Nashville | The Dinner Special podcast

118: Hannah Messinger: How Cooking is an Exercise in Patience

April 13, 2016 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

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Nothing but Delicious

Hannah graduated from Boston University with a photojournalism degree and started her blog Nothing but Delicious out of boredom. She had spent some time away from writing and photography, but through her blog, has learned many lessons like that she indeed wants to be a writer and that cooking is an exercise in patience.

I am so happy to have Hannah Messinger of Nothing but Delicious here on the show today.

(*All photos below are Hannah’s.)

On Starting Her Blog:

I had been reading fashion blogs for awhile. My favorite one is called Sea of Shoes, and they had linked to a blog called, La Tartine Gourmande. Which I’m sure I sound like a redneck. I’m from Tennessee. I’m really sorry. But I had this office job where I was just on the computer all day and talking to people on the phone, so I could look at whatever on the screen.

I ended up reading the entire blog, start to finish, like a book just because, I mean, what else was I going to do? I can’t sit still. I didn’t realize that food blogs were a thing. I didn’t realize they could be a cool thing. Back in the day when you thought of a blog, it was kind of a dorky thing, right? I was just blown away by her images of her recipes and the way she wrote. And I felt like it could be, if nothing else for me, good practice just to write and to photograph things.

Nothing else has brought me so much fun work. It’s not lucrative work. But I mean, my first job, I got from Twitter shooting a brand new chocolate company here, brand new then, not brand new now, called Olive & Sinclair. The owner is a real-life Willy Wonka, and he always just gives me a box with $200 worth of chocolate in it. It’s so much fun.

On Her Curiosity Around Food:

When I was maybe three years old, my yaya – that’s Greek for grandmother – gave me a teeny tiny baking set for Christmas. It’s probably the best gift I’ve ever received, to this day. She was a really great hostess and I have very fond memories of going to her house on every holiday and just Sunday afternoons. And everything she made was so intriguing. From Chex Mix to Jello salad, because it was the ’80s, to prime rib. Everything was perfect.

My mom, every Easter, makes lamb and manestra. Which is not the right name for it, it’s just what my family calls it, I learned recently.

It’s lamb baked on a rack so that the juices drip down. And then you put cherry tomatoes under it and they roast in the juices and let their own juices out. And at the end, you throw in orzo and it cooks in all the tomato and lamb juice. And you serve it all together on a plate with lots of lemon and herbs and feta cheese. And she also makes spanakopita with filo dough. I wasn’t even allowed to touch the filo until I was 18. But now she lets me do it, and it’s really fun.

On Her Food Heroes:

I think everyone in the blogging world. I learned almost everything I know from Alton Brown, as opposed to going to culinary school or anything like that. The book, Ratio, by Michael Ruhlman, was really life changing.

I also love this book called, An Everlasting Meal: Cooking With Economy and Grace, which is by Tamar Adler, but it’s modeled on the book, How to Cook a Wolf, by MFK Fisher. It talks about toppling meals. That if you have steamed broccoli for dinner one night, the next day at lunch you make quick pickled broccoli stem salad. And things like that. Meals that make sense, that merge into one another. And that really changed the way I cook.

On Cooking as an Exercise in Patience:

It takes time and there’s no way around that. If you mess up a recipe, a lot of times the store is closed, you’re out of ingredients, you’re out of money to buy new ingredients. You really have to wait until next week, if you’re a home cook, to try it again. And that can seem like such a long time for an impatient person like me. I feel like that’s an everyday challenge for me, not only cooking but things take time, and cooking has conditioned me, I think, to deal with that in my life.

I did a kinfolk dinner maybe three years ago in Chattanooga. It was all about infusion. And I had made a chai pots de creme. Which, in all my recipe tests, the cream broke because ginger is pretty acidic but it’s a necessary flavor in the process.

So I struggled to figure out how to get it in there. And then when I finally figured it out, I was baking them off at my parents’ place which…they were renting a really old condo at the time. And I put them in the oven and I thought, “This is it. I’ve finally got it.” And I swear, the oven door exploded. And I sat down in the middle of the glass and cried.

On a Dish She Finds Challenging and Requires Patience:

I struggle with custard pies. I mean, we all do. They’re very temperamental. I lose one to slumping or sogginess every now and then like everyone. But I try not to let that get me down.

I’m going to use custard pies as an example, because I just talked about it. And my advice would be just to take baby steps. If you can make each separate component by itself and succeed without combining them, which is to say you can roll out the dough and you can bake it in little rounds. You can make lemon curd, put it on top, top it with strawberries and a little whipped cream or something. Then you know you can do it next time and you feel good going into it. Just that you know what each thing is supposed to be like and that you’ve done it successfully.

My mom always says, “Take the next right step,” which sounds so frustrating when you have a really big and daunting task in front of you. It sounds like being told to think small. But small steps snowball. And that’s the only way you can get anywhere. You can’t do step nine before you’ve done step two. I get really mad at her every time she tells me that, but then I’m like, “Okay, wait, this has always been good advice.”

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

Obviously, I watch Mind of a Chef and Chef’s Table. And Great British Bake Off. Who doesn’t love that? But recently, my favorite is called, I’ll Have What Phil’s Having, on PBS with Phil Rosenthal. It’s so, so, so funny.

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

I’m assuming everyone knows about Molly Yeh. Everyone loves Molly Yeh. She’s so funny and so sweet. I’m just a super huge, major fan girl of Lady and Pups. I like her brutal honesty. I like that she has a series called, The Shit I Eat When By Myself. I mean, it’s embarrassing stuff that I eat shit like that when I’m by myself, too. And I’m like, “Yes! Yes, she’s so cool!” My favorite one, it’s like flaming Cheetos in a grilled cheese with arugula and gouda. It’s beautiful.

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

My favorites right now…do you follow Chef Jacques La Merde? It’s really some of the best satire our generation has ever seen. And then there’s another one called Kimi Swimmy. And I saw her via Munchies on Vice. And they say that she kills octopus with her bare teeth.

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

It’s not very unusual but I have this marble rolling pin that I bought at a thrift store years ago for $10. And two or three years ago, I was in this real freak accident with this semi that ran over my Subaru, and the only things I pulled out of the car, besides myself, were my dog, my camera, and my marble rolling pin. It’s been through a lot with me, so I’m a little attached to it.

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

I’m actually in the process of learning to like shrimp. I know everyone loves shrimp but I just never have. Actually, the restaurant group I work for has a restaurant called, Little Octopus, and the chef there makes shrimp ceviche. That’s really the first time I’ve ever felt like “Okay, I can do this.” I make myself try shrimp a minimum of three times a year, and I’m really glad I did because this was the first time I thought I could get somewhere with it.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

Probably my favorite cookbook right now, and maybe always, is Donna Hay’s, Seasons. It’s just photographed beautifully. The recipes are simple. They’re seasonal. They’re just beautiful. And then because I make pie a lot, I refer to The Four & Twenty Blackbirds Cookbook all the time. It’s really like the pie Bible. You can’t go wrong with a recipe from Four & Twenty Blackbirds.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

I love the album called, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot from the band Wilco. I don’t know, I have a lot of moods while I cook. I go up and down and everywhere in between. And it has a good range of songs that I feel like accompany that.

On Keeping Posted with Hannah:

Definitely Instagram. And my handle is HMMessinger.

099: Dennis Prescott: An Unfolding Food and Photography Journey

December 14, 2015 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

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Dennis The Prescott

Dennis cooks, photographs and writes all the time. His food photography is incredible, and I have to confess I get instant cravings when I see his beautifully made, styled and photographed food on Instagram and on his blog. You can also find Dennis on Food and Wine’s FWx.com where he’s also got some really cool videos up.

I am so excited to have Dennis Prescott of Dennis the Prescott here on the show today.

(*All photos below are Dennis’s.)

On Learning to Cook:

I lived in Nashville for a while, being down there as a guitar player. And being a musician was a wonderful experience, as a full-time musician. Got to do a ton of things and travel and everything else, but I did not get paid very well, because that’s the musician’s lifestyle. But I had come to really enjoy all of these different foods, traveling, and so I kind of decided, well, I can either eat pasta with butter on it, eat at the dollar menu at McDonald’s essentially, or I could learn how to cook. And it was one of those three.

So I went to the Nashville public library, I got a library card, which was probably the first library card I’ve ever had in my entire life, and took out three cookbooks. And then just started working through them, and I became absolutely just obsessed with needing to know everything about everything about food, and how to make every dish. So that’s kind of where it started for me, honestly. Just innocently I just really wanted to learn how to cook some dishes so that I didn’t have to eat junk food anymore.

The people around me encouraged it for sure, because they liked to try it. My friends seem to call me “All or Nothing Guy.” If I’m really passionate about something or if I’m into it, I’m really into it and I want to know everything. It was the same when I was a kid and I wanted to learn how to play guitar, it’s the same. I really like history, it’s the same with that for me, and food was the same thing. And now food and photography are the same thing with me, I just want to know everything about everything.

I’ve never gotten bored of it probably because there are so many things to learn. I don’t know 4% of all of the foods that can be cooked in the world. It’s amazing and I find that really exciting, honestly.

On His Blog:

Initially I started taking pictures of the food dishes that I was cooking just to remember them. I was making so many, working through all of these books and I thought, “I want to be able to remember the dishes that I really like,” so I started taking photos. And then this thing called Instagram kind of popped up, so I started an account. I think initially I started an account for my band actually, and then I started a personal one. And I started posting these photos, honestly horrible, horrible photos, on Instagram. You can just scroll through a few years ago and check it out if you need. But really that’s where it started for me.

And then all of a sudden I started to realize, I was like, “Wait a second, these photos, if you catch the light a certain way or if you do this.” I started to have these glimpses of what a pretty good food photo could be, and then I was like, “Oh wait a second, there’s something more to this here, right?” But initially it was all iPhone shots for honestly probably about two years, so just on my phone snapping photos for documentation.

I only had an Instagram account for quite a while, and probably just because my friends drove me crazy saying like, “You need to write your recipes down, you need to start doing this.” I was like, “Okay, I’ll do it.” And honestly it was quite a scary thing for me initially because writing those recipes or writing that blog I found to be a pretty vulnerable thing. And so jumping in I had a really hard time.

On Honing His Photography:

There’s been some mentors in my life. Some of them I know and some of them don’t know me at all, but I just really love their work. I’ve tried to find people along that way that I find really inspiring, both from a styling standpoint and from a photography standpoint. And then meeting people personally and saying, “I love your craft, can we sit down and have a coffee?,” something like that along the way.

The Internet’s an amazing thing where you can really go online and see all of this amazing work and put that into your own perspective and take that and say, “I’m not going to do it like that, but I love how this is lit.” Lighting is the biggest thing in photography. You can’t really recreate that necessarily unless you practice it. I took hundreds, if not thousands, of really bad shots to get some pretty good shots. And there’s still days where I struggle, because I shoot in natural light. So there’s some days where it’s really dark on the East Coast and you’re just like, “Okay, it’s not working today. It’s just not working for me.” But I really think it’s just this journey where you constantly try to get better and you look back.

The other thing that I try to do often is take a look at shots that I did maybe six months ago or something along those lines and go, “Okay, so what was I doing here? What am I doing now? And how did I get from A to B?,” so I can realize what I’ve learned along the way and keep learning that way. But aside from that, it’s just shooting, constantly shooting. My Instagram is only food for sure, but I shoot people all the time. When I’m lucky enough to travel, I probably take 1,000 shots in Philadelphia or New York City or Toronto or wherever that are just for me, but all of that helps you practice on how to capture composition and lighting and everything else. Which can then cross over into how you do food photography and how you do styling.

On His Photography Inspirations:

David Loftus is fantastic; he shoots most, if not all, of Jamie Oliver’s stuff. Daniel Krieger is a great friend of mine. He shoots cookbooks and for the New York Times and everything. So those two guys for sure for me are probably the ones who I gravitate towards their work. But there is Alice Gao, who has a great account on Instagram, who does some food but she does a lot of lifestyle shots, too. I try to follow a lot of those people, as well, who do travel and do everything, and just be able to constantly be inspired. But in terms of food, those two guys for sure are the ones that I initially fell in love with what they do.

On His Work on Food and Wine’s FWx.com:

Food and Wine, they’re wonderful. I’m not on staff, but I’ve been working with them for over a year. Some of their staff reached out to me through Twitter and sent me a message, said that they really enjoyed my stuff and wanted to see what we could do to collaborate. I was just going to do a project for them, or I didn’t even really know. I honestly freaked out because it was a huge deal for me, and still is, to be able to work with them. It’s a magazine that I read long before we had anything to do with them. So then we just had creative meetings along the way, and then eventually decided how could we kind of take this.

And a videography friend of mine, who’s my partner in the videos, we made a video together with no plan, aside from we thought it was a really great idea. And then that turned into the series. And there’s more of them coming along the way.

I don’t know why I started doing the stacking things, but I did. I don’t want to sound weird, but it did happen organically. I really just enjoyed it. And with that Twitter reach-out, we just decided that that made the most sense. It seemed like I was stacking things and we could go from there. I still do that a little bit, but the column’s branched out a little bit beyond that where I will do other things now, but definitely I guess its main focus is like let’s pick the biggest, boldest, craziest comfort food possible, whatever that is. It could be stacked in a huge burger, it could be ice cream sandwiches, it could polenta fries with some dipping sauce, whatever. But it just has to be over the top.

On Which Creative Outlet He Enjoys the Most:

I definitely enjoy Instagram the most, for sure. Because, as far as the social media world, it’s my first love. It’s the thing I gravitate towards. It’s the thing that I personally go on when I am looking at other people’s social media accounts and what they’re doing. But I really do enjoy Snapchat and I started doing Snapchat with my friends because living in Nashville for a while it was just a really easy way to connect back and forth with them. And then some people were asking me some questions about, this was before I did any videos at all, they were saying, “How do we cook X, Y and Z?” So I was thinking, “Well, how can I do this, and do this cost-effectively and quickly and just get this out there?”

So one day I posted on an Instagram picture, I said, “Follow me on Snapchat, I’m going to show how to make a steak this afternoon, like a restaurant-style steak.” And I had, I don’t know how many hundreds or thousands of people that added me on Snapchat, it was crazy. So then I thought, “Well, I better start using this now.”

I really enjoy it, to be perfectly honest. It’s something where I’m still trying to figure out where I fit in to that world and how best to use that medium for me. But I really like it and I love being able to connect with people. I feel like it’s a different way to connect with people. And I’m able to Snapchat things about my daily life, which I try to do, too. And it’s not necessarily food. Like I was dressed up in a suit and tie yesterday, so I took a selfie of myself. I wouldn’t put that on my Instagram account, but I’ll put that on there. So it’s a cool way, I think, for other people.

And I follow other accounts that do that, too. It’s a way to get a background scene of what that person is actually doing at the time and what’s going on in their daily life, which I think is really cool. I always thought, when I was a kid I was a big Radiohead fan, and I was like, “What are they doing today? What are they eating? Are they at a record store? Are they at the mall?” I just wanted to know that stuff.

I think that’s really cool that we live in a world today where we can get a glimpse into what those people are actually doing. Because they’re probably not making a movie that day or recording a record, they might just be out with their kids. But I think that stuff’s really interesting and it helps you to develop this relationship with the person because you’re like, “Oh, I actually know you, you’re a real human and I appreciate you even more.”

That’s why I like that, as well. So it’s more for me to get that investment in what those people are doing in their lives. And if I can be a part of that, that’s really cool.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

That’s hard. Any of the Jamie Oliver stuff.

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

Definitely FWx. I won’t say my own, but you should probably go check that out sometime. i am a food blog is great, I love that, I love everything she does, too.

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

Definitely my friend Daniel Krieger is great, Alice Gao is great, Stephanie from i am a food blog is great. Diala, her name is Diala’s Kitchen, is great. She’s from Toronto and posts a lot of Toronto shots. If you’re Canadian it’s specifically great.

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

I collect antiques all the time. So I’ve got an antique citrus…like a juicer, and an ice cream scooper from 1880, 1870, and I absolutely love them.

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

Dates. I hated them. When I was a kid I hated dates. And my dad would eat date squares growing up and just try to force feed them on me. I was like, “No,” I was not having it at all. And now I think they’re the most delicious thing in the world.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

When I started cooking I started cooking to the Jamie Oliver cookbooks. As a little plug for a guy I don’t know at all obviously, they’re great, they’re fast, they’re easy. Anyone can make all of those recipes, and it’s really great to build your confidence and learn basic, easy steps that then you can take from there. So for me that’s initially how I started doing it.

I love older cookbooks, so kind of collecting ones. I actually just was looking at one the other day that it was a White House cookbook from the early 1900s and all the recipes that the White House made for the President.

I like a lot of those weird and wacky ones for sure, too. But reading through newer ones, as well, at the same time. So it’s kind of hard to pin exactly one. But if I could say ones that helped me out, for sure initially it was definitely the Jamie Oliver books.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

I love alt-J; I cook a lot to the alt-J records. Foals is a British band that I really love. Anything kind of atmospheric. Anything with a really great drum beat, a little bit of atmosphere. I actually cook to a lot of hip-hop, too, surprisingly. So I love listening to Jay-Z and Kanye and stuff. I’m not nearly cool enough to actually say that I’m a fan of theirs, but I really actually love that when I’m cooking.

On Keeping Posted with Dennis:

On Instagram for sure, on my website, Twitter, Facebook, it’s all @dennistheprescott. If you want to check out FWx, I’m on there, as well. And then if you just google “Dennis the Prescott,” that will come up with different…because I’m very fortunate enough to work with other companies and that kind of thing, like Reynolds and Frigidaire and stuff, so a lot of different recipes are on there that I’ve been able to do for them. Dependent upon what they are, if you’re looking for chicken wings, if you’re looking for whatever, you’ll find it somewhere out there.

098: Brita Britnell: All About Nashville and Hot Chicken

December 9, 2015 by Gabriel 2 Comments

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B. Britnell

Brita is a Nashville native and on her blog B. Britnell she hopes to inspire us with recipes we’ll enjoy making, love eating and most importantly, be eager to share.

I am Gabriel Soh and I am so happy to have Brita Britnell of B. Britnell here with me today.

On Growing Up in Nashville:

I wasn’t born in Nashville, but we moved here when I was young, and I’ve lived here basically my whole life with the exception of college. I went to college in DC. So I’m very much a Nashville native. I absolutely love Nashville.

I will say I’m not into country music at all. I went through a year spurt in high school this one year where I really loved country music and since then I can’t stand listening to it if I’m being perfectly honest. But I love Music City. I love what it is to this city that I am in and just what it has become.

I feel like what it’s become is when people ask, “What do you do in Nashville?” part of me feels like I don’t have an answer, but it’s only because all I want to say is food and music and there’s 101 million different food and music things you can do every night in Nashville and I absolutely love that.

I love to make sure people know, that if they’ve never been to Nashville or maybe they’ve been, but they just walked down Broadway or went in all of the honky-tonk bars, is that there’s such an awesome music scene in Nashville outside of country music. We all appreciate the country music but there’s a really awesome rock-and-roll scene and a really awesome Indie scene and really anything that you can imagine. There’s just so much music in Nashville. It’s really great.

On the Role that Food Played in Her Home:

My father was born and raised in Italy in Sicily and moved here when he was in his twenties and my mom was born and raised in Georgia and so I got a very southern taste. My mom’s entire side of the family is fried chicken and buttermilk biscuits and sweet potatoes. And then my dad knows how to cook nothing besides traditional Italian food, honestly, and he loves to cook and he cooked all the time. Pretty much all he cooked was, I don’t want to necessarily say it was all spaghetti, but it was all Italian-inspired, for sure.

On the Food Culture in Nashville:

I had a big group of friends come and visit recently and I mentioned hot chicken to them and they didn’t know what I was talking about.

This is such a huge phenomenon in Nashville. I don’t think people understand until they get here. There’s a fried chicken place to every McDonald’s that we have. The myth behind the story is that this woman owned a restaurant and she found out that her husband was cheating on her and so she put a ton of paprika and cayenne and all this pepper in his chicken to punish him. He ended up loving it and started a restaurant and that restaurant is Prince’s. And so, since then it’s just hot chicken.

It’s essentially fried chicken that’s unbearably spicy. I can’t eat it. But there’s a hot chicken festival every year that the mayor comes to and it’s a really big deal here.

On Hot Chicken:

I always tell people you have to go to a hot chicken place. I think the absolute best place is Pepperfire. It’s a newer place but I just think that their recipe is the absolute best. I do a lot of Nashville food writing and do a lot of Nashville food photography. So whether or not I like it, I’m around hot chicken all the time. I always force myself to try it. That way I can at least say “They have good hot chicken. Or I don’t like theirs as much.” They’re all very spicy to me.

I actually have an article that I wrote for Thrillist that’s something like “X Number of Under the Radar Hot Chicken Dishes“. And there’s everything. Hot chicken tacos. Hot chicken taco salad. There’s everything. So I would definitely recommend the hot chicken.

Besides that, there is a place here in Nashville that I really like called Biscuit Love Brunch. I like to recommend that specifically to people just because I think it’s got a new-age new American feel while also having that southern-like “it’s all biscuits”, and they do have a hot chicken biscuit there.

On Her Blog:

I was just really bored at work, and during the summer it was super slow, and so I just felt like I needed a creative outlet. It was just this desire for a creative outlet and I did it because I wanted to write.

Honestly I didn’t know what it was going to be. I will say food had nothing to do with it. I never started my blog thinking that it would be a food blog.

I did think, “Oh, maybe once or twice a month I’ll share a recipe. That’ll be fun. I like to cook.” I never imagined that it would turn into a food blog. When I started doing those once or twice a month recipes I realized that was the part of it that I loved the most. It in a way felt like I had purpose as opposed to this “Let me come up with this witty article.”

On How She Learned to Cook:

I just figured it out. I didn’t cook a lot in college. I actually didn’t cook a lot growing up at all to be perfectly honest. It was one of those things that my mom jokes about now. She’s, “I always tried to get you in the kitchen and you wouldn’t even fry an egg.” But I’ve always loved to eat, I feel like, more than the average person. I’ve always been really into food but I just loved to have other people cook it for me.

At a certain point I just dove into it and I just wanted to know everything about it. I listened to lots of food podcasts and read everything I could. I would like to say I’m just self-taught. My husband is also a great cook. In everything that he does, he’s very technical.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

I’m a huge fan of Chopped. I have it in my mind that they should do a Chopped blogger version. I really like Chopped. I like to watch Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives. There’s always a lot of Nashville places on there so I think that that one’s fun.

My husband’s really loves watching Mind of a Chef. So we watch that a lot. Chopped and Mind of the Chef are two of my favorites.

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

I already mentioned Joy the Baker’s blog. I absolutely love it. I will be honest that for me food blogs are a lot about the photography. So my favorite food blogs are mostly my favorite food blogs because of the photography. There’s a food blog called Local Milk. She caught my eye because she’s local. She lives in Chattanooga and does a lot in Nashville so in the same State as me, and her photography is just the most beautiful photography to me. She also does have really great recipes on her blog. I’ve made quite a few. And I also really like My Name is Yeh. She does, I want to say mostly baking, but she definitely does other stuff. Those are for sure some of my favorites.

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

I’ve not gotten into Snapchat. I tried. Literally the only person I’ve ever snapchatted is my husband. I keep saying I’m going to get more into that. And Periscope. I haven’t even downloaded Periscope yet. But I’m really big on Instagram and again just going back to the whole food photography thing, I just love pictures.

I’m a very visual person and I just love the pictures. Local Milk has really beautiful pictures so I love looking at hers. Who else? I follow this one account called This Wild Idea and it’s a Tennessee account and it’s actually a dog, but it’s the same thing. The pictures are really beautifully done and I love that. So again, it’s a lot about the photography for me.

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

I will say I have this spinny thing that you put eggs on and it sits on the counter top. I could never use it because in America we refrigerate our eggs and you keep them in the carton. About six months ago, earlier this season, we got chickens which has been such a great fun experience and so now I’m able to keep the eggs out on the counter.

I love walking in my kitchen and seeing this. It’s this circular thing where the eggs go around it and when you take one egg off the rest spiral down and it’s a neat thing to me. I just love that I have my own chickens and that I have the eggs in the kitchen. I love it. It’s a really cool thing to me. I like to brag about my chickens.

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

This is going back a little bit but when I was a child I absolutely hated peanut butter. I hated peanut butter. I don’t know why, and now I love it. I do a lot. I have a lot of peanut butter recipes on my blog. I have a peanut butter pie that is one of my most popular recipes and I have no idea why.

The smell of peanut butter made me sick. I couldn’t stand it but I absolutely love it.

I want to say a lot of spices. I never really cooked with spices until I got into my mid-twenties and now it’s like I’m obsessed with spices. I just love messing around with them.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

I have both of Joy the Baker’s cookbooks and I absolutely love them. I think she’s working on a third one. I have a cookbook of hers that I want to say it’s called Homemade Decadence.

If you go back and look at my earlier posts from when I first started, I often referenced how much baking made me nervous. I loved to cook but baking was such a complicated thing for me, which kind of goes back to the macaroons, but that one was a great thing for me because I was able to take some of her recipes and I think she does a great job of spelling it out.

We also have the Joy of Cooking which is different from Julia Child’s book but just the Joy of Cooking and it has every recipe you can imagine. I want to say it’s at least 500 pages if not a lot more. I’m not really sure but it’s a ton and it has just everything you can imagine. It doesn’t have more popular or more modern stuff in it. I don’t think it has anything quinoa in there, but it’s got every kind of main dish every kind of bread that you can imagine and it’s an awesome go-to.

It’s been a fun way for me to experiment. My husband and I sometimes literally will be, “We want to cook a dessert. Let’s do something we’ve never done before, but that we should know how to do.” I made cheesecake for the first time recently and so it’s just been neat having that cookbook. I highly recommend that one. I think it’s a good bit of money. I think it’s $50 but I think it’s everything that you could ever want to cook from fried chicken to cheesecake to just every kind of bread. It’s awesome.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

I just started this thing on my blog. Every time I post a recipe I’ve just been posting a YouTube video. And I told the story about how I love to listen to songs on repeat. So I often do. I just will put something on and whatever catches my attention, I’ll hit that repeat button and it will play the entire time that I’m cooking and photographing. I think it drives my husband crazy but it kind of keeps me going.

I’ve been really into lately Lucy Rose. She’s a British musician and I think I heard her in something on HBO, like she was in the end credits. I Googled the song and I’ve been really into her recently.

On Keeping Posted with Brita:

I would say that if you go to my blog www.bbritnell.com, I’ve got all my social media there. The one that I’m most active on is Instagram and my Instagram handle is @b.britnell. I use Instagram the most.