Happy Yolks | The Dinner Special podcast

119: Alexa Arnold: Seasonal Food and The People Who Produce It

April 20, 2016 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

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The Best Bite of the Plum

Her blog, The Best Bite of the Plum, is where she celebrates the experience of eating, preparing, and sharing sustainable, seasonal meals.

Alexa is driven by her passion for food and the people who produce it, and can usually be found promoting healthy school food and farm to school efforts around the country, and browsing cookbooks and farmers’ markets for inspiration.

I am so excited to have Alexa Arnold of The Best Bite of the Plum joining me on the show today.

(*All photos below are Alexa’s.)

On Working in the Good Food Movement:

I’m really fortunate that my mom packed my lunch most days going to school, but there were a lot of kids who didn’t have that opportunity. Kids eat sometimes most of their daily calories in school. So the good food movement is trying to ensure that the food is healthy and nourishing.

On the Shift to Eating More Local:

I think so many people now understand the benefits of eating local and shortening the transportation between the food to their plates, keeping money in the local economy, and eating food when it’s at peak season. I think a lot of people are totally on board with that.

On Cooking What’s Local and Seasonal:

It’s okay to not be perfect and cook seasonally every time. Maybe you were just desperate for the tomatoes because it’s been a really long time. They’re not going to taste as good from the farmers’ market, but it’s okay to not be so strict about your values in terms of just only buying local.

On a Dish That’s Special to Her:

There’s a dish that’s on my blog, and it’s a Concorde Grape Focaccia. I’ve already talked a lot about tomatoes, but the thing that actually was a spark for me at a farmers market was the first time I had a locally grown grape. I’m not even sure what variety of grape it was. It was maybe a Concorde. But I took a bite of it in front of the farmer and was literally blown away by the taste. I was like, “Oh my gosh. If this is a grape, what have I been eating my whole life?”

Grape season is in September, October or maybe late August, but it’s my absolute favorite season. And so this dish is really special to me because it’s the epitome of things that inspired me. And the thought of putting grapes in bread was also really wacky to me at first. I was like, “That doesn’t make any sense.” But it’s awesome.

And traditionally, in Italy, during grape harvest season in September, they make this focaccia. The other wacky thing about it is, they often leave the seeds in the grapes. So, once it cooks and once it bakes, the seeds get a little softer and it’s this little crunch that at first can be shocking when you’re a person who doesn’t like seeds in your grapes, but then it’s kind of addicting and awesome.

That’s a dish that’s pretty special to me. It’s my favorite thing to make. I have a lot of frozen grape focaccia in my freezer because I made so much during grape season.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

Well, I’m going to fail this question because I don’t really watch any, but I’ve been hearing amazing things about the Netflix series called Chef’s Table. I think that’s what it’s called. So that’s on my list to watch, so I’ll report back.

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

I think the one food blog that has really inspired me in a lot of ways is the blog, Happy Yolks. I’ve been following her for a really long time. I don’t know if she’s actually really blogging much anymore. Her writing is so beautiful and honest and vulnerable. And a lot of blogs that I go to, I go to also for the writing, not just for the recipes. And I think she just does such a beautiful job of pairing those.

I also follow Brooklyn Supper. I love her recipes because they’re simple, they’re seasonal. She’s based in Appalachia, I think, in Virginia. I’ve spent a lot of time in Appalachia and I know that there are a lot of people who are eager and hungry for really simple seasonal recipes with food that’s been grown there for a long time.

I’ll also mention my friend Katherine’s blog called Cook with What You Have. She’s based in Portland, Oregon. The name is perfect. She is the epitome of everything I want to be in a cook, which is a person who saves the scraps and the little bits and pieces and makes something really cool and beautiful out of them. And she also has a business where she teaches these awesome cooking classes about just that.

Those are some of my favorite blogs, among so many others.

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

I follow so many food bloggers on Instagram. That’s probably the main social media mode that I use. I love Baker Hands. She is this incredible baker who is also this incredible artist. And she makes this flower art on top of her loaves of bread. It’s amazing. It’s so beautiful. Dolly and Oatmeal, There She Cooks, Local Haven, The Roaming Kitchen, so many others. So many people that are doing just amazing things with food that are constantly inspiring me.

A lot of people that you’ve interviewed. I was looking through your list and was like, “Oh my gosh. I follow so many of these guys. They’re awesome.”

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

I live in New York City, and I have a very small kitchen. So I try to be very intentional with the kinds of tools that I keep in my kitchen. So I’m going to go with treasured, the most treasured item is probably my grandmother’s silver. She gave it to my husband and I as a gift for our wedding.

It’s a really lovely story about how she got this silver. My grandmother’s from rural eastern Kentucky, in the mountains of eastern Kentucky. She moved to Lexington, to the big city, and ended up working at the Capitol Building in Frankfurt, Kentucky. She was the secretary in the building.

And she had made it. She had really left her rural roots for the city, and one of the things she bought with her first paycheck was this beautiful set of silverware that she went home and gave to her mother. And so she gave that to me for my wedding. It’s my most prized possession that I own. It’s amazing. I use it in all of my posts on my blog, too.

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

There are a lot of things. I feel like I’m constantly teaching myself to like new foods that I didn’t like before. But the thing that I will say that I really love now, is pickles. I despised pickles. I hated pickles. I was like a person who, you order a sandwich at a restaurant and a pickle touched your sandwich and you’re like, “Oh my God. I can’t eat that part of the sandwich.”

But then somehow, I just started really loving pickles and started making a lot of pickles myself. Probably prompted by a lot of those farmers at that market who were like, “This is what you have to do to save this produce.” Now I’m totally obsessed with pickles.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

I think the Ottolenghi cookbooks, Plenty More and Jerusalem, they are so creative and difficult in some ways. So those really push me because I think a lot of the cooking I generally do for myself on a daily basis is something that’s just really simple. So cooking something out of all of those cookbooks always feels like a challenge to me and an accomplishment once I’ve made it.

I’d say those cookbooks are some of my favorites. I’ll also mention The Joy of Cooking, which my mother made pancakes from almost every weekend, growing up. So The Joy of Cooking has a special place in my heart.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

My husband is the total music guy in our relationship, so I’m often all over the cooking and over in the kitchen, and he’s at the computer or at our record player, putting some tunes on. So I let him DJ most of the time. But I’m also really obsessed with Robyn and with Sia. Things that make me wanna dance and that I know all the words to make me super excited. So I’ll pick those.

On Keeping Posted with Alexa:

I probably post the most to Instagram. And then I’m on Facebook too but I use that a little less frequently. So yeah, I would say Instagram and just on my blog are probably the best ways to reach me.

065: Danielle Oron: Feeding Her Obsession with Food

August 5, 2015 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

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I Will Not Eat Oysters

Danielle is obsessed with food. Apart from her blog, I Will Not Eat Oysters, she is the chef, owner of Moo Milk Bar in Toronto, photographer, and the author of Modern Israeli Cooking, which is due out in the fall. As if that isn’t enough, she contributes to foodnetwork.ca and Pepper Passport.

I am so thrilled to have Danielle Oron of I Will Not Eat Oysters, joining me here on the show today.

(*All Images Below are Danielle’s.)

On Her Obsession with Food:

I have a mild obsession. And this is what I hear, “(Food is) the worst addiction to have because you have no choice in life but to eat.” And you can’t give that up, so that’s just an addiction that I have, that I’ve obsessed over food since the day I could speak, probably.

My mom used to tell me that I would ask what we were going to have for dinner the following day while eating breakfast the day before. I would just constantly, constantly think about food my whole life.

I was always obsessed with eating. And then later on, I developed a taste for things that I liked and things that I didn’t like. My mom would make a pasta sauce and I would tell her, “This pasta sauce is a little different than the one that you made last week.” And she’s like, “Yes. I forgot the oregano. How did you know?” And that came really young. Then, I would say, when I was about 16 or 17, I got my own TV in my room, so I was really excited about that. Food Network was the first thing I put on.

I think it was one of those Iron Chef episodes, like the old one, the old Japanese ones. I saw, I think it was Morimoto that made some miso filet, and he made it in seaweed, so it was a different cooking technique than I’ve ever seen. That’s what really got my mind thinking about cooking and actually making the food, and not just eating the food and how it’s an art form. That was probably when I really got into it.

On Her International Food Influences:

I grew up with my mom’s Israeli food, and then I would go to lunch, and then I told my mom like, “I don’t want you making me some weird Israeli stuff. I’m going to get pizza at school.” I was trying to fit in that way instead of having my mom send some weird Israeli food or Middle Eastern food that no one could recognize. So I had both Israeli food and Moroccan food growing up, but then I was very interested in fitting in, let’s say, in the American cuisine world. So that’s pretty much what I grew up with.

I fell in love with Korean food, probably still when I was in high school, and I used to go with my mom and we used to get Soondubu jjigae, which is just like the Korean seafood tofu soup. And I just fell in love with it.

My best friend growing up was Korean. I used to go to her house and we’d look through her fridge, and she’s like, “Oh, my mom only left weird Korean food.” I would start eating it. So I would have kimchi, and then she would have nothing else to drink but milk. So I would have kimchi and milk, and she’s like, “You’re disgusting.” But I really loved it and I just developed a palate for it.

Now, I go eat Korean food at a minimum once a week. I started cooking it, so I’m very familiar with the products now too. It came so naturally to me that I definitely believe I was Korean at some point in my life.

On The Idea Behind Moo Milk Bar:

When I met my husband, I was still living in New York. And moved there (Toronto), and wasn’t a Canadian resident, so I technically couldn’t get a job. Because I missed home, I started cooking and baking, and that’s actually when I started the blog as well. It was just out of boredom and needing to create something.

I started baking cookies and I was just obsessed with it and I missed home. So it made me feel nostalgic and reminded me of the times that I know my brother and I would just grab a roll of Pillsbury cookie dough and just eat it.

So I started just making a lot of really good cookies, and then my friends were like, “You should just open a bakery. Just open a bakery and just do it.” And that way, I could actually hire myself to work in Toronto. So that’s what I did.

I talked to my mom about it, and she’s like, “Well, you know, your grandfather had a dairy bar, a milk bar in Tel Aviv in Israel, growing up. He would have flavored milks. He would flavor his own milks that he would get from the farm down the street.” And I was like, “Oh, you know what? That’s great. That would perfectly work with this concept.” So it’s a combination of missing home, baking really good cookies, and then the inspiration from my grandfather back in the day that brought it all together for me.

I started, it was just myself. I was cooking, baking, cleaning, selling, everything start to finish. And then it hit a point where I had a line out the door, and then I realized I had no more products. I was like, “Oh my goodness. Okay, I need to hire more people.” So then you hire more people, and then you get the wholesalers coming to you. And a grocery would be like, “Oh, we would love your cookies in our store.” Then I realized, I need more people.

So the challenge was just keeping up with the growth and getting to that point where you can’t do anymore and getting more people on board and hiring the right people. I would say that initial growth and constant growth is really the biggest challenge that I’ve come across, because it’s not something you can plan for. It’s a Catch 22 where I can’t hire more people until I have enough business, and that was something that was learned. I’m sure not just with bakeries. But with every small business, this happens. So I learned a lot from that.

I take a lot of pride in our product too. I don’t like talking about myself. I can talk about this product all day long. But yes, it’s a very good product. That was our number one goal. You find cookies anywhere but they’ve got a shelf life of a week. Personally, I believe the cookies at least that we’re making, no preservatives, no nothing with butter. So they’ve got a shelf life of a day and a half, two days max, and that’s the best quality. So I really believe in that. I believe in the product.

On What’s Most Popular at Moo Milk Bar and What Could Get More Love:

So we’ve got this Brown Sugar Toffee Bit Cookie that is so buttery. As soon as you pick it up, your hands just get greasy. But it’s just so delicious. It’s so good. That is probably our most popular cookie. And then in the summers, we do special ice cream sandwiches, and we do S’mores ice cream sandwich. It’s so big you can’t pick it up to eat it. It’s so large. We use an oat brown sugar cookie, and then we make our own marshmallows that are probably about two inches thick. We toast it on the spot. We melt some chocolate. We put vanilla ice cream. We make a ground cookie crumble on top. It’s so good. That’s probably our most popular item in the summer.

There is a Banana Chocolate Milk. I mean, there is some love for it, but everyone always goes for, “Oh, I’ll take a Caramel Milk, a Chocolate Milk.” In Israel growing up, there were these popsicles; these popsicles you used to get on the beach where it was a banana chocolate popsicle. And it just reminds me of that. Maybe it’s nostalgic for me, but it is delicious. And we make our own chocolate syrup and we use a compound, a very high quality Italian compound made from real bananas. So it’s got a really good banana flavor to it. It needs more love.

On Her Cookbook, Modern Israeli Cooking:

I was approached by Page Street Publishing. I don’t know if you’re familiar with I am a Food Blog. They did a book with her recently, and they approached me as well, and they said, “I would love for you to do an Israeli or Middle Eastern cookbook, and it’s really trending right now.” I was like, “You know what? Yeah, sure. Let’s do it.” They gave me about 3 months to write 100 recipes, and that was so challenging but in a good way. I really, really loved it.

We did it and I photographed it all too, which is nice. So I was able to do the writing, the recipes, and the photographs. I got a lot of control over what was happening in the book, and I sent it all off. Now, they’re editing it. It’s going into print probably in the next few months or so. Really, really exciting.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

I watch Chef’s Table, which is on Netflix. That was unbelievably shot. Really beautiful, great chefs. Francis Mallmann was probably my favorite. He cooked with a lot of fire and has got a great concept of food.

I love The Mind of a Chef on PBS.

I’m not really into the competition shows. I actually get very angry when I watch them just because I’m like, “No. What are you doing?” or, “That doesn’t make sense.” A lot of times, the best recipes come from development and feeling and thought. And I think when someone is just throwing things together, and this is what I came up with, sometimes it could be great. But most of the times, it’s not my thing. So that’s why I enjoy more of the specials, like the Chef’s Table and Mind of a Chef.

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

My favorite right now is Lady and Pups. She’s got some great recipes on there. Really smart and quirky. I love her writing. It mixes all these cuisines together. I really, really love her. So her.

Happy Yolks has great photography. I really love that one.

Pepper Passport is great. I give them some recipes occasionally. But they’re also great for travel. They’ve got a lot of different cities that they review. So that’s really cool.

And then, oh, Death to Sour Mix. It’s a cocktail blog. Really cool. And I’m really bad at cocktails, believe it or not. So I really like that one.

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

I forgot what the guy’s name is on Instagram. But the dog’s name is Norm, and he’s a pug. And he puts him on things, like on ledges… anyway, he makes me very happy.

Then there is a restaurant called Jack’s Wife Freda in New York that has a great Instagram. They always photograph. I guess, one of the owners, she dresses really nicely and she takes photos with products and holding different dishes in the restaurant. That’s a really cool one to follow too.

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

The item that I can’t do without is my, I’ve got a Japanese Mandolin. I mean, probably the most dangerous tool in the whole, entire kitchen, but I love it. I love my mandolin. Then I’ve got a pair of tongs that I’ve had forever. They’re just a pair of metal tongs. Also, I’ve got a pan. I always make omelettes in.

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

Dried cherries. I used to hate dried cherries. But recently, I rehydrated them in whiskey and I used them inside of a sausage mix. So I made pork sausages with whiskey-soaked cranberries, really delicious. So I’m really starting to love them when they’re soaked in whiskey.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

I am in love with a cookbook called Prune. It’s a woman named Gabrielle Hamilton that wrote it. She also wrote Blood, Bones, and Butter. This cookbook is fantastic. It’s from her restaurant, Prune in New York. She’s got some great recipes. They’re those down home good comforting recipes but with a really nice, elegant, sophisticated twist to them. So I really enjoy it.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

I don’t know why I really love listening to Brazilian Girls and that just gets me going. I guess it’s the vibe of it. Especially in the summer, Brazilian Girls in the summer makes me want to barbecue for some reason, so that and any sort of Dave Matthews Band.

I like really bad R&B music too for some reason, like Trey Songz, and really bad stuff.

On Keeping Posted with Danielle:

I’m big on Instagram. I love Instagram. I’ll post there more than anywhere else. That’s definitely where to follow. I’m @iwillnoteatoysters on Instagram.

052: Brian Samuels: Cooking and Enjoying Fish

June 22, 2015 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

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A Thought for Food

Brian is a Boston-based food photographer, and on his blog, he shares a lot of vegetarian options, and considers his diet 98% pescetarian. A Thought for Food was started in 2009 and has been featured in Food and Wine, Food52 and Yahoo Food, just to name a few.

I am so happy to have Brian Samuels of A Thought for Food, here on the show today.

(*All images below are Brian’s.)

On Blogging:

I think to have a successful food blog, you have to be pretty dedicated. It’s very time consuming, so I think maybe not crazy is the right word exactly, but definitely devotion, passion, maybe a little obsessive. Maybe that’s a better term. That’s really why I think a lot of people who end up writing food blogs have that type of personality.

I would say the most challenging would be the writing of it. I don’t find myself to be a natural writer. I don’t easily sit down and the words flow out. There’s a lot of editing involved. And sometimes I’ll write and write and write, and then delete a huge amount of it. Then, sometimes, I’ll just delete the whole thing and start over again. It takes a while.

There are other times, though, where I sit down and it does flow out a little bit more and I feel like I do have something to say and then it’s a little easier to say it. But for me, the most fun and definitely challenging element, but still the most fun and easy in a way, would be photography. It’s something that I’ve always connected to, just being able to capture my own experiences through the lens.

Back in 2009, when I started the blog, it was, I guess, the start of when food blogs became really big. There were definitely the big ones, like, 101 Cookbooks, Smitten Kitchen, and a few other big ones. I read frequently and I was always creating the recipes and commenting on those posts.

I felt like I also had a story to tell about food, and I was throwing a lot of dinner parties with my husband, or my now husband. I wanted to share those recipes and I wasn’t necessarily expecting people to read the blog. I was just sending it out to family members and friends who asked for the recipes. But I just really felt like I had a passion for food, and it was a way for me to get that story out there.

On His Curiosity for Food and Cooking:

I think ever since I was little, I was always passionate about cooking and showed an interest in it. I remember growing up and my mom making dinner every night. She was very much into making home cooked meals. We had take-out once in a while, but for the most part, she really wanted to make things from scratch and educated us about food.

She worked with a lot of cookbooks herself, in terms of making dinners for us, making meals for us. I just always took interest. As soon as I smelled something, I was always by her side asking questions and wanting to know how she was doing things. And eventually, she had me help her out.

On Getting Into Food Photography:

I went to film school at Emerson College in Boston. And there, I focused on documentary film-making, and I really fell in love with being able to tell stories, especially through film, but about the real world, about real people and not necessarily scripted.

I ended up working for a documentary production company in Boston for three years. And that’s actually when I started the blog, was during that time.

I did see it as a way to combine my love for documenting, not necessarily through photography but just documenting my love for food, recipe development, playing around with recipes, and educating people about food, all that. So it wasn’t necessarily about the photography specifically at the time, but definitely about documenting it.

I was shooting originally, if you go back to old posts, not that I necessarily promote that, I was using a Canon PowerShot, just point and shoot. Taking pictures of the final dishes and maybe a few processed shots along the way. But I wasn’t using great equipment; I was still learning about techniques about how to photograph food. My passion for food photography developed because of that experimentation.

On Being (98%) Pescetarian:

A pescetarian is someone who eats vegetarian and fish. Red meat is out, poultry is out. Basically any land animals are out.

When I was 15, just for health reasons, I decided that I really wanted to cut out red meat from my diet. And I was still eating chicken and turkey, but I really wanted to cut out red meat from my diet. From there, I took out chicken as well. But I could never give up fish or dairy, because I’m just in love with those two things. And I think it allows me to be a little bit more adventurous in my eating, in terms of dining out and experiencing things.

For me, that’s such a huge part of my life, is not passing up the opportunity to try something. So the 98% is really where I will usually have a bite of something if we’re dining out somewhere and it’s really special.

My husband eats meat, so he’ll most likely get a meat dish when we’re dining out. I’ll sometimes have a bite of that. And I still think meat is delicious. He loves making smoked brisket and I’ll have a bite when he’s done, just to try it out. Because I usually help him out a little bit too. So I feel like if I’m doing it, I want to know what it tastes like.

For me, it’s really about where you’re sourcing your ingredients. I make sure that what we’re cooking is locally sourced if at all possible. And I’m knowing the farmers that we’re sourcing it from and all of that. We don’t do it often. I can justify it.

On Cooking Fish:

I think salmon is hard to mess up. It’s fatty.

It’s funny because a lot of people stay away from salmon because they don’t like fishy fish. I never get that because I love fish, and I love it whether or not it has a fishy taste to it. I’m okay with that.

I think they’re getting that from the oils and the fats from the fish probably, and especially with salmon. But in terms of fish that’s hard to mess up, I think that salmon is really easy to work with. It also holds up when you add a lot of flavor to it, so you could do soy sauce, you could do a marinate with it and you’ll still have a really nice fish flavor with it.

I think that some other fish are more delicate obviously. White fish, you don’t want to mess around with that too much, so you have to be careful with that. I always think salmon is really easy to work with. I think sword fish as well. It holds up nicely. They’re both very meaty fish too.

I would not say I’m a pro at cooking fish at this point. I think I have learnt that overcooked fish is not merely as delicious as seared fish. And, so with salmon, I’m trying to make sure that the skin is crispy if it still has a skin on it. That it is cooked all the way through but not overdone. I think working with high heat is really key with fish because you just want that point where it just cooks all the way through and you’re not cooking any longer.

Starting off with high heat is really key. It really depends on the fish and what you’re doing with it and how you’re serving it. I also like to play around with other types of sea foods like scallops and shrimps and we’ll rotate that in our diet as well.

On Choosing Fish:

When I go to buy fish in the store I don’t necessarily care if it’s previously frozen or not, I really look at where it’s being sourced from. With anything I want to buy as local as possible. And coming from New England or, the Pacific Northwest, you can usually find local seafood in these areas but I know that people in the middle of the country struggle with that.

I’m really looking for stuff that, I can have a dialogue with the person at the fish counter and say, when did this come in? Where did it come from? Tell me about it? I think when it came in is usually a good sign of freshness, and yes, that’s pretty much my thought process behind it.

I think the frozen element really makes a difference because as soon as it hits the cold it’s obviously going to preserve it longer. It depends on the fish. Yes the previously frozen thing doesn’t bother me as much as the farmed versus wild caught. If it’s frozen and it tastes good then, great. I don’t think it matters either way necessarily. I don’t think it affects the flavor of it too much.

Here in New England I’ve had the luxury of being able to get fish that was caught that day and having it and there’s a deeper flavor in it. You’re tasting the ocean. It hasn’t lost that flavor. I think a fish that has probably been frozen, it sort of loses that depth.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

Top Chef.

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

I think most people already know these sites but some of my favorites are Sprouted Kitchen and Happy Yolks is a favorite of mine as well, and Not Without Salt is one of my all times favorites. I think Ashley was on your show actually at one point.

Those are definitely some of my top three.

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

All those people definitely. Is it sad that West Elm makes me really happy when I see those pictures?

I’m a sucker for, we have a new house, I follow them just to see what they are posting about. So that always makes me happy. I would definitely say Ottolenghi’s Instagram feed always, I’m always unbored with that and Local Milk is a favorite as well.

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

This is a tough one. It’s funny, the weird one that popped into my head is an egg slicer. I don’t know why and I don’t think I have a connection to it really but it just popped into my head.

I don’t think it’s one of those things that people have but I actually use it fairly frequently. Whenever I want to do a big salad for one of my big weeknight meals. If I want a hearty salad. I always put hard boiled egg on it and it’s just an egg slicer. So I’m saying the egg slicer.

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

Mushrooms. I think would be the one. I was such an adventurous eater growing up but mushrooms, I was disgusted by and now I’m obsessed with them.

I think for the most part we always had it with chicken, in a chicken dish. Or it was on top of pizza. My sister loved it and I think I just hated it because she loved it so much. But I’m obsessed with it now.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

For the most part I look at cookbooks for the pictures to give me inspiration. Recently, the ones would be definitely Plenty. All the Ottolenghi books, I’m always going back to them. Ashley’s book, Not Without Salt’s, Date Night In I’ve been going to too.

I think the same goes for magazines as well. I subscribe to a lot food magazines and usually I go through for the pictures. I love the new Sift magazine by King Arthur Flour. Great pictures and it just gets you thinking, because it’s so baking focused, it gets you thinking outside the box.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks or Norah Jones’s Come Away With Me. When I’m cooking, for the most part, I want that chill music with a glass of wine and it mellows me out.

On Keeping Posted with Brian:

Definitely through Instagram in terms of more day to day. It’s beyond just the food world. It’s also, I put up pictures of my dog, and where I am, and what’s going on in life. On Twitter as well. Those would be the top places. But I’m also on Facebook and all those wonderful sites.