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106: Edlyn D’Souza: An Introduction to Goan Cuisine

January 20, 2016 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

Edlyn D'Souza of Egeedee on The Dinner Special podcast talking about keeping posted with her.
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Edlyn D'Souza of Egeedee on The Dinner Special podcast talking about Goan cuisine.

Egeedee

Edlyn restarted her blog when she moved from Goa, India, to the U.S. in 2012. She is greatly influenced by the way her family approaches food and the way they cook. And though she is not a professional cook, she likes believing that she is.

I am so psyched to have Edlyn D’Souza of Egeedee with me on the show today.

(*All photos below are Edlyn’s.)

On Her Blog:

Edlyn D'Souza of Egeedee on The Dinner Special podcast talking about her food blog.

It was about so many random things. I was really young. So picture that, picture like a young person’s journal with, “Oh, look. Look what I did today.” So it was kind of like Instagram but on a blog.

I think the fact that I had that space, not doing anything with it, when I moved here, I couldn’t work for, I think, a year almost, because I was getting my paperwork done and everything. So I was spending so much time at home, and I was getting kind of depressed even. I just needed to channel that energy into something creative, because that’s what I knew how to do.

Also, I was really hungry a lot, so first, I have to make breakfast. Now, what do I do? Okay. Then I make lunch. I used to go online and look for more American things, because I was afraid I wouldn’t find ingredients that I was used to back home. So I started reading The Pioneer Woman Cooks. I really enjoyed her writing style. My eating habits have changed a lot, so I don’t really cook from her blog, but I still really enjoy reading her writing. And then I figured it out from there.

If you read my blog, I try not to write too much about food when I do the writing part of it. I try to keep that still as a journal. That helps me keep in touch with my family back home, because I’m not really an open person. I find it hard to express myself just talking to people. So writing is that outlet for me and that’s the way I get to communicate with people like, “This is how I’m feeling right now. Leave me alone.”

On Growing Up in Goa, India and the Role of Food:

Edlyn D'Souza of Egeedee on The Dinner Special podcast talking about growing up in Goa and the role of food.

Oh, it played a huge role. I was listening to a podcast, I think your podcast, and the lady was saying how food was something people cooked every day, and eating out is like a luxury almost, it’s like for special occasions. That’s exactly how it was. I don’t think we really missed eating out as much. It was a huge task for my parents to do, cook every day. But now that I’m grown up, I kind of understand how much work it took and it makes me appreciate that. So, yeah, food is huge there.

On Her Curiosity Around Cooking:

My dad is the primary cook in our family. My mother likes cooking, but my dad is much quicker and I think he enjoys the process more than she does. For her, it’s like, “Oh, it’s a chore sometimes,” but he loves it. But he also doesn’t like having other people interrupt. He’d always yell at us, “Go away.” So we watched. We would just watch and try and help but.

I wasn’t really interested because of that. I always thought it was something negative maybe. But I also enjoy watching, smelling everything. But I only started doing it myself once I moved here.

On Learning How to Cook:

Edlyn D'Souza of Egeedee on The Dinner Special podcast talking about learning how to cook.

I don’t think I’ve ever cooked anything with their direction, but just watching them and kind of seeing how things looked. As a kid, I’m just watching the onions brown and exactly when you add the tomatoes after and all those spices that you add one after the other. I kind of put those smells together more than anything else, I guess.

Like I was saying, I only started once I moved here. So it was just me feeding myself and my husband, that’s why I moved here. He’s a good cook too, but a lot of his dishes are pretty standard. He likes making a good steak or a good burger and I can’t eat like that. I need different elements on my plate sometimes. So, I encourage myself to add more flavors to our meals. That’s basically what motivates me.

On the Food Culture in Goa:

Things changed once the Indian economy opened up and more foreign products and packaged foods started coming in. So things kind of changed a bit, it became easier to cook at home. And people also wanted to experiment more with other cuisines and that’s where restaurants came in.

So growing up, yes. I don’t think we used to go out. Maybe one birthday or just for fun. But it’s changed a lot now. People go out more as, “Oh, we’re bored. Let’s do something.” And that would mean going out.

On a Traditional Goan Meal:

The staple in Goa is fish curry and rice. That’s one of the staples that you have to try. So the first thing you would need is coconut, because that’s what most of our curries are based, kind of like Thai cooking. But we use fresh coconut and other spices that have a very orange color. So turmeric, coriander seeds, cumin seeds, tamarind, and just whatever fish is fresh that day.

I would say fish curry or shrimp curry. They basically use whatever fish or seafood is fresh or whatever they want to add to it. But, yeah, that would be the first thing I would recommend, fish curry rice.

On Some Good Resources for learning about Goan Cuisine:

Edlyn D'Souza of Egeedee on The Dinner Special podcast talking about some good resources for learning about Goan cuisine.

I don’t know if you’ve heard of A Brown Table, Nik. He does a lot of Goan-influenced food. It’s really delicious. So if you do want to learn a little bit more about Goan food, because I think he’s half-Goan and half-North Indian, I think, but he makes really good recipes with Goan food. And other more traditional recipes, there are a lot of home cooks and food bloggers that aren’t as popular as bloggers that we read every day, and they may not have the best photography, but they still have really good recipes. So if you just type “Goan food,” (in Google) the top three websites will always pop up.

On How Her Cooking Has Changed Since Moving to the US:

Edlyn D'Souza of Egeedee on The Dinner Special podcast talking about how her cooking has changed since moving to the US.

I think it has changed more so because in the beginning, I used to get really swayed by, “Oh, look at these healthy food bloggers, they eat so well.” And I kind of got pulled in that direction, like that was the only way to do things. But over the past few years since I’ve moved here, I realized that that’s an unhealthy way sometimes to cook if you don’t lead that lifestyle.

So over time, I started cooking more food that makes me happy and nourishes me as well. So I won’t shy away from making mac and cheese just because I like it. So what’s wrong with eating it? So my thinking has changed in that way and I’m happy about that.

On Goan Food in the US:

Pretty much everything is not the same, but Goan food is really hard to find in this part of the country, I think. I never get to eat anything from home unless I make it myself. But the North Indian foods and the South Indian foods, the dosa and the chicken tandoori, that’s really popular here. And I think the restaurants do a good job, but I can’t say for sure, because I don’t live in those parts, so.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

Lately, I’ve been watching, it’s a PBS show called, Mind Of A Chef, and it’s all on my Netflix that I have.

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

If I had to pick a few, my first one would be Hungry and Excited and she needs to get her blog back up. Hi, Revati, do it. Okay. And my other favorites are, which I do enjoy for the writing, is Orangette. Also, I like Oh, Ladycakes, just because she swears a lot and she writes really good recipes. I like that, I like her honesty. And a blog that I can always immediately cook from is Sprouted Kitchen. She always uses ingredients that I know I always have. Those are my basics that I like a lot.

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

Instagram I like following Cats of Instagram. I like looking at cat pictures. They’re so funny. I do follow a lot of food people on Instagram too, but I enjoy looking more at animals — cats, dogs. Another one is, I think it’s called This Wild Idea, where he takes his dog and he puts her on random surfaces. I don’t know if you’ve seen that one.

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

My most treasured item would be my tea strainer. I’ve been wanting to own a tea strainer for the longest time, because when I make tea, I like to make it of loose leaf tea. So, yes, that is my most treasured item. And unusual would be a coconut scraper that it’s not a traditional scraper and sometimes I feel like I’m gonna scrape my palm off when I use it, but yeah, maybe that.

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

I used to really hate cardamom a lot, because whenever we would eat it in food in India, it would always be in a rice dish and it would be the whole cardamom. So when you’re eating it, you bite into it and it used to be a very unsavory taste. But now, I know that you can grind it into dust and use it in baking dishes. I like it a lot more now.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

I don’t really read a lot of cookbooks, sadly. I do have a few that I own that I go back to every now and then. I like The Baking Bible, and the new Sprouted Kitchen cookbook is one of my favorites that I keep going back to every time I need to look up something or just look at beautiful photographs. Her husband takes really beautiful photographs.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

Lately I’ve been listening to M.I.A. I thinks it’s her Kala album.

On Keeping Posted with Edlyn:

Edlyn D'Souza of Egeedee on The Dinner Special podcast talking about keeping posted with her.

The best way is through the blog that I post on and other favorite social media platforms that I like are Instagram.

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Filed Under: Podcast Tagged With: A Brown Table, Cats of Instagram, Edlyn D'Souza, Egeedee, Food Blog, Food Blogger, Goa, Hungry and Excited, India, Kala, M.I.A., Mind of a Chef, Oh Ladycakes, Orangette, Sprouted Kitchen, The Baking Bible, The Pioneer Woman, This Wild Idea

098: Brita Britnell: All About Nashville and Hot Chicken

December 9, 2015 by Gabriel 2 Comments

Brita Britnell of B. Britnell on The Dinner Special podcast.
http://traffic.libsyn.com/thedinnerspecial/TDS098.mp3

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Brita Britnell of B. Britnell on The Dinner Special podcast talking about Nashville and Hot Chicken.

B. Britnell

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

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

On Growing Up in Nashville:

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

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

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

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

On the Role that Food Played in Her Home:

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

On the Food Culture in Nashville:

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

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

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

On Hot Chicken:

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

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

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

On Her Blog:

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

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

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

On How She Learned to Cook:

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

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

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

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

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

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

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

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

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

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

On Keeping Posted with Brita:

Brita Britnell of B. Britnell on The Dinner Special podcast.

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

 

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Filed Under: Podcast Tagged With: B. Britnell, Biscuit Love Brunch, Brita Britnell, Chopped, Diners Drive-ins and Dives, Food Blog, Food Blogger, Homemade Decadence, Hot Chicken, Hot Chicken Festival, Joy of Cooking, Joy the Baker, Local Milk, Lucy Rose, Mind of a Chef, My Name is Yeh, Nashville, Pepperfire, Prince's Hot Chicken, Roller Derby, This Wild Idea, Thrillist

Hello! I'm Gabriel Soh, home cook, food enthusiast and your host of The Dinner Special podcast.
Everything here on The Dinner Special is an experiment, just like with cooking. Thank you for listening and being part of the adventure.

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