Cook's Illustrated | The Dinner Special podcast

126: Ice Sanford: Tasting Food from Around the World

June 8, 2016 by Gabriel 2 Comments

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Foolproof Living

Ice was born with itchy feet. She grew up in Turkey, lived 10 years in the States, four years in the British Virgin Islands, and has recently moved back to the U.S. A food and lifestyle photographer and full-time blogger, she is a firm believer that if you know how to read, you know how to cook. On Foolproof Living, Ice shares easy to follow recipes that are helpful and full of flavor, as well as stories about her travels.

I am so happy to have Ice Sanford of Foolproof Living with me here on the show today.

(*All photos below are Ice’s.)

On Her Favorite Food in Turkey:

A big plate full of Quinoa and Avocado Salad with Blood Oranges and Fennel.

I am a big fan of breakfast. I’m a morning person. I like to get up early and have breakfast. To this day, I do a lot of toast and feta cheese. Feta cheese is so big in Turkey, and olives, my American friends make fun of me because I eat olives in the morning, but olives, jam like cherry jam and homemade marmalade and different cheeses, but mostly feta cheese is big, big back home.

Feta cheese in Turkey, it’s amazing there. Really. It’s so fatty and so delicious, and I just love it. And I have a lot of friends ask me how can you live without this? It’s hard. It’s my favorite thing.

On the Food Culture in British Virgin Islands:

A bowl of braised baby artichoke salad with white beans and shaved manchego.

It’s a combination of a lot of food cultures. When you’re talking about the Caribbean, you have so many little islands and little cultures in there, and they are all living together. We were living on a small island called Virgin Gorda. It’s a nine-mile long island, half an hour ferry ride from the big island Tortola, which is the city, a big, big capital basically. Each island has islanders from the neighboring island like Jamaica, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Nevis and Kitts. So they all bring their own culture and we would have these little food gatherings every so often on the island, and you get to taste a lot of different cuisines.

We were just talking about it with some friends the other day. On one of those, we heard that Nevis and Saint Kitts. Those people eat a lot of monkey meat because they have so many monkeys over there, and it’s just a part of culture. I went there because I tried to eat everything, at least know the taste of it and it was gone. Right after they opened their area, it was just gone. And my husband was like, “I can’t eat that. It’s too close to home.” But for me, I wanted to taste it. A lot of curry, they eat a lot of curry, chicken, seafood is big, and a lot of sweet tastes like putting pineapple, coconut, those are obviously in abundance.

On a Recipe She Picked Up from Her Travels:

Mexican Style 2 eggs topped with guacomole, pasilla chile sauce, Mexican cheese, and fresh cilantro served in a Mexican dish.

One of my favorite recipes, it’s on the blog as well, is huevos rancheros, I am a big fan of huevos rancheros. A couple of years ago, we went to San Miguel de Allende, and there my husband and I went to different restaurants every morning and ordered huevos rancheros every single day just to find what is the best one. If you think about it, it’s just eggs served with some sort of a sauce over a corn tortilla. But this one place called Posada Corazon, a small inn in the heart of the city, had the best, like absolutely the best huevos rancheros because the cook made this pathia sauce, chili sauce, and it was just phenomenal.

She didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak good Spanish, and we tried to really communicate, but it came to the point where it was just not working. She was trying to show me what she used, but then I went to the hotel and made the person at the front desk call her and get the recipe. And since then, it’s our favorite, favorite dish. And I shared that on the blog.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

America’s Test Kitchen.

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

I love Artful Desperado, Gabriel, his work, his photography takes my breath away. I love The Bojon Gourmet via Alanna. She is amazing. Her recipes, to me, they are all doable. I want to make everything. I also like The Clever Carrot, Emilie. She is really talented. There are so many, Snixy Kitchen, I love, and Adventures in Cooking. Those are some that I really like.

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

Oh my God, there are so many people. There is an account on Pinterest and Instagram called A Daily Something. I really liked that. Witanddelight, I really like. There is another girl on Instagram, Mademoisellepoirot. Her photography is amazing, her color schemes, those are the ones that I really enjoy.

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

My mom’s mixing bowls.

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

I can’t say I love it, but I’m working on it. And this is so in a way, embarrassing to say as a food blogger living in the U.S., bacon.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

Flavor Bible, I go to the supermarket with The Vegetarian Flavor Bible. We have a Farmer’s Market here and you can find every kind of vegetable in there and some of them I’ve never seen, but I would like to try. So I go there and look at what would match with this. That’s a very good resource if you’re creating recipes or if you’re trying to finish stuff in your fridge and don’t know what matches with what.

Cook’s Illustrated is a really good resource for me because if you don’t know something, just go there and look. And then, some food blogger cookbooks. I think those guys and gals, they are just doing an amazing job. Seven Spoon cookbook is like a go-to cookbook. I made a lot of things in there. Jamie Oliver is really good, Thomas Keller if you want to learn how to do certain things the professional way. Those are ones that I go to often.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

I like anything Sia. Lately, I’m really, really impressed with her voice and just love it.

On Keeping Posted with Ice:

I do update my Instagram regularly, as well as Facebook. Facebook is Foolproof Living and Instagram is aysegul.sanford. You can find me there.

125: Posie Harwood: A Career Cultivated from Growing Up on a Farm

June 1, 2016 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

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600 Acres

Posie grew up on a farm that is just over 600 acres where here family had access to the freshest of milk, eggs, and harvests from their well-attended garden. On her blog, 600 Acres, is where she shares some of her memories as well as the new things she is cooking and trying in places far from her home. Posie had worked as a food writer and editor for Tasting Table, Food52, King Arthur Flour and she contributes to Sift Magazine.

I am so pumped to have Posie Harwood of 600 Acres here on the show today.

(*All photos below are Posie’s.)

On Growing Up on a 600 Acre Farm:

I look back and I think how lucky I was because we grew up drinking raw milk and my mom made everything from scratch. We didn’t have chips or any of that stuff. But I never felt like, “Oh man, I feel so deprived.”

When I got older and people started talking about organic food and all that kind of stuff, to me, I always thought, “What else is there?” That’s what I’d always known. Now I realize how lucky that is. Some people have to learn that or seek it out. So, it was a really cool experience. I think it is responsible for what I ended up doing.

On Her Interest in Cooking:

My mom, she cooked every night and we always had family dinner, but she is an incredible baker. She always made bread for scratch. Just watching her, I learned a lot of the things I’d love to make and cook and bake. And I also think I just watched her have that natural rhythm in a household and picked up on that.

I never went to culinary school. I didn’t start working in food until a little while after college. So, I just always knew that was what I wanted to do. And not even what I wanted to do. I just felt like, “What else is there?” That is just in me. I feel I don’t have a choice. I have to.

On Leaving the Farm:

I’d spend a decent amount of time in spaces away from home. And then, going to college. I went to college in New Jersey actually and then I moved to Manhattan. I think New York took a lot of getting used to for me. I am really not a city person. I love New York. I think it is an amazing place to live and there is lots of food.

But I have always missed open space and fresh air. I know I won’t stay in New York forever. That’s always been a hard thing to just get used to. It is a pro and a con. It is an exciting, huge place. But sometimes I want to speak to no one for the next four hours, but you can’t when you are in New York. It is an adjustment. It is always a little bit of a balance. Now I work for a company in Vermont. So, fortunately, I get to spend a lot of time up there, which is a really nice balance.

On a Dish That’s Special to Her:

I guess I would have to say baking is my one main love. I feel like the first thing that ever really made me excited about food was baking bread. As I said, my mom, we never had store bought bread. She makes everything from scratch. My favorite thing is just white sandwich bread that she makes. It is the most delicious.

When it would come out of the oven we had all my sisters waiting just like rabid animals and she would cut off the loaf, the heel, and give it to one of us and we spread it with butter, which we always would have because we had cows. And she would churn it. So it was this really bright yellow Jersey cow butter and she packed it in these little ramekins. So, she would take a big swipe and put it on the bread and eat that.

That is the ultimate, that is the best thing. Now, every time when I bake bread, which is a lot, I am always making just that white sandwich bread loaf. And I am like, “Ah, this is heaven.” The thing is it is so easy to make. I think a lot of people are intimidated by yeast bread, which I feel like it is the kind of thing if you make yourself do once, it is totally magical and you realize, “Oh, okay, that is actually easier than so many recipes cooking- wise.” I mean, what are there? There’s like three, four ingredients. It just is all a matter of touch and just getting used to what it feels like, bread dough, and how it should feel.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

Top Chef. I’m obsessed with Top Chef. And The Great British Baking Show. Also obsessed.

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

I love Smitten Kitchen. I love Food52, former employee, I have to say that. I also love The King Arthur Blog where I work now because it is incredibly informative, super good step-by-step baking. If you ever want to learn how to bake, or frost a cake, or make sourdough, check it out.

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

I love following Molly Yeh.

Funny, playful, great flavors, love her farm life snap shots.

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

Treasured item probably my stand mixer, I guess I have to say. It is bright red and I love it, and it does so much for me.

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

Mushrooms. I used to hate mushrooms and now I eat them all the time. I eat scrambled eggs and mushrooms twice a week for dinner.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

Definitely the Joy of Cooking. That is a huge one. Always referencing it. And probably, I have the Cook’s Illustrated Best Baking Cook Book. That is another go to with everything I bake.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

I really like cooking to reggae music. I listen to Bob Marley a lot when I cook because it just makes me want to dance around.

On Keeping Posted with Posie:

Definitely my blog, which is 600acres.com and Instagram. I am always Instagraming twice a day. So you can always check out what I am doing in my kitchen there.

079: Jennifer Farley: How Culinary School was the Right Decision

September 23, 2015 by Gabriel 6 Comments

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Savory Simple

Food is Jen’s obsession, so much so that she dropped her entire life and went to culinary school. She has since worked as a line cook, pastry chef, and cooking instructor. Today, Jen is a full-time recipe developer, food photographer, and she’s working on a cookbook. On her blog, Savory Simple, she focuses on well-tested recipes, bold flavors, and quality ingredients.

I am so happy to have Jennifer Farley of Savory Simple joining me here on the show today.

(*All images below are Jen’s.)

On Going to Culinary School:

I don’t know that you really ever get the courage to do it. You just have to go for it. A lot of people, I think, were trying to talk me out of doing it. But my boyfriend at the time, now my husband, was very supportive. He knew that I wasn’t very happy in my job, and we both really wanted a change and it just felt like the right thing for me to do at the time. I knew I wanted to do something. I had gone through a lot of different possible career changes over time and none of them seemed right. Culinary school is the thing that I kept coming back to. And finally, I just decided it was now or never, and you only live once, and I just went for it. I figured the worst case scenario, I could always go back to a desk job. But it worked out.

A typical day in school involved getting up extremely early, and I’m not a morning person. I think during the first phase of school, I was getting up around five in the morning, getting to school while it was still dark out, changing into my chef’s uniform. You had to change into it there, because you didn’t want any outside germs getting on it. Doing prep. I think it was a two-hour demo and then going into the kitchen and cooking everything that we had just watched the chef instructors make. They would come around and taste it and see if it was as good as what they had made.

If it wasn’t, they would yell at us and tell us to fix it. And then we would usually have about ten minutes to eat it really quickly for lunch before we had to scrub down the entire kitchen. Maybe we would have a couple of minutes to sit and relax. Then we would go in for an afternoon lesson. And then we would be finished by 2:30 or 3:00 in the afternoon. That would be it for the day, except then we would have lots of homework. And you really want to practice your knife skills and cook the stuff and type up the notes.

I’m a very hands-on learner, so it really helps me to see something right in front of me and then practice and have someone modify my technique and say, “No, you need to do it like this instead.” So that’s how I learned best.

On Her Blog:

I actually started the blog in 2009, I think about three or four months before I started school. The blog was initially meant to be a diary of my school experience, but you’re so busy while you’re there. I didn’t keep up with it nearly as much as I wanted to. And I was inspired to do it by this other blog that I had read at the time called Cooking School Confidential, which has since been pulled down, but it was an amazing blog. And I don’t know how she did it. She was writing these super long posts every single day after her classes.

After school finished, I actually had time to start really blogging and documenting my experiments in the kitchen with cooking and baking. And it was so much fun for me because for years before I got serious about cooking, I had a lot of friends that were very good cooks. And I would always ask them for recipes and they would go, “Oh I just threw it together. I don’t cook from a recipe,” and that always really pissed me off. And so I always decided I loved the idea of putting things down, of actually making recipes for people so that when they said, “Oh, this is delicious. Can I have the recipe?” I could go, “Sure. Here’s the recipe and here’s a photo.” And that’s where everything came from.

When I first started doing it, I had no idea that it was even something that I could evolve into a career. It was just really a hobby. I think I first realized it could be something more… I believe it was in 2012 I attended a food blogger conference, and I just wanted, for fun, to meet other people, to become more a part of the community. And all of the workshops were really eye-opening. There were workshops about how to make money and how to find your voice and how to optimize your blog. The whole thing made me go, “Oh wow, I can make money at this?” And that really set me off on the path to try to turn it into a business. And over the next few years, while I was working other jobs in the industry, I started trying to build it up on the side to get where I am today.

On Baking and Desserts:

I learned it in culinary school for sure. Every single day we did a three-course meal. We did an appetizer, entree, dessert. And it was very eye-opening for me, and I think that the desserts were my zen moment in the middle of chaos every single day, because there was this scientific precision to everything, especially when they would come around to check on us and make sure everything was right. It was a lot easier to get the desserts right, so I would gravitate towards them because I didn’t like getting yelled at. And I knew there was a better chance of me getting them right, and I also just found there was something very soothing about making desserts.

I liked it so much more than I thought I would, to the point where actually, halfway through the culinary program, I wondered if I should switch to the pastry program which was completely the opposite of where I was when I started. I didn’t think I was interested in doing desserts at all. I already had a blog called Savory Simple. I was there to learn how to cook. So it was a complete switch. But I absolutely love it now. I specifically went and worked as a pastry chef for a while before I stopped working at restaurants so I could get some additional experience, which was really, really helpful to this day. I loved doing desserts. They were my favorite things to make.

On Her Cookbooks:

I did a sponsored post for Zoku and they loved it. And they loved it so much that they asked me if I would do the book for them. It was exciting; it was amazing. It was the first time. It was one of many times, I think, where I’ve just sat back and said to myself, “I really made the right decision going to culinary school and changing my career because I just had a company offer me a cookbook.” And it was really exciting. It was my first cookbook but it was very guided. They knew exactly what they wanted. It was done in a very short period of time. It was all drink based. It’s technically my first cookbook. I made the recipes but it was just as much them, I think, as it was me.

It was a fun little device to work with, and I liked the challenge in some ways, because it forced me to think outside the box a little bit and I learned that some things did not work in it at all that I thought would. It was also difficult creating recipes for a company, because I would sometimes give them recipes that I thought were delicious and they would go, “No, we don’t like this at all,” and I was like “What, this is wonderful! Why don’t you like this?” And then they would come back with an idea that I thought was just not nearly as good as what I had given them, but I was working for them, so I would always do what they wanted. It was challenging but I think I came up with some good recipes for them.

(On her next cookbook.) It’s for Simon & Schuster. It’s going to be, I think, around 125 to 135 recipes. I’m doing all the photography in addition to the recipes. It’s quite a labor of love. It’s going to be out sometime next year. I’m not sure what it’s going to be called yet, but it is a full range of recipes, both savory and sweet. And I really hope everybody likes it. It’s a lot harder than I thought it was going to be.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

I used to watch Top Chef. Now I don’t really watch any of them.

I watch Big Brother and So You Think You Can Dance, because I don’t want to watch anything that has anything to do with cooking. I just like to mentally escape.

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

I think that there’s great recipes on bonappetit.com. I also think Smitten Kitchen does lovely recipes. I love 101 Cookbooks. I know I’m forgetting some good ones. We’ll stick with those three for now.

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

Oh, there are so many wonderful people that I follow on Instagram and Pinterest. I tend to just gravitate towards people that share a lot of really beautiful photography. I love following Local Milk, and Call Me Cupcake, and Adventures in Cooking, and Reclaiming Provincial. I’ll stick with them.

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

My most treasured item in my kitchen is my Vitamix, and no one can have it ever. I use it every day for something.

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

I used to dislike rosemary and now I love it. I used to associate it with bath products. Same with lavender. They’re delicious. You just have to use them within reasonable, small quantities and not go crazy.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

The Flavor Bible is amazing. It’s really, really wonderful for anyone who wants to cook without a recipe, and I highly recommend it. It’s got lots of different ingredients and it pairs all of these different ingredients. So if you have broccoli and you want to know what to do with broccoli, it will list all of these other complementary flavors. I love that one. And I also love all the different cookbooks that have been released by America’s Test Kitchen and Cook’s Illustrated. Those are solid, well-tested recipes.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

Something ’80s, new wave dance. We’ll say Depeche Mode, Violator. It is so redundant but I like dancing to the Xanadu soundtrack and working to it. It’s electric light orchestra. It’s disco-y. And Jeff walks home sometimes and catches me in the kitchen cooking and singing to it.

On Keeping Posted with Jen:

Definitely my Facebook and my Twitter. I’m very active on both of them.

073: Joanne Ozug: Cooking From Scratch with Natural Ingredients

September 2, 2015 by Gabriel 4 Comments

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Fifteen Spatulas

Joanne has a deep molecular interest in food. On her blog, and YouTube channel, she not only shares recipes using whole foods and natural ingredients, Joanne focuses on explaining the how’s and why’s of cooking and tries to encourage us to cook from scratch.

I am so happy to have Joanne Ozug of Fifteen Spatulas joining me here on the show today.

(*All images below are Joanne’s.)

On Her Blog:

It was about five years ago. I had a background in finance and business and economics, and I just hit this wall where I was like, “I am not liking this at all.” I just was really unhappy, and I really wanted to do something in food. I loved food probably since I was in the womb. I love food. And at the time I was living rural Georgia. My husband is in the Navy, and he was stationed in this really rural part in southern Georgia, like an hour from Honey Boo Boo, just to give you an idea of how rural it was. So there wasn’t a lot of food opportunity down there. So I decided to start the blog as something that could serve as an online resume or like some body of work where I could pour my recipes and stuff into while we were stationed down there, because we moved around a lot. I knew it was going to be somewhat temporary but just something for me to do. I had no idea what it would turn into but that’s how I started.

On Her YouTube Channel:

Since the beginning of Fifteen Spatulas, I’ve always done step-by-step photos, because when I started there wasn’t a lot of that and you’d see a picture of a recipe and it’s like, “That’s great, but how does it look in the middle?” So I focused on step-by-step photos and then there were some recipes where the photos, it almost wasn’t enough. It would have been better explained if I could do it in a video. So I started dabbling a little bit in video, and it’s interesting because when I first started on YouTube, it was just kind of a hosting platform to post videos on my blog. But I discovered that there was a separate different community on YouTube, so again, like the story of how I started, is a little bit different from how it is now and how it evolved. Originally, I just wanted to give people a little bit more information visually on how to make the recipes.

On Her Process for Her Videos:

It’s interesting because even YouTube and my blog, they like different foods. I’m still making food from scratch on both places, but they like different kinds of recipes. So for my YouTube, again I have that list where I write out some ideas and then I’ll refine them further, and I’ll start story boarding them and planning them out. Most of the stuff now I try to storyboard and script. I didn’t use to but it helps to do that. And so from there I’ll go ahead and I’ll film all the close-ups and then the wide shots and then edit, and then put it up. It’s not too bad actually. I’ve got it down to the steps to get me to the end.

The thing that’s tough for me about the blog is the writing part. I will bang out the photos, the recipe, everything will already be set to go, and the last part that I leave for the end is always the writing. It’s the hardest part for me. For a video, you kind of script a little bit but it’s not fully scripted, you’re just talking. So I feel like that’s not as hard for me.

Video requires a lot more work but you have that writing part always like, “What do I say? How do I be witty on the Internet?”

On Her Curiosity Around Cooking:

That definitely started later. I think early on from a young age, you’re like food is delicious! I love food. But you start making it, I remember I think some time in middle school, I started watching Food Network, and I feel like that’s really where my curiosity for the how’s and why’s of food really started. Because there’s some really amazing people on there. Like Alton Brown is one of my favorite people in food ever, and he’s the god of cooking technique and how-to’s. So that’s kind of where it started.

I feel like if you know certain concepts, then you can stray away from recipes. And just cook based on what you find at the grocery store that’s interesting. There’s just a freedom that comes with knowing those basic things, where you can truly become a cook on your own instead of making recipes. There’s nothing wrong with that to start, of course, but that’s why I love it so much, is you can just play around a lot more when you know the rules of the road.

On Cooking From Scratch with Whole Foods and Natural Ingredients:

I ate so much junky processed foods when I was younger. The turning point for me was my freshman year in college. I was so sick. I was throwing up every night, going to the hospital, sometimes I had to have an endoscopy and seeing these GI doctors, and they couldn’t figure out what was wrong and why I was throwing up every day. I was not bulimic or any of that stuff, it was uncontrolled, I just felt so sick. And my GI doctor thought that maybe I should try making my own food. So he wrote me a letter to get out of the school meal plan.

It was just so processed and gross, so I started cooking just in my college dorm room from scratch, just with wholesome real ingredients, real food, and I wasn’t sick anymore. The thing that’s crazy about that is there have been times where I’ve gone to potlucks where I knew there was processed food, like when people are saying, “I made three boxes of mashed potatoes.” I’m like, “Boxes of mashed potatoes? Mashed potatoes don’t come in boxes.” My husband and I both would get sick after we eat that.

So it’s just a reminder of that at least for my body, and I won’t speak for everyone, but for my body, I need to eat food where I know what’s in it and it’s wholesome real food.

It’s so funny because I think cooking from scratch can be laborious, if you make, beef bourguignon or something. But there are so many recipes from scratch that are quick and easy, and totally delicious. I feel like it’s just totally a stigma that exists for whatever reason for some people until they find out or, they’re shown by someone that, “Hey, that’s actually not hard at all.”

I’m not trying to knock on some of these products, but the pre-packaged pancake mix, for instance. I’d see someone make that and think, “You still have to add the eggs and the milk!” I have a great pancake recipe on my website called, 100% whole wheat pancakes, and I think it’s like five ingredients. People go absolutely crazy for them. They’re so easy.

On Some Resources For Learning to Cook from Scratch:

One publication I love that people probably already know about, but I really love America’s Test Kitchen and Cooks Illustrated. I love that they test things, like they’re science heavy behind the food, but they try to keep it relatively simple.

Probably my favorite YouTube channel right now is my friend, Gemma. Her channel is called, Gemma’s Bigger Bolder Baking. She’s a pastry chef from Ireland. She lives in California now. But she just has the most extravagant, ridiculous desserts, like totally out of control, but that’s how I think it should be. They’re just outrageous, but everyone can make them. They’re from scratch. They’re just gorgeous. My friend Alyssia from Mind Over Munch does a kind of healthier spin on some everyday foods, I really like that. I mean there’s so many, like SORTEDfood even. It’s four English guys and they just make food. It’s tons of banter and good eats and it’s a lot of fun.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

I love Barefoot Contessa, and I love The Pioneer Woman show, Good Eats even though I don’t know if that’s on.

I love The Best Thing I Ever Ate, I love that show. Oh my gosh, I’ve gone to so many of those places they recommend to get what they love. I love Chopped too, even though it’s terrifying.

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

Some of my favorites are thelittlekitchen.net, Love and Olive Oil, that one is awesome. It’s my friend Lindsay. A farmgirl’s dabbles. I love Serious Eats, it’s not really a blog but a site, I love them.

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

I’m not on Pinterest much to be totally honest. I’m not a Pinterest person. I’m not having food people coming to mind, because Instagram I love following fashion people like Wendy’s Lookbook. Yeah, Wendy’s Lookbook comes to mind instantly.

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

I have this amazing, beautiful bowl that my best friend’s parents got for my wedding. It’s just a fruit bowl and I put onions, or bananas, whatever in there. And it just feels special because it’s for our wedding and I keep it out all the time, it’s really personal.

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

Cilantro. Oh, my gosh. I don’t know what on earth happened. I hated cilantro for so long. Now, I want it in everything.

I think I ate out at a couple of places and I’m like, “This has cilantro in it, but you know I feel like it’s doing some good here.” And it just kind of crept its way into my heart.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

Okay, this is not really a cookbook. It’s more of a reference, but the Flavor Bible is the best cooking related book ever. You just go in and you’re like, “Hmm, I have some mangoes. Let’s see what pairs well with mangoes.” And it will tell you all the flavor affinities. What else do I love? I love Thomas Keller’s books too, I have a bunch of his.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

Arctic Monkeys band, they have a lot of albums.

On Keeping Posted with Joanne:

I would say my Instagram or my Facebook. Those are my two favorites, so I tend to be on them a lot.

044: Gardenias and Mint: Friendship and Food in Boston and Hartford

June 3, 2015 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

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Gardenias & Mint is an East Coast lifestyle blog by two best friends on a budget. They share things that they love including style, books, cool stuff online, and of course, food.

I am so happy to have Christa Tubach and Regina Vecchione of Gardenias & Mint here on the show today.

On How They Met:

Regina: We go way back. We’ve been friends for a long time.

Probably third grade, Christa moved here. And I had been living here since I was five.

She was just wearing the coolest velvet shirt with a daisy on it. And I was like, “Hey girl, I like your shirt.” And, being a T and a V in our last names, our lockers were next to each other pretty much from middle school on. So even if we didn’t have classes together, we hung out.

Regina: We always got along really well. We have similar tastes. That’s kind of how the blog started. Since we were kids, we’d go shopping and realized, “We love that. We both love that.”

Christa: We’ve always been very good partners when shopping.

Regina: Yeah. We have a lot of the same clothes. We’ve been known to walk out and have the same thing on.

On the Food Culture in Their Cities:

Regina: Boston, I’ve noticed, is all about the gastro-pub style.

Everyone is very into bar food with a refined edge. So you can always find a really delicious poutine with like cheese curds and duck gravy. And then pair it with a really delicious craft beer.

Christa: Hartford is all about the hidden gem. Like neighborhood area. So, you’ll hear people comparing their restaurants with which neighborhood you’re from. In my neighborhood, in the West End, we have, I think, the best Mexican. But you’ll hear other people say they think theirs is the best. So you’re always finding little places here and there from the neighborhoods.

I think it has a lot to do with the local aspects of it; there’s a lot of things happening. And restaurants really try and make an effort in showing you where the food is coming from.

All these little neighborhood places will have the farm listed, the ingredients listed. And it’s great because, even though Hartford’s a city, the surrounding areas are still pretty rural. So we have a lot of farms. And this urban and city farming is happening too. So Hartford is trying to do that. And I think it’s great.

Regina: Boston is very similar. We tend to branch out a little bit. Just because we’re a city so we can’t always have our own farms. But then the surrounding areas, like Concord Mass, we have a lot of farms over there. So we tend to get the fresh, good stuff.

On Neighborhoods in Their Cities for Tasty Food:

Christa: The South End of Hartford is known for the bakeries and the Italian section. The West End, where Mexican is, that one particular place is fantastic. It’s just kind of the walkable neighborhood area that has some delicious spots. And downtown, there are definitely some pockets which are really great. Because Hartford’s pretty spread out so it’s not really as walkable as Boston. So you’re driving and you’ll find little places here and there.

Regina: I wish there was more Thai food actually. That is something I feel it is a little short of. But there is a Chinatown in Boston. So you can definitely get some good hot pot. I’ve had some really great hot pot or I think some people call it shabu. But I feel like every neighborhood in Boston and the surrounding areas makes a point of having a couple of go-to spots, which is awesome.

We love Delis. I feel like no matter what neighborhood you’re in, you can find good food. I personally live in Brookline which is right outside and kind of near Fenway. And I have a couple go-to spots like this place, Otto Pizza, which originally started in Portland, Maine. And Public House, which again, is all about the gastro food. And they have like, I think, one of the most extensive draft beer lists in New England or something. It’s crazy.

On Local Dishes that Visitors May Not Know About:

Regina: Christa and I, one time, she came to visit and we went to this place called Island Creek Oyster Bar. Which is obviously it serves oysters, hence the name. But we ended up getting the mussels as an appetizer. And we were just completely blown away. We were just looking at each other like, “What is happening in our mouths?”

Christa: And it’s local so it’s another thing that Boston’s by the water. Actually, Hartford right now, our little thing that everyone loves is we have this little doughnut spot called Tastease, that has mini doughnuts. And they’re beautiful. They’re decorated. They’re colorful. They’re absolutely fantastic. And no one knows about them.

It’s just one of those things that you’ll see pictures and then you’ll hear about it. And they sell out by 10:00 in the morning. They have a little sign that says, “Over a million donuts served.” Just a small local business that, when you know about it, people are like, “Oh my god, Tastease! I can’t believe I hadn’t heard about it.”

On Their Blog:

Christa: Well, we’re both creatives. I’m a graphic designer and Regina was a photography major. And so we just found ourselves one day, talking about blogs. We hadn’t discussed it. We were just like, “Wow. I follow a lot of blogs.”

Regina: We were both following a lot of the same ones and constantly texting each other about it.

Christa: When Reg moved, we were both starting out in our careers and trying to figure out what we wanted to do. And those first jobs, they’re fun, they’re interesting but they’re not quite as creative as you want. So it kind of started out with being like, “What else do we want to do?” And we just saw that there are opportunities to collect the information off the Internet that we liked. And then doing DIYs, and cooking food, and doing all these things we like to do anyway.

Reg takes beautiful photographs. We were like, “Why don’t we just start doing that and documenting it?” So we actually just sat down one day and we made it happen.

Regina: It was so funny how quickly it happened. We just sat down. We’re like, “What do we want to call it? Let’s do this test name Gardenias & Mint. We could always change it.” And then we’re like, “Actually, I kind of like it.”

Christa: Then we put some stuff together and then we went out to a really good restaurant, and brought a notebook, and literally were like, “What are some ideas? Let’s do this.” We stuck with it. Which is, you know, the hardest part.

Regina: Christa was really helpful for all this too because she had done an internship for Design Love Fest.

Christa: Blogshop. I don’t know if you know who she is. She’s a major blogger out in California. And I kind of interned for a weekend with her where I gave tips on Photoshop. And so it was all about the blogging world though. Not just how to use Photoshop for yourself. But specifically with blogging. And so I had this inside scoop that I didn’t even realize I had. And so it was fun to share what I learned. And you started picking it up on it really fast.

On How to Decide on What to Make for the Blog:

Regina: We have a very serious sweet tooth, in case you haven’t noticed.

Christa: Pretty much everything is some sort of baked good.

Regina: We just love baking. I find it to be very calming. If I’m like stressed out, I just want to go home and make cookies.

Christa: We always are talking about how we want to do more food and less treats but we just end up making cakes.

Regina: It’s funny because we love savory dishes so much. We’re always just like, “Cheese!”

Christa: I think that what happens is we’ll look at stuff that we like. It has to be something that we want to make. Now as much as blogs are about it being pretty, we want to eat it.

We approach it as what looks good. Is this something I want to make for myself? Make for my roommates? Make for my boyfriend? And then we don’t want to just sit there and copy someone’s recipe straight up most of the times.

So it’s nice to be able to feel comfortable with the ingredients to know that we could change something if we need to. How to make it our own because with there being a million things on the Internet, it’s so easy just to be like, “That looks good. Let’s make it.” Well, it’s ours now. But it’s not.

Regina: It’s so easy to adapt things from other people that we always make sure to give the other blog credit if we happen to find it there.

Christa: Yeah. And so, we want to be able to approach it in a way that we feel comfortable kind of tweaking something.

I wouldn’t know how to look at a recipe and change everything but we want to throw an ingredient here, tweak a little bit of that there. And that usually works best for us.

On a Dish Not Turning Out as Planned:

Christa: Yeah, it happens. Actually this past Valentine’s Day, we wanted to just make a cute little heart-shaped pizza. And then we decided it was just going to be heart-shaped pepperoni. And so, it was last minute. We’re scrambling. And pizza is not hard to make by any means, but I’m sitting there, cutting out heart-shaped pepperoni with a knife which is not a good idea.

It’s angular and you’re trying to make these cute hearts and it’s not happening. And something happened. Reg is half making it and we realized we don’t have cheese. And we’re just having such a struggle.

Regina: We just did not prepare at all.

Christa: So she decides, “Look let’s just make something else. I’ll freeze the pepperonis. We’ll make the pizza another time.” And then I go home and we’re cutting it close on time because we wanted to post it.

Regina: Because it was Valentine’s Day. So it was just a specific date it had to be up by.

Christa: So I’m like, “You know what? I’m just going to make this at home. Don’t worry about it. I’m going to do it in Hartford. I’ll figure it out.” And I go to the store, I buy some more pepperoni, and then I walk into my kitchen and I’m like, “Why did I not use kitchen scissors?” It was the easiest thing in the entire world. Took me two seconds. I did like 15 pepperonis in under a minute.

Regina: Versus like half an hour of slimy labor with a knife.

Christa: So I was just like, “Wow, that was dumb.”

Regina: And dangerous.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

Regina: I really like the Barefoot Contessa. She is all about home cooked meals that just make you feel good. And they’re rich and wonderful.

Christa: I actually don’t watch any cooking shows. I feel so terrible saying that. I have caught a couple fun ones at the gym.

Regina: It’s so weirdly satisfying to watch cooking shows at the gym. You feel terrible but great all at the same time.

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

Regina: I’m always on The Kitchn. That’s a good one. I think one of my big inspirations for blogging about food is probably Skinny Taste. She recently came out with one or two cookbooks, I think. But she’s again, back to that comfort food stuff.

It’s always with a low-fat quality. She loves using applesauce to replace things when she’s baking. It’s like comfort food without the guilt.

Christa: And I really love Food52. They post so many beautiful pictures. There’s just something that sparks my interest visually. Which then, when I read about it, makes me hungry.

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

Christa: This is funny. We worked at a pizza place back in high school. And that’s actually where I met my boyfriend. They post their specials on Facebook and Instagram and I love it. All I want to do is go there. When I see every week what they’re doing. I’m so excited.

Regina: Yeah, you heavily monitor it to see if you can go there that weekend for their specials.

Christa: I’m like, “Oh you’re coming home? These are the specials ahead of time. Are you into it?”

Christa: They’re called Flatbread. But there’s American Flatbread and then Flatbread. They’re two different things.

Regina: It’s like The Flatbread Co.

Christa: Yeah, Flatbread Company.

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

Regina: I feel like I always get called out for my butter dish on the counter. I always have room temperature butter at my house. Which is wonderful and apparently it’s a very European thing. I just grew up with it but I feel like room temperature butter just makes my life complete. Because you can just throw it on anything. It’s already ready to go. And then, especially if you’re baking, you already have the room temp butter. So, you’re good to go.

Christa: Our apartment is really old. We have this really cute nook where there definitely used to be an ironing board. But, no ironing board anymore. And we turned it into a spice rack. Were moving soon and I think I’m going to miss it a lot. I didn’t realize how cute it was until we’re not going to have it anymore.

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

Regina: I love tomatoes. I put them in absolutely everything. Tomatoes and onion. I don’t know where I would be without them now. But when I was a kid, I wanted nothing to do with them.

Christa: I’m actually the same way about peppers. I don’t know why kids hate peppers. They’re delicious.

Regina: Vegetables in general. Vegetables make me so happy.

Christa: Like brussels sprouts. Oh my god, brussels sprouts are my favorite.

Regina: I don’t understand the stigma associated with them as a child.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

Regina: A couple of years ago for Christmas, my sister got me this really wonderful book at Anthropology that’s called What Katie Ate. And the photography in it is so stunning. It just has this very dramatic, dark backdrops and pretty high contrast. But they’re just beautiful. And it makes you want to cook really badly.

Some of the food that she does is a little labor extensive but it always looks worth it. And I’m like, “Wow, those potatoes look sensational.”

Christa: My mom, she’s got Cook’s Illustrated my whole life. And just seeing those around, it was always fun to look at the illustrations on the back and just get this real breakdown of food that kind of, is so normal.

There’s something about it that was just so friendly for the everyday person. But actually, I did see a beautiful cookbook the other day called, One Pan, Two Plates. Which is great for a couple, like my boyfriend and myself. Which I definitely want to check out.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

Regina: For me, especially around the holidays, back to baking, but it’s Ella Fitzgerald. And She and Him. They both just put me in that holiday spirit. I’m like, “I need to make gingerbread now.” And then, my coworker introduced me to the most random collection of songs. It’s just like a Nigerian eclectic band that just makes you want to cook so badly. I highly recommend Nigerian music to put you in the mood to cook.

I don’t know the name. It’s not a band name. It was like a collection of various bands on one album. But I think they all have a similar beat to it. And it’s very like, saucy. And you’re just like, “Yeah, I want to make some enchiladas or something.”

Christa: We actually listen to music a lot in the kitchen. It’s just something that gets us excited. But I love Vampire Weekend. They’re just fun and poppy and gets me going. I know all the words so I’m just in my zone. Which is helpful.

On Keeping Posted with Gardenia’s and Mint:

Regina: We are on Instagram.

Christa: Instagram.

Regina: And Facebook daily.

Christa: Yep. And gardeniasandmint.com. So we’re social media people for sure. We try to tweet but we’re not very good at it.

Regina: Bad at tweeting. I don’t know why. Yeah, Instagram though, we’re always on that.

Christa: Yes, and Pinterest, you know, the whole deal.

Regina: Our handle is just Gardenias and Mint. Pretty straightforward.

034: Cristina Sciarra: How Learning to Cook is a Lifelong Process

May 4, 2015 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

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The Roaming Kitchen, Food Blog

Cristina has lived all over the world and feels most at home in her kitchen. She believes food should foster community and seasonal foods and ingredients are worth waiting for. Cristina was on the board of Slow Food NYC and The Roaming Kitchen was a finalist for Best New Blog in Saveur’s 2013 Best Food Blog Awards.

I am so happy to have Cristina Sciarra of The Roaming Kitchen here on the show.

On Writing About Her Food Adventures:

I had been living abroad. I lived in Spain for one year and then I moved to France for a year. In France I lived on a market street. Six days a week we had two butchers and a baker, a cheesemonger. I really fell into the habit of buying ingredients on a daily basis and cooking things on a daily basis.

I came back to New York to go to graduate school for writing. I studied for an MFA in fiction writing. It was a natural marrying of two really strong interests, writing and food, because I think in essence, a recipe is a story to be told. I started to create my own recipes and I wanted some place to write them down before I forgot them and couldn’t cook them anymore.

I love Spain. I studied abroad there and then I lived there for another year. Especially Madrid is where my heart is. I do love Spanish food, but I would say now, at this point, I’ve been with my fiancée for six years and I have spent a lot of time with his family. They live on the western coast of France where they do the oysters and the mussels and the sea salt. Watching my mother-in-law prepare these dishes with a duck she got from her friend’s farm down the road and really, really fresh ingredients. I think that’s influenced me hugely.

Of course it’s French food but more than that it’s local food. Here I frequent the farmers’ market. I’ll buy things that look good. I come home and I think, “What can I do with these things?”

In my mind that’s an extension of what she does in her own home too. As far as cuisines, I love French, I love Spanish, I love Italian, that’s what I grew up eating. I guess I love North American because that’s where I happen to be and that’s where the ingredients are that I’m buying.

Really, the most important thing to me is local, high quality foods then using your imagination and mixing cuisines in order to make something delicious.

On Attending Culinary School in Paris:

I think the culinary school system in France is probably a lot different than culinary school in the States. Just as far as I know, from the people who have gone here, it seems to be more about cuisine styles. Again, this might be too much of a sweeping statement, but at the Cordon Bleu it’s very old school French style teaching. It’s a militaristic style of teaching. Most of the chefs are old men and they are not afraid to yell at you if something goes wrong.

I went for the basic course which is the first third where they teach you basically everything you need to know. They teach you how to cut things properly, and make a stock, and poach a chicken, things like that.

The upper classes are more difficult things and perfecting dishes. I really learned all the building blocks of cooking there. I think for me it was such a valuable education. What does it mean to braise something and chemically why do you do that? Why is it different than a different style of cooking? Although some days were terrifying, the base education was really, really valuable to me.

The basic program was supposed to last three months, but I only had a little time left in France. I thought I would do the accelerated program which takes three months' worth of work and puts it in about six or seven weeks, I guess.

I was there all the time from the early morning to late at night, five or six days a week. It was intense.

Basically the day oscillated between sitting in on a lecture where the chef would speak in French with a translator or in English. He would demonstrate three or four dishes. There would be a big mirror on the ceiling so you can see what’s happening.

In your practical class after that you would be cooking one or two things that he demonstrated.

This was late summer too I will say. It’s a lot of apparel. You’re wearing a lot of clothes that need to be a certain way, so it was very, very hot and a lot of time on my feet. It was one of those experiences I will never forget. While it was really intense it was so valuable to me. I am so lucky and grateful that I got to do that.

On a Kitchen Disaster Before Culinary School:

I made my friend run down to the supermarket and get the pre-made pizza bread that are completely done. They are like bread. You just have to stick them in the oven. I don’t know why I thought this, but I rolled the dough very, very thinly. Way too thinly and then put it in the oven for 20 minutes. It was black, completely charred, a mess. My friends were pretty patient through all of this. Most people like eating free food so it went over pretty well.

There was a farmers’ market one day a week on our campus. I did start going there. That was probably the first farmers’ market that I attended on a somewhat regular basis. That year was really, really trial and error. I remember I made my friend a carrot cake. I was very proud of that because it actually turned out okay.

There’s still so much that I don’t know. I think cooking is such a large subject that I could study and practice my whole life and there would still be more to learn. I think that’s part of what I find so interesting is that it’s endless. What I can do and how I can improve, new tricks I can learn, new flavor combinations. I think that path sort of starts there. It’s just been sort of chugging along ever since then.

On the Slow Food Movement:

Slow Food is actually an international organization that started in the 80s in Italy when McDonald’s first came into Italy. It was a reaction to that. It’s now all over the world. The New York City chapter, we’re under the USA umbrella, but we’re actually the biggest local chapter in the country. We really are in support of food that’s good, clean and fair.

We have several school gardens teaching kids how to grow their own food and how to cook their own food. We have a monthly Slur, which is a happy hour where people can come and talk to members of the board. We have a book and film club which I used to work on where we try to get films and have a panel, or we have book events with the author. Sometimes that includes a cooking demonstration.

We had a woman who wrote a book about making fresh cheese. We all got to try some of this fresh cheese. We work in this general goal of really trying to raise money and awareness for environmental and fair practices in cooking and food production.

We’re actually very lucky in New York because we have many, many farmers’ markets. You could go every day to one or more. We have great access to New Jersey, Pennsylvania, the Hudson Valley. There’s also a company called Good Eggs, which is now in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Brooklyn, and they’re moving to Manhattan and New Orleans.

I love ordering from them too because fish, for example, it’s very hard to know if you’re getting good fish or not unless you have a source that you trust. On Saturdays there’s a local fishmonger, a day boat fishmonger at the farmers’ market but if I wanted fish on a Wednesday, it’s difficult to know. Good Eggs provides really high quality well sourced fish and meat. Frankly, it’s like a grocery store, all kinds of things. We’re quite lucky here. It’s not so difficult to eat really well.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

I don’t really watch any cooking shows.

I will wait until Top Chef is over and binge watch the whole thing. I think every year the cooks get better and better and better. I enjoy it.

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

I have a list of them on my website. I like different ones for very different reasons.

I like good writing a lot so someone like Oh, Ladycakes who writes vegan dessert recipes, but that’s not my preference. I always read because she’s a gorgeous writer and the photographs are beautiful, the same thing with Bon Appetempt.

I definitely would try her recipes but the thing that keeps me coming back is her voice. How original it is, what great read it is. I’d say the same for Dash and Bella. The writing is so evocative and it’s very family-based, about her family. It’s gorgeous, it breaks your heart every time she writes something.

I’d say those are the three that I go to. Those are my top three I would say.

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

I’m the best at Instagram of all of those. It makes me happy, I guess those bloggers that I just mentioned and some more. So many people post such beautiful things and once you get to know someone a little bit when they post about their family or their life it’s a pleasure to see those pictures.

I have friends who live in Europe and South America, to see their posts, what they’re doing is really a gift. It’s a way of keeping in touch with someone you love but lives far away.

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

I’m the wrong person to ask this because I’ll give you a very long list.

To be the most basic, I would say black pepper, fresh ground black pepper, have a kosher salt and a flaky sea salt, have an olive oil for cooking and an olive oil for finishing, a more flavorful fancy pants olive oil.

I think if you have those things there’s a lot you can do with those things. You can open a can of beans from your cupboard and mix all of that together. If you have some herbs put it in there. If you have some radishes or cucumbers put it in there. That’s half of dinner already and leftovers for tomorrow.

Name one ingredient you cannot live without.

Olive oil. I have several olive oils and it’s fun for me. We went to Spain over Christmas to visit my fiancée’s family. They make great olive oil in Spain. I bought a few to bring home. That’s something I love to do also, is buying special food stuffs when I’m away and being able to come home and use them in my own kitchen. Olive oil, salt and pepper, but olive oil I think is fun.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

That makes my life better, well, I would say certainly those big cookbooks that serve as a guide. So in something like the New York Times cookbook, you’re going to find everything in there. Those are my outside cookbooks. The ones I like to look at all the time. What else? I have several Cook’s Illustrated books. I like having a great, great background. Then I have some restaurant cookbooks, some blogger cookbooks. But, really Nigel Slater, his books are the ones I come back to. I read all the time. There are quite a few. I think that’s my favorite.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

I usually leave the music choices up to my fiancée. He plays stuff I like and I don’t have to think about it too much, but I will say I do watch a lot of Hulu shows when I’m cooking. It’s a good excuse to watch things that don’t perhaps need your full attention.

I also listen to a lot of books on tape. I fly through books on tape when I’m cooking. That’s the most enjoyable way to spend an afternoon I can think of, cooking and listening to a book on tape.

I’m listening to 1984 right now. I’m halfway through.

Keep Posted on Cristina:

I would say Instagram is probably my favorite method of social media. You’ll always see me posting there the most. I have a Facebook page for The Roaming Kitchen. I also do updates and articles there and just check in back into to the website.

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

012: Maria Siriano: How To Have Fun Baking and Her Top Baking Tip

March 13, 2015 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

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Sift and Whisk

Today we’re chatting about baking and for me the best part of any dinner, dessert.

Maria is a self-taught baker and dessert maker whose love of baking and sweet things shine through on her blog and in her photography.

I am so pumped to have Maria Siriano from Sift and Whisk here on the show.

On Starting Her Blog:

I used to work in textbook publishing and I actually started off as an intern, literally the day after I graduated college. So I was doing that for about a year and a half and they brought me on from intern to being a temp. The company went on a hiring freeze right before I was about to interview for a permanent job so that kind of sucked. I then was able to go freelance doing publishing stuff.

So I was at home doing textbook editing and I was baking all time because it’s stress relief for me.

In Ohio, which is where I live, we have cottage bakery laws so you can have a home-based bakery, sell stuff at farmers’ markets and that’s what I started doing. I did that for a year and half while I was editing.

Because I was selling stuff I had a website that I created for my bakery and I was doing a blog. So I would put some recipes on there of the stuff that I didn’t sell because I really only sold cookies and occasionally cupcakes but I really enjoyed the blog process and the photography process more than actually going to farmers’ markets and selling.

I was making the same thing every single day which didn’t really appeal to me. So I was like I want to experiment and try new stuff and take more pictures. I was really into photography in high school so then I kind of gradually shut down the home-based bakery and picked up full-time with the blogging.

It has been a little over two years now, it was two years in November and I love it. It is the best job anybody could ask for. Now that’s what I do entirely.

I want to share things with people.

I find that I get a lot more joy out of sharing with a broader audience than I do in a really niche market of just my hometown. So it’s a great way for me to connect with people.

On The Process of Blogging and What Comes Most Naturally:

I still don’t think that it comes naturally to me and whenever somebody compliments me on any of those things I’m like OK what do you want.

But it takes a lot of work and I can see improvement in myself. I’m still trying to improve everything I do because I have my own style of writing. I am an English major. I was really good at writing essays about literature, but I’m not a fiction type person and I always say I’m just such a narcissist and that’s why I can do a blog because I can just write about myself all day.

It’s like journaling. For me it is really cathartic, and I like to have a sense of humor about it and I hope that people appreciate that sense of humor. I hope that I don’t offend anybody ever. I am always worried about that.

Then the photography, I am obsessed with looking at other people’s photography. I always feel like I am almost there, and then somedays I’m just like this is just crap. I still struggle with it, and feeling like it’s good, but if somebody else looks at it and thinks it’s good, I’m over the moon.

But basically my blog is exactly how I talk but with less cursing because I try to keep it clean because maybe a fourteen year old will want a cookie recipe, and then I’ll feel really bad if their parents are like, “Oh, stop cursing.”

On Her Connection to Baking:

In my family growing up, we almost never cooked homemade meals. We did a lot of the frozen. We were like Stouffers‘ people. We did the lasagna. My mom made a couple different meals that she would do like homemade meatloaf, but homemade is in quotations because she would do the Hungry Man or whatever that is in the can.

Both my parents worked, and she was going to college when I was a kid so it was all very take out and boxed food and all that. Whereas my husband grew up in house where they cooked dinner every single night, they rarely went out to eat. So when we moved in together, I was like, “Oh my gosh, he is cooking me dinner every night. This is the best thing that has ever happened to me.” But it took some getting used to. Because we never cooked in my family.

The one thing that we did was bake. For a while we did a lot of boxed mix stuff like cakes like that. We weren’t really fancy about it or precise about it, but we did a lot of cookies, which is my first from scratch baking experience. We did molasses cookies which is a recipe I did on my blog and is still one of my favorite recipes because it is my family’s recipe.

I always want to learn how to cook so what I started doing a couple months ago up until the Holiday craziness set in, I was saying “I am cooking dinner every Wednesday night because I need to learn to cook.”

For awhile right after I got laid off at my publishing job, my parents were trying to kick me back some money so they were like, “Hey, come cook for us. Make freezer meals and we will pay you.” So I would cook everything for them and freeze it, and they’d give me a hundred bucks a week or something and I was like, “Thanks mom and dad.”

Everything I make always turns out really good if I follow the recipe but I can’t do what my husband does which is open the fridge and be like, “Oh, I will just throw all this stuff together and we have dinner.” I can’t do it.

On Baking Being More of a Science Than Cooking:

Whenever people are like I want to get into more baking, I am always like buy a scale. That is my number one advice is buy a kitchen scale. It’ll set you back 30 bucks and it’ll change everything.

My husband has had relative success baking with his kind of free-form method. There are certain things I think that you can do if you like dessert and want to make dessert but don’t want to do all the complicated stuff, and it gets a little what I call “semi-homemade with Sandra Lee.”

You can go to the store and you can buy pre-made pound cake. You can dice that and put some strawberries in it and some whipped cream and that’s really easy. You can just pour sugar or whatever and just toss everything together and that’s really easy to do. You don’t have to do a lot of measuring and things like that.

Even pie, if you don’t make your own crust, the filling you can guesstimate and if it’s not thick enough you add a little more corn starch or you bake it a little longer and it’s not so daunting, but there are certain things that I would stay away from.

Cookies can flop miserably if they aren’t very accurate and cakes, so I think that it just depends upon how desperately you want something.

On Things Not Going as Planned in the Kitchen:

I did a black forest pie for my husband and I got the wrong type of liqueur for the filling and I just ran all over town. I actually literally have the bowl of the first filling sitting on my counter top just sitting out right now because I’m like, “Maybe I can put this on French toast tomorrow morning.” I don’t know what to do with it.

There was one time I made, a couple years ago, and this didn’t even make it to the blog because I was so over it, but it was a lemon zucchini bread. It tasted like rubber. I don’t know what happened. It was so disgusting. I made two of them because I am always really hopeful that it’s going to turn out. Instead of paring back a recipe, I just go all in. So I had two of these loaves of rubber, and I just threw them in the trashcan because I will rage eat the bad stuff. I eat it because I am like, “I hate you so much.” I don’t understand it but that’s what I do.

I had that with macaroons. I made those literally ten times before I finally got one that was blog-worthy.

I was like, “I will go to the bakery down the street.” We have a really good French bakery down the street and they make amazing ones. I’m like, “Why do we even bother.”

On Getting an Idea to The Blog:

What I usually do is I start off with a seasonal ingredient and I do a lot research on that. If there is nothing seasonal then I go with chocolate, caramel, peanut butter, things like that, but I try to stick to seasonal because I am a big fruit person, and I know people are always like, “Make more chocolate.” And I’m like, “No.”

So I start off with finding something seasonal that I want to work with and then I have the book called The Flavor Bible. I will go through there and there’s a list of complementary ingredients and flavors and I will go through there and kind of get inspired by that.

Then I will just think of all the formats and I try to flesh out the categories equally so like pies, cakes, cookies, whatever, but I will say I tend to skew toward pie. I like pie. I will end up with so many pies and tarts that I am like, “Oh my gosh, I have to tone it down,” but I love making them. And then summer, ice cream, I’ll just do ice cream until my ears bleed.

And honestly, a lot of what I do is built off other people’s work because that is what’s great about making recipes is you can. A lot of the testing is done by other people for you so you can find a base or find something similar. Like the roasted plum, I knew somebody had done a roasted peach ice cream, so I said, “Okay, if she did it like this and used this method for peaches, I can do the same thing with plums,” and kind of build from there.

I always try my best to list my source because I’m not a genius. I can’t just make up scientific baking things in my mind.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

So this is embarrassing but I don’t have cable so I don’t watch a ton, but what I do have is some Alton Brown, Good Eats.

We actually have them downloaded and when we travel, we will put episodes on our iPad and watch those because they’re fantastic and full of science.

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

Everything.

I have a thousand in my feed. I am a huge fan of Serious Eats because again they do a lot of science so I love listening to all of that, reading all that.

Blogs, I love Bakers Royale, her photography is just ridiculous and I’m jealous. Also Half Baked Harvest, and my friend Sarah who does the Sugar Hit and my friend Elizabeth who does Sugar Hero.

Elizabeth does candy and she’s amazing because I cannot do candy to save my life.

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

Bonnie Tsang. I think she is the one that has the little daughter, and she is so cute and every time, she just posts really fun and brightly colored things. Every time I see a picture, it just makes my heart happy.

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

All home cooks should have chocolate.

I can’t tell you how much you can make with chocolate but if you don’t have it, it kind of stinks.

So the great thing about chocolate is if you have it, you can just eat it. If you don’t want to just eat chocolate, you can make all kinds of stuff with it like pudding, whip that up really fast, or just add it to any other thing and it makes it better.

Name one ingredient you cannot live without?

Butter. It is very simple for me. I go through so much butter it is not even funny. Every time I do a vegan recipe, I am like, “Where is the butter?”

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

Oh my god, everything. I collect cookbooks so I just love everything. My favorite cookbook is the Cook’s Illustrated Cookbook because it is just such a great reference. If you want to riff on something, they’ve got such a great base recipes.

I also really love, this isn’t baking but, Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution book. We cook a lot out of there, and since I’m not very good at cooking, it is really easy for me to follow. It’s got a revolutionary way of making rice that is just fantastic and lots of Indian food which I love.

I love all of the Baked cookbooks, Baked Bakery in New York. I get all of them as soon as they come out.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

This is really embarrassing, from West Side Story, the song, I want to live in America.

I am a big proponent of singing show tunes while I’m baking, it has such an up beat, it’s just very upbeat so it really gets me going and on track, and the solid beat of it makes me do everything in a timely fashion.

Keep Posted on Maria:

I’m best at updating Facebook. I’m terrible at Twitter, so yeah definitely follow me on Facebook because you will always see the new recipes. Any other things that are a little bit personal, and maybe kind of funny, is on Twitter, but I’m not regular about it.

On Her Favorite Food in Turkey:

On the Food Culture in British Virgin Islands:

On a Recipe She Picked Up from Her Travels:

The Pressure Cooker:

On Keeping Posted with Ice:

On Growing Up on a 600 Acre Farm:

On Her Interest in Cooking:

On Leaving the Farm:

On a Dish That’s Special to Her:

The Pressure Cooker:

On Keeping Posted with Posie:

On Going to Culinary School:

On Her Blog:

On Baking and Desserts:

On Her Cookbooks:

The Pressure Cooker:

On Keeping Posted with Jen:

On Her Blog:

On Her YouTube Channel:

On Her Process for Her Videos:

On Her Curiosity Around Cooking:

On Cooking From Scratch with Whole Foods and Natural Ingredients:

On Some Resources For Learning to Cook from Scratch:

The Pressure Cooker:

On Keeping Posted with Joanne:

On How They Met:

On the Food Culture in Their Cities:

On Neighborhoods in Their Cities for Tasty Food:

On Local Dishes that Visitors May Not Know About:

On Their Blog:

On How to Decide on What to Make for the Blog:

On a Dish Not Turning Out as Planned:

The Pressure Cooker:

On Keeping Posted with Gardenia’s and Mint:

On Writing About Her Food Adventures:

On Attending Culinary School in Paris:

On a Kitchen Disaster Before Culinary School:

On the Slow Food Movement:

The Pressure Cooker:

Keep Posted on Cristina:

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

On Starting Her Blog:

On The Process of Blogging and What Comes Most Naturally:

On Her Connection to Baking:

On Baking Being More of a Science Than Cooking:

On Things Not Going as Planned in the Kitchen:

On Getting an Idea to The Blog:

The Pressure Cooker:

Keep Posted on Maria:

Have Maria’s Special Recipe Sent To You Now: