Nancy and Laurie share a screen from Nancy’s home in Umbria and join Ruth in New York for this live and unedited conversation. Their talk ranges from the current state of restaurant criticism to different party throwing styles. Does Ruth really use paper plates? What’s Nancy’s favorite American cheese for hamburgers. And Laurie explains why sometimes helping out at the grill requires an umbrella.

Charlie was famous for, among other things, a vegetable-forward menu and pioneering a new tasting menu every day. His restaurant is about to reopen.

The hiatus is over. Ruth Reichl, Nancy Silverton and Laurie Ochoa are firing up Three Ingredients again. This season, we’re going live and mostly unedited. You’ll notice some rough edges in this first return episode as our cameras go live before Nancy has a chance to take her seat, Ruth gets a phone call that turns off her camera and Laurie’s phone overheats three times during the session. But with no advance notice, some 350 of you joined our live test session so we’re posting this for everyone to listen in. Thanks to our subscribers, who asked for more Three Ingredients and were patient during our break. We’re planning more live sessions, this time with more advance notice and a different phone for Laurie. Watch your Substack messages for a heads-up about our next Three Ingredients live episode. We’d love for you to join and send us questions.

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Why are the sickest people in our country being served the worst food?

Not content to limit our complaints to hospital food, we move on to school food. Shouldn’t it be better? Can we fix it? Let’s talk about it in this bonus episode of “Three Ingredients.”

And should you care to read the article Ruth wrote about school food in 1978 for New West magazine, there’s a copy in this Dec. 2021 edition of Ruth’s Substack newsletter La Briffe. Also, find the story Laurie mentions by Jenn Harris on Los Angeles schools trying to introduce items like kung pao chicken and “walking tacos” for kids at 1,000 different schools at latimes.com/food.

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In which we discuss our favorite scripted food shows. A few old favorites, and a couple you might never have heard of.

In Episode 9 of “Three Ingredients,” Ruth, Nancy and Laurie have a heated discussion about chiles. First we talk about how they hurt so good that sriracha has possibly become an old lady condiment. Then we talk about how they hurt so bad that Nancy once ended up with her hands in buckets of ice water after a memorable encounter with a lot of chiles. And speaking of hands, Nancy would like you to please throw out your salad tongs and start massaging your dear little lettuce leaves with your hands. And that’s only the beginning of a discussion that ranges from lists — are they good or are they nonsense? And restaurants — are they essential? We talk about potatoes. We talk about apples. We talk about grilled cheese sandwiches ... and irresistible cheese toast. We begin this episode by discussing pancakes. Ruth has a lot of thoughts on the subject.

Three Ingredients is a reader-supported podcast. To receive new episodes as they drop plus posts with recipes, restaurant recommendations and more from Ruth, Nancy and Laurie, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber at https://threeingredients.substack.com/

What will you eat? What won't you? In this bonus episode of "Three Ingredients" we discuss eating some things that many people consider very strange. Tarantula anyone? How about guinea pig? Then we consider the lobster — and discuss other unmentionable aspects of cuisine. And have you contemplated the human toll of eating vegetables? Are you ready for some food for thought? We've got it.

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Ruth Reichl is author of the Substack newsletter La Briffe and 11 books, including “The Paris Novel,” which publishes in April. She was editor in chief of Gourmet Magazine and the restaurant critic of the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. Nancy Silverton leads the Mozza Restaurant Group and is author of nine cookbooks, including her newest, "The Cookie That Changed My Life." Laurie Ochoa is general manager of L.A. Times Food and one of the writers of the paper’s Tasting Notes newsletter. She was executive editor of Gourmet when Ruth led the magazine, editor in chief of the L.A. Weekly and co-author of “Nancy Silverton’s Breads from the La Brea Bakery.”

What do you eat for breakfast? In Episode 8 of “Three Ingredients” we introduce you to what might be the strangest way to start the day. It’s also the most delicious. Then we talk about our favorite condiments with odes to great balsamic vinegar, truffles and vanilla in its many forms. And then, because we just can’t help ourselves, we rag on one that none of us can stand. Laurie shares a funny memory of her first foie gras, Ruth speaks wistfully of a great bourbon she can no longer afford and Nancy goes hunting. This conversation is definitely going to make you hungry. So pull up a chair and join us.

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SHOW NOTES

Oops, I dropped …

If you listened to Episode 2 of “Three Ingredients,” you heard us talking a bit about Michelin three-star chef Massimo Bottura, whose Modena restaurant Osteria Francescana was twice named the No. 1 restaurant on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list. Ruth was about to interview Massimo and his wife, Lara Gilmore, about their new book “Slow Food Fast Cars,” with recipes, stories and gorgeous photos about the food, art, design and people behind their playful and luxurious guest house Casa Maria Luigia outside of Modena. In this episode, Ruth tells us about the talk and the three of us exchange notes about our visits to Casa Maria Luigia.

One of the delights of visiting Casa Maria Luigia is wandering around the property and viewing the art collected by Lara and Massimo, who finds inspiration for his cooking in the works of artists. Consider what he told Ruth about a dish of oysters and potatoes served beneath sheets of gold leaf as she tells it in this story of her first Osteria Francescana meal: “My mind is mixing Piero della Francesca — beautiful gold leaves — and Pistoletto seven hundred years later. But I’m also thinking of stainless steel in the sixties, and how people use tin foil.”

A key piece we discuss in the episode is the triptych by Ai Weiwei called “Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (Lego).” It dominates the living room of the guest house and, as Laurie wrote in the L.A. Times last summer, it’s a kind of statement of purpose for Massimo. He is, after all, a chef who loves to break things and put them back together in his own way.

Massimo’s most famous reconstructed “broken” dish is the dessert Oops, I Dropped the Lemon Tart.

As Nancy shares in this episode, the dessert inspired a brilliant save when she and her partner Michael Krikorian were bringing a vintage model Ferrari Formula 1 to Massimo as a gift. Before they could give the model car to Massimo the bag dropped, breaking the Ferrari into pieces. Rather than throw out the pieces, Nancy had another idea. Michael, who tells the full story on his website Krikorian Writes, enlisted the help of a Casa Maria Luigia server and hid the broken car under a cloche on a dinner plate. When Massimo lifted the cloche, Michael said, “Oops, I dropped the Ferrari!”

Massimo’s break-it-and-put-it-back-together philosophy appeared again when Nancy and Laurie had lunch at Osteria Francescana this past summer and experienced his latest menu called “We Are Here,” “reinterpreting,” as the restaurant puts it, “a selection of iconoclastic dishes of Osteria Francescana, bringing the best of the past into the future.”

One example we discuss: “Tortellini or Dumplings,” Massimo’s update to his now-classic “Tortellini Walking Into Broth,” which the chef told us was “the most scandalous, outrageous dish we did in the ’90s.” That’s because instead of a bowlful of tortellini this dish had just six perfect tortellini. (Most Italians are used to ten tortellini to the spoonful, our friend and writer Faith Willinger said in the Massimo episode of “Chef’s Table.”) In his newest incarnation, five tortellini, looking a bit like cloves of garlic, might be mistaken at first for Asian dumplings. But when you take a bite, you taste the pure essence of tortellini.

Now, about that breakfast …

Sausage on a cookie with zabaglione? Sounds improbable. But Ruth and Nancy both have had and loved the Massimo Bottura dish — as dessert in New York when the chef was in town for his talk with Ruth at the 92nd Street Y and as breakfast at Casa Maria Luigia.

The sausage is cotechino, which you can buy from most good Italian food shops (like Eataly). Should you be ambitious enough to want to make your own, here’s a recipe from Lidia Bastianich. The cookie is sbrisolona, which means crumble cake. We have two sbrisolona recipes for our paying subscribers in a separate post, one from Massimo and Lara’s book and one from Nancy.

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A friend shares what Italian babies are fed as their first solid food. It is, frankly, hard to believe. But then we fed our kids some pretty strange foods too.