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127: Husbands That Cook: How Cooking Together Makes Food Better

June 15, 2016 by Gabriel 3 Comments

Husbands That Cook Feature Image
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Adam Merrin and Ryan Alvarez of Husbands That Cook on The Dinner Special podcast talking about how cooking together makes food better.

Husbands That Cook

On Husbands That Cook, Adam and Ryan share quick and easy vegetarian meals, drinks and snacks, their favorite dishes from around the world, and everything from decadent desserts to healthy vegan options. They try to make their recipes as accessible as possible so everyone can confidently follow along and have fun with it.

I am so excited to have Adam Merrin and Ryan Alvarez of Husbands That Cook joining me here on the show today.

(*All photos below are Adam and Ryan’s.)

On Cooking as a Team:

Adam Merrin and Ryan Alvarez of Husbands That Cook on The Dinner Special podcast talking about cooking as a team.

Adam: I’ve learned so much from Ryan because, obviously, he has a lot more experience than I do, but he was the one that got me so excited about it and made it seem so fun. And so, it’s great to be able to do it together.

Ryan: And then for me, even though Adam may be not as experienced in the kitchen, doesn’t know all the techniques or whatever, but his taste is really, really good, so he always knows what to add to a dish or what to take away to make it even better.

He’s amazing with coming up with ideas for dishes, like, “What if we did a cake with this and that and this?” So he’ll come up with these great ideas. So, we make a good team that way. Maybe I might have a bit more of the experience in the kitchen, just kind of practical skills, he has this amazing internal sense of food. I think that we make a good team.

Adam: I feel like it’s helpful for the blog too, because, at least for me, the one with less experience, I make sure that the details and the recipes are written clearly so for beginning cooks that have never done this before, they can follow along with us. I like to approach it like people are going to be doing this for the first time. I think of my friends who don’t cook and who don’t have much experience in the kitchen. I feel like we’re talking to them, kind of walking them along through it so anybody could do it.

Ryan: Yeah, definitely. Because I’ve been cooking for longer, sometimes something that’s second nature to me or I think, “Well, everyone knows how to do this,” Adam might say, “Actually, I think we should explain this a little more clearly. Let’s try to make this a little more accessible.” I feel like we definitely make a good team in that sense, too.

On Being Vegetarian:

Adam Merrin and Ryan Alvarez of Husbands That Cook on The Dinner Special podcast talking about being vegetarian.

Ryan: I think, for both of us, we’ve been vegetarian for so long. I’ve been a vegetarian for about 16 years, and Adam, over 20, so I feel like at this point we’re so comfortable with cooking vegetarian. I maybe cooked a little bit of meat when I was a teenager, but I honestly barely remember how to do it.

Honestly, if somebody handed me a steak, I don’t know if I could cook it correctly, just because it’s been so long. At this point, it’s just kind of second nature. Just all the great vegetarian recipes out there, there’s so much to choose from.

Ryan: I feel like, with a lot of foods that have meat in them, a lot of times it isn’t necessarily about the meat itself, it’s more about the sauce or the flavors and the spices that go with it. So for some dishes, say like a pasta sauce, it can be very easy to take out the meat because you’re using herbs and spices and all those flavors that you get other ways besides the meat.

Whereas, of course, obviously it’s hard to make a vegetarian version of steak tartare, things like that. For a lot of things, I feel like you can get so much flavor other ways besides just from meat that it actually forces you to be creative and look at dishes in a new way.

I think part of it too is, if people think of vegetarian food as a replacement for meat, I think that’s where you can get those expectations. But if you think about a spaghetti marinara sauce, that’s vegetarian food. You wouldn’t necessarily think about it, you wouldn’t think, “Well, spaghetti marinara is vegetarian,” but it is.

It’s naturally vegetarian. So that’s one of those things where if I serve a pasta dinner to somebody, they’re not going to be thinking, “Wait, there’s no meat in this.” Theoretically, hopefully, they’ll just be thinking how delicious it is and they won’t even notice the fact that there’s no meat present.

On Cuban Food:

Adam Merrin and Ryan Alvarez of Husbands That Cook on The Dinner Special podcast talking about Cuban cuisine.

Ryan: Traditional Cuban cuisine has lots of flavor, they use lots of garlic. It is pretty meat-heavy in general, so a lot of the Cuban foods that I grew up with I no longer eat. But there are so many that we still do. Just black beans and rice with peppers and onions and spices. We have a dish on our website for yuca. It’s a root vegetable.

It’s also called cassava in English. But it’s just loaded with garlic and vinegar and olive oil. It’s just a lot of really bold flavors. We did a plantain recipe recently. I had the fried plantains, tostones, that are delicious. It’s kind of a mix of things, but it’s all very tropical flavors, a lot of garlic, a lot of bright flavors. Vinegars and peppers and things like that, and mangos. It’s delicious food. I love it.

Adam: So, the yuca con mojo recipe that we have on our website uses 30 cloves of garlic, just a little olive oil and salt and vinegar, and it is poured over the yuca, which is very similar to potatoes. But if you were going to try one thing first, I would say to experiment with that one. It’s so delicious.

The Pressure Cooker:

Adam Merrin and Ryan Alvarez of Husbands That Cook on The Dinner Special podcast taking on The Pressure Cooker.

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

Ryan: There’s one called Cutthroat Kitchen that we really like. It’s a super fun game show where they have to compete, cook using crazy challenges, handicaps that they have to get assigned. It’s very fun and very exciting.

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

Adam: I love Cravings in Amsterdam. It’s Paola, and she takes incredible pictures and styles her dishes so beautifully. It’s cravingsinamsterdam.com.

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

Adam: On Snapchat, we really have been having so much fun following so many people. There’s a friend who’s a blogger we met named Asha, who has a wonderful blog called, Food Fashion Party. She cooks Indian food most of the time, and gorgeous, delicious appetizing dishes.

It’s really been fun to now see more than just the photographs that she posts on Instagram, where you can see her cooking in her kitchen and explaining how she makes things and cooking with her family. Every morning, she posts a smoothie. She has a very calming, relaxing voice that’s pleasant to listen to.

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

Ryan: Well, actually, like I mentioned before, remember how I said about how we’re waiting to post the flan recipe until we had a specific kind of double boiler?

I have a double boiler in my kitchen from my grandmother, that she used to make flan, and I still use it to make flan. So it is a well-loved and well-used piece of equipment.

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

Ryan: Oh my gosh, there’s actually a lot for me. When I was a kid, tomatoes, mushrooms, olives, everything, and now I love them all.

Adam: I used to not like beets, and now they’re one of my favorites. I had some today.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

Ryan: One of them, honestly, that has been so great is The Clever Cookbook by Emilie Raffa. It just came out. I know a lot of cookbooks will say that they’re full of timesaving tips and ways to get ahead in the kitchen, but truly, honestly hers really, really is.

It has changed the way that we cook certain things. Like, brown rice takes forever to cook, right? It takes like 45 minutes, but she has this great suggestion to pre-make it and just keep it in your fridge in small containers. That way, whenever you want brown rice, you just open up the freezer and dump it out, and it’s ready. So, stuff like that is so helpful, and her book is great.

Adam: And also, I’d like to just add in that we use The Joy of Cooking a lot for certain recipes. Our lemon poppy seed pancakes were adapted from them.

Ryan: The Joy of Cooking is like a cooking Bible. It’s been in my mom’s kitchen her whole life, it’s been in my kitchen my whole life.

Adam: The recipes are so good.

Ryan: So good, and just so many. If you need to know how to boil an egg, open up The Joy of Cooking. It’ll tell you how to do it. They’re great.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

Adam: Whenever we cook Cuban food, we put on the Buena Vista Social Club. And actually, whenever we do cuisine from other countries, we try to…

Ryan: Match the music to the cuisine. So if we’re cooking an Italian dinner, we’ll put on some Venetian boat singing or whatever. Or if we’re cooking Indian, we’ll put on some cool Indian music, some Bollywood stuff. We have fun with it.

On Keeping Posted with Adam and Ryan:

Adam Merrin and Ryan Alvarez of Husbands That Cook on The Dinner Special podcast talking about keeping posted with them.

Adam: Our blog, it’s HusbandsThatCook.com. We update it about twice a week with recipes, like you said, desserts, dinners, appetizers, drinks.

Ryan: And then on our website, HusbandsThatCook.com, you’ll see links to all of our stuff. We’re super active on Instagram, we’re Husbands That Cook. You can find our Snapchat, we’re Husbands Cook. But all the links to all that is on our website.

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Filed Under: Podcast Tagged With: Adam Merrin, Buena Vista Social Club, Cravings in Amsterdam, Cuban Food, Cutthroat Kitchen, Emilie Raffa, Food Blog, Food Blogger, Food Fashion Party, Husbands That Cook, Ryan Alvarez, The Clever Cookbook, The Joy of Cooking, Vegetarian, Yuca con mojo

068: The Food Gays: Sharing a Taste of Vancouver

August 17, 2015 by Gabriel 2 Comments

Adrian Harris and Jeremy Inglett of The Food Gays on The Dinner Special podcast
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Adrian Harris and Jeremy Inglett of The Food Gays on The Dinner Special podcast talking about the food and food culture in Vancouver, BC, Canada.

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:

Adrian-Harris-and-Jeremy-Inglett-of-The-Food-Gays-on-The-Dinner-Special-podcast talking about their food 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:

Adrian Harris and Jeremy Inglett of The Food Gays on The Dinner Special podcast talking 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-Harris-and-Jeremy-Inglett-of-The-Food-Gays-on-The-Dinner-Special-podcast talking about 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 Harris and Jeremy Inglett of The Food Gays on The Dinner Special podcast talking about how to keep posted on them.

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.

 

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Filed Under: Podcast Tagged With: Adrian Harris, Artful Desperado, Baked, Basho Café, Café Medina, Cutthroat Kitchen, Dennis The Prescott, Feed Feed, Food Blog, Food Blogger, Food Network Star, Galantis, Healthy Eating, Healthy Food, i am a food blog, Jeremy Inglett, Kessel&March, MasterChef Canada, Molly Yeh, Nigel Slater, Nigella Lawson, Plenty, Plenty More, Seven Spoons, Sunday Suppers, The Food Gays, Vancouver, Vanilla and Bean, Yotam Ottolenghi

007: Marisa McClellan: Why No One Will Ever Get Sick From Your Jams, Pickles or Chutneys

March 2, 2015 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

Marisa McClellan of Food in Jars on The Dinner Special podcast talking about how her food blog started.
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Marisa McClellan of Food in Jars on The Dinner Special podcast on Why No One Will Get Sick From Your Jams, Pickles or Chutneys

Food in Jars

Marisa is a canning teacher and author of two amazingly well-received cookbooks on preserving.

She is a writer whose work appears regularly on The Food Network’s FN Dish Blog, Saveur’s website, Table Matters and Food 52.

I am so excited to have Marisa McClellan of Food in Jars here on the show today.

On How Her Blog Came Together:

Marisa McClellan of Food in Jars on The Dinner Special podcast talking about how her food blog started.

I started Food in Jars in late winter, 2009.

I had been working as the editor of a website called Slashfood, which was AOL’s food blog. My job there was coming to an end and I wanted to stay in the food blog community. I looked around to figure out what it was I wanted to write about. And, I realized that I loved canning jars and had done some canning, grew up doing it, and really felt like there was space for me to start a blog devoted to Mason jars and canning and preserving.

So I decided to carve out that little niche for myself. It has been an incredible journey since then.

On Canning:

Marisa McClellan of Food in Jars on The Dinner Special podcast talking about canning and the first things she canned.

I would say that at the start, it came naturally to me, but in the beginning, I didn’t know how much I didn’t know.

There’s been a lot of learning since I started only because as I dived deeper in, I didn’t know that there was so much that I still needed to learn. But I was already so invested that that learning process was really fun and exciting and natural.

I did most of my learning from books and the Internet. For instance, there’s a really great resource at the National Center for Home Food Preservation, which is run out of the University of Georgia and is the repository for the best practices of all canning and food preservation. They had a really good cookbook.

I took one class when I was first getting started on pressure canning just because I wanted to see someone else do it before I dove in. But, for the most part, the kinds of things I was curious about, the answers weren’t out there. I had to dig through and look at the USDA standards for commercial canning to figure out what was okay and what wasn’t.

That was fun and interesting to me, so I was happy to dive in and figure all that out.

On The First Thing She Ever Canned:

As a kid, most of what we did was either blackberry jam or blueberry jam.

I remember being nine or 10-years-old and helping my mom make blackberry jam. I grew up in Portland, Oregon, and that’s a place in the world where blackberries are just sort of anywhere. So that’s one of my primary foundational canning memories.

Then, as I got older, we’d go blueberry picking every summer.

Those two together, blueberries and blackberries, are really the core of my earliest canning memories, and what I started with when I started canning on my own.

On Where Her Canning Jars Obsession Came From:

I think it started in college. I went to college in Walla Walla, Washington, so rural Washington State.

I picked up a habit of wandering through stores, and antique stores, and junk stores when I had an afternoon off from classes. The thing I was drawn to were the old Mason jars. So I would pick up one or two here and there until I had a couple dozen in my dorm room. I used them for water glasses, I used them for pens, and it just kind of grew from there.

I don’t know why. There’s just something so appealing about a Mason jar. It’s clean and it’s got a nice heft to it, and it has so much possibility just in the vessel itself.

Tips For Those Wanting to Start Canning:

Marisa McClellan of Food in Jars on The Dinner Special podcast gives tips and advice for people who want to start canning.

There’s a lot of really good instruction out there as long as you’re getting your information from a trusted source like the Ball Canning website, or in Canada, the Bernardin website, and they’re actually the same company, the National Center for Home Food Preservation, my website.

There’s a whole slew of good online information out there. As long as you’re following those best practices which are to use common sense, clean gear, and process your jars for at least ten minutes once they’re full of whatever you’ve made, you’re going to be okay.

It’s really hard to do harm to someone with jams, or pickles, or anything, and the thing to note too is that botulism, which is the thing that scares everybody about canning, can’t grow in high acid environments. This means that all of your jams and pickles, anything that’s designed to be canned in a water bath, is too high an acid for botulism to grow at all.

So the worst thing that’s going to happen is, if you do something wrong, it’s either going to mold or it’s going to ferment. And you’ll be able to see those things immediately upon opening the jar. So you’re never going to make someone sick with a jam, or a pickle, or a chutney, or any of these things. If they do go bad, you’ll see immediately. So there’s really no danger.

On Discovering Canning For Yourself:

Marisa McClellan of Food in Jars on The Dinner Special podcast talking about discovering canning for yourself.

There have been times when I’ve made things that weren’t as good as I wanted them to be. That typically happens when I am rushing. I find that if you really try to rush your way through a batch of jam or fruit butter or whatever, it’s going to take as long as it’s going to take. And if you have a time table that’s not working with the fruit, it’s better to stop cooking and come back to it later than it is to try to force your timeframe on to it.

I’ve had some really horrible mistakes. Nothing dangerous, but things that didn’t taste good, and I think that that’s part of the process.

One of the things with canning and food preservation that I have really experienced and have observed other people going through as well is that we have lost the institutional knowledge of what we like. It used to be that everybody canned and preserved, and you knew the five or ten things you made every year that you liked, your family liked.

If you’re picking up the canning habit, the food preservation habit without any context, it’s going to take you a few years to figure out what the things are that you like to preserve, that work for your family, that you’ll work through in a calendar year. So, it’s sort of this necessary process of discovery to figure out what are your preserves.

On Her Love of Ingredients And Food:

To be honest, it is just something that’s always been with me. I have always been a little food obsessed from the time I was really young. In fact, the first full sentence I said as a baby was, “More mayonnaise please.” So it’s just innate to me.

I really just have always been interested in food. From the time I was really young, I loved going to orchards. I have always appreciated the abundance of the harvest season, that’s something that just resonates. It connects. I feel most at home during that time of the year.

There wasn’t any one sort of foundational experience that made me go, “Oh, oh, my God, food, that’s where I want to be.” It’s just kind of grown with me as I have grown as a person.

On Her Books:

Marisa McClellan of Food in Jars on The Dinner Special podcast talking about her books.

The first book, Food in Jars, came out in 2012 and is a cookbook devoted to my favorite preserves.

It’s got jams and jellies, and pickles and chutneys. There are some recipes for bread mixes in jars. I’ve got some nut butters, granolas. It was my attempt to wrap my arms around all my favorite things that I had done on the blog and translate them into a book.

The recipes are all revised for the book. So you’ll see something on the blog and it will have been changed a little bit or tweaked or made better for the book.

I think of it as a really good book for someone who’s just started canning, who wants the basics and who doesn’t mind yielding anywhere from 3 to 4 pints of something.

The new book, which came out last spring, called Preserving by the Pint, it’s still jams and jellies and pickles and things like that, but it has a philosophy that canning doesn’t have to be a large undertaking. It’s something that you can do in very small batches in about an hour or less and still really enjoy your product.

The idea behind that was simply that I live in a small apartment and have a small kitchen, and wanted to make things in small batches. And when I started posting those recipes, other people really resonated with them.

Every recipe in the book starts with either a pint of produce, a quart of produce, or a pound or two, so that your yields are only two or three half pints, but the amount of time you’ve invested in making them is really short.

It’s a really good way to prevent waste as well. I always talk about that as my secret mission with that book is it’s not just about preserving, but it’s also about breathing new life into things that you might have otherwise thrown away or decided you just couldn’t deal with.

So for instance, if you get a CSA Share, some weeks you get more than you can deal with. Instead of just throwing it away at the end of the week before you pick up your new box, you can make a little batch of pickles or a little batch of jam and extend the lifespan of that produce and get the most bang for your buck.

On Documenting Her Cookbook Tour Experience:

Marisa McClellan of Food in Jars on The Dinner Special podcast talking about documenting her cookbook tour experience.

I wanted to make sure I didn’t forget some of those lessons that I had learned along the way, so that I can prevent myself from repeating the same mistakes.

In life if you don’t take to heart the things you learn, you do the same things over and over again. I don’t want to do that. I want to move on, learn new lessons, not have to keep learning the same ones over and over.

Throughout the process you definitely have moments where you doubt yourself. You think, “What am I doing?”

I am working on my third book right now, and I have moments where I am like, “I don’t know how to write a book. I don’t know how to do this.” I have done it twice and I still have those feelings.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

I watch Cutthroat Kitchen because my husband’s a big fan.

I watch Top Chef because I find it fascinating, and it’s a really good representation of what’s sort of in the cheffy world at the moment.

I really like the online videos that the Breville small appliance company puts out. They have a really nice YouTube page.

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

Well, food blogs, I love my little community of food preservation blogs like Punk Domestics. Sean Timberlake who writes that blog is also now the blogger for About.com. As for food preservation, he’s been doing an amazing job there.

Wellpreserved, which is a Canadian food blog. My friend Kate Payne writes Hip Girl’s Guide to Homemaking, which is a really good one.

I have a friend who writes a blog called What I Weigh Today. It’s really interesting because it’s the intersection of someone who is a food writer, food editor, loves food, and is also trying to find ways to eat healthfully and work her way through dealing with weight in a culture where we put a lot of focus on both food and body image, and finding how to make that all work together.

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

I am definitely an Instagram addict. I follow a lot of people. It’s hard to even articulate.

My friend Alexis Siemons, she has a website called Teaspoons and Petals and her Instagram handle is @teaspoonsandpetals. She is a tea writer and takes the most beautiful pictures of tea cups, and desserts, and things like that.

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

All home cooks should have salt in their pantry.

You never want to run out of salt because it’s going to give everything flavor.

Vinegar is also useful. Anytime you make something and it tastes flat, if you add a little apple cider vinegar, balsamic vinegar, it’s going to brighten it up.

So salt and vinegar and it’s hard to go wrong.

Name one ingredient you cannot live without?

I cannot live without garlic.

I always have some, I use it every day, and my favorite way to add it to a dish is to grate it on a microplane rasp, because you get tiny little bits, you don’t have to chop it, and you get a lot of flavor. One of the tricks I learned recently was that if you want to brighten up a pot of soup, instead of adding your garlic at the beginning of cooking, add a little fresh garlic at the end. It’s going to make it taste more alive.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

As far as just needing the basics, I still always turn to The Joy of Cooking. Anytime I need to make biscuits or just need a basic recipe for something like that, that’s my go-to. I like the 1960s edition the best because that’s the one I grew up with.

The So Easy to Preserve cookbook, that’s the one I mentioned earlier from the National Center for Home Food Preservation. That’s a great one for when I just need to understand how a recipe should work. I turn to that.

And there’s a book I love called Whole Grains for a New Generation by Liana Krissoff and it’s one that I always find something new in.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

There is an album called Rekooperation by Al Kooper who is a blues and jazz organ player that I love to cook to.

Keep Posted on Marisa:

Marisa McClellan of Food in Jars on The Dinner Special podcast talking about how to keep posted with her.

You can either subscribe to the RSS feed from my blog, or follow me on Instagram, or Twitter, or Facebook.

I try to keep all of those outlets updated.

Anywhere that is your favorite social media or information feed, I am there, and I am trying to keep the world posted about what I am doing.

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    Filed Under: Podcast Tagged With: Al Kooper, Ball Canning, Bernardin, Botulism, Breville, Canning, Cookbook Author, CSA Share, Cutthroat Kitchen, Food Blog, Food Blogger, Food in Jars, Food Preservation, Hip Girl's Guide to Homemaking, Liana Krissoff, Marisa McClellan, Mason jars, National Centre for Home Food Preservation, Preserving by the Pint, Punk Domestics, Rekooperation, Sean Timberlake, So Easy to Preserve cookbook, Teaspoons and Petals, The Joy of Cooking, Top Chef, Wellpreserved, What I Weigh Today, Whole Grains for a New Generation

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

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