Happy Thanksgiving! Today, I talk with food and travel photographer Douglas Merriam, author of Farm Fresh Journey: Santa Fe Farmer’s Market Cookbook. He’s spent his 30-year career traveling the world, shooting for cookbooks, magazines, restaurants, and chefs. He’s a happy home gardener and a really accomplished amateur cook.

Most of all, Doug is a champion for local foodways. His cookbook is the definition of a labor of love. It took him years to put together, gathering recipes from the farmers and artisans who make much of their livings selling their products at the Santa Fe Farmer’s Market. He chose to self-publish the book so that he could control the profit distribution. He gives a percentage of every book sale back to the farmers that appear in its pages. If you want your own copy, you can pick one up at farmfreshjourney.com.

I believe the best cookbooks tell a story, that food itself is a narrative of the place and people who make it. Doug’s is a beautiful book visually — his photos are stunning — but more than that, he captures the spirit of the people who have been working the land in and around Santa Fe for generations.

Douglas Merriam and I met at that farmer’s market where he introduced me to Mia, the 12-year-old daughter of Jose, one of the farmers in the book. Jose dresses up as an elf for Christmas every year and spreads a little cheer at the market.

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Welcome to a special bonus episode featuring baker and pastry chef Frida Silva-Carreira. Frida leads the bakery program at Sour Duck Market on the East Side of Austin, TX. At just 25 years old, she channeled her drive, ambition, and raw talent into this impressive leadership role. I’ve been working with her this year on a cookbook project called The Odd Duck Almanac that features a number of her recipes, including her signature conchas. The book, volume three of a trilogy, comes out in January. I’ll be sure to let you know how to get your hands on one when the time comes. 

This is an excerpt from my conversation with Frida. If, however, you’re a subscriber to my Patreon, you’ll get to hear the entire interview. We talk about her upbringing in Monterrey, Mexico, Kentucky, and Ohio; how she made it up the ladder so quickly in some of Austin’s best restaurants; and her experience coming into awareness around her identity as a Mexican-American during the racial reckoning our country experienced last summer. 

Because you’re here listening, I’m going to keep going. But I can’t do it on my own. Up to this point, Road Hungry has been almost entirely self-financed. I’ve been on the road since late July, and I’ve been broadcasting since the beginning of December. I’m out here finding new people to talk to every week. But to keep going, I need your help.

That’s why I started a Patreon subscription. There are three levels you can choose from to help support this project. Every level receives bonus podcast content like the episode today, exclusive recipes, and the ability to make requests for future content . Gain access to all of that for only $5 per month. That’s a cup of coffee for you, but for me, it really adds up.

For $15 per month, you receive all of that, plus I’ll mail you handwritten postcards from the road from all the places I’m visiting.

I’ve designed my top tier for restaurants and other small businesses to show their support. For $50 per month, I’ll shout you out on the podcast, link to your business on my supporters page, and because it’s fun, I’ll send you care packages from the road with goodies that I collect along the way. This tier isn’t limited to businesses either — if you’re a souvenir junky like me, this option is for you.

I want to take this opportunity to shout out my very first top tier subscribers — Kate Baker and her wife, Suzanne Schalow, founders of the nationwide brewpub, Craft Beer Cellars, and operators of the flagship location in Belmont, MA. Just down the street from there, Kate and Suzanne opened Trinktisch beer hall in March of this year, a restaurant the Boston Globe calls “an omen of happier days to come.” Thank you for being aboard, Kate and Suzanne!

To gain access to all this great bonus content, go to roadhungry.com and click on “Become a Patron” on the top right of the homepage.

If you can, I’d greatly appreciate your support. I’d like to keep doing this, to visit the places all of you have recommended, to talk to the folks who are out there living this strange new world firsthand, and to share it with you. But I can only keep doing this if I can afford it.

I hope you enjoy my conversation with Frida. You can try your hand at some of the recipes mentioned here by getting yourself a copy of The Odd Duck Almanac. “The At Home Issue,” the volume I created last year is on sale now, and the new volume, “The Resilience Issue” is coming out this January. 

Today, I talk to beloved Santa Fe chef Ahmed Obo, owner of Jambo Cafe. His restaurant is a love song to his island home of Lamu off the coast of Kenya, and to the journey he’s been on since leaving Africa. He went from cooking wild-caught fish for tourists in the channels and inlets around the island to apprenticing under some great chefs in New York and New Mexico before finally opening Jambo in 2009.

But there’s more to the story he tells with his food than his own experience. He has an instinctual sense of history and how the flavors in a single bite can represent generations or even millennia of cultural evolution. His menu demonstrates an awareness of where the food he grew up with in Kenya comes from, but also how it has migrated away on the currents of time. Lamu is an ancient Swahili trading hub that welcomed merchants from the Middle East, India, and Asia, and later, became a favorite spot for European colonialists from Portugal and then England. Those same colonialists drove a brutal exodus from the continent, and that diaspora brought those flavors with them to other parts of the world like the Caribbean. Curries, spice blends, animal proteins, and cooking techniques share common ancestry, and chef Ahmed brings them all back together in a harmonious confluence of dishes on his menu at Jambo.

The hard work Ahmed has put in to realize his success has always been about helping others. Beyond working with a number of local nonprofits in Santa Fe, he founded the Jambo Kids Clinic back in Kenya, and uses the proceeds from Jambo Imports, a retail venture he started to partially fund it. If you’d like to help, you can go to jambokids.org/donate to make your show of support and help some families who need it. 

Today, I talk to restaurateur Jennifer Hwa Dobbertin, co-owner of Tenko Ramen located in the Pearl food hall, and the new eatery, Best Quality Daughter, which Time Out magazine just named the best restaurant in San Antonio. I had dinner there after we spoke, and it remains one of the best meals I’ve had since emerging from lockdown.

Jen and I talk about throwing grenades at the bygone chapters of our lives, being in the right place for the wrong reasons and vice versa, and the origins of her signature cuisine — a very personal melding of her mom’s Chinese cooking, the summers she spent in Taipei around her extended family’s hawker stall, and her very Texas-American upbringing. Her food challenges the orthodoxy of the “authentic” that everyone seems to be after these days, telling Sam Sifton in a recent writeup in the New York Times Magazine that the menu at Best Quality Daughter is “authentic to me.”

Her restaurant is filled, not only with great food, but also with the original art of friends and collaborators, a lot of which tells the story of the modern Asian-American experience. And if you have any appreciation for the history of San Antonio, the wallpaper in the bar will have you standing staring at the wall, picking out bygone landmarks for longer than might be comfortable for anyone.

Today on the podcast, I talk to my old pal Sheena Moore, founder of Sheena’s Pickles, an artisan brand of fermented goodies making waves all over Austin right now. Sheena and I have known each other for years since working together back in the old world as tour guides for Austin Eats Food Tours. Sheena is one of those smart, humble, incredibly funny people who makes you feel comfortable in your own skin when you’re around her.

The idea of Sheena’s Pickles has been around for years — a fact I didn’t realize when we talked — but only since the pandemic has the brand reached its current heights. Hers is a study in how to make a side-hustle really thrive. When she first conceived of the business, she decided to get her MBA from the prestigious Macomb School of Business at the University of Texas to see if she could learn enough to make the idea feasible. Not only is she a lovely human, one of my very favorites, but she’s a great example of how uncanny and powerful acting in your life toward the manifestation of your dreams can be.

When she’s not pickling to keep up with her sold-out product-line at Antonelli’s Cheese Shop, she works with rockstar academic Dr. Daina Ramey Berry, chair of UT’s History Department, and professor of African American Diaspora Studies. Sheena and I talk about what it’s like to grow up as an identical twin, how the corporate world nearly crushed her soul, and then we taste a bunch of pickles and cheese.

On today’s podcast, I talk to Trisha Bates who goes by the Instagram handle @urbanamericanfarmer. I first got to know Trisha at the beginning of the pandemic when she was a source for a series of articles I wrote about how Austin’s small farms were providing for the community when the supermarkets were tanking. Since then, we’ve stayed on each other’s collaborative radar, and I’m grateful to call her a friend.

Trisha Bates grew up in rural Illinois, and came to Austin with her two sons a few years back. She’s a pollinator, as you’ll hear, someone taking wisdom and disseminating it, creating new spaces and uses for it, propagating it and letting it flourish where it can. I hope you enjoy our conversation.

Rashad Jones is the host of the Food Network show, “Eat, Sleep, BBQ,” and is the winner of the Guy Fieri competition, “Guy’s Big Project.” He’s the owner of Big Lee’s, a Texas-style barbecue empire in Ocala, FL.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that Rashad makes the best barbecue outside of Texas I’ve ever had, and his is a damn sight better than a lot of the barbecue I’ve had in Texas. You’ll hear for yourself, but that distinction didn’t come easily to him. Just like everything else in his life, he had to work for it, tirelessly, well past the point when most everyone else would’ve given up. He's the father of four, the lucky husband to Dr. Patrice Dion Jones, and a helluva nice guy. I hope you enjoy our conversation. 


Chef Callie Speer is the inaugural interview for the Road Hungry podcast. She and I cover a lot of ground — the meaning of success, how to keep going after a loss, the potholed road out of substance abuse. Callie is whip smart, totally fucking fearless, and funny as hell. That she was my first interview for this project is such a gift.

Also in this episode: some updates on my time in New Mexico's Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

Callie is a native of Austin, which makes her a unicorn by my reckoning. She’s a self-taught pastry chef and successful restauranteur. I hope you enjoy our conversation.

Welcome to Road Hungry. I'm Adam Boles, a writer, a cook, and now, a resident of nowhere in particular. I'm traveling the country to talk to chefs, farmers, writers, and anyone with an interesting point of view about how the country is changing, about the world we're all living in now, and how those things pertain to the one thing all of have in common -- food. This is a little bit of my story as I depart from Austin, TX. Subscribe for all the interviews to come. I'll see you out there.