Cookery by the Book

Korean BBQ
Master Your Grill In Seven Sauces

By Bill Kim with Chandra Kim

Suzy Chase:                  Welcome to the Cookery by the Book Podcast with me, Suzy Chase.

Bill Kim:                  Bill Kim from Chicago. Own two restaurants called Urban Belly and BellyQ, and we have a cookbook called "Korean Barbecue Master Your Grill in Seven Sauces".

Suzy Chase:                  You were born in Korea and raised in the Midwest, now how hold were you when you moved to Chicago?

Bill Kim:                  I was seven years old.

Suzy Chase:                  I would love it if you could describe your first day of school.

Bill Kim:                  Oh my God, traumatic. That's the first word that comes out.

Suzy Chase:                  Yeah.

Bill Kim:                  It wasn't even a first day of school, it was my very first day was I ditched and I didn't even know what that meant because I was so horrified to go to a new school or just even an American school. I'd convinced my brother who was I believe he was six. We took a year off so we started at eight and he was seven and I was like, "Let's not go. Let's go hide in the alley," and there was like almost like a basement that we could walk down and we hid there. What happened was the whole school was looking for us.

Suzy Chase:                  Oh my gosh.

Bill Kim:                  My mom did not know where we were. I've never done that in my entire life. I was so horrified because I was no longer with my parents. We were going into a strange situation and we didn't speak the language and that's the first reaction I had, "Let's go hide. Let's not go." That was my very first day of school.

Suzy Chase:                  Reading in the book about how difficult the transition was for you, I kept thinking about how hard it must've been for your parents.

Bill Kim:                  Yeah, my parents just moved here because they wanted a better life for us. I didn't know what that meant for us being so young but they had to give up a lot. My mom had part of her family here but a lot of her family in Korea and my dad had all of his family there. For some reason, that they felt compelled to drop everything and give us an opportunity and it really was an opportunity for us because in Korea, there were three or four major universities and if you did not get into those places, you could not move up in the world. The American dream is you work hard, you achieve, and you become successful. It doesn't work like that in the majority of the world where you work hard, if you're not educated and you don't reach a certain class, you stay there no matter how hard you work.

                                    For my parents to come here and take that chance, take that opportunity and give us a chance to succeed. I lived the American dream. I worked hard, I didn't speak the language and I love what I do and I have a choice and that was important to them to give us a choice to do what we wanted to do.

Suzy Chase:                  When you cooked at home growing up, your food was Korean with American touches. What were some of the American touches?

Bill Kim:                  We would do fried rice with hot dog and kimchi. That was my mom's way, her way of kind of giving us some kind of protein, if you call that a protein, which I love to this day. She would also take Spam and batter it like an egg wash and kind of toast it and saute it and give it to us in that way. We would, believe it or not, and this is not combining any cultures, my mom used to love making lasagna. I don't know why, but we would eat lasagna for days.

Suzy Chase:                  Really?

Bill Kim:                  She would make big pans and we would put it in the freezer and we would take it out. That was one of our things, she made lasagna. I don't know where she learned the recipe but we would always have lasagna in our freezer.

Suzy Chase:                  It had to have been a neighbor?

Bill Kim:                  We had an American family next to us and we had an Italian neighbor next to us and two of my friends growing up, one was like hardcore Italian and another was a Southside Irish person. I would go to their house and I would pick days, because I knew Friday, my friend Joe McDermott's parents who were both police officers, and I knew every Friday was pizza day. I was like, "Awesome." We, in our household, was whatever's left over, we're going to eat. There was no menu. There was no planning. It's like, "Hey, we have a lot of this and we have to use it," or it would go to waste, which was never happening in our house but Friday, I was always at Joe's house and Wednesday was spaghetti day at my friend Tony's house. I knew those two days, I knew what I was going to get.

                                    At my household, never knew what we were going to get. It was probably leftovers from two days before, but you would never find me at our house on Fridays because I would go at Joe's house.

Suzy Chase:                  That's hilarious.

Bill Kim:                  Yeah.

Suzy Chase:                  Then your junior year of high school, you went to a college night at the local junior college and that's when it all came into focus. What happened when you told your folks that you wanted to attend culinary school?

Bill Kim:                  I thought my parents' reaction, I thought it was going to be like, "What are you thinking," because nobody in our family, no friends, nobody I looked up to never did anything like this. My parents are, "If you want to do this, you got to study hard and you got to do this." I was kind of like, "Okay." I thought I was kind of living a dream because my parents said, "Go do it. If you're going to do it, you got to put everything into it and put your heart into what you do and you got to love what you do." I'm just like, "Okay, I'm going to try this," and I'm not, back then I wasn't a risk-taker so in order for me to go to this school, I found the cheapest way possible, which was to go through a junior college.

                                    I loved it because I just have to kind of memorize recipes. There is this cookbook to this day, and it's like torn apart, it's got tape on it, it's called Wayne Gisslen of Professional Cooking I read that cook book from one to 128 pages. You know what those were? They were the mother sauces and it really made an impact and really, it was the starting point for this book because that's how I learned how to cook. That really made it easy for me because it put it into focus of five mother sauces that you had to remember. From there, you get derivatives of these sauces, I'm psyched. "Wow. I just have to remember five, then I can remember 85?" I just kept on putting that into my career. That's how we cook at the restaurant, that's how I teach people how to cook. I'm just like, "Why can't we put it in book form?"

Suzy Chase:                  As a home cook, I find Korean sauces baffling and it made me feel so much better to know that even Daniel Boulud called Korean sauces mystifying.

Bill Kim:                  Yes.

Suzy Chase:                  You do, you describe the Korean sauces like the French mother sauces. Describe some of the Korean sauces.

Bill Kim:                  Sure, like I think one of the very basic and pronounced is like the Korean barbecue sauce. It's predicated on sweet, tangy, but it's multi-purpose, right? You also have a thing as a tenderizer, which is fruit is used a lot in Korean cuisine. Either Asian pears or apples, or sometimes to kind of tenderize the meat, because there's enzymes that kind of break down the meat, there's kiwi used, or a soda, things like that because in Korea there's not a lot of pasture land, so a lot of the meat that I grew up eating as a kid was usually a tendon or a big hunk of meat that needed to be braised or marinated to break down the toughness.

                                    When we talk about Korean sauces, these are some of the earthy, the gingery, the garlicky, some spice but it's not always spicy. It's really earthy flavors that really haunt you and having those tastes linger throughout after you have eaten it, and it's really, it's whole-flavored. That's what Korean cuisine and using some of those ingredients gets you.

Suzy Chase:                  After culinary school, you met a game-changer in your life, Charlie Trotter. Talk a little bit about that.

Bill Kim:                  I had this bright idea that I wanted to travel, which I certainly did, but I'd moved to Atlanta. The day of my graduation, me and my brother drove to Atlanta to work for a French chef, whose name is John Banchet. Pretty well-known in Chicago. He used to own a restaurant called La Francaise, and that's where a lot of the chefs trained in Chicago and had work and passed through to get their training. I also wanted to go to Atlanta because the Olympics were happening back then. I'd lasted a year, and I was so homesick. I came to Chicago back and I had these contacts, I'd talked to these chefs and basically asked them, "Hey, if you were me, young and only wanted to focus on just cooking. Didn't matter how much I was getting paid, I just want to be a sponge. I wanted to work with the best."

                                    I talked to three chefs. They all pointed to the same restaurant, and it was Charlie Trotter on 816 West Armitage.

Suzy Chase:                  Yeah, I remember that.

Bill Kim:                  Yeah, and I'm just like, "What is he doing or what is he not doing that makes everybody point at the right direction," and when I got there, my mind was blown. We were doing like fresh crab from Maine, using Maine [inaudible 00:11:49] and crushed water chestnuts. I mean I was used to making crab cakes, heavy butter sauces, and here we are doing something totally foreign to me, and I'm just like, "I'm going to eat this up, and I'm going to take this opportunity and I'm going to ride it 'til I fall off." The thing that I'd learned beyond cooking, and still to this day that I have learned, was being part of a community, which means giving back. That has taught me and molded me to who I believe that I believe when I became a chef to be able to say, "Charlie, yes, he taught me about cooking, but he really taught me about giving and giving back." That was the lesson that I took away.

                                    To this day, I give back and give back to the next generation and also give it to people who need it and give them an opportunity to grow and that's a very important lesson that I took away and honestly, with all the chefs that I respect that I work for, they couldn't even come close. All together, they couldn't come close to what Charlie did for the community and people who needed help that he would reach out and lend a hand. That was a very important lesson that has molded me and grounded me to this day.

Suzy Chase:                  You wrote about your time with Charlie, "I never got to meet the customers and missed the feeling of taking care of people by feeding them." Do you think you had to do the French food thing to realize that really where you wanted to be and where you felt comfortable was at a less formal restaurant that paired your Korean heritage with your Chicago upbringing?

Bill Kim:                  I wanted, it's partly true, I wanted to never look back on my career. What that meant was I had to work for the best, no matter what, and I had to start with a classic foundation of cooking that I really wanted to learn, because if I went straight to Asian food, I would always wonder what it felt like to do something classical. I have to get these things out of my system. What I've learned when I was working in fine dining, I did meet some of Charlie's customers and I know them. They were so elevating in what they did and how they did it, and I was just like, "Wow," I never know what a CO of a company does. I've always wondered about it, but the only thing we had in common was food.

                                    That was okay for a time, but I wanted to know about people's [inaudible 00:14:47]. I wanted to know about how these people met. The only way you get to do that is sit down and you get to really talk to people, know them, and as our restaurants got casual and we got to meet people, like you hear the stories, and to me, that is the essential part of a restaurant that you connect with your customers and get to know them. I've seen so many babies that once somebody has dated, gotten married, some of them at our restaurant, and ha their first kid and they have their first bite of [inaudible 00:15:31] at our restaurant. That is something that stays with you, and you're like, "Wow."

                                    You don't really see that at the high-end restaurants. You see it, you celebrate it and it might come once a year, but I see some of these people that are our customer, our supporter, and many ways our restaurant family and we see them twice a week and we're right by a preschool, I see a same girl, I think she's probably like five years old and she came up to me and was like, "Oh, I love your restaurant." A five year old, come up to you and say that, you're just like, "Wow, that is connecting in a whole different level." I see her every Friday, and I'm going to see her today and I know what she's going to have and we usually give her a little soft serve ice cream when she's done and you know, until she finishes preschool, I know she's going to come back every Friday. I know what time she's going to come. I know the parents are going to come.

                                    That kind of emotional connection, it's different, it's on a different level than a lot of the high-end restaurants.

Suzy Chase:                  It's funny because at the beginning of our chat, you said that you didn't think of yourself as a risk-taker but I definitely think you're a risk-taker.

Bill Kim:                  Now I am, but when I was a kid, it was so important for me to give back to my parents what they had given to me. I'm looking at how my parents took the chance to come here and I didn't want to take a chance and not be successful so I just put my head down and went, picked up as many cook books as possible for me to work endless hours and I just did what I was shown. They were the example of, if you want to talk about work ethic, 35 years, six days a week washing people's clothes, it's very humbling to see them do what they didn't want to do but they did it for us. It was very important for me, I had a choice, they didn't. In order for me to not succeed, I'd have been a failure, but I said, "There's no way in hell, I grew up here, I speak the language, I got educated here, I'm going to make it happen. No matter what."

                                    With that knowledge, with that example of them doing what they did, yeah, I'm going to take a risk, I'm going to go. Obviously, part of that risk was my wife that basically what she said to me when we opened up our very first place with no investors, she was like, "You know, we're going to do this together, and we're going to jump off the cliff together." She's of Puerto Rican descent, a very strong-willed lady and we did it together and that was also very important for me. She is the risk-taker, I'm the risk-taker passenger and she's really kind of made me come out of my shell. She is a strong lady that I love dearly and she's part of our success.

Suzy Chase:                  She was the first female captain at the legendary Daniel restaurant here in New York City, right?

Bill Kim:                  Yes, mm-hmm (affirmative).

Suzy Chase:                  I mean that is incredible.

Bill Kim:                  Yeah.

Suzy Chase:                  Talk about how you've blended culinary cultures together?

Bill Kim:                  Yeah, I mean I think it was just natural. I think there was that same moment when we started putting things together was, I asked this question 1993 to a French chef that I worked for, and I said, "If you go out to a Vietnamese restaurant, how does that influence your food, chef?" He kind of laughed in my face and said, "Hahaha, I am French, why would I put anything else in French?" I light bulb came out and there was another incident where another French restaurant I used to work at, and a chef gave me lemongrass. I was like, "What do I do with this?" I'm just like, "I don't know nothing about lemongrass because I'm not Thai or Vietnamese. I'm not Southeast Asian, I'm Korean. I could've got mad at that but I'm just like, "Man, I should know what this is and I'm going to know everything what this lemongrass is made with and I'm going to be the guy who knows how to use this more than anybody else in the kitchen."

                                    That was the opening that I needed. That was the push that I needed to find out what I could learn doing research and knowing other ingredients from other parts of the world because not a lot of people are open-minded, so I started seeking out all different types of cuisine and learning the techniques and almost interchanging ingredients, which meant example, water chestnuts is used in Asia all throughout and farm fresh. Here, it's used a lot of times, used canned and it's not even close to what the fresh water chestnut tastes like but what can we find an ingredient that kind of is similar. Then we started to do research, [inaudible 00:21:09] was the perfect example of that.

                                    As I got to know my wife's culture, eating plantains, tostones, in Puerto Rican culture, the tostones, or tubers or anything like that is used instead of potato and the plantain is used like a bread in a sandwich. I'm just like, "Wow, that is so crazy that it's right in my face," and we opened up a restaurant called Belly Shack and it was a love story told through food and we did what's called a jibarito sandwich which it was just basically pressed plantain sandwich with Korean barbecue and like sticky brown rice and that started it.

                                    I wanted to kind of express my love for my wife through food and Belly Shack was the restaurant and those memories, those dishes, is still in part in our current restaurants and we are doing what's called the mofongo but it's boiled plantains and in the Puerto Rican culture, they actually take bananas and fry it but they also add pork skin and lots of garlic so we're going to lighten it up by adding, we're going to boil the plantains, we're going to add like tofu in there to kind of give it creaminess and we're going to add tortilla for the crunchiness, but we're actually going to season it with one of the mother sauces from the boat, nuoc cham which is light, zesty, tons of flavor, tons of umami, so we're kind of doing that dish take on our version of Asian Latin barbecue.

Suzy Chase:                  In the cook book, I love the idea of starting out by choosing the sauce or seasoning powder you want to make and then the list of the recipes that it pairs with is right on the same page. That's brilliant.

Bill Kim:                  I think that really made the book. Really, and a lot of people think that Asian food to be all technique and how do I get all these ingredients and once I'm done and this is the most important part, once I'm done, what do I do with all these sauces that I have two cups of or these bottle sauces that I could only buy in 32 ounces? I thought about that because I cook at home and I do it professionally, I just don't like having a lot of condiments all over. Why can't you have some of these master sauces prepared in the freezer or refrigerator and use it maybe in your hummus, which I have in my refrigerator every single day. Sometimes I just don't want to have the taste of beans and garlic. Maybe I'll add a little bit of Korean pesto and kind of liven it up.

                                    Then we could also, if you're making canned soup or chicken broth or whatever, why can't we add two tablespoons of the pesto in our broth? You want to have pasta salad? Okay, there you go. It was using these mother sauces being multi-purpose and also being part of your daily life and this keeps on giving you kind of the guidelines how to do that with the matrices that's in the book where you have the leftovers and you're adding and subtracting, you're having the mother sauces and having the map of these mother sauces in the front with the recipes that accompany that and also in the back that you don't have to go back to, it's like seven different pages. It's right there.

                                    Really, really we focused on the end users, and how they like to cook, and how you could use this as a template for your cooking. My purpose was to have the book, the binder be broken because you're using it so often.

Suzy Chase:                  Over the weekend, I made a few of the recipes out of this cookbook. First, was your Corican sauce on page 41, incredible. How did this sauce come about?

Bill Kim:                  I asked my mother-in-law, because my wife does not cook. She's a critic but she does not cook. My mother-in-law's a great cook and she's actually, I dedicated a recipe to her but she makes this like sauce, we have it for Thanksgiving all the time. She's calls it lechon turkey, it's a lechon-style, which just means lechon is a pork but it's usually that lechon is marinated in vinegar, oregano, garlic. Obviously, we have to put our kind of take on it but we ass a little curry powder to make it a little bit different but I've never used vinegar prior to meeting my wife in a marinade, because that's going to be too overpowering, it's going to make things sour, but honestly, like it brings the proteins alive. It also makes it juicy and the penetration with the vinegar through the marinade, it's just tasty. I could even taste it in my mouth right now.

                                    It's so easy. It asks for things that you probably have. I have oregano in my pantry all the time. I have garlic powder, oregano, we always have vinegar, and we always have olive oil so I'm already there.

Suzy Chase:                  Yeah, so then, I marinated the pork chops, your Ko Rican pork chop recipe from page 85 and I marinated it all day.

Bill Kim:                  That's right.

Suzy Chase:                  I also made your nuoc cham sauce, is that how you pronounce it?

Bill Kim:                  Mm-hmm (affirmative), yes.

Suzy Chase:                  From page 43 and I drizzled that over the pork chop and that was amazing. Those Thai chilies really gave it some heat.

Bill Kim:                  Okay, yeah. Then you know what you could also do? Prior to it, you can take some of the marinade before you put it in the meat, and the nuoc cham, then get whole bunch of cilantro or parsley and you could put that in the food processor and you have your chimichurri also.

Suzy Chase:                  Oh my gosh.

Bill Kim:                  Yeah, so if you have some left ...

Suzy Chase:                  I do.

Bill Kim:                  ... That's what you could do. All right, you gotta do it.

Suzy Chase:                  I also made your kimchi potato salad from page 174, which was crazy. I've never eaten potato salad like that and I think every Korean barbecue place should have this potato salad instead of the regular mayo one.

Bill Kim:                  Oh my God, that is my complaint. I'm like, "Where did people learn how to make potato salad with mayonnaise?"

Suzy Chase:                  From my mom haha.

Bill Kim:                  Why? You have this beautiful kimchi at your restaurant that you make and you guys are already doing potatoes so why, that's the thing that drives me crazy because everything is there to do the kimchi potato salad, right?

Suzy Chase:                  Yeah.

Bill Kim:                  Everything's there in a Korean kitchen or Korean restaurant. Why does it have to be mayonnaise paste potato salad? I don't understand it.

Suzy Chase:                  I don't get it.

Bill Kim:                  Maybe after the book comes out, maybe they'll switch to kimchi potato salad.

Suzy Chase:                  Hopefully the word will get out. Where can we find your restaurants?

Bill Kim:                  The restaurant, obviously, it's in Chicago. BellyQ and Urban Belly is in the same building, 1400 West Randolph, then we have another Urban Belly, it's in the Wicker Park area of Chicago. Sometimes I pinch myself to see if this is all real and it's very humbling for me to be at this point in my life where I could kind of tell our story through a book and hopefully people who are listening to the podcast that could come and join us and taste a little bit of love story told through food in an urban setting.

Suzy Chase:                  Where can we find you on social media?

Bill Kim:                  I'm on Instagram. It's ChefBillKim, Facebook, BellyQChicago on Facebook and UrbanBellyChicago on Facebook. Same thing for the Instagram, BellyQChicago and UrbanBellyChicago on Instagram.

Suzy Chase:                  Thank you for telling the story of Korean barbecue your way and thanks for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.

Bill Kim:                  Thank you so much, Suzy.

Suzy Chase:                  Follow me on Instagram at CookerybytheBook, Twitter is IAmSuzyChase, and download your Kitchen Mixtapes music to cook by on Spotify at CookerybytheBook and as always, subscribe in Apple podcasts.

Turnip Greens & Tortillas
A Mexican Chef Spices Up The Southern Kitchen

By Eddie Hernandez and Susan Puckett

Suzy Chase:                  Welcome to the Cookery by the Book Podcast, with me, Suzy Chase.

Eddie:                  My name is Eddie Hernandez and I just wrote a wonderful book called Turnip Greens & Tortillas. I'm the executive chef and partner for Taqueria del Sol.

Suzy Chase:                  You call yourself a Southern boy who never worries about food correct. What exactly does that mean?

Eddie:                  I don't know where the Southern boy got started. It was something that I said to a customer and I got stuck with the name. What I mean when I say I'm not food correct is because I think people emphasize too many rules on cooking and doesn't allow the home cook to really become what they can be, because you have to cook a certain way or another way, or you have to do things this way or their way. Well, I grew up in a house where there was no rules on cooking. It was he who cooks cook whatever he wanted to cook, and the other ones, they were welcome to it. If they didn't want to eat, well, then they're going to have to cook their own food.

                                    What I meant by that is that you should cook any way you like. I want to empower the home cook. Do your thing. Cook whatever you got. It doesn't really need to make sense, it needs to taste good. That's the bottom line.

Suzy Chase:                  That's how it used to be, though, I thought growing up. Somewhere in the past I'd say 30 years that changed. Everything had to be completely correct and perfect.

Eddie:                  You're absolutely right. I've been cooking for 30 years. It's many examples of how people where so dramatically about doing things one way. I had said before, "Listen, eggs are not just for breakfast. A steak is not just for dinner. A steak is for whenever I want to eat a steak and eggs are for whenever I want to eat eggs." There was a very well-known chef here in town, and he came to my restaurant. I knew him really well. I had a steak with a white sauce on the menu, and he went ballistic on me. That was a sin, a no-no. White sauces were just only for fish. I'd say, "Well, you bring me a book that says that I'm not supposed to do that. An etiquette book on cooking, and then I might think about it. But now this is the way I cook."

                                    He ordered the steak with the white sauce. After he got through eating, he came to me and he goes, "You know what? I really admire that you really don't care so much about what people think and you cook good food. That steak unbelievable."

Suzy Chase:                  That's great.

Eddie:                  Then he came to work for me. But people live in this world where they have to go by the rules all the time. Cooking should be a time to enjoy. It needs to be good because you think it's good.

Suzy Chase:                  Nearly 30 years ago there was a guy named Mike Klank who hired you for your first waiter job at a Tex-Mex restaurant. Little did he know you were the best thing to happen to that restaurant. Describe how and where it all started with a bag full of turnip greens.

Eddie:                  Well, in 1987, I came to Georgia to visit a friend. I was already living in Waco, Texas, at the time. I just wanted to spend some time away from everything. From the music, my friends, just get away. I came over here to take some time off away from everybody. There was a restaurant that was about to open, and my friend said, "Why don't you get a job? I know you can cook. Stay here." I said, "Man, I don't think I really want to get a job in the kitchen." He bet me a case of beer that I was just afraid to ask for a job because I wasn't going to get hired and I said, "Oh no, I will definitely get hired. I know." So I took him up on the bet and we pull up and we went inside. Of course my hair was all the way to my shoulders, I had the earrings, the bracelet, typical rocking wannabe individual.

                                    Mike was there, and I went to talk to him and I said, "Are you hiring?" He goes, "What are you looking for?" I told, "Well, I'd like to be a waiter." He goes, "Okay. When can you start?" I said, "Anytime." He says, "Tomorrow?" So it is. The next day I showed up and I became a waiter. Three days later I don't know why I went and told him, I said, "All these people are not coming back." He says, "Why?" I says, "Because of the food the bad and the service is worse, and I'm one of the waiters." He look at me like ... But in those three days, he and the kitchen staff saw me that I would go to the kitchen and make my own food, because they were so slow. I make my own dishes. I would cook something for me to eat so they already had a sense that I knew what I was doing.

                                    Mike said, "Can you cook?" I said, "I can do better than what you're doing right now." And he says, "Okay. Tell me what do we need to do?" So we work up a deal. One of things is that I really like Mike as a person. I thought that he was a straight shooter and that he was going to treat me with respect, somebody that I wanted to work with. He went to the kitchen and fired the chef, I took over the kitchen. I said, "I'll get this thing straight in three days," and he goes, "Okay." I'm glad I said three days, because I would have said four, I'd be looking at 10 more years. Those three days became 30 years so far. I'm still in the kitchen. I didn't want to do it at the beginning but now I love it.

Suzy Chase:                  Wow. It's crazy how moments like that change your whole life.

Eddie:                  I'm telling you. Sometimes it's unreal. I just can't believe that him and I, we've been working for so long.

Suzy Chase:                  As an example of your creativity, tell us the story about the bag of turnip greens.

Eddie:                  There was a man named Bobby Avery and his wife, Jaunita in the very late 80’s like '88, '89. He was a regular customer already by then. He showed up with a bag of turnip greens one day on a plastic bag. He gave them to me and he said, "Eddie, if anybody can make this thing famous, it'll be you." I said, "Thank you," and I took them to the kitchen and they went bad because I really didn't know what to do with them. The next Friday Bobby showed up again with another bag and I felt bad, so I went to Mike and I said, "Mike, what is this?" He says, "A turnip green." I said, "What do you do with it?" He goes, "Well, you cook it and we eat it." I said, "Well, how do they cook it?" He says, "Oh my god. Get in the car." We went out to eat lunch at a couple of restaurants over the next week or so, so I see what people did with them.

                                    It made no sense. They were bitter. I went back to the restaurant and I changed everything. I did it differently than the Southern people were doing it at the time. I got a lot of grief because I didn't cook them the way everybody else did and I said, "Well, I don't care. If you don't like them, you don't have to eat it. But this is how I do it." I had refused to make cornbread. I said, "No, because we eat them with tortillas in Mexico." That's a true story. We're talking 1989 and in my dreams did I ever thought that turnips greens and tortillas would be the title of a book. I was not the one that named the book. I never thought that those two little words become a title of a book. I just said, "In Mexico we eat the turnip greens with tortillas. Tortolitos."

                                    I said, "So I'm not going to give you cornbread." People used to sneak cornbread into the restaurant. It was funny because I catch him and I go, "What are you doing?" He goes, "But you won't make cornbread," and I said, "It's a Mexican restaurant for God's sake. You eat with tortillas." Eventually I give in and I started making cornbread. Now I make it all the time. As I grew as a cook, and I learned more about the ingredients available in the South and all this and that, now I make blue cornbread. I do popcorn cornbread. I do all kinds of cornbreads now, and I really like it. I learned to assimilate the culture that I was in, which it was the South. I learned to love it.

                                    I love the fact that people still says, "Good morning," and, "Hi," and, "God bless you," and, "Have a good day." I grew up in that culture in Mexico where people always say, "Good morning." Even if they didn't like you, they will still good morning to you because that's the way we grew up. Here we are 30 years later, that recipe has never left the restaurant. It's been our menu ever since.

Suzy Chase:                  What's your favorite type of avocado and what do you look for when you're buying avocados?

Eddie:                  Well, we always try to use Hass. We always have. Because I love Mexican avocados, but they're a little bit more buttery. The pulp, it's a little bit thicker, it's less fluid and less oily, so it looks different. The flavor is a milder not as sweet flavor, it has more of an avocado flavor to it. But if I had to use a different avocado, I will go to Mexican avocados. You want a firm avocado. You don't want it mushy. If you look at the picture on the book, you'll see that you can see chucks of avocado. That's how we like our guacamole to be. I want to be able to taste the avocado when I take a bit into it. I want to run into a piece of onion or a jalapeno, and that gives me another burst of favor in it.

                                    That the jalapenos are roasted. Not roasted, but warm. You put them in a pan with a little oil and you cook them a little bit, it takes the green flavor of the jalapeno away but it retains the heat and the taste. But it doesn't taste green so it doesn't conflict with the flavor of the avocado. We use lemon rather than lime because it doesn't cook the pulp of the avocado. It maintains the flavor of the avocado there's a reason for everything when I cook. I try to think about what the ingredients will do to each other throughout the cooking or throughout this and that. That's why it's different.

Suzy Chase:                  Food is history. Food has a story. What does this cookbook represent to you?

Eddie:                  I wanted a cookbook that people can actually cook better. I like to read a cookbook that has a story. Each dish on any cookbook should have a story on why the dish came alive. We tried to do that in Turnip Greens and Tortillas.

Suzy Chase:                  Over the weekend I made your recipe for Pico de Gallo on page 202, your Salsa Frita on page 204. I could literally eat salsa every day. One thing that struck me was how different these two salsas tasted, but they had almost the same basic ingredients. The only difference was that the diced tomatoes were cooked in oil for the Salsa Frita. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Eddie:                  If you go through the book and you see we got a good selection of salsa. They're basically the same ingredients all the time. It's the time that you manipulate the ingredients that make the salsas different. Even if all the other ingredients are the same ingredients, the fact that the jalapeno is cooked differently will affect the flavor of the salsa. But then you take the tomato. You keep everything else the same but now you're going to fry the tomato or you're going to boil it, or you're going to steam it, you're going to warm it, and that changes the flavor of the salsa.

                                    With five ingredients you can actually create 25 different salsas that will not look or taste the same based on what you do to the ingredients. In the book, I hope the people will get that idea, that everybody can make a green salsa, but why is this salsa different than the other one? Well, it's because what we do to the ingredients. For the salsa frita, it's one of the simplest salsas you will ever find, but you cannot argue that it's a really good salsa. Tomatoes, jalapenos, and salt, and a little oil and you get this wonderful salsa that goes so well on top of fried egg or mixed with potatoes and sausage or put on top of a cheese enchilada.

                                    You can do amazing things with everything in the book and that's what I want people to be able to go, "Okay, this is a wonderful salsa, I'm making me burritos tomorrow with that," or, "I'm going to make me chicken enchiladas," or, "I'm going to make me a fried egg," or, "I'm going [inaudible 00:14:05]." That's the beauty of cooking, when you learn to use what you have in ways that are different than the one before. Then you start growing as a cook and eventually you become really good at it.

Suzy Chase:                  I also made your recipe for Poblano Corn Chowder with Shrimp on page 121.

Eddie:                  Holy cow.

Suzy Chase:                  That was amazing too-

Suzy Chase:                  It was my whole Sunday and I had such a blast making all of these recipes. They were all incredible. But describe this chowder, how it's basically a modified lobster corn chowder.

Eddie:                  I did a plate-off with a classical French ... I went over there and he was going to tell me how to do the ducks in sauces, and reduction sauces and demi glazes, and really neat stock. In return, I was going to teach him how to implement peppers into his cooking so he can modernize his French cooking ways. I saw a lobster chowder in there and I really like it. Lucky for me or I don't know why, I go, "This could be really good if ... It needs texture." That was the first thing I said, "It needs texture."

                                    I added the poblanos, I added the onions, I added the different types of corns to it, then used all heavy cream instead of end up using half-and-half and modernized it on a way that he actually have never seen. I added shrimp to make it affordable rather than the lobster, because not all of us can afford lobster every day. But you can always get some shrimp. That way you can do the soup and I it won't cost an arm and a leg. I just took the chowder idea and make another idea out of what I thought that I can do by using what I had, which is a variety of peppers and vegetables, to recreate the chowder on the way that I envision it.

Suzy Chase:                  This is one of those cook books that you could leave out on the kitchen counter and make something different every night of the week. That's why I love it.

Eddie:                  That's probably the biggest compliment I got so far. I said this to Susan Puckett, I said, "Susan, I want a cookbook for the kitchen. I don't want a cookbook for the coffee table."

Suzy Chase:                  Before we wrap up, can you talk just a little bit about Susan Puckett and what she had to do with this cookbook, and how you know her?

Eddie:                  First of all, she should be lucky that I didn't kill her when we got started. We clashed big time. She's a food editor, she knows all about correct food and politically correct recipe, and I am not. She was going, "Well, you have to do it this way," and I go, "No. I don't have to do it that way." We had a hard time from the get-go, until I said, "Let's do this something. I want you to try making the recipes. I want you to test them." She's quiet, and I said, "That way you can get in my head and you can really see how I think. Because the way you think the way to cook is not the way I see it. Let's get started with a little something simple, and then we'll progress from there on."

                                    I got her to start cooking the recipes. When she did one not the way I said so, I caught her and I got so mad at her. I said, "You cannot change food without even knowing what it's supposed to taste like. Make it the way [inaudible 00:18:00] this time, then you can change it. You have the power to do it the way you like it later, but you have to trust me." I said, "Because I trust you. I know you're going to write a good book, but you have to let me write the recipes." She started cooking and eventually she became a fan. But her way through the process, she was already going, "Oh, we need to put that recipe on the menu. Oh, we need to put that other recipe on the menu."

                                    Finally one day I said, "Susan we are not writing the bible. Come on. You gotta stop it. This is what we want to put in the book, this is what everything thinks that we should do, and I agree with some of them." Then we started working really good. We got into it, we really want to work hard on it. We worked really hard for the last year, and then we got through and it was a let-down. There's nothing else to do with the book. It was like, "I really want to keep on cooking." We still eat breakfast together. We became really good friends. We're really good foodies, the two of us. We enjoy trying new things and I think she learned a lot about cooking by working with this book. Since I write it, I don't think she needs any help. As a cook, yes, she needs divine intervention. But nevertheless, she can cook out of Turnip Greens and Tortillas.

Suzy Chase:                  Where can we find your restaurants?

Eddie:                  We have four in Atlanta. In the City of Atlanta we have four. We have one in Athens. We have two in Nashville. If you go to taqueriadelsol.com all the locations are listed there with the hours of operations for all the restaurants.

Suzy Chase:                  Where can we find you on social media?

Eddie:                  You can find me on Eddie Hernandez on Facebook or chefeddie1@taqueriadelsol, on Instagram and on Twitter @chef135.

Suzy Chase:                  As your grandmother said, if you want to eat it, then learn how to make it for yourself because I'm not going to be here one day and who's going to cook it for you?

Eddie:                  Exactly.

Suzy Chase:                  With that, I thank you for learning and writing this cookbook and coming on Cookery by the Book Podcast.

Eddie:                  Thank you so much.

Suzy Chase:                  Follow me on Instagram at Cookery by the Book, Twitter is @IAmSuzyChase and download your Kitchen Mix Tapes, music to cook by, on Spotify at Cookery by the Book. As always, subscribe in Apple Podcasts.

Bring It!
Tried and True Recipes for Potlucks and Casual Entertaining

By Ali Rosen

Suzy Chase:                  Welcome to the Cookery by the Book Podcast, with me, Suzy Chase.

Ali Rosen:                  I'm Ali Rosen, and my new book is Bring It! Tried and True Recipes for Potlucks and Casual Entertaining.

Suzy Chase:                  You have been nominated for an Emmy for your show Potluck, and two IACP awards, and named a Forbes 30 under 30. Plus, Thrillist once said that you had one of the coolest jobs in food. I love it. Now, your new cookbook, Bring It!, is all about potlucks and casual entertaining. Talk a little bit about that.

Ali Rosen:                  Well, this book is really the culmination of everything I've learned in my career. I'm so lucky to do my show, where I get to talk to chefs, and cookbook authors, and creators all day. And I was just excited to share some of what I've learned, and my recipes. And so, the book is really all about answering that question of, "What can I bring?"

                                    Because you know, the dinner parties that we do today, I think are really different to the formal parties people used to have. Everybody's always bringing something, people are always coming together by bringing different dishes. So, this book is 100 recipes that can kind of answer that question.

Suzy Chase:                  So, let's start off with talking about how to use this cookbook. In particular, the badges. How do we use those?

Ali Rosen:                  The badges were really important to me because as somebody who kind of flips through a cookbook a lot, as you obviously do, I ... You know, sometimes I'm looking for something specific, and I don't know whether it's going to fit into that category. And when I, as I started testing recipes, I really sort of found that, when you're bringing food to an event, or to a dinner, they kind of need to fall into one of three categories, or in multiple categories.

                                    One is "day ahead," because you oftentimes have to go to an event, and you need to make it ahead. One is "fridge to table," because oftentimes, there isn't an oven there, you need to just be able to bring something and have it come straight from the fridge. The third is "30 minutes or less," because we all kind of run out of time when we're cooking, and we need something to be quick.

                                    So, I wanted to divide the book in that way, and some of the recipes fall into all three categories, some of them don't fall into any. But it's kind of a good way, as you're flipping through the book, to really figure out if there's something in particular you need, that it's there.

Suzy Chase:                  So, in the cookbook, you wrote, "There's an art to a meal where all the food is made ahead and brought in. It should be an orchestrated dance of different cooks and different kitchens all coming together at one table for a meal that feels both cohesive and simple." That's easy for you to say. So, how do we ensure that this meal is successful?

Ali Rosen:                  Well, I think the most important thing is planning. You know, I think that when people think of potlucks, they think, "Okay, great, I'll just tell everybody to bring something, and then it'll be fine." And then, you know, you end up with like six salads and three desserts, and nobody has a main course.

                                    So, you can get out of a lot of the cooking by having everybody bring different things, but you, at the very base level, need to kind of give people direction. You know, assign people, say, "Okay, you're making the salad, you're making a meat, you're making a vegetable side, and you're making the dessert." And then that gives people the context.

                                    You also want to give people the context of what they have to cook with. Do you have oven space? Do you have fridge space? Do they need to bring their own utensils? Do they need to bring a knife, if it needs to be cut? Those kinds of things that just, kind of, thinking through how you're going to set it up, and who's bringing what, will save you a ton of time on the back end, because then you're not scrambling to figure out who's bringing what.

                                    So, especially in today's age, I mean, there's so many great programs online or through email. You can just have people check a box. And I think that organization from the outset can make a potluck feel really cohesive, even though different dishes are coming out of different kitchens.

Suzy Chase:                  Speaking of setup, going to potlucks, there are always the hurdles of transporting the food, storing the food, and issues with the food sitting out. What are your tips for that?

Ali Rosen:                  I think the biggest thing is not to overcook. You know, a lot of people think, "Okay, I'm going to make this dish, and then it's going to be totally done. I'm going to cover it, and then I'm going to transport it while it's hot." And what people forget is that food keeps cooking, especially if it's covered, even if you're only traveling 15 or 20 minutes to somebody's house.

                                    So, you really have to think through, if you need to reheat something, you want to let it completely cool down, uncovered, before you put it in the fridge. You want to undercook it a little bit, so that when you put it back in the oven, you don't overcook it. And you just want to think through whether you can serve it at room temperature or not. Because I find that, at a lot of potlucks, people get so worked up about serving hot food, when there's so many great dishes that you can serve at room temperature.

                                    The flip side of that is, of course, food safety. If you're having an outdoor picnic, and it's really hot outside, and it's the summer, you do want to make sure that you're only taking things out of the fridge right when people are ready to eat, because you also don't want it to sit around all day. Not just for food safety reasons, but because you don't want the food to start looking sad. You know?

Suzy Chase:                  Yes.

Ali Rosen:                  So it changes everything.

                                    Again, it's, so much of it is just sort of thinking through the dish as a whole, rather than just the cooking piece of it. People think through the recipe, and they don't think through the steps from getting it from point A to point B. And that can be really easy, you just have to plan ahead.

Suzy Chase:                  As a mom, I find that potlucks are a bit of a competition. Like, when our kids get together, it's always like, "Hey, I made this chicken blah blah blah," and then I brought hummus.

Ali Rosen:                  Right.

Suzy Chase:                  So ...

Ali Rosen:                  Yeah. I usually bring the wine in those cases. Like, "Well, I'm sorry, here's your wine."

Suzy Chase:                  "And I have cups, too."

Ali Rosen:                  Yeah, exactly. "I brought cups."

Suzy Chase:                  So, you have a show called Potluck, that I have been watching here in New York City since it launched in 2013. You talk food and drink with various chefs, cookbooks authors, and restaurateurs. Did you get any inspiration for your cookbook from your show?

Ali Rosen:                  Oh my god, I get inspired every day. You know, I had an untraditional background into food. I actually started my career in news production, and then I moved over to food. So, I don't have that culinary school background that a lot of people who are journalists or in the food industry have.

                                    And I always like to say, "I went to the greatest cooking school in the world," which is, I get to learn from chefs every day. When I have a question about something, you know, I then find somebody to teach me how to do it, and that's a segment for my show. I mean, this afternoon, I'm going to a bakery to talk about how to make perfect scones, because I really want to perfect my scones recipe.

                                    So, I feel like I have a fun perspective, because I still come at it from the perspective of a home cook. I don't have that classical training. So, I feel like my recipes can approach things in the same way that everybody at home does. I mean, I am a mom, I'm busy, I'm always trying to find a quick and easy way to do something. But on the other side of that, I've just been so lucky to learn from all the best people in the industry.

                                    And a lot of the book mentions that. There's a watermelon ribs recipe that has this watermelon sauce that was inspired by, I did a segment with Floyd Cardoz, who has a new restaurant now, the Bombay Bread Bar. But he had a fish with a watermelon sauce, and it just inspired me to say, "Ooh, I'd love to do a watermelon sauce on something. Ooh, how about ribs?"

                                    So, so many of my recipes are kind of like, I'll taste something or try something, or learn a technique from a chef, and it just kind of takes off from there. So my show has really inspired the book, just because I get to learn every day, which is pretty lucky.

Suzy Chase:                  That's exactly how I feel with this cookbook podcast. I'm just a mom, and a home cook, and I learn something from every cookbook.

Ali Rosen:                  Right. But that, I think that makes you ... It's funny, because you know, there was this moment, sort of early in my career, where I thought about, "Oh, I should really take time away and go to culinary school." And I'm glad that I didn't, because I think that there's a very big difference between cooking in a restaurant kitchen and cooking at home.

                                    And I think that a lot of people today, this is why so many blogs are popular, and podcasts, and people who don't come at it from a traditional background, because we're all just trying to make things work. We're all just trying to make something that works for our family and our kids, and we don't have, you know, 20 people prepping the ingredients for us. And we're not buying in bulk, and we're not making things in the same quantities and sizes, and we're not making the same recipes over and over and over again.

                                    So, restaurants have a totally different perspective than people cooking at home. And so, when I look at cookbooks, the cookbooks that I love, they do tend to be from people who come at it from that angle. Because that's the perspective that I have when I'm looking at a cookbook, and I'm trying to come up with something for dinner, or for a party. And I'm just like, "God, I just want to have something that's easy, but everybody thinks is really impressive." That's always the goal.

Suzy Chase:                  You know, I never thought about having a theme for my potluck. That is brilliant.

Ali Rosen:                  Yeah, well, I think people want to have a direction. Like, oftentimes, I'll get invited to something, and they'll say, "Oh, bring a dessert." And I'm like, "Well, what kind of dessert? What else are people bringing? Is somebody else bringing a cake? Should I bring a cake? Should I bring cookies? Is somebody else going to bring cookies?"

                                    I mean, I think that if you have a theme, you can give people ... First of all, you can give people an exciting way to kind of explore a new cuisine, or a new topic that they've never really thought of before. And we kind of all do themed potlucks even when we don't think about it, right? Like, Thanksgiving is kind of a themed potluck.

Suzy Chase:                  Yeah.

Ali Rosen:                  You know, Easter is often a kind of a themed potluck. I mean, we have a lot of holidays that we think of as potlucks. And then, there are some holidays, like Cinco de Mayo, or Saint Patrick's Day, where we tend to cook other cultures' foods because we've sort of adopted these holidays into our own.

                                    But there's no reason to not say to your friends, like, "Hey, let's have a potluck. You know what, let's all do Italian food." Or, "Hey, let's all do great summer vegetables right now, 'cause that's what's in season." You know, there's no reason to not give people a direction to go in, because then, again, even though everyone's cooking in a different kitchen, you're going to have a meal that actually feels cohesive, rather than like, "Well, over here we have quesadillas, and over here we have cheesy pasta." Those are two kind of similar things, but they're totally different.

                                    So if you just say, "Hey, let's all make Mexican food today, and you're going to bring the guacamole, and you're going to bring tortillas, and you're going to look in some cool cookbook that you have for a recipe we didn't even know existed." I mean, that can kind of create a fun theme.

                                    And, when you talk about that competitiveness among potlucks, it actually sort of brings people together, if everybody feels like they're kind of in it together, doing something new, they're not bringing the thing that they always bring. It kind of creates a fun element for it.

Suzy Chase:                  You had a lot of cookbook authors give you great advice. One in particular was Dorie Greenspan. What advice did she give you for this cookbook?

Ali Rosen:                  Oh my goodness. Dorie is my hands-down favorite cookbook author. I have every one of her books, and I use them constantly. And she just has been such a guiding force, not just because I love her books, but because every time I've asked her for advice, she says yes. Which is exactly why people love her books, because she's so generous.

                                    And mostly, her advice was just to make sure that you pay attention to every piece of it. Because with a cookbook, when somebody buys a book, they're not only paying whatever they're paying for the book, but they're also buying ingredients, they're investing their time.

                                    And so, at every stage of the book, it was so important to me to make sure that every recipe worked, every photo looked exactly like what it could look like. All the photos ... We ate all the food, after we made it, for the photos, for the book.

                                    So, the best advice that I've been given is just, don't ever hand over any part of the process. You know, work with people, I have a great team of people collaborating on this book, from the editor to the photographer, to the food stylist and prop stylist. But you just want to make sure everything works and looks great.

                                    Because at the end of the day, you're only as good as the worst recipe in the book. So, when somebody goes to make it, if it doesn't work out for them, it doesn't matter than 99 out of 100 recipes are great, 100 have to be great. So, I've learned that from talking to authors like Dorie, and everybody else who's been so generous with their time.

Suzy Chase:                  Popcorn. I've never thought about bringing popcorn to a party or potluck. You have five different flavored popcorn recipes in the cookbook. Describe those.

Ali Rosen:                  Yeah, I'm a little bit of a popcorn fanatic. I tend to have it like every afternoon. And I love adding flavors to my popcorn. I think that when we think of adding flavors, we think of that, kind of like, caramel popcorn in the mall, you know, when you buy those tins that come in like, butter, cheese, and caramel. And that, I mean, that's kind of complicated to make.

                                    So, I just, for many years, have had ideas about adding flavor to popcorn without making it too heavy, and without making it difficult to carry. So, the book has five different recipes, and they kind of range from a pizza flavor, which is tomato paste and some dried basil, and sprinkle in some Parmesan cheese, to sweet versions, cocoa powder and sugar.

                                    And so, it's really these different recipes that are using flavors, but it's not quite as heavy as what you would think. And so, it's great to bring to a party, especially like a Super Bowl party, or an Oscars party, where everyone's kind of sitting around watching something.

                                    And it's also great as a gift. If you want to go to somebody's home, and they're making dinner, and they haven't asked you to bring anything, it's a great little gift. You know, you find a little bag, you put it in, you tie it up. And they don't have to eat it right then, but it's kind of a fun extra thing to bring. And everybody likes popcorn, so why not?

Suzy Chase:                  So talk about the recipe testing process.

Ali Rosen:                  Yeah, the recipe testing process for this book was really fun for me, because I have two siblings, and they both live here in New York with me, and they both have wonderful significant others. And every Thursday night, we would get together and they would test recipes. And I would, you know, spend the whole week working on new things, and tweaking things, and by Thursday it was like, "All right, I've got this down, this is going to be great."

                                    And then, they'd give it the thumbs up or the thumbs down. And they all have really different palates, they have different things that they like. My brother is very meat and potatoes. My brother-in-law is very, you know, he doesn't like cheese, he doesn't like this, he doesn't like that. My sister likes really comforting, homey foods. My brother's girlfriend doesn't really like seafood. I mean, it was like, if I could find dishes that they all liked, I felt like, "Okay, this is a winner."

                                    And there were a lot of recipes that didn't make it in the book, 'cause they weren't that great. And then, I had a team of people testing all over the country. You know, I put out a call on Facebook, and just said, "Hey, anybody want to try some recipes?" And I had 50 people from all over the country and all over the world saying, like, "Yeah, I'm game."

                                    And so, these recipes were really such a labor of love, and tested, tested, tested, tested, tested. Because, you know, every time you tweak it, it can get a little bit better. And so, I just was so lucky to have so many friends and family kind of make sure that this book really worked. Because I think that's what we all want, when we buy a cookbook. We want to believe that every recipe works. And it's not always the case, so that was the most important thing to me.

Suzy Chase:                  Over the weekend, I made your recipe for pistachio and anchovy pasta, on page 93. In the description, you wrote, "Sometimes the best meals happen when you least expect it." How did this recipe come about?

Ali Rosen:                  Yeah, this was one of those just lovely, serendipitous moments of, I was on a trip to Italy with my husband, and we were driving. And we were just so hungry, and we stopped and parked the car in a town called Siena. We just were like, "Okay, we're just going to sit down at the first restaurant we see," thinking it would be kind of a throwaway meal, which is sort of disappointing when you're on vacation in Italy, but we were just so hungry.

                                    And we sat down, and we ordered this pistachio-anchovy pasta, and it was like a revelation, because it wasn't too heavy on the pistachios, it wasn't too heavy on the anchovies. You know, you might not even notice either ingredient at first, but it was just kind of like a pesto-like sauce on this pasta. And it was so perfect, and I just thought, "Well, god, this has to be something that you could make at home," because it seemed so simple, but it's so flavorful.

                                    And it's turned into one of my favorite recipes in the book, because I just, to me, the best kind of recipe is a recipe that takes less than 30 minutes that also people are really impressed by. So, I think that one was just one of those where, it was just the total lightning bolt of inspiration, of like, "Hey, why haven't we been combining pistachios and anchovies all this time?"

Suzy Chase:                  For dessert, I made the strawberry sandwiches on page 196. I was really surprised to see that this was from a Japanese recipe.

Ali Rosen:                  Yeah, I mean, that was another sort of ... Just, you know, you learn so much when you travel. And I was in Japan a few years ago, just on vacation, and I was sort of expecting it to be like a sushi and ramen bonanza, and the thing that I was so surprised by was how much Japanese food and culture we don't even see here, that doesn't make it here.

                                    And one of the things that I just sort of fell in love with was that the Japanese love sweet sandwiches, which is not something we really think of. You know, we tend to think of a sandwich as being in the savory camp, but actually, if you have a piece of light white bread, it's kind of like ...

                                    You know, the strawberry sandwiches is kind of like a strawberry shortcake in a different form. The bread, it's kind of just the vehicle, and then you have the strawberries and the whipped cream. I mean, as you saw here, this is a recipe that, yeah, it's great when strawberries are really in season.

                                    But it's still fun, you know, if you can get strawberries, and you can make some good cream, it's a really fun, messy, gooey, lovely recipe. I made this for my sister-in-law's baby shower recently, and it was just so fun, 'cause people are picking it up, and surprised, and it just kind of makes people smile.

Suzy Chase:                  Where can we find you on the web and social media?

Ali Rosen:                  So, my website is potluckwithali.com, which has all of my segments with chefs, and recipes from chefs, and some of my own recipes. And then, on social media, I am Ali_Rosen, A-L-I-underscore-R-O-S-E-N. Because if you find the regular AliRosen, it's a bikini fitness model who's taken my name.

                                    She must wonder why she gets tagged in food photos all the time. People will say to me, "Oh, I tagged you in something." I'm like, "Nope, that's my Florida-based doppelganger, who focused on a different, is definitely focused not on eating strawberry sandwiches at the moment."

                                    But yeah, that's where you can find me online, and yeah, every Thursday on NYC Life for any listeners that are in New York. But you can watch the whole show online, as well.

Suzy Chase:                  Now I'm ready to tackle the next potluck, picnic, or dinner party. Thanks, Ali, for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.

Ali Rosen:                  Thank you so much for having me. I can't tell you how much I appreciate it.

Suzy Chase:                  Follow me on Instagram at CookerybytheBook, Twitter is @IamsSuzyChase, and download your Kitchen Mixtapes, music to cook by, on Spotify at CookerybytheBook. And as always, subscribe in Apple podcasts.

Vegetarian Viet Nam

By Cameron Stauch

Suzy Chase:                  Welcome to the Cookery by the Book Podcast, with me, Suzy Chase.

Cameron:                  Hi, I'm Cameron Stauch, and my new cookbook is Vegetarian Viet Nam.

Suzy Chase:                  It was so great to meet you at the International Association of Culinary Professionals, IACP Conference, last weekend here in New York City. Do you have any fun highlights from the conference, other than meeting me?

Cameron:                  Meeting you was great, that was great that we were able to connect in person, so that's always wonderful. Yeah, you know, it's always great to see friends, and then to also see other cooks or writers or journalists that you kind of see their names on Twitter in real life, but there's some really interesting panels.

                                    I was really taken, though, with this guy name Mike Lee, who I think he has a website called The Future Market, so he's looking at trying to solve different food issues with thinking about the future, and thinking kind of really out of the box and seeing which ideas that he has will take, will stick, and people will go with. So he's looking at different stuff like edible wrappers, instead of getting rid of plastic.

                                    He was talking about a cracker where they're planting like different types of grains with different types of legumes, so that it would be like a grain and a bean together as a cracker. And then it would change with the seasons or with the growing cycle, so these two things would be growing together at the same time. But they're really doing is they're putting nutrition back into the soil, the nutrients back into the soil, so they're really looking at regenerating the soil is the main goal, and then the byproduct is using these ingredients to make crackers.

                                    So I found those type of ideas, that normally I don't think about, to be really fascinating.

Suzy Chase:                  Okay, first off, talk about that day in late 2012, when you took to the streets of Saigon to explore the food stalls.

Cameron:                  Sure, well at that time, I think a few months earlier, I had just moved to Hanoi with my wife and family, and I wanted to kind of, you know, look into the food of the country, and so did a short trip to Saigon. And I'm not a morning person, but only when it comes to food, food and markets will get me up early. So it was an early morning, I woke up early, threw on my clothes, and I was hungry, so I was wandering the streets and I was trying to get to the nearest market. And generally outside the markets, you'll have some really tasty food stalls.

                                    And I came upon one, where it seemed like a good sign. There was a bunch of eaters, they're all hunched over their bowls, everybody's kind of quiet, so I thought okay, this must be a good one. So I went in, I just motioned for a bowl, started eating it. Kind of thoughtlessly, actually, and I thought this is a really good bowl of pho. And then, I realized that it was vegetarian, and it was the first kind of really great vegetarian pho that I'd had. And it had mushrooms, daikon, carrot, and had these kind of really nice chewy fried sticks of tofu skin, that had been fried and then simmered in the broth. And then the broth had all the flavors that a traditional beef pho would have, so the anise, the cinnamon. And then of course it had the herbs, the culantro, Thai basil, cilantro.

                                    So I was just taken with it, and so I wanted to look more into the vegetarian side of Vietnamese food.

Suzy Chase:                  You've lived in so many places around the world. What about Vietnam compels you to do this project?

Cameron:                  You know, there are several things. One of the first things is, being a chef, especially coming from North America. When I was learning to be a chef, Alice Waters was really taking off, and so learning about where your food was coming from, sourcing it, and the traceability of it. And so when I moved to Hanoi, that was really hard, where you could go and see the meat and seafood in the market, but it was really hard to find out where is it coming from, and how are those animals being treated, and how's the seafood being caught.

                                    So that was something that we had in mind as a family, so we started to eat a little bit less meat just for those reasons. And then, my young son at the time, I think he was about four years old, announced one day that he was gonna only eat vegetarian. So our family meals had to change a little bit that way. And then I was just coming from a job, where part of my job was to take care of dietary restrictions, and a big part of that was the vegetarian meals, so it was already in my mind thinking about vegetarian food.

                                    And then, as I looked around, I noticed that in Hanoi there'd be pockets, little kind of days where I'd go past a temple, and there'd be just vegetarian food at the temple or at the pagoda, and I didn't really understand why. And then talking to a friend who had been there for a while who's vegetarian, he mentioned that going to the center and the south there's more vegetarian food that was more prominent. So I thought it was something that I was interested, to do more research.

                                    So it was just a collision of things that kind of came at the right time, where I thought, I think there's something here that I wanted to look into. And I recognized that there was a need for such a book, because there wasn't a book out in English on Vietnamese vegetarian food. There's great books on Vietnamese food, but nothing that solely looks at the vegetarian side of things.

Suzy Chase:                  How did you collect the recipes?

Cameron:                  You know, I guess I go about through a few different methods, where sometimes it's a matter of going out eating the street food or eating at restaurants, and then kind of checking to see what are the consistent ingredients in them. You know, I was fortunate enough to cook with monks and nuns in different monasteries, and monks and nuns in Vietnam eat all vegetarian, so that was a great thing to do, was to spend two or three days in each different type of monastery to see what they would how, and how they would treat things.

                                    And then I was also able to cook with home cooks. A lot of people in Vietnam, they're very proud of their cuisine and of their culture, and I was able to learn enough of the language to communicate with them in an elementary way. But they would invite me into their homes if I showed some curiosity, so I was very fortunate to also do that.

                                    So it was just a combination of things, of people sharing their recipes, sometimes it's me seeing okay, I can come up with this recipe myself. Or, there were a couple recipes that are meat-based, that I hadn't seen a vegetarian version, but it was easy for me to come up with a vegetarian version. So there's different ways that I was able to do that.

Suzy Chase:                  So in North America, vegetarians and vegans often embrace these alternative diets for environmental, health, or moral reasons. Is that the same in Vietnam?

Cameron:                  I think increasingly, yes. I think that what's happening in Asia, particularly, right now is people are seeing the impacts of a certain type of Western lifestyle on the environment. And people are increasingly more concerned about their health, because again, I'm seeing a lot more things pop up in Vietnam, and also here in Thailand where I live right now, about the traceability of food. People wanna know where their food's coming from, and there seems to be a greater demand on organic ingredients.

                                    But in Vietnam as well, there's a religious aspect where the lay Buddhist believer will eat vegetarian maybe once or twice a month as a rite of abstinence of purification, so they're doing it to hopefully bring good luck, or to avoid bad luck for themselves or a family member. So that would be the other aspect of it in Vietnam.

                                    And also what's interesting is, I believe something like 60% of the population of Vietnam is under the age of 30, so I think these environmental and health and moral reasons are gonna kind of come to more of the forefront than what traditionally it was more for religious reasons.

Suzy Chase:                  Give us the history of the vegetarian culinary replications approach in Asia.

Cameron:                  My understanding is that Chinese monks in China would want to invite non-Buddhists or just locals into their monastery, and they would eat vegetarian but the locals would not. So what they would do is, they would make dishes that looked and tasted as much as they could similarly to the meat and seafood dishes, so that was a way to kind of welcome the people in, and to make them feel more comfortable eating vegetarian food.

                                    And that type of idea filtered down into Vietnam through the religion, and then into the kitchens, where people would make a replica of the dish. So you'll see it on menus, where the names will be the same name as the meat or seafood dish, with the work chay, c-h-a-y, on the end, so that indicates that it's this type of meat or seafood dish, but it's a vegetarian version.

                                    And another signifier too, is the way that they garnish the dish if they're using the same herbs or the same garnishes, that's another indication that okay, this is vegetarian, it's supposed to be replicating this dish.

Suzy Chase:                  That is so interesting, I'd never heard of that before your book.

Cameron:                  Yeah. And you know what, it was a good way for me to see the see differences and similarities in what the cooks were trying to do, so to be able to see and taste meat and seafood version, and then see and taste the vegetarian version. It was good for me to know that. And actually, the first two times that I went into vegetarian restaurants, it kind of threw me, because I was like, wait a minute, this meat dish, this is a seafood dish. And then, as I learned more Vietnamese, more about vegetarian food in Vietnam, I was like oh this is just signifying to people. This is like this dish, so if you like that, maybe you might want to try that again.

Suzy Chase:                  In regard to street food, why should we pay attention to the lunar calendar if we're traveling to Vietnam?

Cameron:                  As I was talking just earlier about the lay Buddhist eating vegetarian once or twice a month, so typically they will do it around the new moon and the full moon. So they might eat it one day on the new moon day, and one day on the full moon day, or they might eat it two days around each of those. So what's interesting is some of the street food vendors will switch from their meat and seafood dish, to a strictly vegetarian one.

                                    And I think also what I should point out, too, is when I say vegetarian, I'm also really meaning vegan as well, because a lot of the vegetarian food falls into the vegan category.

                                    So I had one day when I was on a research trip, and it was one of my first trips, where I was in the city of Hue, and I'd gone to this street food stall for some noodles. And it was just fantastic, and they were vegetarian, I said this is great. And so I thought, I'll go back the next day, and then the next day she was back to selling her beef and pork noodles, and I was like why is this? I didn't know yet why these things happened, so then I was able to learn about following the cycle of the moon. So if you're traveling, that's also important.

                                    And also what's important, too, is some restaurants will do like these elaborate buffets for vegetarians on that day, 'cause they know that they'll get a rush of people, so it's easier for them to prepare a quantity of food, and put it as a buffet 'cause they'll have more diners than they regularly would during the other days.

                                    So those are things to look for, if you're traveling to Vietnam. You know, follow that new moon and full moon cycle, and you should be set.

Suzy Chase:                  Way before this project, you were part of the kitchen team that cooked for the governor general of Canada. Tell us about that.

Cameron:                  It's similar to cooking at the White House, so we would do cooking for events like a state dinner, or we'd cook for the cafeteria for the staff there, or for the governor general and their family. So I was lucky to cook for the last three, in between living overseas, and one of my jobs there was when we'd have a big event, was to take care of the dietary restrictions, so whether it was somebody who was vegetarian, vegan, gluten free, or they had a certain allergy. So what my job was to make replicas of the plates that we were serving, to try and make it look and taste similar to what people were getting, and actually my goal was to make it taste better so that the people at the table were like, "Oh, what's that? I want that," instead of the main thing.

                                    So I was able to take those skills from the kitchen, and then when I was doing the research for this book, kind of used similar skills in looking at, like okay, if I had this person, how would I treat this, and how can I make this dish into something that's vegetarian, if I needed to do it, if I hadn't seen a vegetarian version. Or, if I did see a vegetarian version, I was what are the steps, are they replacing for the texture or for the flavors, by not having the meat and seafood there.

Suzy Chase:                  You also cooked for Queen Elizabeth, right?

Cameron:                  I did. I actually cooked for Queen Elizabeth and her husband, Prince Charles and Camilla, and Will and Kate, so I've cooked for three generations of the royal family when they visited there.

Suzy Chase:                  That's so cool.

Cameron:                  Yeah, and what's really interesting about that, is they are no different than any of our own families. So, you know-

Suzy Chase:                  They were bickering at the table?

Cameron:                  No, no.

Suzy Chase:                  I'm kidding.

Cameron:                  They were not there at the same time, but what I mean is, the older generation wanted something simple but tasty, nothing too crazy, so it was just more like maybe a piece of nicely cooked fish or meat with some nice vegetables, but simple. You know, Prince Charles is very into organic food and where his food comes from, so we focused on that. And then, when Will and Kate came, they basically said, "Surprise us, we'll eat anything."

                                    It was really interesting to learn that Kate also genuinely loves to cook, and so she was asking us questions, and we actually had some culinary students there helping us make the food that day. She was asking them about cooking, and she showed that she is really, really into just learning about food, and wants to learn herself, so it was fun. It was just like the three generations of our own families.

Suzy Chase:                  I'm dying to know about Cam Van, Vietnam's Julia Child.

Cameron:                  She basically, I believe in the late '80s or early '90s, she was a literature teacher before, and somehow she got a cooking job in like a culinary institute, and then someone asked her to be on TV. And she just had a manner about herself, a quiet, assured manner, but she was also a really good teacher, and so she had this very popular cooking show on TV in Vietnam, she had a newspaper column. She ended up writing over 40 booklets of different Vietnamese recipes from all around the country. So she in a sense taught a lot of Vietnamese people how to cook in their homes if they're watching that, because of having all the wars, there wasn't as much of a written history of their food, so Miss Van was a way to teach people about these different dishes that maybe they had heard about from their relatives in different parts of the country.

                                    And cooking with her was just a special day, so she taught me some vegetarian recipes, some of her family favorites, like a young stewed jackfruit with Vietnamese coriander just stewed in soy sauce and sweet soy sauce, or a tofu skin sausage that you can use in bahn mi or in soups. But she's just a lovely person, and she's had a big influence in Vietnam in teaching people about their own food. And when I told people that I had the chance with her, they knew who she was, so she's a big deal, and it was an honor to cook and learn from her.

Suzy Chase:                  I read that during an introduction of Vietnamese cuisine at that Culinary Institute of America in 2000, she showed a bottle of fish sauce, a bottle of vinegar, a glass of lemon juice, several kumquats, onion, garlic, and ginger, and she made 16 types of sauces for 16 dishes, out of those ingredients.

Cameron:                  Yeah, I wouldn't be surprise, one, that she has the ability to do that, but it also shows the variation in sauces that occur throughout the country. So yeah, no, she's a special woman, so I wouldn't be surprised that she was able to do that.

Suzy Chase:                  I love how you put the pantry staples chapter at the beginning of the book. So many cookbooks bury it in the back. One integral staple is vegetable stock. Describe your favorite go-to vegetable stock.

Cameron:                  In the book, I offer two different vegetable stocks, a light vegetable stock and a rich vegetable stock, is what I call it. And I offer two, because they work with different recipes. One might require a lighter stock, and one might more richer stock, so I kind of look at them as a chicken stock and like a veal stock or beef stock.

                                    So with the rich vegetable stock, I use onions and carrots, some celery, garlic, a small amount of plum tomato, and I'll cook that in a little of oil. And then, I'll kind of stew that for a little bit, maybe for five, ten minutes, probably ten minutes, and then add some dried shiitake mushrooms, some fresh mushrooms or some eggplant, and a little bit of salt. And then add some water, bring it to a boil, and then I'll simmer it for about 45 minutes to an hour.

                                    And I find that especially that addition of the dried shiitakes and the eggplant or fresh mushrooms, just gives it an extra body to it, gives it a bit more richness in flavor. And what I like is that it's versatile over different types of cuisines. You know, I tried to keep it fairly plain-flavored so that you can use it for other types of cuisines, and not just recipes in the book.

Suzy Chase:                  So the other night, I made your recipe for Lemongrass Chili “Chicken” Strips Stir-Fry on page 71, and I used some grilled vegetarian chicken strips from Trader Joe's, and the lemongrass made it such a lovely, fragrant, hearty dinner.

Cameron:                  What I really like about that recipe ... Now traditionally in Vietnam, they would serve it with cubes of deep fried or shallow fried tofu. You know, there's some new faux meats out there. For example, the ones from Beyond Meat, I'm a fan of their Beyond Chicken. And I kind of think that if some Vietnamese vegetarian cooks, if they had access to this ingredient, I think they'd use it. So I wanted to kind of play around with that as an ingredient for people who use it, but you can substitute it with tofu.

                                    But what's great is lemongrass, the chili, the little bit of garlic, just kind of brings everything, it just pops in flavor, and then just a little squirt of lime juice, then a little bit of cilantro. Just in one bite, you just kind of get this nice explosive flavor of the lemongrass and the chili and the garlic.

                                    Yeah, and also the great thing, too, is for leftovers, you can use them in a salad, you can use them in a bahn mi sandwich, or if you're using it for a different type of sandwich. You could even, if you wanted to do some rice paper rolls, and you a little bit extra, and through it in with some slices or julienne vegetables, put it in there with some herbs and lettuce.

Suzy Chase:                  A recipe in the cookbook that caught my eye was the green banana tomato tofu soup. Describe that.

Cameron:                  One of the first weekends that I was living in Hanoi, I took a food tour with a food guide who soon became a close friend too, and he took me down this alley. And we had this dish, but we had the non-vegetarian version first, which was the green banana, tomato, and tofu, and then there's a little bit of snails in it as well. And then about a year later, I started going to this one vegetarian restaurant near my house, just this really small shop, and I was looking at it and I said, "Wow, that looked like a similar dish." And I was speaking to them, and they said yeah, this is the vegetarian version.

                                    And so what it is, is I learned it from my friend Ling and mother [foreign language 00:23:16], and what it is it's green, unripe bananas, not plantains, so it's a good differentiation to know that. So your unripe bananas, and you can peel them as much as you can, and then you kind of either put them in finger-length pieces or slice them, and you first blanch them in tumeric-infused water. And that helps remove the stickiness and a little bit of the bitterness. And then you take them out.

                                    And then you just stew them this nice stew of tomatoes, some tofu, you've got some shallots, a little bit of tumeric. And then you garnish it with some finely sliced betel leaves or shiso leaves. And then, you can either have it just as a soup like that, which is what they typically would do in the northern countryside, in someone's home or something like that. Or, you can have it just over a bowl of vermicelli noodles.

Suzy Chase:                  What's the flavor profile? Is it more banana-y or more tomato-y?

Cameron:                  Well, it's not gonna have any of that banana flavor that you think of as a ripe banana. So I would say the tumeric is probably a little bit more pronounced, and then you will get the tomato. Green banana is a bit more of the starch, you know, so thinking of it as like a potato in the stew type of thing. So it adds that texture, and also you have to look at these green unripe bananas, in the countryside, they're growing all over on banana trees right around the house. So most likely, I'm assuming, this dish came out of a time of poverty where they didn't have much to use, but they had these unripe bananas on the tree, and they thought what can we make with this, so that's how it came out.

                                    And instead of using ... Sometimes what I like to do is add some sauteed cubed pieces of portobello mushrooms to kind of mimic the earthiness of the snails, sometimes I'll throw that in as a little extra flavor and texture.

Suzy Chase:                  What's up next for you?

Cameron:                  I'm living in Bangkok, Thailand right now, and so I'll be here for another year and a half or two years. So I'm thinking of looking up the vegetarian food here in Thailand, or seeing about what's out there. There is a festival in late September, October every year, so that's something that I'll look into.

                                    A few other projects, but one thing that I'll be doing that I'm excited about is this November, I'm doing a culinary tour of Vietnam, I think around the 4th of November to the 14th, with Best Way Tours in Vancouver. And we're taking a small group, eight to 12 people, and we're gonna go from Hanoi into the center to Hue and Hoi An, and then go into Saigon, and then into the Mekong. And we'll be cooking with home cooks, some of the people from the book, some of my friends that I've met, do some street food tours, so I'm really excited to be doing that.

Suzy Chase:                  Where can we find you on the web and social media?

Cameron:                  Yeah, so on Twitter you can find me @CamCooks, c-a-m-c-o-o-k-s, and on Instagram and Facebook you can find me at A Global Kitchen.

Suzy Chase:                  Naomi Duguid wrote, "Cameron's easy style makes you feel that you a friend at your side to guide you as you shop and cook." It's been so much fun chatting with you. Thanks so much for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.

Cameron:                  Oh Suzy, it's been a joy, and I hope that I can be on at some other time in the near future.

Suzy Chase:                  Follow me on Instagram at Cookery by the Book, Twitter is @IamSuzyChase, and download your Kitchen Mix Tapes, music to cook by, on Spotify at Cookery by the Book, and as always, subscribe in Apple Podcasts.

The Alaska From Scratch Cookbook
Seasonal, Scenic, Homemade

By Maya Wilson

Suzy Chase:                  Welcome to the Cookery by the Book podcast with me, Suzy Chase.

Maya:                  Hi, I'm Maya Wilson, the author of The Alaska From Scratch Cookbook: Seasonal. Scenic. Homemade.

Suzy Chase:                  Let's set the scene. You wake up one morning in California and think to yourself, let's sell almost everything we own and up and move to Alaska. How did you come to that life changing decision?

Maya:                  You know, we had a very intense pace of life in California. The kids were much younger at the time. They were seven, six, and three, and so much of life was characterized by the drive, kind of workaholism and upward mobility, and really, I felt like it wasn't, we had reached a burnout point, kind of a breaking point, and it wasn't good for the kids, and it wasn't good for me, and it just wasn't a healthy way to live life, and so really wanted to seek out very deliberately and intentionally a slower pace of life for our family, and that's how we kind of started looking for jobs up in Alaska and eventually landed here.

Suzy Chase:                  What made you think about Alaska?

Maya:                  I love Alaska for its nature and majesty and the water and the clean air, just something that we didn't have in California, and the lack of traffic, and just the way that Alaskans live off the land and out of the sea, and all of those things were really, really appealing to me, and being kind of far flung was really appealing to me, and being a little removed and getting into the outdoor lifestyle, and those sorts of things, and so that all was really exciting, and it was right around the time that Alaska was starting to pick up momentum on reality TV and things, and so there was a big buzz around life in Alaska, and I was excited to be a part of it.

Suzy Chase:                  On your blog, you talk about Alaska's unique regional cuisine. Describe a couple of unique dishes.

Maya:                  Some of the dishes in the book, we have a hunter's pie that's made with ground moose, and because moose is one of our game meats, I think there are more moose on the Kenai Peninsula than there are people, and so that's one, but you can certainly use ground beef or ground turkey in that recipe with great results. Similarly, with the moose chili. That uses ground moose as well, and then we have things like reindeer sausage that we use for reindeer hotdogs or you can use it as smoke sausage, but if you don't have access to reindeer sausage or reindeer hotdogs, you can substitute a great smoked sausage like the turkey or beef, and the same with a good locally sourced hotdog, so I try very hard to feature some of these great local ingredients that we have but also make it accessible for people who live in the lower 48 and beyond, who don't have these same ingredients that we enjoy.

Suzy Chase:                  "The food was the representation of me at the table, but I had become invisible. I hadn't set a place for myself, nor had I demanded one be made for me. I was nourishing others, but didn't feel worthy of the same nourishment myself." I mean, that phrase resonates so deeply with so many people. Talk about how healing emerged with this cookbook.

Maya:                  Wow. Yeah, that moment that I talk about in the book was so pivotal for me, and it's been amazing for me to hear the responses and hear that it does resonate with people, and to know I'm not the only one who has experienced this. That's been really great for me, and I just came to a place and it kind of culminated in that moment where I realized, I am worthy of being heard. I'm worthy of being seen. I am worthy of the longing and feeling safe, and I need to stop asking for permission to show up to my own life, and it really began to sink deep into me at that moment, and so the book has really been kind of a self-actualizing process, really becoming, and leaning into who I am, and who I'm meant to be.

Suzy Chase:                  So many women in particular really, really think about that. I know I've thought about that. It's like looking at your pictures, it looks like you have the most wonderful life, and you made it.

Maya:                  It took so much hard work to get here, but it's important work, and if you get to a place where you realize you are in the wrong story, take charge of it. Grab your autonomy back, and really seize your life, and make it what you want and hope for it to be.

Suzy Chase:                  Were you ever worried that this was going to be the wrong move, that it was only in your head that once you got there, you'd say oh, I don't belong here, I really belong in California?

Maya:                  No. Never. As soon as you step off an airplane into Alaska and that crisp air hits you, and the beauty of this place, and the stars in the sky, and the northern lights, and the wildlife, I'd never had a single visitor come visit and not leave rejuvenated and feeling healed, and like they're more in touch with themselves, and that's really something Alaska comes off with me, and it's something I try to offer to my readers from long distance, too, and they ... We've got something really beautiful and special and healing up here, and I really do want to share it with everyone.

Suzy Chase:                  As a kid who grew up with food stamps, how did that influence your cooking style?

Maya:                  That's a great question. Growing up poor and with food insecurity certainly teaches you how to cook out of necessity and to make things out of nothing, and it makes you very adaptable in the kitchen, and when I moved up to Alaska and we had these long, dark winters, and lack of access to fresh food or fresh food is very expensive, or you live miles from the grocery store, I suddenly tapped into that child in myself that says I know how to do this. I know how to work with little or nothing and make it something, and that's something that being poor taught me, and so Alaska has kind of brought that out in me in a way that's positive and in a way that allows me to make a difference, and I never want to forget where I came from.

                                    I never want to forget those mayonnaise sandwiches and those boxes of macaroni and cheese, and those things that kept me going because it keeps me very grounded, and it helps me realize and really appreciate the food and where it comes from, and the people sitting around the table and all their various backgrounds, so it really shapes me and also helps me in the kitchen today.

Suzy Chase:                  The photos of Alaska are stunning. Did you take all of the photos for the book?

Maya:                  I took a vast majority of the photos in the book, with the exception of photos of me, my wife took, and there are also a few scenic shots in the book that she took as well. There was one in particular. There's a gorgeous spread in the middle of the book of the peak of Denali from an airplane, and we were on our honeymoon, and we took a glacier tour, an aerial glacier tour, and we landed on a glacier, and at one point, the airplane turned on her side of the plane, and the peak of Denali shone out, and I passed her the camera. I said, "Get that shot," and she nabbed it, and so she took that shot and a few others in the book that are really beautiful, but for the most part, I took the shots in the book, and the food photography is shot by me, edited by me, all except the ones that have me in them. She also took the cover shot because that's me holding the bowl there.

Suzy Chase:                  So, there's a recipe on page 116 called Kenai Cheese Dip. Describe that.

Maya:                  There's this place here in Kenai, it's actually kind of out of the way in town, called Echo Lake Meat, and they sell this cheese dip that they're famous for, and places all over Alaska try to replicate it, and it's kind of a staple in Alaskan homes, and it's cheddar cheese and jalapenos, and liquid smoke, and some mayonnaise, really, and when you stir that all together and you put it on crackers or chips, and you see it all over Alaska. People love this stuff, and I discovered years ago when I was first introduced to it, that when you warm it up, it makes kind of a pseudo-queso, and it occurred to me for the book that this would be great on a cheeseburger, and so I put a big, just huge amount of black Kenai cheese on top of a burger and stick it under the broiler, and let it get al gooey and melty with those jalapenos, and that liquid smoke, and I put a little barbecue sauce on the burger, and it's just ... It's amazing.

Suzy Chase:                  So, on another note, tell us how gnocchi became your therapy.

Maya:                  It's funny. In life, I find when you go through trauma or grief or loss, the first thing that goes is we stop feeding ourselves, right? And this is why people bring food when someone dies or because we stop feeding ourselves, all self care goes out the window, and when my mom had end-stage cancer, and I was doing her hospice care, I stopped feeding myself, and after she died, there was a time that, you know, it took a long time to get my appetite back and my equilibrium back and to feel inspired to be in the kitchen again, and the thing that really I remember very clearly motivating me to be in the kitchen was teaching myself how to make gnocchi.

                                    I always wanted to make it, felt like it was too intimidating a thing to make gnocchi at home like the famous Italian chefs on television, and I always wanted to do it, and so I started trying and making it, and rice and potatoes, and then trying a ricotta version which is much easier, and landed on a dish that really exemplifies that period in my life of working through grief and finding my new normal once my mom was gone, and you know, that song Landslide by Fleetwood Mac?

Suzy Chase:                  Yeah.

Maya:                  Stevie Nicks. That's kind of a life anthem for me. There is a line in there that says, "I've been afraid of changing because I've built my life around you," and so much of my life has been that, and the way I shaped my life around who my mom was, or in response, a reaction against who my mom was, and that carried on into other relationships in my life as well where I shaped my life around other people, and once she was gone, I really asked myself, well, who are you going to be now? And that all circles back to what we talked about at the beginning where finding that sense of worthiness and belonging and a voice, and it's really been profound for me, the loss of my mom and the way that that has shaped my life and my food.

Suzy Chase:                  It really makes you have to grow up.

Maya:                  Absolutely. Absolutely, and you just, you realize that there are so many things that you choose to do or not to do because of a person in your life, and once they're gone, there's kind of a vacuum, and you realize hey, the motivation for that isn't there anymore, and it changes you.

Suzy Chase:                  And on the other hand, it can free you up. You can do anything.

Maya:                  Yes. There's a huge amount of freedom, and it's huge. I talked about it in the book in the beverages chapter about how I had never touched alcohol while she was alive because she struggled with alcoholism, and after she was gone, I realized that my motivation for being afraid of alcohol and not ever touching it or drinking it was completely gone, and that gave me a freedom to explore that, and try wine pairings, and start enjoying a cocktail every once in a while, and that has been hugely freeing for me, and there are so many other things, that I could point to, that are similar where I've become a different person, really, because of that loss.

Suzy Chase:                  In the cookbook, you have these incredible looking baked chicken wings with bourbon and birch syrup glaze. What's birch syrup? I've never heard of that.

Maya:                  We have lots of birch trees in Alaska, beautiful birch trees with the white bark and with yellow leaves, and if you cap those like you do a maple tree and you get syrup that's much like maple syrup, but it's a little darkier, more molassesy, kind of like sorghum, and it has some woodiness to it like almost piney-ness, and it's got great dimension and depth to it, a little less sweet than maple syrup, but it behaves very much the same way in recipes, and it's a great Alaska ingredient that I really wanted to show off, but if you don't have birch syrup, glaze with pure maple syrup in exchange, and it'll still produce great results.

Suzy Chase:                  I wonder if Whole Foods has birch syrup?

Maya:                  You know, if they don't, I can ship you some. Yeah, I would love to send you a bottle because it's really great.

Suzy Chase:                  It sounds incredible. So, give us some of your favorite things from your favorite thing section in the cookbook.

Maya:                  Oh, one of the ones that comes immediately to mind is my cast iron because I just used it this morning. I had a deadline for my weekly food column in the newspaper and busted out my cast iron skillet. It is just my trusty sidekick, and cast iron is so Alaska and goes back to the gold mining days, but it's also an amazing tool in the kitchen for getting great color and sear on your seafood, your vegetables, and I love the way you can transfer it from the stove top to the oven to the campfire seamlessly. I just am obsessed with my cast iron, and also like a good cast iron dutch oven, equally love for making a big pot of soup, just obsessed with cast iron.

                                    Another thing in the book that is one of my favorites is avocado oil. I love to use avocado oil for searing fish in particular, and I have a lot of beautiful Alaska seafood in the cookbook. I cook a lot of salmon, halibut, and avocado oil has a much higher smoking point than, say, extra virgin olive oil, and it just gets beautiful color on your food, and it's flavorless so you can use it pretty much anywhere in any recipe that calls for oil.

Suzy Chase:                  I like that you included the iPhone, which I'm constantly picking up and looking at while I'm cooking.

Maya:                  Oh, 100 percent. Yeah, my iPhone always has food on it. I have to clean it off all the time, but yeah, I use it all the time to look up recipes. I'm always taking pictures, whether I'm, you know, cooking or styling, I always try to get a shot on my iPhone for Instagram, and I'm texting my wife, asking her if she could pick up ingredients at the store, and all these things, and so the iPhone is kind of, I'm never without it. I know a lot of us have this horrible addiction to our technology, and our iPhones in particular, but I find it so useful in the kitchen. I can look up reviews to a recipe. I can look up ingredients. The options are endless, and I'm never without it.

Suzy Chase:                  Last weekend, I made your recipe for poached halibut in Thai coconut curry on page 87. There is something so lovely and light about halibut. It might be my favorite fish. Talk about how you asked your readers which recipes should be in this cookbook.

Maya:                  Oh, I took to social media after I had announced that I had a cookbook deal, and I said okay guys, help me out, what recipes that have previously been published from the blog or from the food column would you think absolutely have to be in the book, and I was able to put a few of those in there, most of it's new, but I really wanted the ones that had been previously published to be reader favorites, that they want to see in the book, and so I got all these responses and my wife was so nice to compile them in a list and put tally marks and check marks and tally it up for me, and the one that was at the very top of that list was that halibut in the Thai curry. People love that dish because of its ease, but also because of its elegance. You can serve that to guests, but you can make it quickly, and it's so healthy, too. It's got greens and lean fish and healthy fats like coconut milk. It's just a great dish, and people really adore it, and I was thrilled to get to put that one in the book.

Suzy Chase:                  So, one reader even won a cooking competition with your halibut recipe.

Maya:                  One of my readers up in Anchorage, her husband submitted it for a cooking competition, and after he won, they sent me an email. They said, "This is our favorite recipe. We won a competition, and it's so awesome." They even sent me a photo.

Suzy Chase:                  Oh, that's fun. Where can we find you on the web and social media?

Maya:                  Well, my favorite social media is Instagram. You can find me on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and at alaskafoodscratch.com.

Suzy Chase:                  And, there was a terrific piece on your cookbook in The New York Times yesterday. Congratulations on that.

Maya:                  Thank you. Thank you. I still can't believe it. I am thrilled and honored by that.

Suzy Chase:                  And one last bit. I noticed that on every Alaska From Scratch blog recipe entry, you post the local temperature and a song, so I asked you to curate a kitchen mix tape playlist on Spotify, and it's awesome. So, everyone just search "Cookery by the Book" on Spotify, and you'll find some of Maya's favorite songs to cook by.

Maya:                  Awesome. I love it.

Suzy Chase:                  In the forward, Kim Sunée wrote, "Hers is the story of an arduous emotional journey, a tale of caution to those of us who ignore what's deepest and true inside our hearts." Thanks for sharing your journey with us, Maya, and thanks for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.

Maya:                  Thank you so much, Suzy. It's been a pleasure.

Suzy Chase:                  Follow me on Instagram at "Cookery by the Book." Twitter is "imsuzychase," and download your kitchen mix tapes, music to cook by on Spotify at "Cookery by the Book," and as always, subscribe on Apple Podcasts.