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088: Liz Rueven: Celebrating Jewish Food and Holidays

October 26, 2015 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

Liz Rueven of Kosher Like Me on The Dinner Special podcast.
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Liz Rueven of Kosher Like Me The Dinner Special podcast talking about celebrating Jewish food and Holidays

Kosher Like Me

Liz keeps a Kosher kitchen at home and food truly excites her. She is always on the lookout for great restaurants, farmers markets, food festivals, and passionate food innovators. Liz spends much of her time researching and exploring extraordinary dining and food events. And today, we’re going to chat about the Jewish holidays and, of course, the food that surrounds them.

I am so happy to have Liz Rueven, editor and chief eater of Kosher Like Me, here today.

(*All photos below are Liz’s.)

On the Five Jewish Holidays Starting the Fall:

Liz Rueven of Kosher Like Me on The Dinner Special podcast talking about Rosh HaShanah.

So, we begin with Rosh Hashanah, which literally means, the head of the New Year and it’s the Jewish New Year. We eat foods that are symbolic of new beginnings and good luck. So we often eat sweet things. There’s an association most people know between apples and honey. Apples are an early fall fruit, and the honey is really part of the beginning of most meals where we dip the apple in honey, and we wish everyone a sweet New Year. A lot of the other foods are really about, bountiful, full wishes, for example, pomegranates.

Liz Rueven of Kosher Like Me on The Dinner Special podcast talking about Rosh HaShanah.

Pomegranates have many, many seeds. I know that you read my post and my recipe for pomegranate and honey glazed chicken on one of my favorite websites, a website I contribute to, called The Nosher. Pomegranates have like millions of gazillions of seeds, they’re very difficult to dislodge, as you know, because I gave a little technique that I borrowed from a fellow blogger, a blogger friend of mine. But, the pomegranate is so plentiful in the fruit that we use it as a symbolic food, wishing that all of the good omens and good wishes will be as plentiful as the number of seeds in that fruit.

Liz Rueven of Kosher Like Me on The Dinner Special podcast talking about Rosh HaShanah.

There are many other foods associated with Rosh Hashanah but, 10 days after that we go on to Yom Kippur, which is the most solemn day in the year, and there’s no food. So we fast for what turns out to be about 26/27 hours. But at the end of that fast, of course, there’s a feast, like in every culture after a fast. There are many traditional foods, that I don’t know are really symbolic, but we just tend to eat them. Different cultures eat different things, my background is Eastern European, I would say the most quintessential thing that we eat is a noodle pudding or kugel.

Liz Rueven of Kosher Like Me on The Dinner Special podcast talking about Yom Kippur.

On my blog, every year, I post a different recipe for noodle kugel. I have a very traditional one, and then last year I posted one with lemon and ricotta cheese. This year we’re posting a recipe for a noodle pudding or kugel with apple and fennel. It’s a great thing to eat because it’s very satisfying, and it’s very comforting, and it’s very filling. That’s what happens at the end of the fast.

And then, right after that, we have a harvest festival called Sukkot, and people erect temporary structures outside, and people who are really observant, live in those, eat all three meals in those, and sleep in those. They’re called a sukkah, and when, for those of us who don’t eat every meal in them, we often try to eat dinner in them.

Liz Rueven of Kosher Like Me on The Dinner Special podcast talking about Sukkot.

Invariably, it’s cold and rainy, all of a sudden the weather shifts in the northeast at that time, probably in Vancouver, too. And so the focus is really, not only on the harvest foods, but I always focus on the warming foods, so I start to integrate warming spices and dishes like soups and casseroles. It’s usually when I take out my slow cooker also. So this year, we’ll be posting a butternut squash soup, that should be really delicious. Butternut squash grows in the northeast at this time of year and it’s a great thing to just throw in the slow cooker and just have simmering.

Liz Rueven of Kosher Like Me on The Dinner Special podcast talking about Sukkot.

If you’re eating outside in your sukkah, you’re going to want something like that and warm foods. All of the sudden we shift from the salads to things like that.

Then, we have the next holiday, which is a celebration of the laws that were given to us in Sinai, and it’s called Simchat Torah, which really means the joy of Torah, which are the laws. And in general, people do stuffed foods for this holiday. Things that imply full bounty, so that there’s a lot of joy. And then, we end the five holidays with Hanukkah, which is always focused on oil, which we never really eat very much of.

Liz Rueven of Kosher Like Me on The Dinner Special podcast talking about Simchat Torah.

We fry things, donuts, potato latkes, all variations of things fried in celebration of the miracle that occurred, historically, when a vessel of oil that was supposed to last only a few days, lasted a whole week. Which, was enough time to produce more oil. So the oil thing gets really big, and what’s really fun is making lots of different kinds of pancakes, wheat pancakes, potato pancakes, sweet potato pancakes, zucchini, or apple, all sorts of pancakes, deep-fried, so for those of us who are more health conscious, it’s like a time of year where we say, “What the heck, we’re eating fried, it’s Hanukkah.”

Liz Rueven of Kosher Like Me on The Dinner Special podcast talking about Chanukah.

So, that’s the five holidays.

On Starting Kosher Like Me:

My home is strictly Kosher, and when we’re away from our home, we do exactly what my grandparents did. My grandparents were immigrants from Poland, they came to the lower east side of New York City, and they found that there were a lot of choices of things to eat. They just started eating fish and vegetarian when they were away from their Kosher home. Today, we have so many great choices of vegetarian and vegan restaurants that it’s really almost effortless. In those days, people would have a side order of string beans, because that was what was available if you didn’t want to eat chicken, or meat, or whatever was offered in a restaurant, so it’s completely different today.

My intention was really to be a resource for people who honor the rules like I do, because when I travel, I do a lot of research. Friends would say, “If I’m going to Aspen, where should I eat? Where do they have a lot of vegetarian choices?” But what’s happened is, I write so much about vegetarian and vegan, because I write so much about what I do outside of my kitchen, that I have a much broader base of followers than I ever expected. I have vegetarian, vegan, Jewish, not Jewish, Muslim, all sorts of people who are also just interested in healthy food. Because I really only eat and only write about things that are happening seasonally anyway. It’s a trend and people really are interested in it. For us, it’s just the way we always eat.

On the Best Part of Being Editor and Chief Eater of Kosher Like Me:

Liz Rueven of Kosher Like Me on The Dinner Special podcast talking about the best part of being the chief eater at Kosher Like Me.

I would say I love meeting with creative people who are either, small producers, for example, honey makers, who have small backyard apiaries, or people who are making inventive products like my friends at the Gefilteria in Brooklyn, who have revived the old tradition of making gefilte fish and they’re making it sustainable, interesting, healthy, hip again. I really love meeting with the makers and the farmers. I do a lot of work at farms, especially trying to support my Connecticut agricultural scene. I love meeting the farmers, and the growers, and the makers. I like that better than eating in restaurants and writing food reviews, actually.

When I started writing four or five years ago, the approach to reinventing traditional Jewish foods was not as vibrant as it is now. For example, I’m part of a kosher food bloggers network, and that’s what we call ourselves, The Kosher Food Bloggers Network, and we are all across the country, and there was so much interesting rethinking of traditional foods. Four or five years ago, it wasn’t as energetic or vibrant a community or a scene. I would say that has been a big and wonderful exciting surprise.

Whitney and Amy, from Jewhungry and What Jew Wanna Eat, as you know, I co-authored a book with them. Those are my friends. What was really exciting was that we brought such different perspectives to it, Amy coming from Connecticut originally but living in Austin, Texas, has a completely different view of things than I do here. Whitney was in Miami, she has since moved to LA, so now her view has changed again, but she was a southern girl. I have these roots deep in the New York area and there was one other, there were four of us who wrote the book, and we called the book, Four Bloggers Dish.

The other person who contributed was Sarah Lasry, and she comes from a much more observant background. She brought a whole different perspective, and she was the one who kept saying, “I think we need more meat in this book guys,” and the three of us are like, “I don’t know.” It was great, yeah, you’ve met some of the cream of the crop.

On Her Passion for Food:

Liz Rueven of Kosher Like Me on The Dinner Special podcast talking about her passion for food.

I went back recently and I read my first blog post, which was in 2011, and I wrote about my grandfather. My grandfather was a traditional Jewish baker, and he came from Poland, he had three or four years as a young teen, as an apprentice, where he was sent away from his family, and he learned how to bake bread. When he came to this country, he baked bread and lots of other things, and I grew up with my grandparents coming to my home every Sunday. He would bring things like the most delicious rye bread, and onion rolls, and challah, and jelly donuts. So, he was one of my inspirations, but I have to say that my grandmother was a brilliant baker in her own right.

So it was just interesting that even though he would bring stuff home from the bakery, she baked also. The reason she baked, this really blew me away when I really thought about it, is because so many members of my family had food allergies, so she baked at home in order to avoid using eggs and dairy. She was a vegan baker. She was born at the end of the 1800s and she developed all of these recipes, never wrote them down, she couldn’t read, she couldn’t write, she was illiterate. But she developed all of these recipes, and it turns out, as I thought about it, they were vegan.

It’s just crazy because half my cousins and my sister were allergic to eggs and dairy. So, I would say my grandparents are my greatest inspiration.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

Well, there’s a new show about to launch, that I really am very excited about, it’s called Holy and Hungry, and it’s with Sherri Shepherd, and she goes to lots of different people who cook with an eye towards their religious background. She interviews people with Hindu perspectives and beliefs, and Muslim perspectives, and Orthodox Jewish perspectives, she goes to Christian cooks who are making foods from the Bible.

This show to me is super exciting, you have to look for it, it’s called Holy and Hungry. To me, that’s the most exciting.

I love Chopped, of course, because I really can’t get over the kinds of ingredients that they throw at these poor contestants. I really admire them for being so responsive and clever and being able to keep their wits about them. I would just have a total meltdown but, that’s why they’re competing. The opposite of that is Ina Garten because she’s so soothing and you want to be in her buttery arms, and they’re very, not her arms, but the food is so buttery. So I would say those would be three shows that I do love.

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

Well, I don’t know if you read The Kitchn, I really love The Kitchn, my daughter, who’s in her 20s, turned me on to it. It’s just such a huge resource. It covers so much and I love her how-tos, how to make a Caesar salad, how to handle winter squashes. I love what she does in that blog. I know she’s got a whole team.

I read and contribute to a blog called The Nosher, and so to nosh means to snack, so The Nosher really covers a ton of Jewish food trends, and edited by someone named Shannon Sarna, so her voice is very prominent in there, she’s like a master challah baker, she does all sorts of crazy and wacky challah recipes.

But of equal importance, she solicits posts from kosher and Jewish food bloggers who have very different perspectives on things. So there’s this great overview of what people are doing across the country and I love that. There’s a blog called, May I Have That Recipe, and it’s two sisters, I think they’re in Philly, and they write vegetarian, and vegan, and kosher, and their recipes are really inventive, and I’ve met them through my bloggers network. I really love what they’re doing. They’re smaller so props to them. They have a big readership, they really do. You can hear their voices in there, it’s really beautiful, and they act like such sisters, really fun.

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

Okay. My favorite feed on Instagram is called, MyGarbage.

When you look at this, to me, it is the most beautiful feed on Instagram. He, I think it’s a he, shoots his rectangular, white, garbage pail with all of the scraps from a dish that he’s made, but he arranges them. They look incredibly gorgeous, and I think for me, there’s a little message about food waste, which is that we could be reducing and we could be reusing, well not reusing the waste, but using it differently because he doesn’t even post his recipes, he just posts the ingredients which you see in the garbage pail. All of his photos are identically set up. And it’s very rhythmic and interesting to see them.

I love, love, love him. I love David Lebovitz, who is in Paris. He’s got a very funny voice, and he writes all about baking and cooking as an American in Paris, and he’s a brilliant photographer, and he’s very funny. There’s another person from Philly, and her feed is called Food In Jars, and it’s all about her preserving, and conserving, and putting up ingredients that she loves, and I just find it fascinating to see what she’s doing. Food In Jars, it’s great.

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

Well, I have a beautiful collection of ceramic handmade, plates, platters, bowls. I’m a really big sucker for big platters, big bowls. When I travel, I buy these things, which are really, really inconvenient and difficult to carry back. But I don’t care, I just feel like I’m bringing back the soul of an artist. I just get stuff, if you saw my kitchen right now, I have piles of tomatoes on a platter, and I have all sorts of things piled, like pears here in Connecticut in a big, deep, gorgeous hand-thrown ceramic bowl, so I would say, those are my most precious items.

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

I don’t know, there aren’t that many things that I’ve really converted to liking. I like most things, the one thing I don’t like and I haven’t gotten to like it at all is smoky profiles. I just feel like I’m licking an ashtray. I have no interest in that at all. So if people gift me smoky salts, whoever is around is really lucky because I’ll pass them on right away. So I can’t say that I started to like something that I didn’t like, I would just say that’s what I don’t like.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

Well, by training, I’m an art historian, so I think that I really love to read food history. I took a fantastic class at the New School in New York City, the teacher was Andrew Smith, and he wrote an encyclopedic book called, The Oxford Companion to American Eating and Drinking. If it’s 4th of July, or I’m thinking about, I don’t know, avocados or something, whatever it is, I might turn to his book first and see what he has to say about it.

Parallel to that, and right next to it on my shelf, is an encyclopedia, it’s called, The Encyclopedia of Jewish Foods, by someone who unfortunately has passed away. His name was Gil Marks, and he was a brilliant inspiration and researcher to his community, and so when a holiday comes up, I always look to him first, and I get an overview and a refresher. He covers everything, he covers the meaning of the holiday and the meaning of a food. And you can also just look into his book, just look up an ingredient, so it could be something like peaches. And he’ll talk about peaches, or he’ll at least lead you to a recipe for peaches. But beyond the history, I really loved The Forest Feast.

I love her work. I love these hand drawings and the simplicity of her recipes. It helps me to get out of my head and just keep it really simple. Also, I love Beatrice Peltre, La Tartine Gourmande, her photographs I think are among the most beautiful food photographs I’ve ever seen, and when I look at her work, her blog, or her book, which I have, that’s really awe inspiring.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

Well, I really like hearing The Stones when I cook, The Rolling Stones. That’s real rock and roll and I’ll listen to anything The Stones have ever done and just be happy to play with that.

On Keeping Posted with Liz:

Liz Rueven of Kosher Like Me on The Dinner Special podcast talking about how to keep posted with her.

Well, a lot of my readers are still turning to Facebook. Everything is @KosherLikeMe. I post probably numerous times a day on Instagram, and you can subscribe to my blog and see what I’m up to each week.

 

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Filed Under: Podcast Tagged With: Andrew Smith, Chopped, David Lebovitz, Food Blog, Food Blogger, Food in Jars, Four Bloggers Dish, Gefilteria, Gil Marks, Hanukkah, Holy and Hungry, Ina Garten, Jewhungry, Kosher food, Kosher Like Me, La Tartine Gourmande, Liz Rueven, May I Have That Recipe, MyGarbage, New School in New York CIty, Rosh Hashanah, Sarah Lasry, Simchat Torah, Sinai, sukkah, Sukkot, The Forest Feast, The Kitchn, The Nosher, The Rolling Stones, What Jew Wanna Eat

060: Dinner Was Delicious: Chicago and Its Food

July 20, 2015 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

Dinner Was Delicious on The Dinner Special podcast
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Lucy Hewett and Rachel Adams of Dinner Was Delicious on The Dinner Special podcast talking about the food culture in Chicago.

Dinner Was Delicious

Based in Chicago, Lucy and Rachel share recipes, photographs and love food enough not to take it too seriously. They’ve been destroying kitchens together since 2011.

I am so happy to have Lucy and Rachel of Dinner Was Delicious joining me here on the show today.

(*All images below belong to Dinner Was Delicious.)

On How They Met:

Lucy Hewett and Rachel Adams of Dinner Was Delicious on The Dinner Special podcast talking about how they met.

Rachel: Lucy and I both worked at this really weird tech start-up in Chicago. Chicago has this awesome tech scene.

Lucy: We were lucky to have this job.

Rachel: And it was great, but it wasn’t super creatively fulfilling. So we just bonded together over our shared love of food and gossip of the weird architecture in the office space.

Lucy: We found each other in the midst of a strange company. For our Parks and Rec enthusiasts, we describe it as Entertainment 720. We just talked about what we wanted to do and became good friends outside of work.

On What Made Them Want to Collaborate with Each Other:

Lucy Hewett and Rachel Adams of Dinner Was Delicious on The Dinner Special podcast talking about what made them want to collaborate.

Lucy: Rachel was baking a lot. My job was already creative because I was a graphic designer. And Rachel was doing operations and needed a creative outlet and would bring us the most incredible desserts. I started with cupcakes and pies and all kinds of really incredible desserts, and I was always like, “If you ever want to collaborate, we should be documenting these. These are beautiful. Have you written down the recipes? What’s next? Let’s do something with this.”

Rachel: So Lucy was doing her photography business, and I was baking more and more and then started actually baking as a little side project, just for some extra cash. I baked for a wedding that was for one of our mutual friend’s siblings, and Lucy was shooting photography for it too. So I was doing a bunch of cupcakes, and Lucy was like, “Well, I’ll come over, and I’ll take pictures of the cupcakes. It was super fun and we decided, “Well, let’s do it.”

Lucy: It was kind of intimidating to think about getting it started, but really, we just put a Tumblr theme up. I made a logo in five minutes that wasn’t really the logo that we wanted, but we just needed to start and it just started there.

On Their Interest in Food and Cooking:

Lucy Hewett and Rachel Adams of Dinner Was Delicious on The Dinner Special podcast talking about their interest in food and cooking.

Lucy: We like to eat. I really like to eat. I became interested in food after I moved to Chicago, and I became interested in food out of the realization that I don’t know how to cook for myself. I moved into my own apartment five years ago, and so it’s just all on me. I couldn’t rely on my roommate to have dinner ready for me anymore. And Rachel had all this knowledge, basics that I didn’t know, and so that was really helpful to just be cooking with her. And then eating in Chicago, you are exposed to all kinds of different things that I became interested and curious about that.

Rachel: I’ve always cooked. My mother, bless her heart, she’s an awesome nurse. Briefly in the late ’90s, she was a super kick-ass body piercer. But she can’t cook to save her life, and she’ll say it as much as I will. So if I wanted to eat when I was a kid, I had to figure out how to make it myself. I cooked a lot with my grandma, a little bit with my grandpa too, and just figured out how to cook, always super-passionate about it.

Love cooking for people. Another part of why we started collaborating was Lucy wasn’t as proficient in the kitchen, so it was like, “Well, come over. I’ll show you how to fry an egg.”

Lucy: At the time, I was still a graphic designer, and I didn’t know how I wanted to shoot food. It was kind of a way to learn that and experiment with different techniques.

On Not Taking Food Too Seriously:

Lucy Hewett and Rachel Adams of Dinner Was Delicious on The Dinner Special podcast talking about not taking food so seriously.

Rachel: So I think some people, many people who are really passionate about food start getting a little self-inflated about it. They lose the fun and the spontaneity of food and letting it be just what it is: something delicious to nourish you and share with people that you love. I think that we work really hard to keep the important things in mind: sustainability, seasonality, nutrient density, all of these things that we think about. But we let our love of food really shine through to be what it is, which is food. You eat it with people you love, and we’re giving food the space to be enjoyable, rather than something that’s stricter.

On a Kitchen Disaster:

Rachel: One happened last night. We’re in Lucy’s photography studio, and we were supposed to make Cheeze-Its, and I just . . . They just did not work. So even if you’re someone who’s proficient in the kitchen, screw-ups happen. Your recipe doesn’t always work out as planned. When you’re testing stuff and flying by the seat of your pants and maybe didn’t set your timer, sometimes things can get burned.

Lucy: There’s a lot of burning. Not a lot, but that’s my biggest.

Rachel: One of my favorite memories with us, though, was the day that we made the fried chicken at my place, and you brought the bone-in chicken. And this was way, way, way early on, like before I had any butchery experience, but I love taking carving on the meat now. I was still super squeamish. And so we were going to make a fried chicken dinner, and Lucy brought the chicken and it was bone-in because bone-in chicken is more delicious. But it was a whole chicken. I had to figure out, how do I take this bird apart?

Lucy: I was there for moral support, and it took a lot to go down.

Rachel: It took a lot of bourbon. This was four or five years ago now.

On the Food Culture in Chicago:

Lucy Hewett and Rachel Adams of Dinner Was Delicious on The Dinner Special podcast talking about the food culture in Chicago.

Lucy: People are really interested about food here, and there’s everything available. I don’t even know where to start. It’s overwhelming.

Rachel: People, when they think about Chicago food culture, they’re going to think first about deep-dish pizza.

Lucy: Yeah, that’s true.

Rachel: And people might not realize that it’s actually one of the most prominent culinary capitals in the U.S. We have Alinea. We’ve got Next. We’ve got Publican. We’ve got all sorts of really wonderful, creative restaurants. We’ve got a lot of ramen going on right now too.

It’s more than just meat and potatoes. It’s people who really care about interesting food. It’s not just white people with Western stuff.

Lucy: Yeah, food from all different cultures. The neighborhoods are so diverse that you can have food from all over the world and have it done well.

On a Dish That Captures What Chicago is About:

Rachel: That’s a really hard question.

Lucy: Because Chicago isn’t one thing food-wise for me. Hot dog, I guess.

Rachel: Because it’s got everything.

Lucy: It’s got everything on it. And we’re so particular about how we have our hot dogs. This is the least original answer I could give you.

Rachel: No, I love it.

Lucy: But it is the Chicago style, no ketchup and . . .

Rachel: You’ve got the mustard, which has lots of Asian and Germanic influences. You’ve got this beautiful pickle that’s like a fermented pickle. It’s not a brine pickle. So it has a long fermentation process rather than the vinegar. So lots of different cultural influences there. It’s everything on a bun and like, “Ugh!”

On a Food That Locals Love that Visitors May Not Know About:

Lucy: So there’s this one dish called a “mother-in-law.” It’s a hot dog and a tamale covered in chili in a bun with a bunch of cheese, and there’s also the Chicago original rainbow cone. It’s this huge stack of ice cream. It’s got orange sherbet, pistachio, this really special cherry ice cream, chocolate, everything all on one cone, and it’s so, so essential Chicago summer. In your cut-off jeans, you’ve got to get an original rainbow cone.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

Lucy: I love Anthony Bourdain.

Rachel: I love The Taste, though. Anthony’s on there, but Nigella, come on, give me a break. She’s perfect.

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

Rachel: Wit & Vinegar. Billy Green is the best human on the Internet. Love him so much. I’m super into I am a Food Blog.

Lucy: Yeah, I am a Food Blog is great. I always go to Smitten Kitchen. She’s great, solid recipes. She’s been around for so long, she has such a great library of recipes.

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

Rachel: I’m a grandmother on the Internet.

Lucy: That’s true.

Rachel: I follow lots of cat Instagrams, so I just get cat pictures in my feed throughout the day.

Lucy: Our friend Jana has an account called Bike a Bee that I follow on Instagram and Twitter and she’s hilarious and also shares all this cool information about plants. And she’s a beekeeper, and so she shares her process about beekeeping and selling honey, which is really cool.

Rachel: Speaking of Jana, there’s another, based in Philadelphia. There’s a restaurant and butchery space and education space about meat and sustainable meat called Kensington Quarters. It’s awesome. It’s not for vegans. If you’re squeamish about meat, you’re not going to love it. But they post the most beautiful, educational pictures about meat. They’re super great people I connect to.

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

Rachel: My KitchenAid mixer. I know that’s super cliché, but it has lived so many lives. It came into my life in the most . . . I was in a not super great relationship, and all that I wanted – and this was eight years ago, all that I wanted was a KitchenAid mixer because I had just started baking, and I was really passionate about it. And all that I wanted for my birthday was a KitchenAid mixer. But I was 22, 23.

Nobody has KitchenAid money at 22, 23. So I asked the guy that I was dating at the time, not a super great relationship, to talk to my friends and be like, “Everybody pitches in 10 or 15 bucks to get the KitchenAid.” And he did it, and I got my KitchenAid. And it was the best ever, and lived through a bug infestation.

It lived through 17 moves now, just going all over the place. It’s gotten me through everywhere. I love it more than everything. It barely works. It’s got this big nick on the top of it from one of my more urgent moves. My apartment flooded, and it was horrible. And I just grabbed the mixer and ran. Yeah, I love my mixer more than anything.

Lucy: I don’t know. My kitchen is kind of tiny. I don’t have any sentimental passed-on pieces yet.

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

Lucy: Pickles.

Rachel: Yeah, pickles? You didn’t like pickles?

Lucy: I didn’t like pickles. I wasted so much of my life not liking pickles.

Rachel: Weird. For a long, long time, I was really not into food. I didn’t eat asparagus until I was 25.

Lucy: Or things that were cute.

Rachel: I wouldn’t eat lamb.

Lucy: Rabbits.

Rachel: I still don’t eat rabbit. It makes me sad. I know, I’m an idiot. I didn’t have cauliflower until I was 27 and, oh my gosh, I love it now. If there’s anything that anyone is ever afraid of eating food-wise, you could be skipping your favorite food, the most delicious food you’ve ever eaten. Just eat all the things you’re afraid of. Everything is good if you cook it right.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

Lucy: What to Cook and How to Cook it.

Rachel: That’s such a good one. I just got Edward Lee’s Smoke and Pickles, and it is one of the most beautifully written cookbooks I’ve ever seen. The recipes are amazing. They’re flawlessly tested. The photography is beautiful. And his prose, he has chapters in between with actually prose in it. It’s so wonderful and smart and touching.

Lucy: And What Katie Ate books are beautiful, so I look at that for inspiration sometimes for photography. It’s gorgeous, lots of good party recipes.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

Rachel: Everything. Music makes me hungry.

Lucy: Yeah, it depends on what mood I’m in. I’ll put on an old album, like Tom Petty and The Rolling Stones, or I’ll blast Robyn if it’s winter or summer.

Rachel: If I’m making pie, I want to listen to The Secret Sisters, for sure. If I’m eating my feelings, I want to listen to Neko Case’s latest album and just cry into my soup or whatever comfort food I’m cooking. But if it’s just like general, just hanging out in the kitchen, you can’t go wrong with Robyn. She’s the queen. She’s flawless.

On Keeping Posted with Rachel and Lucy:

Lucy Hewett and Rachel Adams of Dinner Was Delicious on The Dinner Special podcast talking about keeping posted with them.

Lucy: DinnerWasDelicious.com, so that is where you should keep going. And then follow us on Instagram @effingdelicious, and we’re also @effingdelicious on Twitter as well.

 

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Filed Under: Podcast Tagged With: Alinea, Anthony Bourdain, Bike a Bee, Chicago, Chicago original rainbow cone, Dinner Was Delicious, Edward Lee, Entertainment 720, Food Blog, Food Blogger, i am a food blog, Kensington Quarters, KitchenAid, Lucy Hewett, Neko Case, Next, Nigella Lawson, Parks and Rec, Publican, Rachel Adams, Robyn, Smitten Kitchen, Smoke and Pickles, The Rolling Stones, The Secret Sisters, The Taste, Tom Petty, What Katie Ate, What to Cook and How to Cook it, Wit & Vinegar

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

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