The Joy of Cooking | The Dinner Special podcast

127: Husbands That Cook: How Cooking Together Makes Food Better

June 15, 2016 by Gabriel 3 Comments

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Husbands That Cook

On Husbands That Cook, Adam and Ryan share quick and easy vegetarian meals, drinks and snacks, their favorite dishes from around the world, and everything from decadent desserts to healthy vegan options. They try to make their recipes as accessible as possible so everyone can confidently follow along and have fun with it.

I am so excited to have Adam Merrin and Ryan Alvarez of Husbands That Cook joining me here on the show today.

(*All photos below are Adam and Ryan’s.)

On Cooking as a Team:

Adam: I’ve learned so much from Ryan because, obviously, he has a lot more experience than I do, but he was the one that got me so excited about it and made it seem so fun. And so, it’s great to be able to do it together.

Ryan: And then for me, even though Adam may be not as experienced in the kitchen, doesn’t know all the techniques or whatever, but his taste is really, really good, so he always knows what to add to a dish or what to take away to make it even better.

He’s amazing with coming up with ideas for dishes, like, “What if we did a cake with this and that and this?” So he’ll come up with these great ideas. So, we make a good team that way. Maybe I might have a bit more of the experience in the kitchen, just kind of practical skills, he has this amazing internal sense of food. I think that we make a good team.

Adam: I feel like it’s helpful for the blog too, because, at least for me, the one with less experience, I make sure that the details and the recipes are written clearly so for beginning cooks that have never done this before, they can follow along with us. I like to approach it like people are going to be doing this for the first time. I think of my friends who don’t cook and who don’t have much experience in the kitchen. I feel like we’re talking to them, kind of walking them along through it so anybody could do it.

Ryan: Yeah, definitely. Because I’ve been cooking for longer, sometimes something that’s second nature to me or I think, “Well, everyone knows how to do this,” Adam might say, “Actually, I think we should explain this a little more clearly. Let’s try to make this a little more accessible.” I feel like we definitely make a good team in that sense, too.

On Being Vegetarian:

Ryan: I think, for both of us, we’ve been vegetarian for so long. I’ve been a vegetarian for about 16 years, and Adam, over 20, so I feel like at this point we’re so comfortable with cooking vegetarian. I maybe cooked a little bit of meat when I was a teenager, but I honestly barely remember how to do it.

Honestly, if somebody handed me a steak, I don’t know if I could cook it correctly, just because it’s been so long. At this point, it’s just kind of second nature. Just all the great vegetarian recipes out there, there’s so much to choose from.

Ryan: I feel like, with a lot of foods that have meat in them, a lot of times it isn’t necessarily about the meat itself, it’s more about the sauce or the flavors and the spices that go with it. So for some dishes, say like a pasta sauce, it can be very easy to take out the meat because you’re using herbs and spices and all those flavors that you get other ways besides the meat.

Whereas, of course, obviously it’s hard to make a vegetarian version of steak tartare, things like that. For a lot of things, I feel like you can get so much flavor other ways besides just from meat that it actually forces you to be creative and look at dishes in a new way.

I think part of it too is, if people think of vegetarian food as a replacement for meat, I think that’s where you can get those expectations. But if you think about a spaghetti marinara sauce, that’s vegetarian food. You wouldn’t necessarily think about it, you wouldn’t think, “Well, spaghetti marinara is vegetarian,” but it is.

It’s naturally vegetarian. So that’s one of those things where if I serve a pasta dinner to somebody, they’re not going to be thinking, “Wait, there’s no meat in this.” Theoretically, hopefully, they’ll just be thinking how delicious it is and they won’t even notice the fact that there’s no meat present.

On Cuban Food:

Ryan: Traditional Cuban cuisine has lots of flavor, they use lots of garlic. It is pretty meat-heavy in general, so a lot of the Cuban foods that I grew up with I no longer eat. But there are so many that we still do. Just black beans and rice with peppers and onions and spices. We have a dish on our website for yuca. It’s a root vegetable.

It’s also called cassava in English. But it’s just loaded with garlic and vinegar and olive oil. It’s just a lot of really bold flavors. We did a plantain recipe recently. I had the fried plantains, tostones, that are delicious. It’s kind of a mix of things, but it’s all very tropical flavors, a lot of garlic, a lot of bright flavors. Vinegars and peppers and things like that, and mangos. It’s delicious food. I love it.

Adam: So, the yuca con mojo recipe that we have on our website uses 30 cloves of garlic, just a little olive oil and salt and vinegar, and it is poured over the yuca, which is very similar to potatoes. But if you were going to try one thing first, I would say to experiment with that one. It’s so delicious.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

Ryan: There’s one called Cutthroat Kitchen that we really like. It’s a super fun game show where they have to compete, cook using crazy challenges, handicaps that they have to get assigned. It’s very fun and very exciting.

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

Adam: I love Cravings in Amsterdam. It’s Paola, and she takes incredible pictures and styles her dishes so beautifully. It’s cravingsinamsterdam.com.

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

Adam: On Snapchat, we really have been having so much fun following so many people. There’s a friend who’s a blogger we met named Asha, who has a wonderful blog called, Food Fashion Party. She cooks Indian food most of the time, and gorgeous, delicious appetizing dishes.

It’s really been fun to now see more than just the photographs that she posts on Instagram, where you can see her cooking in her kitchen and explaining how she makes things and cooking with her family. Every morning, she posts a smoothie. She has a very calming, relaxing voice that’s pleasant to listen to.

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

Ryan: Well, actually, like I mentioned before, remember how I said about how we’re waiting to post the flan recipe until we had a specific kind of double boiler?

I have a double boiler in my kitchen from my grandmother, that she used to make flan, and I still use it to make flan. So it is a well-loved and well-used piece of equipment.

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

Ryan: Oh my gosh, there’s actually a lot for me. When I was a kid, tomatoes, mushrooms, olives, everything, and now I love them all.

Adam: I used to not like beets, and now they’re one of my favorites. I had some today.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

Ryan: One of them, honestly, that has been so great is The Clever Cookbook by Emilie Raffa. It just came out. I know a lot of cookbooks will say that they’re full of timesaving tips and ways to get ahead in the kitchen, but truly, honestly hers really, really is.

It has changed the way that we cook certain things. Like, brown rice takes forever to cook, right? It takes like 45 minutes, but she has this great suggestion to pre-make it and just keep it in your fridge in small containers. That way, whenever you want brown rice, you just open up the freezer and dump it out, and it’s ready. So, stuff like that is so helpful, and her book is great.

Adam: And also, I’d like to just add in that we use The Joy of Cooking a lot for certain recipes. Our lemon poppy seed pancakes were adapted from them.

Ryan: The Joy of Cooking is like a cooking Bible. It’s been in my mom’s kitchen her whole life, it’s been in my kitchen my whole life.

Adam: The recipes are so good.

Ryan: So good, and just so many. If you need to know how to boil an egg, open up The Joy of Cooking. It’ll tell you how to do it. They’re great.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

Adam: Whenever we cook Cuban food, we put on the Buena Vista Social Club. And actually, whenever we do cuisine from other countries, we try to…

Ryan: Match the music to the cuisine. So if we’re cooking an Italian dinner, we’ll put on some Venetian boat singing or whatever. Or if we’re cooking Indian, we’ll put on some cool Indian music, some Bollywood stuff. We have fun with it.

On Keeping Posted with Adam and Ryan:

Adam: Our blog, it’s HusbandsThatCook.com. We update it about twice a week with recipes, like you said, desserts, dinners, appetizers, drinks.

Ryan: And then on our website, HusbandsThatCook.com, you’ll see links to all of our stuff. We’re super active on Instagram, we’re Husbands That Cook. You can find our Snapchat, we’re Husbands Cook. But all the links to all that is on our website.

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.

067: Sarah Fennel: Baking and Picture Taking

August 12, 2015 by Gabriel 4 Comments

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Broma Bakery

Since starting her blog in 2010, Sarah has inhabited seven different kitchens, graduated college, worked in marketing for a restaurant group and now works full-time on Broma Bakery. Her blog, Broma Bakery, is where she shares her love of food while indulging in her passion for photography.

I’m so happy to have Sarah Fennel of Broma Bakery on the show today.

(*All images below are Sarah’s.)

On Her Blog:

My dad’s a reporter, so I’ve always been around cameras and film and all of that stuff. So, from a very young age, I was always interested in photography, not necessarily food photography, but just holding cameras, taking pictures, things like that. Then, when I went to college, I really missed doing photography on a more regular basis.

At college, you get so stuck up with studying and not so fun stuff. So, I just decided to pick up my camera and started shooting food. The blog and the photography really came together in the same moment, in that, I missed my mom’s baking. I wanted to have some creative outlet and I just put them together.

I had no formal training. I had never done food photography before. I just picked up a camera and went with it.

On Her Interest in Baking:

I was always more interested in baking. My sister is a huge cook; she has been interested in cooking since she was 13 years old. She would help my parents cook almost every meal at my house, so she took on that role and I stepped back. But I’d always loved sweets; I’ve always had a huge sweet tooth. So, the baking came along more natural to me and it was a nicer reward for me in the end, to be able to eat desserts.

It’s a lot more precise and it takes, for me, my development is a lot of going to tried and true recipes I’ve used before, bloggers that I trust, and creating something new, but a lot of it is really taking stuff that you know is going to work and then working off of that, because there’s been times when I’ve tried doing things just thinking that I could make cookies or a cake and it’s really a science. You need be precise in what you do.

On Her Passion for Photography:

I was doing a lot of portraits. I did photography courses all throughout high school and then some in college as well, but I was really into taking pictures of people. I really liked engaging with different people. There was something about, when you put somebody in front of the lens and I guess have them shine through your pictures.

I, again, just really taught myself. I think that, if you look on my blog, my styling is very minimal, but there definitely is a style to it. I’ll use plain backdrops and things like that. And, in terms of that portion of the site, I thought it was really important to engage with my readers, just because there are so many people out there that are interested in food and food photography, but don’t really know where to start.

So many of my friends that have come over and see me taking my photos, the first time when they come over, they were like, this is what it looks like? I mean, the behind the scene is a lot more thrown together than you’d think. So, I thought it was really important to put that on the site, to make it seem a lot more accessible to people, and hopefully get them to be able to be inspired and start photographing food.

On Working on Her Blog Full-Time:

I guess it was fortuitous, really. I was working at this restaurant job and things weren’t working out. I wanted to make a switch and instead of jumping into something right away, I thought my favorite part of this job has been taking pictures of food.

I have this baking blog. It’s gotten good reception so far. Let’s give it a couple of months and see if I can really push this to be my full-time job. So, I just took a leap and went for it. Two months passed and I was like, I want to keep working on this. Then four months passed and it’s really just gone from there. It’s something I feel fortunate enough to be able to do as my full-time job and it’s definitely something that I want to have continue grow. But, yeah, it sort of happened and I went with it.

Doing it as a side project, I didn’t really set a schedule for myself. I didn’t set different tasks I had to do to keep up with things. Things that most people don’t realize is that, there’s recipe development and there’s photographing, posting, getting them out there, but then there is so much, in terms of social media and marketing and even just connecting with other bloggers, that goes into creating a successful blog, that takes so much time.

For me, I’ll wake up at 9:00 and I’ll just get a cup of coffee and go straight to my computer, and then I’ll comment on other blogs, see what’s been going on with blogger friends that I know and that usually takes about two hours to really go through and engage with other people. Then, I’ll switch to doing some Pinteresting. Pinteresting is really important, keeping yourself active on that. So, I’ll do that probably for another hour, take a break for lunch and then right after lunch, I’ll go into making a recipe and then photographing it as well. That can take anywhere from an hour and a half to the whole afternoon. Then sometimes, if I can get a workout in, I’ll do that.

On Some Misconceptions About Baking:

I think that there are two main things. In general, when people see baking and they see a brownie that’s perfectly fudgy or a cake that’s three layers, it seems like there is a lot that goes into it. And sometimes there is, but especially with my style of baking, it’s a lot easier than it seems. I mean, it is very precise, but as long as you’re following along with those directions and really making sure you have quality ingredients, those two things will take you far in baking.

Then, I’d say the other thing that really I’ve seen prevents people from doing things is things like Pinterest and all these blogs that have popped up, because you see this final products and they seem so unattainable, just because there’s so many of them and there’s perfect lighting and there’s these perfect bit shots and all of that. I think that really scares people and it makes them think that it’s something they can’t do.

My biggest piece of advice would be to just go out and try one of those recipes, and really see how it goes. More often than not, you’ll be surprised with what you can do.

On Messing Up in the Kitchen:

There have been so many times. It still happens all the time.

There was this one time when my sister and I were making a chocolate beet cake, like with beets. We followed the directions and we put the cake in the oven, and then we realized, “oh my God,” we didn’t put the oil in. So, instead of just a beet cake, we put it on the blog and called it a low fat beet cake. It totally worked, but things like that happen all the time.

There was one I did this winter. I was trying to do peppermint cookies, so I chopped up little circular peppermints and I baked them. They came out of the oven and they completely melted off of the cookies. There were these little candy drippings everywhere. And it was just absolutely awful. So yeah, it’s a regular occurrence in the kitchen.

On Some Online Resources for Those Interested in Learning More about Baking:

One site that I go to very regularly is Food52. It’s a fantastic site. It’s basically recipes that people submit, as well as recipes that the professionals at Food52 will recreate and photograph themselves, but then, in addition, they have this whole tips and tricks section, where you can learn things like if your baking soda is expired and how to make the perfect loaf and things like that. It’s been really helpful for me and it’s just beautiful photography. It’s a really nice site layout. So, I definitely would suggest that.

In terms of books, I really grew up with The Joy of Cooking and that’s the book that we constantly pulled out, anytime we wanted a recipe. So, just going to classics like that is really great, because you can’t go wrong.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

I’m really into Chef’s Table, Ina Garten’s Barefoot Contessa and Mind of a Chef.

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

You got to know about Food52, How Sweet Eats is one of my favorite bloggers, Joy The Baker is like the queen of all things baking.

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

On Pinterest, I follow Half Baked Harvest. She’s an incredible photographer and she has really unique things. On Facebook, I follow Ambitious Kitchen. She does great healthy recipes, but then she also does some really fun workout stuff. On Instagram, Kale and Caramel. It’s really innovative desserts. I love it.

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

I don’t think it’s unusual at all, but my KitchenAid is my baby. My boyfriend got it for my birthday a couple of years ago and I use it at least three or four times a week, and you can just do everything with it. So, it’s the most worth it gadget I’ve ever owned.

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

I used to not like avocados. I thought they were overrated. I just didn’t get them and then one day, I just made avocado toast, because I was bored, and I’m obsessed with avocados now. I put them on sandwiches, I put them in my toast, put them with my eggs. Sometimes I’ll have them for dinner, love them.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

Joy of Cooking, absolutely. Back to basics, it’s all you need. Then, the Dominique Ansel baking cookbook is unbelievable. The photos are amazing, the recipes are amazing. You’ve got to check it out.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

Motown, like always. Put on Motown and I’m like bopping around the kitchen. It’s just so fun and I love it.

On Keeping Posted with Sarah:

Instagram is my favorite form of social media, so you can check me out on Instagram.

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.

056: Autumn Giles: Black Sheep Ingredients, Gluten-Free and Beyond Canning

July 6, 2015 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

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Autumn Makes and Does

Autumn is a writer and home cook who shares her greenmarket-focused gluten-free food on her blog. She’s also a poet and produced a podcast called Alphabet Soup, a project about food and language from fall 2011 to spring 2014. Autumn’s work has appeared in the New York Times, Serious Eats, and Buzz Feed Food, just to name a few.

I am so thrilled to have Autumn Giles of Autumn Makes and Does here on the show today.

(*All images below are Autumn’s.)

On Her Curiosity Around Food:

I always remember being fascinated with food. I can recall when I was just old enough to be left home by myself with my little sister, we would make up a lot of experiments in the kitchen, and my mom getting home and feeling frustrated with me. Because not all of my experiments were edible at that time. But I did that. I remember always having that interest, wanting to experiment, I guess, and cooking up weird stuff and making my sister eat it.

Then, both my parents, I gardened with them growing up. And my grandmother always gardened, so I think that grew my interest, and cooking came from that as well.

On Her Blog:

It was at a time when I had been out of graduate school for about a year. It was nothing that I had thought about or considered, but it was sort of because of the prodding of my friends and family saying, “You might have something to share. You might have some knowledge that could be useful for other people.” I didn’t go into it with any kind of expectations. It was very casual at the beginning. And my blog is still very casual, you know, crappy camera, crappy pictures, that kind of thing, like, “Here’s what I cooked.” And it just evolved from there.

The writing (is most challenging) but it’s a specific aspect of the writing that was difficult for me and remains difficult because I think I’m a pretty private person. As I moved more toward writing my blog more regularly and writing online more regularly, I never really had that impulse to write about what was going on in my life. I didn’t have that drive. I actually felt like I was resistant to that. Because I was feeling like not really wanting to put all the details out there on the Internet.

I’ve worked on striking a balance. So I can still be a blogger who writes about what’s going on in my life, but also keeps a comfortable level of privacy for me as a person.

On Her Interest in “Black Sheep” Ingredients:

I guess I just mean weird stuff. When I lived in New York, I was a regular greenmarket shopper and was so lucky and privileged to be able to have access to the amazing greenmarkets in New York with such an insane variety of food that’s grown locally there. I would go to the greenmarket week after week and new things would show up.

That’s what I would get most excited about, and just learning about those new ingredients by cooking with them and tasting them.

In the past year, I moved to the southwest and one thing that I tried when I first moved here that completely blew me away was nopales. Nopales, for folks who don’t know, are the flat, teardrop shaped part of a cactus. The cactus have flat paddles. So someone had prepared those smoked and it was so amazing. The texture was very meaty. The flavor was very smoky but also very tart. And I guess as an ingredient in general, cactus pads also just blew me away because they have a tartness that is really surprising for folks who haven’t tried them. I think I expected them to be more bland. Because I’ve heard people compare them to tofu, like, they can take on flavors and textures. But I found them to be very tart and very surprising in that way.

There are different varieties that have varying level of spikes on them. So they have the big long spikes, and then they have tiny spikes called glochids. And one of the ways that people will help remove the glochids is grilling them, and it burns the spikes mostly right off. I did a post on my blog about harvesting the prickly pair of fruit, and also a way that people get the little glochids off the fruit.

On Gluten-Free Foods and Misconceptions:

There’s a lot of reasons that people eat gluten-free. The reason that I eat gluten-free is because I have celiac disease. So I have to be pretty careful.

I think a misconception that I’ve encountered is, “Oh, you can’t eat the bun on this hamburger. Let me just take the bun off for you and here’s the hamburger.” I would be really sick if I ate that hamburger. I think there is just frustration, like, gluten-free people are a pain, that they don’t like to eat. That’s probably the big one, like, “Don’t you want to eat something?” And I love food, I just happen to need to eat gluten-free food all the time.

For someone who needs to eliminate or reduce gluten in their diet, my first tip is to always focus on foods that are naturally gluten free. There are just so, so many. When you really focus on that and really find things within that to get excited about and explore, you definitely don’t feel limited in your diet.

I am writing a preserving book right now, and that’s something that in very rare cases, encounter any gluten in those recipes. So that’s an area that I connected with, got excited about, and I’ve explored a ton. And I didn’t really have to worry about gluten in that arena at all.

I think trying different and sometimes a little more odd or less likely used cuts of meat because they’re usually cheaper, you can buy higher quality meat and explore something that you have not cooked before. Also, without having to worry about gluten.

On Her Podcast:

I started Alphabet Soup on my own. About halfway through, my friend Kelly from Kelly Bakes, joined me.

In grad school, all my poet friends were always getting together to cook, and it just seemed like most of my friends who were writers were also very into food. It was sort of the impetus for me to start a podcast – talking to writers about food and talking to food people about writing. That was how it started.

I started out with just myself doing interviews, and then it went into Kelly and I having conversations along that topic as it continued.

As I probably don’t have to tell you, producing a podcast is a ton of work. It wasn’t like I got tired of doing it; I would still love to maybe explore in the future. But I think at that time, Kelly and I were both ready to shift our energy towards other projects. I felt like it had come to a natural conclusion in a way.

On Her First Cookbook, “Beyond Canning”:

It is about preserving and it focuses on three main techniques, which is preserving with vinegar, fermenting and sweet preserves, like preserving sugar with jam. It’s really trying to focus on unique flavors, different textures, and something new to the conversation around food preservation.

I have no formal culinary training. I most definitely consider myself a home cook. And when I started with preserving and did it more and more, I learned what I liked.

I definitely see it more as a really great tool for home cooks, not something that should be separated to the side, like you cook and then you preserve, that they can really be incorporated together to make people more savvy home cooks. And of course my love for the greenmarket had a big part of it.

Almost all the recipes in the book are quite small batch. So if you are in a CSA or you go to the greenmarket and you find something beautiful but they’re quite expensive, you can buy a few and make something great out of them that you can enjoy later, and incorporate into your cooking and make your cooking better.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

I have to say I’m not a big cooking show person. However, the last cooking show I watched was my friend Dan who has a blog, Renegade Kitchen, who’s also an actor, just joined…I think it’s Home and Family TV. It’s on the Hallmark Network, a whole new family show on Hallmark Network.

He does an awesome job of talking to people. So we were saying like black sheep ingredients… He talked about black garlic. I think he did a DIY corned beef. I have to give him a shout out and say that was the last food show I watched and I really enjoyed it.

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

There’s so many. It’s so hard to name. But my friend Elizabeth who has the blog, Brooklyn Supper, I think she is consistently making awesome food, seasonal food, and really accessible delicious recipes that are also unique, which is so hard to do.

I love the site, Wayward Spark. It definitely has some food but it isn’t just food. And then Southern Soufflé; Erika is a phenomenal writer and takes gorgeous pictures. As the name suggests, focuses on southern food and really is an incredible storyteller.

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

The one that I engage with the most and the most naturally that doesn’t feel like work for me is Instagram. The people who make me the happiest on there are ones who are very inspiring home cooks who aren’t just posting about composed pictures but are sharing what they cook every day. I know that bugs some people but I love it when people share what they cook everyday. It really gives me inspiration for what I’m cooking.

Folks on Instagram that really make me happy are Michele who is at Cider and Rye, who makes phenomenal cocktails and posts lovely pictures. Dan, who I mentioned at Renegade Kitchen. The Joy of Cooking, Megan and John, the folks behind The Joy of Cooking are always posting super inspiring stuff and gorgeous photos. Hector, who is at Mexicanity is a phenomenal example of someone who is cooking insane amazing stuff, and it is just super inspiring. My friend Julia Sforza is another person who is just always cooking and is an awesome home cook. And Nicole Taylor, who is at Food Culturist, who is also working on a book.

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

I think the most unusual, it’s not technically an item, but my home is a very old home and it has a cellar which is just literally a cave dug into the hill. A hundred year old cave is definitely the most unusual thing in the kitchen.

I want to track the temperature a little better. Because I’m wondering if I could use it as a cold storage. I do live in Arizona and it’s pretty chilly during the winter months, but I figure it probably wouldn’t be as chilly during the summer.

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

As a child, I really hated tomatoes. And I think it was partially a texture thing. And also just the issue of eating tomatoes out of season from somewhere far away, which is still to me not a very pleasant experience.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

Taste of Country Cooking by Edna Lewis is a favorite one of mine.

I’m a huge community cookbook fan, so like the church. I mentioned I was into casseroles. So huge big collection of community cookbooks which really make me happy.

And Saving the Season by Kevin West is one that I really look up to, and I think is a great book.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

Definitely Beyonce. As I mentioned, I’m finishing up my cookbook right now. I just need to get motivated, get things done, it’s Beyonce.

On Keeping Posted on Autumn:

I’m probably most active on Instagram. I would love if folks joined me there. I am Autumn Makes on Twitter and on Facebook.

007: Marisa McClellan: Why No One Will Ever Get Sick From Your Jams, Pickles or Chutneys

March 2, 2015 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

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Food in Jars

Marisa is a canning teacher and author of two amazingly well-received cookbooks on preserving.

She is a writer whose work appears regularly on The Food Network’s FN Dish Blog, Saveur’s website, Table Matters and Food 52.

I am so excited to have Marisa McClellan of Food in Jars here on the show today.

On How Her Blog Came Together:

I started Food in Jars in late winter, 2009.

I had been working as the editor of a website called Slashfood, which was AOL’s food blog. My job there was coming to an end and I wanted to stay in the food blog community. I looked around to figure out what it was I wanted to write about. And, I realized that I loved canning jars and had done some canning, grew up doing it, and really felt like there was space for me to start a blog devoted to Mason jars and canning and preserving.

So I decided to carve out that little niche for myself. It has been an incredible journey since then.

On Canning:

I would say that at the start, it came naturally to me, but in the beginning, I didn’t know how much I didn’t know.

There’s been a lot of learning since I started only because as I dived deeper in, I didn’t know that there was so much that I still needed to learn. But I was already so invested that that learning process was really fun and exciting and natural.

I did most of my learning from books and the Internet. For instance, there’s a really great resource at the National Center for Home Food Preservation, which is run out of the University of Georgia and is the repository for the best practices of all canning and food preservation. They had a really good cookbook.

I took one class when I was first getting started on pressure canning just because I wanted to see someone else do it before I dove in. But, for the most part, the kinds of things I was curious about, the answers weren’t out there. I had to dig through and look at the USDA standards for commercial canning to figure out what was okay and what wasn’t.

That was fun and interesting to me, so I was happy to dive in and figure all that out.

On The First Thing She Ever Canned:

As a kid, most of what we did was either blackberry jam or blueberry jam.

I remember being nine or 10-years-old and helping my mom make blackberry jam. I grew up in Portland, Oregon, and that’s a place in the world where blackberries are just sort of anywhere. So that’s one of my primary foundational canning memories.

Then, as I got older, we’d go blueberry picking every summer.

Those two together, blueberries and blackberries, are really the core of my earliest canning memories, and what I started with when I started canning on my own.

On Where Her Canning Jars Obsession Came From:

I think it started in college. I went to college in Walla Walla, Washington, so rural Washington State.

I picked up a habit of wandering through stores, and antique stores, and junk stores when I had an afternoon off from classes. The thing I was drawn to were the old Mason jars. So I would pick up one or two here and there until I had a couple dozen in my dorm room. I used them for water glasses, I used them for pens, and it just kind of grew from there.

I don’t know why. There’s just something so appealing about a Mason jar. It’s clean and it’s got a nice heft to it, and it has so much possibility just in the vessel itself.

Tips For Those Wanting to Start Canning:

There’s a lot of really good instruction out there as long as you’re getting your information from a trusted source like the Ball Canning website, or in Canada, the Bernardin website, and they’re actually the same company, the National Center for Home Food Preservation, my website.

There’s a whole slew of good online information out there. As long as you’re following those best practices which are to use common sense, clean gear, and process your jars for at least ten minutes once they’re full of whatever you’ve made, you’re going to be okay.

It’s really hard to do harm to someone with jams, or pickles, or anything, and the thing to note too is that botulism, which is the thing that scares everybody about canning, can’t grow in high acid environments. This means that all of your jams and pickles, anything that’s designed to be canned in a water bath, is too high an acid for botulism to grow at all.

So the worst thing that’s going to happen is, if you do something wrong, it’s either going to mold or it’s going to ferment. And you’ll be able to see those things immediately upon opening the jar. So you’re never going to make someone sick with a jam, or a pickle, or a chutney, or any of these things. If they do go bad, you’ll see immediately. So there’s really no danger.

On Discovering Canning For Yourself:

There have been times when I’ve made things that weren’t as good as I wanted them to be. That typically happens when I am rushing. I find that if you really try to rush your way through a batch of jam or fruit butter or whatever, it’s going to take as long as it’s going to take. And if you have a time table that’s not working with the fruit, it’s better to stop cooking and come back to it later than it is to try to force your timeframe on to it.

I’ve had some really horrible mistakes. Nothing dangerous, but things that didn’t taste good, and I think that that’s part of the process.

One of the things with canning and food preservation that I have really experienced and have observed other people going through as well is that we have lost the institutional knowledge of what we like. It used to be that everybody canned and preserved, and you knew the five or ten things you made every year that you liked, your family liked.

If you’re picking up the canning habit, the food preservation habit without any context, it’s going to take you a few years to figure out what the things are that you like to preserve, that work for your family, that you’ll work through in a calendar year. So, it’s sort of this necessary process of discovery to figure out what are your preserves.

On Her Love of Ingredients And Food:

To be honest, it is just something that’s always been with me. I have always been a little food obsessed from the time I was really young. In fact, the first full sentence I said as a baby was, “More mayonnaise please.” So it’s just innate to me.

I really just have always been interested in food. From the time I was really young, I loved going to orchards. I have always appreciated the abundance of the harvest season, that’s something that just resonates. It connects. I feel most at home during that time of the year.

There wasn’t any one sort of foundational experience that made me go, “Oh, oh, my God, food, that’s where I want to be.” It’s just kind of grown with me as I have grown as a person.

On Her Books:

The first book, Food in Jars, came out in 2012 and is a cookbook devoted to my favorite preserves.

It’s got jams and jellies, and pickles and chutneys. There are some recipes for bread mixes in jars. I’ve got some nut butters, granolas. It was my attempt to wrap my arms around all my favorite things that I had done on the blog and translate them into a book.

The recipes are all revised for the book. So you’ll see something on the blog and it will have been changed a little bit or tweaked or made better for the book.

I think of it as a really good book for someone who’s just started canning, who wants the basics and who doesn’t mind yielding anywhere from 3 to 4 pints of something.

The new book, which came out last spring, called Preserving by the Pint, it’s still jams and jellies and pickles and things like that, but it has a philosophy that canning doesn’t have to be a large undertaking. It’s something that you can do in very small batches in about an hour or less and still really enjoy your product.

The idea behind that was simply that I live in a small apartment and have a small kitchen, and wanted to make things in small batches. And when I started posting those recipes, other people really resonated with them.

Every recipe in the book starts with either a pint of produce, a quart of produce, or a pound or two, so that your yields are only two or three half pints, but the amount of time you’ve invested in making them is really short.

It’s a really good way to prevent waste as well. I always talk about that as my secret mission with that book is it’s not just about preserving, but it’s also about breathing new life into things that you might have otherwise thrown away or decided you just couldn’t deal with.

So for instance, if you get a CSA Share, some weeks you get more than you can deal with. Instead of just throwing it away at the end of the week before you pick up your new box, you can make a little batch of pickles or a little batch of jam and extend the lifespan of that produce and get the most bang for your buck.

On Documenting Her Cookbook Tour Experience:

I wanted to make sure I didn’t forget some of those lessons that I had learned along the way, so that I can prevent myself from repeating the same mistakes.

In life if you don’t take to heart the things you learn, you do the same things over and over again. I don’t want to do that. I want to move on, learn new lessons, not have to keep learning the same ones over and over.

Throughout the process you definitely have moments where you doubt yourself. You think, “What am I doing?”

I am working on my third book right now, and I have moments where I am like, “I don’t know how to write a book. I don’t know how to do this.” I have done it twice and I still have those feelings.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

I watch Cutthroat Kitchen because my husband’s a big fan.

I watch Top Chef because I find it fascinating, and it’s a really good representation of what’s sort of in the cheffy world at the moment.

I really like the online videos that the Breville small appliance company puts out. They have a really nice YouTube page.

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

Well, food blogs, I love my little community of food preservation blogs like Punk Domestics. Sean Timberlake who writes that blog is also now the blogger for About.com. As for food preservation, he’s been doing an amazing job there.

Wellpreserved, which is a Canadian food blog. My friend Kate Payne writes Hip Girl’s Guide to Homemaking, which is a really good one.

I have a friend who writes a blog called What I Weigh Today. It’s really interesting because it’s the intersection of someone who is a food writer, food editor, loves food, and is also trying to find ways to eat healthfully and work her way through dealing with weight in a culture where we put a lot of focus on both food and body image, and finding how to make that all work together.

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

I am definitely an Instagram addict. I follow a lot of people. It’s hard to even articulate.

My friend Alexis Siemons, she has a website called Teaspoons and Petals and her Instagram handle is @teaspoonsandpetals. She is a tea writer and takes the most beautiful pictures of tea cups, and desserts, and things like that.

What is something all home cooks should have in their pantry?

All home cooks should have salt in their pantry.

You never want to run out of salt because it’s going to give everything flavor.

Vinegar is also useful. Anytime you make something and it tastes flat, if you add a little apple cider vinegar, balsamic vinegar, it’s going to brighten it up.

So salt and vinegar and it’s hard to go wrong.

Name one ingredient you cannot live without?

I cannot live without garlic.

I always have some, I use it every day, and my favorite way to add it to a dish is to grate it on a microplane rasp, because you get tiny little bits, you don’t have to chop it, and you get a lot of flavor. One of the tricks I learned recently was that if you want to brighten up a pot of soup, instead of adding your garlic at the beginning of cooking, add a little fresh garlic at the end. It’s going to make it taste more alive.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

As far as just needing the basics, I still always turn to The Joy of Cooking. Anytime I need to make biscuits or just need a basic recipe for something like that, that’s my go-to. I like the 1960s edition the best because that’s the one I grew up with.

The So Easy to Preserve cookbook, that’s the one I mentioned earlier from the National Center for Home Food Preservation. That’s a great one for when I just need to understand how a recipe should work. I turn to that.

And there’s a book I love called Whole Grains for a New Generation by Liana Krissoff and it’s one that I always find something new in.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

There is an album called Rekooperation by Al Kooper who is a blues and jazz organ player that I love to cook to.

Keep Posted on Marisa:

You can either subscribe to the RSS feed from my blog, or follow me on Instagram, or Twitter, or Facebook.

I try to keep all of those outlets updated.

Anywhere that is your favorite social media or information feed, I am there, and I am trying to keep the world posted about what I am doing.

Have Marisa's Special Jam Recipe Sent To You Now:

001: Claire Thomas: What To NEVER Bring To A Dinner Party

February 20, 2015 by Gabriel

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The Kitchy Kitchen

I am super excited to have the amazing, the awesome Claire Thomas here as my special guest today.

She is doing a lot of really cool stuff. Apart from her website The Kitchy Kitchen, Claire also has a cookbook called The Kitchy Kitchen. She has a television series called Food For Thought with Claire Thomas, and in my opinion, she is rockin’ it.

She is truly on a mission to help us home cooks amp up our everyday dinner routines.

On Her Interest in Food History:

I fell across food history. I read this article. It’s in one of my favorite magazines called Gastronomica. It was an article about how Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper is neither kosher nor Aramaic. It misses it on both accounts, and I thought that was so funny because the Passover meal is kind of a set script. Everyone knows what that is. It seemed sort of a weird place to take artistic license.

As I read the article, it talked about how he actually just put his favorite food in the painting, which is eel with orange slices, which I thought does not sound Italian. He’s Florentinian, so I expected pasta or something like that.

Then it occurred to me that he probably didn’t have pasta. They definitely didn’t have tomatoes. They did not have corn. They didn’t have so many of the things we think about as being integral to the Italian canon of cuisine.

So it sent me on this weird journey of, “What was Italian cuisine before the Age of Exploration?” Just really weird, nerdy side projects.

So I ended up just falling in love with food history.

I found it to be the closest thing to a time machine, because if you understand how people ate, you understand how they lived, their economy, their environment, the politics of the time. Some of the funniest and oldest laws on the book for major cities like Venice, for instance, are actually food-related, something people have seemed to be historically very persnickety about. So you get a great sense of, I guess, people’s personalities through history.

What I love about it too is it’s something inescapable about the human condition. We have to eat.

I love how it makes me feel connected to the past, and the people who lived in the past. Because a lot of times, we can think of them as figures in oil paintings with funny wigs, or that kind of thing. It’s cool to think of them as real people who had very strong opinions. Some of them like their food salty, some of them liked it spicy. That kind of thing.

On Starting The Kitchy Kitchen Blog:

It’s so funny thinking about where my blog started and where it is now.

I started the blog as a little fun place to put my creativity. My job was kind of boring, and my mom saw I was struggling. At this point, I was really full-blown geeking out over food history and recipe testing. She said, “Why don’t you start a food blog?” Which wasn’t really a thing four years ago as much as it is now.

Being a nerd who didn’t understand how the Internet worked, I thought, “Oh, then okay, I have to prep everything. I have to have really great recipes and learn how to shoot.” I put all this pressure on myself not realizing that the Internet is like you’re a tree falling in the middle of a forest. You can fail in anonymity for very long, so it was great.

I learned how to shoot food photography by basically just picking up a camera and shooting it and staring at the picture and trying to figure out what was wrong with it. It was basically trial and error. My dad’s actually kind of an amateur photographer. He loves photography. It all came down to lighting. So we would have conversations about where the light was coming from and what exactly it was doing.

Then I started noticing food styling. I was able to basically quit my job that I had and become a full-time food stylist.

The blog was just pretty interesting. It started out very pretentious. If you go too far back, the food is kind of over-the-top. I think I was trying a little too hard. I was trying to appear very sophisticated, and it’s funny.

On Messing Up in the Kitchen:

The opening line of my cookbook is “Have you cried yet?”

Literally. I’ve had my fair share of kitchen disasters, and still do. It’s funny. Like when I recipe test, most of the time, I’ve gotten it down to where I understand recipe structure really well at this point.

The one place that I’ve seen the most kitchen disasters is with attempts at gluten-free and vegan baking, because it’s just chemistry. It’s straight-up chemistry.

Do you guys have a BJ’s in Canada? It’s where I used to eat in middle school all the time. It’s like a pizza parlor.

They have a thing on the menu called the Pizookie. It’s a chocolate chip cookie that’s cooked in a pizza plate, and it’s gooey in the middle. They serve it with a scoop of ice cream on top. It’s wonderful.

I thought, “Oh, how cool would it be to do like a gluten-free, vegan version of that. Almost like a flourless chocolate cake, but a chocolate chip cookie.” I thought like, “Oh, this won’t be that hard.”

I had soup.

I had gluten-free, vegan, chocolate chip cookie soup the first three times I tried to make this thing. It just would not come together.

On What to (not) Bring for a Dinner Party:

What I tell people whenever they come to a party I’m throwing, they asks, “Oh, how should I do my event?” or whatever. I always tell them, “Don’t ever try something the first time at a party. It’s just Murphy’s Law. It’s not going to work ever.”

It’s this need to impress. We want to be fancy and cool in front of our friends. My aunt has this cookbook called Cooking For Compliments, which is amazing just because of the title. Because at least it’s open about it, cooking for those compliments.

I mean, honestly, if you want to cook for compliments, if you want to impress people when you go to a party, just bring the dessert, because people will love a mediocre dessert and will not forgive a mediocre salad. So you will never get a high-five like, “Oh my gosh, amazing salad!” That never happens at a dinner party.

You could bring boxed brownies. I’m not kidding. If you bring boxed brownies, people will be like, “Oh, I love boxed brownies. Thank you so much. This is fantastic.” No one would be mad at you. Everyone would be totally happy about it.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

No Reservations

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

Joy the Baker, she’s a buddy of mine and she’s amazing.

Then Whitney A. My girlfriend, Whitney, is a sommelier and is amazing at putting together events and pairing wine and food. Those are definitely two of my favorites.

Also A Cozy Kitchen is another favorite. There are so many.

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

On Pinterest, I follow Bonnie Tsang. She has like a million followers. But she’s a photographer and she has so many great little pics. Also, Jenni Kayne. She’s a designer here in L.A. who I love. She’s so chic. She just picks beautiful, minimalist items.

Instagram, there are a few people I just followed that I thought were really, really special.

Nectar and Stone was one that I follow. She’s a patisserie person. She makes these just ridiculous, ridiculous confections. Then, I guess, also my friend, Jonathan from Compartes. He’s a chocolatier, and he always posts photos from his chocolate-making process.

What is something all home cooks should have in their pantry?

I’d say for me, sriracha. Because, full disclosure, on weekday nights when I’m just lazy, my favorite dinner to make is scrambled eggs. I love eggs in general. I did scrambled eggs with a little bit of sweet soy sauce and whatever soft herbs I had. So basil, cilantro, green onion. Whatever I had, and then sriracha. That was it, and it was just the best thing. It was so good.

Name one ingredient you cannot live without?

Butter.

Brown butter makes it much better.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

The Joy of Cooking is important in sort of an encyclopedic way. I mean, it doesn’t have that heart but it’s just such a great reference.

I collect vintage cookbooks. I have a couple dozen now. They’re so fun to me. The one that I actually cook out of the most though is called A Shaker Cookbook Not By Bread Alone. You can actually find it all over eBay. It is not a difficult vintage cookbook to find.

But vintage cookbooks have a habit of being poorly edited. A lot of times, the recipes haven’t been tested at all. A lot of times they’re presented in paragraph format, and they will actually say sometimes like, “You should know how to do this.” I was reading a recipe for a welsh rarebit, and they listed, “Cheese and toast. You should know how to make this.”

The Shaker cookbook is filled with amazing pie recipes.

It’s a great sort of anthropological look at the Shaker community and their approach to food. It has titles like Sister Amelia’s Strawberry Flummery, which I don’t know what that is, but it sounds magical.

It’s ridiculous sounding. But it’s fun. I love it, and I cook from it all the time. The recipes are really well edited. They’ve been tested a million times, and I’ve been very impressed.

If you’re going to start a vintage cookbook collection, that’s actually a pretty good one to start with.

Keep Posted on Claire:

Well, my YouTube channel. I post on my YouTube channel three times a week. If you guys are looking for things between showings of Food For Thought and between the blog, you can always find some fun, new content there. I do everything from quick little tips to full-blown recipes.

Then otherwise, Instagram. If you @ mention me, or say hello, I’ll say hi back. I follow a lot of my own followers. I love reaching out to you guys. Please find me out there.

On Cooking as a Team:

On Being Vegetarian:

On Cuban Food:

The Pressure Cooker:

On Keeping Posted with Adam and Ryan:

On Working in the Good Food Movement:

On the Shift to Eating More Local:

On Cooking What’s Local and Seasonal:

On a Dish That’s Special to Her:

The Pressure Cooker:

On Keeping Posted with Alexa:

On Her Blog:

On Her Interest in Baking:

On Her Passion for Photography:

On Working on Her Blog Full-Time:

On Some Misconceptions About Baking:

On Messing Up in the Kitchen:

On Some Online Resources for Those Interested in Learning More about Baking:

The Pressure Cooker:

On Keeping Posted with Sarah:

On Growing Up Around Food and Cooking:

On Southern Culture:

On Southern Food:

On Some Resources to Learn More about Southern Cuisine:

On Her Blog:

The Pressure Cooker:

On Keeping Posted with Erika:

On Her Curiosity Around Food:

On Her Blog:

On Her Interest in “Black Sheep” Ingredients:

On Gluten-Free Foods and Misconceptions:

On Her Podcast:

On Her First Cookbook, “Beyond Canning”:

The Pressure Cooker:

On Keeping Posted on Autumn:

On How Her Blog Came Together:

On Canning:

On The First Thing She Ever Canned:

On Where Her Canning Jars Obsession Came From:

Tips For Those Wanting to Start Canning:

On Discovering Canning For Yourself:

On Her Love of Ingredients And Food:

On Her Books:

On Documenting Her Cookbook Tour Experience:

The Pressure Cooker:

Keep Posted on Marisa:

Have Marisa's Special Jam Recipe Sent To You Now:

On Her Interest in Food History:

On Starting The Kitchy Kitchen Blog:

On Messing Up in the Kitchen:

On What to (not) Bring for a Dinner Party:

The Pressure Cooker:

Keep Posted on Claire:

Have Claire’s Special Dinner Dish Recipe Sent To You Now: