Dorie Greenspan | The Dinner Special podcast

120: Katie Wahlman: Finding A Creative Outlet In Baking

April 27, 2016 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

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Butterlust

Katie’s blog, Butterlust, allows her to combine her love of food with the need for a creative outlet. She is open and honest about everything she makes on her blog and believes that she could quite possibly be the messiest cook on the planet.

I am so thrilled to have Katie Wahlman of Butterlust with me here on the show.

On a Dish That’s Special to Her:

I would go back to that zucchini bread recipe that I was talking about because it is my grandma’s recipe and my mom grew up eating it and then I grew up eating it. Even my mom, who, like I said, isn’t a big cook, isn’t a home baker, isn’t a home cook, it’s one of those things that even neighbors growing up and my best friend’s moms and everybody would get so excited when my mom would bring over a loaf of zucchini bread.

It really is the first baking memory from scratch that I have. You have to grate all the zucchini – that would be my job. Then my mom would let me pour in the oil and do all the stirring. It doesn’t require a mixer. It’s a really simple quick bread. But it does have a lot of memories attached to it for me as well.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

I don’t have cable. My boyfriend and I recently cut the cord and we don’t have a cable service, so I don’t watch a ton of food TV, but I do watch a couple food shows on Netflix. The Great British Baking Show is on Netflix now, and I’m still on season 1, but it’s absolutely adorable and I’m kind of obsessed with it. Everybody is so happy and supportive of one another, and they make really amazing things and you learn so much from it.

Sometimes while my boyfriend and I cook dinner, we watch Chopped reruns. It’s kind of an inspiration while we’re trying to make something out of what’s in the refrigerator. So we’ll do that. And my favorite thing that I rave about to anybody who will listen, is Chef’s Table on Netflix. The six-part series documentary is about some of the best chefs in the world. The cinematography is just so stunning. I’ve probably watched each of the episodes three to four times; I love it.

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

I follow like 200-plus blogs. There are so many inspiring bloggers out there. A couple of my go-to’s that I will check every once in a while if I’m in need of inspiration or just want to see what these girls are up to, I love Hummingbird High, Michelle Lopez.

Two Red Bowls, which is Cynthia. She makes these amazing beautiful dishes. And then My Name is Yeh. She’s Molly Yeh of North Dakota. She makes the most fun, just happy type of desserts, so she’s really an inspiration too.

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

Some of my favorite Instagramers are probably @ladyandpups. Her stuff is absolutely beautiful. Again, a lot of Asian inspired food but her photography is just really stunning. Beth Kirby of @local_milk. She’s kind of just exploded in the last few years. I can’t even understand how she can take such beautiful photos. They’re just absolutely stunning. And then I guess probably Eva Kosmas Flores from Adventures In Cooking, who I know that you’ve also had on the podcast. Her stuff’s beautiful as well. I love how moody and Pacific Northwestern it is. The lighting is just absolutely stunning.

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

Does a couch count? I feel like my living room and kitchen are just basically like one big room. I don’t really have anything super unusual. I would say my most treasured items would be I have this antique teal-blue Pyrex bowl that belonged to my great-aunt Aggie who lived to be 102. So I have that, and I’m like, “Don’t touch it.” My boyfriend tries to use it to cook in and I’m like, “Don’t! If you break it, I’ll die.” Probably also my KitchenAid mixer. As a baker, your KitchenAid mixer is your best friend.

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

This doesn’t necessarily apply to baking as much, but I used to hate, despise broccoli, and now I love it. I eat it everyday. It’s my favorite vegetable.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

Well, like I said, I don’t have a lot of room for cookbooks. My collection is pretty slim currently, but the, Baking: From My Home To Yours by Dorie Greenspan is probably my favorite baking staple.

I also have this cookbook called, Vintage Cakes by Julie Richardson. She apparently found a box of old vintage recipes in the attic of a bakery that she bought or something like that, and tweaked them to make them a little bit more modern and created this vintage cakes book out of it, which kind of goes with the scheme of me really loving these simple, really rustic skillet cakes. A lot of the stuff in there is along those lines, and everything I’ve made from it has been totally spot on. So I actually really love that one too. I’ve been baking from it a lot lately.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

Probably anything shamelessly poppy. I have a wide variety of likes when it comes to music, but when I’m baking, I want to dance around and have a good time in the kitchen. So, probably Taylor Swift’s, 1989. I think when that album came out, for the next three months, that was the only thing I listened to while I baked. I find myself listening to a lot of Hall & Oates and old pop music which is a lot of fun. So yeah, anything that I can dance around to and have fun with.

On Keeping Posted with Katie:

I’m probably the most active on Instagram, so my Instagram handle is @butterlustkatie.

117: Hannah Kirshner: Studying Food Through Work

April 6, 2016 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

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Sweets & Bitters

Hannah is the founder and editor of Sweets & Bitters, a blog and series of printed mini-cookbooks offering a beautiful and practical vision of everyday pleasure. Each volume features fun recipes with helpful tips, and sets the scene with photo essays.

Hannah grew up on a small farm in Washington State, and continued to study food by working her way through a number of varied food roles: from harvesting herbs on an organic farm to developing recipes for publications. She is happiest when her creative and culinary interests overlap.

On A Dish that is Special to Her:

Since I’m just back from my time in Japan, I’m thinking about Japanese food a lot. I had a little apartment there, and I would cook every day. I would go shop. There was a produce market and a butcher right next to my apartment on my street. It was so fun to go each day and get fresh things from them, and try and cook.

But I didn’t get to learn recipes as much as I wanted to. I’d imagined that I would be cooking with grandmas and getting behind the scenes in restaurants. And it took two months just to get to the point where I had those relationships. So maybe next time I go back, I’ll get to do that. But mostly, I was just cooking classic Japanese comfort dishes, or things that I already knew. I definitely had to shift the way that I cooked to suit the type of kitchen ingredients I had there.

One of my favorite things to cook for myself is Oyakodon, which is the rice bowl with chicken and egg. It roughly translates to mother and child bowl, which I just think is delightful.

First of all, let me just describe the whole dish for anybody that doesn’t know. It’s chicken thigh, usually, like the dark meat of chicken, and egg, and some negi, which is the Japanese green onion. It’s like a scallion, in between a scallion and a leek. It’s thicker than a scallion and a little sweeter. But you can easily use scallion too. So you’ve got the chicken, the egg, the negi, and sort of a sweet sauce, with sake, mirin, soy sauce, and dashi, the Japanese kelp and fish stock. And it’s over rice, so it’s just sweet and salty and savory, and it’s over rice. And it’s really easy and fast to make.

I would just crisp the skin of the chicken first, under the broiler, because that was my little change to it, because I love crisp chicken skin. And then, meanwhile make the sauce — dashi, mirin, soy sauce, and sake, and just get the balance of the sauce to taste right. And really, it can be to taste, a little sugar in there too. Then, add the chicken to that, cut it up into little bite-sized pieces, because you’re going to eat it with chopsticks, and then put that in the sauce. And then when it’s almost done, add the negi or a scallion. Then you beat a couple of eggs with a little bit more dashi, and just pour that into the pan, and let it almost cook, and just slide the whole thing onto a big bowl of rice.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

I actually don’t watch any, I don’t have television.

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

As far as blogs, I really love David Lebovitz, he mostly writes about baking, and cooking in his little kitchen in Paris. And he’s so funny, and witty, and his recipes are really, really reliable. Also, the New York Times cooking site I use a lot. I really love the recipes form the New York Times.

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

Instagram is the only one that I really use. And farm animals, flowers, and food are the only things I want to feed my feed. Saipua, I don’t know if I’m saying their name right either, but it’s a florist from Brooklyn, and they actually moved upstate, and have a farm. I really love following them.

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

Just back from Japan, I actually purchased an iron nabe, big cooking pot, which made my luggage really heavy. But it’s hand hammered iron with a cedar lid, and it makes the kitchen smell like Japan every time I cook in it.

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

I think I still dislike all the things I’ve always disliked. There’s only a few. I don’t like peanut butter.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

I really like the classics like, Joy of Cooking and Fannie Farmer. I like, How to Cook Everything. And then again, David Lebovitz, and Dorie Greenspan for baking, they’re two of my favorites.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

There are some funny old jazz song like, Everybody Eats When They Come to my House.

On Keeping Posted with Hannah:

Mostly I use Instagram, though I’m on Twitter and Facebook.

086: Samantha Seneviratne: Cooking Up A Career in Baking and Food

October 19, 2015 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

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Love Comma Cake

Sam has been a food editor at Good Housekeeping, Fine Cooking, and Martha Stewart’s Everyday Food. Today, she’s a freelance recipe developer and food stylist and recently released her first cookbook called The New Sugar and Spice: A Recipe for Bolder Baking. She was also a Finalist in the 2015 Saveur Blog Awards for Best Baking and Desserts Blog.

I’m so psyched to have Samantha Seneviratne of Love Comma Cake here on the show today.

On Baking and Sweet Things:

I think I knew I was going to be a baker from when I was a really little kid. I told my family that I was going to be a baker and a librarian when I was five. I always loved dough and sugar and butter. I always loved working with those things. So as soon as I knew that people needed jobs to keep afloat, I realized that dough was probably the way I should go. So I think it’s in my blood.

I went to culinary school and I studied both savory and sweet, and I worked as a food editor at different food magazines. So in doing that, I pretty much have to do both sweet and savory, and these days I do some styling and recipe development both sweet and savory. I do both. I love doing the baked goods. That’s what I really want to do all the time.

On Finding Her Career in Food:

Well, it took me a long time to figure how I was going to do it. I went to college. I went to a liberal arts college, and I studied Latin American studies, and Spanish Literature, and then I got a job after school in public television, and then worked for a different non-profit. I had a bunch of other things that I was directing my life towards. Then, all of a sudden, I just realized what I really loved to do is cook, and that I should just go to culinary school and make it happen. But it took me a while to figure out how to do it because I’m not really a restaurant chef. I have great respect for restaurant chefs but that’s not what I do, and I knew that wouldn’t be my path. So it took me awhile to figure out exactly how I was going to make a living cooking. And magazine test kitchens were the place for me for awhile and that worked out well.

I had a friend who worked at the magazine, and she played on a soccer team with an editor at Gourmet magazine. So I told her I was interested in food and she said, “Well, why don’t you meet this guy. He’s a food editor at Gourmet.” And he took me on a tour of the gourmet test kitchen and showed me what he did, and I thought, “That looks like a good job. That looks like exactly where I should be.” So after that visit with him, I went to culinary school and that’s what I did.

On Her Food Heroes and What She’d Make for Them:

I mean the baking heroes like Dorie Greenspan and David Lebovitz, and there are so many, Rose Levy Beranbaum. There are so many baking stars, so many classics.

I’m really into fried dough. Lately, I’ve been really making donuts and just this morning we made apple fritters and funnel cake. I think fried dough is what I’m really feeling these days. It’s not good for you, but it’s fun to make.

The thing is the difference when you fry it and then eat it right out of the oil, toss it in sugar and then eat it. It’s a whole other ball game. It’s so much more delicious than anything you can ever buy because it’s a timing thing. So I’d probably make some fried dough of some kind.

On Her Blog:

I wanted to get more of an online presence that was just me. I was working at different magazines, and I love working in magazine test kitchens because you’re really part of a team, and you’re all creating this food in this vision and under this brand name.

I wanted to have a body of work that was mine, and that I could contribute to and that was 100% my voice. Just exactly what I wanted to make whenever I wanted to make it and so that’s what I did.

I just was craving a place where I can have complete control over everything I did. So that means any whim that I had I just was able to do it.

On Simple Rules of Thumb for Baking for Greater Success:

I think people are more scared of baking than they need to be. There’s a little more flexibility than people think there is. Things could vary slightly depending on how warm your butter is or something like that, but your disasters are rare, right? So measuring flour is important, temperatures are important. I think measuring flour is number one. Once you’ve learned how to measure flour, things are going to improve greatly, or get a scale, also, a really good way to go.

(On baking with cold eggs.) You can totally warm them up. There are little tricks like you can keep your eggs in some warm water and that’ll heat them up. Or you can even if you crack them into a bowl and then let them warm up that way. That also works. You can warm up your butter by pounding it with a rolling pin or sometimes I even microwave it on a low 20% power, 50% power, you can warm your butter up. Which a lot of people don’t recommend because it’s easy to go from cold butter to melted butter and then you’re kind of screwed. But you can do it. It works. But I think measuring flour is number one.

On Her Cookbook, The New Sugar and Spice:

It was a long process. I probably started a proposal for that book four years ago. It took me a long time to write the proposal. I wrote a proposal for a book I wasn’t that happy with, and then I scrapped it and then wrote a new proposal, and it took a long time to get the proposal in good shape. And then I shopped around with agents. Then she helped me work on the proposal and then we pitched the book. It’s a long process, but I always had the dream of writing cookbook. So just finding the book that felt right and it took me a long time to get there, and I think I did. I like it.

It’s basically a baking book and I use spices and the chapters of the books are all organized by spice. The general idea of the book is that I try to use a little less sugar. I don’t like overly sweet desserts, and I think that it’s easy to fall to that trap. I think sugar can be a crutch. So I try to develop recipes that were a little bit less sweet and used spices to amp up the flavor in a more complex and interesting way. That’s not to say they are low sugar or diet or anything like that, but they seem to me to be a little less sweet and a little more interesting.

I also wrote a lot of history. I got into researching the history of certain spices and how that related a little bit to my family history because my parents are from Sri Lanka. I started digging into the history of cinnamon, I realized that my great grandmother grew clove trees in her yard, and my great grandfather grew vanilla beans. And I learned that my family’s history was intertwined with spices in that fun way, so I wrote a lot about that.

I had fun writing the intros that were all about spice history and my family history and having really personal head notes about my parents, and my brother, and things like that. That felt unique, and fun, and special to me because, as a food editor for a magazine, you don’t ever get to just write about yourself or write about why you like something. You don’t get that opportunity very often and so I took it in the book.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

I don’t have cable television so I don’t watch anyone.

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

I have a lot of food blogs that I love. It’s going to be hard to list them. I love Brooklyn Supper, and I love Two Red Bowls. And I love The Fauxmartha. Those are three right now I’ll tell you that I love.

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

The only thing I do out of all those things is Instagram. So I would say, I think David Lebovitz is really funny and his Instagram account makes me laugh.

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

I have a little dowel that I got at a hardware store. I had them cut it down so it’s like a four-inch dowel. I don’t know what they’re for when you buy them at the hardware store, but I use it to roll out little pastries, and I love it. It’s the most useful tool in the world and it was a dollar.

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

I’m into anise seeds now and I didn’t think I was into it before. Actually the book, writing that book, I have a couple of recipes for anise seeds in a biscotti and in a pear tart, and I think they’re both delicious. I’ve really come around on anise seed.

I hate liquorice like so many people, but I didn’t realize that if you use anise seeds sparingly and if you pair it with something delicious, it can work in combination with other things. I just hadn’t figured that out yet, but I like it.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

Regan Daley’s In the Sweet Kitchen is one of my all-time favorite books in the whole world. I think that book is super smart. There’s a lot of information at the beginning. It’s a baking companion, and there are glossaries and flavor pairing charts and things like that, that make baking really easy and inspire you to do good things. And then the second half of the book is all these wonderful recipes. I think that book is genius. That book makes my life better.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

Oh my gosh, anything. I just like Beyonce, Taylor Swift, and all those guys. That kind of music, I love it.

On Keeping Posted with Sam:

Instagram probably. You can find me at @samanthaseneviratne, and you can follow me there or you can sign up to receive all updates on my blog Love Comma Cake.

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

June 17, 2015 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

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Foodista, International Food Blogger Conference

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

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

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

On Her Passion for Food and Cooking:

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

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

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

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

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

On Starting Foodista:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s the short story of how we started.

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

On the International Food Blogger Conference:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On How Food Blogging Has Changed Since 2009:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

I love anything Jamie Oliver.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

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

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

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

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

On Keeping Posted with Sheri:

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