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060: Dinner Was Delicious: Chicago and Its Food

July 20, 2015 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

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Dinner Was Delicious

Based in Chicago, Lucy and Rachel share recipes, photographs and love food enough not to take it too seriously. They’ve been destroying kitchens together since 2011.

I am so happy to have Lucy and Rachel of Dinner Was Delicious joining me here on the show today.

(*All images below belong to Dinner Was Delicious.)

On How They Met:

Rachel: Lucy and I both worked at this really weird tech start-up in Chicago. Chicago has this awesome tech scene.

Lucy: We were lucky to have this job.

Rachel: And it was great, but it wasn’t super creatively fulfilling. So we just bonded together over our shared love of food and gossip of the weird architecture in the office space.

Lucy: We found each other in the midst of a strange company. For our Parks and Rec enthusiasts, we describe it as Entertainment 720. We just talked about what we wanted to do and became good friends outside of work.

On What Made Them Want to Collaborate with Each Other:

Lucy: Rachel was baking a lot. My job was already creative because I was a graphic designer. And Rachel was doing operations and needed a creative outlet and would bring us the most incredible desserts. I started with cupcakes and pies and all kinds of really incredible desserts, and I was always like, “If you ever want to collaborate, we should be documenting these. These are beautiful. Have you written down the recipes? What’s next? Let’s do something with this.”

Rachel: So Lucy was doing her photography business, and I was baking more and more and then started actually baking as a little side project, just for some extra cash. I baked for a wedding that was for one of our mutual friend’s siblings, and Lucy was shooting photography for it too. So I was doing a bunch of cupcakes, and Lucy was like, “Well, I’ll come over, and I’ll take pictures of the cupcakes. It was super fun and we decided, “Well, let’s do it.”

Lucy: It was kind of intimidating to think about getting it started, but really, we just put a Tumblr theme up. I made a logo in five minutes that wasn’t really the logo that we wanted, but we just needed to start and it just started there.

On Their Interest in Food and Cooking:

Lucy: We like to eat. I really like to eat. I became interested in food after I moved to Chicago, and I became interested in food out of the realization that I don’t know how to cook for myself. I moved into my own apartment five years ago, and so it’s just all on me. I couldn’t rely on my roommate to have dinner ready for me anymore. And Rachel had all this knowledge, basics that I didn’t know, and so that was really helpful to just be cooking with her. And then eating in Chicago, you are exposed to all kinds of different things that I became interested and curious about that.

Rachel: I’ve always cooked. My mother, bless her heart, she’s an awesome nurse. Briefly in the late ’90s, she was a super kick-ass body piercer. But she can’t cook to save her life, and she’ll say it as much as I will. So if I wanted to eat when I was a kid, I had to figure out how to make it myself. I cooked a lot with my grandma, a little bit with my grandpa too, and just figured out how to cook, always super-passionate about it.

Love cooking for people. Another part of why we started collaborating was Lucy wasn’t as proficient in the kitchen, so it was like, “Well, come over. I’ll show you how to fry an egg.”

Lucy: At the time, I was still a graphic designer, and I didn’t know how I wanted to shoot food. It was kind of a way to learn that and experiment with different techniques.

On Not Taking Food Too Seriously:

Rachel: So I think some people, many people who are really passionate about food start getting a little self-inflated about it. They lose the fun and the spontaneity of food and letting it be just what it is: something delicious to nourish you and share with people that you love. I think that we work really hard to keep the important things in mind: sustainability, seasonality, nutrient density, all of these things that we think about. But we let our love of food really shine through to be what it is, which is food. You eat it with people you love, and we’re giving food the space to be enjoyable, rather than something that’s stricter.

On a Kitchen Disaster:

Rachel: One happened last night. We’re in Lucy’s photography studio, and we were supposed to make Cheeze-Its, and I just . . . They just did not work. So even if you’re someone who’s proficient in the kitchen, screw-ups happen. Your recipe doesn’t always work out as planned. When you’re testing stuff and flying by the seat of your pants and maybe didn’t set your timer, sometimes things can get burned.

Lucy: There’s a lot of burning. Not a lot, but that’s my biggest.

Rachel: One of my favorite memories with us, though, was the day that we made the fried chicken at my place, and you brought the bone-in chicken. And this was way, way, way early on, like before I had any butchery experience, but I love taking carving on the meat now. I was still super squeamish. And so we were going to make a fried chicken dinner, and Lucy brought the chicken and it was bone-in because bone-in chicken is more delicious. But it was a whole chicken. I had to figure out, how do I take this bird apart?

Lucy: I was there for moral support, and it took a lot to go down.

Rachel: It took a lot of bourbon. This was four or five years ago now.

On the Food Culture in Chicago:

Lucy: People are really interested about food here, and there’s everything available. I don’t even know where to start. It’s overwhelming.

Rachel: People, when they think about Chicago food culture, they’re going to think first about deep-dish pizza.

Lucy: Yeah, that’s true.

Rachel: And people might not realize that it’s actually one of the most prominent culinary capitals in the U.S. We have Alinea. We’ve got Next. We’ve got Publican. We’ve got all sorts of really wonderful, creative restaurants. We’ve got a lot of ramen going on right now too.

It’s more than just meat and potatoes. It’s people who really care about interesting food. It’s not just white people with Western stuff.

Lucy: Yeah, food from all different cultures. The neighborhoods are so diverse that you can have food from all over the world and have it done well.

On a Dish That Captures What Chicago is About:

Rachel: That’s a really hard question.

Lucy: Because Chicago isn’t one thing food-wise for me. Hot dog, I guess.

Rachel: Because it’s got everything.

Lucy: It’s got everything on it. And we’re so particular about how we have our hot dogs. This is the least original answer I could give you.

Rachel: No, I love it.

Lucy: But it is the Chicago style, no ketchup and . . .

Rachel: You’ve got the mustard, which has lots of Asian and Germanic influences. You’ve got this beautiful pickle that’s like a fermented pickle. It’s not a brine pickle. So it has a long fermentation process rather than the vinegar. So lots of different cultural influences there. It’s everything on a bun and like, “Ugh!”

On a Food That Locals Love that Visitors May Not Know About:

Lucy: So there’s this one dish called a “mother-in-law.” It’s a hot dog and a tamale covered in chili in a bun with a bunch of cheese, and there’s also the Chicago original rainbow cone. It’s this huge stack of ice cream. It’s got orange sherbet, pistachio, this really special cherry ice cream, chocolate, everything all on one cone, and it’s so, so essential Chicago summer. In your cut-off jeans, you’ve got to get an original rainbow cone.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

Lucy: I love Anthony Bourdain.

Rachel: I love The Taste, though. Anthony’s on there, but Nigella, come on, give me a break. She’s perfect.

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

Rachel: Wit & Vinegar. Billy Green is the best human on the Internet. Love him so much. I’m super into I am a Food Blog.

Lucy: Yeah, I am a Food Blog is great. I always go to Smitten Kitchen. She’s great, solid recipes. She’s been around for so long, she has such a great library of recipes.

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

Rachel: I’m a grandmother on the Internet.

Lucy: That’s true.

Rachel: I follow lots of cat Instagrams, so I just get cat pictures in my feed throughout the day.

Lucy: Our friend Jana has an account called Bike a Bee that I follow on Instagram and Twitter and she’s hilarious and also shares all this cool information about plants. And she’s a beekeeper, and so she shares her process about beekeeping and selling honey, which is really cool.

Rachel: Speaking of Jana, there’s another, based in Philadelphia. There’s a restaurant and butchery space and education space about meat and sustainable meat called Kensington Quarters. It’s awesome. It’s not for vegans. If you’re squeamish about meat, you’re not going to love it. But they post the most beautiful, educational pictures about meat. They’re super great people I connect to.

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

Rachel: My KitchenAid mixer. I know that’s super cliché, but it has lived so many lives. It came into my life in the most . . . I was in a not super great relationship, and all that I wanted – and this was eight years ago, all that I wanted was a KitchenAid mixer because I had just started baking, and I was really passionate about it. And all that I wanted for my birthday was a KitchenAid mixer. But I was 22, 23.

Nobody has KitchenAid money at 22, 23. So I asked the guy that I was dating at the time, not a super great relationship, to talk to my friends and be like, “Everybody pitches in 10 or 15 bucks to get the KitchenAid.” And he did it, and I got my KitchenAid. And it was the best ever, and lived through a bug infestation.

It lived through 17 moves now, just going all over the place. It’s gotten me through everywhere. I love it more than everything. It barely works. It’s got this big nick on the top of it from one of my more urgent moves. My apartment flooded, and it was horrible. And I just grabbed the mixer and ran. Yeah, I love my mixer more than anything.

Lucy: I don’t know. My kitchen is kind of tiny. I don’t have any sentimental passed-on pieces yet.

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

Lucy: Pickles.

Rachel: Yeah, pickles? You didn’t like pickles?

Lucy: I didn’t like pickles. I wasted so much of my life not liking pickles.

Rachel: Weird. For a long, long time, I was really not into food. I didn’t eat asparagus until I was 25.

Lucy: Or things that were cute.

Rachel: I wouldn’t eat lamb.

Lucy: Rabbits.

Rachel: I still don’t eat rabbit. It makes me sad. I know, I’m an idiot. I didn’t have cauliflower until I was 27 and, oh my gosh, I love it now. If there’s anything that anyone is ever afraid of eating food-wise, you could be skipping your favorite food, the most delicious food you’ve ever eaten. Just eat all the things you’re afraid of. Everything is good if you cook it right.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

Lucy: What to Cook and How to Cook it.

Rachel: That’s such a good one. I just got Edward Lee’s Smoke and Pickles, and it is one of the most beautifully written cookbooks I’ve ever seen. The recipes are amazing. They’re flawlessly tested. The photography is beautiful. And his prose, he has chapters in between with actually prose in it. It’s so wonderful and smart and touching.

Lucy: And What Katie Ate books are beautiful, so I look at that for inspiration sometimes for photography. It’s gorgeous, lots of good party recipes.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

Rachel: Everything. Music makes me hungry.

Lucy: Yeah, it depends on what mood I’m in. I’ll put on an old album, like Tom Petty and The Rolling Stones, or I’ll blast Robyn if it’s winter or summer.

Rachel: If I’m making pie, I want to listen to The Secret Sisters, for sure. If I’m eating my feelings, I want to listen to Neko Case’s latest album and just cry into my soup or whatever comfort food I’m cooking. But if it’s just like general, just hanging out in the kitchen, you can’t go wrong with Robyn. She’s the queen. She’s flawless.

On Keeping Posted with Rachel and Lucy:

Lucy: DinnerWasDelicious.com, so that is where you should keep going. And then follow us on Instagram @effingdelicious, and we’re also @effingdelicious on Twitter as well.

058: Erika Council: An Introduction to Southern Food

July 13, 2015 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

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Southern Soufflé

Erika was introduced to the art of biscuit-making at the ripe old age of four and was nicknamed Southern Souffle in college when she was dishing out meals from the hot plate in her dorm room. On her blog Southern Soufflé, she shares her love of Southern soul food through not only her recipes, but the warmth in her writing and stories.

I am so excited to have Erika Council of Southern Soufflé here on the show today.

(*All images below are Erika’s.)

On Growing Up Around Food and Cooking:

My paternal grandmother owns a restaurant in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and it’s been there since 1976. A lot of my summers were spent in the back of that kitchen, not always happily, but you learned how to make things like biscuits and fried chicken. She owned what we call a Southern style meat and three, and that’s where you get the meat and three vegetables and side of cornbread or biscuits. So you can imagine how much meat and three we’re turning out on a daily basis.

It was really kind of a drop biscuit that she taught me. It’s kind of a wet dough and you use the scoop and just drop it. You make a lot of batches at one time like that and that was my experience actually just scooping it and dropping it on the pan.

Then my mother’s mother made fancier angel biscuits, which use yeast and rise real high.

When you’re 13, 14, 15, you don’t really appreciate it as much as I do now that I can make fried chicken with my eyes closed. I will say that I learned a lot of valuable lessons just working back there and meeting the average people that wash the dishes, not a lot of the top chefs you see that live this glamorous lifestyle on Food Network. It’s just so far from that actually really running a restaurant and just trying to maintain success over a decades’ worth of time.

I think I learned more about the importance of food and how it was important to the people making it, rather than the whole glamor, a beautiful picture of food, you know.

She (grandmother) is older now and my uncle does most of the cooking in the back, but we do go and visit.

I’m in Atlanta so it’s about seven hours from here. I’ll go every now and then and visit her at home, but she doesn’t do a lot of actual cooking in the restaurant. You can find her every now and then sitting at a booth in the front when you walk in drinking coffee. She kinda makes it her way to introduce herself or speak to everybody, but if you’re from the North Carolina area and around there you know who Mama Dip is.

On Southern Culture:

I guess Southern culture, in my opinion, is kind of the backbone for a lot of things that you see everywhere. I’ll go to San Francisco for work and see someone rolling up collard green wraps and I’ll think about, just actually picking those collard greens out of the ground and hot liquor which is the liquor and the juice from the actual greens boiling down.

The South for me is just so many things. This is where I was born and raised and lived the majority of my life. It’s the people who have a complicated past, but I mean the most hospitable. Everyone says Southern hospitality but you would think it’d be a bunch of disgruntled angry Southerners, but we’re far from that.

It’s a lot of things you don’t see, where communal tables with all different kinds of people sitting together. It’s a melting pot, which is what the South has always been.

On Southern Food:

I think that Southern food is a mix of all cultures. From the very beginning, without getting into historical aspects, you have plantation cooking, which is a combination of European and African, West African cooking, and you’re seeing this sort of Southern revival, everywhere, but here, I think a lot of people are getting more back to the roots, which is, Southern food really was a plant-based diet.

So you think fried chicken and greasy and all this, but it was really the plants, like the greens, and the onions, and things of that nature. And I see a lot of people just getting back to that and just having the greens and their vegetables being the focus of their dish.

I would say that soul food is Southern food. I think that anything that you cook, and you put your heart and soul into it, that is soul food. So whether it is a Boston Cream Pie that you’ve taken your time, you’ve sat down and you made it from scratch, that’s your soul food. When you look at the definition of it, it’s a term actually that came around about the 1960s to describe African American Southern cooking, but the actuality of soul food is, it is the origins of Southern food, because Southern food started out with plantation cooking and you have to look at that and then you look at soul food as being fried chicken, collard greens, and cornbread. Which commercially it is, but a lot of African Americans will say if you’re cooking something from the heart and soul, that’s your soul food.

I absolutely love fried chicken and I love crawfish. It’s hard to get crawfish here in Atlanta like I could get it in Louisiana, but definitely those two items. Any way you got em’, I’ll take em’.

On Some Resources to Learn More about Southern Cuisine:

So my grandmother wrote a cookbook. It’s an older one, Mama Dip’s Kitchen. It’s a great basic book. The basics, she’s got a good forward in there about her life. A huge one is Mastering the Art of Southern Cooking and that’s by Nathalie Dupree and Cynthia Graubart. Nathalie Dupree is the grand dame of Southern cooking. She’s actually been nominated for Who’s Who James Beard Award this year and that book was nominated for one of James Beard’s Awards. So I definitely would say that book, it’s like 730 pages of Southern food and it’s talking about Southern food.

There’s so many. Charleston Receipts is another one, that’s a Junior League cookbook. It’s an old school book from Charleston. A friend of mine, Adrian Miller, he wrote a book called Soul Food. So that’s a great book to read about the origins of soul food, it won a James Beard Award too.

On Her Blog:

My mom actually never was a cook, and she mentioned to me one day she was reading someone’s blog and she sent it to me. She was like, “Hey, you know what? You should do this.” So when I started out, I just kind of was doing the recipes. I used to email my mom recipes that I would cook and she would try it. So I would just type up a recipe and it’d be a really short little passage or whatever.

Actually, what kind of turned it around for me was, I went to a food blog conference and it just was everything I didn’t want to be. And that kind of made me turn my back towards what I thought was cool and just kind of go with what was actually me. I hate to say that, it’s awful, but it’s just the reality.

I used a different camera, the camera I was using to take pictures of my kids, before I was using my iPhone. You know, I started out kind of, staging the food, but that really wasn’t me either, so now it’s more just taking the pictures as I go and just how I cook it, because that’s really what it’s about to me. If I could make elaborately beautiful layouts of food, then I would do it, but I can’t, so I’m not even going to try.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

I don’t. I used to watch Top Chef.

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

So I’m obsessed with Two Red Bowls and Lady and Pups. Those two blogs are amazing. I guess from learning about different types of Asian style cooking, just how they incorporate different things, I love that.

The Bitter Southerner, if you like to read. They post a kind of journal entry every Tuesday and it’s something that’s about the South. Sometimes it upsets people and sometimes it’s beautiful, but I would definitely recommend reading The Bitter Southerner.

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

What makes me happy on Instagram, Megan from Take A Megabite, because her food is so happy with the animals and the different flags. So definitely Take A Megabite on Instagram. She definitely makes me happy with all her photos.

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

The most treasured item I have is my grandmother’s apron. It’s in a lot of the photos. My maternal grandmother passed away a few years ago, but she was a history teacher back in the ’40s, ’50s. She and my grandfather were huge civil rights activists. I learned so much from her as far as just African American history and just things that they don’t teach in school, things that you wouldn’t even know, just having to have been in her presence, learning how to make cakes and along with the struggles of the past, and her apron was always what she wore. So that is probably my most prized possession in my kitchen.

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

I like beets and I used to just be extremely anti-beet. The rest of the people in my family, not so much, or in my house, but I’m trying to slowly get them into it. I definitely would say beets.

I think that when they were made for me, they weren’t made right perhaps, but gosh, this was probably about ten years ago and someone made these little appetizers with goat cheese and they had pickled beets on the top. And it sounds disgusting, right, but it was so good, and I think then on, I’d say, “Well, you know what? Maybe I can find a way to make it better.” In the South, we pickle everything.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

The Joy of Cooking is a good one. Right now, I’m kind of on a baking kick. The Bread Bible is one I’ve been using. Definitely those two have been helping me.

So there’s a chef in Kentucky named Edward Lee, and he’s American or he’s Korean-American and his book is Smoke & Pickles and it’s a great… I hate to say fusion because I don’t like that word. It’s a combination of Southern and Asian food, and he’s just done an impeccable job. It’s an older book but I’ve been kind of cooking my way through that just lately. There’s so many. I have a lot of cookbooks but definitely those.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

Right now, Rihanna. I won’t say the name of this song because it’s explicit. I’m a big hip hop fan. We listen to a lot of rap music. Kendrick Lamar and Drake are really kind of on repeat. They make me want to cook. I listen to that all day.

On Keeping Posted with Erika:

I do better on Instagram. I’m on Twitter, and then Southern Soufflé on Facebook.