Cookery by the Book

Hawker Fare
Stories & Recipes From A Refugee Chef's Isan Thai & Lao Roots

By James Syhabout
with John Birdsall

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

James:                  Hello, my name is James Syhabout and my latest cookbook is Hawker Fare, stories and recipes from a Thai and Laos chef's refugee's point of view.

Suzy Chase:                  In the preface of Hawker Fare, Anthony Bourdain wrote "This book will make you a better person. That's before you even try any of the recipes."

                                                      Wow! What a ringing endorsement.

                                                      So let's kick things off with a bit of geography lesson. Where is Laos and what defines the cuisine?

James:                  Laos is a land locked country wedged in the North East of Thailand, between Thailand and Vietnam with Cambodia kind of like adjacent to it.

                                                      Being a land lock country, you know there's a lot of preservation involved. Like fish sauce, and stuff. Unfiltered style fish sauce called Padaek. So that's kind of like the basis of seasoning in Laos food that can be funky. It can be like anchovy deliciousness, and spice levels, you know a lot of dried chilies.

                                                      Also it's very, cause it's land lock, jungle you know? So things are very herbacious, bitter, that's kind of like ... and also like seafood, but like fresh water. The only body of water we have is the Mekong river running through the country.

Suzy Chase:                  The first hundred and twenty five pages in this book detail your family's journey. Take us back to 1981 when you and your folks arrived in Oakland as refugees.

James:                  That year when we arrived, couple of suitcases, there wasn't much else too at the time. We arrived in Alameda, which is a small island right across the estuary from Oakland. We stay over there for like a week until our social worker found us permanent stay. We ended up in Oakland on 25th and telegraph with a bunch of other fellow Laos families that pretty much had the same kind of story, just mainly coming from different parts of Laos.

                                                      There were some people coming from Vientiane, some people from Luang Prabang, some people from Nong Khiaw, and that's how we settled and that's how the story became, and that was our little Laos community. The little Laos hub, just one block, small block radius.

Suzy Chase:                  So I read that Syhabout was the name given to your father by an immigration officer. What is your family name?

James:                  You know that's something I still can't get an answer, actually.

Suzy Chase:                  Really?

James:                  I know my mom's maiden name is Yeu Ying. I never had that conversation with my dad actually, my parents were separated so I never had that conversation. How did we derive this name, I goggled it. There's not so many Syhabouts out there.

Suzy Chase:                  Yeah.

James:                  So then the few Syhabouts that reached out to me are like "Are we related?" Uh, I'm not sure, maybe the last name but the last name is kind of made up. That's what my cousins were telling me. I'm like, okay then what is our real last name? It's like no one knows, it's kind of like this cool mystery like John Doe in a way.

Suzy Chase:                  Yeah.

James:                  But you know, I'm eager to find out actually now. But no, I kind of like the mysterious of it. I think the name is so unique I don't know how it got derived. Yeah, it's still a mystery that's unsolved. I think I'm going to leave it that way, I think it's much cooler.

Suzy Chase:                  So there's Lao, Laos, Laotian, Lao Isan? Can you explain those?

James:                  Yeah, the best person to explain this is Professor Vinya Sysamouth who I interviewed in the book, you know what's the difference is.

                                                      So the difference in Lao, Laos, Laotian. Isan is a region what we call in Thailand, that's Northeast, which was not part of the Lan Xang Kingdom, which is part of Laos. So culturally the Isan region of Thailand is culturally Lao. And Lao is Laos currently, and back then it was made up ... it was the most ethnically divers country in the world. There's forty plus ethnic groups and tribes and they all have their own dialects and different languages.

                                                      But you know we all related because that's the genetic make up of Laos. There's the Khmer, the Hmong, there's so many I can't name them all. But that's what Laos is.

                                                      I think about it's almost like California. What does it mean to say you're Californian? You can be from Mexico, from Laos, you could be from ... so when people say, I'm Khmer or Hmong their like, yeah you're Lao. You're from Laos, you're hill tribe. It's just very interesting place, I like to describe it like the bath country. It's wedged between France and Spain, but people know it as the bath country. And I feel like Isan is kind of the same way.

Suzy Chase:                  I can't even imagine what your parents went through in terms of culture shock when they moved to Oakland. I mean, everyday things like riding the bus or going to the grocery store must have been such a strange experience. Optimism kept them going, tell us about the restaurant that you parents opened.

James:                  The restaurant was your stereotypical mom-and-pop restaurant you know? It was family ran, family owned, from Uncles and Aunts and the kids in the front of the house. We would have purveyors so we would go down to China town and produce terminals and with a wad a cash and buy ingredients for the day or couple days. And that was kind of like the grind, that was the restaurant life.

                                                      Yeah it's definitely new seeing the lights and billboards and tall buildings. Where we came from the countryside, where we had dirt roads and water buffaloes and it's much ... very 180 degrees. Yeah, it's totally opposite. I don't know how we ended up in Oakland but I'm pretty sure my parents never seen a map or world globe before we came here.

                                                      But I think they rerolled the dice on optimism. I'm pretty sure they heard of America back then. It's like the land of opportunity, so yeah they kind of like rolled the dice and made a gamble of it.

Suzy Chase:                  So you helped out at the restaurant after school and on the weekends?

James:                  Yeah, it was like I said a true family restaurant, on the weekends. Afterschool I would catch a bus to the restaurant. My summers were spent at the restaurant in Concord. So I was never in town for that. I was like the prep cook, that was where my mom multi tasked, she had to babysit and run a business and cook and provide for us. So it was the only resources we had. We didn't have any other family in Oakland at that time, so had the self sufficient in a way.

Suzy Chase:                  Was that when you figured out you wanted to be a chef?

James:                  I figured out at a very early age that I wanted to be a chef. There's something about cooking that was very, very stimulating to me. And it kept my interest. I like doing it, I like food, I love ... which you know. I think there's a lot of seven, eight year old boys who would love to run around with a knife and play with fire. So, I just love eating, I eat everything. Something’s I wasn't allowed to eat. I wanted to try it, I would sneak it in. Raw beef larb, and they were like "You're too young to eat raw beef." I wanted to try it anyways, maybe because I was a vigilante. Kids don't like to do the things your mom tells you not to eat.

                                                      But I liked it, I liked those bitter flavors. I kind of took interest, it was like a whole new world that was different than what I was getting in public elementary school. School lunches like frozen pizza and corn dogs. Which meals were not exciting and kind of bland and boring. That's what kind of sparked my interest, and just being like the noise and sounds of a busy restaurant. It was just like overwhelming but it was like kept my interest and definitely kept my curiosities high. And that's how I got to love cooking. It's like every day is a new day. You know, I just felt alive.

Suzy Chase:                  When I started reading this cookbook and cooked out of it, I kept seeing strong similarities between Thai and Laos food. How did Lao morph into Thai?

James:                  My theory, it's the way we found was tracing back through immigration. People always ... a culture will always ... when they move the thing they take with them, not in their suitcase or whatever, is the food they eat. The food they love. The food they comfort with. That's their security blanket, their food, this nourishment. So, when Bangkok was bustling as the big city that was the land of opportunity. A lot of people from Isan migrated to Bangkok to become your cab drivers, you construction workers, your maid, and your blue collar workers.

                                                      Obviously they brought their food with them. The ingredients were all there, we shared the same ingredients. But it was the style of cookery was much different than the city. So they would start cooking a lot of these foods for themselves. To feed themselves among their own community. Then it kind of caught on by the people who lived in Thailand centrally and in the city, like wow we are not used to these flavors. It's different.

                                                      There it existed in Thailand and Isan is part of Thailand, Nationally. So there's no fault to calling it Thai. I think it's both correct. It's Thai and it's Lao. It's not one or the other.

Suzy Chase:                  As a tenth grader you thought to yourself "I need to do this." after you saw a story about the French laundry. Then you were off and running. Tell us about culinary school.

James:                  Yeah in tenth grade I already knew what I wanted to do. I was in advance placement classes, the college preparatory classes, more reading, reading Charles Dickens and scarlet letter. Asking myself, I want to be a cook. All these SATs SATs wasn't going to help me. That didn't call or sing to me, what sang to me was like gourmet magazines and Art Culinaire and the French Laundry Cookbook. That's what kept my interest. That's what I wanted to read and wanted to do.

                                                      So yeah, I kind of bowed out of my AP classes. I figured I needed to get on a fast track, start planning, getting ahead. I need to be in kitchens where all the stuff I read could actually be piratical.

                                                      I know that just from working at my mom's restaurant since I was a child. I had great knife skills and all that, but I never had the chance to really cook with butter, or cream, or make beurre blanc and work with foie gras or ya know instances of butchery of different animals. I never had to do that in my mom's kitchens. That's what I needed to learn and grasp, that's what interest me so I had to set myself up and plan to get there. To get these experiences and seek them out and make it happen.

Suzy Chase:                  Then in 2009 your fine dining restaurant Commis earned a Michelin star in less than four months of being opened. Talk about that!

James:                  Yeah so my first restaurant was in 2009, we opened Commis first, of all things. I love fine dining, I still do. I love the artistry of it. I love the production value of it. I love the discipline of fine dinning. I think that's the thing that comes across. No matter of level of cookery, rustic or not, there's a fair amount of respect and discipline because it is a craft on every level.

                                                      So yeah, we opened that and we got the Michelin star and it felt good, it felt good to be home in Oakland. After traveling and working elsewhere and to be grounded back home again. And having this responsibility now that a Michelin star. That's like worldly, globally recognized. That was definitely an honor and like I said responsibility. It was a good time to exhale a little and like okay we did it! It was just fantastic.

                                                      But what does this all mean? The restaurant got busier, thank God. Yeah it was kind of like, that's Commis. And then we're about eight years old now. It's been a good ride, and it gets better by the day. I still love the restaurant every time I go in. It still feels fresh and brand new.

Suzy Chase:                  So then at one point in the book, after your stint in Europe, when you realized you wanted to open Hawker Fare the restaurant you wrote "The dishes I was raised on, everything I love most, I had no idea how to cook." How did you tackle that?

James:                  Yeah I was like who was going to cook all these things for me? All these chili dips she used to give to me all the time in the refrigerator. It's kind of a shame I grew up on this, I was in the kitchen when she made these things, but I don't know how to do it. I kind of skipped or turned a blind eye on like an opportunity of educating myself how to do this. So I had to dust off the cobwebs of my taste buds and remember what things taste like and kind of use my fine dining pallet and skill to figure it out on my own. And really trust my own pallet and my own memory and what things were supposed to be or taste like. Of course, I have mom to sign off on it. But I needed to trust myself first. Like, oh does this jog memory. There's just this ... does this take me back to ... does this chili dip take me back to 1989 when I first had it.

Suzy Chase:                  Wow.

James:                  So that was my gauge of learning myself how to cook this food. I did it with a lot of trial and error, it wasn't easy. But I think that my training in fine dining definitely helps, like training my pallet. Kind of gives me the tools to build my map how to get to where I need to be with a specific dish. This was like, mom's food, where there's no scales. It's a handful of this, a handful of that. Lots of love. That's all it needs and requires. Sometimes you know, am I over thinking this? It's like oh I think the ratio of sugar to fish sauce is two to one and there's like, we don't know. Let's just make it taste correct and worry about the ratio and write down the recipe later. It's kind of like building a recipe through numbers rather than as we go tasting. It's kind of like to taste. It was a different way of approaching a recipe.

Suzy Chase:                  I found it interesting that the recipe measurements in the cook books included grams. Why did you do that?

James:                  I wanted it for the reader to say, if you needed to adjust the recipe like double it or triple it, or doing it in half. It's much easier in grams, than trying to measure out. It's easier to measure out a recipe that says ten grams and just measure five if you want to cut the recipe in half. Rather than do a half teaspoon then do that's a quarter teaspoon. I don't have a quarter teaspoon measure. Just doing metrics just makes more sense in cooking in general. I think it gets you to a better product, and the funny thing is that's not how this food's made.

                                                      So I'm kind of, a way for me, I'm trapped between two worlds, and both are correct.

Suzy Chase:                  On parts unknown, Anthony Bourdain mentioned that it was only your second time back in Laos. Did you have that familiar feeling of home when you went there, or did it feel totally foreign to you?

James:                  Definitely had a flashback of my youth, of like our living room and our interior house to some of these houses and villages. It's very reminiscent of the way it's decorated and everything. The way things are placed, it feels like home. That was kind of weird also, like noises and no one spoke loud in the household. So that was very nostalgic to me, that was very ... but being overwhelmed with it. That was different, it was kind of like everywhere. It's like, this is the way of life. It's not just where our house was just, oh we're different cause we're different. No, this is who we are. And that was very eye opening and comforting in a way.

Suzy Chase:                  Last weekend I made your recipe for poached chicken with rice, Khao Mun Gai on page 181. Is that how you pronounce it?

James:                  Correct.

Suzy Chase:                  Okay, good! This is the most delicious broth I have ever tasted in my entire life and I'm actually making it again right now. It's on my stove as we speak. Can you describe this heavenly dish?

James:                  It's a one pot dish, humble, you get this whole chicken either from your yard. That's how we would do it from home. And then you make this beautiful stock, with aromatics, then you take the chicken out. You kind of let it sit to room temp when it's fully cooked and moist. You always got to cook it to the bone, makes it more succulent. Then you have this beautiful broth, you can serve by itself. But you take that broth, there's so much of it, cause you need enough to submerge the chicken to poach it in.

Suzy Chase:                  A gallon of water.

James:                  Yeah. So you cook that with the rice and then it's one of those dishes that kind of connect the dots. You know you have everything from the broth, you're eating the entire process of this dish minus the sauce, obviously. It's just a very comforting thing, like something ... one of those things you when you feel homesick, want to eat every day. For me it would be like Khao Mun Gai. That's like you know rainy day, nice day on a picnic, when you're sick. It's the equivalent of chicken noodle soup.

Suzy Chase:                  Oh but like twenty million times better.

James:                  Thank you.

Suzy Chase:                  So what's the deal with pink chicken? I always thought that pink chicken was undercooked but in the book you say that's not so.

James:                  Yeah I think it's more of a cultural difference. For me even today, you go to China town you get like a soy sauce chicken, whatever, they chop it up on the cutting board it's bleeding. We're there to cook the meat, but not the bone marrow. Once you cook the bone marrow to where the point it's brown, the chicken's overcooked. It's no longer enjoyable. It's not juicy, it's not succulent. I think that's where it comes from, it's more like a cultural ... a lot if it's like a cultural difference than what we're used to here.

Suzy Chase:                  Where can we find you on the web, social media, and where can we find your restaurants?

James:                  Well my restaurants in Oakland, Commis in Oakland, Hawker Fare is in San Francisco. You can find me on social media at James Syhabout all lower case first and last name put together on Instagram, Twitter.

Suzy Chase:                  You have opened up a whole new world of food for us. Thanks James for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.

James:                  Thank you very much for having me, it was a fun discussion. Thank you.

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 always subscribe on Apple Podcasts.

Lose Weight By Eating
Detox Week

By Audrey Johns

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

Audrey:                  Hi, my Audrey Johns. I am the cookbook author of "Lose Weight by Eating: Detox Week" and the founder of loseweightbyeating.com.

Suzy Chase:                  I'm so happy you're back on my podcast. This cookbook was spawned from your popular Detox Diet Week blog post. Tell us about the Detox Diet Week.

Audrey:                  Oh, absolutely. And, Suzy, thank you so much for having me back on. I'm so thrilled to be back on Cookery by the Book.

                                    When I was writing my first cookbook, "Lose Weight by Eating", I had written a post called Detox Week and put it up on my blog, loseweightbyeating.com, and it quickly took off as the number one post on the entire site. People were losing weight really quickly. They were losing up to 18 pounds in a single week, and some of the people who only had maybe 10 pounds to lose were losing 8 pounds in a single week, and that's just ... usually the last 10 pounds is a slow go, and that's okay. That's expected.

                                    But people were losing weight at such a huge rate that it was immediately evident to me that we needed to explore this a little bit more. What would happen is people would lose 10 to 18 pounds in a week, and they would contact me and say, "Can I do another week? How do go about continuing this plan?" So, I quickly modified it for people to be able to go on it for as long as they wanted, and people were continuing to lose large amounts of weight very, very quickly and in a really healthy way.

                                    When it came time to write my next cookbook, it was just obvious to myself and to my publishing house that this was what I needed to write about. What I'm most excited about is that when people think detox, they think, "Oh, I have to starve myself" or "All I'm gonna do is drink juice for two weeks". But the food, you have so much food that people contact me, and they say, "I couldn't finish my lunch. What do I do?"

                                    What I love to encourage people to do with this book and with the detox week is to eat so much metabolism boosting, healthy foods that your hunger receptors are turned off, your metabolism is roaring, and your body just takes over the weight loss for you. It's just natural, and it's easy, and it's effortless.

Suzy Chase:                  I wanna ask you about the metabolism boosting ingredients, but first, can you refresh our memory with your wight loss story?

Audrey:                  Oh, certainly. About eight years ago, I lost 150 pound in 11 months, and I've kept it off now for eight years, but just like any other person, especially us ladies, I do fluctuate from time to time 10 pounds up and down. That's when detox week came into play for me was if it did gain a little bit of weight or if I did feel extra bloated and gross and I had a TV show to go on, I would lean on the detox week, and it would just be immediate. The weight would fall right back off. It would reset my taste buds to be craving the healthier foods and to reset my metabolism.

                                    The weight loss originally started with the first weight loss plan, "Lose Weight by Eating", which you can find on loseweightbyeating.com or in my first cookbook, "Lose Weight by Eating", but this next plan is based off of the first one, and it's all about taking out the processed foods, the fake sugars, drinking more water, moving your body a little bit more, and planning out your meals so that you know something yummy is coming for dinner, so you're not going to over indulge at lunch kind of a thing.

Suzy Chase:                  Tell us about metabolism boosting ingredients.

Audrey:                  Oh, I love my metabolism boosting ingredients, and I love to point them out to people. I go to restaurants, and my friends are like, "All right, you don't need to point that out, Audrey." There are a lot of ingredients out there, and they're always gonna be the all natural ingredients, are gonna help to boost your metabolism. Anything with Vitamin C in it is naturally going to boost your metabolism. Immediately when we think Vitamin C, we think of citrus, and yes, that's a big one, but also berries and lots of different greens such as spinach and broccoli will all naturally boost your metabolism.

                                    With a lot of my recipes, you'll see I'm using a lot of bell peppers, and that's partially because I love them and also because they're really great at boosting metabolism. And once you cook them down with some onions, which are also metabolism boosting, you won't really be able to taste them. If you think about fajitas, you think, "Well, that can't possibly be healthy", but it really is depending on how much cheese, of course, you put on top if it. But if you were to make fajitas at home and you were to throw in an extra onion and throw in an extra bell pepper and make it all caramelized and yummy like we all love them on our fajitas, people are thinking that they're indulging because it picks up all the flavors of the steak and of the shrimp. And I'm speaking of my Surf and Turf Fajitas here in the new cookbook, "Lose Weight by Eating: Detox Week", but what you're doing is you're just filling your body up with all of these great metabolism boosting ingredients. Your body just does it all for you.

                                    Of course, we wanna exercise. It's great for our body, but if you can eat the foods that tell your body to shed weight, that's the easiest way to go.

Suzy Chase:                  In terms of snacking, talk about fruit vs. the hundred calorie packs.

Audrey:                  I love talking about this, Suzy. I'm so glad that you brought it up. Those hundred calorie packs, I am not a fan.

Suzy Chase:                  I know.

Audrey:                  First of all, I feel like they never really curb any cravings. You have one, and then like-

Suzy Chase:                  You want two more.

Audrey:                  ... "They're only a hundred calories, so I'll have another." Exactly. It's just they're empty calories, and they're packed full of fake sugars. Say for instance you're getting the hundred calorie packs, and they're the sweeter items. They're gonna have fake sugars in there that are gonna tell your body to hold onto weight to store your fat. But if you were to have a piece of fruit instead, say if you were to have a bowl of berries, that's going to go ahead and crave your sweet tooth, and it's gonna naturally boost your metabolism. Plus, your body knows what to do with the real sugars found in fruit. Your body does not know what to do with fake sugars made in a laboratory. And just kind of going back to nature and feeding ourselves the way our bodies expect to be fed instead of feeding our bodies out of a laboratory.

Suzy Chase:                  And I've heard you say that a banana takes up as much as room as hundred calorie pack in your bag.

Audrey:                  Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And it has its own natural little packaging, too, which I love. I almost always have a banana in my bag. I'm a mommy. I have an eight year old, and so I've always got snacks in my bag. I'm always picking up bananas at the local produce area at my grocery story, and the produce manager knows me. But I've always got a banana in my bag because it takes up the same amount of room, if not less because in our purse it fits a little bit better there than a hundred calorie pack. And you've always got a healthy snack, it's already prepackaged for you, and it's so good for you. It's got all that potassium, it's going to turn off your hunger receptors, it's so much better for you than just junk food.

                                    And the calories, it's just about the same amount of calories as a hundred calorie pack. However, it's going to benefit your body where the hundred calorie pack, it doesn't do anything for your body.

Suzy Chase:                  So, here's the big question. What is the key to losing weight and eating what you want?

Audrey:                  I love that. Suzy, you've already read my first cookbook, "Lose Weight by Eating". I love food, and my whole philosophy on food is I wanna be able to eat something really yummy, three meals a day plus snacks, and so if I can't make it skinny and healthy, I'm just gonna have the real thing.

                                    Through my first cookbook, I tried to create healthy onion rings, and I finally gave up, and I was like, "You know what? I'm just gonna go and get myself some onion rings and get over it." Because from time to time, I'm not going to be able to find the healthier version of it. But if it can, then I am going to try as hard as I can. Like I said, I tried 10 times with those onion rings. But I'm going to make it in a healthy new way so that I can splurge as much as I want.

                                    In this new cookbook, I've got chili, and I've got potato soup, and I've got my caprese pesto sandwiches where I hollow out the rolls so that I don't have as many carbohydrates, but I have lots of cheese and veggies and yummy homemade pesto. So, I try to take out some of the extra carbs or some of the extra ingredients you might not need and make it in a healthy new way.

                                    Specifically, my vegetarian lasagna that's in the new cookbook, most people never realize whenever I make it for them that it's healthy even thought it's over 50% veggies. I like to trick your taste buds into eating healthy. And like I said with my onion ring story, if it doesn't taste as good as the full fat version, it's not gonna be in the cookbook. I'm just not gonna your time or your money or disappoint your taste buds. Anything in the cookbook will be as good as the full fat version.

Suzy Chase:                  To give us a little boost, you suggest we use your detox water.

Audrey:                  Yes. I started out making fruit infused waters many, many years ago, and it kind of blew up on the Internet, and that's pretty much where "Lose Weight by Eating" made its mark was fruit infused waters. I'm pretty sure everybody listening right now has heard about them at this point. I was a big pioneer in the fruit infused waters.

                                    As I started writing more recipes and learning more about ingredients, I realized not only is water going to boost your metabolism, but so are many of these ingredients. For instance, my cucumber, lime, and mint water that's in this new cookbook, the cucumber is gonna naturally reduce bloat as will the mint, and the lime is going to naturally boost your metabolism. So, you're having a yummier way of enjoying your waters, but you can drink lots and lots of water, boost your metabolism, clean out your system, keep you full. But by adding in these ingredients, you're also benefiting your body in other ways by reducing bloat and boosting your metabolism even more.

                                    So, I've got lots and lots of yummy waters in this book. The pineapple strawberry infused water, Suzy, is so good, and it's great for curbing a sweet tooth. It's got lots of metabolism boosting ingredients. And in this book, I also came up with a few sodas. There's three soda recipes, so you can make a homemade strawberries and cream soda or mojito flavored soda, and you can feel like you're over indulging, and you can curb that soda craving and your sweet tooth all while boosting your metabolism and doing something really healthy for your body.

Suzy Chase:                  You were on the Rachael Ray show last month, and you made a giant breakfast cookie. Describe that.

Audrey:                  I love that breakfast cookie. I've been lucky enough to be on Rachael Ray three times now, and it's really interesting. For the breakfast cookie, I was actually backstage talking to Bob Harper from "Biggest Loser", and he was so excited about being able to make that breakfast cookie with me. He couldn't stop talking about it. He was like, "How do you do this? How is this healthy?". I explained it to him, and he was so thrilled about it, and he loved them. It's like, hey, if you can get Bob Harper to love your food, that's a big deal.

                                    That's from my first cookbook, "Lose Weight by Eating", and it's packed full of good for you ingredients. So, you're going to be filling up your tummy with heart healthy oatmeal. I like to say it's basically a bowl of oatmeal baked into a cookie. For those of us who aren't the biggest fan of eating oatmeal in the morning, what about if it was a cookie?

                                    And so that's kind of what "Lose Weight by Eating" is about. You're gonna be enjoying things, and you don't realize that they're healthy.

Suzy Chase:                  How's Bob Harper doing after that crazy heart attack?

Audrey:                  He's strong. He just came out with a new cookbook. He's just a great individual. I adore him, and I love being able to work with him. But he seems good. He's a tough guy. He came back really quickly.

Suzy Chase:                  There's a whole chapter called "Salad Wraps", and your favorite is the Spring Rolls with Peanut Sauce. I find that I can never get the hang of rice paper. What is the trick?

Audrey:                  Oh, man. I love that you brought that up. I just recently did a Facebook live on how to make them because it's really daunting the first time that you work with rice papers. I love to tell the story in the book that the first time I worked with them, my daughter, she was only seven at the time, she kicked me out of the kitchen. She was like, "Move on over, mom. I got this."

                                    I feel like it always seems very daunting to work with them, especially if you've never done it before, but my tip is if you mess up, take all of the stuff out of them, just dump the filling back into the bowl and throw the rice paper right back in water. What typically happens with rice paper is it sticks together kind of like tape does, but unlike tape if you toss it back in the water it all comes together in a perfect little round again.

                                    So, I did give some tips, and I did show you how to roll them up on my Facebook page, Lose Weight by Eating with Audrey Johns, but you know, hey, if a seven year-old can do it, absolutely anybody can do it. Just toss them back in the water and keep working.

Suzy Chase:                  Okay. I'm trying that this weekend. Watch out world.

Audrey:                  These spring rolls are so good I have to hide them from myself. I would eat the entire recipe. And you know, they're only 361 calories for four rolls including the peanut sauce-

Suzy Chase:                  Wow.

Audrey:                  ... and I'm pretty full after having the four, but I have to hide the other four in the back of the fridge because I can't stop. They're so, so yummy.

Suzy Chase:                  What should we do if we go out to eat and happen to go overboard?

Audrey:                  That happens to pretty much all of us, including me. I love to recommend whenever you do go out to eat, plan ahead so that you know, okay, this is what I'm going to order. But if you do go overboard, I just recommend get over it. Life is short, and you're going to mess up. Very often people trying to lose weight will blow their diet on an extra slice of chocolate cake or by going overboard when they go out to eat, and then they say, "Okay, well, I'll start again on Monday". And that's when you're really losing out.

                                    The messing up and having the extra slice of cake, that's not a big deal. We all do it, and that's going to happen to all of us, even to me. I have definitely gone overboard, and I will probably go overboard again at some point this month. But the way that you can succeed with weight loss is just get over it. Don't deprive yourself from your next meal. Don't say, "All I'm gonna do is have smoothies tomorrow". Just get over it and get right back on the bandwagon, and the very next meal should be healthy, and it should be back on plan.

                                    But if you say, "Oh, I'm gonna start again on Monday", then you're gonna end up eating so many extra calories between, say it's Tuesday that you blow your diet and you wait all the way until the next Monday, you're missing out on all of these days. Just get over it and move on.

Suzy Chase:                  A few days ago, I made your recipe for a "Bruschetta Pasta in Bed" on page 189 from your "Date Night and Family Dinners" chapter. Okay. This is just a few ingredients. It's spinach pasta, olive oil, garlic, tomatoes, basil, green onions, and Parmesan. But it packed so much flavor.

Audrey:                  Absolutely. And it's just like I said, Suzy, I want these recipes to be very, very flavorful and really, really yummy. I love that I was able to do a date night chapter for this book. Of course, I like to giggle and laugh, and yes, it's called "Bruschetta Pasta ... in Bed", but my daughter loves it. We make this, and we sit down in the living room and watch a kid's movie while we're eating it, as well, from time to time.

                                    But I do. I love to pack all of recipes full of as many flavors as possible because there's nothing worse than bland diet food. Nobody wants that. I don't want that. This is one of my all time favorite recipes. From time to time, I'll throw in some cubed chicken, as well, if you wanna little bit of extra protein, but it's only 302 calories, and it's over a cup. It's a cup and a quarter of pasta. It's a lot of pasta. And you've got lots of basil and lots of tomatoes. It's just really, really full of flavor. And, of course, Parmesan cheese, so I really recommend anybody who's craving pasta, this is a great opportunity to have real pasta and really enjoy it.

Suzy Chase:                  Talk a little bit about your "Date Nights and Family Dinners" chapter. I love it.

Audrey:                  I love it, too. I love it, too. With the book, there's definitely a lot of smoothies and salads and health food, but I wanted to include a lot of things to impress, meals to impress your date or good family meals when you have your mother-in-law coming over and you wanna be able to impress her. So, I've got different meals like my "Chicken Cordon Bleu with French Bistro Salad" I got to make with Rachel Ray a few weeks ago, and she couldn't get over it. She was so excited about it.

                                    Because it's also family night as well as date night chapter, there's avocado club cheeseburgers with sweet potato fries in there, as well. I want to give you with those yummy meals that will impress, that will work for both date night so that you can put the kiddos to bed early and enjoy a nice date night. And as a reminder, Valentine's Day is coming up, and it's right in the middle of the week, so hey, why not have an at-home date night. Buy yourself a nice bottle of wine and put the kids to bed early and save a lot of money and a lot of calories and do it yourself at home.

                                    I definitely recommend the brushcetta pasta, the spicy Kung Pao chicken for two is also really fantastic and just spicy enough that you wanna feed the kids something else, put them to bed, and enjoy it with a nice glass of white wine.

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

Audrey:                  Online you can find me at loseweightbyeating.com. You can also find me on Facebook at Lose Weight by Eating with Audrey Johns. Like I said earlier, Suzy, I've been doing a lot of Facebook lives. I think maybe I'll have to choose one of these date night meals to do soon considering Valentine's Day is coming up.

Suzy Chase:                  Totally.

Audrey:                  Yeah. I think I'm gonna have to figure one out. But yeah, you can find me there, and I try to do my best to answer lots of questions on Facebook, so put your questions up there on the most recent posts, and I check them a couple times a week and answer questions.

Suzy Chase:                  Terrific. Well, thanks, Audrey, for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast again.

Audrey:                  Thank you for having me again.

Suzy Chase:                  Follow me on Instagram @CookerybytheBook, 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.

Adventures in Slow Cooking
120 Slow Cooker Recipes For People Who Love Food

By Sarah DiGregorio

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

Sarah:                  Yeah. My name is Sarah DiGregorio, and my cookbook is called Adventures in Slow Cooking, 120 Slow-Cooker Recipes For People Who Love Food. And I have a foreword by Grant Achatz and recipes for weeknight dinners, party food, desserts, cocktails, and more.

Suzy Chase:                  You wrote in a piece for Food & Wine magazine, "That bulky contraption you only break out for chili night is one of the most powerful and versatile tools in your kitchen."

                                    Tell us about our beloved slow cooker.

Sarah:                  So I think that a slow cooker is one of the most sort of underappreciated and, like I say, underutilized tools in the kitchen. It can do a lot more than people realize. I think a lot of people keep a slow cooker around sort of in the back of a cabinet, and you know you bring it out to make a stew when it gets cold out or chili night, things like that, and the slow cooker is great for those dishes. It works really, really well, and there are many, many great recipes out there for those kinds of dishes.

                                    But one thing that I realized when I was an editor at Food & Wine magazine, I was talking to Grant Achatz for a story about slow cookers, and he was just rattling off all these dishes that you can make in a slow cooker. So he was telling me about steamed British puddings and dumplings, and in particular, custards, using the slow cooker as a water bath for custards. And I thought, "Well, that makes sense," but also it just also seemed really counterintuitive to me and very much a surprise.

                                    And so I went home and I started tinkering with my slow cooker and trying some of the things that he had mentioned. And of course, he was completely right. And I just, I think that there's something really wonderful about discovering that this very familiar kitchen tool and something that a lot of people have a lot of affection for, something that you remember maybe your parents using or your grandparents using, there's something really wonderful about taking it out again and using it not just for the things that you have nostalgia for, but also using it in different ways and sort of bringing it into the modern kitchen.

Suzy Chase:                  So this cookbook goes well beyond soups and stews. Other than custards, what is one surprising slow cooker recipe in the cookbook?

Sarah:                  That is a great question. So one thing ... I don't know how surprising this is to people, it was a surprise to me, how well the slow cooker makes polenta. So polenta, especially traditional polenta, the kind that is not quick cooking and not instant, it can take a little while on the stove top and can make sometimes kind of a mess when it pops and bubbles a bit. And one thing that I really loved to discover was that polenta cooked very slowly in the slow cooker is really beautiful and it gets very creamy and very tender. And I used a bit more water, so the ratio of water is a bit higher than what most people use on the stove top, but what happens is that the polenta ends up having a long time to hydrate, so it gets very, very tender, very creamy. It has a very rich and intense corny flavor when you cook it slowly in the slow cooker. So that was one surprising ... surprising to me, at least, and I feel like that's a very useful thing.

                                    Another surprising thing is maybe to think about braising vegetables in the slow cooker. So most people think about braising meat in the slow cooker, but actually, vegetables are beautiful in the slow cooker. So for instance, I like to do beets. And what happens when you braise vegetables low and slow is that you end up with just a little puddle of the juice from the vegetable, because I don't like to add extra moisture to the slow cooker when I braise vegetables, because the vegetables bring their own moisture and you don't want to end up with something that has too much moisture. You sort of end up with that washed-out flavor that sometimes you get in slow cooker recipes.

                                    So what I do is I just put beets pretty much directly into the slow cooker with salt, a little bit of olive oil, and I let them go. And when they're ready, they're very tender, they're very sweet, and you have this little puddle of beautiful beet juice at the bottom of the slow cooker, which I mix with some sherry vinegar and just pour over so it kind of has like a self-saucing, self-saucing beets. And it just sort of reinforces that flavor so it's a very intense and yet mellow kind of flavor. I love that kind of thing.

                                    I do a similar thing with cherry tomatoes, where I mix cherry tomatoes with just a bit of salt, olive oil, and a little bit of honey, and I crack the lid so that the moisture will evaporate. I let them go for a long time and they get very, very, very intense, that sort of wrinkled, sweet, caramelized cherry tomato confit almost. It's really a nice thing to do.

                                    So I like to encourage people to think about braising vegetables instead of meat in the slow cooker, because it just works so well.

Suzy Chase:                  What do you do with those cherry tomatoes? Do you just eat them or do you put them on something?

Sarah:                  Yeah. Well, you can do almost anything with them, but I toss them with pasta. They make a great quick, a very fresh tomato ... sort of a blistered cherry tomato sauce for pasta. I also really like them just spread, toast thickly with ricotta, and then just pile that on top for a really simple dinner or lunch I think is really, really wonderful. You could also use them as a topping for grain bowls. They just carry so much flavor, and they keep in the refrigerator for a long time, so it's a very versatile thing to have around.

Suzy Chase:                  Give us a short history on the slow cooker and Irving Naxon.

Sarah:                  Yeah. So this is such a great story. I love this. I love that the slow cooker has a good story behind it, because it seems like the kind of cooking tool that should have a good story behind it.

                                    So Irving Naxon was an inventor, and his mother came from Lithuania. So his mother immigrates from Lithuania, and their family was Jewish and they came from a village that was mainly Jewish in Lithuania, and he remembered his mother telling him that there was a communal oven. So everyone in the village would make a pot of stew on Friday, and before the sundown, before the Sabbath, everyone would bring their pot of stew to this communal oven, because during the Sabbath from sundown to sundown on some Friday night to Saturday, in the Jewish tradition you aren't supposed to do any work.

                                    So everyone would bring their pots of stew to this oven, and the baker would bank the coals, so let the coals just kind of fade and make this gentle heat that could go unattended for the rest of the night and the entire day the next day, and then everyone would come back and get their pots of stew that had been bubbling away very, very gently all day unattended, and bring them back, and this would be sort of the family dinner for Saturday night.

                                    And he remembered his mother telling him about this and how delicious those stews were and what an ingenious way this was to end up with a hot cooked meal on Saturday when you couldn't be doing any work in the kitchen on Saturday. And so he decided that he would try to replicate this, so the idea was for him that you could plug it in and let the stew go, and if you were observing the Sabbath on Saturday, you could just let that stew cook and then have a beautiful hot meal when you were ready to have it on Saturday night without having even lifted a finger on Saturday.

                                    I think that there's something really, really evocative about that, because it's sort of rooted in the immigrant experience. It feels to me like a very American story, and I love it. I love that that's where its focus comes from.

Suzy Chase:                  Is it Crock-Pot or slow cooker?

Sarah:                  So Crock-Pot is a brand name, and so slow cooker ... it's sort of like tissue versus Kleenex, so Kleenex is actually the brand ... right. So Crock-Pot was what when ... the Rival Company bought the slow cooker from Irving Naxon in 1971, and when they did that, they rebranded it as the Crock-Pot. He had called it a beanery. He had called it a couple different things, but mainly he called it "Naxon Beanery," and they rebranded it, called it a Crock-Pot. But the generic term is "slow cooker."

Suzy Chase:                  Hugh Acheson said that slow cookers are a gateway to get people to cook from scratch again. Do you think so?

Sarah:                  I think that the slow cooker is a really wonderful tool, because it meets you where you are. And that can change from day to day for everybody, I think. There are days when I am running around and I don't have time to do anything other than maybe throw some eggplant into the slow cooker, a few spoonfuls of harissa, and then before we eat I toss in some chickpeas, and that dinner, I spent maybe 10 minutes on that dinner total. And it's wholesome and it's home made, it's comforting. So I think that that's absolutely true. When you don't have time and you need to make dinner for your family and have it be something wholesome and something delicious, the slow cooker can meet you where you are.

Suzy Chase:                  So give us some slow cooker tips. Let's say we have raw ingredients, like onions or mushrooms. Now, should we saute them before popping them into the slow cooker?

Sarah:                  Yes. Ingredients like onions and mushrooms that have a lot of moisture in them, in most cases I think you need to saute them before you put them in the slow cooker, because if you don't, their texture is never quite right. In a lot of different recipes I tried really hard to not ask people to saute the onion, because I know it can be annoying to be like, "Now I have to saute the onion before I put everything in," but I really think it's better. It takes an extra five minutes and it really is better, because what ends up happening is, first of all, you draw the liquid out of the onion so that you don't end up with extra moisture in the finished dish. So when you saute the onion, you are drawing the moisture out of it a bit.

                                    And then also, you are getting that browning and that sweetness from the onion that really sort of suffuses the final dish and makes that flavor so much deeper and better. And then also, the texture of the onion breaks down a bit so you don't have sort of weirdly crunchy bits of onion at the end. So I do think that for things like onions, for things like mushrooms, it is important to saute them before you put them in.

Suzy Chase:                  What about frozen foods? Defrost or don't defrost?

Sarah:                  It's a safety issue with things like frozen meat. You cannot put it in the slow cooker, because it won't come up to temperature fast enough, so you really can't do that.

                                    For things like frozen vegetables, it is much better to defrost them first, because you can end up with too much liquid otherwise, so it's better to defrost, drain, and then put them in, because one thing that you have to be careful about in the slow cooker is you just get much less evaporations than you do with other cooking methods, so one thing that I think makes people think that they don't like slow cooker cooking is that they have maybe had a bad experience in the past with a recipe that ends up with too much liquid. So you just have to be conscious of that when you're putting together a slow cooker recipe, that you want always to have a little bit less liquid than you would normally, because you won't get the same evaporation that you do in the oven or on the stove top.

Suzy Chase:                  Speaking of liquid, what do we do about condensation?

Sarah:                  Yes, condensation. So it is important to be aware of this with the slow cooker, because you have the lid on all day, so the condensation rises up and drips down and you don't lose any of it to evaporation. And in some cases that can be great. So for instance, like I was saying about braising vegetables, I love to think about vegetables as sort of self-softing in the slow cooker, so you sort of end up with this closed, moist cooking environment that can end up ... you can get a lot of flavor that way.

                                    But there are certain cases where you want to be careful of it, so there are a couple ways that I deal with that. One is that it's okay to crack the lid in some cases. Manufacturers will tell you not to do this, because technically, if you crack the lid, they can't be assured that the temperature will rise fast enough, high enough fast enough, but for things like ... so I wouldn't do that for something like ... I wouldn't put brisket or chicken in the slow cooker and then crack the lid and walk away for eight hours. I would not do that. But for something like those tomatoes that I mentioned, the caramelized cherry tomatoes, I do crack the lid, because I'm not concerned about them reaching a certain temperature to be cooked through. Instead, I want to make sure that their moisture is being slowly evaporated.

                                    And then in some cases, what I do is I will just line the lid with paper towels. You could also do this with like a clean cloth towel, but I find that paper towels are just ... because they're thin enough that you can get the lid closed over them, so they're easier. So I do that for things like custards where I don't want the condensation to gather at the top and then drip back down onto the surface of the custard. It wouldn't be the end of the world, but it's just not particularly nice. It kind of ruins that beautiful silky top. So in that case, what I do is I just put down a layer of paper towels and then close the lid on top of it, and that way what happens is any condensation just gets absorbed by the paper towels and it doesn't jump back down onto the surface of the custard.

Suzy Chase:                  Describe how we can sear or brown directly on our stove top.

Sarah:                  There are a couple models that have inserts, like the crock, that is stove top safe. So I have one, actually, that I really like. It's a Hamilton Beach model. And the crock, actually I can just put it on the stove top like any other skillet. I can saute my onions, I can saute my aromatics, I can brown my chicken, whatever it is I'm doing, and then I just pop the insert back into the slow cooker casing and turn it on.

                                    So that can be very useful if you slow cook a lot. It can be useful to think about getting a model that you can saute on the stove top, and it sort of saves you a pot. But it's certainly not necessary. You can just as easily saute your onion and your aromatics in a skillet and then just transfer the food from the skillet into slow cooker before you start.

Suzy Chase:                  Will the crock stay "stove top safe" on it? How will we know?

Sarah:                  That's a good question. The box would certainly ... it's a big selling point for models that are stove top safe. The box and the instructions will definitely say, "stove top safe." If you have a traditional slow cooker that is like a heavy stoneware crock, I would very much assume that it is not stove top safe. Most of them aren't. But what you could do is see what model number you have, what brand and what model number, and just search it online. The crock itself will not say it on it, I don't believe, but you could certainly find that information if you know what brand and what model you have.

Suzy Chase:                  How do we tackle crunchy foods like granola or spice nuts?

Sarah:                  That is a good question. So like I said before about cracking the lid to allow for evaporation with things like the cherry tomatoes, you can do a similar thing with granola and the spice nuts. And in this case, what you're doing is you're really using the slow cooker as a gentle toaster. So I love to do this kind of thing, because it doesn't require you turning on your oven, it's very hands off, and it toasts really gently and it ends up with a really nice result.

                                    So in this case, what I do is, for instance, I have like an Indian spice Chex Mix. I just put the mixture into the slow cooker and I crack the lid to make sure that all of the ... to make sure that everything will stay crunchy. And then I just stir it a couple times and let it go until everything is toasted. And that's a really fun way to use your slow cooker, especially around the holidays.

Suzy Chase:                  Our last tip. How do we use bakeware and our slow cooker?

Sarah:                  That's a great question. As long as your bakeware is oven safe, you can use it in the slow cooker. So this was a discovery that I was really happy to make, because when you cook desserts in the slow cooker, you can certainly cook certain things in the crock itself, but it really opens up your options when you realize you can put like a souffle dish in there, you can put a bunch of ramekins in there. You can even put things like canning jars. I like to do these little mini cheesecakes and I make them in canning jars so everyone gets their own little cheesecake in a jar, and it's delicious and it's a very fun presentation.

                                    So any kind of bakeware that you can use in your oven, you can use in your slow cooker, so for instance, those little oven-safe ramekins. I also have a four-quart ... four-quart? No, sorry. It's a two-quart, a two-quart souffle dish that I make sticky toffee pudding in. And as long as it fits in your slow cooker and it's oven safe, it is completely fair game. And that can be really fun.

                                    Another idea that's in the book is I make a ricotta cheesecake in a loaf pan, so just a loaf pan like you would make banana bread in. It fits in your oval slow cooker and it's kind of a fun presentation, as well, because then you end up with this cute little rectangular cheesecake, which is very delicious and looks nice, too.

Suzy Chase:                  I made your recipe for Apple Spice Overnight Oatmeal with Hazelnuts on page 64 over the weekend.

Sarah:                  Oh, good.

Suzy Chase:                  And as a mom, I'm the one who gets up and makes breakfast for everyone in the morning, so it was so luxurious to have breakfast already made and ready to go. It was really good.

Sarah:                  Yeah. I am not the breakfast maker in my home, because if I were, no one would ever eat breakfast. So I was very attune to the problem of getting breakfast on the table, especially for little kids, when you're not a morning person. I'd much rather do it at night and then have it ready in the morning. So I'm glad that that worked for you.

Suzy Chase:                  No, it was perfect. I had a glass of wine. I was making the apple mixture. It was all ready when I woke up.

Sarah:                  Yeah, exactly, exactly. That's great.

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

Sarah:                  You can find me at sarahdigregorio.com, that's Sarah with an H, and then D-I-G-R-E-G-O-R-I-O, dot com. I'm also on Twitter at Sarah Digregorio, and on Instagram at Sarah E. Digregorio. So those are my ... and I'm always happy to hear from people. I am truly grateful to everyone who picks this book up, and I am very, very, very happy to answer any questions, talk things through. People have ideas about a variation that they want to try, I'm always happy to hear from people.

Suzy Chase:                  Adventures in Slow Cooking is about rethinking how to use this magic appliance.

                                    Thanks, Sarah, for coming on Cookery by the Book Podcast.

Sarah:                  Oh, thank you. It was such a pleasure to talk to you.

Suzy Chase:                  Follow me on Instagram at Cookery by the Book Twitters. I am Suzy Chase. And download your Kitchen Mix Tapes. music to cook by on Spotify at Cookery by the Book. And as always, subscribe in Apple Podcasts.

Pantry and Palate
Remembering And Rediscovering Acadian Food

By Simon Thibault
Photos by Noah Fecks

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

Simon:                  Hi, I'm Simon Thibault, and my new cookbook is called, "Pantry and Palate: Remembering and Rediscovering Acadian Food."

Suzy Chase:                  I adore cookbooks like this, it's more than just a cookbook, it's a family narrative that spans over 100 years. A reacquaintance with old food traditions, with recipes, and anecdotes, seasoned with history. Acadie doesn't exist geographically anymore, so what exactly defines the Acadians?

Simon:                  Acadie is defined by the people, and it's defined by family more than anything else. One of the first things that happens when you're in Acadian communities, is people will ask you, "Well, who are your parents?" That way, you can start to establish a possible family connection. Like mine would be, I am Simon, son of Hector, son of Ulysses, son of William, son of Isadore. Within those five generations, you and I might be able to find some kind of familial connection, and that's how Acadians identify themselves. We're always in this constant state of seeking each other out, that's how we exist.

Suzy Chase:                  The connection between the Cajuns, and the Acadians intrigued me, talk a little bit about that.

Simon:                  Sure, I mean historically what you essentially have, is that in 1755, the Acadians were colonists to what is now Atlantic Canada, specifically New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island, and actually into parts of what is now Maine, actually. We were there, and we were colonists to the area, and then the English were like, "Uh, sign fealty to the crown, or we're kicking you out, because we're afraid of you being still French," and we're like, "No, we're not French, we don't care."

                                                      They kicked us out, and we were sent all over the place, some of us went back to France, and some people who went back to France later on ended up in Louisiana, and the best example of describing the connection between Acadians and Cajuns. It was a gentleman named Barry Ancelet. Barry is very much like a very militant Cajun, he's a poet, and musician, professor at Lafayette, and he once said that it's like talking to two siblings who were separated the age of eight, and meet again when their 80.

                                                      You have a root, but you have a completely different life experience, and then you meet again, but you still feel this strong kinship. I have a lot of friends from Nova Scotia, and from my New Brunswick, who have gone to Louisiana, and as soon as you say you're Acadian, it's like, "Come unto my house my cousin, we're going to go eat together." There's this really wonderful connection, and again that desire to reconnect that kind of exists.

Suzy Chase:                  I'm with you, I don't want a cook that teaches you how to dump and stir.

Simon:                  Thank you.

Suzy Chase:                  I want a culture, and cuisine mixed into my cookbooks, so when you were doing the research, you said that there was only one Acadian cookbook published in 1974 that was in French, is that right?

Simon:                  Yeah, pretty much, and that book wasn't even translated into English until like 2001. It's funny, I know a friend of mine works for the publisher who published that book, and she said, "Your book has actually helped our book sell again." Which is great, the more the merrier really, but yeah, there was very little information, and so it was very much a question of going through primary sources, but luckily the primary source for my book were a series of notebooks, which were my grandmother's, and my mother's, and my great aunts, and various other family members.

                                                      When I first started this book, because there was no other real ... Other than the one cookbook around this, it was very difficult to decide what to put in, and my background is in journalism, so it's very much a question of, how far back do you go? How far do you start digging? Then I started looking into everything from like agricultural reports, to folklore, to everywhere, and I was like, "Oh my God, what am I going to do?" This woman, who is kind of a mentor of mine, Naomi Duguid, she's a James Beard award-winning author.

                                                      She, and her ex husband wrote a series of cookbooks, two of which won book of the year award, and she lives in Toronto here in Canada, and she and I were talking, and she said, "Just write the recipes, don't worry about all the information you think you're missing. The recipes will tell you where to focus," and she was right, and I decided to focus on these family recipes, but the family recipe, again with the whole thing of being Acadian, your family will tell you who you are, and where to go, and where to seek out things like further back, and that was the key to it all, and I'm really grateful for that.

                                                      The recipes taught me where to dig, so a simple recipe of a cornmeal molasses bread can lead me back to how the Acadians came in contact with the loyalists, who were Americans who had left the United States after the War of Independence, and how those traditions became part of it. Within the loyalists, there are also black loyalists, so African Nova Scotian communities were in conjunction with all of these things, or like the tradition of rasping potatoes, and using that pulp in a very specific way, that's German influence, that's a German thing.

                                                      The Acadians didn't do that realistically beforehand, so each recipe told me where to go, and so it was a heck of a research project, but the best part about it all for me, was that doing all this research, and cooking, was about experiencing what it means to be Acadian in a context that I had never experienced before, and not in such a profound way, and so I'm really grateful for that.

Suzy Chase:                  Going through the series of notebooks that your mother gave you, did you discover something you never knew about your mom, or your grandma?

Simon:                  I really did, because the thing was, that my grandmother who wrote the majority of these notebooks, she passed away when I was like four, or five, so I never really knew her. I only know her through story, through like stories that my mother would tell about her, or that my uncle would say about her, so I had no real connection to this woman, not in the same way that I had to other grandparents, or whatnot, or other family members.

                                                      In digging through this, I came to understand who she was, and what her life was like on a daily basis, and that was not only a wonderful educational process, but a wonderful process that I came to understand who this woman was for my own mother, and that was a connection that I never would've had beforehand, and so I'm again deeply grateful for that. More than anything, it was also interesting to see the life that she had. You have a woman who graduated high school when she was 16, but because she couldn't go to teachers college education yet, because she had to be 18, her brother, who was a priest, sent her to a finishing school in Québec for the Ursuline College, which actually was the first college established for women in North America.

                                                      She went there for two years, and so she learned what was then known as les arts menagers, or home economics, but not home economics where like what would've been for you, or myself, meaning like how to do very simple things. It's like no, economics in all of this, what is the nutritive value of certain forms of food? What is the price of these things? How can I stretch that? How can I cook these things? All of these things, like how to truly create a home, and as I was digging through all of this, and realizing there were very simple, and subtle things that my mother did, that I was like, "Oh, that's the root of the that," which was kind of wonderful to see.

Suzy Chase:                  When was your grandmother born?

Simon:                  She was born in 1908, or in '09 if I remember correctly. The books were also written by my grandmother, and also other ancestors like a Great Aunt, and things like that, so you have everything from the 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s, and 60s in all of this, so you see everything from the development of industrialization, industrialized foods. You will see recipes like some things will ask for baking soda, but it will actually ask for what they would call Pearl Ash, which technically is actually baking soda.

                                                      Later recipes will ask for baking powder, so you see the development of things in the 20th century, and whatnot, which was super interesting to me.

Suzy Chase:                  The gorgeous cursive that we don't see anymore.

Simon:                  Oh God yes. It's fun, I've seen enough of it now that I'm like, "You were taught by nuns, you were taught by nuns," you can just tell by the writing.

Suzy Chase:                  With so many recipes handed down from generation to generation, the measurements are vague. What was the recipe testing like for you?

Simon:                  I'm not a professional cook, I never went to culinary school. I'm a journalist, so my background in all of this, and I'm very much a self taught cook, but because of my background in journalism, my interest is always as thorough as possible, and I'm the kind of guy who will go and try anything once, especially in terms of cookery, and testing out in techniques, and whatnot. I realized that it's one thing for me to be able to cook on my own, it's another thing for me to transmit that information to another person, and for them to be able to execute it, that was the job.

                                                      Like you said, all of these recipes, the vast majority of them had next to no directions, and relatively vague measurements. I would fiddle around, figure it out. I was really lucky, because I have a friend who works at America's Test Kitchen, he works for Cook's Country's. His name is Tucker Shaw, super sweet guy, and I emailed him, and I said, "Tucker, what am I going to do about how to transmit this information?" He gave me a bunch of really great tips, and one of which, was read the recipe out loud, or get someone actually, no, get someone to read you the recipe out loud, close your eyes, and mime with your hands what you think should be doing.

Suzy Chase:                  Really?

Simon:                  Yeah, but it's true, because if you've cooked enough, or you've baked enough, you should know intrinsically when things should happen, and if someone's telling you what to do, and all of a sudden your brain goes, "No, I shouldn't be doing that yet," it makes sense, you know what I mean?

Suzy Chase:                  Yes.

Simon:                  Yeah, it was a really smart tip, so thank you Tucker Shaw.

Suzy Chase:                  Why can't you find Acadian food in restaurants?

Simon:                  For various reasons. The number one thing is most people just cook it at home. It's most of the major dishes tends to be large family gathering kind of dishes, that's one thing, but if you are in Acadian communities, you will occasionally find it on a few things, like occasionally in diners, and things like that. The thing is, because Acadians lived a form of life that was often subsistence cookery, survival, peasant food, food that would stick to your ribs, and keep going through a long day of work, there is next to no refinement as we view refinement today.

                                                      The idea of something being necessarily aesthetically pleasing on a plate as we view it today in the 21st century, doesn't really stick around. I've often said that Acadian food is homey, and homely, but very pleasing to the stomach. It's more pleasing to the stomach than to the eye. A perfect example is this dish called Rapure, or Rappie Pie, which is a dish of you take potatoes, you rasp the potatoes, and then you extrude all of the starch out of them by squeezing them, and then you reconstitute that with stock, and that creates this ...

Suzy Chase:                  Porridge?

Simon:                  Yeah, it's like a potato porridge, or a potato congee, or jook, and it's just kind of like, "Okay," and then you add some form of meat to it, whether it be poultry, or wild game, or even like clams, like large bar clams, which is a favorite of mine, and then you bake that in an oven at God like 400, 450°, I can't remember right off the top of my head right now, but like for an extended period of time, and it's basically insanely thick, mildly gelatinous, and sits on your plate, but it sits in your belly, and you're just like, "I am so full of food right now, and so happy," and think about it, it will keep you going for a long time, but it's not the sexiest thing in the world.

                                                      I recently was lucky enough to have the chance to hang out with some people from the perennial plate, who were this lovely couple from Minnesota who've won multiple Beard Awards for their videos, and I took them around, and there's a shot in the short that we did where you see someone plating Rappie Pie on a plate, and you just this sound as it hits the plate, and it jiggles, and then, "Yep, that's it." I know a lot of people would just be going, "What am I eating? What?" It's kind of fun like that, but I mean I don't know, I love it, and I grew up on it.

                                                      It's like everybody, I think if you have any form of ... No matter what your ethnicity, there's oftentimes some kind of dish somewhere that it's like, "This is just for us, it's not for you." It's always fun when someone who is not from your community comes in, and really adores it, it's like, "Okay, you can stick around."

Suzy Chase:                  On Monday night I made your recipe for Cajun Fricot, and that's not a looker either.

Simon:                  No, it's not, but ...

Suzy Chase:                  It's so darn good.

Simon:                  Good, good.

Suzy Chase:                  I had my brand-new class parent committee over for dinner, and they loved it, and the spicy Cajun sausage really flavored the chicken, which was interesting.

Simon:                  Yeah, totally, so Fricot is basically a chicken and dumplings stew, you'll find it throughout most Acadian communities, if not all of them, but in the 1990s, a bunch of people from Louisiana started coming to Southwestern Nova Scotia, which is where I grew up in a little village called Church Point, or Pointe-De-L'Eglise. In this village there is actually a university, it's called Universite Sainte-Anne, or University Sainte-Anne, and at Sainte-Anne there is an immersion program.

                                                      French immersion, so people will come in, and learn how to speak French, and a lot of people in the 1990s started coming there to learn French, because they wanted to reaffirm their cultural heritage through a linguistic way. A lot of people from Louisiana came up, and they were like, "All right, well, let's try some of your dishes," and they all went, "Oh, you all need spice in this. Where's the pepper, where's the seasoning, where's the spice," and we're like, "No, not there."

                                                      One gentleman, a really wonderful guy named Lucius Fontino, who everybody told me, "You need to talk to Lucius," like for years, and so Lucius and I finally started talking, and he said he had gone down, and he'd had it, and he was like, "This would be really good with sausage, or just spice it up," and so when he went back to Louisiana, he started making Fricot, but he made it with a little bit of pepper, or a little bit of Tasso Ham, or Cajun sausage. Most people outside of the South can't get Tasso, so I was like alright, any kind of like decently nice Cajun spicy sausage will do well in a pinch, and it's funny, it's one of the recipes that has gotten a lot of attention, from a lot of people, which is kind of wonderful.

Suzy Chase:                  I encourage everyone to make it, it's on page 125.

Simon:                  Thank you.

Suzy Chase:                  You scoured through old cookbooks, and recipes, and said that the feedback you received from other Acadian families has been eye-opening, how so.

Simon:                  One of things, is as an Acadian, because there's been so little attention to our food, and all of a sudden my book comes out, and people are like, "Oh, we can talk about this?" This is now a point of pride for people, because amongst Cajuns, the way that you express yourself, is by your food, but Acadians express themselves by what comes out of their mouths, the way that they speak, but for Cajuns, it's what goes in your mouth. All of a sudden there's this new way to express Acadian pride, and the sense of who we are.

                                                      Food is a cultural product, or a cultural artifact, whichever way you want to view it, and all of a sudden for people to like, "Oh, we can talk about this, we can be proud about this," and people are interested in it. That's been the thing, but the other thing of it, is that some people have been like, "Well, why did you do it like this?" It is such a food of people's homes, and no matter what your ethnicity is, the food of your cultural heritage is always very indicative of your own family, and so some people were like, "Well, why did you not do this? Why did you do it this way?"

                                                      In the Fricot, like the classic Fricot, I had some people who were like, "What are you doing? Why do you have carrots in your Fricot?" I was like, "Oh, come on, like my mother doesn't do it," but I was like I need to give people some form of introduction to this, and I even say, I was like, "Carrots are not habitual, it's okay," like you have to think of what's the easiest point of access for people who have no context of this food to get into it.

                                                      I even had one person completely, and utterly criticize me. They were like, "He said it's going to be all his grandmothers recipes, but he's all bastardized them." I'm like, "I haven't bastardized anything, I've basically made sense of it." No, it's been super fun, like I mean I live in Halifax, Nova Scotia, I work as a freelance journalist, and when I wrote this book, I thought, "Okay, it'll do well in Atlantic Canada, and maybe a few other things."

                                                      It gained national attention here in Canada, it was on the cover of the life section of the biggest newspaper in the country. I've done interviews all over the place, and now it's getting interest in the US, which is kind of amazing, and I mean that was the point, is to get people talking about this. It wasn't purely from an intellectual point of view, or from an educational point of view. Acadians live all over the place, most of us are based here in Atlantic Canada, or in parts of Québec, and a little bit of Maine, but we are a diasporic people, we are a diaspora.

                                                      We are living all over the place, and we very specific, and individualistic kind of experiences of what it means to be Acadian, and to see that in the media it resented, there was so many people like, "Oh my God, we're here, we're being viewed, we're being talked about." It was kind of wonderful for people, and it's a little surreal, all of a sudden I've become this accidental Acadian spokesperson. I'm like, "I didn't sign up for this, I'm happy to do it, but it's that's not what I expected to happen."

Suzy Chase:                  Is your mother still alive?

Simon:                  Yeah, both my parents are very happy, and healthy, knock on wood, as I'm knocking on my head.

Suzy Chase:                  Are they so proud of you?

Simon:                  Yeah, they're very, they're just like, they can't get over it, like just how many people have come up to them, and just people will come up to my mom, and be like, even people have told me they remember my grandmother, or told my mother that they remember her mother. Like one gentleman, we had a book launch down home for the book, it was in the month of May, and this gentleman came up, and he said to me, "I remember your grandmother's cooking, I remember sitting at your grandmother's table with your mother when she was a child, and just eating these foods," and it was kind of amazing.

                                                      He just had tears in his eyes, he was like, "I haven't thought of these flavors of these things for years," so it was kind of amazing, but no. It's funny, because my parents are relatively private people in the sense of they will talk to everybody, but they've never been people to seek out a new form of notoriety, or fame, or anything else, and people are stopping them in the street, and they're like, "I read your son's book," and like oh my God, it's resonating in lots of places, so it's been wonderful for them.

Suzy Chase:                  A recent entry on your blog called Cookbook Love described your love of cookbooks, and the first time you walked into Kitchen Arts & Letters here in New York City, recount that moment for us.

Simon:                  It was April of 2015, I was in New York for the James Beard awards. I was going to the award ceremony, and friends of mine are like, "You have to go to Kitchen Arts," and I read cookbooks like their novels, I read them cover to cover, and I walked in, and I met Nach, who is one of the major owners of the store, and one of his other staff members, and he was talking to a woman, she was looking for a book on Chinese cookery, and he mentioned Fuchsia Dunlop, who is one of my favorite cookery writers.

                                                      She's a British woman, who has made an entire career talking about Chinese cookery, and he was talking about her books, and I just said to the woman, "If you don't mind me interrupting," I said, "You should really read her book, Sharks Fin and Sichuan Pepper, because chapter 4 is specifically about the appreciation, and the understanding of texture in Chinese cuisine." Nach looks at me, he's like, "Do you want a job here? I just kind of hit the floor. I was like, "I seriously would if I lived in New York, I would apply for there in a heartbeat."

                                                      Nach and I just started talking, and he gave me a bunch of really wonderful suggestions. I said, "These are the kinds of things that I read," but it was just amazing to be in a store that is so dedicated to cookery, and every single form from intellectualization, to the practicality, to the aesthetic, and the staffers were just so knowledgeable, and so accommodating, and knew so much about what there was in the store, it was kind of amazing, and I left there with having spent, I don't know, $400, $500.

                                                      I got to the airport, and my luggage was overweight. The guy at the counter is like, "That will be $100 please." I'm like, "Ah, shit."

Suzy Chase:                  It's money, that's all.

Simon:                  Just money, but I've fallen in love with that store, and every time I go to New York I made a point of going, and then when the book came out, one of the other owners, Matt said to me, he said, "We could do a book launch here," and I was really amazed, and I said, "Yes, please." In November this year I went down to New York again, and we had a small little book launch, and a few friends of mine showed up, which was really lovely, and then the event was over, and two things happen.

                                                      One, I was just about to leave, and Matt said, "Can you please sign some copies for us," and I said, "Sure." I said, "How many do you want me to sign? If you don't sell them, you can always send them back." Matt says, "Oh no, I'm going to sell them all."

Suzy Chase:                  Wow.

Simon:                  I was a little taken aback, and I was just really moved, because this is a store that is pretty much the Platonic ideal of what my interesting food is. Like I said, there is an intellectualization, there's a practicality to it, but it's all about getting people to cook, and to think about food, and I think that's really amazing. After I signed the copies, the nights over, I walk out, and I'm with a friend of mine, and I just burst into tears. He's like, "What's wrong?" I'm like, "Nothings wrong, I just had a book launch in New York."

Suzy Chase:                  You made it.

Simon:                  Yeah, it was really kind of amazing, and I was really, really pleased. Just in December of this year, Kitchen Arts & Letters put out their list of the top 10 cookbooks of the year, and there was my book.

Suzy Chase:                  Yep.

Simon:                  I was like, all right, I don't need anything else anymore, I'm good, like to me that was the be-all, and end-all.

Suzy Chase:                  It was one of their favorites for 2017.

Simon:                  Yeah, so I'm sitting there on the list sitting next to Wylie Dufresne, and it's like are you kidding me? David Tanis, and all these people, I'm like, this is insane. I remember my first time in New York, I came, and I was at the Beard Awards, and I'm sitting at this table, and I'm looking around, and Dan Barber's the table next to mine, the Kitchen Sisters are two tables over. Dorie Greenspan is up on stage, and I'm like, "Where am I?" I just sat next to this woman, and I said to her, and I said, "I'm sorry, I just feel like a little bit of a country mouse, and I don't know what to do," and she said, "That's okay, I don't know, I understand that feeling completely."

                                                      She was there with her son, and she was from Colorado, she's like, "Mom, you have one of these." She's like, "Yeah, but I still feel like a country mouse." I was like, "It's okay, it's okay to have those kinds of moments," and especially, like I said, I live in Halifax, Nova Scotia, I love where I live, but it's one thing to see what you're doing as a professional, and then finally get the recognition, and just have it happen it that kind of way has been incredibly, it's been liberating, but it's inspiring, but more than anything, it's shown me that I can do what I need to do, I can do this. There's this is affirmation that has come about, that I'm like, "No, I'm doing the right thing, and it's good.

Suzy Chase:                  You also love Bonnie Slotnick too.

Simon:                  Oh my God.

Suzy Chase:                  Do you want to hear the craziest story?

Simon:                  Please.

Suzy Chase:                  We moved to 10th St. here in the West Village, and I said, "I'm so excited, I'm going to be a couple blocks away from Bonnie Slotnick." That same month we moved in, she moved out over to the East Village. I was so upset. Anyways, she's still close.

Simon:                  Yeah, I mean, and she's the sweetest woman ever. Two people I know who live here in Halifax, are originally from New York, and they're living here now, but they'd asked her for a book 10 years ago, and about two years ago they got a phone call, "Are you still looking for this book?" They were like, "Yes." She remembered them eight years later, even thought they weren't living in New York anymore. I mean ...

Suzy Chase:                  That's incredible.

Simon:                  Bonnie is a walking repository of culinary information around books that is like unparalleled, it's insane, and amazing, and every time ... I have friends who go to New York, I'm like, "Two places to go, Kitchen Arts & Letters, and Bonnie Slotnick," and just sit in Bonnie's, and just look for the most random things. I mean I found a first edition of a cookbook from Nova Scotia in there. I found all kinds of wonderful goodies in there, and I can ask her about things, and I actually met a real hero of mine in Bonnie Slotnick.

                                                      I met Grace Young, who is an award-winning author who wrote a really wonderful book called, "The Breath of the Walk." I was in there one day, I was on a trip to New York, and I left, and about five minutes later she walked in, so I had missed her, and I had been talking to Bonnie about how much I loved her books, and she said, "Well, she's in here often," and so I got in contact with Grace, and I actually got to meet Grace at Bonnie Slotnick, and I said, "All right, we're going to go to the Chinese cookery section, and you're going to tell me what are the books that I need to own." It was a pretty amazing experience.

Suzy Chase:                  That's surreal.

Simon:                  Yeah, it was wonderful, but that's the wonderful thing about, we live in a celebrity culture, and yes, food people have deservedly garnered attention for the work that they do, whether it be working in kitchens, or writing about food, but there's still a highly democratic ... It's still a very democratic way of living, and working, meaning that you can often contact these people, and they often will help you.

                                                      I think that's a really important thing, and a really important thing to emulate in your own behavior, is like if there's all this information out there, why would you keep it to yourself? Share the knowledge, that's the whole point of cookery, is to share that knowledge in as many ways as possible. That's been amazing, and this kind of work that I've been doing around working in food journalism, is that grossly, the majority of people will be like, "No, I want you to have this information, and I want to help one another, and it's like, let's just get people cooking, let's get people thinking about food. Let's give people agency to do what they need to do," and that's really wonderful.

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

Simon:                  Yeah, you can find work at simonthibault.com, I'm also on Twitter, and Instagram. That's SimonAThibault, and Thibault is spelled T-H-I, B as in Bobby, A-U-L-T, and you can actually recently find me, if you go to Perennial Plates website. Perennial Plate recently did a video where I explained to them what Acadian food is, and took them down to where I grew up, and had some Acadian food with the gang from Perennial, and it's a really wonderful video.

Suzy Chase:                  You've said cookbooks have allowed you to travel the world, and now you've allowed us to travel through your terrific new cookbook. Thanks Simon for coming on Cookery By The Book podcast.

Simon:                  Thank you so much for having me, it's been wonderful.

Suzy Chase:                  Follow me on Instagram at CookeryByTheBook, 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.

Healthy Meal Prep
Time Saving Plans to Prep and Portion Your Weekly Meals 

By Stephanie and Adam of Fit Couple Cooks

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

Stephanie&Adam:                  Hey guys.

Stephanie:                  I'm Stephanie.

Adam:                  And I'm Adam.

Stephanie:                  Of Fit Couple Cooks, and we just released our book titled Healthy Meal Prep.

Suzy Chase:                  On your Fit Couple Cooks Facebook page you wrote, "This book is not here's 1,000 recipes, good luck." Or "Make blah blah chicken with 36 ingredients." Or "Eat my weight-loss starvation diet recipes." No. This is food, real food. Okay, so I'm glad you're on my podcast, because prepping and portioning intimidate the heck out of me. Tell us how this cook book can encourage us to prep and portion in the new year.

Adam:                  The cool thing about the book is that we do the heavy lifting for you, in regards to the portion control. So, it's really easy step by step to just follow exactly the ingredients that we give you, and just have faith that the portions are exactly what you need.

Suzy Chase:                  Where do you get your recipe ideas?

Stephanie:                  I think we mostly come up with them just by thinking about, "Well, what's a popular food right now?" Or not even just right now, just a classic food. Something like lasagna, or buffalo chicken, and then we turn it into a meal prep version so that you can still eat all of your favorite foods, and not just get stuck eating the same old boring chicken and rice all the time.

Suzy Chase:                  So, what if we get bored eating the same thing every day for lunch? What can we do?

Adam:                  Well, the book helps you fix that problem, because it gives you, not only a lunch and a dinner, but it also gives you a third option, so each day you're swapping in a recipe. So, you might have chicken for lunch one day, beef for dinner, and the next day you might have fish, and then back to chicken again. So, you're always moving through different recipes so you don't feel bored.

Stephanie:                  So, for the full week you're gonna be prepping three main courses so that you can interchange. I mean, you're gonna have the same breakfast every day, but then you'll be interchanging your lunch and your dinner every day so that you're not eating the same exact three things every single day.

Suzy Chase:                  So, I find that breakfast is the hardest meal to plan. Give us some breakfast tips.

Adam:                  So, in the book we do a lot of things that can last a long time. So, we have overnight oats, and chia seed pudding, and things like this that are really nutritious and they last a long time, and that have a lot of great flavor in there too, so you don't feel bored eating the same thing every day, and it's very wholesome, and keep you full for long time.

Stephanie:                  And you don't always have to have a giant breakfast. I think some people feel like they have to make so many things for breakfast, but really just like a small chia seed pudding will be packed with nutrients that you need, and then you can have a snack sometime shortly after your breakfast, and then get straight on to lunch. So, it's not like you have to think about, "Oh, what am I gonna make for breakfast?" It can just be something as simple as overnight oats, which can take five seconds to prepare.

Suzy Chase:                  It's the beginning of the new year, and lots of folks are thinking about joining a gym. Talk about your own fitness journeys.

Stephanie:                  Sure.

Adam:                  Sure. So, back in 2010 I was 230 pounds, and I'd kind of made a conscious decision, my 21st birthday I wanted to lose 70 pounds, and get to 150 pounds. I did that successfully, and did it through meal prepping, and consciously knowing what I put into my body, and then from there I realized that the scale didn't really matter. The scale weight wasn't as important as how I felt, and so I went through, then, a transformation in building strength, and building my physique, and becoming a stronger version of who I was, and not really worrying about the scale.

Stephanie:                  Lifting some heavy weight.

Adam:                  Lifting some heavy weight. Now the goal is to enjoy a healthy lifestyle that you can maintain, and your end goal is not to have to worry about your weight. You wanna be happy, healthy, and be able to maintain your body, and not stress about it.

Stephanie:                  Yeah, and for me I grew up, I was always overweight, and then when I got to college I was still overweight, and very unhappy. I think the heaviest I was was 210. In college, I started to cook for myself once we had our own apartment, because of course, freshman, sophomore years you were eating a lot of bad food in the dining hall. Then once I had control over my own food I was learning how to cook, and I would call my mom, and my grandma and I'd say, "Hey, I just bought a piece of chicken, what do I do with it?" That's how I started to cook. Just by cooking my own food I started to naturally lose weight, and then I started to get really into fitness a few years ago. For the first time ever I was going to the gym, I was technically a gym rat. I was waking up every day and going to the gym, and doing some crazy things, and I had a personal trainer, and that's how I got really into my fitness journey, but that coupled with my nutrition journey at the same time.

                                                      So, that's why we do what we do now, because your nutrition is even almost more important than just working out all the time. That is the key focus here so that when people are ... it's the start of the new year, and people are wanting to join the gym, they also really need to be meal prepping, and eating healthy foods in order to see results, and feel results.

Suzy Chase:                  So, your YouTube channel is called Fit Couple Cooks. Give us a little background on you two as a couple, and how it played it out on YouTube.

Stephanie:                  Sure. So, I actually started making my own channel before I had even met Adam, back in 2013, and I called it Classy Cookin' with Chef Stef. I had a really cool jingle. I was just doing it because I had come home from ... I had graduated with my master's degree, and I came home, and I didn't know what to do. I was like, "Hey, you know what I love to film and edit, I think I'm gonna show people how to make healthy food." I was just trying to ... I had always done recipes with very few ingredients, and they always taste amazing. I mean, if you just saute garlic that immediately tastes amazing.

                                                      So, I was making all these recipes, and I wasn't gaining many followers. Then once I met Adam, one of the first things I found out about Adam was that he was a personal trainer, and a professional chef and I was like, "No way, you fit in so well with my life." My YouTube channel was all about helping people, but I was not a chef. It was just recipes that I was making on my own, I was self-taught. Then, so Adam started to appear in videos, and it got awkward being called Chef Stef, because it was always like, "And this is Chef Adam."

Adam:                  The early videos were, "This is my friend, Adam."

Stephanie:                  "I got this recipe from my friend Adam." Then once we decided that we were gonna end up eventually together, we decided to re-brand, and it turned into Fit Couple Cooks just by tossing back ideas of, well we wanna make it about healthy food, and we wanna make it about gym videos, and nutrition tips, and all these kinds of things. Once meal prep took off we got kind of side tracked with doing gym work outs, but we do have a few that Adam made videos of, so we do wanna get back into showing people what to do at the gym as well, because there're a lot of people who walk into a gym and they don't know what to do. So that's kind of how it started.

Suzy Chase:                  On YouTube you also gave us a glimpse into your personal life, and the whole immigration process. It looked so frustrating.

Adam:                  Yeah, it was a little bit back and forth between me coming to America, and back to Australia. We're so grateful now that we're back together, and I can stay here in the US, and we haven't got to be separated.

Stephanie:                  It was definitely a struggle, and we always shared everything with our followers, because sometimes Adam wouldn't be in a video, and I would have to say, "Well, Adam is in Australia trying to work through the visa process." But we always kept videos up, even if we were separated, and I think our followers really enjoyed going through the process with us, and they were all so excited. It was one of our top posts ever, in the history of Fit Couple Cooks, when Adam finally got his permanent resident visa. Yeah, it's been fun keeping everyone up to date on the journey.

Adam:                  Yeah, we even got to show them the wedding, we had the original wedding in Australia, we posted that so people could join with us on our special day.

Stephanie:                  Yep. We showed videos from the first wedding, and tons of pictures from the second wedding, and it's really awesome, this community that we're building.

Suzy Chase:                  You talk about macros in this cookbook. What are those?

Adam:                  Okay, so macros are the ... macronutrients is the big word for macros, which break down into proteins, carbs, and fats. These are the nutrients that you're eating every day, and calories is what most people concern themselves with when they're thinking of losing weight, they think of, "How many calories should I eat? I probably should eat less calories to lose weight." And that's totally not what we're about. We're about understanding that macros equal calories. So, for each protein and carbohydrate that you eat, one gram equals four ... so four calories, four protein, and four carbs, it's nine calories for fat.

                                                      So, what we do is we get people to figure out their base metabolic rate, which is how many calories that you burn per day, because your body burns between 12 to 1,500 calories a day, just if you laid asleep all day, you didn't move, your body is burning calories, because it has to function. Your heart has to pump-

Stephanie:                  Which is exactly why girls, or anybody who are eating only 1,200 calories a day have a problem losing weight, because all they're doing is eating what their body needs just to be breathing. Not even including them walking around, or working all day, or exercising, or doing anything like that.

Adam:                  Yeah, so we make sure that in each meal there's enough protein, carbs, and fats that are going to give you the fuel that you need, because calories are simply fuel for your body, so you don't wanna be lacking energy. You wanna be refueling your body, you don't wanna be starving yourself like we put in that Facebook post. It's not about eating a very restrictive diet, it's about eating the right amount of macros, and that's what the book helps you do, so you don't really have to think about it, you can just trust the portions that we give you, and they're gonna be right for you.

Suzy Chase:                  I have a couple of random ingredient questions for you.

Adam:                  Sure.

Suzy Chase:                  Coconut oil, is it really healthy?

Adam:                  Yes. There's heavy debate about is saturated fat good for you, is saturated fat not good for you? So, the coconut oil statement comes from just that saturated fat, so there's a lot of debate on both sides, saying it's healthy, some saying is definitely not healthy, but it's the saturated fat issue. We're firm believers that plant-based fats are good for you, and we don't stray away from putting coconut oil into our food. Most of our recipes do include coconut oil, and we encourage people to use plant-based fats over animal fats for cooking, which is why we use a coconut oil, an olive oil, and things like this, flaxseed oil, but the encouraging thing is for people not to avoid fat. The big stigma, you know that's come out of the '70s and '80s is that, you know, fat is bad, fat makes you fat, which is totally false, that's not how fat works. Fat is just another fuel source. So, we encourage people to use the coconut oil, and all the fats.

Suzy Chase:                  Yeah. I saw Stephanie on one of your YouTube videos, and you were at the grocery store, and you showed us fat-free yogurt, and how much sugar it had in it. It was crazy.

Stephanie:                  Oh yeah. Everything that is labeled fat-free, or low-fat, or anything like that, you should totally stay away from, because they're just replacing the fat, which is natural, they're replacing it with chemicals, and sugars, and things that your body just can't process, and shouldn't be having anyway.

Adam:                  Yeah. So minimal ingredients that we wanna go for, and then you stray away from things that contain no fat.

Stephanie:                  Right.

Suzy Chase:                  What is palmitate?

Adam:                  So, palmitate is an extract from the palm tree, which is a fat substance. Basically what it's used for here in America is milks. Instead of using the milk solids, or the fat from the milk, they're using palmitate, so they strip the milk from the fat that naturally comes from the milk, and they replace it with palmitate. I don't know why they do this, it's not really heavily found outside of the US. We found in the US that it's quite common, it's hard to find a full fat milk, that's something hard to try and find here in the US.

Stephanie:                  Yeah, we noticed a big difference between Australia and the USA, well I noticed especially, once I've been to Australia a few times, that when you go to the grocery store everything is different. Like if you go and look at their almond milk, you'll find almond milk, the ingredients are almonds, and water, and salt, or something like that. If you come to America, they always have carrageenan in them, and vitamin A palmitate, and all these extra ingredients that are just not necessary.

Suzy Chase:                  What's the difference between cacao and cocoa?

Adam:                  Oh, great question.

Suzy Chase:                  Cacao.

Adam:                  Cacao. So, cocoa and cacao are different. Cacao is the raw form of chocolate. So it's the raw cocoa bean, and so once they apply heat to it, and heat treat it, then it becomes cocoa.

Stephanie:                  So when a doctor tells you to go eat chocolate every day, he's actually talking about cacao, not a Hersey's Chocolate cocoa bar.

Suzy Chase:                  Oh.

Stephanie:                  Because those have been processed and treated and everything. So, cacao is just the natural form of chocolate. The raw-

Adam:                  It's very raw, very raw, very bitter, very hard to take on its own, normally you have to pair it with some sort of sweetener, or some sort of natural sugar.

Stephanie:                  Which is why when in the book we have the overnight oats with cacao, and bananas, and the bananas sweeten the cacao. We don't add sugar into the overnight oats, because the bananas help it with the sweetness, but the cacao is in there too for added benefits, and to make it a little chocolatey.

Suzy Chase:                  In your world, the biggest question of all time is ... drum roll ... how do I reheat my meal prep if I'm at work or school?

Adam:                  It is, it's one of the biggest questions.

Stephanie:                  Every day. Okay, so for reheating ... well, Adam and I actually eat a lot of our food cold, because a lot of our recipes can be easily eaten cold, but if you do wanna reheat your food, go ahead.

Adam:                  So yeah, we are home a lot so we just reheat ours in a pan. We'll quickly put it in on high heat, and just bring it back to temperature, or we use a really cool product called Hot Logic, where it's like a mini portable oven, so if you're on the road, or you're not at home, you put your meal prep container straight into the Hot Logic, and then you zip it up, and then within an hour it's reheated your food. So, it great. I use it when I train for jujitsu, I'll plug in before I start my training, and then by the time I'm finished, I come back and I have a hot meal ready to go.

Stephanie:                  It's like a personal, portable mini over they call it.

Suzy Chase:                  That thing is brilliant.

Stephanie:                  Yeah. It's like a little lunch box. It's very small, it fits perfectly just one little meal prep container. You can take it around anywhere with you. They even have a car jack for it, so if you're EMS, or if you're a truck driver, you can always have a hot meal on the road. It's the most brilliant product.

Suzy Chase:                  So, last night I made your recipe for one pan spiced beef with chick peas and arugula on page 25. I have to say that I was worried that this dish would be bland, because at first glance it's basically beef, chick peas, and arugula, but the cumin, mustard powder, smoked paprika, and tumeric really did the trick.

Adam:                  That's right. This recipe is actually old, this is a 2013 recipe I created when I was ... it's one of my original recipes I ever created. So, when I was personal training I would make this in huge batches, and exactly, it's my little secret spice blend in there that gives it the trick. [inaudible 00:16:35] it's probably one of the most under utilized recipes, is because in glance it kind of doesn't look like that's super appealing, but you try it and you're like, "Yeah, it hits the spot."

Suzy Chase:                  It's amazing.

Stephanie:                  Thanks.

Suzy Chase:                  I love how you make flavor the focus along with the nutrition planning and prepping too.

Adam:                  Absolutely. So, having a chef background, that's kind of the key right hook we have is that being able to balance everything, and put the right flavors with stuff that was the cool bit in the start when we were creating recipes, and when I first met Stef it was like, I was always like, "You should try putting that in there. Try putting that in there." And that's how most of the recipes got created is just knowing what flavors to go where. Exactly, you don't want everything to be bland, and you wanna be able to not get bored. To be consistent you wanna make sure that food is ... you really wanna eat it.

Stephanie:                  Yeah, we mesh our two minds. His chef brain versus my very practical non-chef brain, and those two come together perfectly where he'll say, "Let's do this, this, and this." And then I'll say, "Well, this has to be a little bit more practical, and we have to make these into one pan instead of just using two pans." So, it's kind of the magic ingredient that we both have different backgrounds.

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

Adam:                  Sure. So, the main platform we have is YouTube so you can go to youtube/fitcouplecooks that's the main hub, but we also have Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, you can find us there as well.

Stephanie:                  Yeah. Everything is just Fit Couple Cooks, and yeah, we have almost a following of almost half a million people.

Suzy Chase:                  Wow.

Stephanie:                  Which is pretty cool. Changing lives everywhere. All over the world, literally.

Adam:                  All over the way. Some of the countries we see analytics, we're not even sure that-

Stephanie:                  We don't even know how to say them.

Adam:                  Yeah.

Suzy Chase:                  That's really impressive.

Stephanie:                  Yeah, and people from all over the world are sending us pictures of the book too, which is really cool. They'll send us a picture and be like, "Oh your book is here in Switzerland, and your book's here in France." It's pretty cool.

Suzy Chase:                  As you say on YouTube, "You don't have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great." Thanks Stephanie and Adam for coming on Cookery by the Book Podcast.

Adam:                  Thank you so much.

Stephanie:                  Thank you.

Suzy Chase:                  Follow me on Instagram @cookerybythebook, 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.