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052: Brian Samuels: Cooking and Enjoying Fish

June 22, 2015 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

Brian Samuels of A Thought for Food on The Dinner Special podcast talking about keeping up with him.
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Brian Samuels of A Thought for Food on The Dinner Special podcast talking about cooking and enjoying fish.

A Thought for Food

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

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

(*All images below are Brian’s.)

On Blogging:

Brian Samuels of A Thought for Food on The Dinner Special podcast talking about blogging and his curiosity for cooking and food.

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

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

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

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

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

On His Curiosity for Food and Cooking:

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

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

On Getting Into Food Photography:

Brian Samuels of A Thought for Food on The Dinner Special podcast talking about getting into food photography.

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

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

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

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

On Being (98%) Pescetarian:

Brian Samuels of A Thought for Food on The Dinner Special podcast talking about being 98% pescetarian.

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

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

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

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

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

On Cooking Fish:

Brian Samuels of A Thought for Food on The Dinner Special podcast talking about cooking and choosing fish.

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Choosing Fish:

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

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

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

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

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

Top Chef.

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

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

Those are definitely some of my top three.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

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

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

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

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

On Keeping Posted with Brian:

Brian Samuels of A Thought for Food on The Dinner Special podcast talking about keeping up with him.

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

 

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Filed Under: Podcast Tagged With: 101 Cookbooks, A Thought for Food, Boston, Brian Samuels, Cooking Fish, Date Night In, Emerson College, Fish, Food and Wine, Food Blog, Food Blogger, Food52, Happy Yolks, King Arthur Flour, Local Milk, Norah Jones, Not Without Salt, Pescetarian, Photographer, Plenty, Sift, Smitten Kitchen, Sprouted Kitchen, Top Chef, Van Morrison, Vegetarian, West Elm, Yahoo Food, Yotam Ottolenghi

010: Ashley Rodriguez: How Dating At Home Helps Us Reconnect

March 9, 2015 by Gabriel

Ashley Rodriguez of Not Without Salt on The Dinner Special podcast talking about what drew her to start blogging.
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Ashley Rodriguez of Not Without Salt on The Dinner Special podcast on How Dating At Home Helps Us Reconnect

Not Without Salt

Ashley was on a path to becoming a pastry chef at Spago in Beverly Hills when she found out she was pregnant and everything changed.

Today she has a successful blog, named best cooking blog by Saveur in 2013, and a new book called Date Night In, an extension of a popular series on her blog called Dating My Husband.

I am so excited to have Ashley Rodriguez of Not Without Salt here on the show.

On What Drew Her To Starting a Blog:

Ashley Rodriguez of Not Without Salt on The Dinner Special podcast talking about what drew her to start blogging.

When my husband and I were living in LA and I was working at Spago, I would come home and have all these crazy stories from the night’s work. He was like, “You should start a blog.” And that was the first I’d ever heard of the word blog.

As I do often with his ideas, initially, I laughed it off and I’m like, “No, who would read that? What is that? I don’t know plus I don’t really have time for that. I’m working at the restaurant all the time.”

It wasn’t in the plan for me to leave the restaurant so abruptly. We found out we were pregnant and then things changed from there.

The blog initially started after we had moved back home to Washington State, and I started my own dessert catering and wedding cake business. And so the blog was my free website.

It started off like, “Hey, look at the cake I made last weekend,” that sort of thing, until it evolved into what it is now.

So it’s really the blog that taught me how to write recipes, how to take pictures of food, and even writing about life itself.

It’s really, really evolved over the eight years that I’ve done it.

On Blogging:

Ashley Rodriguez of Not Without Salt on The Dinner Special podcast talking about blogging and her process.

I think the most natural is the recipe development or the idea for the food.

Recipe writing is a whole other subject just because I’m not a meticulous cook, and so it’s hard to write recipes in that way. But coming up with the food ideas, I think, comes pretty naturally for me and then also the photography aspect.

The writing is the hardest and I think I could have so many more recipes and so many more photos and things like that than I actually share. But it’s often the writing and what’s the story behind it and what’s the point of this recipe that keeps me from sharing more often.

It just takes so much time, and it takes so much attention.

I feel like I’ve lost touch with the blog through the process of writing the book because I’ve put all of myself into the book, which I wanted to do, but sadly the blog lost its way. So I’m hoping to find my way back to it.

Right now I’m in this crazy process having just launched a cookbook that my level of respect and empathy for others who have gone before me and wrote a cookbook, it’s just crazy. I just value cookbooks in such a different way now. So I’m going back and going through my library and finding inspiration from others in that way.

I look at the blog as kind of like this encyclopedia of what has inspired me, throughout the years, throughout the course of the years. It’s rare that I post a recipe that’s a straight recipe from someone else’s cookbook but there’s often inspiration there.

On Where Her Love of Pastries and Cooking Came From:

Ashley Rodriguez of Not Without Salt on The Dinner Special podcast talking about where her love of pastries and cooking came from.

I don’t have a super romantic idea of having all these memories in the kitchen and all of that. There are a few of those, but what I do have is I grew up not being afraid of the kitchen, which I think is a huge gift that my mom taught me.

Even though I didn’t spend hours with her in the kitchen, I watched her and I watched her not following a recipe. I watched her coming up with a dinner in 20 minutes from whatever she could find in the cupboards and throwing in some spices here and there and just being fearless, and I think that’s a huge, huge gift.

So it’s never been intimidating to me, the kitchen and cooking.

But it really wasn’t until I lived in Italy for a semester where I fell in love with food and the culture around the food. I was studying there as part of my art degree, when I once thought I was going to be a high school art teacher. It was the first time I experienced a culture where life happens around the table.

Initially I felt guilty for spending all my money on meals that would vanish and what do I have to show for it. But I quickly realized that that’s silly because what was happening around the table was even more important than the food that I was absolutely falling in love with and enjoying.

I came back with just this renewed excitement and just having completely fallen in love with food.

And then the pastry, I’ve always loved sweets and I felt that pastry really married my love of art and food, so that’s kind of the route I took.

On Her Popular Blog Series “Dating My Husband”:

Ashley Rodriguez of Not Without Salt on The Dinner Special podcast talking about her blog series Dating My Husband.

That series started four years ago which is crazy to me.

We have three young children, and when I started the series they were very, very young. Our youngest was just a baby, and I remember in that time missing my husband.

We both worked from home so it’s not that we weren’t seeing each other, but we were completely not connecting and we were just basically trying to survive that time of our lives.

I remember always just looking at him and realizing that I see him more as my roommate rather than my husband or best friend. And I really didn’t like that feeling.

The way that we used to connect, we would go out every Friday night before we had children when we were dating and try new restaurants and new foods. We kept journals, going to these restaurants, on what we tried and I really missed that.

Going out on a weekly basis wasn’t really in the budget like it used to be, but I realized that the kids go to bed pretty early and the hours that we were using in the evening, I would often grab my computer and he would grab his. And I would go to the couch and turn on the TV and eventually fall asleep on the couch.

There were many hours in the day where we were just not using because I often used that as my time, once the kids were in bed, I’m off the clock, I’m done.

But what happened then is I completely neglected our relationship and forgot how important that was and it was definitely taking its toll.

The weekly date nights that we started, I used it as a time to really stretch myself in the kitchen too.

Because the other thing that happens sometimes when you have children is you kind of get into these ruts and cooking becomes a chore and I wanted to continue to fuel my passion for it and love for it.

So I stretched myself in the kitchen and cooked the sort of food that I don’t cook on a regular basis and really make that evening feel special.

The initial part of the series was that yes, we would do this once a week, which we definitely tried to do. We still try to do it. It does not always work but that’s okay. It worked really well when I was writing a book about it because the accountability of writing a book made it.

On Her Book, Date Night In:

Ashley Rodriguez of Not Without Salt on The Dinner Special podcast talking about her cookbook Date Night In.

As I saw the response from Dating My Husband, I realized okay, I’ve hit on something here that people can relate to which was exciting.

The emails that I got from people from reading that series and the comments I received from those posts were by far just some of my absolute favorite.

As much as I love food and cooking and recipes, again, it’s really what happens around that food and around the table that’s what really excites me. And so that was really wonderful. Plus it put to use all the relationship classes and the relationship books that I read growing up. It married these two subjects that I find very, very fascinating.

There is this woman, she’s a Seattle food writer, Rebekah Denn. She was the one that actually said, “I think there is a book here” and at that point, this was really, really early on in the series.

The desire to write a book was definitely, definitely there. I had had offers of writing a cupcake book or things like that and none of them really felt right. I explored this Dating My Husband option every now and again, but we hadn’t been doing it long enough for me to write about it from a really genuine and sincere place. It felt to me in midst of it a very, very slow process but eventually it came to be, and I spent a year working on the proposal and eight months writing the manuscript.

It really stays pretty consistent to the original posts. In fact, there are still rewritten versions of some of the original posts. But the book itself is 25 chapters and each chapter is a different meal.

It’s arranged seasonally and lots of them have cocktails.

They all have desserts since obviously that’s where it kind of all started from. And it’s fun food.

It’s not how we eat on an everyday, weekday basis, but there’s fried chicken and the food that excites me and kind of lures me into the date.

Each chapter starts with a really honest narrative about dating my husband and about just the intention behind it and just what it takes to make a long-term relationship really work. And obviously, there’s much joy and happiness in that but there is a lot of work, so I speak really honestly about our marriage.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

I just started watching Master Chef Junior with my kids, which has been so fun. I usually don’t like those kind of reality cooking shows, but to experience it with them and for them to see these young kids have so much talent and so much ability in the kitchen, it’s been really inspiring.

As a result of that, actually, I’m teaching my eight-year-old how to make an apple pie today. So I’m pretty excited.

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

I think probably many of them you already do know about.

I read Sprouted Kitchen, Seven Spoons, and actually both of those they have books coming out this year.

And another good friend of mine has the blog, A Sweet Spoonful.

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

I think Instagram is my most happy place right now as far as social media stuff goes.

I follow a ton of food people for sure, but I actually love following people who aren’t in the food world. So different artists. Right now I’m following Lisa Condlin who’s an artist/illustrator. Helen Dealtry, who’s out of New York, painter.

It’s fun to step outside the food realm.

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

Salt!

I think it’s one of the most important ingredients, if not the most, and I think home cooks tend to be a little bit afraid of using a lot of salt.

It still sort of has a bad rap although that’s changing, which I’m very happy about.

And salt of different kinds and varieties, it’s exciting to play around with that and different flavored salts and things like that. Although I usually tend to stick with vanilla and smoked salt. The other ones don’t do it for me.

Name one ingredient you cannot live without?

Salt.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

Anything by Nigel Slater just really, really makes me happy. It makes my life better.

I go through so many different phases. I’m inspired by different books at so many different times.

Last night I cooked from this Frankies Spuntino cookbook that was really fun and it’s a beautiful, beautiful book.

I have so many friends that have written books that are really fun to read and inspiring.

I love particularly the book Eat. I wish I could write a cookbook like that. It’s basically just a list of ingredients and how to put them together, but it doesn’t really give super precise measurements. Just a nob of this and a bit of that and so I love that.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

I wish my husband was here to answer that. He is the family DJ.

He has such a great taste of music and he puts on music tailored fit to our date nights and all that kind of stuff, but I don’t really know what we’re listening to a lot of the time.

Keep Posted on Ashley:

Ashley Rodriguez of Not Without Salt on The Dinner Special podcast talking about how to keep posted with what she is up to.

I really like Instagram. I think that’s my most regular. That and my Facebook page for the site. So on instagram I’m @Ashrod and Facebook is, you can find me at Not Without Salt.

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    Filed Under: Podcast Tagged With: 2013 Saveur Awards Best Cooking Blog, A Sweet Spoonful, Ashley Rodriguez, Beverly Hills, Cookbook Author, Date Night In, Dating My Husband, Food Blog, Food Blogger, Frankies Spuntino, Helen Dealtry, MasterChef Junior, Nigel Slater, Not Without Salt, Pastries, Rebekah Denn, Seven Spoons, Spago, Sprouted Kitchen

    004: Elena Rosemond-Hoerr: How Southern Food Stands Out From Other Cuisines

    February 23, 2015 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

    Elena Rosemond-Hoerr of Biscuits and Such on The Dinner Special podcast talking about keeping posted with her.
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    Elena Rosemond-Hoerr of Biscuits and Such on The Dinner Special podcast on How Southern Food Stands Out From Other Cuisines

    Biscuits and Such

    On her blog, Elena shares her love of southern cuisine and southern culture, and apart from the amazing recipes, you'll find gems such as her Cast Iron Chronicles, which is a series that documents the restoration of a seriously rusted cast iron pan.

    She co-authored a cookbook called The American Cookbook: A Fresh Take on Classic Recipes, contributed recipes to The Meat Cookbook, and has a new book coming out in April called The No Time To Cook! Book, which you can preorder.

    I am so delighted to have Elena Rosemond-Hoerr from Biscuits and Such here on the show today.

    On Missing Home:

    Elena Rosemond-Hoerr of Biscuits and Such on The Dinner Special podcast talks about missing home.

    I graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art which is an art school in 2008. I graduated right at the beginning of the recession which meant that I took a job that I didn't really want just to sort of float along. I was living in D.C. with my then fiancé, who's now my husband, and the apartment was decorated with all of his stuff which meant swords and dragons.

    I was so out of place and I felt so homesick.

    I just kept telling myself that if I could only make food that reminded me of home, I would feel better and it would be the way to get myself through this stretch.

    I really wanted to make my grandmother's country-style steak, but I couldn't remember the whole recipe and I was a little dodgy on it. So I looked online because food blogs were starting to become a thing and I felt like I might be able to find some resources and there were no southern food blogs.

    It was just a total lack of availability; there was nothing representative of the south online.

    So I was complaining about it to Dan, my husband, and he was like, 'Well, you could just do it.' I was like, 'Oh, yeah, that's a good point.'

    So I have a degree in photography, that's my background, and he is a web developer. So we put together Biscuits and Such and the first post, which was Country-Style Steak went up in October of 2008.

    I have gone back and updated a lot of the photos and a lot of old posts. But, I have left the photos on that post because they are horrible and since they're so bad I think it's nice to look back sometimes and see how far I've come.

    It's a good indicator of how much the blog and I have progressed over the past six years.

    On Cooking:

    Elena Rosemond-Hoerr of Biscuits and Such on The Dinner Special podcast talks about cooking.

    My family is very passionate about cooking, all sides.

    My mother is from New Jersey and her mother is very Sicilian and her father is very Irish; both families are recent immigrants and food is the way that they give love and the way that they nurture each other.

    My father's family is very, very southern and on that side, also, food is how you comfort. You bring food to friends and relatives and families; potlucks for funerals, potlucks for weddings. It's the way that we nurture each other. So I grew up in a family where even through a lot of passionate fighting, the way that we connected and the way that we communicated was around the dinner table.

    So I'm definitely not a chef. I learned from my parents and my grandparents and from experimenting. But food is something I've always been very passionate about.

    I cook for my family pretty frequently. When I first started the blog, the person I was thinking of most was my grandmother, my father's mother, Barbara. We just spent a ton of time together throughout my childhood and my teenage years.

    She cooked with me a lot and both of my parents were not super keen on having us in the kitchen when we were growing up because it got in the way of the productive things. But my grandmother would let me make JELL-O with her and let me dabble with her. It's really where I learned how to experiment.

    I do love cooking for my family, now. My dad and I cook together all the time and it's really nice to talk to them about food and to feed them and to share traditions. Especially because what I focused the blog on is our southern food culture. So I really had a great opportunity to connect with my family about our family food traditions and foods that they grew up eating, and that they still love, and that I grew up eating and that I still love. That's been really nice.

    On Southern Cuisine:

    Elena Rosemond-Hoerr of Biscuits and Such on The Dinner Special podcast talks about southern cuisine.

    The thing that stands out about this so much, to be both in southern cuisine and southern culture, is just the sense of warmth and a sense of community. I feel so loved everywhere I go in the south. The grocery store, my vet, the parents at the school where I teach. Everyone is just loving, and friendly, and welcoming, and warm and that's one of the things that I missed the most when I was outside the south.

    Southern food is kind of the same way. It's home food, it's comfort food. It's not overly experimental or fancy. It's just good, quality ingredients made with care and that is something that I think is really special.

    It definitely has its roots in sort of frugal, simple, farm-based, agricultural-based communities. They didn't have a lot of many things, but what they had was the time and energy to put into the ingredients and to really cook with quality and care.

    On Being Fearless in The Kitchen:

    Elena Rosemond-Hoerr of Biscuits and Such on The Dinner Special podcast talks about being fearless in the kitchen.

    I was definitely always fearless.

    It’s a really important quality, especially during recipe development.

    I learned a lot of techniques, both with my parents and grandparents and through trial and error, just by sort of seeing what would happen if I combined these ingredients or if I tried this method.

    I drew a lot of inspiration from watching them and from cooking with them. But a lot of my progression has just been through seeing what would happen and a lot of times failing and being cool with that.

    On Kitchen Disasters:

    Elena Rosemond-Hoerr of Biscuits and Such on The Dinner Special podcast talks about her kitchen disasters.

    The first Thanksgiving after Dan and I started dating, we had his sister, her husband and their then two-year-old daughter, our niece Meredith, over for dinner. It was the first time that I'd ever cooked for them.

    There was a lot of pressure because I had just started this blog and I bought a pumpkin to make a pumpkin pie. I was super excited to make it from the pumpkin and to do it from scratch. I made it and I was so proud. It had taken me hours.

    Meredith and I whipped the cream together and we put it out. She took a bite and she started to bawl.

    I was like, 'What happened?'

    Then, I tasted it. I realized that in my excitement, I had forgotten to put spices in the pumpkin pie and sugar in the whipped cream. Two super essential ingredients. Pumpkins don't really taste like anything without the pumpkin pie spices. You need those. It was awful, it was so awful, I was so embarrassed.

    The next year for her birthday, I made Meredith a chocolate mousse pie and she said it was 'pony magical.' That's about the highest praise a three-year-old will give you.

    On Co-authoring – The American Cookbook: A Fresh Take on Classic Recipes

    Elena Rosemond-Hoerr of Biscuits and Such on The Dinner Special podcast talking about co-authoring a cook book.

    I got a call last June from someone at DK, which is a publisher based in London. They have U.S. and international publications and they're part of Random House.

    They said that they had been interested in doing a cookbook about American cuisine, but that the author that had pitched the idea was from London. They didn't think it was a great idea for an English author to fly solo writing an American cookbook, so, they were looking for an American author to work with her.

    I was super interested and it turned out that Caroline, my co-author, lives in Durham, which is about two hours away from where I live and is where I'm from. I drove up to meet her and we just really hit it off. We spent the day coming up with a list of all the recipes and dividing it up.

    Then I spent about three and a half, four weeks cooking, writing recipes and cooking like crazy. The whole book was cooked and tested and re-cooked and written in about three and half, four weeks.

    It was a really cool experience for me.

    I had obviously been writing recipes and developing recipes for the blog for a number of years, but it was my first experience writing for a book where there are standards for how the recipes need to be written. It's UK-based, so I had to measure and weigh everything because it's the metric system which I am not familiar with.

    There was this huge learning curve which was really challenging and also really fun. I'm very fortunate that my first cookbook was in such a wonderful environment where I had Caroline holding my hand and the editors holding my hand and everyone sort of showing me the ropes.

    I'm very fortunate that since the American cookbook, DK has asked me to come back and work with them on two additional projects. So I did The Meat Cookbook and then we just wrapped on The No Time to Cook! Book, which has been fun.

    The Meat Cookbook came out this past September so it's available. It's 300 recipes and so much more. It's a really great, solid cookbook and I contributed 50 recipes to that book.

    The Pressure Cooker:

    Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

    None. We don't have cable.

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

    Nothing in the House is one of my favorite ones. Not Without Salt is great. Those are probably my two favorites.

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

    Instagram is great. I follow a ton of food bloggers but then also, a lot of lifestyle bloggers. One of my favorites is Hey Natalie Jean.

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

    Red pepper flakes.

    Name one ingredient you cannot live without?

    Red pepper flakes.

    I love them because they add a really subtle heat. They add a nice undertone of spice that isn't overpowering and that you can use in any dish.

    I put them in everything.

    You never notice that they're there, but they add just a really rich and subtle heat, which I think is important in pretty much all savory dishes.

    What are a few cookbooks that have made your life better?

    I just bought Not Without Salt's new date night book, Date Night In.

    I love her blog and I love that 'Dating My Husband' series, so I'm really excited to dig into that one.

    When I was first learning how to cook, my husband bought me Tom Colicchio's Think Like a Chef. It's amazing because it teaches you processes, not recipes, which I think is so important, especially when you're first starting out.

    Ratio is another one that's similar that's really great.

    That teaches you how to make things… like the ratios for making cookies, the ratios for making cakes. The sort of standard recipes for all of these things that you can then adapt to your own needs.

    That is absolutely what made me the recipe developer that I am now. I have a foundational understanding of how to make different kinds of dishes.

    Keep Posted on Elena:

    Elena Rosemond-Hoerr of Biscuits and Such on The Dinner Special podcast talking about keeping posted with her.

    The blog is called Biscuits and Such. It's BiscuitsAndSuch.com. I am on Twitter and Instagram as @ElenaBrent. On Facebook as Biscuits and Such.

    So you can find me and follow the blog and see new posts and updates on all of those places.

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      Filed Under: Podcast Tagged With: Biscuits and Such, Cast Iron Chronicles, Cookbook Author, Country-style steak, Date Night In, Elena Rosemond-Hoerr, Food Blog, Food Blogger, Hey Natalie Jean, Jell-O, Maryland Institute College of Art, Not Without Salt, Nothing in the House, Ratio, Southern Cuisine, Southern Food, The American Cookbook: A Fresh Take on Classic Recipes, The Meat Cookbook, The No Time To Cook! Book, Think Like a Chef, Tom Colicchio

      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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