The Flavor Bible | The Dinner Special podcast

135: Meredith Steele: From Stay-at-Home Mom to Food Entrepreneur

August 10, 2016 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Steele House Kitchen

Meredith left her job as a graphic designer to become a stay-at-home mom after her daughter was born. During this time, she created her blog In Sock Monkey Slippers, started her own recipe development company, and was a finalist in the 2013 SAVEUR Blog Awards. At the end of 2015, insockmonkeyslippers.com evolved into Steele House Kitchen, a space where Meredith shares moments of laughter, inspiration, and creativity around good, honest food.

I am so psyched to have Meredith Steele of Steele House Kitchen joining me on the show.

(*All photos below are Meredith’s.)

On Becoming a Stay-at-Home Mom:

For many years, I was in advertising and graphic design, behind the scenes, and photo shoots, and everything. Everything was just fast paced. And then my husband and I became pregnant, and very excited, but things just kind of went wrong from day one. And Mia decided that she wanted to come out four months early, which left me kind of… Everything stopped. Your job stops, your life stops, and you end up just living in the hospital. So we did. I lived in the hospital for five months. She came home perfectly healthy; just smart, great kid. But she came home and had immune sensitivity. So she couldn’t be out in the world.

We were imprisoned in our house for a year until her immune system could catch up with a regular baby and toddler at the time. So obviously, I had to leave my job. And you know, cooking has always been one of those things that I’ve just absolutely loved from the time I was little. It’s just always been in my life. It’s not that being a mom is boring. It’s the complete opposite, but I kept looking for something for me to do, just to have… So I can just take 30 minutes a day just to become myself again. I just went back to my passion which was cooking, and then also photography, which I’ve been doing ever since I was a teenager. So I realized that I wanted to cook for my daughter who was now able to eat foods, and she had very sensitive gastro problems because of prematurity.

Everything had to be very strict, and very pure, and no preservatives. Not even jarred baby food was good, because some had food coloring in it. She’s allergic to food coloring and just everything. So I just broke it down to basics and started making baby food. And I had the blog to let everyone know how she was doing in her transition from hospital to home.

And then all of a sudden, I was like, “Well, you know, we’ll just cook baby food. Let’s put this recipe,” because people were starting to ask for it. And then I had a baby food company come and say, “Could you start doing recipe development for our company?” This was crazy. Maybe this could be my next transition in life. It’s becoming a light-bulb moment. Let’s maybe try this out.

On Starting Her Company, MBS Recipe Development:

It really came in a time when my husband changed careers and decided he wanted to be a sommelier. So he wanted to go back to school, which left us with no income. I was already working for Disney at the time, doing recipe development for a few websites of theirs. I thought, “Well, you know, let’s pay more attention to the recipe development company. Let’s create a company, pay more attention to this. Put blogging on the sideline for right now, so I could basically pay the mortgage.”

And it worked, and it was something I really, really enjoy doing. So it’s really strange how blogging can take you other places than just a blog. It was just one company after one company. I started with Disney, then BBDO, which is a PR company, came and started working with a lot of their clients. And now, I work for pretty much almost all the major PR companies. I work with some small ones, too. PR companies are my most prevalent client, but, I also work for some local restaurants. A lot of editorial…I work with a lot of local magazines here, statewide magazines.

On Her Cookbook, Effortless Entertaining Cookbook:

I got a call one day from a publisher, and they just said, “We would really like to do a book with you.” I thought, “Okay. Am I ready for this?” I’m not really sure, and I said, “Well, what’s the timeline?” They said, “Well, you’ve got about four months.” I thought, “Oh, no. Sorry, go find yourself someone else because this isn’t going to work.” But I thought about it, and it was one of those very failsafe contracts where when you publish a book through a publishing house, they do, I wouldn’t say own the book, but they’re very responsible for the book. So if things fail, you kind of have a good padding to fail on. And I kept thinking, “Well, I know I want to write a book. Maybe this is the way to go,” just to get my feet wet and see if this is going to be safe.

I thought, “Okay, let’s just see how a cookbook is even written,” because I did not know the first thing about it. So they walked me through the process, and gave me a nice advance so I could leave work. And it’s been good so far. So we sat there and had a brainstorming session about what we were going to do, and I think it all just came along when I was in my office staring at racks of wine that my husband is hoarding for, you know, clients and everything. I thought how we entertain a lot. Like every weekend we’re trying to… I test recipes on our friends, he tests wine on our friends. So let’s write a book about that.

So we wrote a book about entertaining. How about we do it effortless? And I said, “Okay. Effortless Entertaining,” and that was the name of the book. It’s a collection of seasonal recipes that you can pull together ahead of time really simply or pull together in the last 20 minutes.

It’s available for pre-order now, and it’s called Effortless Entertaining Cookbook.

It was a fun book to create, because we had a lot of people come over and help me out with the photography and everything.

Another good thing about having my husband, you know, in the drink business was he was able to pair almost every recipe with wine or beer. So I think when you’re waiting for your party and you’re about to get in, you’re at the grocery store and you’re buying everything. You come to that wine aisle, and you’re like, “Oh, what I’m I going to serve? What’s cheapest or what’s the best?” It’s so confusing. And so he’s been able to provide a few options for everything, and make it easier.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

Not that many. I totally missed the days of PBS, those cooking shows. If PBS is on rerun, I’d watch all those. I like America’s Test Kitchen. Sometimes I’ll just go with some old school Ina Garten. She’s pretty awesome, but I rarely watch cooking shows. I rarely have time to turn on the TV.

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

A Thought For Food, Brian Samuels. That’s a great blog. I absolutely love it. Brian and I have been on a few media trips before. And the way he cooks is very fresh, and very creative. And some of his recipes really inspire me on, “Oh, that’s a great combination. I never even thought about that.” So definitely that one. I also…I don’t know if it’s really like a food blog but Serious Eats. I like that one a lot. There is a cocktail blog I’m really into right now, it’s more of a website called Punch. I enjoy reading and look forward to their post. It’s really informative. Those are the three right now that I read a lot.

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

I’m not on Facebook too much. Snapchat either. But I do love Instagram. So a lot of food stylists I follow on Instagram, I like Jamie Oliver’s account. I know that’s just really basic, but I worked for him for a little bit and their whole department is really fun to follow.

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

My most favored item is my grandma’s strainer. It’s really cool. It was her grandmother’s. It’s like 1901. It’s this really punched metal thing that looks like it’s been beaten up. But it’s my most treasured thing. If that was not in my kitchen, I don’t think I could function. It’s huge. It’s like the size of a large wok. It’s amazingly that big.

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

Anchovies. I hated Anchovies as a kid, and I put them in everything now. Every salad dressing is gonna have anchovy in it. Sometimes I just…like pizza dough, like a flat bread. Put a little anchovy on it, and it’s just so good. It’s ridiculous, but like…and fish sauce. I didn’t like fish sauce and miso. Things like umami flavors that you can never even tell that they’re in a dish, but lend this nice blanket to kind of push up your flavor. So miso is definitely something that I did not like for a long time, but I’d put it in my chicken stock and it’s really nice. It brings a great flavor, and anchovies in my salad dressings.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

There is one I’ve enjoyed and I look through it a lot, because it’s a seasonal cookbook. I think pretty much any seasonal cookbook really makes my life easier, because I know I can just switch to that season because we do eat very seasonally here. But there’s one called The Farm.

The Farm, that makes my life a lot easier. It’s very simple recipes, and it’s such a great story. I love cookbooks that have good stories. April Bloomfield cookbooks are wonderful. And The Flavor Bible is my bible. It does not leave my desk. It is with me wherever I go. For those who don’t know, it is this compilation of flavor pairings, basically anything. Any food, any flavor, any season. Reads like a dictionary. You just pick it up, go to the food you want and see what will pair. I think I use it on a daily basis.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

Everything, there is always music. Sometimes like I’ll have interns come in and they’re, you know…they put dance music on. I’m like, “Okay, it’s a dance day. Let’s do it.” But right now I’m listening to Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats, a lot of him right now. That just makes me want to cook. It’s like outrageous, kind of soul and got a beat. It depends on what I’m cooking, too. If it’s in the winter and it’s like a slow risotto, I get some Nina Simone or some Miles Davis.

On Keeping Posted with Meredith:

Instagram for sure, it’s just @meredithbondsteele.

110: Kate Payne: Stumbling on Homemaking and Food Preservation

February 17, 2016 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS

Hip Girl’s Guide to Homemaking

Kate is an author, freelance writer, and educator. She’s written two books, Hip Girl’s Guide to Homemaking and Hip Girl’s Guide to the Kitchen. And her writings can be found in publications like Edible Austin, HGTV Mag, and websites such as Canning Across America and The Kitchn. Kate learned to be an avid home canner and a gluten-free baker while living in New York City and she now also teaches classes on home food preservation.

I am so happy to have Kate Payne of Hip Girl’s Guide to Homemaking joining me here on the show today.

(*All photos below are Kate’s.)

On What a Typical Day Looks Like:

Every day is very different. Either I am preparing for a class which usually means I am gathering vegetables, I am emailing farmers or I am buckling down and doing some writing, which happens often. So in those days, I hole up with the computer and a cup of tea and nail out maybe three or four hours of time to sit and write or work on other deadlines and things like that. I also just launched a bitters line. So now, my days are interesting and they have new bitters making tasks in them as well.

It’s pretty all over the place. I am a procrastinator. So my writing usually is fit into the very last time slot between when it needs to be turned in. I try, I really try to set up times where I have a morning writing schedule or routine, but I am not having much luck with that.

On Food Preservation and Canning:

I think my mom would vote me the least likely to be domestic leaving high school and into college. But I really took it on and moving to Brooklyn, moving to New York in 2008, the stock market broke and I was trying to start freelancing. I was even applying for other jobs and I felt like my budget didn’t really match. My capabilities for spending money didn’t match the opportunities that I would have liked to spend money. So I really felt like it was time to get creative and if I like jam, maybe I should learn how to make it. If I wanted pickles in the house, then I better figure out about making those because buying a $10 jar every week isn’t going to work out any longer. So, I stumbled into it via the food community, going to the farmer’s market, getting a CSA.

I had some great mentors with food preservation. I found a mentor in New York City. I now live in Austin, Texas. I moved back about five years ago. But I found a mentor in New York, Eugenia Bone is her name, and I am sure everyone is familiar with her, but she wrote a book around the time that I was researching called, Well-Preserved. And that’s a really wonderful guide to folks in food preservation, and she was kind enough to let me into her home after I invited myself over and decided to ask some questions. She was a great mentor and she actually wrote the foreword to my second book.

On Encouraging Home Cooks to Try Food Preservation:

I think, first of all, just knowing some basic science which you can read in just a few pages of either my book or a few resources that I have put forth in my book. Just understanding the science behind it, you will understand very early on then that you are not going to kill your friends and family with a jar of jam, most likely. Similarly, you are not going to likely kill your friends and family with a jar of pickles either.

So, the things that we find very intimidating, it’s because we just don’t have the knowledge of how botulism bacteria is borne. My first canning experience was canning peach jam, and I was sure that the bubbles inside the jar were botulism spores or something. And it was just me not knowing that you couldn’t even see them if there were, but they can’t bloom in that environment.

We create safe products by following simple recipes and basic kitchen cleanliness like don’t pet the dog and then shove stuff in your jar, rather than try to achieve sterility. That’s just so not possible because oxygen is all around us. We are breathing and everything travels in the air. So, really, I just try to remind people to relax. So if you prep the fruit or cut up the veggies the night before, and then the next day you actually make the thing, those are the most practical and simple recipes to do because it really just cuts it up into reasonable chunks of time rather than saying, “Hey, you have three hours to work on this,” which many of us often don’t.

On Some Good Resources for Learning More about Food Preservation:

I would definitely recommend both of Linda Ziedrich’s books, The Joy of Jams, Jellies and Other Sweet Preserves is one. And then, her other book, The Joy of Pickling. She is also one of my mentors. She reviewed the whole draft of my first book’s manuscript and really a great food preservation mentor. But her books are amazing, wonderful, small batch, really highlight the flavor in seasonal aspect of foods and you will not go wrong with her.

And then, a newer resource, not when I was actually getting started but I think you spoke recently with, Cathy Barrow of Mrs. Wheelbarrow. And she just wrote a beautiful book that has a lot of great information on pressure canning. In my book, I don’t really have a tutorial. I teach some classes on pressure canning, but I think it is so important to be able to put up your broths and stocks that you make, your bone broth and everything you are making nutritiously in your kitchen, to be able to store that on the pantry shelf versus in your freezer.

On Her Books:

The homemaking book was the first book. Came out in 2011. I moved to Brooklyn in 2008 and upon getting there, I was feeling like it was the final exam for everything I had learned post college and in my DIY. How do you grow stuff? How do you clean the house without toxic chemicals that cost money? And how to not let all the groceries, the farmer’s market goods that we got, go to the compost pile? I just felt like, “Oh my Gosh, I need some help here. And I think other people like me would like all the stuff pulled together.”

So I started the blog for Hip Girl’s Guide to Homemaking and just started putting stuff out there because there was another aspect of it for me that was very intriguing, and it was that I hadn’t been in the kitchen before in my post college years. I mean, as minimally as possible. I was just sort of, “Here I am. I am in the kitchen but not willingly.” And then I get to New York, and I am trying out making my own bread because gluten-free bread at that time, you bought a door stop if you were getting a loaf of gluten-free bread. So I was like, “I can make better than this for less than nine dollars a loaf for sure.” So I actually liked it, I liked being in the kitchen. I was wondering, “Is this okay. I am a modern young woman, empowered woman. Am I allowed to like being in the kitchen in terms of my feminist friends?” And the answer was yes, and a resounding yes from everyone all over.

I really wanted to explore that in the Hip Girl’s Guide to Homemaking that gender is not…to try to drop some of the previous attachments that we’ve had to the kitchen and to the home, in general, using a controversial word like homemaking to begin with. So, yeah, I really wanted to explore all of that stuff. Then the Kitchen book, turns out I had so much more to say about the kitchen because I myself had a rocky past with getting to a place where I felt comfortable and confident. So, I don’t think it happens overnight, but I definitely wanted to let people know how to go ahead and start getting used to the kitchen or get more kick ass in the kitchen.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

I don’t watch any cooking shows because I don’t have a TV, and I am not really into television so much. But I’ve enjoyed some of the America’s Test Kitchen shows via the computer and all that.

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

I’d say that you would have to know about Food in Jars and you want to visit The Kitchn. Food52, I think, is another great aggregate site. And then, wellpreserved.ca. Those are my friends, Joel and Dana, that live in Canada. And then, there’s also Punk Domestics. I think that’s another great source and site for everybody to visit because it’s a great place where everyone’s recipes get pulled.

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

Well, I am really into the Dram Apothecary. Great feed and beautiful photos, and I am really into the style and design that they are doing, and I just love them. Of course, there’s Tuna Melts My Heart and he makes me pretty happy, and all the pets in the feed of my dog’s Instagram feed, she only follows pets. So just scrolling through the pets only feed is great.

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

I think the most treasured item I have in there is a Le Creuset baking dish that I bake my cakes in. It’s a white enameled Le Creuset that is a vintage one that has the little shell handles. And it’s beautiful, and I only paid $10 for it. I use it at least once a week if not more. And then, I really treasure my spatulas, my high heat rubber spatulas. That’s a weird thing to treasure I think, but I love them.

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

I’d say cabbage, in general, because I make kraut now. I make that bacon cabbage salad that we talked about and yeah. I’ve just never really been into cabbage and now I love all the things that you can do with it.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

I think The Flavor Bible is a great resource for folks. I consult it often. I am a Joy of Cooking girl and specifically, there are couple of editions that I am really into and following those recipes from the 1996 publication. I am really into that one.

And then, I also visit Eugenia Bones’ book often. It’s called, At Mesa’s Edge. She’s just got a lot of basic recipes in there but are really versatile, and I just love her work in general. She is a great resource.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

I guess, just the artist, in general, is Patty Griffin. She’s got a song called, Making Pies, and that’s a very inspirational song.

On Keeping Posted with Kate:

Well, I am on all the platforms. Though, I think more often you can see what I am doing at the moment on Instagram.

087: Nick Evans: Learning to Love Your Leftovers

October 21, 2015 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS

Macheesmo

Nick has a ton of fun cooking. He’s self-taught and loves experimenting with all kinds of food. On his blog, he’s shared over a thousand recipes since 2008, and he wants to teach us home cooks to be more confident in the kitchen. In 2014, he published his first full cook book called Love Your Leftovers and you might have seen him on TV. He was a featured home cook on NBC’s Food Fighters.

I’m so excited to have Nick Evans of Macheesmo joining me here on the show today.

(*All images below are Nick’s.)

On Learning How to Cook:

Well, I would say, three or four years of doing Macheesmo, I put myself through an informal cooking school. I would look up recipes that had really technical aspects to them and then just practice and practice and practice them in my home until I felt really comfortable with that method, comfortable enough that I could write about it, at least, in a funny way if not a successful way. So I put myself through a little bit of a culinary school, I would say. Not the culinary school aspect where I know how to run a kitchen like a professional restaurant, but a culinary aspect in a technical way, at least, so knowing how to make sauces and knowing how to do stuff like that. I feel pretty comfortable with some of that stuff. It’s mostly just practice, a lot of failure.

On Some Good Resources for Learning to Cook:

I think if you don’t subscribe to it, America’s Test Kitchen, and I do some work with them also so it’s a little bit self-promotional, but they are an amazing resource and the recipes are some of what I think to be the most clearly written recipes. They’re very well tested, they’re very well written and almost without a doubt fail safe. And they have a lot of really basic stuff too.

Another place I’d look if I’m looking up a technique that I don’t know how to do is just YouTube. YouTube can be a nightmare. You have to be careful with it, but what I always try to do is if I’m looking up a technique, I will watch three or four videos on it, because there’s going to be a million. Try to pick up the similarities that the chefs are doing and that’s probably going to be right. And then if there are any weird outlier parts, maybe just be like, “I don’t know about that.” But YouTube is a great resource because a lot of cooking techniques are very visual, I think. It helps to actually see somebody do it, which is funny, because I don’t have a lot of videos on my website actually, I just do mostly photos and try to write it in a way that makes sense. I went through a phase where I watched a lot of YouTube videos on various techniques.

On Keeping Motivated to Learn:

My biggest thing, which I still do to this day, is I think it’s so important to go to different stores. Because you can look up all kinds of stuff on the Internet and I sometimes struggle with that because it seems overwhelming. But instead of going to your normal grocery store, go to a different one. Go to an Asian grocery store. Go to a Latin grocery store. And it can be a little bit intimidating and you’ll be out of your comfort zone, but at the same time, you’re going to find things that are different and you’re going to be inspired by, “Oh, there’s a totally different kind of produce there that’s not in my normal grocery store. Oh, there’s a different brand of this, maybe that tastes a little bit different.”

I’ll just pick up a few things that look interesting, then I’ll go back home and look up ways to use those things. So I start with the store and what I can actually find, and then I try to get inspired based on that instead of just trying to tackle the Internet or something and find something that looks appealing, because then it’s always a struggle. If you find some recipe and it has this weird ingredient and you go, “I can’t find that,” and so you just give up. So instead I start with what I can find, then maybe try a new place and then go the other direction and try to find something good to make with it.

On His Cookbook, Love Your Leftovers:

I came up with the idea a long time ago actually and just had a hard time wrapping my head around the best way to present it. But essentially I was getting a lot of feedback from readers and people that I talk to that they felt like they had to start from scratch every day. So like, “Oh it’s Tuesday, I have to get up, I have to chop all this stuff, I have to do all this stuff. Okay, now it’s Wednesday, I have to cook all from scratch.” So the idea is that instead of cooking from scratch, you cook like foundational meals when you have time, so big batches of things, and then those will store well and you can use those as jumping off points for other meals.

So leftovers is such a non-sexy word and it doesn’t get a lot of respect in America, but even great chefs will tell you that in really big restaurants, they’re taking stuff they cooked before and transforming it into something totally new and making it a special or using it in a different way.

The idea of the book was to take that into the home kitchen and it’s how I actually cook and how I actually feed my family, and so I thought it would be helpful to write a book around that. So that’s what it is. It’s fun. People e-mail me all the time like on Amazon reviews and stuff and say that it’s totally changed the way they think about how to cook, because it’s a little bit different of a method but I think the results are pretty awesome.

On Appearing on NBC’s Food Fighters:

It was very random. I saw something on a Facebook group that I’m a part of and they said, “Hey, this new show.” At the time, the show didn’t have a name or anything, but a production team was just looking for good home cooks. And so I just applied. I just sent in an e-mail and it was a very long process. They later told me that they got about 10,000 applications and they whittled that down to, I think, eight home cooks. So it was like a four-month process basically of interviews. We had to do in-person cooking. It was a big deal.

And now they’re on Season 2 of the show actually, and so I’m sure that that audition process is even more intense than the one I went through, because I was in Season 1, but yeah, it was super fun. It was a crazy experience. My family got to fly to LA and do the whole LA thing for a little bit, so that was fun. And I got to meet some awesome chefs. They’re all really cool and really down to earth, very fun, and I earned some money, so hey.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

Well, I watch Food Fighters since I was on it and I watch Chopped a lot. I think Chopped is probably the hardest of any cooking show. I can’t imagine doing it. I think it would be really challenging but also that’s why it’s awesome to watch. Those are the two I watch most regularly.

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

There’s a new one that I’m reading recently called the The Beeroness. You’ve got to check her out. She’s awesome. Every recipe has beer in it and I’m a big beer drinker, and she takes beautiful photos.

My friend Nik, who I met last year, he runs a blog called A Brown Table, and he takes, I think, some of the most stunning food photos on the Internet right now. They’re very dark. It’s actually a look I’ve never been able to get down when I photograph stuff. They’re very dark but they all look so delicious. I just want to eat everything that he makes because it looks so great. So check out A Brown Table.

And then my other friend Dan. I like to read guy food blogs, because there are not a lot of them and I feel like there’s a guy food blogger community that needs some love. So Dan from The Food in My Beard, he just makes weird stuff. He’s just a weirdo dude, but he is a great cook and always funny and his food is like out of this world crazy and delicious, so check that out.

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

I don’t do Snapchat yet. People keep asking me that and I’m like I don’t understand it. I haven’t wrapped my head around it yet. I always tend to be a late adaptor to these things so I will probably get to it in a year when there’s some other cool thing that I should be learning but I’m not on Snapchat yet.

Instagram, I really like following Local Milk. Her name is Beth and she just has these beautiful photos which I think is what makes Instagram awesome, it’s photos, so I just follow people that take great photos, or my wife who posts only photos of our child. She’s a little creepy.

On Pinterest, honestly my Pinterest account is such a cluster of just… It’s thousands of pins because I follow every food blogger, so I don’t have a specific person really that I like.

But on Facebook, well, actually they’re on Pinterest too, but I really like Todd and Dianne. They write a blog called White on Rice Couple and they take really great photos. I’ve taken some of their photography lessons and they’re super helpful, very friendly people, and they are just an inspiration in the food photography world and also in the food blogging world. And they post really cool videos on Facebook, so if you’re a Facebook fan, their page is awesome because they shoot these beautiful, quick, little 30-second or 1-minute videos that are really beautiful. I always have to go cook something right away after I watch them.

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

Okay, so this is weird. It’s not actually anything I use to cook, but it’s something that appeases my son while I cook. I have an eight-month old baby and one of my friends got us… At the time I was like, “Well, that’s stupid,” but it’s like a net stuck to a ring that they can hold and you can put food in the net, and then they can chew on it and you don’t have to worry about it choking them or something. So I will stuff this net thing full of fruit like water melon, pineapple, and he’ll just chew and suck on it for like 30 minutes and I can do whatever I need to do. So that net, it must have cost like five bucks, but I’ve used it $200 worth of times already, so I love the net thing. I don’t know what it’s called. I can’t Google kid net thing. Don’t Google kid net thing. I don’t know what to Google, but it’s like a kid feeder net thing. It’s my favorite thing in the kitchen right now.

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

I think this is may be a common one for food bloggers but I used to hate beets. The only reason why is because my idea of a beet was a canned beet that was really soggy and bright maroon-red color and would stain everything. It was only later that I was like, “Oh, wait, you can get fresh beets that aren’t canned? Well, those are delicious,” so now I really love beets but I still don’t eat the canned kind.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

Well, there’s one, well, Love Your Leftovers obviously but the one book that I’ve used, I probably got it close to when I started Macheesmo. I’ve had it for six or seven years I would say. It’s called The Flavor Bible and I still use it every single week to help just with my recipes. Basically it lists every food in the world and then it has complimentary foods with it, so you can look up apples, then it’ll say blue cheese, red wine, whatever goes to your list. And there’ll be a huge list so you can literally come up with recipes just by looking up these flavors and seeing what pairs well with them, so I use it all the time. My copy is beat to hell but I love that book.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

It depends if my wife is in the kitchen or not. If Betsy’s there, she really likes classic rock so we’ll listen to like Van Morrison, she’s a huge Van Morrison fan, and I just noticed they re-released one of his, like the essential Van Morrison or something and it’s awesome. So we’ll listen to that. If she’s not there, I like to listen to rap music when I cook, so like right now, I’ve been listening to the Fetty Wap album which is… I don’t know what to say about it. I just love it. I think he’s awesome and I love listening to rap music. And it gets me pumped up and I like to cook to it.

On Keeping Posted with Nick:

Well, as you might imagine, Macheesmo.com is my blog. I’m on every social media platform except Snapchat, and it’s all slash macheesmo. So Facebook, whatever, it’s all just slash macheesmo, you’ll find me. So whatever platform you like.

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

September 23, 2015 by Gabriel 6 Comments

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS

Savory Simple

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

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

(*All images below are Jen’s.)

On Going to Culinary School:

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

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

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

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

On Her Blog:

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

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

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

On Baking and Desserts:

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

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

On Her Cookbooks:

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

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

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

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

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

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

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

On Keeping Posted with Jen:

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

073: Joanne Ozug: Cooking From Scratch with Natural Ingredients

September 2, 2015 by Gabriel 4 Comments

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS

Fifteen Spatulas

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

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

(*All images below are Joanne’s.)

On Her Blog:

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

On Her YouTube Channel:

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

On Her Process for Her Videos:

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

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

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

On Her Curiosity Around Cooking:

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

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

On Cooking From Scratch with Whole Foods and Natural Ingredients:

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

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

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

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

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

On Some Resources For Learning to Cook from Scratch:

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

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

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

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

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

Arctic Monkeys band, they have a lot of albums.

On Keeping Posted with Joanne:

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

069: Danguole Lekaviciute: Being Adventurous and Playing with Food

August 19, 2015 by Gabriel 2 Comments

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS

10th Kitchen

Danguole believes in adventurous eating and drinking. And her kitchen is her ultimate playground. Although she appreciates the classics, she truly tries to bring something creative and original to her blog, 10th Kitchen.

I am so delighted to have Danguole Lekaviciute of 10th Kitchen joining me here on the show today.

(*All images below are Danguole’s.)

On Starting Her Blog:

What happened was that a good friend of mine moved across the country, and she had a personal blog that she was doing a project 365 on, which is where you take a picture everyday and write a little blurb about it. And it’s meant to get a good blogging habit going.

When she moved away, I jumped on board. I got my own blog, and I started doing the same thing. It was a fun way for us to keep in touch. I don’t think anybody read it besides us. But what I found eventually was that I was mostly interested in talking about food and cooking. So when that wrapped up, it was just a natural transition for me to start a food blog.

I pretty much immediately bought my domain and started taking some crappy pictures and telling awkward jokes. And about four years later, I’m still doing the same thing.

I had a personal WordPress blog before, just your basic template. I had no idea how a website works. Those templates make it so easy for anyone to put up their website without really having to do a whole lot of work. Since then I’ve learned a lot about HTML and CSS and all the intricacies with hosting and stuff like that. So I’m at the point where I put it on my resume now, because it is such a valuable skill that I never had before.

I think the most challenging part was trying to switch hosts halfway. And I just lost my website for a day and a half. And it was terrifying, even though at that point, not that many people read it. So I just went back to my old host, and was like, “Please take all my money. I’ll stick with you. Just make it work again.”

It’s a terrifying thing when your website is down for some reason. It’s like an extension of you. And even though you know it doesn’t matter, it feels so strange.

I think all of it felt pretty natural to me. I’ve always played with recipes a little bit and developed my own. I’ve written before. And I’ve done photography as a hobby before. I don’t know if you can tell from those early shots because they’re just not great. But I always dabbled in artistic things like that. So all of it made sense, except the technical part probably.

On Her Curiosity Around Food:

I cooked since I was a kid. And I remember trying to make things work from an early age. I definitely helped out in the kitchen a lot. And I definitely have memories of being 10 or 12 and just playing in the kitchen and seeing what happens.

In my family, it was more of a chore. And I actually really liked it. So my sister would always do the dishes if I cooked, so I always enjoyed that arrangement. To me, it was fun.

I love David Lebovitz. I think his style is so classic and so refined. And he has such a good way of connecting it to his life in France as far as blogging goes. Jeni Britton Bauer of Jeni’s Ice Creams in Columbus completely changed my life with her method for making ice cream, which I do regularly. And I love Mark Bittman. I have his books. I’ve read his articles. I followed his podcast. He just has so many smart things to say about food and policy and connecting it to the everyday cook in the kitchen and how you can make small changes and work toward a more sustainable food system, which is the stuff that I find interesting.

On Adventurous Eating:

I’ve always been interested in just playing with things and seeing what happens. I think if I didn’t have an artistic streak, I think I’d be some sort of scientist because I just like to see how a dish changes if you use coconut oil instead of butter or more herbs or more this or more vinegar. So to me, that comes naturally. I think it’s important to appreciate all aspects of cooking.

I love ethnic food from all over the world. I’ve always dabbled in Mexican or Thai or Vietnamese. I don’t think there’s a particular cuisine that’s the good gateway. It’s more about playing with recipes that you know and love. Like if your family is from France or Russia or wherever, I think it just comes from mastering what you know and changing one thing here or there to see how the dish changes and to see how the ingredients interact with one and other.

Fish sauce, when you first smell it, is just so overwhelming and so different from what I’m used to. But it just makes such a difference in dishes. And it’s such a great savory base for crisp, clean flavors. They all meld so beautifully together in Thai and Vietnamese cuisine. It’s a thing of beauty. I love it.

On Being Fearless and Experimenting in the Kitchen:

I remember making tacos from this leftover roast chicken, and I mixed it with a bunch of sour cream and green onion. That’s not a taco. But it was one of those times right before grocery shopping that you had to make do with whatever you had. And my family appreciated that.

One thing I was trying to do was make buttermilk rolls, which I have eventually got to making through cultured buttermilk, with powdered buttermilk. I really wanted that flavor. But I was working with a recipe that required you to heat up milk. And so I was like, “Oh, I’ll just switch it with buttermilk.” And of course, I should have known that when you heat buttermilk, you just get a curdled mess. That completely threw me off my game. That’s something that I should have know but just didn’t think about. So that happens all the time.

On Making Cooking More Fun:

I think mastering the things you know and love is a good first step to where you don’t even need the recipe anymore. Then you can play with the proportions or add different ingredients to it. Simple things like switching out parsley for cilantro or basil or something like that is a good start.

If you view recipes as a template, if you see the part that’s starchy and the part that’s savory and the part that’s fresh and the part that’s acidic, it’s like a puzzle. You can swap out the lemon juice for sherry vinegar maybe and see what happens. Just see a recipe as a whole, and then take apart the components and see what we can do with them.

It’s a balancing act, and it also makes you more flexible. If you don’t have lemon juice, you can try a certain vinegar or lime juice, things like that.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

I honestly don’t watch much TV. I used to watch Top Chef back in the day. Right now, I’m binging on Orange Is The New Black. There’s cooking in that show, a little bit, prison cooking.

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

I think anyone listening to your podcast would probably know about Smitten Kitchen and David Lebovitz. Those are my favorites.

I also have blogger friends that I keep up with who are really talented, The Sugar Hit is fantastic, My Name is Yeh. Who else? SugarHero is a really fun baking blog. There’s tons. Any type of cuisine, any type of cooking you’re into, there’s a blog about it, which is fantastic.

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

I follow Take A Megabite. I think you’ve had her on your podcast before. She is just so colorful. It’s not my style at all, but it makes me very happy.

I follow The Sugar Hit, like I said. Sarah just has great taste for desserts and a great eye for photography. Tieghan from Half Baked Harvest, she’s really fantastic. She’s really visually oriented. Kelly Beall, who does Design Crush, is also really good. On Pinterest, she always posts interesting design, interesting food, interesting style.

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

I have a stovetop smoker, which I don’t break out too often because it makes your house smell like bacon for days afterward. But yeah, it’s fantastic. I love it. If you don’t have a backyard pit for barbecue, it’s a good alternative.

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

I am really trying hard to like mushrooms. It’s the one food that I just never liked, never appreciated it. And I like the flavor of it. I do like mushroom ravioli if it’s all chopped up. I think it’s a texture thing. So I’m trying really hard, and I’ve done some things with it that I ended up liking a lot.

I actually smoked shiitaki mushrooms one time, put them on polenta, and that was actually enjoyable. So that’s where the stovetop smoker comes in.

It depends on what kind of mushroom. Big, slimy portobello, I’m still at like 1%. I’ll eat it if I have too. But yeah, shiitake mushrooms are great. I love chanterelles. So, I’m working on it.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

I have a lot of cookbooks. I like Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan. I’m trying to cook my way through it. Mark Bittman’s books are always a great resource. I have How To Cook Everything Fast right now. It’s focused on fast food, but it is also really inspirational. His combinations are really innovative. And I think the cookbook that I like the most isn’t actually a cookbook, but I literally sleep with The Flavor Bible. I’m always flipping through it at night when I’m looking for ideas. It’s like a dictionary of what flavors go together. And it’s fantastic. I use it for inspiration all the time, and I used to have it on my nightstand. It’s like the bedtime story for me.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

I’ve been branching out a little bit with my taste in music. I usually listen to indie rock or stuff like that. But I’ve been into soul lately. So if I had to pick a song, I would pick Nothing On Me by Curtis Mayfield. I love that. It’s my jam right now.

On Keeping Posted with Danguole:

I probably use Instagram the most. I’m really visually oriented. It just makes it so easy to let people know what you’re up to and what you’re drinking, what you’re eating.

048: Brooke Conroy Bass: An Introduction to Cajun Cooking and Food

June 12, 2015 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS

Chocolate and Marrow

Today we’re celebrating rich, decadent and indulgent food. On Chocolate and Marrow, Brooke uses local and seasonal ingredients to create dishes inspired by growing up in New Orleans and from her current life in Portland in the Pacific Northwest.

I’m so happy to have Brooke Conroy Bass of Chocolate and Marrow joining me on the show.

UPDATE! Since our chat, Brooke became a finalist in the 2015 Saveur Blog Awards for Best New Voice for Chocolate and Marrow.

On Starting Her Blog:

I was doing a lot of research and a lot of scientific analysis for my dissertation and it got a little bit too much. I just felt like there was this imbalance in my life. While I’m thinking about all of that, I went to Italy with my grandmother who loves to cook. And we did this amazing cooking, culinary experience. I just found myself being so happy. I’m just really in my element, and that’s really how I realized I need to incorporate food in a more creative way throughout my life, more than just cooking in the home.

That’s when I decided, you know what, I’m going to start a blog.

Finding the time for it is a totally different matter. It’s more of a weekend thing. I just spend my Saturdays always cooking and photographing and at night I’ll do the recipe development and research and things like that.

On Her Interest in Food:

I’ve loved cooking ever since I can remember.

I was probably five years old and I don’t even know how I could write at the time. But I remember standing by my grandmother’s side and she was saying, she’s cooking catfish, frying catfish. And I remember saying to her, “I really want to learn how to do that so I can go home and cook for my family.” I don’t know what I was thinking at the age of five, they probably wouldn’t let me turn on a burner at that age. And so she got me a crayon and a piece of loose leaf paper and was like, “Well, here, write down the recipe as I cook and that way you can have it for yourself.” So I did and we actually still have that piece of paper that I wrote it on, which is really fun to pull out and look at sometimes.

She is one of my food heroes for certain. I have a number of them but she’s certainly the one that I think piques my interest in cooking.

She worked on a television show in the 80s and 90s called Great Chefs and so she’s always loved food. Even today, when she’s in town visiting for Thanksgiving and we sat and chatted in my kitchen for about eight hours after Thanksgiving while I whipped up some gumbo and some French bread. It’s just one of those things that’s really, really fun to do together.

On the Food Culture in New Orleans:

The food culture in New Orleans is really synonymous with the party culture. We cook food that can feed 30 people and be a big part of a celebration and that’s how we do things down there.

It’s like you can’t have a party without tons of food and you can’t have tons of food without a party.

There’s also some pieces of New Orleans cuisine that are kind of staples in ways of cooking and ingredients that we always use. So yeah, that’s definitely how I think of it at least.

On Cajun Food:

Cajun food, I think like anywhere else around the world, we work with the ingredients that we have available to us and that’s when in forms, different cuisines. With Cajun cuisine, it’s really working with what’s available on the land which is there’s a lot of rice. We see a lot of rice and beans and things like that.

But also there’s this abundance of seafood, so things like oysters and crawfish and shrimp and catfish. That puts itself into a lot of good food that we prepare.

For me, Cajun cuisine, though, it’s like eating home. I mean, I probably cook at least one or two Cajun dishes just for dinner for my husband and I each week and it’s something that always makes me feel comfortable and at home in my kitchen. I just don’t even have to think about it. It just kind of happens.

People love their King cakes and their beignets and their po’ boys and things like that. But most people don’t know about our festival food. You know how most people like spring, summer, fall, and winter as their four seasons. Well, in New Orleans, we don’t have those seasons. We’ve got Mardi Gras, we’ve got festival season, crawfish season, and Saints season.

During festival season, everyone has probably heard about Jazz Fest. I think probably one of my favorite kind of off the map food is crawfish bread from Jazz Fest.

It’s this two kind of flat bread, sandwiched around this melty cheese with crawfish and olives and all these spices. It’s just one of these foods that I think if you’re able to go to New Orleans at the end of April or early May for Jazz Fest, you cannot miss the crawfish bread because it’s absolutely amazing!

On Key Elements in Cajun Cooking:

You know how the French have mirepoix, which is onions and carrots and celery. Well, in Cajun food, we have the holy trinity is what we call it. That is basically like a mirepoix but sub out the carrots and put in bell peppers.

That kind of gives it that spicy kick that New Orleans food is really well-known for. And I think also, New Orleans food is known for being fried. I won’t say fry anything but something in a nice cornmeal batter with just a little squeeze of lemon is probably a real classic New Orleans food.

I think that probably a really great dish to start with would be a gumbo. I know that sounds intimidating but it’s really basic. It just involves a roux and a stock and some kind of protein like chicken or turkey or seafood even, and then the holy trinity, sautéed with some spices and a bay leaf.

Then you throw it all together in a pot and just let it simmer and it’s pretty much heavenly. I think it’s a great way to start introducing yourself to Cajun techniques and also flavors.

On Some Good Resources for Learning About Cajun Food and Cooking:

One of my favorite cookbooks is actually called Cooking Up a Storm.

That is a book that came out after Hurricane Katrina because as you can probably imagine, when Hurricane Katrina hit, one of the things that people lost that they loved the most is their cookbooks. When people lost their homes, their cookbooks went with it. And so Cooking Up A Storm came out. It’s produced or created by two of the writers of The Times-Picayune which is the local newspaper there.

They actually found all these old recipes that have been published in The Times-Picayune and that readers were writing in and inquiring about, saying, “I lost my recipe books and I really want to get this recipe or that recipe.” So they published a collection of readers’ most requested recipes and I think that’s just a really great book for so many reasons.

As far as blogs, I actually just recently discovered a blog called the Acadiana Table and I have absolutely fallen in love. They have so many phenomenal Cajun recipes, just really authentic. I love the way that they do Cajun food.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

The only cooking show that I watch is actually Top Chef.

I was really stoked this year because there were two Portland chefs on it, so it’s really a fun season to watch.

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

I’m a sucker for writing, good writing on blogs, and so my favorite would probably be Cynthia of Two Red Bowls, who has really short, fun, engaging posts.

Erica of Southern Souffle, who I think her words are just super soulful and inspiring and I just really connect with her over what she usually writes.

And then Beth of Local Milk, who is known for her photography but her writing is just as beautiful and eloquent, so I definitely recommend checking those bloggers out.

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

To be honest, I’m not a huge Facebook or Pinterest person, but I am addicted to Instagram.

Some people that make me happy, I would say Martine Cooks is the handle and she’s amazing. She lives in New Orleans, she’s a photographer, and just posts the most beautiful photos with inspiring captions of things like oysters and crawfish, which I can’t get enough of.

And then probably some of my local chefs like Ian Wilson of Fenrir, post just really beautiful food all the time that’s super artistic. And Ryan Roadhouse of Nodoguro who does these most amazing Japanese-inspired dishes and I love looking at the crazy ingredients he gets flown in.

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

I don’t think I have a bunch of unusual things but I do love my cast iron skillets. I have way too many of them but they are like my little babies.

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

I have to say clams. I used to hate them and then I met a friend who–actually we met on Instagram, which is a whole, different, long story. But I told her I hated clams and she convinced me to try making them with her and so I did and they were absolutely phenomenal, so now I’m addicted.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

I absolutely adore The Flavor Bible when I’m looking to create new recipes, I’m looking for inspiration on what pairs well with what. And then I think Sean Brock’s Heritage, I’m really crushing on hard right now.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

I can’t really think of a song or an album. I’m more of a Pandora person, so I have my Pandora stations.

I’d say my favorite ones are probably Louis Armstrong radio, which I use on mornings if I’m baking or something. Milky Chance, which I use to cook with during the week, just like on a random week night. And then Bob Marley is my go-to for the weekends. He just kind of gets me, you know, feel loose and inspired in the kitchen.

On Keeping Posted on Brooke:

Probably Instagram. I usually post at least once a day and it’s either recipe testing or ingredients that are inspiring me. I would love for people to check out Instagram and see you on there.

047: Kylie Antolini: Baking and Eating in Portland, Oregon

June 10, 2015 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS

The Baking Bird

Kylie started her blog in 2008 when she was experimenting with vegetarian and veganism, and through her journey, discovered her love of baking.

Apart from showcasing her baked goods on The Baking Bird, she also shares her favorite places and adventures around where she currently lives, the lively food city of Portland, Oregon.

I am so happy to have Kylie Antolini of The Baking Bird joining me here on the show today.

On Finding Her Passion for Baking:

When I was at home and I was a teenager, my parents were meat eaters. I just became vegetarian because it interested me. I thought it was a healthier lifestyle and I had to fend for myself. So I first started out with getting cookbooks. Maybe you’re familiar with them: How It All Vegan! and The Garden of Vegan by Sarah Kramer and Tanya Barnard. They were my main inspiration.

I first started making some of their savory recipes. And then I decided to experiment with some of their dessert recipes. I just really love the idea that you can bake awesome stuff without using traditional ingredients like butter and eggs, and you get similar results.

I love the process of experimenting like with flax egg replacer or applesauce and bananas. So that was really the thing that caught on to me, and I really just enjoyed experimenting. I felt like a scientist in the kitchen. And to this day, I don’t bake vegan really anymore but one of my favorite vegan baking hacks is putting apple cider vinegar and non-dairy milk and making a buttermilk with it because it curdles the milk, which is awesome because I don’t like going to buy buttermilk because it usually goes to waste. I only use like a cup of it. That’s one of my favorite things that I’ve carried into my regular baking style now.

That was how I found my passion for baking. I just really enjoyed it and I combined my love for photography and started taking picture of things I made and thought, “Oh, I started a blog.”

On No Longer Being Vegetarian:

To be honest, it wasn’t really by choice. I had gotten into running quite a bit around the time that I became a vegetarian, and my body just couldn’t keep up with the nutrition I was getting.

Unfortunately, there were some signs that showed up here and there. My doctor encouraged me to start eating meat. I also suffered from a lot anxiety and insomnia and I noticed the correlation from eating to vegetarian and running too much. So it took a lot of convincing and my parents were really adamant about it. They’re just trying to get me meat all the time, and I was like, “Uh!” But I ended up feeling a lot better once I did and I started sleeping a lot better. My anxiety really went down. So that was really basically it. I wanted to keep being vegetarian but it just wasn’t best for my life.

On Her Interest in Food:

I know that after I was going to being vegetarian, I really got an interest in collecting a lot of cookbooks. I became really obsessed with food because when you have to start combining certain ingredients to have the right nutrition, the right balance, you really have to look at a lot of different resources. So I became obsessed about collecting lots of cookbooks and reading recipes. That was what really got me into cooking.

And my mom was always a really avid cook when I was younger. She kept all the vintage Bon Appétit magazines and was really into that. And my grandmother on my dad’s side is also a great baker. And so I would bake with her.

She’d always have a homemade pie or something for dessert when we come over to eat. I guess they were my inspiration and I grew up in a family that really loved food, so that had a big part of it.

On the First Thing She Baked:

Well, I remember the first thing that I bragged about. It was this vegan chocolate peanut butter pie with bananas, and no-bake. It was so easy and so delicious. I think it was actually from La Dolce Vegan, the cookbook from Sarah Kramer.

Fabulous recipe but terrible photos if you go back and look in the blog. It’s the very first one but it’s delicious.

On Things Not Going as Planned in the Kitchen:

I can think of one or two instances. But fortunately, it doesn’t happen very often which is great. That’s why I think baking is more of my thing than cooking.

I was trying to make a vegan chocolate cake. I turned the pan upside down and it just completely disintegrated and crumbled into pieces. I was like, “Okay.” I think I baked two things that day and they both didn’t turn out. I was like, “This is just not my day.”

Sometimes you have the baking energy and sometimes you don’t. There’s just something in the air and it makes your work shatter. But for the most part, I’m pretty lucky.

It always depends on your oven too. I had to get used to my oven in my apartment. It runs a little bit warmer. So I found over the years that it’s best to play it safe and subtract a little bit of time from your baking time and check it so it’s not too done.

On The Food Culture in Portland, Oregon:

Portland is crazy with food. There are so many people here that love food and have a passion for it. It was the number one reason I actually decided to move here. Because when I first visited, I spent a week here and had a list of places I wanted to go. I was just amazed with how people love food here and get such a wide variety.

You can go to a specific shop just for cupcakes or just for pie. I think the food culture is very experimental and it’s very inspiring. Sometimes it can get a little predictable.

There’s a lot of repeat comfort food here. A lot of pork belly, I see that left and right. So people really love that kind of Southern style. I see that quite a bit. But it makes sense when it’s overcast a lot of the time and it’s raining. So people really enjoy that kind of food here.

There are a lot of donut places. I’m sure you’ve heard of Voodoo Doughnut.

I will drive by and the line can be an hour long. It’s pretty nuts. But there have been a few places that have popped up that you can get donuts now. Pip’s Doughnuts is really amazing if you’ve ever had a chance to check them out. And my personal favorite is Coco Donuts.

On Special Places to Eat in Portland:

I would have to say as far as dinner places, my favorite, favorite place is Tasty ‘N Sons. They’re at North Williams and they’ve opened another location Downtown.

And I really have been loving Ox. I went there for my birthday. I had a fabulous birthday meal.

LucLac has an amazing happy hour. You can get like a huge variety of different small plates for just $15. They make amazing cocktails too. So they are really awesome. Sweedeedee is my favorite brunch place that can get really crazy busy though. A lot of people have caught on that it’s amazing.

For really good vegetarian/ vegan food, Harlow is wonderful too. They make great smoothies.

Levant is also really nice. They have Mediterranean food and they just started doing a brunch. And Scott Snyder who’s the owner, he’s actually from Santa Cruz where I’m from. So we have some ties to that in some ways. He’s really great. His food is awesome.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

Well, I don’t have a television, so I think that makes me the odd one out. But I did just finished watching the last season of Top Chef.

Two of the chefs on the show were from Portland and that was all over the Portland news. I had to watch it.

I actually had an opportunity to photograph Doug Adams who was on the show, one of my freelance jobs for the Portland Mercury. So that was really awesome. I got to meet him in person and that’s made me more interested in watching the show.

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

I definitely have a lot of favorite bloggers I follow on Pinterest and Instagram or what-not. My three favorites of late would be Half Baked Harvest. Perhaps you’re familiar with her. And my latest obsession, Twigg Studios. I think she’s from England or Australia. I forgot. Anyway, I contacted her because I just fell in love with her photography and wanted her to know that her stuff is amazing. So definitely check her out. Her photos for just her recipes are genius.

I also recently discovered Broma Bakery and I really like her recipes.

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

I would say Instagram, I really love following Izy of Top with Cinnamon. Her recipes and photos are amazing. I really love Call me Cupcake. She is lately @linda_lomelino. She is amazing too. And then also, the Twigg Studios gal with her blog.

As far as Pinterest, I don’t really always know who I’m following.

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

I wish I could say I had some really cool hand-me-down spoon from a great grandmother or something.

I would say my most treasured item, because I use it so frequently, two metal mixing bowls, my small and large. I bought them a few years ago when I started making macaroons. The recipe I was going off of said that it was best to have metal bowls just for keeping the coolness and protecting it from too much heat. And I love them.

I just use them for everything, so I couldn’t bake without them.

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

Cardamom did not sit well with me at all. But now, I love it. I want to put cardamom in every single thing I bake. A lot of recipes on the blog have cardamom in them. I almost have to stop myself because people are going to get tired of using cardamom now. It’s really weird. I don’t know what it was. I don’t know if it was becoming vegetarian and experimenting with spices, but I love cardamom and also ginger. I used to hate ginger and I use it all the time now.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

I think my number one favorite go-to resource book is The Flavor Bible. It’s pretty awesome.

If I want to tweak a recipe or I have an idea, I can go to that and it will list a bunch of ingredients that go really well with it. It’s pretty spot on.

They also recently released a Vegetarian Flavor Bible. I haven’t looked at it. But Flavor Bible is amazing.

I also really love the Cook’s Illustrated Baking Book because they have just the basic pie and cake recipes that you can make your own. They’ve been tested by the best of the best bakers and scientists. And that’s what they do all day long. So that’s a really great resource to have too.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

I love music so much and I always try to put on a record when I bake. It’s really tough. I would have to say Bruce Springsteen, Born in the U.S.A.

On Keeping Posted with Kylie:

I think I’m most active on Instagram, The Baking Bird, and Pinterest. I’m also on it quite a bit. Yeah, Instagram and my blog.