Yotam Ottolenghi | The Dinner Special podcast

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.

078: Chitra Agrawal: Following Tradition and Inspiration with Her Creations

September 21, 2015 by Gabriel 2 Comments

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ABCD’s of Cooking

On her blog, ABCD’s of Cooking, Chitra shares her family recipes from South and North India as well as her own creations from things that inspire her, like local ingredients and other cuisines. Chitra is writing her first cookbook on Bangalore recipes using local ingredients and runs a small batch Indian condiments company called Brooklyn Delhi. As if she isn’t busy enough, Chitra hosts pop-ups featuring Indian inspired cuisine and teaches cooking classes.

I am so excited to have Chitra Agrawal of ABCD’s of Cooking and Brooklyn Delhi joining me today.

(*All images below are Chitra’s.)

On Her Blog:

I guess I have been collecting a lot of my family’s recipes for a long time, and I also get a farm share every week during the growing season. So I usually take a lot of those recipes and then use whatever vegetables or produce that I have and make these recipes my own.

The name ABCDs of Cooking comes from that because ABCD means American-Born Confused Desi which is basically someone like me who grew up in the U.S. but is of Indian or South Asian descent. A lot of my cooking is an analogy of that where it’s based in traditional Indian cooking techniques but then using influences local or even just like cuisines that I grew up eating in the U.S.

I always was cooking for my friends in high school or in college. I remember even my roommate and I, we would religiously go to the grocery store every week, and as a college student, I think that was weird because a lot of the times, college kids go out and eat a lot, but we made it a point to cook at home. It was basically also the way I grew up. My parents have always even though they worked nine to five jobs, they always had home cooked meals on a table. So I think, it’s just the culture that I grew up into.

On Her Condiments Company, Brooklyn Delhi:

I make achaar or Indian pickle. So it’s basically a spicy condiment that is made from vegetables and fruits, and of course in India, it’s also made from local vegetables and fruits. A lot of times, green mangos or thin skinned lemon, gooseberries.

My farm share actually inspired me to come up with a lot of these recipes. The farm which I actually source from now is called Wilklow Orchards and they were the farm that was supplying the Greene Harvest CSA that we were a part of when we lived in Fort Greene, which is basically the neighborhood over from where we are now. And we got rhubarb, heirloom tomatoes, green gooseberries, and I started making achaars from all of these different vegetables and fruits, and I started serving them at my pop-ups and at my cooking classes, and then I got so into it.

My husband is a food packaging designer. He was like, “Why don’t we start packaging these?” and basically we just went with it, and I contacted the farmer directly and I was telling him that I tested all my recipes using his ingredients, and now I want to order like hundreds of pounds of the produce. I literally just text him, and then I get the produce, and then I make it in a commercial kitchen space that I rent out.

It really helped that I already had the recipes pretty much down. The next part was testing to see that these recipes could be shelf stable according to FDA regulations. So there’s all these different hoops you have to jump through when you are making a product for store shelves. So that was definitely a learning process. Luckily, I have a lot of friends that are in the Brooklyn community, in the food community that have either launched products or knew people that did launch. So I was able to gather a lot of this information through that network and then quickly bring everything to market. And it helped because Ben has that background as a food packaging designer. So, he was able to navigate for me really quickly as to how the label was going to look. I didn’t even know how big the font size should be or these types of things. So that was extremely helpful to have him there.

I think that achaar also is an unfamiliar condiment. So a lot of what we’re still doing is educating people on how to use it. A lot of people compare it to a chutney but it’s definitely more intense in flavor because it’s actually pickled in the oil, and the salt, and the spices versus a chutney that a lot of times can be definitely more mild in flavor. So that has been one thing where when I walk into a store and I want the buyer to try it, I have to explain through all of those different uses of the product versus if I was selling like a ketchup or something like that. So I think that’s probably been the main challenge, but it’s also been cool because a lot of store owners that really love the product, had been huge advocates for us, and when you have that type of support from local stores that are talking to their customers about new products that are in the store, they become advocates for us when we’re not there.

On Writing Her First Cookbook:

The cookbook is all going to be about Bangalore, South Indian style cooking. My mother is from Bangalore. So all of the recipes are based in traditional South Indian cooking techniques but also, as I cook at home, I am using a lot of the local ingredients that are found seasonally. So that’s the spin on it and it’s all vegetarian. A lot of it is gluten-free. I am a lifelong vegetarian, so this book is the story of my family and how, a lot of these recipes came to be. I have just been working on that for the last year or so.

There are so many different types of cooking in India, and they actually vary quite a bit. My dad is from North India. I guess I can speak to the difference between those two cuisines, what you find in the restaurants a lot of times, North Indian cuisine, non-curry. But South Indian cooking is a lot based in rice, lentils, you may know, dosa or idli, the fermented kinds of foods, and then both regions have dals but I’d say that like sāmbhar or rasam, these are some of the lentil dishes that are popular in the South. And so those are some of the differences. Even some of the spices, like curry leaves, are used more in South India. Black mustard seeds, even the beverage is different. So after a meal, you’ll drink tea in the North usually, and in the South you drink coffee that has chicory in it. So those are some of the differences but even in the book I talk about how, the cooking that is of my mom’s family from Bangalore is a lot different from South Indian cooking that may exist in Tamil Nadu or in Andhra Pradesh.

Bangalore is a city in Karnataka. So there is all of these different layers to cooking, and especially regional styles of cooking in India vary not only from North, South, East, West but within South India, to even from household to household. Because when I was researching a lot of the recipes, I found that my aunt may make one recipe that is according to what her mother-in-law may have taught her versus another aunt that is making the recipe according to how my grandmother taught her.

On Her Pop-Ups and Teaching Cooking:

I guess the pop-ups started because I started selling prepared foods at some markets in Brooklyn and my friend, who I used to do the prepared foods with and a pop-up that was Indian Mexican. So we started coming up with all of these different recipes, we did Indian Tacos at this one market. And that was actually pretty soon after I had started the blog, too. So I started to realize that, not only do I like writing about and creating the recipes, but I really like feeding people, and so that part became one that I wanted to explore further. After doing the market, we decided to do a pop-up supper club. That was in 2009, and we were just playing around with all these different recipes.

We would make like Indian Tamales. We would make all these enchiladas, all these crazy sauces and condiments, and then we would invite people, and this pop-up was in her house. And so we would literally would have these tables in her dining room and set it up all nice and everything, and then we put out tickets, and people bought them, and they would show up at her house. And so it was so fun.

So we did those, and then I started doing some of my own, where I would do, I did one at Brooklyn Winery, where they had someone that paired the wines with my meal. So that was the North and South Indian dinner I had done. And now, I do a dinner with my friend Diana Kuan, who is a cookbook author. She wrote, The Chinese Takeout Cookbook. So what we do, and this one is called Tangra, we make up recipes that are mix of Indian and Chinese cooking, and it’s all vegetarian, and also uses local ingredients. We always partner with a farm and also a local brewery, and then we are able to offer our creations to whoever wants to come.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

Chef’s Table on Netflix. That show is amazing.

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

Not Eating Out in New York, my friend, Cathy Erway’s site. She posts every week and it’s very interesting because she also is very in tune with seasonality and what she is getting in her farm share. And she also calculates how much each meal costs because for a year or two what she did was, she just cooked at home. So it’s an odd pairing to be eating-in every day in New York. It’s like the city of restaurants. I feel like she has a very cool take and spin on what she does, and she posts very frequently, which I feel like is sometimes the anomaly now with a lot of food bloggers, myself included sometimes.

And then another one that I’m sure you may know is A Brown Table, Nik Sharma, I feel like his photography is just mind blowing, and he is such an awesome guy too. He always has super creative recipes and I love his blog.

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

On Instagram, I love Diana Kuan’s feed, who I partner with for our pop-ups because not only is she a really talented chef, but she’s also a talented illustrator as well. So she always has something really cool that she’s working on on her site. I love The Feed Feed, they are reposting photos from other food bloggers or food Instagrammers, and there’s always something so interesting that you can get from there. And then, of course, I love again, A Brown Table and his Instagram feed.

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

So, this is my tempering pot. It’s this little pot and basically this is what I fry all my spices in. You put just a little bit of oil and then different spices, and what happens is in the hot oil, the spices, the flavor just blooms, and after that, you pour the spices, the tempering, on top of the dishes. So it could be a lentil dish or it could be a yogurt dish. But I love this thing. I take it everywhere when I’m teaching classes, and I always encourage students to buy one as well because I think because of the small surface area, it really does the job well, and I love poaching eggs in it because it’s so tiny that you can poach an egg perfectly in it.

In different parts of India, it’s called different things. So sometimes, it’s called what tempering is, it’s called chaunk, or it can be called vagharne, or it can be called tadka. So there’s all these different names.

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

Oh, bitter gourd. When I was growing up, I hated it. It was just so bitter, and now, I’ve developed a taste for bitter things. So I actually, I’m going to include a recipe for bitter gourd chips in a cookbook, and there’s a farm actually, Hepworth Farms, that started growing bitter gourd locally, too. So it’s awesome because we can get local bitter gourd and, yeah, the bitter flavor, I like it now.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

Well, I have like all the Ottolenghi cookbooks. I feel like I just love looking at those photos. They’re just amazing, and I think he just combines recipes in such interesting ways. Another cookbook is of course Diana’s cookbook. That’s my Bible for Chinese cooking, The Chinese Takeout Cookbook. Louisa Shafia’s, New Persian Kitchen. I have that. I have so many cookbooks piled up all over the place for looking at, but those are some of the ones that I really love, and of course, the classic Madhur Jaffrey cookbooks, An Invitation to Indian Cooking, A Taste of India, all those classic ones are like gems.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

Well, I love Shangri-La by The Kinks. I love that song on so many levels, but what I love about it too, I guess, when you compare it to cooking, is that, it always surprises you. Some parts of the song are really sweet and all of a sudden, it becomes this cacophonous noise, and I love that about cooking too. There’s the slow simmer and then if you’re tempering spices, the crackling of the spices, so it’s that type of dynamic, I like.

On Keeping Posted with Chitra:

Probably Instagram, and I am just Chitra, and then on Twitter, it’s my blog, ABCD’s of Cooking.

068: The Food Gays: Sharing a Taste of Vancouver

August 17, 2015 by Gabriel 2 Comments

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The Food Gays

Adrian and Jeremy love food, photography, and social media. And on their website, The Food Gays, they share healthy and tasty recipes as well as food news in and around Vancouver, BC, Canada.

I am so happy to have Adrian Harris and Jeremy Inglett of The Food Gays on the show today.

(*All images below are Adrian and Jeremy’s.)

On How They Met:

Adrian: We met I think maybe close to six years ago.

Jeremy: Yup, we met through a friend.

Adrian: Through a mutual friend at a random party that neither of us were planning to go to.

Jeremy: We went anyways.

Adrian: And we didn’t really know anyone there other than the host. So yeah, we kind of just gravitated towards each other, and we’ve been hanging out and . . .

Jeremy: Doing our thing ever since.

On Collaborating on Their Blog:

Jeremy: So it was probably July of 2012 when we decided to pursue the food blog, not really knowing what we were getting ourselves into.

Adrian: We were just wanting to find a hobby to do together, something fun. I was blogging previous to this, doing a fashion arts kind of blog, and I think Jeremy was tired of me being on the computer all the time. So we thought we’d put our heads together and was like, “What do we both like?” And we were already cooking a lot at home and doing that, so we just started it not really knowing what was going to become of it, just something fun to do as a hobby.

Jeremy: Baking is kind of a specialty. So it just goes back to my roots. My grandma used to be a baker, and there are probably three or four other bakers in my family too. So it’s just in the family, and I feel comfortable with it.

Adrian: I guess I’d always been cooking too. Even as a little kid, I was in the kitchen making weird snacks and that kind of thing, left to my own devices probably a little too much. But I never ever thought that we’d have a blog, that it just started really organically. Neither of us had any sort of preconceived notions of . . .

Jeremy: What it’s gonna look like…

Adrian: . . . what it’s was gonna be…

Jeremy: what we’re gonna post in a month.

Adrian: Yeah, it’s really evolved a lot from three years ago, for sure.

On Their Separate Roles for the Website:

Adrian: We don’t really have anything set in stone, but we’ve, I guess, gravitated towards what . . .

Jeremy: we enjoy most.

Adrian: Or what each other’s strong suits are. So Jeremy’s definitely a lot more about the analytics and the planning and . . .

Jeremy: organizing and making sure things are up.

Adrian: And I’m probably more gravitated towards the styling and photography.

Jeremy: And then we work together on recipes and in the kitchen, so it’s intertwining. It’s a good nest.

Adrian: We pick up where the other leaves off. Because it’s hard, right? Being a blogger . . . We don’t need to tell you. It’s like there’s so much involved, and you don’t necessarily think of all of that when you’re first starting.

We definitely worked our way through it.

Jeremy: There’s no way I was thinking about analytics week 2 of our Food Gays. It was just like, “What am I gonna tweet about?” and “Who should I follow?” and stuff like that.

On Deciding What to Make for the Blog:

Jeremy: Depends on the season.

Adrian: Yeah, nowadays probably, it’s really seasonal for us. We cook a lot with fresh plant-based ingredients, I guess you could say, so what’s fresh at the market. I really love farmer’s markets and going at least once or twice a month and getting inspired…

Jeremy: Sometimes once a week.

Adrian: Well, depending on what we can afford. But I don’t know. I guess before we were very much just cooking . . .

Jeremy: to experience cooking and to get to do that.

Adrian: I guess now we are probably trying to be more creative and inventive with flavor combinations and what can we come up with and that kind of stuff.

On Their Blogging Process:

Jeremy: First, create, of course. I think I’ve tested out a few things over the couple of years, but I think right now we’re doing the Instagram test first.

Adrian: Yeah, a lot of times, we’ll post stuff to Instagram now because that’s where we really put our primary focus in the past few months. So we’ll put something up and if it gets a lot of interest, then we’re like, “Okay, that’s definitely worthy of a blog post,” and we’ll then go to the next steps.

But generally, if we do post our recipe to the blog, we’ll try to have tested it a few times at least and make sure it’s a solid recipe because that’s important too, that you’re putting something out there that’s going to work for people. But it’s different every time, I guess.

If we were doing it, say, for a client or something, if it was a sponsored post, then there would be a lot more involved time-wise.

Adrian: I really focused a lot in the last few months practicing, and Jeremy definitely is very important part of the process though. He’ll tell me if something’s not working or if I can’t figure something out.

Jeremy: “Do this there. Try this.”

Adrian: Or use his hands a lot in the shots.

On Misconceptions about Healthy Food and Healthy Eating:

Jeremy: That it’s all green and boring.

Adrian: We really try and show people that it can be fun and that you can really make fun interesting things and use new ingredients. I think it can feel really limiting for people.

We’re not vegetarian, and that’s why I think we can have so much fun with it. But for those who are and who have food allergies and limitations that way, it can feel really like the same thing. I think you can get into a bit of a food rut. So, yeah, I think that’s our biggest thing, just that it can be different and you can have fun with it and have great, amazing flavors.

Adrian: And get to know your farmers too because that starts to inspire you too.

Jeremy: Yeah, he’s glad to know this really, really wonderful woman for his edible flowers.

Adrian: I’m talking about her flowers all the time.

Jeremy: Well, eating-out option is kind of hard in itself.

Adrian: Yeah, I think eating out can be a challenge.

Jeremy: You’re not gonna go out and buy a nine-dollar salad when you can easily make a three-dollar salad at home and that can fill you up.

Adrian: I think pick your splurge moments, I guess. We definitely eat junk food, and not everything that we eat is on Instagram. And then we have just regular routine meals and stuff.

Jeremy: But just incorporating it into your routine is just a good way to do it.

Adrian: Just start slow. Just start somewhere.

And cut down on your meat. That’s something that we’ve done a lot. We love protein still, and we’ll eat it maybe a few times a month now, as opposed to it being like it felt like it needed to be every single night of the week. That, with the side of your vegetables.

If you shift your focus . . . And I think cookbooks. Cookbooks and blogs, that’s a really great way because a lot of the work is done for you. You don’t need to sit and worry about trying to come up with something super creative. Just go online and find it. Someone’s done it. Try it out.

On the Food Culture in Vancouver, BC Canada:

Adrian: You can probably find a little bit of everything here. For someone who’s really well traveled, maybe Vancouver still has a lot of growing to do, but in a lot of ways, if you’ve been here or if you’re from here, you know it’s a bit of a small town. So in that respect, we do have a lot of options, and we’re spoiled.

Jeremy: There’s still a lot of restaurants that we have never been to.

Adrian: People ask us where we should go eat, and we’re like, we haven’t dined out probably, nearly . . .

Jeremy: as much as we used to.

Adrian: Yeah, nearly as much as we used. Can’t keep up. It’s like a full-time job.

On Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner in Vancouver:

Adrian: I think breakfast, we’d probably say Café Medina.

It’s a good solid spot. Go early so you’re not waiting in line for too long. But they do a really good breakfast.

Jeremy: Lunch, there’s this really cute spot, Japanese spot, Basho Café. They do these lunch sets, so you get three little pastries, or two pastries.

Adrian: Yup, and some soup.

Jeremy: A lunch bowl and a soup and a drink.

Adrian: It’s made by this little Japanese family. It’s super authentic, really, really good, just solid home-cooking lunch. And dinner, we’d probably say Kessel&March. That’s one of our favorite restaurants.

And we live in the distillery and brewing district of Vancouver, so there’s literally within a 15-minute walking span four or five different places that you can go drinking.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

Jeremy: MasterChef Canada.

Adrian: Love Nigella Lawson, which I mentioned, Nigel Slater.

Adrian: Oh, and we just started watching Food Network Star, which is just ridiculous, but… Cutthroat Kitchen.

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

Adrian: I’m sure you probably know about a lot of them, but stuff we love, Feed Feed, that’s a really great place for just dinner inspiration. Artful Desperado, yeah, we love him. And then we’ll give Baked a shout because we just started contributing for Baked, the blog, so that’s a really good baking website.

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

Jeremy: I really love Dennis The Prescott stuff.

Adrian: Yup, Dennis Prescott, for sure. Again, Feed Feed for sure, Artful Desperado, Molly Yeh, I am a Food Blog, Vanilla and Bean…

Jeremy: Just to name a few.

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

Jeremy: Ironically, the appliance we didn’t use for maybe two years, which we’re now using almost every other day.

Adrian: The pressure cooker.

Jeremy: Yeah, steam pressure cooker.

Adrian: And we just got it and we never used it, and then it sat there for literally two years. We finally figured out how to use this scary-looking object, and yeah, it’s really great.

Adrian: We make dog food for our dog, so we have to steam vegetables.

Jeremy: It just keeps all the nutrients in the vegetables that we’re cooking for him and because we only feed him real food.

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

Adrian: Mine would be cilantro.

Jeremy: Blue cheese for me. It was too pungent to eat before, but now I can just eat it, no problem.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

Adrian: Definitely Ottolenghi’s cookbooks Plenty, Plenty More. Those are two really great ones. Sunday Suppers, love that book.

Jeremy: My school pastry book, that’s good resource.

Adrian: Yeah, Jeremy has a lot of books from school, and then we’ve got this Seven Spoons cookbook. We haven’t cooked from that yet, but it’s a really beautiful one. We actually laid off the cookbooks in the last few months because I kind of went a little crazy.

It’s like an addiction in itself.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

Adrian: Right now we really love Galantis’ “Peanut Butter Jelly.”

It’s such a good song. They just released the album. It’s very good.

On Keeping Posted with The Food Gays:

Adrian: Definitely, Instagram’s our number one platform.

But Twitter, Facebook, we’re pretty much on all three, and we’re trying to post more recipes to the blog. So definitely, check us out there more, where you can expect more recipes this summer.

055: Liz Harris: Turning Food into Her Career

July 1, 2015 by Gabriel 2 Comments

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Floating Kitchen

Liz is a cook, photographer, and writer. And on her blog, Floating Kitchen, she explores and shares seasonally inspired recipes that are sometimes healthy and sometimes indulgent, but always fun and delicious.

I am so psyched to have Liz Harris of Floating Kitchen here on the show today.

(*All images below are Liz’s.)

On Her Career Before Food:

Before I started blogging, I was actually a research scientist. I went all the way in school. My undergraduate focus was biology, and then I went on to get my PhD in Biochemistry. That was five years of training, post undergrad degree.

Then I went and did a post-doctoral fellowship in Cancer Biology. That was another four years of training. I spent about thirteen years working towards becoming a research scientist, and then I was working in that field. It just wasn’t clicking for me anymore so I made a drastic change in my life.

Making the change was very hard, mentally, because I had committed so much time and you feel compelled to continue on this path.

I still love science. I find it really interesting. I love reading about it in my free time. I liked actually doing it, but at the end of the day, the lifestyle that I had created for myself around this career wasn’t very healthy for me anymore, and so I needed to change that.

On Her Introduction to Cooking:

My family is pretty into food. I come from a line of great cooks. My grandmother, my great aunts, my mom is a big cook as well. I was always just in the kitchen or around the kitchen with them. So I was always very interested in it. My family also owns a farm and a wholesale distribution business in New Hampshire, so food is just something that we think about a lot and have always been really interested in. It’s just what we do.

My great auntie, Dot. She was probably the best cook in the family. She also was always very patient with me and she let me help her. She didn’t get mad if you messed up or anything. Because I’m sure I messed up a lot when I was little. I owe a lot of my cooking abilities to her.

On Turning Her Hobby into Her Career:

About five years ago is when I really started doing it. It was still a hobby at that time, but I started being a lot more serious about cooking every day for myself, cooking for friends, having people over.

That’s when people started suggesting to me, too, “Hey, you’re really good at this. Have you ever thought about having a blog or doing something with it?” And I was like, “No. Computers hate me. I would never have a blog. I can’t even do email!” That just seemed really out of reach for me.

I was spending so much time on my career, so it was like, “No way I could do that on the side.” So that’s when I really started getting into it. Around 2012 or 2013 is when I made this choice to leave my career as being a scientist, and that was the obvious thing to do, is to pursue something in cooking.

I think whenever you make a really big drastic change like that, there is a fine balance between courage and sheer stupidity. You just have to say, “Alright, I don’t know what’s going to happen and I’m just going to do it and go for it.”

My parents obviously were really supportive. I didn’t feel like I was going to be letting them down. I also was giving up a paycheck and all these other practical things. They were encouraging me and telling me that it would be okay. It gave me the guts to do it.

I’m just a really determined person. Once I get something in my head, it does not escape my head until I do something about it. So I just decided to do it and now here I am.

When I first left science, I didn’t know what I was going to do. I was mulling around for a few months, figuring it out.

I actually simultaneously started my blog and started working in restaurants. I had never had a restaurant job before in my whole life, so that was a really fun and eye-opening experience. So I started on those two paths; I had the blogging and I had the restaurant work. After doing both those simultaneously for about a year, I decided that I just wanted to pursue the blogging for now. Restaurant work is hard. I mean, it was fun but it’s a lot of work for not a lot of gain. And my blog was picking up and was growing, and I decided to put all of my energy into that.

On the Type of Cooking that’s Most Natural:

I think the savory dishes come more naturally to me. I’ve developed a style where I just like to throw things together. I cook mostly vegetarian food and it’s just easy to roast up a bunch of vegetables and make some grains, make a quick dressing. That is definitely more my everyday style. Although I do love the baking.

I think the enjoyment I get out of the baking is not the actual doing it but it’s the sharing it. Because that’s the stuff that’s easy to share, and that’s why I loved cooking to start with. I loved bringing people food or inviting people over.

Cookies and brownies are something I would take to work all the time, or bring to my neighbor’s house. So I like that aspect of the baking. But in terms of the following the instructions, I can do it and I’m great at it, but I just prefer to not have to think that much about it. Which is funny because being a scientist, all you’re doing is thinking about instructions all the time.

On Where She Finds Inspiration for Her Blog:

Mostly from other bloggers.

I read an enormous number of blogs. I have like 400 blogs on my feed. It’s insane. Because people are just doing so much great stuff, so I love just seeing what everyone else is doing.

I’m really inspired by cooking with the seasons. That’s something that’s important to me. Growing up in a family that has a farm, I’ve always been aware of that and try to follow that as much as possible. It’s better for your wallet and the environment. It’s good for your body. It tastes better when you buy food that’s in season. I love going to the local markets and looking for things that look great, and bringing them home and making something from them.

On Things Not Going As Planned in the Kitchen:

I feel like at this point, I’m pretty knowledgeable of what is going to work together, what flavors will go together, and what techniques are going to work.

I guess the only things for me, that it’s not actually the cooking part, it’s always something else that happens. I remember I made this huge tray of eclairs and they were glazed. And I dropped them and they went glazed side down on the rug, with dog hair stuck in them. It’s that kind of stuff.

I will finish a whole thing and then I’ll have some klutzy moment at the end and ruin everything, which is very unfortunate. But those things happen to me more than actually with the cooking part.

In the beginning, when I was in graduate school and during my fellowship when I was learning to cook, I was very strict about following recipes. I had to have a recipe or I couldn’t make something. Because I didn’t have that awareness of what things went together. But now that I have been cooking for so many years, it’s easy for me, just something that I’ve picked up.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

I do like to watch the Barefoot Contessa.

A show I used to love to watch that’s not on anymore is Alton Brown’s Good Eats. Of course, that’s like a science-y cooking show, so you know I’m going to love that one. I don’t really watch any food competition shows because they kind of stress me out. I get nervous for the contestants.

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

From the 400 that I follow, let’s see. One blog that I love is called Local Haven. Her name is Ashely, and she has really great photography and really authentic, unfussy recipes that just feel good when I’m on her site and look at her photos. So I think everyone should check out Local Haven.

I also really love Foodie Crush by Heidi. Heidi has great recipes and great photography, but I think the thing that I appreciate most about her site is that she spends a lot of time talking about other bloggers and other blogger’s recipes. It’s really refreshing in a job where you talk about yourself all the time. I mean, that’s really what we have to do, is promote yourself. So it’s so nice to see somebody who is talking about other bloggers so much. I’ve been introduced to a lot of new sites through her blog. So I think that’s a good one everyone should check out.

And I love How Sweet It Is by Jessica. Her stuff is just so over the top and fun, and it just makes you feel good when you read it.

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

On Instagram, I love Sweet Paul Magazine. He has a lot of not just food pictures, it’s food and crafts and gardening. All the photos are really bright and fun and whimsical. He has a great feed.

I also love, on Instagram, all the meta-sites, like Food 52 and The Kitchn. Great photography, great recipes, and again, they reshare a lot of stuff from the community. So it’s been a great way to connect and find new Instagram accounts and new food bloggers.

On Twitter, I love Sarah from The Sugar Hit. She is just hilarious. She has really funny tweets. I definitely recommend people checking her out.

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

I guess the thing that would be the most treasured, is I do have recipes from my great aunt. She was the one that was sort of the biggest cook in our family. And all the recipes from my grandparents and other family members, and I think those are probably the most treasured things, just having those cards with the stains on them and the handwritten notes. It’s just really fun. You feel like you’re cooking with them when you’re using them.

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

This is a tough question because I used to dislike everything. I was that kid that only ate grilled cheese, chicken, and peanut butter and jelly for like twenty years. So it’s very surprising now that I will eat everything.

I think one of the main things is tomatoes. I used to hate tomatoes, raw tomatoes. I didn’t like tomato sauce. I would wipe the sauce off of my spaghetti, which horrified my parents. But now, I love fresh tomatoes. I love making sauces.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

I really like Vibrant Food by Kimberly Hasselbrink. It’s really colorful. I want to eat everything when I flip through the pages. It’s just a spectacular book that I think everybody should own.

I love Joy the Baker. She’s one of my favorite bloggers. I love Homemade Decadence, again, really fun and whimsical, and of course, totally makes you hungry when you’re looking at it.

I also love all the Ottolenghi books. I don’t cook from them that often, because all the recipes are really involved, but just such a great source of inspiration and great photography as well.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

I really like something upbeat when I’m cooking, like Stevie Wonder or Taylor Swift. Anything with a good beat deserves to be in my kitchen.

On Keeping Posted with Liz:

The best way, the first way is my blog, of course, floatingkitchen.net. I post new recipes two to three times a week. So you can check me out there. Instagram is my favorite, so that’s a fun place. I love connecting with people on Instagram.

052: Brian Samuels: Cooking and Enjoying Fish

June 22, 2015 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

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A Thought for Food

Brian is a Boston-based food photographer, and on his blog, he shares a lot of vegetarian options, and considers his diet 98% pescetarian. A Thought for Food was started in 2009 and has been featured in Food and Wine, Food52 and Yahoo Food, just to name a few.

I am so happy to have Brian Samuels of A Thought for Food, here on the show today.

(*All images below are Brian’s.)

On Blogging:

I think to have a successful food blog, you have to be pretty dedicated. It’s very time consuming, so I think maybe not crazy is the right word exactly, but definitely devotion, passion, maybe a little obsessive. Maybe that’s a better term. That’s really why I think a lot of people who end up writing food blogs have that type of personality.

I would say the most challenging would be the writing of it. I don’t find myself to be a natural writer. I don’t easily sit down and the words flow out. There’s a lot of editing involved. And sometimes I’ll write and write and write, and then delete a huge amount of it. Then, sometimes, I’ll just delete the whole thing and start over again. It takes a while.

There are other times, though, where I sit down and it does flow out a little bit more and I feel like I do have something to say and then it’s a little easier to say it. But for me, the most fun and definitely challenging element, but still the most fun and easy in a way, would be photography. It’s something that I’ve always connected to, just being able to capture my own experiences through the lens.

Back in 2009, when I started the blog, it was, I guess, the start of when food blogs became really big. There were definitely the big ones, like, 101 Cookbooks, Smitten Kitchen, and a few other big ones. I read frequently and I was always creating the recipes and commenting on those posts.

I felt like I also had a story to tell about food, and I was throwing a lot of dinner parties with my husband, or my now husband. I wanted to share those recipes and I wasn’t necessarily expecting people to read the blog. I was just sending it out to family members and friends who asked for the recipes. But I just really felt like I had a passion for food, and it was a way for me to get that story out there.

On His Curiosity for Food and Cooking:

I think ever since I was little, I was always passionate about cooking and showed an interest in it. I remember growing up and my mom making dinner every night. She was very much into making home cooked meals. We had take-out once in a while, but for the most part, she really wanted to make things from scratch and educated us about food.

She worked with a lot of cookbooks herself, in terms of making dinners for us, making meals for us. I just always took interest. As soon as I smelled something, I was always by her side asking questions and wanting to know how she was doing things. And eventually, she had me help her out.

On Getting Into Food Photography:

I went to film school at Emerson College in Boston. And there, I focused on documentary film-making, and I really fell in love with being able to tell stories, especially through film, but about the real world, about real people and not necessarily scripted.

I ended up working for a documentary production company in Boston for three years. And that’s actually when I started the blog, was during that time.

I did see it as a way to combine my love for documenting, not necessarily through photography but just documenting my love for food, recipe development, playing around with recipes, and educating people about food, all that. So it wasn’t necessarily about the photography specifically at the time, but definitely about documenting it.

I was shooting originally, if you go back to old posts, not that I necessarily promote that, I was using a Canon PowerShot, just point and shoot. Taking pictures of the final dishes and maybe a few processed shots along the way. But I wasn’t using great equipment; I was still learning about techniques about how to photograph food. My passion for food photography developed because of that experimentation.

On Being (98%) Pescetarian:

A pescetarian is someone who eats vegetarian and fish. Red meat is out, poultry is out. Basically any land animals are out.

When I was 15, just for health reasons, I decided that I really wanted to cut out red meat from my diet. And I was still eating chicken and turkey, but I really wanted to cut out red meat from my diet. From there, I took out chicken as well. But I could never give up fish or dairy, because I’m just in love with those two things. And I think it allows me to be a little bit more adventurous in my eating, in terms of dining out and experiencing things.

For me, that’s such a huge part of my life, is not passing up the opportunity to try something. So the 98% is really where I will usually have a bite of something if we’re dining out somewhere and it’s really special.

My husband eats meat, so he’ll most likely get a meat dish when we’re dining out. I’ll sometimes have a bite of that. And I still think meat is delicious. He loves making smoked brisket and I’ll have a bite when he’s done, just to try it out. Because I usually help him out a little bit too. So I feel like if I’m doing it, I want to know what it tastes like.

For me, it’s really about where you’re sourcing your ingredients. I make sure that what we’re cooking is locally sourced if at all possible. And I’m knowing the farmers that we’re sourcing it from and all of that. We don’t do it often. I can justify it.

On Cooking Fish:

I think salmon is hard to mess up. It’s fatty.

It’s funny because a lot of people stay away from salmon because they don’t like fishy fish. I never get that because I love fish, and I love it whether or not it has a fishy taste to it. I’m okay with that.

I think they’re getting that from the oils and the fats from the fish probably, and especially with salmon. But in terms of fish that’s hard to mess up, I think that salmon is really easy to work with. It also holds up when you add a lot of flavor to it, so you could do soy sauce, you could do a marinate with it and you’ll still have a really nice fish flavor with it.

I think that some other fish are more delicate obviously. White fish, you don’t want to mess around with that too much, so you have to be careful with that. I always think salmon is really easy to work with. I think sword fish as well. It holds up nicely. They’re both very meaty fish too.

I would not say I’m a pro at cooking fish at this point. I think I have learnt that overcooked fish is not merely as delicious as seared fish. And, so with salmon, I’m trying to make sure that the skin is crispy if it still has a skin on it. That it is cooked all the way through but not overdone. I think working with high heat is really key with fish because you just want that point where it just cooks all the way through and you’re not cooking any longer.

Starting off with high heat is really key. It really depends on the fish and what you’re doing with it and how you’re serving it. I also like to play around with other types of sea foods like scallops and shrimps and we’ll rotate that in our diet as well.

On Choosing Fish:

When I go to buy fish in the store I don’t necessarily care if it’s previously frozen or not, I really look at where it’s being sourced from. With anything I want to buy as local as possible. And coming from New England or, the Pacific Northwest, you can usually find local seafood in these areas but I know that people in the middle of the country struggle with that.

I’m really looking for stuff that, I can have a dialogue with the person at the fish counter and say, when did this come in? Where did it come from? Tell me about it? I think when it came in is usually a good sign of freshness, and yes, that’s pretty much my thought process behind it.

I think the frozen element really makes a difference because as soon as it hits the cold it’s obviously going to preserve it longer. It depends on the fish. Yes the previously frozen thing doesn’t bother me as much as the farmed versus wild caught. If it’s frozen and it tastes good then, great. I don’t think it matters either way necessarily. I don’t think it affects the flavor of it too much.

Here in New England I’ve had the luxury of being able to get fish that was caught that day and having it and there’s a deeper flavor in it. You’re tasting the ocean. It hasn’t lost that flavor. I think a fish that has probably been frozen, it sort of loses that depth.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

Top Chef.

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

I think most people already know these sites but some of my favorites are Sprouted Kitchen and Happy Yolks is a favorite of mine as well, and Not Without Salt is one of my all times favorites. I think Ashley was on your show actually at one point.

Those are definitely some of my top three.

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

All those people definitely. Is it sad that West Elm makes me really happy when I see those pictures?

I’m a sucker for, we have a new house, I follow them just to see what they are posting about. So that always makes me happy. I would definitely say Ottolenghi’s Instagram feed always, I’m always unbored with that and Local Milk is a favorite as well.

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

This is a tough one. It’s funny, the weird one that popped into my head is an egg slicer. I don’t know why and I don’t think I have a connection to it really but it just popped into my head.

I don’t think it’s one of those things that people have but I actually use it fairly frequently. Whenever I want to do a big salad for one of my big weeknight meals. If I want a hearty salad. I always put hard boiled egg on it and it’s just an egg slicer. So I’m saying the egg slicer.

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

Mushrooms. I think would be the one. I was such an adventurous eater growing up but mushrooms, I was disgusted by and now I’m obsessed with them.

I think for the most part we always had it with chicken, in a chicken dish. Or it was on top of pizza. My sister loved it and I think I just hated it because she loved it so much. But I’m obsessed with it now.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

For the most part I look at cookbooks for the pictures to give me inspiration. Recently, the ones would be definitely Plenty. All the Ottolenghi books, I’m always going back to them. Ashley’s book, Not Without Salt’s, Date Night In I’ve been going to too.

I think the same goes for magazines as well. I subscribe to a lot food magazines and usually I go through for the pictures. I love the new Sift magazine by King Arthur Flour. Great pictures and it just gets you thinking, because it’s so baking focused, it gets you thinking outside the box.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks or Norah Jones’s Come Away With Me. When I’m cooking, for the most part, I want that chill music with a glass of wine and it mellows me out.

On Keeping Posted with Brian:

Definitely through Instagram in terms of more day to day. It’s beyond just the food world. It’s also, I put up pictures of my dog, and where I am, and what’s going on in life. On Twitter as well. Those would be the top places. But I’m also on Facebook and all those wonderful sites.

050: Sheri Wetherell: Founding Foodista and the International Food Blogger Conference

June 17, 2015 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

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Foodista, International Food Blogger Conference

Started in 2008, Foodista is a passionate community of food lovers who share and exchange its knowledge about everything culinary. There’s editorial content from food, news, to health and nutrition, but Foodista stands out with its always growing database of user submitted recipes.

Since 2009, Sheri and her team has been organizing the International Food Blogger Conference, which focuses on food, writing, and technology. This year, it’s being held in Seattle, Washington, from September 18 to 20.

I am so excited to have Sheri Wetherell, co-founder and CEO of Foodista, and the International Food Blogger Conference, here on the show today.

On Her Passion for Food and Cooking:

My father’s a retired airline pilot, so I spent a lot of my youth just hopping on planes, because it was free, traveling the world with him. I think just exploring a lot of international cuisines and cultures really honed by palette for food and travel. Also, my mother comes from a very large family and I was just always in the kitchen, cooking with my grandmother and my aunts.

Also, my father’s mother had a restaurant. I never professionally cooked, but I’ve just always been around food and I’m just passionate about it.

I started baking with my grandmother. I had my own little bread loaf pan and we would bake bread a lot. It’s funny, I’m a really bad baker to this day. So, clearly, nothing really stuck from a baking standpoint.

I would say my longest stint of living abroad was in Japan. I taught English there for three years, so I definitely like to incorporate a lot of Asian, specifically Japanese elements, into my cooking. Tofu for one, I’m trying to get my four-year-old to really embrace tofu – unsuccessfully, thus far. Then, I did a study abroad in Italy many, many years ago. Those foods, rich pasta dishes are still definitely part of my cooking core.

Here in the Pacific Northwest, we have amazing access to just beautiful fresh fish. We eat a ton of fish.

On Starting Foodista:

I would love to take credit for that, but that was completely my life partner and business partner, Barnaby Dorfman’s idea. He was an executive at Amazon.com and created, if you know the Internet Movie Database, he created IMDB Pro. So his idea, if you’re familiar with the Internet Movie Database, he wanted to create something similar, but around food.

Both of us have a passion for food and cooking, and so for many years we thought, “Oh, wouldn’t it be great to someday start a company that’s all recipes, that’s smart as far as search, like a Google search, so you don’t have apple pie, apple pie, apple pie.”

In 2005, we came up with the name Foodista and registered the domain and hired engineers to create software much like Google would pull in fair-to-use, free to use, recipe content algorithmically.

For a few years, we were just a lights on, nobody’s home recipe database, just a little search field. And then in 2007, we really wanted to start our own company, so we thought, “Let’s move back to the Foodista idea,” and we brought on another partner who is a brilliant engineer, Colin Saunders. He comes from a Napa Valley wine family, so he also shares the same delicious passions that we do.

We started to develop Foodista, and at the time, it was a completely different company than it is now. When we launched, we really were a Wikipedia of food, if you will. So it was structured data that our software would pull in algorithmically, as I said, but then we were developing a large community of predominantly food bloggers to add recipe content.

Amazon then invested in us, because the three of us founders are all former Amazon.com employees, and they were interested in the new IMDB of food, if you will. We were operating that way for a long time, building our network of our community of food bloggers.

About three years ago, we shifted away a little bit – long story short – from the cooking encyclopedia, is what we were calling it, but everybody could edit, to much more of an editorial website and food news. We still have that large community of recipe contributors and bloggers, but we’re now much more food and recipe news.

That’s the short story of how we started.

I think at the end of the day our goal is to feature everything and anything related to food that people are interested in. If they want to take a cooking class in Italy, they can find all the resources on Foodista. So that’s one of my personal goals, but who knows. The Internet changes so quickly. I think the key as any website owner, blogger, whatever, is to be nimble and to change with what your audience is looking for, so that’s what we will continue to do.

On the International Food Blogger Conference:

It is a fun party. The three things of the conference are food, writing, and technology. We gather speakers in all of those areas just to offer the best of the best to our attendees. It’s definitely a weekend of intense learning, but amazing networking with people in the industry, as well as fellow bloggers.

We share on social media and connect with our fellow bloggers, but this is really an opportunity to meet offline and engage and form friendships. It’s just an amazing event and there’s a ton of gourmet food and wine. We feature some of the best restaurants and shops and food producers in the area. It’s a lot of bang for your buck.

Back in the day, we were developing tools for bloggers to help them build traffic and SEO to their sites. Any industry that you’re in, you always want to go to the conference that represents your industry, and there wasn’t one. I kept talking to food bloggers and saying, “Is there any sort of conference for food bloggers?” Everyone was saying, “No, but we want one.” In less than four months, we hurried and put one together.

We thought if we could get 50 people in a room to talk about food, writing, and technology, the three things that are most important to food bloggers, we can really hash out what are their goals, what bloggers are really aiming to improve upon. And so we kicked it off. It immediately sold out in less than a week. So we thought, “Well, our venue has space for 50 more.” So we extended it and we capped it at 100, and it was amazing.

Our keynote was Ruth Reichl formerly of Gourmet. We had Molly Wizenberg and Elise Bauer, Jaden Hair, just a bunch of amazing, amazing speakers. Sur la Table was our key sponsor. They put together a 23 pound bag of goodies, which was amazing, for each attendee. It was just this weekend of amazing food and speakers, and then afterwards everybody said, “That’s great. When’s the next one?” And we went, “Oh, yikes! We’re now in the event business.” So I operate two businesses: Foodista and the International Food Blogger Conference.

So that’s how IFBC started, kind of by accident.

We thought we would just do one, so now it’s grown into an event of more than 300 attendees.

On How Food Blogging Has Changed Since 2009:

In 2009, when we hosted ours, Twitter was still was fairly new. And I was still kind of unsure, I was like, “What’s this Twitter thing? We’re going to write 140 characters? Who’s going to read this stuff?” So it is interesting to see how things have evolved.

I think the medium as a whole has become much more visual, especially with social media, as we’ve seen with Pinterest and Instagram. I think Instagram has barely even scratched the surface of what its potential is going to be. So bloggers, if you’re not yet on Instagram, sign up today and start doing it. And the same with Google Plus; I think we’ve just scratched the surface with the capabilities of Google Plus.

As far as a blog, I think it is going to become more visual. And I mean that in the sense that people are already taking amazing photographs, but I think perhaps it might be more interactive, maybe people will be doing more podcasts such as yourself, more video content, video tutorials, things that are quick and easy for their readers to digest, if you will, like, three minute how-to videos.

I think blogs will become more enriched with a variety of different content, maybe more self-publishing will be done as far as ebooks. I think ebooks, as far as cookbooks, are still relatively new. They have a long ways to go. They need to become a lot more visual, I think, than a lot of them are now.

It’s going to be really interesting to see how blogs take off. I think, not just food bloggers, but bloggers in general, need to be very creative as far as how they present their content. There are so many, as you said, food bloggers out there. It’s how do you separate yourself. So it’s hard work.

I’ve said at our conference before that bloggers are not just bloggers, they’re content producers. As you said, you’re doing recipe development, you’re styling your plate, you’re photographing it, then you’re editing those photos, you’re publishing it. But then once it’s live, you can’t just forget about your content. You have to keep marketing that content, and how do you repackage it into new and interesting ways. If you write that chicken recipe, don’t just forget about it. Include it in other chicken posts, like a round-up. It’s really thinking like an editor and a marketer, rather than just a food blogger.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

I love anything Jamie Oliver.

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

I’m going to promote my girl, Andie Mitchell, Can You Stay For Dinner, not that she needs any help because it’s a phenomenal blog, but beautiful photography. Oh, gosh, there are so many. We have such a big blogger community that I’d hate to call out one over the other. Also, La Tavola Marche in Italy. She and her husband do amazing things. They run an inn and a cooking school too, and unfortunately, they’re selling it. So if anyone’s on the market to buy it…

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

Gosh, that’s a good question. I cannot think of anyone specifically. I’m going to have to pass on that one. I’m totally blanking on specific names.

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

My mother brought me this amazing Vietnamese vegetable peeler from her cooking school in Vietnam, so that’s pretty cool.

I also find, as a parent especially, I’ve got a vegetable spiral cutter, not that it’s that unusual, but for all you parents, you want to get your kids to eat more vegetables. You can do mile long zucchini pasta noodles from this thing, or curly fries. It’ll peel the whole thing in these fun little spirals. Not necessarily unusual, but super fun and a great way to make your food fun.

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

Avocado. Amazingly, I used to hate avocado until I literally was about 25. I liked guacamole, but I did not like anything else. I did not like just sliced avocado in salad, crazy I know. But I just happened to be in the kitchen talking to my step-mom one day and she was slicing them and putting this vinaigrette over them. And all of sudden, it’s like something snapped in my head where I had to have them. Now I absolutely cannot get enough avocado in my life. I love it.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

Anything from Ottolenghi. I could just sit for days and drool over his cookbooks.

Also, just anything from Dorie Greenspan, too, if you’re looking for great French recipes that are doable. And Marcella Hazan, her Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. She has just amazing recipes, specifically just a very simple roast chicken where she seasons the bird with salt and pepper, and just stuffs the cavity with pierced lemons and roasts it. It’s the most brilliant roast chicken you’ll ever have.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

It depends on my mood and what I’m cooking. Sometimes I like classical, sometimes I like some jazz, and anything Cuban. I love Cuban music. I have no Cuban in my DNA, but I think maybe in my past life I was Caribbean.

On Keeping Posted with Sheri:

Check us out on Instagram; we’re working on building that up and I’m addicted to it. It’s super fun. So Instagram, Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest; we’re on it all.

024: Meike Peters: How Mediterranean Cooking Can Be Simple

April 10, 2015 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

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Eat in My Kitchen

On Eat in My Kitchen, Meike shares her culinary journey which is inspired by her mother’s passion for cooking and food, and her connection with Malta in the Mediterranean. Her photography is amazing and transports us to her dining table in her apartment in one of Berlin’s wide boulevards.

I am so thrilled to have Meike Peters of Eat in My Kitchen on the show today.

On Her Blog:

I’ve always loved food and cooking. I’ve been cooking for almost 20 years now and we always have lots of friends over. Sometimes I cook for ten, 15, 20 people. After our dinner parties, people always ask me for recipes, they just give me a call during the week like, “Can you give me some inspiration and tell me what I can cook?” So at one point I thought I can also share all of this on a blog.

I also love photography, I love writing. The blog brings everything together. Now you can just go to the blog and see what I cook and get some inspiration from there.

Cooking is definitely easiest. I don’t even have to think much about it; it just comes naturally. Photography and writing, it depends a lot on my moods, especially with writing. Sometimes when I’m in the right mood or sometimes even when I’m lying in bed in the morning, I have a whole text in my head. But when I’m not in the right mood, it can take an hour, two hours and it just doesn’t come out.

With photography, it depends a lot on the light. So since I take all my pictures with daylight, I depend a lot on how the lights change. Sometimes the food and the light and everything works perfectly, and sometimes it doesn’t, and then it’s a bit more work.

For me it’s important that the food looks quite natural and even of late, I don’t decorate much. With my food, I’m not the kind of person who gets five plates and five fancy spoons. What you see on the photos is what I use for cooking and the plates we eat from. It’s very practical.

On Her Mother As an Inspiration:

We talk on the phone two, three times a week and very often we just talk about recipes, what we cook.

She travels a lot and sometimes she calls me from a restaurant and tells me, “I had this amazing pasta here in Sicily with truffle. You have to try that.”

We both have this huge passion for food; for cooking and good ingredients. And very often it comes very natural that we talk about it other than mother and daughter. Others may talk about clothes and shoes and handbags. We talk about cabbage, carrots, soups, and pasta.

When I visit my mama, we sit at the table and we drink wine, we eat. Sometimes we meet in the kitchen at five in the afternoon and we just cook and chat. Although my family is German, it’s quite Italian.

On Mediterranean Food and Cooking:

It doesn’t need many ingredients, but the ingredients are very good. It starts with good olive oil, good vegetables, ripe vegetables, something that’s hard to find sometimes here in the north of Europe, in Berlin.

But in the Mediterranean, they pick the vegetables and fruits from the trees and they are perfect, ripe, sweet. So whenever we go to Malta and I come back home to Berlin, I’m a bit disappointed with what I find here. The cooking is varied because they have these amazing ingredients; they don’t actually need much. You throw together what you have.

Whenever we are in Malta my cooking is very quick. The seafood is amazing; we just throw some fish on the barbecue and some great bread and olive oil. A quick salad and that’s it; doesn’t need much. But what you have is very, very good and it’s very pure.

I use a lot of fennel seeds in my cooking. That started, was it ten years ago, when I moved in with my boyfriend because they have amazing fennel seeds in Malta. So there are more fennel seeds in my cooking. And citrus fruits like lemon zest, orange zest, I use that a lot. These are ingredients that everybody really knows but once it really fits your taste buds, you might use it a bit more. So for me, it’s citrus flavors and fennel seeds.

The best thing is to travel to Italy, to Malta. Find a nice mama who opens her kitchen for you and cook with her. I think it’s like with any other style of cooking as well; that it’s always best to meet someone who is from this country and to cook with this person.

Because a cookbook, a blog, they can inspire you to try out things that you might not have tried before, but the best thing is always to cook with people who come from this country or from this area, and to learn from them. That’s what I believe.

They know more of the secrets because it’s the cooking that comes from their mother or grandmother; all these recipes that are given from one generation to the next. And I love to learn like this.

On Food Culture in Berlin, Germany:

It’s very multicultural and there are these trends like in any other big cities. At the moment, there’s big hype for Korean food, burgers as well; a big burger hype.

There are always new people coming to the city and bringing their culinary background with them. But it’s really very inspiring because it’s permanently changing and developing.

The locals here, they love a dish that is called Königsberger Klopse. It’s like a meatball and it’s cooked in a broth. The sauce is a bit thick and creamy with capers. It’s sweet as well. For some people it’s quite a challenge. If someone prepares it well, then it’s really, really good.

What is very famous here is currywurst. Everybody knows currywurst, it’s a sausage. It’s light with a curry ketchup. I’m not a big fan of that.

On Her Blog Series, “Meet in Your Kitchen”:

The idea is that I meet other people in their kitchen because on my blog people just see what happens in my kitchen.

For Meet in Your Kitchen, I meet other people in their kitchen, people who inspire me. Some have culinary backgrounds, some are artists, designers, friends. The idea is to show a process through the eyes of their kitchen.

We cook one dish together; the recipe will be, as always, on the blog and as well, they choose if they want to bake or to cook. I spend a few hours with them in their kitchen and we talk about their lives, the projects, food. Also culinary memories, how they learned about cooking and the food culture in their family.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

None, I don’t watch any. I’m sorry.

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

I love Manger by Mimi Thorisson. I mean, it’s very popular. I love France. I love the food. I love the pictures. It’s a very popular blog.

I love What Should I Eat for Breakfast Today by Marta. She lives in Berlin as well. I did a feature with her and I love her photography. I love her writing, her start into the day, and I love her blog.

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

Okay, I follow Marta What should I Eat for Breakfast Today, she makes me happy.

I follow Manger as well, Mimi Thorisson because she shows France.

I like to follow travel bloggers. I don’t know their names, but I love to see when they go to the Caribbean and it’s like going on holiday for a split second.

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

Everybody should have good olive oil, good flour. I use spelt flour, like white spelt flour, for all my baking and that’s really good. Yeast for baking, also.

Name one ingredient you cannot live without?

Something I cannot live without is bread. I love bread. If that’s the only thing I can eat for the rest of my life, I’m happy. I love bread.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

I love the Nigel Slater cookbooks because I love his approach to cooking and his diary form of the books.

I like Ottolenghi although I don’t cook much of his recipes, but I find him inspiring.

There is a new cookbook that I got for Christmas, Persiana; this book is great too.

I like Nigella Lawson’s baking book.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

Jazz music, in general, Wes Montgomery. Yes, jazz music, definitely.

Sometimes I need something loud and wild, sometimes classic music. It depends a lot on my mood really.

Keep Posted on Meike:

The blog, that’s where I share pictures on Instagram, on Pinterest, on Facebook, on Twitter as well. You get the recipes, the pictures, all on the blog.

Have Meike’s Special Dish Recipe Sent to You Now:

020: Ileana Morales Valentine: Grow Closer by Cooking and Eating Together

April 1, 2015 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

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A Little Saffron

On her blog, Ileana documents the food journey of her and her fiancé (now husband), Danny, and all the stories behind their meals. Besides writing for A Little Saffron, Ileana pens a column for the Tampa Bay Times called In Our Kitchen, which is based on the blog, and she’s also written for the Associated Press and the Miami Herald.

I am so delighted to have Ileana Morales Valentine of A Little Saffron joining me on the show today.

On The Idea Behind Her Blog:

I think it was brewing for a long time. In college, I was studying, you could say, studying food blogs, just obsessively looking at them. Then, I moved to Tampa and met Danny and I think it took me a year just to settle on the name. It was easier to start cooking more regularly when you have someone else to cook for, so it just started from there. He was really encouraging and I just started one day.

On Being a Writer and Her Inspirations:

Growing up as a kid, I always loved to read. I was a bookworm. When I was really little it was Roald Dahl, stuff like that, and then I got into teen stuff. I’m trying to think of one writer. I’m so terrible at picking favorites, but if I focus on food writers, one person I really love is Molly of Orangette.

I think she has an incredible knack for writing about such everyday things, but it’s from her perspective and it’s so interesting. I’ll read anything she writes.

The focus on food came in the last few years. I’ve always been someone who loves to eat. I think maybe that’s where it comes from. I was a chubby middle schooler. I’ve always loved food. Then when I went to college I had to start cooking for myself. I was a vegetarian too so I really had to pay attention to what I was doing, go do groceries, and it sort of started from there.

On Her Passion for Food:

The women in my family take pride in what they cook for sure, but they have their staples that they stick to. They don’t have a ton of cookbooks the way I have. They don’t have a cookbook problem at all. They just have their tried and true recipes, which is great too because then I can request that when I go home. I could ask my grandma, “Can you make arroz aguado,” or one of the other things she makes. It’s great.

I always loved to eat but growing up we mostly stuck to Nicaraguan Latin food. I grew up in Miami so that was pretty much what we stuck to, but once I left for college, I was in Gainesville, such a vegetarian-friendly town, I tried things like tempeh and tofu. It was a whole new world.

On What Cooking Means to Her:

My mom cooked, especially when I was growing up–I’m the oldest–she cooked all the time and there was always a homemade meal on the table. It wasn’t a dinner unless it had rice. It’s not a full meal without rice.

Food was important. My mom has a ton of plates and utensils because there are constantly people over at the house and it’s constantly around the food. It’s just a ridiculous amount of food.

When Danny came to my parents’ house the first couple of times, they just overwhelmed him with food. That’s how they show their love and to show you’re welcome here.

For Danny, who grew up in Iowa City, Iowa, his dad has a garden and seems to be kind of into food. He has a little cooking journal. His mom is very focused on working out, a high protein diet, but he grew up eating things like meatloaf and stuff that to me is very foreign, but very American classics like that.

I think we both are very good eaters and are so excited about trying new things. I think the interesting balance is that he’s such a stickler for the recipe and I try to tell him all the time, “A recipe is a guideline. You can improvise. If it calls for a scallion, you can use another kind of onion-y thing,” but he just wants to stick to whatever the recipe says.

On a Kitchen Disaster:

One of the kitchen disasters that comes to mind is–this was in our first apartment together–he was making some kind of spicy pork. We had been up late. The movie There Will be Blood is tied to this because we were watching it. It’s such an intense movie. At some point, Danny just took over the meal. I was like, “Okay. I’m tired. You’re going to exactly follow the recipe. Fine.”

It’s after midnight and the thing is still not done.

We finally sit down to eat it and it’s painfully spicy. You cannot even eat it, so I think I ate a cracker and went to bed.

Turns out he should’ve bought the Guajillo chilis. He got the only ones that were available at the store, these tiny little red ones. If it’s a tiny little red pepper, that’s your first clue. Don’t put the whole thing in there.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

Definitely Ina Garten, Extra Virgin, Bitchin’ Kitchen, probably some others but those come to mind.

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

Definitely Food 52. I think it’s beautiful and smart and has so much great content on there.

Orangette. Molly Yeh. She’s just incredibly creative. She had a gummy bear sangria on there the other day. She’s just insane in a very good way. Two Red Bowls, I really like. She has beautiful photography and some very cool recipes from her background, her perspective, which is interesting. Local Milk has really beautiful photos and recipes as well.

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

On Instagram I follow Food 52, Jillian Guyette–she has a food blog. She has a really beautiful aesthetic. It’s very minimalist, and she cooks a lot with her fiancé, so I kind of relate to that. I like her stuff a lot.

On Twitter, I really like Naturally Ella. She’s funny. Who else? Kristen Bell–not food related–but since Veronica Mars, I’m forever a fan girl, and her husband Dax Shepard.

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

Canned beans. For me, I grew up eating beans and rice. That’s my comfort food. While I love beans made from scratch, I don’t always have the time to do it, and if you have a can of beans you can make dinner.

Name one ingredient you cannot live without?

Garlic.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

One that I got recently that is excellent is from my friend Molly Gilbert. She blogs at Dunk and Crumble and the book is Sheet Pan Suppers, which is a really brilliant idea. I love the oven, just to throw it in there and let the oven do most of the work.

She has a lot of really smart recipes in there. There’s one where you’re using the polenta that comes in a tube, which I don’t usually buy but I got for the recipe, and you put sausage and bursted grapes in there and thyme and it’s so good and it’s on one sheet pan.

So that’s definitely one, for sure. It’s so great. Then anything Ottolenghi. His book Plenty is constantly inspiring. I don’t necessarily make all that stuff, especially not on a weeknight, but it’s a lot of inspiration in the book.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

I actually love cooking to Brazilian music, like samba and stuff like that. Brazilian music is great background noise.

Keep Posted on Ileana:

Instagram and on the blog, ALittleSaffron.com.

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 Condiments Company, Brooklyn Delhi:

On Writing Her First Cookbook:

On Her Pop-Ups and Teaching Cooking:

The Pressure Cooker:

On Keeping Posted with Chitra:

On How They Met:

On Collaborating on Their Blog:

On Their Separate Roles for the Website:

On Deciding What to Make for the Blog:

On Their Blogging Process:

On Misconceptions about Healthy Food and Healthy Eating:

On the Food Culture in Vancouver, BC Canada:

On Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner in Vancouver:

The Pressure Cooker:

On Keeping Posted with The Food Gays:

On Her Career Before Food:

On Her Introduction to Cooking:

On Turning Her Hobby into Her Career:

On the Type of Cooking that’s Most Natural:

On Where She Finds Inspiration for Her Blog:

On Things Not Going As Planned in the Kitchen:

The Pressure Cooker:

On Keeping Posted with Liz:

On Blogging:

On His Curiosity for Food and Cooking:

On Getting Into Food Photography:

On Being (98%) Pescetarian:

On Cooking Fish:

On Choosing Fish:

The Pressure Cooker:

On Keeping Posted with Brian:

On Her Passion for Food and Cooking:

On Starting Foodista:

On the International Food Blogger Conference:

On How Food Blogging Has Changed Since 2009:

The Pressure Cooker:

On Keeping Posted with Sheri:

On Her Blog:

On Her Mother As an Inspiration:

On Mediterranean Food and Cooking:

On Food Culture in Berlin, Germany:

On Her Blog Series, “Meet in Your Kitchen”:

The Pressure Cooker:

Keep Posted on Meike:

Have Meike’s Special Dish Recipe Sent to You Now:

On The Idea Behind Her Blog:

On Being a Writer and Her Inspirations:

On Her Passion for Food:

On What Cooking Means to Her:

On a Kitchen Disaster:

The Pressure Cooker:

Keep Posted on Ileana:

Have Ileana’s Special Dish Recipe Sent to You Now: