Ella Fitzgerald | The Dinner Special podcast

113: Lynn Chen: Forging a New Relationship with Food

March 9, 2016 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

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The Actor’s Diet

On her blog, The Actor’s Diet, Lynn shares restaurant views, fashion and beauty tips, recipes and her life in show biz. She credits her blog for helping her come to terms with her eating disorders and it’s now a place for celebrating food.

An actor, body image activist and podcaster, just to name a few things she’s up to, Lynn is a media maven and she looks like she’s having an awesome time with it.

I’m so psyched to have Lynn Chen of The Actor’s Diet here on the show today.

(*All photos below are Lynn’s.)

On Her Blog:

In 2009, I was already reading a lot of food blogs, the food blogs that existed. The scene was different in 2009 than it is today but the blogs I was reading at the time, the format that was very popular was food journaling, just basically showing what people ate on a daily basis. And for me, I had been coming to terms with a very tumultuous relationship with food and eating disorders. I was a binge eater and I was also a little bit anorexic.

So for me, finding out what portion sizes were was really tricky. And so, to read these blogs made me feel like I could have a guide as to how much you were supposed to eat, and to feel full or satiated. So that’s how it started. I was reading these food blogs and then one day I was like, “I wonder if I should start a food blog?”

When I started, not only was the food blog scene different but the acting scene was different, where in my industry, you were just an actor. You weren’t an actor/blogger/anything else, which is acceptable today but back then, it just wasn’t. And it was like, “No, you’re an actor, you have to just act, you should not show your personal side because no one wants to see your business.” And actually what happened was, I was fired by both my agent and my manager and instead of trying to find a new agent and a manager, which I knew I could have done, I was like, “Let me take a year to come to terms with this whole food thing and what do I have to lose?”

If I just stop acting, and stop having a job that requires me to look a certain way, and take that pressure off of me and try to forge this new relationship with food, let’s see what happens. At the time, I was also trying to get pregnant. So, I was like, “Let’s just see what happens.” And the blog started initially as a food journal and it was me and my friend Christy Meyers, a holistic health counselor and we were basically just posting what we ate every day, and it just blew up.

And for Christy, it became very clear after a while, she was like, “I don’t want to do this,” because she was already counseling clients one-on-one. It was, the last thing I want to do at the end of the day is write more about food and also she didn’t want her clients to read it and be like, “Hey, you ate chocolate cake. What’s the deal?” So, she backed away from it and I kept going and over the years, I just have switched the format a little bit, where I’m not posting everything I’m eating on a daily basis, which gets old. It’s been almost seven years now. It’s crazy.

On Coming to Terms with Her Eating Disorder:

I think that when I was in recovery, they were always saying to me, you don’t just give up an addiction. It’s not like you can just be like that’s it, I’m done. You have to replace it with something. And so, for me, instead of focusing on counting calories or figuring out how much fat content was in something, I was figuring out how to make the photograph look beautiful, and I was focused on this new obsession, this new way of writing about food and talking about food, which took my focus off of what I looked like, what I was ingesting, but still fed that part of me that needed to be obsessive about food.

And also, not only was the creative side of me fulfilled, but just getting so much free food as a food blogger, I didn’t feel like anything was off limits because when you have a house that’s full of potato chips, the last thing you feel like doing is binge eating potato chips because there so many. You can only do that for so long. So, it really helped me come to terms with that whole concept of, “Oh, I have to eat this because this may be the last time.” There was no last supper for me anymore.

That was always the problem for me in the past, I was binge eating because, “That’s it, this is the last time and then tomorrow I go on my diet.” There was no diet anymore, there was no last supper, it was just always there and then it lost its appeal, its magic. It just became what it was.

On What She Would Say to Someone Struggling with an Eating Disorder:

I hear you, is what I would say to them because there were so many years, where I was not only struggling but I was also getting help simultaneously and I was like, “What’s going on? How come I’m not getting better? How come I’m doing everything I think I’m supposed to be doing and it’s still not getting any better?” And it was years of that. I really, truly think that it does get better and I can’t give you any magic formula, just like no one else could give me a magic formula to get better. I’m living proof that it happens.

So if I can just be the embodiment and let you know that it happens and you’ll get better. You just will, I know you will but you just have to keep at it. I would say, don’t beat yourself up because, for me, it would always be like, I was “good” for six months and then I fell off the wagon and then I’d have three months of being off the wagon and just be like, “I can never get back.” That’s just the way it was for a long time, and eventually, it stopped being that way.

On Thick Dumpling Skin:

Thick Dumpling Skin came about because, for the first few years of writing The Actor’s Diet, I was writing a lot about my eating disorder, obviously because I was coming to terms with it and I got such a response from so many people, and it was so specifically about culture and our families. It was just something that I could really relate to as an Asian American being in a culture, where we don’t really talk about our feelings.

When we socialize and gather, it’s all about the food, not how are you doing? It’s how much have you eaten and have you eaten? And, oh try this, and you’ve got to get the recipe. I felt like because it was such a serious topic and it was coming up so often, I didn’t want my blog, The Actor’s Diet to become just a site for that, I wanted to give it another place. I was listening to NPR one day and I heard this interview with a woman named Lisa Lee talking about how she went to Taiwan and was forced to go on this diet and that it was just okay.

It was considered totally fine to starve herself, and I was like, “Who is this woman, I need to connect with her.” I went on Facebook, I looked her up, we had 40 friends in common. I went to the person at the top of the list, he introduced us and the next thing you know, I’m connected with Lisa Lee and she’s like, “We have to do something.” We thought about making a book, we thought about making a documentary, then we were like, “Let’s just blog.”

So, we started Thick Dumpling Skin and immediately heard from all these people who wanted to share their story. And all these years later, we’ve been in NPR ourselves, we’ve been in Marie Claire. We’re still the only source that exists on the Internet for Asian-Americans and that just shows me how much more work we have to do. Because people still think of eating disorders as a primarily white, middle-class woman problem, and we see that it’s not. But the problem is, especially in the Asian-American community, therapy is not an option for a lot of people.

People don’t want you talking to strangers and paying them. That doesn’t make sense to them. So for a lot of, especially younger people who are still under their parents’ rules and insurance, they have no one to talk to, so we are hoping that our site is a place for them.

On the Thick Dumpling Skin Podcast:

What I love about the podcast formula, is that you can just talk off the top of your head and I think that a lot of, when you’re talking about body image and you’re talking about eating issues, when we write it out, you feel this responsibility to be so precious with your words and to edit yourself. And I think that in order to have this dialogue, we need to have it in everyday conversation.

So, what we hope is that, with the podcasts, we want to go to the experts, get them on the phone, have them answer the questions because I’m not comfortable answering questions that are that serious.

On Her Videos:

Well, my husband works at BuzzFeed, so full disclosure on that, and the reason I started YouTubing, was because, it’s funny, so my husband would just be like, “I have to make a video today. You want to eat donuts?” and I’d be like, “Yes, I’m not doing anything, let’s go and eat donuts.” So we just started making these videos when he was free and when I was free for his job and I started to grow a following from it and people started subscribing to my YouTube channel. which before that had only been movies I’d been in and clips from other YouTube interviews that I had done, nothing that I created on my own. And since people were subscribing, I was like, “Oh, I think I should create some content for new subscribers, otherwise, I’m wasting time. So being on BuzzFeed, has been really interesting because it’s opened me up to a completely different audience.

The same exact week I was on Fear The Walking Dead, which was the number one cable premier ever in the history of TV. I was a guest star on that and more people recognized me from BuzzFeed videos than from being on Fear The Walking Dead. But they didn’t know who I was, they were just like, BuzzFeed. They didn’t know my name or anything and in that, I realized, “Oh, I think I should try to do a little shift,” because I’ve been acting since I was five years old, doing this a long time and let’s just see what happens if I shift things around. So, I have new managers, they’re mainly focused on me as a blogger, as a food person, as a food host and we are going for it. We are going for the hosting TV stuff. I want to be the first Asian-American female to host her own show on Food Network.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

I watch so many cooking shows. It’s not even funny how many cooking shows I watch. They’re mostly, not competition.

I watch everything from the stuff on The Food Network and Cooking Channel that’s demonstrational, like The Pioneer Woman, The Barefoot Contessa. I even watch Semi-Homemade with Sandra Lee, which doesn’t even exist anymore. I watch The Kitchen, I watch America’s Test Kitchen, I watch The Chew. I just watch a lot of food shows.

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

Well, you’ve actually had a couple of them on your podcast already as guests. Lily from Kale & Caramel. I also read CakeSpy on a regular basis. There are a lot of blogs that I’ve been following since the beginning, like Kath Eats Real Food. She was one of the main reason I became a blogger. She knows I love her and I’ve just been following her and her life forever.

I like Cupcakes & Cashmere, she lives in my neighborhood, so I stalk her online, so embarrassing. She’s great. I love her site and I like seeing parts of my neighborhood pop up on her site, makes me feel like seeing someone I know on TV. And Joy the Baker. She’s somebody I followed for a very long time and I’ve loved every incarnation of everything that she’s done. She has an Instagram feed now called Drake On Cake where she makes cakes and puts Drake lyrics on them and it’s of course, exploded the Internet as is everything she does. So, she’s great.

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

My friend, Leslie Durso is a vegan chef and I just love keeping in touch with her on Snapchat. My friend Whitney Adams, she has a great YouTube channel as well, she’s a wine expert. She is hilarious on Snapchat. I’m just starting to get into the Snapchat game, it’s not something for people over 20-something. So it’s a little strange, but I like that world a lot right now because it’s people being honest and real because it disappears.

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

I’m not too sentimental about stuff in my kitchen. Things break all the time but I guess, if there was something I was the most sentimental about, it would have to be my mug from college, my Wesleyan mug. It has four chips in it because I’ve dropped it but I can’t bring myself to throw it away because I went to college with it.

I think I ate ramen out of it, I can’t get rid of it. So I use that all the time but looks like crap.

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

I like everything, except, you know what I didn’t like growing up was raw tomatoes, on their own, I don’t even think I would go near one. In fact, when I was younger, and I used to drink a lot of orange juice, my mom would pour it for me and I would drink it and be like, “No, that tastes like raw tomatoes.” I think because I thought it would taste like V8.

Sometimes I remember being a jerk and refusing to drink my orange juice, even though I liked orange juice because I’d be like, “It tastes like raw tomatoes.” I like raw tomatoes today, not like eating them like apples or anything.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

I don’t cook from cookbooks that often, but I do use them as inspiration. Actually, a very sentimental item to me, is The Moosewood Cookbook. It’s probably a cookbook that I’ve had since college. It was what I first learned to cook from because I used to be a vegetarian and I still use it as inspiration sometimes. I just love that, it’s all hand drawn and it just reminds me of being young and not knowing what oregano was. How far have we come?

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

I don’t listen to music anymore. As I said, I listen to all these podcasts but I guess, you know what puts me in the mood to cook is, it’s a song, The Frim Fram Sauce, do you know that song?

It’s a jazz standard but there’s a great version of it that I think it’s Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald do. It’s a great song, it’s all about food.

On Keeping Posted with Lynn:

I think probably Facebook. I have double Instagrams, double Facebooks, The Actor’s Diet and Lynn Chen because one is for the blog, initially one was for acting but now, those worlds sort of coincided with one another. So, if you want to know what’s going on with me, I think the Lynn Chen Facebook fan page is probably the best one because I put everything that’s the most important to me there.

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

June 3, 2015 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

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

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

On How They Met:

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the Food Culture in Their Cities:

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Neighborhoods in Their Cities for Tasty Food:

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

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

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

On Local Dishes that Visitors May Not Know About:

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

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

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

On Their Blog:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On a Dish Not Turning Out as Planned:

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

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

Regina: We just did not prepare at all.

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

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

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

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

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

Regina: And dangerous.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Regina: It’s like The Flatbread Co.

Christa: Yeah, Flatbread Company.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

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

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

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

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

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

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

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

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

On Keeping Posted with Gardenia’s and Mint:

Regina: We are on Instagram.

Christa: Instagram.

Regina: And Facebook daily.

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

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

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

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

032: Luisa Weiss: How Travel Has Shaped Her Food Journey

April 29, 2015 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

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The Wednesday Chef, Food Blog

Luisa is an author, a food columnist for Harper’s Bazaar Germany, teacher of both writing and cooking and leads food tours in Berlin where she lives with her husband and son Hugo.

I am so thrilled to have Luisa Weiss of The Wednesday Chef here on the show today.

On How Her Travels Have Shaped Her Food Journey:

I grew up in an international home. My dad’s American, my mom is Italian and I was born and partially raised in Berlin.

My parents split up so I moved to Boston with my dad but kept coming back to Germany and Italy to see my mother. I’ve had lots of different food cultures in my life from the very beginning and moving to Boston for college was interesting in a way because I came from high school in Berlin and then college food, the dorm room, the freshman 15, all that was totally new to me. And then Paris…

Paris, the food education. Paris was obviously really wonderful. I don’t think I’ve had as much of an epiphany as a normal American would have just because Italy’s culture is similar in that they really revere ingredients.

Everywhere I’ve gone, I’ve definitely picked up something and taken it with me.

Italian food is what I’m really comfortable with and familiar with. I know exactly what it’s supposed to taste like and I have a lot of confidence in that.

But over the past 10 years of blogging, I’ve become so much better at cooking all kinds of different things. Now I feel like I say Italian but then I also want to say that I am really good at cooking Indian food at home now, and American food, and baking, and all kinds of other things.

So it’s still Italian but definitely there’s lots more going on now.

On How Her Blog Started:

I was working in book publishing and I had discovered food blogs a couple years before. I loved them. And it just dawned on me one day like, “I love reading food blogs. I love to cook and I love to write. Why aren’t I writing a food blog?”

At the time there were many food blogs already and I assumed if I threw my hat in the ring, that nobody would care or pay attention because I’d be the last one to the party. So I just did it on a whim and I thought it was going to be writing practice more than anything else.

I majored in English in college and I wanted to go to graduate school for writing. A professor of mine was like, “Don’t do it. If you’re going to write, you’ll do it out of your own accord.” But I didn’t and so finally the blog was meant to be a practice and then it turned into so much more.

I’ve been a passionate cook and baker my whole life really, but I got into this rut when I was living in New York, my early years in New York but also in Paris. I made the same things over and over again.

It’s not that I didn’t want to make anything else, it’s just that nothing occurred to me. What else would I cook other than these three things? But I was really obsessive about clipping recipes and so I have binders and binders full of recipes from the newspaper food sections. So when the time came to come up with a concept for the blog, like some kind of a focus, right away I was like, “Okay, well I guess I’ll just cook my way through the newspaper recipes.” Then I could never cook a recipe twice because I always had the blog to think about. So in the past 10 years the blog has been my culinary education.

On Cooking for Hugo:

When Hugo was born or when he started eating solid foods, I was coming up with silly little ideas that I thought other people might be interested in. It was also meant to be a journal of what I was feeding him, too. Like, “This was a good idea. Let me write it down so that I remember it next time,” there’s nothing in it that’s earth shattering. There’s nothing totally new in it, but I thought I would have appreciated or I do appreciate when other mothers say, “Oh, this really worked for my kid,” because even though I’m such an omnivore and my husband too, we did not give birth to an omnivore. Everybody says, “Oh just feed the kid whatever you’re eating.” When we tried that, he just wouldn’t eat. He’s a little picky.

It’s getting better and he’s weirdly adventurous in certain moments. So we have a Sichuan restaurant that we’re obsessed with. Every once in a blue moon we go. He’ll end up eating half the things that we do. His mouth’s on fire. He’s got tears streaming down his face and he’s asking for more. But then other days, he refuses to eat a meat sauce with his pasta. The pasta has to be unadorned and plain, nothing.

So whenever somebody says, “This really worked for my nine month old, or a 10 month old, or two and a half year old,” I think, “I want to pass that information on,” and the same for me. I had a couple inspiration moments and I just found recipes that he ended up liking. I thought, “Might as well share them.”

I hated hearing this when I was pregnant, the mother of a newborn and all this but now that I’m a little older I understand why people say, “Enjoy it,” because actually the stages are all so short that while you’re in them, especially for the first time, you have no idea. You’re like, “Oh my God. My kid’s going to be eating pureed carrots for the next 10 years,” but subconsciously you think that they’re not even going to be eating pureed carrots for a month. So just live in the moment and then move on. Be flexible.

On Her Book, “My Berlin Kitchen: A Love Story With Recipes”:

The book is a collection of stories in chronological order that tell the rough outline, and in some cases not that rough, of sort of the strange path from Germany to the States, back to Germany, back to the States, to France and then ultimately back to Germany again.

Each chapter has a recipe at the end so it’s a lot about food but also about family, about what it’s like to grow up in several different cultures. All the alienation and difficulty that that can present even though it’s in a sense a nice problem to have, but it does have a lot of its own emotional baggage.

Then the love story with the city of Berlin that I’ve had my whole life.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

I used to watch, like literally 13 years ago, Nigella and Jamie and Two Fat Ladies, but now I don’t watch any.

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

Dinner: A Love Story which is about cooking for your family, specifically older children once they’re three years and up, how you get family dinner on the table.

Orangette which is a beautiful food blog with lovely recipes and writing and photos and just wonderful.

Bon Appetempt, which is a humorous take on cooking recipes from magazines but it’s also about life and things.

Lottie and Doof. Tim’s writing is so amazing and his food is too but now that I think about it, I haven’t actually cooked that many things from it but I just love his take on the world and I just feel his site is a little blast of joy.

There are so many others. Those are the ones off the top of my head.

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

Okay, Abbey Nova from Design Scouting which is the other blog I was going to say that I love, but it’s not a food blog. Follow her on Pinterest. Love her.

And on Facebook, Humans of New York. Best account ever. Literally every post is a gut punch in good and bad ways. It’s just wonderful.

Instagram. My friend, Rachel Roddy, in Rome. She always posts pictures of her sink with all of the beautiful things that she’s bought at the market that day and it’s just her sink. My mother’s from Rome and my mother lived in Rome when I was in college, and there’s just something about the light. When I look at those pictures, there’s something very deep going on inside of me. They make me happy.

Her blog is Rachel Eats and that’s the other blog I was thinking of. Beautiful, provocative, gorgeous writing about living in Italy but being English. It’s incredible and her Instagram.

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

Canned tomatoes, salt, olive oil.

I feel like I can’t live without canned tomatoes. That’s breakfast, lunch and dinner right there.

Name one ingredient you cannot live without.

Yeah, canned tomatoes without a doubt.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

Fuchsia Dunlop’s Every Grain of Rice, which is Chinese home cooking demystified.

The Kitchen Diaries by Nigel Slater. I love it. It’s more of a journal of food but it’s very inspiring for when you’re feeling like, “I don’t feel like cooking anymore. What should I do?” I go to him and he always gets me going again.

Diana Henry’s A Change of Appetite, so Diana Henry is an Irish food writer in London and she’s incredibly prolific. She publishes a book a year or something and they’re all incredible. I don’t understand how she does it. I mean really they’re all incredible and they’re all so different. Her most recent book that’s available now is called A Change of Appetite and it’s ostensively of being like a lighter eating book but it’s just great. It’s full of incredibly delicious, lush, interesting recipes.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

I actually am not really into music when I’m cooking although I guess something cheerful like Ella Fitzgerald.

Keep Posted on Luisa:

Well I’m pretty good whenever I have a blog post up, I ping the three big ones: Instagram, Facebook and Twitter so any of those is fine. I love Instagram most. It’s definitely the most fun I have while doing social media. It doesn’t feel like work.