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113: Lynn Chen: Forging a New Relationship with Food

March 9, 2016 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

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The Actor’s Diet

On her blog, The Actor’s Diet, Lynn shares restaurant views, fashion and beauty tips, recipes and her life in show biz. She credits her blog for helping her come to terms with her eating disorders and it’s now a place for celebrating food.

An actor, body image activist and podcaster, just to name a few things she’s up to, Lynn is a media maven and she looks like she’s having an awesome time with it.

I’m so psyched to have Lynn Chen of The Actor’s Diet here on the show today.

(*All photos below are Lynn’s.)

On Her Blog:

In 2009, I was already reading a lot of food blogs, the food blogs that existed. The scene was different in 2009 than it is today but the blogs I was reading at the time, the format that was very popular was food journaling, just basically showing what people ate on a daily basis. And for me, I had been coming to terms with a very tumultuous relationship with food and eating disorders. I was a binge eater and I was also a little bit anorexic.

So for me, finding out what portion sizes were was really tricky. And so, to read these blogs made me feel like I could have a guide as to how much you were supposed to eat, and to feel full or satiated. So that’s how it started. I was reading these food blogs and then one day I was like, “I wonder if I should start a food blog?”

When I started, not only was the food blog scene different but the acting scene was different, where in my industry, you were just an actor. You weren’t an actor/blogger/anything else, which is acceptable today but back then, it just wasn’t. And it was like, “No, you’re an actor, you have to just act, you should not show your personal side because no one wants to see your business.” And actually what happened was, I was fired by both my agent and my manager and instead of trying to find a new agent and a manager, which I knew I could have done, I was like, “Let me take a year to come to terms with this whole food thing and what do I have to lose?”

If I just stop acting, and stop having a job that requires me to look a certain way, and take that pressure off of me and try to forge this new relationship with food, let’s see what happens. At the time, I was also trying to get pregnant. So, I was like, “Let’s just see what happens.” And the blog started initially as a food journal and it was me and my friend Christy Meyers, a holistic health counselor and we were basically just posting what we ate every day, and it just blew up.

And for Christy, it became very clear after a while, she was like, “I don’t want to do this,” because she was already counseling clients one-on-one. It was, the last thing I want to do at the end of the day is write more about food and also she didn’t want her clients to read it and be like, “Hey, you ate chocolate cake. What’s the deal?” So, she backed away from it and I kept going and over the years, I just have switched the format a little bit, where I’m not posting everything I’m eating on a daily basis, which gets old. It’s been almost seven years now. It’s crazy.

On Coming to Terms with Her Eating Disorder:

I think that when I was in recovery, they were always saying to me, you don’t just give up an addiction. It’s not like you can just be like that’s it, I’m done. You have to replace it with something. And so, for me, instead of focusing on counting calories or figuring out how much fat content was in something, I was figuring out how to make the photograph look beautiful, and I was focused on this new obsession, this new way of writing about food and talking about food, which took my focus off of what I looked like, what I was ingesting, but still fed that part of me that needed to be obsessive about food.

And also, not only was the creative side of me fulfilled, but just getting so much free food as a food blogger, I didn’t feel like anything was off limits because when you have a house that’s full of potato chips, the last thing you feel like doing is binge eating potato chips because there so many. You can only do that for so long. So, it really helped me come to terms with that whole concept of, “Oh, I have to eat this because this may be the last time.” There was no last supper for me anymore.

That was always the problem for me in the past, I was binge eating because, “That’s it, this is the last time and then tomorrow I go on my diet.” There was no diet anymore, there was no last supper, it was just always there and then it lost its appeal, its magic. It just became what it was.

On What She Would Say to Someone Struggling with an Eating Disorder:

I hear you, is what I would say to them because there were so many years, where I was not only struggling but I was also getting help simultaneously and I was like, “What’s going on? How come I’m not getting better? How come I’m doing everything I think I’m supposed to be doing and it’s still not getting any better?” And it was years of that. I really, truly think that it does get better and I can’t give you any magic formula, just like no one else could give me a magic formula to get better. I’m living proof that it happens.

So if I can just be the embodiment and let you know that it happens and you’ll get better. You just will, I know you will but you just have to keep at it. I would say, don’t beat yourself up because, for me, it would always be like, I was “good” for six months and then I fell off the wagon and then I’d have three months of being off the wagon and just be like, “I can never get back.” That’s just the way it was for a long time, and eventually, it stopped being that way.

On Thick Dumpling Skin:

Thick Dumpling Skin came about because, for the first few years of writing The Actor’s Diet, I was writing a lot about my eating disorder, obviously because I was coming to terms with it and I got such a response from so many people, and it was so specifically about culture and our families. It was just something that I could really relate to as an Asian American being in a culture, where we don’t really talk about our feelings.

When we socialize and gather, it’s all about the food, not how are you doing? It’s how much have you eaten and have you eaten? And, oh try this, and you’ve got to get the recipe. I felt like because it was such a serious topic and it was coming up so often, I didn’t want my blog, The Actor’s Diet to become just a site for that, I wanted to give it another place. I was listening to NPR one day and I heard this interview with a woman named Lisa Lee talking about how she went to Taiwan and was forced to go on this diet and that it was just okay.

It was considered totally fine to starve herself, and I was like, “Who is this woman, I need to connect with her.” I went on Facebook, I looked her up, we had 40 friends in common. I went to the person at the top of the list, he introduced us and the next thing you know, I’m connected with Lisa Lee and she’s like, “We have to do something.” We thought about making a book, we thought about making a documentary, then we were like, “Let’s just blog.”

So, we started Thick Dumpling Skin and immediately heard from all these people who wanted to share their story. And all these years later, we’ve been in NPR ourselves, we’ve been in Marie Claire. We’re still the only source that exists on the Internet for Asian-Americans and that just shows me how much more work we have to do. Because people still think of eating disorders as a primarily white, middle-class woman problem, and we see that it’s not. But the problem is, especially in the Asian-American community, therapy is not an option for a lot of people.

People don’t want you talking to strangers and paying them. That doesn’t make sense to them. So for a lot of, especially younger people who are still under their parents’ rules and insurance, they have no one to talk to, so we are hoping that our site is a place for them.

On the Thick Dumpling Skin Podcast:

What I love about the podcast formula, is that you can just talk off the top of your head and I think that a lot of, when you’re talking about body image and you’re talking about eating issues, when we write it out, you feel this responsibility to be so precious with your words and to edit yourself. And I think that in order to have this dialogue, we need to have it in everyday conversation.

So, what we hope is that, with the podcasts, we want to go to the experts, get them on the phone, have them answer the questions because I’m not comfortable answering questions that are that serious.

On Her Videos:

Well, my husband works at BuzzFeed, so full disclosure on that, and the reason I started YouTubing, was because, it’s funny, so my husband would just be like, “I have to make a video today. You want to eat donuts?” and I’d be like, “Yes, I’m not doing anything, let’s go and eat donuts.” So we just started making these videos when he was free and when I was free for his job and I started to grow a following from it and people started subscribing to my YouTube channel. which before that had only been movies I’d been in and clips from other YouTube interviews that I had done, nothing that I created on my own. And since people were subscribing, I was like, “Oh, I think I should create some content for new subscribers, otherwise, I’m wasting time. So being on BuzzFeed, has been really interesting because it’s opened me up to a completely different audience.

The same exact week I was on Fear The Walking Dead, which was the number one cable premier ever in the history of TV. I was a guest star on that and more people recognized me from BuzzFeed videos than from being on Fear The Walking Dead. But they didn’t know who I was, they were just like, BuzzFeed. They didn’t know my name or anything and in that, I realized, “Oh, I think I should try to do a little shift,” because I’ve been acting since I was five years old, doing this a long time and let’s just see what happens if I shift things around. So, I have new managers, they’re mainly focused on me as a blogger, as a food person, as a food host and we are going for it. We are going for the hosting TV stuff. I want to be the first Asian-American female to host her own show on Food Network.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

I watch so many cooking shows. It’s not even funny how many cooking shows I watch. They’re mostly, not competition.

I watch everything from the stuff on The Food Network and Cooking Channel that’s demonstrational, like The Pioneer Woman, The Barefoot Contessa. I even watch Semi-Homemade with Sandra Lee, which doesn’t even exist anymore. I watch The Kitchen, I watch America’s Test Kitchen, I watch The Chew. I just watch a lot of food shows.

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

Well, you’ve actually had a couple of them on your podcast already as guests. Lily from Kale & Caramel. I also read CakeSpy on a regular basis. There are a lot of blogs that I’ve been following since the beginning, like Kath Eats Real Food. She was one of the main reason I became a blogger. She knows I love her and I’ve just been following her and her life forever.

I like Cupcakes & Cashmere, she lives in my neighborhood, so I stalk her online, so embarrassing. She’s great. I love her site and I like seeing parts of my neighborhood pop up on her site, makes me feel like seeing someone I know on TV. And Joy the Baker. She’s somebody I followed for a very long time and I’ve loved every incarnation of everything that she’s done. She has an Instagram feed now called Drake On Cake where she makes cakes and puts Drake lyrics on them and it’s of course, exploded the Internet as is everything she does. So, she’s great.

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

My friend, Leslie Durso is a vegan chef and I just love keeping in touch with her on Snapchat. My friend Whitney Adams, she has a great YouTube channel as well, she’s a wine expert. She is hilarious on Snapchat. I’m just starting to get into the Snapchat game, it’s not something for people over 20-something. So it’s a little strange, but I like that world a lot right now because it’s people being honest and real because it disappears.

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

I’m not too sentimental about stuff in my kitchen. Things break all the time but I guess, if there was something I was the most sentimental about, it would have to be my mug from college, my Wesleyan mug. It has four chips in it because I’ve dropped it but I can’t bring myself to throw it away because I went to college with it.

I think I ate ramen out of it, I can’t get rid of it. So I use that all the time but looks like crap.

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

I like everything, except, you know what I didn’t like growing up was raw tomatoes, on their own, I don’t even think I would go near one. In fact, when I was younger, and I used to drink a lot of orange juice, my mom would pour it for me and I would drink it and be like, “No, that tastes like raw tomatoes.” I think because I thought it would taste like V8.

Sometimes I remember being a jerk and refusing to drink my orange juice, even though I liked orange juice because I’d be like, “It tastes like raw tomatoes.” I like raw tomatoes today, not like eating them like apples or anything.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

I don’t cook from cookbooks that often, but I do use them as inspiration. Actually, a very sentimental item to me, is The Moosewood Cookbook. It’s probably a cookbook that I’ve had since college. It was what I first learned to cook from because I used to be a vegetarian and I still use it as inspiration sometimes. I just love that, it’s all hand drawn and it just reminds me of being young and not knowing what oregano was. How far have we come?

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

I don’t listen to music anymore. As I said, I listen to all these podcasts but I guess, you know what puts me in the mood to cook is, it’s a song, The Frim Fram Sauce, do you know that song?

It’s a jazz standard but there’s a great version of it that I think it’s Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald do. It’s a great song, it’s all about food.

On Keeping Posted with Lynn:

I think probably Facebook. I have double Instagrams, double Facebooks, The Actor’s Diet and Lynn Chen because one is for the blog, initially one was for acting but now, those worlds sort of coincided with one another. So, if you want to know what’s going on with me, I think the Lynn Chen Facebook fan page is probably the best one because I put everything that’s the most important to me there.

075: Jeannette Ordas: Creating Delicious Meals from Making Do

September 9, 2015 by Gabriel

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Everybody Likes Sandwiches

Jeannette’s blog, Everybody Likes Sandwiches, is about the joy in preparing fresh food simply. She has fun creating delicious dishes from making do, and wants to let us know that eating and living simply and beautifully doesn’t have to be complicated.

I am so thrilled to have Jeannette Ordas of Everybody Likes Sandwiches, joining me here on the show today.

(*All photos below are Jeannette’s.)

On Publishing Her Own Pop Culture Magazine:

I think at the time I was working at a record store and I just finished university and I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I had studied film in school so I wanted some sort of creative outlet and I loved drawing and I just thought, “Oh, I’m gonna start a ‘zine.”

I had seen them being in record stores or in little magazine shops, so I thought, “Oh, I’m gonna start one.” It was just folded, I did cut and paste. This was before Photoshop probably or before I had access to Photoshop. And it was just Xerox, staple, folded, copied at Staples and it was a good way for me to write about music. I originally started it just so I could get free CD’s from record labels.

Then I started having a food column called “Faster Pussycat Eat Eat.” I always wrote a little recipe in every issue and it was fun coming up with recipes. At the time I don’t think there were blogs so it was a good way to combine all my interests. Music, movies, food, so it was fun, and it was a creative endeavor that’s self controlled. I was the boss, I didn’t have anyone telling me what to do so that was a very fun creative project to work on.

On Her Blog:

I think just before I started, I came across a blog called, Chocolate and Zucchini, Clotilde, I think she’s from Paris. And so that was the first one I had ever seen and I was like “Wow, people are writing about food and sharing recipes.” And I really liked that, I liked documenting my food somehow.

I wasn’t sure what I wanted Everybody Likes Sandwiches to be, so I think I initially just opened up blogger. I couldn’t think of a name and I picked probably the worst name, because it’s so long. It’s so hard to type into a browser bar, and it’s not about sandwiches so, I don’t know. But I think it fits, ‘cuz sandwiches are simple, easy, and I think a lot of the recipes I choose to make are like a sandwich, very simple, easy.

That was my start, and I remember it was late at night and I just started my first post. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t even have a camera back then. It took a few months, but I remember I started getting people commenting, and it just kind of freaked me out. I didn’t think people were reading it. And, yeah, it was kind of fun, because I realized there was actually like-minded people, and they would link to their blogs so then I realized there’s actually a whole little community out there.

On Blogs She’s Followed Since Starting Her Blog in 2005:

Molly from Orangette. I think she was probably my second commenter. And she’s super successful, she has her amazing podcast which I listen to all the time, Spilled Milk. Yeah, so that is probably the one I remember best that’s still around.

All of a sudden a lot of people had food blogs. There’s still plenty I think from around that time, not 2005, but maybe end of 2006, 2007 maybe. That’s when I think people like, Tea and Cookies blog, I think she started probably around then too.

On Her Passion for Cooking and Food:

I think it comes from my mom. When I was little my mom would always have a ton of cookbooks and she had this big recipe folder that, I don’t even know what it was, a case, a giant plastic case that she used as a file folder. She’d always be clipping recipes from newspapers and magazines, and my mom loved baking, my mom loved cooking, so food always was going on in the kitchen.

We helped out, me and my brother helped out but I really loved helping my mom stir cake batter and then when my mom started working full-time again, she would always leave a little note, “There’s chicken legs in the fridge, Jeannette. Can you make dinner?” So I would have to look up a recipe, figure out what I wanted to make with that. Sometimes she’d leave me a recipe, I think, initially, but then it was just like, “Oh there’s chicken legs, use those up.” So, yeah, I think it was just something to help out the family, it wasn’t a chore exactly, I really liked doing it and, I think, I would get all kinds of ooh’s and ah’s from my parents, so that was very encouraging.

I think there’s a certain point I became a vegetarian and my family was not vegetarian. And I think I was a vegetarian for 10 years, probably in my late teens, early twenties. That I think really helped me love cooking. It was something unusual that I didn’t become a vegetarian for any sort of reason other than to sort of piss off my parents, maybe? It was just a little rebellious kind of move to become a vegetarian. That was just something I sort of figured out on my own, like cooking with beans and cooking with lentils and just using vegetables and tofu.

I think still most of our meals that I cook now are probably 70% vegetarian anyways, so I love vegetarian food.

On Make-Do Cooking:

I think it comes from maybe not having a lot of money. When I moved to Vancouver I worked at a record store, so I didn’t make a lot of money. And as a creative I’ve always been sort of struggling. So yeah, I hate wasting food and then I tend to postpone cooking dinner sometimes. It will be late so stores are closed or I don’t wanna run out to the store and buy anything, so I have to scramble and look, what’s in my cupboard or here’s some celery and some lentils. It just comes from our grandmother’s type of cooking where, yeah, they didn’t go to the grocery store and buy the best cuts of meat. They couldn’t buy whatever they wanted, because they had a strict budget. So I think that’s how my style of cooking developed, part laziness, part that I didn’t have a lot of money, so I think it all comes from a little quirkiness.

I remember once just having, this was years ago, and I was having a friend over for dinner when I realized I have no money. So I bought a little bit of Parmesan cheese and I had celery and pasta and onion and so I made this pasta dish that was basically sautéed celery and onions with some hot peppers topped with celery and then little bread crumbs. And I was just like, “Wow, this is very delicious.” It’s probably not what you want to serve someone coming over for dinner necessarily, but the person I was with probably was in a similar situation, and they were happy to have a free meal.

I think it’s probably good to have some good herbs on hand, dried is totally fine, fresh is better. I love having rosemary on hand or like Herbes de Provence, which is this herb mix that has lavender and thyme and rosemary. I think generally you should be playing with recipes. Like I don’t have a lot of things sometimes, and I hate bananas so most smoothie recipes always call for bananas so I use pineapple instead. But yeah, I have lentils. You should have aromatics like onions and garlic on hand. I think you can do a lot if you have an onion and some garlic.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

I do watch TV and I would have to say we just started watching The Great British Bakeoff. I only started watching the newest season and it’s perfect. Everyone is so polite, everyone is so kind and gentle, there’s no ego and there’s lots of luscious cakes and baked goods, so that’s pretty great. And then we also started watching, my husband and I, it’s a Netflix show, I think it’s called Chef’s Table. And it’s by the director of Jiro Dreams of Sushi, so each episode is a new chef, one-hour documentary about a certain chef, and it’s probably the most inspiring television I have seen in a long time. Not even if you’re interested in cooking, but I think obviously that helps, my husband who could care less about cooking finds it very inspiring. I think if you’re a creative person it’s really great hearing from people who are creative and have passion for what they do and do well.

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

I think Dinner Was Delicious. I really like that one. Good photography, but it’s the writing that’s kind of snappy, sassy and fun. Kitchen Culinaire. She’s a local Vancouver blogger. I’ve been to her kitchen and pretty much the blog features her beautiful kitchen and her beautiful recipes that are quite simple but very beautiful.

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

I would say Kitchen Culinaire is really good on Instagram. I look at Instagram a lot. Wit and Vinegar is another food blogger who has a great Instagram. Coco Cake Land, another Vancouver blogger, beautiful, fun, photographs of tasty cakes.

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

It would probably be a split between, I have this old cast iron frying pan that was given to us by my husband Cornelius’s grandmother when she passed away, and it’s an old workhorse. I feel like it’s just something that I’ll never get rid of, and I use it all the time. I just made eggs for breakfast in it this morning. I use it for baking salmon, I’ve baked cakes in it, it’s really amazing. I also am very partial to my pistachio colored KitchenAid mixer, which I got as a wedding present so, I love that.

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

I have a lot of dislikes for being a food blogger and someone who supposedly loves food, but I think cucumber is one that I never really liked, and I still don’t really like when people flavor water with cucumber. That’s not very refreshing for me. But now, like last night, we had sandwiches and I had cucumber in the sandwich. I make cucumber salads all the time. I just find it really refreshing, especially during the summer.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

Well, I think one of the first cookbooks that I really loved when I started cooking, when I became a vegetarian, was The Moosewood Cookbook. It has no photos and that doesn’t bother me and I just really loved it. It was hippy-ish, but it really sort of explained vegetarian cooking for me, so I really think that cookbook deserves the prime spot on my shelf and I’ll never get rid of it.

There’s a whole series of those books from I think it’s a restaurant in upstate New York, vegetarian restaurant, and all the recipes are really great.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

Probably an album by the Kinks called Village Green Preservation Society. Very retro, it’s from the ’60s so it’s retro, but it’s just very pleasant sounding poppy. It would be a perfect cooking album, but if I really am feeling tired and I need a little something, I would probably throw on Robyn, something really fun to get in the kitchen.

On Keeping Posted with Jeannette:

I would say on Instagram. My handle is kickpleat so that would be the best way.