creative under pressure was really hard for me.

With my blog, it’s free content, it doesn’t matter if it’s not perfect. But, with the book, it kind of put the fear in me. First of all, there was this intense deadline – all these other people are waiting on. For my blog if don’t post one week it doesn’t matter really. No one’s mad at me. For the book they had this deadline and I had to try to be creative and really think on my feet and just come up with interesting shots. At first I felt paralyzed. Because it was just so different and it just felt really difficult.

On If We Can Expect More Cookbooks in the Future:

I think I’m crazy enough to do this thing again. I don’t have kids but I would imagine, your first kid, is like you have no idea what you are doing.

It would be nice to do a second book to apply all of those things first of all. But also I love the whole process, making all these recipes that all fit together. For the blog, I do that to some extent on the blog, but it’s not the same as like having it all together in a book and pulling all these different influences and flavors and everything and having it all come together into a book. That was really satisfying and I’d love to do that again.

On How to Get our Hands on Alternative Baker:

Well it comes out September 13th. And it can be preordered through anywhere. Amazon, Barnes & Noble, your local bookstore, Books-a-Million, any retailers of books you can preorder it. And if you want to find out more about the book you can go to alternativebaker.com and that’s my cookbook page. I talk all about the book there.

136: Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack: Passing On the Flavours of Mexico

August 17, 2016 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

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Muy Bueno

On her blog, Muy Bueno, Yvette shares her family stories and takes her readers on a journey through old-world northern Mexican cuisine, traditional south of the border home-style dishes, and Latin fusion recipes. Muy Bueno was a finalist in the Saveur Blog Awards in 2012 and 2014, and Yvette has published two cookbooks: Muy Bueno: Three Generations of Authentic Mexican Flavor and Latin Twist: Traditional and Modern Cocktails.

I am so thrilled to have Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack of Muy Bueno joining me here on the show today.

(*All photos below are Yvette’s.)

On The Role Food Played in Her Home:

I grew up in El Paso, Texas, which so many people think, “Oh, you have Tex-Mex food,” but if you’ve ever been to El Paso, it’s pretty much Mexico. Our home is literally a mile away from the Juarez Mexico border. My grandmother came from Chihuahua, Mexico, when she was 10 years old. She’s passed away. She passed away when she was 98 years old, but my mom was a single parent and we lived next door to my grandma. So it was basically my mom and my grandma who raised me, and it was food all the time. It was either see my mom in the kitchen all the time or my grandma in the kitchen. And that was why I named “Muy Bueno” what it is because my grandma would always be in the kitchen, and just anytime any visitors would come, she would always say, “Siéntate a comer, esta muy bueno,” which means, “Sit down, come and eat, it’s very good.” And so every time I thought about my grandma and trying to come up with a blog name, that name just kept coming to me.

My grandma was just always in the kitchen and I was always in there with her. I just loved to sit there and watch her make homemade flour tortillas. And I just couldn’t wait to get home from school and just sit there and just listen to her stories. She would just tell me, you know, growing up in the ranch in Chihuahua, Mexico, and during the Mexican revolution, and crossing over to Texas with her family when she was only 10 years old, and just how scary it was. And the things that she experienced, I just found it fascinating. I could just hear her stories over and over and over again. I just loved sitting there and just watching her cook. And that was what I fell in love with.

Although, growing up, what’s so funny is seeing her in the kitchen, my mom always in the kitchen, that was where I did not want to be. I just felt like they were under appreciated and just always there. But as I became a mom, I realized that’s just your gift to your family. And that’s your showing your love to your family, and that’s when I fell in love with cooking, once I had my own children. But in my teens and college, I was like anti the kitchen, anti-cooking.

On Rediscovering the Kitchen:

Everybody would tease me, my family would, especially my brother. He’s seven years older than me and he still teases me, thinking, “Oh, you still don’t cook. You just play one on the Internet.” Because he would be the biggest one. My grandma, too, would say I’m never gonna find a man because I didn’t like the kitchen. It was just like a running family joke. But it’s not that I didn’t know how to cook. I just chose not to cook. My love in the kitchen was when I would entertain. I would love to have friends and family over, and that’s when I would get creative and have fun, when I knew I could cook for a crowd.

It was until I had children, I was like, “Okay, now I kinda have to cook.” So that’s when I started calling my mom and asking, “Okay, How do I make some of these recipes?” She never had it written down. I never bothered to write them down. I would just make them as she was telling me over the phone. And so that’s how I would learn some of the traditional dishes that I grew up with.

Still to this day, when I make a dish that my grandma would make often, I just seriously feel her. I just know that she’s watching me and guiding me in the kitchen. So it’s really cool.

On Her Cookbook, Muy Bueno: Three Generations of Authentic Mexican Flavor:

That was really challenging when we tried to come up with our tagline or subheading. It’s like authentic could be very misleading, I guess. People could be very judgmental when it comes to any type of cuisine, whether it’s authentic or not authentic. Everybody’s definition of authenticity is very different. And when it comes to cooking, it depends on what region. I just came back from Oaxaca, Mexico, and there were so many dishes and ingredients that I have never heard of. So my chicken mole is completely different than a mole that’s made in Oaxaca, Mexico. That’s why we named it “authentic flavor.” We’re not claiming that it’s authentic Mexican, but that it’s authentic to us, and it’s the flavor of Mexico that we know and love.

I just posted a recipe not too long ago of this very authentic traditional dish called chiles en nogada. And it’s not a dish that we necessarily grew up with, but I researched it enough and learned how to make it to share it with my fans. And there’ll always be somebody who’s like, “No, this is not authentic, because an authentic chiles en nogada, you have to peel the walnuts.” And it’s like, sometimes, I skip steps to try and make it easy for the everyday cook. Who has a time to be peeling walnuts?

So just little things like that, I try to make dishes that are authentic in flavor, but are easier to make and maybe adding a spin where it’s a healthier dish or just making it more simple, but keeping those traditional and authentic flavors in there.

On Co-Writing a Second Cookbook, Latin Twist: Traditional & Modern Cocktails:

It was funny because you never know who you’re gonna meet. That’s what I love about blogging is it’s opened up so many new relationships that sitting in my old job in a cubicle, I would have never had the opportunity to meet. And Vianney is another Latina blogger who is from Texas. So we automatically had that connection, and I followed her blog, she followed my blog. And one event, we went with Nestle to go to California and be a part of a tamalada.

And that evening, we were both flying out and had a long delay at the LA airport. We’re like, “Let’s get some cocktails.” And so we started with one cocktail, and another cocktail. She has a great section in her blog that’s called Margarita Love. And so I kept telling her, “Vianney, you need to write a margarita cookbook, you know, margarita cocktail book.” She’s like, “Yeah, that’s my goal. I wanna do that.” I was like, “Well, let me know if you need help, and I can design it for you, or I can talk to the publisher that I worked with and see if they might be interested.” And she was like, “Okay, okay.”

And so then, after I was on the plane and we parted ways, I was thinking, “I need to do something with her. I don’t wanna steal her thunder with a margarita book, because I would love for her to still do that on her own, but we need to team up together and write a cocktail book, not only just of margaritas, and not only just of Mexican cocktails, but cocktails of Latin America and Spain. And so that’s how the idea started. I approached her saying, “How about we team up together and we write a cocktail book together and share both of our loves of these fun cocktails that usually end up being Latin-inspired.”

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

I love anything with Giada or Rick Bayless or Pati Jinich. It’s not so much of the show, but more about who’s cooking and who captivates my attention.

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

I would say White on Rice Couple. I’ve just always loved their photography style and just their whole life in general. They have this gorgeous garden and these orchards. It just looks fabulous. I also love Matt Bites, Matt Armendariz. I just love that he’s a Latino. He seems like he would be a fun friend. I love his photography and his styling. He works with his partner who has an amazing eye for food styling. And just together, they do some magic. For me, it’s all about visuals and photography, and capturing the story with it. And so those blogs have always kept my interest.

I also love Foodiecrush. She has an amazing, a completely different sense of style, where I think it’s more modern and clean, and she also has a background in graphic design. So I love her clean space when it comes to styling food.

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

I follow a lot of yogis on Instagram. I just love yoga girl, and she just always has some inspirational messages. It’s just neat to see all these amazing yoga poses that she does in the middle of nowhere, or like super tropical, exotic amazing spaces. But I just love that she always has positive messages or inspiring quotes, always to her photos.

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

That’s an easy one. It’s my grandmother’s rolling pin. After she passed away, my mom asked me what it was that I would love from my grandma, and I just wanted that rolling pin that she would make flour tortillas with every day. And so come to find out she had two rolling pins, and my sister asked for one too. So we each got a rolling pin. I think it’s kind of like a baton, like your turn. It’s time to continue that legacy and those traditions of food with your family.

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

I would say nopales, which are cactus petals. It’s not even so much that I didn’t love it. It’s just we didn’t really grow up eating them very often. When I saw them, it was more in a jar and they just looked slimy and they just didn’t appeal to me. And so it was not, until recently, where it’s like you can honestly get them fresh. I put them in a smoothie every morning or mix some scrambled eggs or just in a fresh salad, it’s just such a fun ingredient that I think it’s underrated and it needs to be used more often.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

I love Rick Bayless. I love Pati Jinich. I also love Marcela Valladolid. Anything Mexican, I just love to, not only read the recipes, but read their history or learn how they make the recipes. It’s just interesting, because you can have a tres leches cake in all the books, and they’ll all be completely different. I love seeing the variety of the same Mexican dish and how it’s made by different Mexican chefs.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

I would say any old Mexican music. There’s Paloma Blanca, which is a white dove. And there’s another one called De Colores. So they’re just two old Mexican songs, and it’s like I’m flooded back with feelings of my grandma, racing to go pump up the volume and sing. Now I sing those songs and turn up the volume for those songs, and just know that grandma is there watching me cook, singing with me.

On Keeping Posted with Yvette:

I think Instagram’s definitely my new love. That’s where I post the latest and greatest, also on Facebook. I’m not on Snapchat yet. I do have an account, but I haven’t caught on to the Snapchat wagon, which I’m sure I will soon. But yeah, for now, definitely Instagram on Muy Bueno Cooking. And on Facebook, it’s under Muy Bueno Cookbook.

135: Meredith Steele: From Stay-at-Home Mom to Food Entrepreneur

August 10, 2016 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

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Steele House Kitchen

Meredith left her job as a graphic designer to become a stay-at-home mom after her daughter was born. During this time, she created her blog In Sock Monkey Slippers, started her own recipe development company, and was a finalist in the 2013 SAVEUR Blog Awards. At the end of 2015, insockmonkeyslippers.com evolved into Steele House Kitchen, a space where Meredith shares moments of laughter, inspiration, and creativity around good, honest food.

I am so psyched to have Meredith Steele of Steele House Kitchen joining me on the show.

(*All photos below are Meredith’s.)

On Becoming a Stay-at-Home Mom:

For many years, I was in advertising and graphic design, behind the scenes, and photo shoots, and everything. Everything was just fast paced. And then my husband and I became pregnant, and very excited, but things just kind of went wrong from day one. And Mia decided that she wanted to come out four months early, which left me kind of… Everything stopped. Your job stops, your life stops, and you end up just living in the hospital. So we did. I lived in the hospital for five months. She came home perfectly healthy; just smart, great kid. But she came home and had immune sensitivity. So she couldn’t be out in the world.

We were imprisoned in our house for a year until her immune system could catch up with a regular baby and toddler at the time. So obviously, I had to leave my job. And you know, cooking has always been one of those things that I’ve just absolutely loved from the time I was little. It’s just always been in my life. It’s not that being a mom is boring. It’s the complete opposite, but I kept looking for something for me to do, just to have… So I can just take 30 minutes a day just to become myself again. I just went back to my passion which was cooking, and then also photography, which I’ve been doing ever since I was a teenager. So I realized that I wanted to cook for my daughter who was now able to eat foods, and she had very sensitive gastro problems because of prematurity.

Everything had to be very strict, and very pure, and no preservatives. Not even jarred baby food was good, because some had food coloring in it. She’s allergic to food coloring and just everything. So I just broke it down to basics and started making baby food. And I had the blog to let everyone know how she was doing in her transition from hospital to home.

And then all of a sudden, I was like, “Well, you know, we’ll just cook baby food. Let’s put this recipe,” because people were starting to ask for it. And then I had a baby food company come and say, “Could you start doing recipe development for our company?” This was crazy. Maybe this could be my next transition in life. It’s becoming a light-bulb moment. Let’s maybe try this out.

On Starting Her Company, MBS Recipe Development:

It really came in a time when my husband changed careers and decided he wanted to be a sommelier. So he wanted to go back to school, which left us with no income. I was already working for Disney at the time, doing recipe development for a few websites of theirs. I thought, “Well, you know, let’s pay more attention to the recipe development company. Let’s create a company, pay more attention to this. Put blogging on the sideline for right now, so I could basically pay the mortgage.”

And it worked, and it was something I really, really enjoy doing. So it’s really strange how blogging can take you other places than just a blog. It was just one company after one company. I started with Disney, then BBDO, which is a PR company, came and started working with a lot of their clients. And now, I work for pretty much almost all the major PR companies. I work with some small ones, too. PR companies are my most prevalent client, but, I also work for some local restaurants. A lot of editorial…I work with a lot of local magazines here, statewide magazines.

On Her Cookbook, Effortless Entertaining Cookbook:

I got a call one day from a publisher, and they just said, “We would really like to do a book with you.” I thought, “Okay. Am I ready for this?” I’m not really sure, and I said, “Well, what’s the timeline?” They said, “Well, you’ve got about four months.” I thought, “Oh, no. Sorry, go find yourself someone else because this isn’t going to work.” But I thought about it, and it was one of those very failsafe contracts where when you publish a book through a publishing house, they do, I wouldn’t say own the book, but they’re very responsible for the book. So if things fail, you kind of have a good padding to fail on. And I kept thinking, “Well, I know I want to write a book. Maybe this is the way to go,” just to get my feet wet and see if this is going to be safe.

I thought, “Okay, let’s just see how a cookbook is even written,” because I did not know the first thing about it. So they walked me through the process, and gave me a nice advance so I could leave work. And it’s been good so far. So we sat there and had a brainstorming session about what we were going to do, and I think it all just came along when I was in my office staring at racks of wine that my husband is hoarding for, you know, clients and everything. I thought how we entertain a lot. Like every weekend we’re trying to… I test recipes on our friends, he tests wine on our friends. So let’s write a book about that.

So we wrote a book about entertaining. How about we do it effortless? And I said, “Okay. Effortless Entertaining,” and that was the name of the book. It’s a collection of seasonal recipes that you can pull together ahead of time really simply or pull together in the last 20 minutes.

It’s available for pre-order now, and it’s called Effortless Entertaining Cookbook.

It was a fun book to create, because we had a lot of people come over and help me out with the photography and everything.

Another good thing about having my husband, you know, in the drink business was he was able to pair almost every recipe with wine or beer. So I think when you’re waiting for your party and you’re about to get in, you’re at the grocery store and you’re buying everything. You come to that wine aisle, and you’re like, “Oh, what I’m I going to serve? What’s cheapest or what’s the best?” It’s so confusing. And so he’s been able to provide a few options for everything, and make it easier.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

Not that many. I totally missed the days of PBS, those cooking shows. If PBS is on rerun, I’d watch all those. I like America’s Test Kitchen. Sometimes I’ll just go with some old school Ina Garten. She’s pretty awesome, but I rarely watch cooking shows. I rarely have time to turn on the TV.

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

A Thought For Food, Brian Samuels. That’s a great blog. I absolutely love it. Brian and I have been on a few media trips before. And the way he cooks is very fresh, and very creative. And some of his recipes really inspire me on, “Oh, that’s a great combination. I never even thought about that.” So definitely that one. I also…I don’t know if it’s really like a food blog but Serious Eats. I like that one a lot. There is a cocktail blog I’m really into right now, it’s more of a website called Punch. I enjoy reading and look forward to their post. It’s really informative. Those are the three right now that I read a lot.

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

I’m not on Facebook too much. Snapchat either. But I do love Instagram. So a lot of food stylists I follow on Instagram, I like Jamie Oliver’s account. I know that’s just really basic, but I worked for him for a little bit and their whole department is really fun to follow.

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

My most favored item is my grandma’s strainer. It’s really cool. It was her grandmother’s. It’s like 1901. It’s this really punched metal thing that looks like it’s been beaten up. But it’s my most treasured thing. If that was not in my kitchen, I don’t think I could function. It’s huge. It’s like the size of a large wok. It’s amazingly that big.

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

Anchovies. I hated Anchovies as a kid, and I put them in everything now. Every salad dressing is gonna have anchovy in it. Sometimes I just…like pizza dough, like a flat bread. Put a little anchovy on it, and it’s just so good. It’s ridiculous, but like…and fish sauce. I didn’t like fish sauce and miso. Things like umami flavors that you can never even tell that they’re in a dish, but lend this nice blanket to kind of push up your flavor. So miso is definitely something that I did not like for a long time, but I’d put it in my chicken stock and it’s really nice. It brings a great flavor, and anchovies in my salad dressings.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

There is one I’ve enjoyed and I look through it a lot, because it’s a seasonal cookbook. I think pretty much any seasonal cookbook really makes my life easier, because I know I can just switch to that season because we do eat very seasonally here. But there’s one called The Farm.

The Farm, that makes my life a lot easier. It’s very simple recipes, and it’s such a great story. I love cookbooks that have good stories. April Bloomfield cookbooks are wonderful. And The Flavor Bible is my bible. It does not leave my desk. It is with me wherever I go. For those who don’t know, it is this compilation of flavor pairings, basically anything. Any food, any flavor, any season. Reads like a dictionary. You just pick it up, go to the food you want and see what will pair. I think I use it on a daily basis.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

Everything, there is always music. Sometimes like I’ll have interns come in and they’re, you know…they put dance music on. I’m like, “Okay, it’s a dance day. Let’s do it.” But right now I’m listening to Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats, a lot of him right now. That just makes me want to cook. It’s like outrageous, kind of soul and got a beat. It depends on what I’m cooking, too. If it’s in the winter and it’s like a slow risotto, I get some Nina Simone or some Miles Davis.

On Keeping Posted with Meredith:

Instagram for sure, it’s just @meredithbondsteele.

134: Joumana Accad: Sharing a Taste of Beirut

August 3, 2016 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

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Taste of Beirut

Born and raised in Beirut, Lebanon, Joumana moved to the U.S. in 1979 and is a former school teacher, pastry chef, caterer and translator. She started her blog, Taste of Beirut, in 2009 to share a window into the Eastern Mediterranean where Lebanese food mixes with Turkish, Syrian, Persian, Iraqi, and Egyptian flavors. Joumana was a finalist in the 2012 SAVEUR Blog Awards, has shared over 1200 recipes on Taste of Beirut, and published a cookbook, Taste of Beirut. Today, she works both in the U.S. and in Lebanon as a food stylist, recipe developer, menu consultant, and a cooking instructor.

I am so excited to have Joumana Accad of Taste of Beirut with me here on the show today.

(*All photos below are Joumana’s.)

On the Role Food Played While Growing Up in Beirut, Lebanon:

When you are born and brought up in one place, you don’t begin to realize how special it is until you move out of that environment into a completely different environment. And that’s what happened with me when I moved to the U.S. It suddenly dawned on me what the words fresh and local meant. For example, my grandmother who lived with us and she was in charge of feeding us, she would buy her fruits and her veggies every single day by lowering a straw basket and checking out the street vendors, and then even bargaining with them to do her marketing for the day. And then she would cook every single day, a fresh meal. And that’s something that when you live in a country like the United States or even in Europe, it’s something that you don’t have that luxury of time. I wanted, all of a sudden, being thrown in a new culture, you feel like you want to hang on to your roots and your heritage, but you don’t know quite how to do it. That was the impetus that got me started on the blog, wanting to blog about it.

I’ve always had an interest in cooking, it just was not encouraged when I was growing up. It was not something one would, at that time, encourage people. It was more like, “You need to go to college and learn something serious like law or business.” I had no interest in. But in the U.S., left to my own devices, whatever comes naturally is what you end up doing. To me, my interest in cooking was completely natural, and I did it on my own learning, sometimes calling home and getting tips. And it just gradually developed over the years. But I think the seed was there initially.

On Lebanese Cuisine:

It’s a simple cuisine with ingredients and techniques that recur for example. When you talk about Lebanese cuisine and dairy, you’re talking about yogurt. And I’m not talking about the sweetened yoghurt with the fruit at the bottom. I’m talking about the plain, a little bit sour yoghurt that is used for sauce. If you’re making a stew or a soup, that is used as a side dish. If you’re making a pilaf with rice or with bulgur, that would be the yoghurt. There’s a lot of legumes, chickpeas being one of them, beans, lentils, a heck of a lot of lentil dishes. Simple things like citrus, lemons, you’re always squeezing lemons either in a salad or on a soup or whatever.

It’s not a sophisticated cuisine. And once you’ve learned a few techniques… And now, there are some dishes that require some more sophisticated technique, but by and large, it’s a simple cuisine that anybody can learn and that anybody can make in less than 30 minutes.

On What a Typical Lebanese Meal Looks Like:

Well, for example, you would take, say, any kind of veggie that would be in season, say artichoke. If you have an artichoke, then you would make a stew with some artichoke. The stew would not have a whole lot of meat, it would have a few pieces of shank, maybe with some bone to give more flavor. And then at the end of that stew, to give it flavor, you always add a pesto which is basically you sizzle, in some olive oil, some cilantro and some garlic. You add that at the last minute for flavor.

We have lemon, we have tahini. Tahini is essential in a pantry. Tahini would be like the Lebanese or the Levantine equivalent of butter for the French. Because with Tahini, you make your hummus, you make your dressing for your salads, you make a lot of different veggies dressed with that tahini dressing. You boil them or steam them and you add that tahini dressing. You don’t use butter, you use tahini. And tahini is a paste that’s made out of sesame seeds. That’s about it.

On Her Cookbook:

So many people were telling me, “You ought to have a cookbook,” because I was getting such a good response from the blog and getting to be a guest on radio shows, and on television, and so on. I didn’t have to struggle really. I had a publisher who was interested, HCI, famous for publishing the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, and they offered me that book deal, and I worked on it. And I basically wanted to include the core recipes that would exemplify Lebanese cuisine without going just crazy. So I just focused on that. And each recipe had a photo because I’m also the food photographer for the blog and cookbook.

I moved back to Lebanon since 2011 because I wanted to immerse myself in the cooking scene here, cook with local cooks. I thought that it would behoove me to have that experience under my belt, instead of sitting in Dallas writing about Lebanese cuisine by memory. It was a great experience, because I was able to spend half my time in the mountain and learn about country style cuisine, which is completely different from Beirut style cuisine, and cook with Lebanese cooks and learn from them some tips and techniques that I never would have had that exposure had I been still living in Texas.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

Oh, gosh! That’s an easy one. I don’t watch any.

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

I used to subscribe to French food sites, it was called cook.com. It’s a paying site, but they have chefs, French chefs, and I learned a lot from it because I thought French chefs were very creative. And it was fun, interesting and fun. I also read a lot of blogs, and they’re usually in French from North African bloggers, because this is one cuisine I’m curious about and I don’t know much about. This is a very rich cuisine in terms of cultural history, variations, all these different tribes. It’s very interesting to me, so I’m learning. I like to learn more than just read a blog because it’s trendy or something.

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

I like Instagram. To me it’s the best medium, because it’s quick and easy, and yeah, it’s an instant gratification. I follow a lot of world famous photographers, for example.

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

I can tell you my treasured, because I would not be in any kitchen if I don’t have it, it’s my garlic mortar. It’s a special wooden mortar specifically for garlic. I refuse to use that garlic press thing. It has to be mashed, and so you have to pound the garlic with some salt or something to make it pasty.

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

Oh, easy, eggplant. I used to hide the eggplants when I was in school, in elementary school, in the pocket of my apron, so I wouldn’t have to eat it. Of course, I have changed 180 degrees as far as eggplant is concerned in my adult years.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

I’m on a constant search for deepening my knowledge of Middle Eastern cuisine. So for example, if I read a cookbook, I want it to not just have a bunch of recipes. That, to me, is not interesting. I want to know the why and the history behind it, and all this. So for example, there’s some cookbooks on Persian Cuisine that I’m really enjoying, because they really go in depth on the history behind the dishes and interesting works like that.

Well, there’s, for example…her name is Margaret but she wrote a book on Persian Cuisine. There’s also Najmieh Batmanglij who also published some beautiful book on Persian cuisine, beautiful photography. Those are cultures that I’m interested in, that I want to learn more about, and the cookbook does the job. It delivers not just recipes, but the whole holistic thing of the culture.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

Well, not classical. Classical makes me want to sleep. Anything from, let’s say, the late ‘70s onwards is good. My son introduced me to Linkin Park. And yeah, I’d go for Linkin Park. I’d go for something like from ‘80s, like Fleetwood Mac, I like this kind of stuff.

On Keeping Posted with Joumana:

Well, I’m pretty active on Instagram these days. So you just go on Taste of Beirut.

114: Cathy Erway: Eating In and The Food of Taiwan

March 16, 2016 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

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Not Eating Out in New York

From 2006 to 2008, Cathy made a commitment to stay away from eating out in restaurants, having street food and take out, so she could explore other avenues of not eating out. She wrote a book about her experience called, The Art of Eating In. More recently, Cathy published a cookbook that looked into her mother’s home cooking roots called, The Food of Taiwan. In addition to her writing, Cathy has been interviewing guests on her weekly podcast, Eat Your Words, on Heritage Radio Network since 2009.

I’m so happy to have Cathy Erway of Not Eating Out in New York with me here on the show today.

(*All photos below are Cathy’s.)

On Committing to Not Eating Out in New York:

It was a series of frustrations, like a bad restaurant meal here and there. Who hasn’t had that and then felt like, “Gosh, I could make something much better. Let me just figure out how to get into the habit of it.” I think that’s the hard part, is getting into the habit of it. It’s a routine switch rather than like a food or…I think it’s eating preference for many people. So that happened. And then at the same time I wanted to start a food blog. At this time, 2006, most of the websites and blogs that I saw were all about restaurant gossip, the hottest new chef, this opening, that closing, and all that stuff.

I wanted to do something different because I didn’t think that food has to be about the industry of restaurants necessarily, which is fun, but I also didn’t have the budget for it, too. Who does? When you’re young and you’re into food and you drop $50 plus on a meal. So I decided to make my blog about home cooking. And then I want to give myself a challenge and give the blog something new to talk about.

On Things She Had to Get Used to With This Project:

Well, the social dilemmas of not eating out in New York were actually some of the most fun adventures that I had. But you have to try to bring people together in a communal situation that doesn’t have to do with restaurants. So that meant for me at the time, potlucks, dinner parties. And then I got really into throwing cook-offs and going to them and participating in all sorts of community events. There were supper clubs and all these really fun, amazing, community events to do. So that became my social life, and I met a lot of my friends through those.

On Dumpster Diving:

I wanted to explore all the ins and outs of what not eating out in New York meant. I was interested in foraging in the park. I learned that many people were doing this, gathering dandelion greens for a salad and this and that. I also heard about freeganism. The concept is basically reusing.

So if you have ever picked up some books that you saw on the street or a chair, this is pretty much like that, except its good food that is being wasted by a supermarket or maybe it’s a restaurant or something like that. But for the most part the freegan circles that I ran into and explored and went on walks and trash diving, it was supermarkets and also bakeries, too. Bakeries have so much leftover at the end of the day. If you walk into a nice bakery and you see all those bagels or croissants or something, at the end of day, they’re going into a dumpster.

On Her Book, The Art of Eating In:

I was writing the blog, Not Eating Out In New York, for a couple of years when I got approached by agents. And at that point I didn’t have an idea for a book. Cookbook didn’t seem quite right, but the agent wanted me to write a memoir, but I didn’t really have the story yet. I felt like I was just getting into it, I was just learning about all these interesting communities like a freegan. So, I wasn’t quite there yet. I really sat on the idea for about a year or so until I began writing this book.

It was great. It was definitely written almost in real time too, but it pushed me to explore more folks who were doing really interesting things with food.

On What She Enjoys About Eating In:

I think that people have this misconception like it’s really lonely and it’s sad and they have this image of a person in their small insufficient kitchen with their insufficient cookware and so forth. So to get started, I would have a dinner party with a few good friends who you don’t mind just getting a little messy in the kitchen with, and maybe messing up some dishes with.

And you’ll see it’s a lot of fun. And what will happen usually is that it becomes this domino effect and your other friends will want to host the dinner next, and then, you will go from there. You’ll want to also improve upon something that you made last time. So it has an infectious quality to it. I think that’s a fun way to really get into cooking.

The funny thing is that the habit actually is easier once you’re cooking more often because you have not only just more know-how about what works when you’re cooking, but you have all these leftover odds and ends in your fridge. It actually becomes easier to just heat up that rice and then make fried rice with half a head of broccoli and something else rather than order out. So convenience, it can actually happen more often when you’re cooking.

On Her Book, The Food of Taiwan:

It took a long time, a lot longer than I thought. So The Food of Taiwan I think is something that a lot of folks who are interested in food would find super delicious and interesting. All the flavors that go into this wonderful tropical island and all the cultures that have contributed to it is really interesting. It’s where my mother grew up. But growing up and even to this day as a young person in New York, little is talked about with regards to Taiwan and especially Taiwanese food.

When I was shopping this book around originally, this was in 2011. In fact, a lot of awkward conversations would arise when people just didn’t really know what Taiwan was or where it was or why we should talk about the food of Taiwan, like, “How is it different from other Chinese food?” I would hear all the time, and I’m like, well, people are starting to understand a little bit more about the different regions throughout Asia, not just in China, and it’s also catching on in restaurants.

You see people getting into Thai food, you see people getting into Korean food, you see all sorts of niches. So it took a lot of convincing and a lot of patience and perseverance, but finally we made it happen.

On The Hardest Part About Writing The Book:

The hardest part for me was choosing about 100 recipes that I felt would really exemplify Taiwanese food. Because I don’t really have much of a precedent to go on. This is why I was hoping it would be the most comprehensive English language cookbook about Taiwanese food. I have seen some cookbooks in Taiwan, of course, but they tend to be street foods or home style foods, and I wanted to combine both home style and street food to show what is really celebrated on the island right now in food.

That was really difficult for me to whittle it down to 100 recipes and what’s the right one and all that stuff, and then of course, write all the recipes for it. My favorite part, of course, was writing the intro and the culture and the history lessons in it.

On What a Traditional Taiwanese Meal Would Look Like:

Taiwanese are actually really seasonal and they take pride in local specialties and seasonal specialties. So it really depends on the time of the year. For instance, people love really fresh, pure and not overly seasoned specialties like fresh bamboo shoots. You wouldn’t want to mess with that with too much sauce or anything like that. You just want to taste that purity of the wonderful ingredient.

Or it could be bitter melon, for instance, something really pure. So I think that to harmonize with the meal, you want one really shining star vegetable like that on the plate. And I would say that you would want a nice rich heavy meat. There’s a lot of pork belly used in Taiwan and they do it very, very well. I would do like a red braised pork belly, nice little dish. You would also typically serve that with something a little sour and piquant, like maybe some pickles, pickled cabbage, for instance, nice little crunch and contrast.

And then I would do maybe a more simmered, braised dish. So three-cup chicken is really great or three-cup squid, which is similar. And this is a clay pot simmered dish with lots of ginger, garlic, and chilies and basil at the end. With those three things, I think you can have a wonderful meal, just right there.

On Some Common Ingredients in Taiwanese Cooking:

I think that one thing they do have a lot of is little fried shallots, which is an excellent garnish. They’re crunchy and they add a little savory topping to anything. It could just be a pile of sauteed greens. Sprinkle those on or some crushed peanuts would do a similar trick. White pepper is pretty widely used in dishes and five-spice powder, but that’s more to marinate things or cook into a stew. Aside from that, there’s really not that many crazy ingredients. This is not a too heavily spiced cuisine, it is not ultra spicy, it is not ultra sweet, you don’t need all these crazy tastes. So it’s pretty accessible.

On Her Podcast:

Heritage Radio Network is a wonderful nonprofit podcast radio station. At first it was just a really random outgrowth of Heritage Foods USA. And our station was and still is at a little converted shipping container in the backyard of Roberta’s Pizza in Bushwick, Brooklyn. So over the years, that little shipping container has gotten heat and air conditioning. We have also become an actual nonprofit and we have many more shows than what was the case when the station began in 2009. I think there were like five shows.

I happened to be a guest Snacky Tunes with Greg and Darin Bresnitz. And then I had this idea for a show. After one conversation, it just happened and it’s been going since. It’s been really fun. I find it a great way to talk to people.

On Some of Her Favorite Podcast Episodes:

One of my favorite heroes in food Sandor Ellix Katz joined us for an episode. He wrote, The Art of Fermentation and Wild Fermentation. He’s just such an amazing brain. It was so great to get him on air. So definitely check that out. And I really enjoyed interviewing an old female restaurateur legend named Nora Pouillon, and she opened the first certified organic restaurant in the 70s. She was just a real pioneer in the food movement. So it was lovely to have her on air. She talked about her memoir.

In the past, the show has taken so many twists and turns. So nowadays I focus on food and books as the premise. But in the past, I used to focus on food and dating. So if you scroll down throughout the archives, you’ll see some fun ones.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

I don’t really watch any. Sorry.

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

I would say go to No Recipes, Marc Matsumoto is awesome. I’ve always liked Food52, I love Amanda and Merrill. And Chitra Agrawal, the ABCD’s of Cooking is my girl. So definitely check her out.

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

There are so many Twitter accounts out there and they always make me happy when people are joking about this and that. Lucky Peach has some good posts. I’ll give them that credit for it and they have some great photos too. So let’s say Lucky Peach.

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

Well, I do have these old molds that you’re supposed to put mooncakes in and I love them. I don’t really use them because they’re beautifully hand carved wooden molds with all of these ornate patterns. They would show up on a mooncake on the surface. I actually tried to use them but the dough gets stuck, but I love having them around. I usually put something inside and just leave it there, but yeah, they’re just beautiful old cooking tools.

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

For me that would be cheese. I am still trying to like many types of cheese. So the stinkier, the blue cheese, I’m not quite there yet. But since my 20s, I’ve been trying to eat more, trying to like more cheeses. And I know that this is crazy when it comes to most of the foodies that I know. It’s always been my Achilles heel, not really having a taste for cheese growing up. I don’t know why.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

I love Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Italian Cooking. I love Elizabeth Andoh’s Washoku, home style Japanese cooking. I learned so much from these books. They’re so comprehensive and they take such a deep dive into all these classic recipes from a culture that I didn’t grow up eating. I definitely love eating. So those are some really great staples. But on that similar note, I love to collect really great books about fill-in-the-blank regions. I have a really great book about Portugal right now, I have a great book about Senegal, all through the lens of food. So bring it on. Every single country I want to collect a cookbook of.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

Lately, I’ve been listening to lot of Latin Boogaloo, so I will say Joe Bataan’s Riot! right now. It’s just so much fun, it’s groovy, 60s Latin, New York jazz. It’s awesome.

On Keeping Posted with Cathy:

Check me out on Twitter. Also go to noteatingoutinny.com.

Eat Your Words on Heritage Radio Network. So it’s heritageradionetwork.org. You just click on the shows, find mine. And check out others, too. They’re awesome.

105: Elizabeth LaBau: Making Candy and a Sweet Food Career

January 13, 2016 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

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SugarHero

Elizabeth is a baker, photographer, writer, taste tester and chief sugar officer of SugarHero.com which she started in 2011. Elizabeth went to culinary school after college to learn about baking and patisserie, and worked for years in a number of Los Angeles restaurants and bakeries. She now makes her living developing candy and dessert recipes, writing for websites and writing cookbooks. Her first cookbook, The Sweet Book of Candy Making was published in 2012, and she writes for the About.com candy site and is a contributor to Better Homes and Gardens.

I am so pumped to have Elizabeth LaBau of SugarHero here on the show today.

(*All photos below are Elizabeth’s.)

On Discovering Her Passion for Baking:

My parents actually think it’s funny that I do this for a living because I would make a bee-line out of the kitchen whenever my mom wanted help. You would see the cartoon puff of smoke from Wile E. Coyote whenever she wanted me to do anything. So they still think it’s a little funny that this is my chosen career. But after college, I got married. I was working in a really boring office job. And I would just always be reading food blogs instead of working because that was how great of an employee I was, and I would print out recipes from these blogs and make them at home.

And so it was really the necessity of being out on my own, and having to cook, and then having all this extra time to really delve into the world of food writing and food blogs. They can have more adventurous or fun recipes than maybe your standard cookbook that I grew up cooking from. It really opened my eyes to all these people who were playing with food and making some fun things. Most of the blogs I liked reading were desserts because I have a huge sweet tooth.

That’s really where it started. It was just being out on my own in my own kitchen and finally playing with food instead of just making something my mom told me to make for dinner.

On Her Culinary School Experience:

I went in the evenings after work. I kept working while I was going to school. So it took longer, and it was a little hard to balance both things, but it was absolutely the right thing because I wasn’t committed to a culinary career. It was more like, “Well, we’ll see how I like it, and if I don’t end up wanting to do anything with it, at least, I’ll have some more skills.”

My primary teacher was someone who worked with Sherry Yard with various Wolfgang Puck restaurants. So she was really knowledgeable, and she really did a great job of breaking down the science of baking. Not just teaching us skills but really the theory behind it. So I found everything fascinating. I loved everything. I took everything we did in class, and I’d do it again at home on weekends trying to make it better, and I actually started a prototype food blog. It’s no longer existent, but it would just all be pictures of stuff that I learned in school.

It was so fun. I absolutely loved it. I actually get a lot of questions about going to culinary school, and in general, I don’t really recommend it unless you go to one that’s affordable for you. I think they are so expensive now. But the one I went to was pretty reasonably priced, and it wasn’t a huge financial burden. In that case, I absolutely recommend it because it was a blast.

On Working in Restaurants:

The first place I worked was a bakery in Los Angeles called Sweet Lady Jane which is still around. It’s an LA institution. It’s a very, very high quality bakery. And that’s really where I feel like I got my culinary education because there is the theory you learn, and then there is what actually happens in a kitchen, and I feel really lucky that I worked there. I worked there for about a year. I feel so lucky that that’s where I started because I just learned everything that I missed in culinary school. I learned how people actually do things in the real world.

I learnt to work fast and to work clean and to work in a tiny little space because you don’t have a whole bench of your own in the kitchen usually like you do in culinary school. It was a great bakery. They make everything from scratch which is very, very rare in bakeries, which is another thing I learned. I learned production work, high volume, fast-paced production work, and I also learned some cake decorating. So it was a little bit of everything. And it was really the best place I ever could have started. And then from there, I was able to find different places that would teach me different things.

On Deciding to Start Her Freelance Career and SugarHero.com:

It was really gradual. A few years after I started working in kitchens, I was at a job where I didn’t have full hours, and I was looking for something to supplement my income. And I on a whim applied for a job at About.com and ended up getting it.

I would just do that in the evenings and on the weekends, and as that took off, I was able to devote more time to it. And it was really over the course of about five years, I would work on About more, and then I would take on maybe a few other little projects. Eventually, I started my own blog, and then as I switched on, I would try to find a job that would be part-time where I would work maybe three days a week, so I could devote more time to my freelance stuff.

I didn’t end up going fully freelance until about four and a half years ago. By that time, I had been doing writing on the side for about five years. So it was nothing I ever planned. I didn’t know food writing was a thing in college. I didn’t know that was a career people had. People didn’t make money on the Internet when I was in college. It just really gradually developed, and I found that I really loved it.

On Her Book, The Sweet Book of Candy Making:

I was super pregnant when I wrote it. It was so stressful. I actually got contacted by the publisher, their acquisitions editor had been looking for someone to write a candy book. So it was really just being on the Internet in the right place, at the right time. I think she found me through the About site, and then she also got a recommendation from another person who had written a candy cookbook.

So it fell into my lap which I feel very lucky about because I know it’s not always easy to get a book. And it happened really fast. It was, I think, written in five months while, again, very pregnant. And actually, our apartment had a flood during that time, and we had to move out part of the time and live in a hotel with no kitchen.

So it is truly a labor of love. And I am hoping to write another one. I have an idea. I have an agent. It just has been a matter of carving out the time. But the book was really intended to be a one-stop shop for people who want to learn about candy making. So it has some basic recipes and then some more creative ones. But really, if you don’t know much about candy making, it’s intended to be your guide to getting started. That was the whole point, and I hope that’s what people take from it.

On Candy Making:

I think everyone thinks that about candy because you need a thermometer. It’s like as soon as you put a piece of equipment into the mix, they are like, “Oh no. This is too much. I’m going to buy a Snickers bar. I’m out,” and there are candies that are harder, but I think so many candies really are very approachable.

If you want to start making candies, start with truffles. You need cream, and you need chocolate, and that is literally all you need. And you don’t need a thermometer, and you need a whisk maybe, but everyone has one.

I think there are ways to ease into it before you’re having to pull taffy. You don’t have to start at the top. Start with something really approachable with a microwave fudge recipe. There are definitely things you can do to ease into it.

On Resources for Learning More About Candy Making:

Yes, so actually, I have a favorite candy book that I recommend to everyone. It’s by Peter Greweling. It’s called Chocolates and Confections, and there’s actually two versions. There’s a pro-version and a Chocolates and Confections At Home. He is an instructor at the CIA, the Culinary Institute of America, and it’s like the encyclopedia of candy.

It’s so thorough. There’s a million in process pictures. He goes over everything from basics to really complex layered candies. It’s so smart, and it’s a little bit scientific if you’re interested in that, but it doesn’t have to be. You can skip all the science and just get to the recipes. It’s such a great resource. The home version is maybe a little more what home cooks might want, but it’s such a great book.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

I watch hardly any. The ones when I do catch them, I actually really am old school. I like Alton Brown. I think he’s great.

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

I almost always read dessert blogs that these are all going to be sweet focused. I love Sprinkle Bakes. I think Heather is a genius. I really like The Sugar Hit. It’s so fun. Cleobuttera, she’s in Egypt hence the name. She just has the most gorgeous photos. I like The Cake Blog. They have a lot of contributors, so it’s like a compilation website, but they do really fun stuff. And then 10th kitchen, who I know, you’ve interviewed her. She is just the funniest, and I want to be her best friend.

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

I’m actually just learning how to use Snapchat. I had a 20-year-old teach me how because I’m an old person. I’m still figuring that out.

I follow The Actor’s Diet, Lynn Chen. She does some food and then some LA stuff that I like. I follow Hey Natalie Jean who has chickens. She’s great. On Instagram, again The Sugar Hit just has the most fun, explosive pictures ever. She really makes me happy.

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

Oh, gosh. I have a marble rolling pin from my grandmother that I got when she passed away. And that’s really special for me. I don’t actually use it but it’s just laying in the kitchen, so I can always think of her when I see it.

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

Lavender and flower flavors. I used to be, “Ehh,” and now I throw rosewater on everything and lavender and violet. It’s a sickness.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

There is a chain in Los Angeles called Lemonade. It does fresh salads and sandwiches. They have a cookbook that I actually love. They got me to eat Brussel sprouts all the time. It’s life- changing. The Lemonade Cookbook, I really like. For desserts, I have a really charming one called, The Bungalow Heavens Cookies cookbook. And it’s all cookie recipes from Pasadena which is where I used to live. Oh, and I just love the Barefoot Contessa. I think she’s awesome. I want to visit her house and have her cook for me. So I have a lot of her books.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

Actually, I listen to my iPod all the time when I’m in the kitchen because otherwise, it’s really boring. I listen to Vampire Weekend a lot. I really like Kishi Bashi. I don’t know if you know him, but he’s a violinist who also sings, and he does some really amazing stuff. So I’d say Vampire Weekend and Kishi Bashi always get me in the kitchen.

On Keeping Posted with Elizabeth:

SugarHero.com, and I am on Facebook. Instagram. If you have questions about candy making or baking, send me an email. I try to respond generally promptly.

104: Jessie Oleson Moore: How Baking Led to a Healthier Relationship with Food

January 6, 2016 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

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CakeSpy

Jessie is a writer, illustrator, baker, and founder of CakeSpy, which is a dessert detective agency dedicated to seeking sweetness in everyday life.

From write-ups on bakery visits and delicious recipes to art projects, Jessie encourages us to bake and live with sweet abandon. Jessie has authored two books, CakeSpy Presents Sweet Treats for a Sugar-Filled Life and The Secret Lives of Baked Goods. She is also an eating disorder activist.

I am so happy to have Jessie Oleson Moore of CakeSpy joining me here today.

(*All photos below are Jessie’s.)

On Starting Her Blog:

I was working at a refrigerator magnet company and I was actually the art director. It was the refrigerator magnet division of a greeting card company, and I know it sounds silly, but I had reached a point where I was not going to have too much more advancement in my job, so, I was feeling a little bit antsy, and I had wanted to start my own company for a long time.

At the time, I was reading a book called, The Purple Cow by Seth Godin, which is a fantastic book, I highly recommend it, but it gave a lot of great suggestions for how to start a business. And ultimately one of the things that I took away from it was that to start a business, you’ve got to start out doing what you love. So I was like, “Okay. Well, what would my ideal business have?”

It came to me right away. I was like, “Well, it would have writing, illustrating, and baked goods.” All awesome things, but how do you start a business with that? So I was like, “Well, all right, maybe I’ll start a blog and I’ll figure out what I want to do with the business.” This is 2007 when I could probably count the food bloggers on one hand.

So I started a blog, and I did not in any way think that the blog would become my business, but it had this beautiful fusion that allowed me to start a business doing all of the things that I loved. So I feel really fortunate that I’ve been able to do that.

On Her Journey and Relationship with Food:

Actually your question couldn’t come at a better time. I was at the conference of the National Eating Disorder Association, which was in San Diego this year, and that was a wonderful opportunity. There were over 600 attendees, and it was just a coming together of people who have suffered from eating disorders, people who have family or friends who have suffered, and also researchers and clinicians.

I suffered from an eating disorder from the age of about 12 until, I would say that I really actively began to become recovered in my late 20s and early 30s. So I’m 34 now, so that’s fairly recent. I think that eating disorders are something that, for one thing, nobody asks to have an eating disorder. Nobody aspires to that. And they’re rather insidious things because they insert themselves in your life so gradually, at least in my case and many other cases that I know of, that before you know it, it’s become part of you. Or you think it’s part of you.

And for me, who knows really what got me there. I believe that for me, it was not one thing that made me have an eating disorder, but maybe a few things. I think that to begin, maybe I had an anxious nature and a nature of perfection. And when you have that and you reach your tender teenage years where your body is changing, all of a sudden it becomes really enticing that in this world that feels really out of control, that your food is something that you can control.

So what began as kind of an after-school special type of worrying about food and dieting, escalated quickly into bulimia. And then when I stopped exhibiting bulimic behavior, I thought I was better, but secretly, somehow without realizing it, I had really just become anorexic.

So I suffered from a lot of food-related issues. And I think that actually my food blog, as funny as it might sound, was part of the gateway to recovery for me. I think that food is something that people with eating disorders have a very complex relationship with. But at first when I began to bake, I think that that was… even though it was before I really, truly, hardcore went into recovery, I think that baking was the gateway that led me to recovery.

Because at first, I think that I would only take the teeny, tiniest taste of anything that I baked, but it’s like I started to get to know my enemy. And all of a sudden, when you start baking, it’s like, “Whoa, there actually isn’t evil and the devil lurking in this cupcake. It’s actually just butter and sugar and flour and very real things. It’s not going to ruin my life.” So I think that by beginning to bake, that it helped me to, at first, maybe fear food less, and then to begin to understand it, and ultimately to have a much healthier relationship with it.

On What She Would Say to Someone Suffering from an Eating Disorder:

Number one, you’re not alone. You’re less alone than you think. Number two, this is a problem. You might think, “Oh, but I’m not anorexic so it’s not an issue.” It is an issue. If it’s affecting your life, then it is an issue. And it’s not okay, and it’s important that you get help.

And that leads into, get help. And what type of help you need, it will differ from person to person. I found that my best support was through an eating disorder support group, a physical, in-person group. I liked a group better than one-on-one therapy. I just felt like it had that aspect of connection, although I did have one-on-one therapy.

I was never hospitalized. Some people require that or benefit from that. But the NEDA.org website, National Eating Disorder Association, is fantastic. They have a lot of resources, and they also have a helpline that you can call and get resources.

On Learning How to Bake:

I grew up in a household that was reverent to sweets. Everyone in my family loved sweets. And my mom is, while she was never a professional baker, she was a stay-at-home mom, but to call her an amateur baker would really not quite do it justice. She could have been a baker easily, a professional one.

For instance, my birthday cakes every year, I did not ever, ever have a cake mix cake. I basically had a wedding cake. My birthday cake every year was a three-tier homemade vanilla cake with pink frosting, and roses all piped on. And my mom would make this for me because it was my birthday dream. So for me, sweets have always been something that have been present in my life and that I have loved and appreciated.

And more than even just the sweets, but the culture around them. I can’t remember what I wore or what we had for dinner on my birthday when I turned six, but I remember the cake, and that is a happy memory. So that has always been present in my life. And I was always like a sous chef to my mom while she was baking, very intently interested on getting to lick the beaters at first, but I got more and more curious about the process as I grew up.

And I think that for a long time I felt like, “Oh, well, my mom’s the baker. That’s not really for me.” But it was funny because when I first started baking in earnest, which really quite honestly was when I started the website, I realized that I already knew more than I realized, I think just from absorbing it from years of watching her. So I’ve always had an interest in sweets, but I’m largely self-taught.

On Her Art and Illustrations:

I’ve always been artistic. My mom actually, while she was a stay-at-home mom, as soon as my youngest sister went to school, she pursued her dream of being a children’s book illustrator. So my mom, she is kind of famous, Margie Moore. So my mom is artistic, my dad is a super talented water colorist and painter. And once again, the culture that I grew up in, I was always artistic.

And I went to art school. That is what my training is in, and I studied illustration. I’ve always drawn characters, too. Actually, I was going through some old papers awhile back, and I actually found this drawing I had done of a cupcake and a muffin and they both had smiling faces.

On Her Cookbooks:

The first book, the nutshell story about that is that when I started my website and I started to gain some web popularity… and very early on, I was like, “You know what? I should get a book deal.” So a literary agent had approached me and I was like, “Yeah, I’m going to get a book deal. I’m going to nail this.” So I put together a book proposal, and every single person I sent it to rejected it.

Every single person. I was crushed. And my reaction was, “Screw you, publishing industry. You don’t want me? I don’t want you.” I put that to bed, and if anyone asked, I was like, “No, I don’t want to write a book.”

But then about two years later, actually one of the publishing houses, Sasquatch Books in Seattle who had actually rejected the book previously came back to me. All of a sudden, I guess the timing was right. So they asked me to come in for a meeting. I did.

And I had walked to the meeting, because at the time I lived in Seattle and I was maybe 15 minutes away. By the time that I got home from my appointment with them, they had sent over a contract.

So it’s funny because while it happened very quickly, it also did not happen very quickly. That book was put together largely from the archives of popular recipes from my website. And I actually wrote that book in about three weeks.

At that time, I had about four years’ worth of recipes. So while it was a tremendous amount of work to write headnotes that were cohesive and to format the recipes, I did have quite a bit of the work already done. And then I believe I had a leisurely five weeks to do all of the illustrations.

The second book, throughout writing on my website, I had become interested with baked goods with interesting backstories. My saying is that, “It tastes better with a backstory.” Even the most humble food can become far more interesting and rich when it has a great story behind it. So that book, I think, was born out of that love.

It was with the same publisher. And it was an idea that I had and they let me run with it. So the two books that I’ve written visually both in terms of recipes are quite different but I think that when you see them side-by-side that you see the common thread of the way that I write and my sense of humor.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

I am embarrassed to tell you that I do not watch any food shows. The one that I used to watch though when I was in high school, which is not on anymore but I loved it, was the Sara Moulton show. It was so informative. I just loved listening to her voice. So I’ll say that in the 1990s I was all about Sara Moulton.

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

Well, if you’ve never seen my friend Peabody’s website, it is called, Culinary Concoctions by Peabody, and this is like my sister from another mister. If there’s a delicious, indulgent dessert it is probably on this website. Even indulgent desserts that you’ve probably never even thought of, they’re on this website. So I really, really highly suggest that one.

I also think there’s a lot of great foodie stuff on Craftsy.com, which is actually a website that I write for. That was how I first was exposed to them. But they have a lot of great food content on there so I’m often checking them out.

And I also love Serious Eats which is another website I previously contributed to but that’s not why I suggest it. I just think that they always do a really great job. So I love reading what they have to say.

Oh, and another one that I always get a lot of great information from is the King Arthur Flour Blog. They always have great information that gets into the nitty-gritty of the process of baking. So I always really enjoy it if there’s a recipe that is on their blog, I really feel like I get a full story from their site.

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

I follow this one called The Purple Pug that posts pug pictures and also party ideas. The party ideas are wonderful and inspiring but the pugs are my main draw. If you put a pug in a costume – I am on it. I love my friend The Domestic Rebel, Hayley. She posts a lot of really delicious photos. So she’s always inspiring me. And, oh my goodness, I love following Big Gay Ice Cream.

They’re an ice cream company but they post ice cream and unicorns and funny pop culture. So basically they’ve won my heart.

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

Even though it’s maybe about six feet away from my kitchen, I think that my unicorn collection really sets my baking area apart from others.

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

I would say tomatoes. When I was little, I had a real problem with as I called it, “tomato thingies.” If I got a slice of pizza and it was the kind of sauce that wasn’t totally pureed, if it had maybe little bits of tomato skin in it, I could not abide by it. I just could not do it. I would not eat it. But now I’m like, “Oh my God, tomato everything.” So I’ve had a real turn around with that one.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

Probably my favorite cookbook on earth, aside from my own, is the Betty Crocker Cooky Book. And this is the early 1960s edition where cookie is spelled C-O-O-K-Y. And this book you can easily find it on Amazon. They’ve reissued it. But it’s wire bound and I just love this book.

It’s got all sorts of cookies but it’s got these adorable headnotes like, “Mrs. Martin Flowers of Omaha likes to make these cookies when she’s not attending to her hat collection,” and things like that. So it’s very amusing, very telling of a different era. And it’s got those weird Technicolor photos. So I love that book.

I also love any King Arthur Flour book. I always love their books. I love all of the cookbooks by the proprietors of Baked, the Brooklyn bakery. And I also have a deep love of any self-published church cookbooks, the type of things that ladies auxiliary committees will do. Those cookbooks are my favorite. I love those.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

In art school I felt like anything Velvet Underground made me want to create art. But I feel like for me, it’s got to be good oldies to make me want to cook. So that could be Bob Dylan, like, Blood on the Tracks or Tangled Up in Blue.

On Keeping Posted with Jessie:

Definitely on social media, I’ve been getting more into Instagram. I post lots of unicorns, pugs, illustrations, and baked goods, nothing not to love. So that’s a good way and via Facebook is a good way to keep apprised of what’s going on and of course the blog.

102: Erin Alderson: Moving From Fast Food to Healthier Eating

December 23, 2015 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

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Naturally Ella

On her blog, Naturally Ella, Erin shares seasonal vegetarian recipes that are pantry-inspired and favorite recipes that are simple, fresh and exciting for her family. She’s written two cookbooks, The Homemade Flour Cookbook and The Easy Vegetarian Kitchen.

I am so happy to have Erin Alderson of Naturally Ella here on the show today.

(*All photos below are Erin’s.)

On Her Journey From Fast Food to Fresh and Seasonal:

It’s definitely been a long journey, but one I’m glad I took. Through high school and part of college, we were a middle-class family who was always on the go. Had a lot of activities after school, during school and it just seemed like we never really had time to cook. Looking back I think we probably did have time. But like most people it’s just convenient to eat out and grab food as we go.

It wasn’t until in between my freshman and sophomore year of college that my father had a heart attack and had a quadruple bypass. He survived it all but it was definitely a wake-up call for my entire family. After that we changed our diets and we haven’t looked back.

On Getting Started to Eating Healthier:

Baby steps. Definitely baby steps. Instead of eating out every day I’d eat out three times a week. I just stepped back slowly but surely. There were things I didn’t like at first. I didn’t always eat a lot of vegetables as much as I should have. It took time. It took time to really grow and get the process down.

I thought it might have been easier than I expected. I definitely had it built up in my head thinking that, “Oh, I’ll be able to do it. It won’t be that hard.” But it definitely was a day-by-day experience and there were a lot of temptations and challenges around every corner.

I feel like a lot of time people think, “Oh, health food. That must mean salads.” And really I don’t know. I love eating whole grains I do a lot of noodles. Again everything in moderation. You can have a lot of fun with it.

On Some Good Resources for Starting to Eat More Healthy:

I think blogs are awesome. A lot of the healthier food blogs because there’s just so much inspiration. And a lot of times those I feel like are recipes that people can really dig into.

Any of the Michael Pollan books are really a kind of good, swift kick in the rear. Because you read them and think, “Okay. This is why I should be doing this.” Mark Bittman is also a good resource. I think he’s the one that has the cookbook, How to Cook Everything.

I feel like those books can really be go-to references. They don’t have to be something that you read cover to cover. It’s just something that you can say, “Hey. I feel like trying this.” And you can go and dig into it.

On Her Blog:

Originally I started as a healthy baking blog way back in 2007. This was towards the beginning of my healthy eating journey and I wanted to share. For whatever reason I thought blogging sounded like fun even back then.

But I soon realized I didn’t like baking. And I fell in love with cooking. And that really took hold when I joined a CSA. And it was one of the ones where I could go out and pick. Every week I’d go out to the farm and I’d get to pick the produce that was ready. So I was getting my hands dirty.

It just really felt like connecting me to my food more. And forcing me to… instead of making a list of recipes and then going grocery shopping it was forcing me to say, “Okay. This is what I have. What can I make?”

It definitely opened my eyes to different varieties of things. I tried new things. Like kohlrabi was something that I would have never bought at the store but because it was there I tried it. And you learn about it and while sometimes at first you don’t like it. You can try it a different way and prepare it a different way. I think it’s a lot of fun.

In fact in the early days I would come back from the CSA and photograph everything. And I’d say, “This is what I got from the CSA this week.” And then the recipes would be based on that. That’s when my blog really turned seasonal.

On Essential Pantry Items for a Healthier Diet:

I always say that people need a couple, two to three, different kinds of grains. If you’re a grain-eater. Obviously I know there are some diets out there that people don’t eat grains. But for my purpose I’m going to say a few grains. Quinoa’s always a nice one to have because it’s quick-cooking. I love brown rice. That’s a good base for things. I usually have some millet and oats on hand.

And then you need some legumes. I love black beans, chickpeas and lentils. I usually have one of each of those. When I say pantry-inspired, those are really the items that I’m thinking of.

On Her Cookbooks, The Homemade Flour Cookbook and The Easy Vegetarian Kitchen:

The first one the publisher actually reached out to me and said, “Hey, we think that you would be a really good fit for this concept we have. Would it be something you’re interested in?” At first I’m, “Oh my gosh!” I’ve talked about milling flour. I had a lot of grains but I’ve never really put the two together. The more I thought about it, I was like, “No, this is a really good extension of my brand because a lot of times these are the ingredients I have in my house anyway. So what a cool way to show a second use for them.” So that concept was interesting for me.

Then the second book was an idea that I had been playing around with for a while. Because it kind of goes back to that seasonal, “I have these things, what can I do with them?” And so for The Easy Vegetarian Kitchen, it’s 50 base recipes that you can build upon with whatever you have. And so I keep it really open-ended but I do give some examples of what to do per season.

On Being in the Kitchen as a New Parent:

I don’t blog full-time. I have never actually blogged full-time. Naturally Ella has always been my secondary thing that I do and I’ve kept up.

But as of January it’s going to be my full-time because with having Mack around I’ve found that I can’t continue to do about three different jobs. So I’m going to focus solely on the blog. I have been spending quite a bit of time in the kitchen. Primarily during nap times and on weekends when my husband’s home.

But he actually loves being in the kitchen. I put him in the bouncer and I set him up on the kitchen island. And he loves to watch and really enjoys just being there. So that’s nice. It’s been very helpful.

My husband and I’ll even put food up to his nose and say, “Hey, this is mint.” And there was one time that he accidentally got parsley in his mouth and that was a really funny experience. Because he was, “Wait a minute, what is this?” We’re really looking forward to when we can start solid foods and have him experience all of that.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

We don’t have cable. We only have antennae. AI still watch shows like MasterChef. I love Junior MasterChef just because I love seeing the eight-year-olds and the 10-year-olds just get in the kitchen. I think it’s really inspiring for kids to see other kids be in the kitchen. And hopefully grow a generation that’s used to cooking.

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

I love blogs. I’ve met a lot of friends through blogging. But the blogs I’m loving right now, who are doing some really creative vegetarian cooking, are, The First Mess, With Food + Love, Cookie and Kate, Love and Lemons. I’m sure there’s about a dozen more I could name, but those are the four that I really love.

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

So on Instagram, I love following The Fauxmartha. She has a two-year-old at home who sometimes you see little hands in her shots. And I just love that.

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

I have a giant stoneware bowl that is made from a company where I used to live. And it’s a pottery place that’s no longer in business. I just love it. Because I feel like you can’t buy bowls like that anymore.

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

Oh. So many. I’m going to have to say goat cheese. For the longest time I was scared of any cheese that was white because I thought it was goat cheese. But now I love it.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

First and foremost, The Vegetarian Flavor Bible is pretty much how I develop recipes. It’s so great because you can look up an ingredient and get other ingredients. And I love both of The Sprouted Kitchen’s cookbooks. There’s a new cookbook out called, Rose Water and Orange Blossom. That’s a Mediterranean/Lebanese cookbook and it’s just wonderful.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

Yo-Yo Ma did a collaboration with a few bluegrass artists. And it’s called, The Goat Rodeo Sessions and it’s my favorite one especially this time of year. It gets me in the mood to get in the kitchen and cook.

On Keeping Posted with Erin:

Instagram. I am all about Instagram these days.