Turntable Kitchen | The Dinner Special podcast

084: Kate Ramos: An Introduction to Mexican Cooking

October 12, 2015 by Gabriel 4 Comments

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Hola Jalapeño

After spending years as a chef, food editor and recipe developer, exploring different kinds of cuisines, Kate discovered a passion for Latin food, culture and cooking when she married her husband. Hola Jalapeño is where Kate cooks through Mexico, Central America and beyond and embraces fresh, healthy and simple cooking at the root of traditional Latin cuisine while experimenting with modern preparations.

I am so excited to have Kate Ramos of Hola Jalapeño joining me here today.

(*All images below are Kate’s.)

On Foods She Loved Before Mexican Cuisine:

I would say probably Italian food. I am a lover of pasta. Before we got married, my husband and I went and traveled around Italy for 3 months and we ate pasta every single day and I had no problems with that whatsoever. After a while, Armando was kind of done with pasta. We did actually find a Mexican restaurant in Florence. We went there for his birthday and it was $10 for a burrito and I think they charged us $5 for chips and salsa because the ingredients were so rare there that it was really expensive to have that stuff, but I’m fine with pasta every single day of my life. Other than Mexican cuisine, that’s probably my favorite.

It’s mostly plant-based in both places. It’s all about regionality. Well, I know most about Mexican cuisine, but they’re very much tied to the products and the produce grown in that region. It’s very similar to Italy in that regard and food is very high priority to both cultures, so I’d say it’s very similar. There’s obviously ingredient differences but I think that either culture would be at home in the feel of the food, if maybe not the actual ingredients that they’re using.

On Being Introduced to Authentic Mexican Cooking:

I probably was first introduced to authentic Mexican cooking and not Tex-Mex cooking, when I moved to Napa Valley and I started working at Mustards Grill and I worked with a lot of Mexican cooks in the kitchen and that’s where I first learned an intense amount about Mexican cooking.

I was surrounded by these people who had moved to the United States from all different regions of Mexico. They would make food for a family meal for the staff and each person would take turns and they would take that opportunity to make something from where they were from, in different regions of Mexico. I think that’s when I started realizing how immense Mexican cuisine is and how varied it is, especially how vibrant it can be, probably from those experiences. As I worked through kitchens, I had moved on from Mustards but I continued to work in restaurant kitchens mostly with Mexican people and continued to learn. To this day, I’m constantly intrigued by how varied and distinct the food can be.

I would say that the meals at the restaurant were highly influenced by what was going on behind the scenes in the kitchen. We did have a lot of Latin-inspired dishes that would come out of the kitchen that were on the menu. Cindy Pawlcyn, who owns the restaurant, has a lot of Latin inspiration in her cooking and I’m sure a lot of that came from working with Mexican cooks her whole life. I would say the dishes were a lot more refined, the ones that we would actually serve the customer, but they were highly influenced by what was happening.

On Mexican Food:

I would say that Mexican food is so much more than the Tex-Mex food found in most Mexican restaurants across the United States and maybe Canada. The food of Mexico is enormously diverse. It can’t really be described in one succinct idea of what it is, except to say that it’s always bold, it’s always vibrant and it’s always, like I was saying before, intimately linked to the products and the produce of that region. It’s varied from the foods of Oaxaca are completely different from the food of Chihuahua where my husband’s family is from. They all are very colorful and bold and fresh flavors, so I’d say that’s the one unifying concept behind it.

I would say that Mexican food is not easy. It’s not like splash-dash in the pan, you’re done. I think a traditional Mexican home would have you feel like it is because they constantly have a pot of beans, they constantly have rice, they constantly have all these things that constitute a meal. But if you’re going to make a traditional meal from scratch, you have to make the beans, you have to make the rice, you have to make the tortillas, the sauces take a long time to make. I think it’s not hard, but it takes a lot of time to actually recreate a full-on traditional Mexican meal.

You can go to the burrito truck and it’s like, “Can I have a burrito?” And two minutes later they hand it to you. If you were to make all those ingredients, it would take you hours. Carnitas is very popular meat that’s in burritos or tacos. That takes hours because it cooks in its own fat. It’s like a confit of pork. So that’s not something that you just, “Yeah, I’m going to go make some confit for dinner tonight. I’ll be done about 11:30 if you want to come over for dinner.” So, it is very time-consuming.

On Some Resources For Learning More About Mexican Cuisine:

There are some really wonderful, amazing cookbooks out there. Some of my favorites, Pati Jinich. I think she has a show on PBS. I have not watched her show, but I love her cookbook and it’s called Pati’s Mexican Table. She’s just a wealth of knowledge about food from all over Mexico. Another one about the desserts of Mexico that is really fantastic is called My Sweet Mexico and it’s by Fany Gerson, who is a pastry chef in New York. She’s Mexican but she lives in New York. She spends time half and half. Her book is phenomenal because it goes through all the different regions and has very unique things in there you would never see in the United States. Rick Bayless is also a wonderful resource. All of his cookbooks are really good and very in-depth. Then, of course, there’s Diana Kennedy. She’s like the Julia Child of Mexico. She moved to Mexico in the 1970s and has written about Mexican food for 30 or 40 years and her books are really great.

On the Food Culture in Mexico:

I would say that it’s very much a priority in people’s daily lives. Sitting down around a meal with family members is very important. It’s not something to be set aside or maybe happen once every two weeks. Sometimes here in the United States, we kind of let food go by the wayside. It’s an essential part of life there and I think it’s really embraced as part of living a good life, is enjoying the food and drink and family and enjoying the fruits and produce and all that they have to offer that’s there fresh around you, is really important to people all over Latin-America.

On Something That Didn’t Turn Out as Planned:

Well, I would say, it has taken me a while to perfect my bean recipe which is pretty essential when you’re cooking a lot of Mexican food. I initially thought that bean should be thicker, like a chili, and then you would mash that up to make refried beans or whatever. My husband was always very, very kind, but he is like, “It’s okay, it’s great,” not very excited about it. It wasn’t until we went to visit his aunt and I saw her making beans and I was like, “You put so much water.” It’s like a soup really when you first make them and then as the week goes on, you take the beans out of the broth and then you mash them with oil to make refried beans or whatever. I didn’t get that at all until I actually saw her making the beans. So now, I have a pretty solid recipe. I feel pretty confident about it, but it took some time.

It’s called The Perfect Pot of Beans because I’m very proud that I finally have that recipe down. So you can make the perfect pot of beans too.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

I have to say none. I don’t have a television, so I don’t watch cooking shows.

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

Some of my favorites, I love Salt and Wind which is a travel/food lovely recipes, but it’s all about travel and I love that site because I live in the middle of nowhere, so I kind of can travel via that site. Another great one is Heather Christo Cooks. She has wonderful recipes that are easy for the most part and they always are delicious. Beard and Bonnet is a great blog that I love. Turntable Kitchen, I love her writing, Kasey’s writing is great. I could go on and on.

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

I’m a big Instagrammer and obviously I follow mostly food bloggers or people in food. I really like Lisa Thiele. She does With Style and Grace and most of her photos are of her kids, but they’re so stinking adorable. I love it. It makes me happy. Mom’s Kitchen Handbook is another great one, that’s Katie Morford. She has really great recipes and she has tons of school lunch ideas which I steal all the time for my daughter who is in school. Like I said before, I love a sense of humor. I love ones that make me laugh, so one of my favorites is called Queen Bey Breakfast, which is photographs of Beyonce holding breakfast dishes, like superimposed breakfast food. It’s really hilarious. It makes me laugh every time.

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

Well, I have the world’s ugliest wallpaper in my kitchen. I swear to God it is crazy. It is a montage of flowerpots and hanging flower baskets cut from different pieces of wallpaper. When we first moved into our house, we’ve lived there six years now. It’s embarrassing to admit that wallpaper still is up there. But now it’s like a part of the kitchen and as much as I do want to get rid of it, it just continues to exist. It’s like it defines our kitchen, it’s crazy.

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

Well, it’s not really an ingredient, but I used to really despise kombucha. I thought who in the world wants to drink vinegar. That is the weirdest thing, but now I have to have it all the time. It’s kind of disgusting. I have a slight addiction to kombucha. I used to despise it. I used to make fun of people who drank it and now I am one of those people.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

The ones I mentioned earlier are some of my Mexican favorites, but there’s tons more. I love cookbooks. I have a huge cookbook library. Some of the ones I’ve recently been reading and re-reading is Feast by Sarah Copeland. It’s a vegetarian cookbook that is just gorgeous and has such delicious recipes. Another one that I’ve been poring over is The New Midwestern Table by Amy Thielen. It really encompasses this region that I live in, this upper Midwest region of the world. She’s just an excellent writer. Another one this time of year I always have cracked open in my kitchen is called Blue Ribbon Preserves, because now I’m canning. I have tomatoes coming out every orifice, so I’m canning, canning, canning and it’s a book about canning and I always follow her recipes to a T and they always work beautifully.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

I know you wouldn’t know it from looking at me, but I have a hip-hop heart. I love hip-hop, so usually if I’m cooking or testing recipes or working in the kitchen, I have on Macklemore, I love his work, Mos Def, Talib Kweli. I also love 1990s hip-hop like old school, so I have Pandora Summertime Radio on all the time, but it’s mostly hip-hop.

On Keeping Posted with Kate:

Well, of course, the blog, holajapeno.com is the best place to go to see what’s happening in my kitchen. I love Instagram, Hola Jalapeño. I’m @holajalepno on Twitter or Facebook, my Facebook page too always has constant updates. Any of those would be a good place.

082: Melissa Coleman: Tried-and-True Over Adventurous Foods

October 5, 2015 by Gabriel 4 Comments

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The Fauxmartha

Melissa admits to having a severe sweet tooth, and on her blog, The Fauxmartha, is where she shares her tried-and-true recipes that she brightens up to suit each season. She confesses to being an over-sharer, and believes that when you find something that works, and works well, it must be shared.

I am so excited to have Melissa Coleman of The Fauxmartha joining me on the show today.

(*All images below are Melissa’s.)

On Cooking:

I came out of the womb loving food. My mom said I was four years old, sitting at the breakfast table, and she said I would be asking what we were having for lunch and dinner while eating breakfast. And she always told me, “Melissa, eat to live, don’t live to eat.” And I still live to eat and I eat to live. I love food.

So it started with a love of food and as I grew up, probably even as a little girl I would go over to my neighbor’s house and make cookies. I even loved to bake as a young girl and then in high school, as soon as I could kind of clean up my own messes, my mom would tell you otherwise, but I started baking in the kitchen and experimenting with all sorts of crazy stuff. People were so nice to try my stuff. And that just kind of continued.

Once we went to Chicago and I was on my own, married, three meals a day, I needed to somehow prepare and I liked knowing how to do things. I liked knowing the science behind things, I liked knowing how things work and I think that’s kind of what fuels cooking: how does this work? How does baking soda work with liquid in the oven, at what temperature?

In college, I think I was probably the only one doing this, I was watching Martha Stewart on the weekends, that was really cool. And then that fuelled the interest, and she talked a lot about theories behind stuff, so I learned enough to be able to talk about it. And then one Christmas I asked for, I think it was King Arthur Whole Grain Baking Cookbook, it was this huge thick cookbook. I think it was a pale pink. I read that thing from cover to cover. I learned about wheat and the germ and the endosperm, and everything. I learned how wheat is bitter and how to cut the bitterness.

I liked food so much I had to watch myself, so when I baked I tried to use wheat flour and then tried to lighten things up for a long time. I still use a lot of wheat flour now. But I guess I would attribute a lot of that knowledge to the King Arthur Whole Grain Baking bible. It’s chunky, it’s thick.

I have not read through it in a really long time. I’m sure a lot of bloggers, and just home cooks in general experience this. You make a lot of other people’s stuff at first, a whole lot, until you begin to learn what the ingredients do together, and what you like. And so now I have my cake recipe, or my bread recipe, or my muffin recipe, like a base recipe, and then I tweak it from there. So they are my recipes, but it’s a long heritage of people and books that I learned from.

On Her Passion for Food and Cooking:

I always liked to create even as a kid, and I think that’s a little bit of what food is for me too, it’s creating. But my background is in design, so I’ve been a graphic designer for a long time. When we moved to Chicago I had a design job and I liked it for a while, and then I didn’t like it for a while, and I just kept thinking. I had these long drives to work and I would just think, “There has got to be a way to merge my two loves. There has to be a way to merge design and to merge food.” And at that point I was always blogging, and I didn’t really know that those two were so inter-connected. The way I think about food, the way I think about recipes and writing the recipes is the way I think about design. How do I communicate this in a really simple but beautiful and real fashion?

I talked to a couple of other people who were struggling to figure out what do I do? I don’t even know what I want to do. And I always tell them, “Just play.” And that’s what blogging was and cooking was for a really long time, and probably still is in a lot of ways. But just play, and natural things come out. And that’s what it was for me.

On Not Being Creative or Adventurous with Food:

(Who she thinks is creative.) It’s Molly, Molly Yeh. She’s just so fun in the kitchen. She has fun with her recipes. She’s playful with her recipes. She plays, she really plays in the kitchen. I like her approach and it encourages me. Also, through the years, I’ve followed Turntable Kitchen and I like the spices that they use in recipes. They turned me on to cardamom and so did A Sweet Spoonful. Her granola recipe, marge granola that she makes, she uses cardamom. So things I wasn’t used to trying, I never grew up with, looking at their recipes, and making some of their recipes encouraged me to add those things into mine and explore a little bit.

So I’ll just tell you a little bit about my embarrassing story that happens over and over again. I get to a meal. I am with other people who would call themselves foodies and food enthusiasts, and they bring out a plate of burrata cheese and I’m, like, “Oh no, not cheese.” A big pile of cheese turns me off big time. It’s a texture issue, and it’s a mental issue. I kind of have the palate of a child. But it’s embarrassing every time, and every meal.

I went to an event the other week and at multiple meals I had to talk about my distaste for cheese, or I had to tell them I like mild cheddar cheese. I like Parmesan, I like a certain Feta that I can get at my co-op. It’s super-duper embarrassing, but I’ve learned to own it. It’s like, I don’t like cheese. And that’s okay, and I like to bake, and that’s okay. So I think just figure it out, just own it.

My husband has taught me that. He tells everybody before we go over to their house, “She likes this and she likes that.” I’m like, “Don’t tell them that, that’s so embarrassing.” But it helps. It’s not awkward. It’s way less awkward. So just own it.

On Her Tried-And-True Recipes:

Most of the times, it’s the food that we make over and over again. I find myself with blogging, I try to think of recipes sometimes for my blog, and I’m like I should just post the recipes we make. And I need to figure out how to articulate this recipe. But we make a lot of bowls, like food and bowls which start with a grain and some vegetables and some kind of protein which is usually beans for us and then a sauce, and it’s the things that we make over and over and over again. I almost want to delete any recipe that I’ve only made once. Because most of the recipes, we make them. My blog is my resource, that is what I cook from. And then I add new recipes that we make.

A lot of the inspiration has come from things that we have eaten out, or some of our favorite things that we have out, how can we make them at home? And, probably, how can we make them better and cheaper ourselves? And that’s kind of where they come from. We’re just pretty basic people, like when I am thinking up meals for the week, I start with a grain and then build the recipe around that. I either start with a grain or I start with the vegetable drawer.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

None. None. None. I used to. We’ve just gotten Hulu. We were no cable people for a long time. I watch Rick Bayless sometimes on PBS because we can stream it through an antenna.

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

A new one to me is Renée Kemps; her photography is beautiful. I go to her site to just bask in the photography. And then Love, Cake. She is actually who I base my scone recipe off of. Her recipes are so good. It’s a baking blog. I think she even has a culinary background. Her photos are beautiful. Go to Love, Cake.

We make a lot of bowls, and they can get kind of mundane and redundant, so I go to Pinch of Yum because Yum has all the sauces in the world. They are quick and easy and they come together in no time, so go to Pinch of Yum for your sauces.

We eat a lot of vegetarian foods. We are not vegetarian, although people think we are, so I go to Cookie and Kate and Naturally Ella and A Couple Cooks for inspiration on that front.

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

So, I’m a Pinterest delinquent. I’m barely on Pinterest. Facebook, I follow Cookie and Kate again. I love her recipes. She has roundups, which are so nice, because I just need a lot of ideas.

I like FoodieCrush on Facebook, she also has a ton of ideas. She is fun and playful.

Instagram is my time suck. I spend all my time there. I love Instagram. Again, I love Renée Kemps; her stuff is beautiful. Gosh, she’s the one that stands out the most to me. I love her stuff right now.

And then Snapchat, I am not going to join. I have to save my time somewhere. I spend it all on Instagram, so…

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

I am going to go with treasured; it’s not unusual, it’s very every day but it’s my chef’s knife. I have used it so much; I use it multiple times a day. The handle is starting to chip away, which it shouldn’t. It’s never spent a day in the dishwasher, but I use it so much that it is well loved.

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

I would say I am working on cheese. Feta; I like certain Feta. It’s got to be pretty fresh.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

Whole-Grain Mornings, it’s by Megan Gordon, I mentioned her earlier. I love that cookbook. It’s like a handbook for brunch, which is our favorite meal. And then naturally I love Erin’s new cookbook, The Easy Vegetarian Kitchen. It’s like a really resourceful vegetarian handbook, seasonal, so she’s got a base recipe and then how to make it across the seasons. I’d say those are the two dirtiest books in our house, which means they are well used and well loved.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

I listen to Sylvan Esso. I don’t know if people know of her. We listen to her over and over again. Her song Play It Right is kind of a little too mellow, but it works for me, and my daughter walks around the house saying, “Play it right, play it right, play it right.”

On Keeping Posted with Melissa:

I am so simple. I find the one thing that works is Instagram. You can find me there always.