How Alison Roman Does Thanksgiving

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Speaker 4 Hey friends, this is Radio Atlantic. I'm Hannah Rosen, and we have a treat for you today, today being Thanksgiving.

Speaker 4 Recently, I interviewed chef and cookbook author Allison Roman on stage in DC at Sixth and I.

Speaker 4 And since many of us are thinking about food this week, we decided to share that conversation.

Speaker 4 Even if you don't know Roman, it's likely you've eaten one of her recipes, especially her mega viral one for caramelized shallot pasta.

Speaker 4 And one of the reasons that dish was so ubiquitous was because of how few ingredients it called for.

Speaker 4 Her new book, Something from Nothing, uses that same minimalist approach, relying mostly on pantry staples. I gave Roman a test on stage.

Speaker 4 I had her pick items from my pantry out of a bag blind and see what dinner she could make up on the spot.

Speaker 4 I also asked her some questions sent in by you, the listeners, about how food is changing, how food media is changing, and whether you should switch up the Thanksgiving staples.

Speaker 4 Here's our conversation. The big controversy over the last couple of years is go traditional or go salmon wellington.

Speaker 5 Absolutely not.

Speaker 5 And if anybody here is thinking about doing salmon wellington, please call me and I'll come over.

Speaker 5 No, no, I want to help you.

Speaker 5 I want to call you in. I don't want to push you away because we got to fix that.

Speaker 5 I don't think it's an either-or situation. I am a big fan of additive rather than like burn it all down.
So,

Speaker 5 because Thanksgiving is also famously not just about you, right? It's about the people that you're eating with and giving thanks.

Speaker 5 So, unless you are doing Thanksgiving for one, which is cool,

Speaker 5 and then you can do Wellington everything if you would like.

Speaker 4 So you mean you make a traditional turkey? Yes. Traditional pie?

Speaker 3 Pie I do galette.

Speaker 5 I have like my Thanksgiving menu, which is also the problem with doing Thanksgiving publicly is that my personal Thanksgiving preferences don't really change that much.

Speaker 5 Like I do one regular classic turkey, full turkey, let's call it.

Speaker 5 And then I do turkey, the slow-cooked legs and the thighs because it's just, it's so much better tasting than a regular turkey, but without the pomp and circumstance of a beautiful bird in front like I feel like I'm missing something so I do understand the attachment at least visually to the full turkey and what do you add like do you saying every year you feel pressure to add something something new and in 20 years it'll be like 18 things on the table no it's more like you know I consider it to be like, okay, the stuffing and the turkey and the gravy and the cranberries never really change for me.

Speaker 5 It is what it is. And one year it's green beans, one year it's Brussels sprouts, one year it's squash, one year it's carrots.

Speaker 3 That's still pretty basic.

Speaker 5 Yeah, but like a vegetable, it's a vegetable. And then I put a salad.
So it's like you kind of rotate in these things.

Speaker 5 But if there's somebody at your table that's like, if I don't have, you know, X, Y, and Z dish, I'll simply die, then just make it. You know, like, that's not the time to say no.

Speaker 5 It's time to say yes.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 4 If somebody comes to your house for dinner and they want to make a side or bring something do you allow it

Speaker 3 god

Speaker 5 you mean do you mean at thanksgiving or generally speaking you know you you decide

Speaker 5 here's what i'll say i think that it's okay if you're like i made everything and i just need a bowl and a plate to like plate it and i'm like Great. But if they're like, where's your skillet?

Speaker 5 I'm like, nope, shut it down. Do not cook in my kitchen.
Like, bring something. But I feel that way about other people too.
I would never do that to you.

Speaker 5 You know, I would never come over and cook in your kitchen.

Speaker 4 But what you evaded the easy way out, which is like, what if someone just wants to bring something?

Speaker 3 Sure. Really? Yeah.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 3 Sure.

Speaker 4 Probably it doesn't happen to you because people are intimidated.

Speaker 3 People.

Speaker 3 People wouldn't dare. Yeah.

Speaker 5 I also think that potlucks should are the worst thing that's ever happened to us.

Speaker 5 Because that's how you end up up with like

Speaker 4 just a menu that does not go it doesn't go okay we have a question from Meredith after the holidays when we're sick of eating what are some of your go-to recipes to get back into eating on the lighter side but also stay cozy it's very specific yeah I mean

Speaker 5 I'm gonna go with that's gotta be soup it's soup it's oh and soup is kind of always the answer if you're wondering but I feel like you make the broth with the bones from the turkey you have some vegetables you can throw in.

Speaker 5 You can also just like sip turkey stock. You can do a lot with that.
I feel like that is the on-ramp to doing it all over again.

Speaker 4 So you, people in the audience, people out in the world, sent us a lot of questions in a lot of different formats. And I'm going to sprinkle them throughout.
From Robin.

Speaker 4 What enabled you to break free and set yourself apart in the crowded world of food bloggers and cooking shows? Were there distinct things you did or did not do?

Speaker 3 Okay, Robin.

Speaker 5 I

Speaker 5 yeah, I think that for me, I started cooking in restaurant kitchens, and I just wanted to be a cook. And that was my goal.
I started cooking before iPhones existed, before Instagram existed.

Speaker 5 I didn't start cooking with the goal of being like a blogger or on the internet in any capacity.

Speaker 5 And so I think that knowing that, even as the internet and Instagram and social media became a part of my life, just as like a a product of being a person in the world

Speaker 5 it kind of doesn't matter what your profession is it's something that you kind of partake in and

Speaker 5 I think just knowing that the whole time like having that be my North Star of like well I'm a cook and I cook and that's what I do

Speaker 5 and then I think

Speaker 5 I you know it's funny because I do it is crowded and sometimes even I am like well what how am I different you know if like do you you sort of like okay you all write recipes and you all have a YouTube channel and you all have a newsletter and you all did it.

Speaker 5 It's like, okay, it does become a bit more of a struggle. And I think that the only answer remains like, and as cheesy as it is, is like being yourself because there's only one of you.

Speaker 5 And there could be a hundred YouTube channels, but there's only one of you and your personality.

Speaker 5 And so the more you can double down on being yourself and infusing your recipes, and that means the title of the recipe, the ingredients you use, and the way that you write instructions, like the more personality and individualism that you can infuse into those things, I think that is the answer.

Speaker 4 Although I do think you also have an uncanny ability to figure out what people actually want to cook, as opposed to just like your own, you know, the world of Allison.

Speaker 4 It's like what actually translates into people's kitchens. I don't know what that is, but you have like a good radar for it.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I don't know. I think it's like an authenticity when it comes to developing because I'm living in the same timeline where I'm like, oh, the weather is this, and I feel like this.
And

Speaker 5 you all do too at that time.

Speaker 5 It's a bit different for a cookbook because obviously you're sort of picking things and investing in recipes that are living as a collection versus like, this is coming out this week and you're all going to make this this week, you know?

Speaker 5 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 4 We have a question from Danny. What do you see as the biggest misconception in food media right now? And how do you think creators should respond to it?

Speaker 5 I think that the misconception is

Speaker 5 that it's dead entirely because I do think that it has died, but I do think it will come back.

Speaker 4 What is it? Food media?

Speaker 3 Food media. Interesting.

Speaker 5 Okay. Because there's already people doing it.
There's already people that I know that are like starting up a thing or, you know, kind of returning to let's rebuild what was kind of taken away.

Speaker 5 When I started working at Bonapete in like 2005 or 2011, there were, I want to say, eight other food magazines. And you could work at any of them.
And it was sort of like, which magazine are you at?

Speaker 5 And you would go to an event and you'd be like, oh, there's so-and-so from Food and Wine and so-and-so from Real Simple.

Speaker 5 And like, there was like a community of people that were editors or, you know, writers,

Speaker 5 people that worked within the concept of food media. And now there is not that.
It is, there's people that work at a magazine. There's magazines that have food sections, newspapers, et cetera.

Speaker 5 And then there's people that create food on the internet.

Speaker 3 Right. They're influencers.

Speaker 5 Exactly. It's like a completely all over the place.

Speaker 5 And I think that there are people that are really interested and invested in kind of regaining what it means to be a journalist in the food space and sort of tell stories of culture and cooking and food that aren't just these sort of

Speaker 5 entertainment narratives that are like content creators. And so I'm optimistic about it.

Speaker 4 That's so interesting because food, it does take experience, like to write a cookbook, to figure out, okay, now I have a concept big enough for a cookbook.

Speaker 3 You would think it does.

Speaker 4 I don't know how you get from like creator to that, you know? Like you have to cook a lot, you have to have experience in kitchens, or at least that's the way it's been.

Speaker 5 You don't, is the sad part. But I think it's also because people don't, a lot of people don't write their own cookbooks.

Speaker 3 Like.

Speaker 4 What?

Speaker 5 Which is, I'm not, it's not, I mean, yeah, but it's in the same way that a lot of people don't write their own books. Or like Ghostwriter is an occupation and people do it.
I know them.

Speaker 5 I know people who do it.

Speaker 3 And,

Speaker 5 you know, I think that it is a different skill set.

Speaker 4 Who wrote this book?

Speaker 5 Me. I do everything.
You can tell because there's typos.

Speaker 5 Because things are messed up. That's how you know it's me.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 4 You started out working in institutions like BuzzFeed, the New York Times. Now you're independent.
Can you compare pluses and minuses? Like what's better about one, what's worse about the other?

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 5 I think what, you know what I will say? I really miss working with other people.

Speaker 5 I really miss collaboration and I really miss being,

Speaker 5 some of my editors would say that this is not true, but I actually really do miss being edited.

Speaker 5 And I don't mean like my writing specifically or the style of recipes, but I mean the like push and pull of getting somebody to

Speaker 5 make the writing tighter, to sort of ask you a question that you hadn't maybe explored.

Speaker 5 Really like making sure something is

Speaker 5 as well thought out among people as possible. And that doesn't always make for a better recipe, but it does make, I think, for better writing to have like a great editor.

Speaker 3 It's less lonely. It's less lonely.

Speaker 5 It's yeah, I think working for yourself can be pretty lonely. I think more recently I've started, and during like book time, there's a lot more collaboration that goes into it.

Speaker 5 And that's why I love making books because you get to work with photographers, you get to work with artists and designers, and you know, then comes like the promotion of it and the tour.

Speaker 5 it's like becomes more community based and when you're not in a book writing season

Speaker 5 it is a little bit more like you and I'd say the hardest part of that is nobody is gonna give me an assignment like I am so busy all the time and nobody told me to be busy like right nobody is giving me a deadline nobody's demanding anything from me nobody's asking me to like launch a tomato sauce but I'm like I'm gonna do this thing and then I'm like I'm so stressed out with like this job that I just made myself.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 5 And I'm like, oh, maybe I should stop giving myself so much work. But, you know, there is an element of like, what are we doing? What am I doing this for?

Speaker 5 Even though like I know the answer to that, but it's so much easier to work with people and be like, oh, I have an assignment. I have an assignment.

Speaker 5 And that's why I really love things like Thanksgiving because that to me is like the ultimate assignment. It's like, you know what you're doing.

Speaker 5 And this is, you know, you're coloring in the lines a bit. And I don't know.

Speaker 4 Since you wrote your last book, you had a baby. He's very cute.
I'm sure you guys have seen pictures.

Speaker 4 You told New York Magazine that you make your own baby food. Do you actually make your own baby food?

Speaker 5 Yeah, I do. But I'm not making baby food.
I'm making food that he can eat, which I feel like there's a distinction there. Like I make lentils and I eat lentils and so does he.
I make, you know,

Speaker 5 I'll roast squash and eat some and then like he eats roasted squash. I'm not like making a, I don't,

Speaker 5 I think I I have a hard time admitting that I'm making baby food. So I'm really talking around it.

Speaker 3 I'm being silent on purpose just to make you defensive. Yeah.

Speaker 5 I'm like, no, I don't make baby food.

Speaker 3 I don't. I swear.
I'm a baby. I'm not trying to start a war.
Yeah.

Speaker 5 But yeah, I thought that that would never be me. And it won't last forever.
It's lasting right now because he eats so little. And the things that he does eat are very simple.

Speaker 5 When it comes time to be like, making like fish sticks from like, no, thank you. Pass.
Like, I don't think that that's me, but right now it feels doable.

Speaker 4 How many people here made the caramelized shallot pasta?

Speaker 3 Probably everyone.

Speaker 4 Did you ever figure out why that one went viral? Like, in all these years of thinking about it, I recently looked back at the recipe, it's so simple.

Speaker 4 Like, the only complicated ingredient is anchovies. But other than that, it's so basic.

Speaker 5 It's complicated emotionally for people, but anchovies in and of itself is not a complicated ingredient. I think that it was

Speaker 5 sort of right time, right place. I don't think recipes can happen in that way anymore.
I think that it was like a very zeitgeisty moment where Instagram was just like,

Speaker 5 I think there's statistically speaking, I looked this up, I forgot the actual numbers, but I want to say like...

Speaker 5 The way that it's grown from five years ago, like the amount of users on Instagram is just an unfathomable number.

Speaker 4 Because there's no unified threat of popularity. So it just can't be one thing that goes viral.

Speaker 5 Exactly. So either things aren't going viral or so many things are going viral that we sort of don't notice anymore.
But it feels like it was a very special place and time.

Speaker 3 But I also think that it's a really delicious pasta. Totally.

Speaker 5 Every person who made it told five people to make it. And those people told five people to make it.
And it wasn't like a product of the internet.

Speaker 5 It was a product of people actually cooking it and eating it and being like, oh my God, like I have to make this again. I have to have this.
And

Speaker 5 it was also like five ingredients. And I think that that in and of itself is fascinating to me anyway.

Speaker 5 And I find that with music and art and movies and even like getting dressed or something, I'm like, oh, sometimes pairing back and simplicity is the best choice.

Speaker 5 And it's not a result of something being easier or like lazy or a consolation prize. Sometimes the easiest or most simple thing is the best.
And you can just be like, you know what?

Speaker 5 Like that pasta doesn't have cheese on it because it doesn't need it. I'm sure we've all put cheese on it.
It's okay.

Speaker 5 I'm okay with that, but it doesn't need it. And I think that that's really important to like remember.

Speaker 4 After the break, we put her new cookbooks approach of making something from nothing to the test.

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Speaker 4 I've never done this on stage, but we're going to try it. We're going to play a little game with Allison.
But first, I want you to read something in your book.

Speaker 3 Oh, which I thought was so funny.

Speaker 5 I've never done that either. Really?

Speaker 4 It's so lovely. It's the thing I have.
I'm sorry I wrote in your book.

Speaker 3 I hope that doesn't bother you. No, I actually love that.

Speaker 4 It's that little purple part. This is what Allison wrote about her husband because she also recently got married.
And I thought it was really beautiful.

Speaker 5 Just do it all at once, guys.

Speaker 3 It's honestly great.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 5 I've literally never done this before. You can do it.
And when people say, when they hear that I'm going on a book tour, they're like, what do you do? Do you just like read from your cookbook?

Speaker 3 And I'm like, no.

Speaker 4 Do you just get on stage and cook?

Speaker 3 Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 5 Okay. In his vows, he told me that his favorite nights at home were when we did.

Speaker 3 Slow down. Okay, fuck.

Speaker 3 Like way down. Okay.
Well, I'm nervous.

Speaker 5 Really put me on the spot. Okay.
In his vows, he told me that his favorite nights at home were when we didn't have time to go grocery shopping and I made something of what we had in the pantry.

Speaker 5 Because it was in those thrown together moments that he got to see how my imagination worked.

Speaker 4 It was really, I thought that was really lovely.

Speaker 5 Thank you, Max. Thank you.

Speaker 4 This is really weird, but just bear with me.

Speaker 4 I brought a bag that's made up from the pantry of me and my partner, and Allison has to go in and pick out three things from the bag and then tell us what she would cook from it. And if it works,

Speaker 4 if it works, we'll do it twice.

Speaker 4 If it's boring and weird, we'll just do it once.

Speaker 5 This is my fantasy, by the way. I am really into it.
Okay, so I'm just picking it up.

Speaker 4 You just have to pick up three things, and you can't really look, but just go in and pick up three things. This is also merch from the Atlantic, just

Speaker 4 and you have to say what they are because people in the audience can't see.

Speaker 5 One potato.

Speaker 5 Okay, let me ask: am I only allowed the quantity of which I pick up? No, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 3 Okay, so potato, conceptual potato. It's a conceptual potato.
Symbolic potato. One symbolic potato.

Speaker 4 And you can add things that normal people would have in their house. You can be additive.

Speaker 5 Garbanzo means organic.

Speaker 5 And to clarify as well, does everything have to go together?

Speaker 4 They have to, this is your meal.

Speaker 3 Okay. They don't have to be like in one dish.

Speaker 4 You have to make us.

Speaker 4 This is your husband's concept here. It's like, we didn't go grocery shopping.

Speaker 5 Sour cream.

Speaker 5 To what do I owe the pleasure?

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 4 We didn't go grocery shopping. This is what we got.
That's the idea here. Okay.
Okay, so bring it.

Speaker 4 What are we having for dinner, honey?

Speaker 5 Well, I gotta say, it's gotta be some sort of potato soup. We're going sour cream and potato together.
The sour cream doesn't have to go inside of it, but it should go on top of it.

Speaker 5 Bonus points if you have onion, garlic, leek, shallot. Oh, you don't?

Speaker 3 No, you do. That's fine.
That's normal stuff. Yeah, absolutely.
We all do. Everybody does, yeah.

Speaker 5 Okay, so yeah. And the reason that that soup is good or a soup like that is because you don't have to have a shallot if you have an onion.
You don't need a leek if you have a shallot.

Speaker 5 You know what I'm saying?

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 5 So allium, potato, broth, better than bouillon if you don't have broth.

Speaker 3 That's right.

Speaker 5 Okay, so potato leek soup or potato soup of some sort with this. No blender.
We're not blending.

Speaker 5 This is no, we're not making baby food. Okay.
But my baby does like potato soup in a chunky form. That is baby food.
Yeah, for adults. Yeah.

Speaker 5 And then if we're doing this in the same meal, perhaps there's some sort of like chickpea salad situation, but like a frizzled chickpea, because a raw chickpea out of the can is never going to hit the same.

Speaker 5 But if you had some greens, you could put it over the greens, like toss it with that.

Speaker 5 And I mean, you could even put a little sour cream in the bottom of that if you wanted. But I think just on the soup is good.
Okay. It's a weird meal, I'm not going to lie.

Speaker 5 We're doing, really to me, the soup would be the meal. And then I would say, well, I'm going to put these back for another time.

Speaker 5 But if I'm trying to to play the game here.

Speaker 3 That's not how the game works. Okay.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 Should we do one more? Okay.

Speaker 3 Great. Okay.

Speaker 5 Sorry, I'll see. Okay.
So I can't use any of these anymore. Okay.

Speaker 3 These are.

Speaker 4 You cannot use this. Okay.

Speaker 5 It's like I can tell what the cans are.

Speaker 4 I know, I know.

Speaker 3 I couldn't fix that.

Speaker 5 Oh, no.

Speaker 5 Quinoa.

Speaker 3 Boo.

Speaker 5 There's not one quinoa recipe in this book. I'll save you the time if you're looking.

Speaker 5 Panana curry paste.

Speaker 3 Okay. Gluten-free.

Speaker 5 That's good.

Speaker 5 And we're a healthy. I'm like really hoping this is coconut milk.
Oh, fuck.

Speaker 5 Black-eyed peas, no salt added.

Speaker 5 I do want to take this time to say, unless it's for health reasons, I genuinely think that you should avoid the no salt added legumes in a can because, like cooking pasta in salted water, it's so hard to season any sort of bean or pea that has not been seasoned from the beginning.

Speaker 5 Like, you can add so much salt to these, and you're always going to be like, Why do they taste like this? And it's because they were not treated with love and care and salinity from the beginning.

Speaker 4 All right, so we're having kind of a crap dinner tonight, but you know,

Speaker 4 we're having an interesting it's raining, so we're not going shopping.

Speaker 3 So, here we go.

Speaker 6 Fuck.

Speaker 5 Well, I guess what we'll do is we'll make some sort of

Speaker 5 like a salad with the black-eyed peas and the quinoa. I'm going to make the quinoa.
It's going to be mid peruged.

Speaker 5 And then, but we're going to make it taste good with some grated garlic and

Speaker 5 olive oil, lemon juice, and we're going to add the black-eyed peas. We're going to let it sit.

Speaker 5 If you had something like lots of parsley or like a cucumber, you could do like a tabboule-esque situation

Speaker 5 with black-eyed peas, which as we know are high in protein which we love okay

Speaker 5 and then if you have curry paste let's let's pray you have a can of coconut milk and like one zucchini or whatever or like we're allowed to use more potato you could kind of make a quick sort of curry with that

Speaker 3 and call it a day

Speaker 5 thank you that was hard thank you

Speaker 5 I'm so brave.

Speaker 3 Thank you.

Speaker 3 Okay,

Speaker 4 so this one's a little serious, so we're taking a serious turn.

Speaker 4 Having grown up, this is from Jordan, having grown up in a diet-obsessed culture, how have you maintained a loving relationship with both your body and with food and cooking?

Speaker 3 Well, Jordan,

Speaker 5 that is extremely hard.

Speaker 5 It's hard every day.

Speaker 5 I don't want to like gender it and say that it's specific to women, but I think that any person in the public eye that where you're looking at photos or videos of yourself at a clip that no human should.

Speaker 5 It's not healthy for anybody's brain to do it. You become really self-judgmental and really hard on yourself.

Speaker 5 And that's in addition to where we are culturally, where we see photos of what people say, oh, well, that's good or that is aspirational.

Speaker 5 And I don't know, you're like, I see bones. Like, I see your bones.
Like,

Speaker 5 I don't know that that is aspirational. But we are in a place right now where I think things are so skewed because everybody is looking at themselves constantly.

Speaker 4 And you're supposed to love food. Like you're trying to convey a love of food, a love of making food, a love of eating.

Speaker 5 But and also to be successful, you also have to be hot and young forever.

Speaker 5 And so you have to love food and love eating, but also look a certain way and never age and like be a mom, but don't talk about it.

Speaker 5 And like there's all these sort of things that you're supposed to adhere to in order to achieve success that seem completely out of line with actually cooking and eating and living.

Speaker 5 And I think about it every day and trying to square it and it's really challenging.

Speaker 4 So what do you?

Speaker 5 I mean, I don't know. I think that you, you,

Speaker 5 I don't know.

Speaker 5 I don't, I don't know. I don't know the answer.
I feel like it's the work is like begins in your cell. Like you have to like love yourself and et cetera, et cetera, like platitude, platitude.

Speaker 5 But like it's true.

Speaker 5 And because no one's like body positivity and like all this stuff that kind of ebbs and flows culturally it's it's not I don't think you can trust it you can't like wait for the culture to change to make it feel like you're doing the right thing yeah yeah I was thinking maybe the culture has opened up to a wide variety of people in cooking like a lot more maybe than when you started out yeah absolutely so that's hopeful yeah I think the democratization that the internet provides where like everybody kind of has the opportunity to create their own space and their own niche is really great And there is truly something for everybody.

Speaker 4 I'm having a really hard time transitioning to the next question, and you'll understand why

Speaker 4 after this profound conversation.

Speaker 3 Okay, here goes.

Speaker 1 From James.

Speaker 4 I've been distressed for many years at how bland chicken has become.

Speaker 5 That's a you problem, James.

Speaker 3 I don't think we're having that problem.

Speaker 3 Whoa.

Speaker 4 50 years ago, chicken was amazingly flavorful, etc., etc. What can we do? Is this true?

Speaker 5 I'm not 50. I don't know.

Speaker 5 But I think that a lot of our foods are not as good in like the farming and the this, that, and the other.

Speaker 5 I think what you can do is you can buy chicken from a farm, and that means going to your farmer's market.

Speaker 5 I don't suggest you like leave your home and go to the farm, but there are ways for the farm to come to you. Almost every city has a farmer's market, and those chickens

Speaker 5 are almost always significantly better tasting. They have more fat, they have more flavor.

Speaker 5 When it comes to things like chicken, meat or fish and you know I would call it like specialty vegetables, I do think that seeking them out from smaller farms makes a huge, huge difference.

Speaker 5 It's like a tomato. When you get like a beautiful tomato from the market and like in the middle of August, you're like, well, this is delicious.

Speaker 5 And then you get a tomato at the supermarket in February, you're like, well, this tastes like shit. It's like not the same food, but it is.
So it's not really the tomato's fault.

Speaker 5 It's what we've done to the tomato. And same for the chicken.

Speaker 5 Like, if you're getting your chicken in a place where they're feeding it like ground up gravel or whatever, and they're like living in a horrible place, they're not going to taste very good.

Speaker 5 And so you have to take that into consideration of like when you eat meat or fish, especially. you're eating what they're eating.
So I think about that a lot when I'm purchasing my protein.

Speaker 4 Yes, yes, yes. Okay, Sarah, what are some of your all-time favorite cookbooks? How did they inspire you as you conceptualized your cookbooks?

Speaker 3 Hmm.

Speaker 5 A lot of my all-time favorite cookbooks were ones that I started reading after I started writing cookbooks. And

Speaker 5 intimidating. Yeah, well, I kind of went in pretty blind to writing my first book.

Speaker 5 I wasn't like a person who consumed a lot of food media or read a lot of cookbooks and my parents didn't have any cookbooks, really. My mom always just cooked from, you know, her brain.

Speaker 5 It was never like a recipe household. Same with my dad.
Like, I never really even saw recipes in my house. And it was a lot of like, oh, this is how your grandmother makes her brisket.
It was bad.

Speaker 5 We didn't need to remember it.

Speaker 5 But like, it was sort of lore. It was talked about.
It was passed down verbally. We weren't like, it wasn't a recipe thing.

Speaker 5 So I would say that after the first one that I wrote, I started looking to other books just to sort of,

Speaker 5 because the books that I was reading were like memoirs and they were sort of longer form, like the Alice Waters biography, and Judith Jones, The 10th Muse, and books like that that really inspired me to write about food because I felt like the recipes I had nailed in terms of I knew what I was cooking and I knew what I wanted to cook, but getting the inspiration to figure out, well, how did I want to say it, like Lori Colwin style, you know, like okay, we're not writing recipes, but we're talking about food in a way that gets you excited to cook.

Speaker 5 So, I feel like those were the most inspirational to me and have shaped my career more than a book of recipes.

Speaker 4 Okay, last one. This is kind of an ender question.

Speaker 4 Do you experience cooking burnout and how do you stay inspired or get back in the groove after a rut?

Speaker 4 I think this is relevant to a lot of people who feel like, oh, I'm doing the same thing, cooking dinner every night. Like, what do you do?

Speaker 5 Yeah, I experience that also. And I think a lot of people maybe assume that I don't or that I just have.

Speaker 5 Like, if you do it for a living, maybe there's the fantasy that you have this endless spring of inspiration, but I don't.

Speaker 5 And oftentimes I think, to be totally honest, that's like how this book was born was

Speaker 5 just going more simple and falling back in love with how good it can taste to cook like five ingredients together in a pot and be like, wow, this doesn't actually need anything else.

Speaker 5 pairing back and just kind of reminding yourself that like a cook a chickpea cooked from dried in a bath of olive oil and garlic and herbs and chili for like three and a half hours in the oven is gonna blow your mind.

Speaker 5 And it's when you're always looking for something to excite you, you overlook those things.

Speaker 5 And you kind of think of that as like maybe not as good or consolation prize or you open up your pantry and you're like,

Speaker 5 all I have are like a can of tomatoes and like some lentils. And it's like, well, you can make the best tomato soup of your life with that if you want, you know?

Speaker 5 And kind of reframing and reminding yourself that you don't actually need that much to do something really fabulous is a good way to get out of a rut.

Speaker 4 Well, thank you for sharing that all with us. And thank you guys for being amazing audience.

Speaker 3 Thank you so much.

Speaker 4 Thank you to Allison Roman and also thank you to our hosts at Six and I, a center for arts, entertainment, ideas, and Jewish life in Washington, D.C.

Speaker 4 This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Kevin Townsend.
Rob Smirciak engineered this episode and provided original music.

Speaker 4 Claudina Bade is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Speaker 4 Listeners, if you like what you hear on Radio Atlantic, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to the Atlantic at theatlantic.com/slash listener.

Speaker 4 Or, it's holiday times, you can buy someone a gift subscription. I'm Hannah Rosen.
Thank you for listening.

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