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I'm Samin Nasrat.
And I'm Rishi K. Sherway.
And we're homecooking.
Kind of.
I'm in your home after last night's event in San Francisco.
And I guess neither of us are cooking.
But yeah, it was the cook-off.
It was the cook-off.
It was the kick-off for my Good Things book tour.
And it was so fun and comforting to get to do it with you, Rishi.
Yeah, last night was so nice.
We taped the event, the conversation about your book.
And so for this episode of Home Cooking, we're going to present that conversation.
Thanks so much to KQED for recording it for us.
But before we get to the actual event recording Samin, I still have to ask you what is the best thing that you've had to eat recently?
You already know what the best thing that I ate is because you got it for me.
I gave you a babka thinking we would share it, like an entire loaf of babka.
Yeah, where is that babka from?
It's from my friend's bakery, Loquat, in San Francisco, and they're just extraordinary bakers.
Can you actually explain what makes a babka a babka?
A babka is an enriched bread, which means there's eggs added to the dough to make it richer, kind of like a brioche or a challah.
And it's a braided loaf.
I think the classic babka is sort of layered with cinnamon sugar, but also another classic flavor is chocolate, which is really decadent and delicious.
And then you know all sorts of people doing all sorts of innovations these days with other spices and flavors.
But it's just the yummiest dessert bread, breakfast bread.
Did you ever watch berry?
No, i would like to.
I love that show, and there's one character who at one point, goes to get a babka for a party and he says you want i should go get the babka?
Huh, maybe do babka.
It was one of those earworms where though, i had never had a babka myself until today, like i just will sometimes say do babka.
It's kind of a nice phrase.
Yeah.
Anytime I get two of anything, I'm like, two babkas.
Well, I think now that you ate an entire babka, you understand why he ordered two.
But I am really excited to tell you about my best thing I've eaten recently, because it might have been a top five best thing in my life.
Wow.
Yeah.
So I got to go on vacation recently to Italy, and we went to Sicily, where I've never been before.
And for probably 20 years people have been telling me when you go to Sicily, you have to go to this town called Noto and visit this pastry and gelato shop called Caffè Sicilia.
And there's actually a Chef's Table episode about the chef Corrado Asenza.
So we went there and there's a region in Sicily called Avola where they're just famous for the almonds.
And I have to say, the first time I had Sicilian almonds...
I understood why almond extract and almond paste taste the way they do.
Because before that I never felt like there was a relationship between that very sort of floral taste of marzipan or almond extract and actual almonds.
I've always felt like they're too different.
Yeah, they're very, very different.
But then I had Sicilian almonds and they taste... like almond extract.
They're so floral and fragrant and amazing.
And so all across the island.
It's so hot there that a traditional breakfast is to have granita, which is kind of like shaved ice.
Usually you have espresso granita on a brioche.
Oh, we're both having brioche.
On a brioche with a big dollop of whipped cream.
And that's what you have in the morning instead of drinking coffee.
You eat espresso granita on a brioche.
Is this not your kind of place?
I'm a granita.
Yes.
I got too excited.
I couldn't even make sense of that.
Yeah.
Also because I was specifically told to order a glass of almond milk, which is not necessarily a thing one looks forward to anywhere else.
Like not as a creamer or something like that?
No, just a glass of milk to drink.
So we got almond milk.
We got almond milk cappuccinos.
We got almond milk granita.
Yeah.
We got some other things too, but anything almond there was just like the most heavenly fragrant, otherworldly taste.
And it was just so crazy to understand.
All it had in it was almonds and sugar and maybe a little bit of salt.
Like there was nothing else and it was just the purest expression of a flavor.
It really felt like I had made a pilgrimage.
And so if you ever get a chance to have almonds or almond milk or almond milk granita in Sicily, I encourage you to do that.
Incredible.
Okay, let's get to the live event.
Also, before we get to it, I just want to give everybody a fair warning that because it was your book event and I wanted to do a good job and be an appropriate interviewer, I did kind of go into my Song Exploder interviewer mode.
What's an appropriate interviewer?
Well, you know like I want to.
You put so much love and thought and heart into the book and I wanted to not just pepper you with silly jokes.
I wanted to also, you know, create a circumstance where we could talk about the real heart and ideas of the book.
And that's maybe like a little bit more earnest than we kind of get on this show.
Yeah, you were so generous.
People might be shocked at how appropriate we both were.
Hi!
Hi everyone, thank you so much.
It's so awesome to be here at our home stage.
Thank you for coming out.
It means so much to us to get to spend this evening with you.
Yeah, it means a lot to me to be here.
Thank you so much, Samin, for having me here.
Thanks to all of you for coming and letting me be a part of this exciting moment in your life and career.
Oh, I wouldn't have it any other way.
I mean, who else is going to torture me?
Yeah.
I wanted to give you a little note about how tonight's going to go.
Normally, I feel like with a book event, the author will speak about the book and talk about the themes, and then at the end there'll be a QA.
But, As some of you might know, on our podcast Home Cooking, it really is about the questions that we get from people.
It was a show that we started in the pandemic when people had a lot of questions about how to cook and what they were going to do in the new reality of lockdown.
And it really has that format of just answering people's questions, or rather Samin answering people's questions and me presenting them to her.
That has become such a part of the fabric of our friendship and our relationship other people sort of in the middle of the fabric between us that I thought it would be nice if tonight's event was built like that as well.
So we put out a call for questions from the audience and we got so many great questions sent in.
And so I'm going to weave some of those in, as we're talking about Samin's book, rather than have a separate section at the end.
And yeah, like I said, we got some great ones.
Apologies if we don't end up getting to your question tonight.
Thank you, everybody who did send in questions.
Before we get to any of those though, I just thought we could maybe talk a little bit about the process behind making this book.
I want to go back to when you finished Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat.
As everybody just heard, you went basically straight from that book into making the TV show, and then you had a pretty hard reckoning right.
I'm just wondering if you could tell me about the moment when you decided you were going to make another book, because i think there's certainly an option where you could have been like i did it, retired at the top, going out like this yeah, i mean.
And also in the last eight years, there have been many times i wished that i hadn't decided to do another one.
But at the heart of it, i'm a person who makes things, i create things.
I'm so generative i can't not and i think, riding the incredible highs of just not only the praise and attention, but the part where interacting with people and seeing the thing that I made make its way into their lives, that was so gratifying and amazing that I knew I wanted to do it again.
And so in some ways I think I maybe acted a little hastily, immediately sort of selling another book proposal and saying I would do it again.
Because I think for me, I'm very slow.
It's been eight years since Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat was published.
I need downtime and quiet to figure out what I'm going to say next.
And certainly you know, I had the idea for Salt Fat when I was 19 or 20 and the book came out when I was 37.
So it was... So the next one will be four years from now.
You're doubling your rate.
Yeah, it's true.
I'm going a lot faster.
Yeah.
But...
That was in my head becoming a thing for so long.
It was my whole life was moving toward salt fat acid, heat in a way that I could visualize what I was making.
I always knew what it would look like.
And with this one, that's not been true at all.
And that's been a source of a lot of agony for me.
At first, I proposed a completely different book that was much more ambitious.
It was kind of like a sister to salt fat in that it was another philosophical tome that And within a year I kind of realized it would take me another 20 years to do that.
And I just, I kind of melted under the pressure of it.
And they said, it's okay, just figure out what you want to do and do that.
And so it took me some time and a lot of writing and unwriting to get here.
And along the way, you know, there was just a lot I was going through in my personal life and also just my own internal search for meaning and the role of cooking inside of that.
Wondering if you could articulate what are the things about good things that are similar to salt fat acid heat, and what are the ways in which it's different.
What's similar first is me.
I just mean my voice.
At the root of it, I'm a teacher.
I want to share the things that make me excited, the things that I'm curious about.
My goal in talking about cooking and food on the page is always to invite you in and to make it feel possible.
And even though at many times I was like, I'm not going to complicate this.
I'm going to keep it real simple.
Of course, I complicated it for myself.
Ideally, it's quite simple for you still, but that involves a lot of thinking, structural work, organizational work and trying to figure out how to connect dots.
So At its heart salt fat, acid heat is like a very intense distillation of my understanding of all cooking down to these four elements.
And while this is not quite as distilled, you know, the biggest chapter by far is the vegetable chapter.
I love vegetables so much.
They're at the heart of my cooking.
And I probably labored for about two years to figure out how to structure that so that I could give you the broadest possible understanding of how to use any vegetable.
And so you'll recognize the kind of flow charts and matrices and that kind of visual structure explanation that we did in salt fat, acid heat with wendy mcnaughton, who i believe is here her incredible illustrations, and so i tried to honor wendy and everything that she taught me about organizational thinking in some of the flow charts in this book.
So yeah, it's a little bit of like specifics and a little bit of generalities.
So that's what's similar, but what's different is also me.
I'm much more present in this book.
It's a very personal book.
It's very much a document of my life and my cooking in this time and my home.
You know, we shot all of the photos in my home.
My neighbor, the wonderful photographer, Aya Brackett, who lives 40 feet from me, she's amazing.
She shot the photos in our like shared sort of.
We live together sort of on a shared courtyard, not exactly a compound, but she's very familiar.
We've known each other almost 25 years.
And so she knows me.
And I feel like that comes across in the photos.
It's my stuff.
We didn't rent props like they do a lot of times for photo shoots and things.
It's really an accurate picture of my life and my cooking.
And that feels really good.
It feels nice to get to share that.
I don't know if you did that intentionally.
The thing that's similar about this book is me, and the thing that's different about this book is me.
I didn't, yeah.
Well, I wanted to also ask you a little bit about the systems.
Thinking around the, just the structure of the book.
How do you decide what's going to be the first thing that you're going to present in the book?
And what is the first thing that you present in the book?
I don't remember.
Do you mean like the introduction?
I mean the, i mean the title page uh, the things that you can.
We'll cut this later.
You know the stuff that you know that people can use then later for the recipes.
Oh no oh, my first chapter.
Okay, got it, i'm.
I was chosen to moderate this because of our communication rapport.
I don't know.
It's all relative.
Yeah, yeah.
All right.
So the book is called Good Things, which is a nod to a Raymond Carver quote, which is the epigraph.
And the line is eating is a small good thing at a time like this, which really has become sort of a line that I've come back to over and over again.
And I do believe in a way that represents the way that food is a source of meaning in my life food and cooking and eating together.
So much of my cooking life, I was obsessed with what was on the table.
And very much now I would say my focus has shifted to who's around the table.
And I care a lot less about what's on the table.
And so it's nice that what's on the table is an excuse for us to come together.
But what's important is that we're together and that that can be a source of comfort for in a time like this.
And the thing is, it's always a time like this.
There's always something hard going on for somebody, whether it's yourself or somebody around you.
And that this, if we just shift our mindset a little bit, can be this opportunity each day for connection.
So once I realized how valuable that quote was, I thought maybe I'll name the book A Small Good Thing in honor of this quote.
And then I thought, Well, I knew it was going to be a big book, so that wasn't going to work.
And then I thought maybe I'll call it Small Good Things, like a collection of all the small good things.
But then I knew that wouldn't pass through the marketing because they'd think it was tapas recipes.
And so I was like, okay, good things.
And so I fell asleep, and the next morning I woke up and I was like oh, good things, all good things must come to an end.
And then I was like, good things come in threes.
Good things come in small packages.
And I was like, there we go.
I see now my chapter titles.
I see how I'm going to organize this book.
It took me a long time and a lot of internal struggle to decide to write a book of recipes, which felt initially like being disloyal to myself and to my readership when I've written a whole other book. teaching you how to cook without recipes.
And also in the meantime, in the last eight years, I've written a lot of recipes, mostly for New York Times cooking.
And that's been kind of a boot camp.
I feel I've gotten a lot better at it when I interact with people on the street or people communicate with me.
They don't say like, I mean, sometimes they say salt, fat, acid, heat taught me how to cook.
It changed my life.
But Also, they say, wow, I love that chicken.
Wow, I love that focaccia.
And so I've come to understand the recipe is a tool and it serves people.
So even if I struggle with it, I want to offer the thing that will be the most useful.
So once I decided to write a book of recipes, I was still being quite stubborn and I was like well, it's not going to look like every other cookbook.
It's not going to have a chapter of salads and then a chapter of soups and a chapter of desserts.
And literally, I ended up four years later with a chapter... of salads and a chapter of desserts.
But I had to get there my own way, which was through this award play.
And then the first of those good things is good things come in small packages, which is what Rishi was trying to get me to.
So, yeah, can you talk a little bit about that first chapter?
Yeah, I mean, so... Okay, I see.
It's all of you making fun of me.
Okay.
Okay.
So I eat very simply at home is the truth.
Like I have a quite what I think is quite a boring diet.
I could probably exist on quesadillas alone for the rest of my life.
I always have the rice cooker going.
I eat a lot of rice, some boiled vegetables, roasted vegetables, a fried egg, maybe a little chicken thigh.
And then really, what makes my food exciting is the condiments, some of which are store-bought and some of which are homemade.
And truly that's what turns like the bowl of rice.
It makes it new again.
It's not always the same bowl of rice, because I might have garlic and herb labanon at one night and I might have chili crisp on it the next night.
Some nights I might have both, and So the small packages refer to all the jars and containers in which you can store all of these condiments which I want to teach you how to make.
What made you decide to start the book that way?
Because, you know, I think you could easily imagine someone talking about those kinds of things almost like an afterthought.
Yeah.
In a lot of ways, there are components that appear again later in the book.
So that was I wanted to sort of set the stage with it.
So I had introduced you to the preserved lemon paste that I refer to a million times, or the green sauce, which is just sort of the very simple name I ended up with for an herb salsa or a salsa verde.
Because I do refer to these components, because it is truly a reflection of how I eat at home and how I cook for other people and with other people.
And so these are those simple building blocks that make that possible.
Awesome.
I want to turn to a question that we got from Lexi.
Hey, Samin and Rishi, this is Lexi from Oakland.
What kinds of things are just better when you make them from scratch and keep in your fridge and pantry rather than get store-bought?
I've really recently been experimenting with making my own chicken broth awesome and soaking and cooking my own beans.
And I just want to know what other pantry and fridge essentials are just so much better when you make them from home.
But I'm specifically talking about low skill, high delicious kind of recipes, something you can just make over a Sunday morning with a cup of tea and you know your favorite.
Thank you.
Awesome.
Very good.
I see what you were doing now.
Really good job, Rishi.
I see you.
Thank you, Lexi, for that question.
Speaking for all of us in the low skill corner of the room.
Yeah, well, also, like, I know that your wife is an amazing sort of fridge stalker.
So what are some of the things in your fridge?
Well, right now, actually, courtesy of Samin, we have a mason jar of the green tahini dressing.
And As good students of Samin's, that just goes on all kinds of things.
Sometimes we'll be making pasta and we'll have a little salad with it and we'll use it as salad dressing.
Sometimes it goes on some rice.
Sometimes it just goes on some veggies.
Yeah, that one's a really good one.
But she's higher skill.
She is higher skill.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, so let's go back to rudimentary.
Yes.
So I do think that the green sauce, which again a lot of what's ended up in this book is, is a reflection of the fact that in my cooking career I would say the arc of my cooking career has been a little bit upside down or inside out.
I don't know, maybe inverted.
Because I grew up a kid in a house where my mom was cooking.
She taught me how to make scrambled eggs, tuna salad, I don't know, toast, English muffin pizza.
I went to college where I really got very good at English muffin pizza.
And then next thing I knew it, I was in this world-class kitchen at Chez Panisse.
And so I was learning how to make every single thing from scratch at the highest level.
And that was how I spent my whole 20s and most of my 30s was always cooking at this incredibly high standard professionally, and not very often at home, honestly.
And since I've really moved away from restaurant life and now I spend so much more time In my own home and in friends' homes who are not food professionals, I've just understood.
Oh my God, I don't have to be holding myself to these crazy standards on a daily basis.
Because often what ends up happening is...
I know what's possible.
And so I'm disappointed by my own reality, because it's not always the farmer's market freshest thing or the finest ingredients from the imported food market, because I don't have the energy to go get it.
Or also when I cook with friends at this previously mentioned Monday dinner.
That's been a great lesson for me, because people with kids, you know they have other priorities.
And so, even if you love food, which we all do at Monday dinner still sometimes you're just running to the corner store to get the sour cream and the grated cheese.
You know, and still do, I remember, the quality of the cheese and the sour cream.
Or do I remember that we had a great meal?
I remember that we had a great meal.
And so that's just, I've shifted, I've loosened up a little bit.
And I think that's reflected.
And so you know there's a whole part in salt fat acid heat, like in three different ways.
I teach you how to make mayonnaise by hand.
There's like an illustrated infographic by Wendy of whisking.
There's my narrative explanation, and then there's a written recipe.
And then in this book, I literally use an immersion blender for everything, you know?
Yeah. it's my favorite tool so i i have just sort of become more of a home cook and that is reflected and so instead of saying you have to chop all your herbs and cover them in this way and do it in this order i'm like dump everything into a thing and use your immersion blender or your blender to make the sauce and guess what like of people who've already received the book the green sauce is one of like the things people have said i put that on everything i will never not have it in my fridge So things like that, the dressings that are a different chapter, I always have jars of dressing in the fridge because it just makes it so much easier and more exciting to eat salad.
There is a little bit of a high effort thing, which is the chili crisp, which is definitely a weekend project.
But that one, again, I make it once or twice a year and I eat it all year long.
So, yeah.
If you were to imagine you know the lowest effort, highest yield thing that really surpasses the store-bought version.
It's what, in this book, I named house dressing, which is taken from Via Carota, which is one of my favorite restaurants in New York, in the West Village.
And I love their green salad so much that I wrote an entire column about it at the New York Times.
And somehow I did not name, as writers don't often put their headlines on their own pieces in newspapers and magazines.
So some brilliant person called it the best green salad in the world or something.
So then it went viral.
And I'm like, wow, I took green salad viral.
Like, I feel pretty good about that.
And it is at this point still one of my highest rated and most beloved recipes.
And it really has changed sort of my own relationship to salad dressing.
And many of my cooking friends, some of whom are here tonight, actually like who were professional cooks.
They're the ones who named it house dressing, because they, kind of jokingly, always have it in the kitchen so that they can serve it to the people they're cooking for.
What makes that dressing so good that it gets that title?
Why is it so much better than other dressings?
I think they're very specific about the vinegar.
It's a sherry vinegar.
They dilute the vinegar with a little bit of warm water.
But also what I think makes that dressing really good is it has a little bit of honey or maple syrup or sugar in it.
And so there's just this tiny, tiny hint of sweetness that sort of balances any harshness that might be in there.
And also you have to use good olive oil.
But it just... It's like...
Even the other day I made it for a cooking class I was doing online and you know, a kid walked by afterward and ate it and she was like man, this is good salad.
Like, I'm like, if you can get kids to be excited about salad, it's a good dressing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Can I digress about Via Corotta for a second?
Of course.
So I went there after you told me how good the salad was when I was in New York one time.
And I went there specifically to get the salad and I got the salad, but it was like to get a reservation is tough.
So I got there at a strange time when I had basically already had to eat lunch, you know?
Oh, you had to pre-eat.
I had to pre-eat.
Yeah.
But I was like, that's fine.
I'm just going to have a salad.
And then I did have the salad, but I was a little bit hungrier than that.
I also thought I was being very virtuous by having a salad.
So the other thing that I got was their French fries.
Have you had their French fries?
No.
Their French fries are the sort of shoestring fry that is so thin that the only rational way to eat it really is by having about Just like jamming a handful into your mouth.
400 at a time.
Salad and French fries.
That's a good dinner.
Yeah.
I felt like I had the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other.
It was great.
But if anybody does go to Via Crota for the salad, I also recommend shoving 400 fries in your mouth at once.
I would like to go back to your Monday night dinner and the thing that you said about how what was on the table for this book started to matter a little bit less to you than who was around the table.
And I think you wrote about this really beautifully.
And I was wondering if you would read from the page that I've bookmarked there for you.
Yes.
This is a chapter called Good Things Are Better Shared.
Several years ago my friend Greta Caruso began having friends over to her apartment in New York City every Sunday night for dinner.
Even though she's a wonderful cook, the dinners were never extravagant.
Instead, each was an occasion for Greta to reconnect with close friends and a way for her to anchor her week.
At the time, I visited New York often for work.
The dinners were so special that I started planning my trips around them.
At Greta's table, I witnessed whims evolve into traditions.
I watched my friend take pleasure in creating beauty as she set the table with her favorite vintage linens, candlesticks and flower arrangements.
Each week, when the bowl of Castelvetrano olives appeared, we'd all instinctively put our phones down.
Not because Greta had decreed it, but because it felt so nice to be together for a few hours, no matter what was happening in the outside world.
I've spent my entire adult life gathering at rowdy tables for delicious meals, but something about those Sunday dinners was different.
Greta's focus was less about what was on the table and more on who was around it.
Though I sat there dozens of times, I could probably tell you only a couple of things we ate.
Yet I can recall scores of jokes and stories and all the times I was kicked under the table for being dense.
I remember the buzzy thrill of being introduced to new romantic partners and the heaviness of consoling grieving friends.
The deep sense of friendship and community I felt at Greta's dinners made me want to create a similar ritual for myself.
At the time, my career was shifting.
I was traveling constantly and felt unmoored in my own life.
Though I had been cooking for decades by then, it was rarely in such a casual communal way for the people closest and most important to me.
And something about that felt wrong.
I made many excuses for it over the years, but the one I relied on most was this.
My apartment was too small for a proper dining table.
Where would people sit?
How could I host a weekly dinner without a table?
On one level, I knew this was irrational.
I've always encouraged others to think more expansively about space and let go of convention.
Sit on the floor, I'd declare.
Sit on the couch.
Eat at the coffee table.
And yet, I couldn't do it myself.
My own hypocrisy weighed on me.
At any rate, I wasn't home.
I was out in the world filming and then promoting a documentary series on book and speaking tours out reporting my column in the New York Times Magazine.
I didn't have time to institute any sort of ritual.
And if I did, would my friends even come?
I turned these thoughts over in my mind until, exhausted, I stopped traveling so much.
I moved out of the tiny apartment into a hand-built house in Oakland with its own little dining area.
The first thing I did after unpacking was commission a woodworker friend to build me a table.
Finally, I thought, I'd make my own Sunday dinners happen.
But the pandemic shut down the world the week after the table arrived.
It didn't help that I'd also begin to descend into an abyss of depression.
Sitting by myself at my gorgeous table in my beautiful home, I examined my life.
What good was everything I'd achieved if I felt so unbearably sad and alone?
One morning, a year and a half later, I was testing a recipe at home.
I'd been working on a pork braise inspired by tacos al pastor.
But whether I was depressed, unqualified or the task itself was impossible, I kept failing miserably.
And with each failure, I grew sadder and more unsure of myself.
My friend Sarah texted me to see if I was up for a visit.
We'd known each other for more than 10 years.
We were the kind of friends usually brought together by an outside force rather than of our own volition.
She was at the farmer's market nearby with her kids who wanted to come see my pup, Fava.
Of course, I responded, I'm just here ruining some pork.
While the kids played with Fava in the yard, Sarah asked what was wrong.
I don't know, I said.
I just can't get this braise right.
It's haunting me.
And to make matters worse, I'll be stuck with six pounds of braised pork to eat by myself.
Well, we'll help you eat it, she offered with a coy smile.
Maybe it's because i was feeling so low at the time, or so deprived of casual gatherings that didn't require complicated arrangements and covid tests, but i was so lonely and starved for connection that i received sarah's casual offer like a vial of life-saving elixir.
When i quickly asked, worried that she might recant, how about tuesday at our house?
Sarah proposed.
Two days later, i arrived at her door, pork in hand.
We shredded it into a dinner of tacos, for which everyone was grateful, no one as much as me.
The braise may not have been a major culinary achievement, but it did just fine for dinner on a tuesday night in oakland.
It was so natural and nice to be together that, as the evening ended, we all wondered should we do it again next tuesday?
We've continued gathering weekly ever since, though Monday nights eventually became our standing date.
It took nearly eight months of Monday dinners for me to realize I'd inadvertently built the ritual I'd so craved.
It just looks different than I'd initially imagined.
At our Monday dinners, I've learned how to share both responsibility and credit.
I've learned that if I let other people care for me, they will.
I've learned how it feels to build something sacred with people I love.
We'll often say, only half joking, that Monday dinner is our religion.
And while everyone in our group loves to cook and eat, no one person, not even me, directs the menus or does all of the cooking.
Sure, sometimes I have a recipe or two I want to test and share, but other people's desires, interests and constraints also influence what we eat.
When we can, we take advantage of our many hands and make dumplings tamales, ravioli or another labor-intensive assembly line dish.
And when I encounter a special occasion ingredient while shopping a perfect side of wild salmon say, or first of the season crab I snag it for us.
Because while Monday dinner isn't a dinner party, it is a special occasion.
Four years in, this ritual and the community that sustains it are at the heart of my life.
These friends have taught me what it means to belong.
And I've finally found the sense of meaning in cooking and in life that I've sought for so long.
It brings me indescribable joy to share food with my Monday dinner family.
Whenever I nail a new recipe or stumble upon a cache of ripe fruit, I immediately begin planning how to incorporate it into our next meal.
But this isn't to say that we always make fancy or complicated food.
When it's hot, we pull out the kiddie pool and eat hot dogs and popsicles.
When we're too tired to cook, we'll order empanadas or pizza and throw together a salad.
What we eat together matters far less than the fact that we eat together.
So, in the spirit of Monday dinner, this chapter is a compilation of dishes best shared with others, whether for the amounts they yield, the time and effort they require or the communal pleasure they offer.
And I got to call out that Monday dinner family is here in the audience tonight.
Isn't that so nice?
I think everybody here is getting a copy of this book.
And I'm sure you were probably excited to get it anyway.
But I don't know, after hearing that, like for me, this is what makes this book so special.
And I think of that bit as the centerpiece of the ideas of the book.
And it's so beautifully told.
And I really love it.
Thank you so much for reading.
Thank you, Rishi.
Thanks, everyone.
Not only are we back with a new season of episodes, we've also got brand new home cooking merch.
We finally put our tomato can home cooking logo on a shirt.
You can get it as a t-shirt or a sweatshirt or a tank top, or even a onesie for little baby home cooks.
Plus, there's a tote bag with the drawing of the round salt can thing that has Samin and myself and our dogs Fava, Bean and Watson on it.
It is the pinnacle of tote bags and there is a pun in there if you think about how pinnacle is spelled.
There's also a special shirt in honor of our special recurring guest, the man with hot takes and a surprisingly high-pitched giggle, my dad, known to samin and all my close friends as summation uncle.
He has his own shirt that says team summation uncle, featuring three little jars of saffron and he undoubtedly has very strong opinions about their color and flavor.
And of course there's also still the OG sweatshirt with the drawing of the can of sardines and the inexplicable shrimp.
Jenga forever shirt.
And all of this stuff was illustrated by our wonderful Mamie Rheingold.
And all of it is available at homecooking.show slash merch.
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I just got a delivery from ButcherBox and there was so much good stuff in it.
And I'm so excited.
What's the number one thing that you're most excited about?
Well, right now, i have to say it's boneless, skinless chicken thighs.
B s c, t did you just make up an acronym?
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For a 4995 charge for a Wi-Fi subscription for when you're on the plane.
For the plane?
Yes, that I had signed up for like two months ago.
Oh my gosh.
Not realizing that it was a recurring charge.
So I immediately went and canceled it.
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I think the pandemic is still close enough, in the rear view too, that we don't take gathering for granted.
You know, I'm so grateful that we get to do this event and that everybody gets to be here.
And I thought in the spirit of what you just read and your Monday Night Dinner crew, I
I put together this set of questions about cooking for groups and I thought what better way to present them than as a group.
Hi, Rishi, Kesh, and Samin.
My name is Kelsey.
She who pronouns, and I live in Oakland.
Every Monday night, I have dinner with a group of housemates and friends and sometimes guests.
Hi, Samin.
Hi, Rishi.
My name is Laura and I am part of a terrific group of friends who has a stand-in Friday night dinner.
My name is Alyssa.
My close friends and I have decided to do collective dinners.
Hi, Samin and Rishi.
This is Sarah from Concord, California.
So one thing that my family really likes to do with friends, and with families that we're hoping to convince to be our friends, is to have over for dinner.
We want to have one of our upcoming dinners themed around good things.
What menu of dishes and a dessert would the two of you recommend for FIDATE people?
Oh, and I forgot to say that there is some dietary restriction.
Some, but not a ton.
There are a few folks who are gluten-free, and we would love to hear your ideas for us.
Thank you.
Oh my God, that's so beautiful.
And those are all people who I believe are here in the audience tonight.
You guys, that's amazing.
Wait, was there another dietary restriction besides gluten-free?
Well, there's a bunch of dietary restrictions.
They all listed all of the dietary restrictions and there's frankly, too many to list, but I thought it was a good thing to keep in mind when you do have to cook for big groups.
You have the general principle of people have dietary restrictions.
And so I think the spirit of all of those questions was really like, how do you do that?
What do you think about?
But also I really loved this idea of designing a menu for a group of people out of things from good things.
Yeah, I love that so much.
This is, I'm like, there's tears just...
Right there.
So, okay, guide me.
Is it more important for me in this answer to come up with a cohesive dinner menu or is it more important to come up with the types of things that would work for groups and or people with dietary restrictions?
Speaking personally, what I would like to hear most is one cohesive menu.
I want you to take me through course by course.
We're going to start here, then you're going to make this, then we're going to have this, then we're going to end with this.
Okay.
All right.
So to me I also write about this in the book that something has shifted in me as a person who cooks for other people and sometimes hosts and sometimes co-hosts other people, which is historically, I've always felt like the way to show.
I love is by doing everything and kind of being like a Tasmanian devil, you know.
No no no no no, don't get up.
Like I'm going to wash all the dishes and that that in some way is allowing everyone else to have a nice time.
And I've realized that that actually stresses everyone out, including me.
And so I'm trying to do less.
And in that I'm generally thinking of the simplest possible things to offer to people because, like I say, it's not about dazzling.
This kind of thing, especially in order to create a ritual that continues.
It can't kill you every week.
So one of my favorite things to make when people come over is popcorn.
I was eating popcorn during our sound check.
Yeah.
And the popcorn in the book is.
I call it my forever popcorn because I will never make it another way.
But it's very much influenced by the Bjorn corn, which I consider to be a perfect snack.
And I ate many bags of Bjorn corn before I realized.
Part of the reason why it's so good is that they grind the nutritional yeast and the salt in a grinder until it's a very fine powder.
And then they mix the popcorn with like massive amounts of it.
So the popcorn's totally coated, because normally if you just add nutritional yeast to your popcorn, you eat all your popcorn and then all the nutritional yeast is at the bottom of the bowl with some butter.
Yeah.
Let me just interrupt you for a second here because okay, you're going to make popcorn, but I feel like you have.
Jump ahead into a knowledge that maybe not everybody has, which is that popcorn is better with nutritional yeast.
Oh, yes.
Popcorn is very good with nutritional yeast.
Why?
It's just like delicious umami, cheesy flavor.
Also, it's vegan friendly.
Also, popcorn is vegan.
I like making it with coconut oil or a mixture of coconut oil and like sunflower oil.
You can add butter or not.
But I actually don't think you always need to add butter.
I think it's like, in some ways, if you don't add butter and you add just the right amount of oil when you're popping it, the nutritional yeast sticks perfectly to it and then you don't get the like cheese fingers, which nothing against cheese fingers.
So the key is to grind the yeast.
And then I've created what I call the two bowl method.
So you put your popcorn and all the toppings in one bowl, you put a second bowl on top and you shake until like there's just a cloud of nutritional yeast in the air.
And that's how you know you used enough.
And then it just is all coated and so delicious.
So like a big bowl of popcorn, I think is a really fun and inviting way to start a meal.
And then I don't know, I kind of like meals where you're not having to get up a bunch of times, so you can kind of bring everything to the table.
And one of my favorite ways to eat is many salads.
So, for example, like you could have a hearty bean salad that had, say, house dressing on it.
Yeah.
And macerated onions and herbs, whatever vegetables are in season, whether that's tomatoes and cucumbers or bits of broccoli.
Just a really hearty, delicious bean salad.
If dietary restrictions allowed for it, maybe I'd put big crumbles of goat cheese or feta cheese in there.
And then something where you don't have to get up.
So maybe a side of slow roasted salmon.
People can add that to their salad if they wanted to.
I would have a big green salad.
It's nice to have a second salad.
And then I would have other condiments that you've already made because you thought ahead.
So you have your green sauce and your labneh and your chili crisp and you just pull them out from your fridge.
You have a nice warm loaf of bread.
There is like the most extravagant and wonderful meal for people.
It's so awesome.
And then for dessert...
What do you want for dessert, Rishi?
Oh, you want cookies, obviously.
Rishi loves chocolate chip cookies so much.
But again, I would make a dessert that's made ahead in advance and not something you have to really worry too much about.
So One of my favorite ones from the book is a delicious flan.
Or there's also a burnt honey icebox cake.
And it's inspired by the wonderful Michelle Polzin, the pastry chef.
Her famous burnt honey Russian honey cake, amazing 20-layer cake which I wrote about at one point for the New York Times.
And it took me like days to test it because you have to bake every layer of the cake separately.
And then you make this amazing burnt honey dulce de leche frosting and you layer the whole thing and you let it sit for a day.
And it's so awesome, but it was so much work.
I've never made it again.
And so actually one of our Monday dinner friends one day said I don't know why you wouldn't just make that with graham crackers.
And I was like, oh my God.
So I asked Michelle if I could adapt her recipe, and I adapted it with graham crackers into an icebox cake.
And it's so easy and it's so good.
So that's probably what I'd make for dessert.
Yeah, that sounds great.
Thank you.
In your capacity as a teacher and as a provider of recipes.
I think that what's so nice about this book, and everything that you've talked about so far and you talk about in greater detail in the book itself, is this idea of lowering the stakes for home cooks.
And it almost feels like in every recipe in this book, there's an invisible step zero that you've put in, which is don't stress.
Yeah.
And then all the other steps.
Yeah.
That's as much for me as it is for you.
I think so much of what I had to do for myself during the making of the book was reassure myself that things that I thought were so simple, that didn't require a recipe, were worth mentioning.
Like one of them that we talked about recently was something I call kid crudités.
Yeah. which I learned about from my neighbor, Aya, who shot the book.
I was over at her house one night and she was just trying to get her kids to eat some vegetables.
And she like, cut up some carrot and cucumber sticks and drizzled a little seasoned rice vinegar and some flaky salt on top.
And we started eating them.
And I was like, these are the best crudités I've ever had.
And I am like a person who has spent my life making very beautiful crudités, platters and In the tradition of Alice Waters, for people up and down the world.
And this was so delicious that I was like, I'm never making this any other way.
And also I was like, how am I going to write that down?
Like carrot sticks, cucumber sticks salt, rice vinegar.
It seems insane.
So yeah, it is insane.
So i didn't write that as a classic recipe.
I wrote it in a different format with a story, to sort of say this is this thing.
I do all the time, think about doing that all the time, but i had to really like trust myself that other people would find that worth including, because if you open up the internet or if you open up other cookbooks or magazines, So much of it is filled with like glossy, you know, dazzling sort of attempts to recreate what's happening at a restaurant at home.
And that's not what I do.
And that's not what this was.
And I really doubted that it would be what people wanted.
But I think in some ways, maybe hearing that that's the kind of encouragement I have to give to myself.
And I'm always telling myself less is okay.
That maybe hearing that from me will be comforting to you.
So, yeah, there are things like the crudités.
They're presented in story form.
The recipes take all kinds of forms in the book.
But there are also very traditional recipes.
And all of the recipes in your book, I know went through hardcore testing, trying to both ensure that the results are consistent, but also that they're comprehensible for people who are going to read them.
Given all of that effort that you put into making this thing, where you do have some result in mind?
What are your feelings when you hear someone say I made your recipe but I changed it?
I did this thing instead of this thing.
How do you feel about that?
I actually feel, in general, that's my hope for you.
My hope is that I've written it in such a way that that it's clear to you upon reading what is crucial to know, which is often like sensory cues, like smells browning, you know, crackling sounds, things like that.
And often the way I write.
It is very loose to say you can use this herb or that herb, you can do this or this.
So I actually am stoked when people change stuff.
What I don't like is when They're like, I changed 90% of the things and this recipe sucks.
And I'm like, well, I don't know what to tell you.
So I actually try to test with a lot of that flexibility in mind, with a lot of availability, geographical availability of ingredients in mind.
My testers are not here in the Bay Area, which is literally the easiest place to get any ingredient you ever wanted.
So I very intentionally make sure it's achievable.
And I do feel very much a responsibility that if you follow my recipe to the letter and it doesn't work, that's my fault.
I did something wrong.
I didn't communicate something essential to you.
But if you're taking like an extraordinary amount of liberties, then the responsibility shifts.
Yeah.
Not to rub salt, fat acid heat into the wound, but here's a question from Mandy.
Okay.
Hi, Samin and Rishi.
This is Mandy from Berkeley, California.
My local grocery store sells a delicious curry tofu salad with currants and cashews.
My girlfriend wanted to recreate this, but she used chicken and she didn't have currants, so she used dried blueberries.
And I was going to make the same recipe, but I didn't want to separate my cashews out of my assorted nut mix, so I just used almonds.
So the cashew tofu currant salad became an almond chicken blueberry salad.
So this got me thinking.
What are your hot tips for making substitutions in recipes without completely changing the identity of the dish?
I'm actually into that one.
That one I feel like kind of.
I would feel like almost everything except the blueberry doesn't sound.
Blueberries are so sweet to me.
That's one where I'm like, I don't know.
But all the other parts I feel like could work.
I was appreciating Mandy's question and had a thought about it.
And then she emailed again with a follow-up, echoing what was already in my head, which is that there's like a ship of Theseus metaphor in substitutions where like eventually, you can substitute every single part out and make a completely different dish.
So you end up with a tofu blueberry dish instead of... That's amazing.
Based on the chicken...
It's kind of incredible.
So what is the most flexible dish or recipe in good things that you can think of, where people can change a lot and they won't make you upset?
Well, I actually feel like I did my best to create rubrics for this.
In the vegetable chapter there are multiple matrices meant to encourage change, sort of expansive thinking.
And so we took pictures of specific dishes that I made with the different elements.
Here's one actually that I think I even put in the title.
Oh.
I had to change the title to make it fit.
But it used to be creamy one-pot pasta with ricotta and any vegetable.
And then in order to make it fit on one page, I had to change the format.
So now it's called creamy one-pot pasta with ricotta and peas.
Like I had to create a base one, but then there's a gazillion variations.
This recipe is endlessly adaptable.
Substitute any of these vegetables for the peas.
But at the base of the recipe is pasta and ricotta.
So I think if you took out the pasta and the ricotta...
That one's on you.
Yeah.
But could you make it with rice and ricotta?
You could.
I don't know what that would be, but yeah.
I would like to encourage everyone to try and break.
Yeah, I actually encourage that too, because I think that's also where good new things come from.
But this is also a very funny trope.
I make a practice of not looking at comments on the internet, especially in New York Times cooking recipes, because that is like so painful.
Actually I'm kind of a hypocrite because I never look at the comments on my recipes, because Because my fragile ego can't handle it.
But I always consult the comments when I'm looking for someone else's recipe.
But often it's truly a trope that you get like three down and someone's like well, I'm a vegan, or I only use margarine, or I did this, this and this, and this thing turned out horribly.
So I don't know, man.
We got this question that I love and I was also curious about.
Hi, Samin and Rishi.
My name's Aparna.
I have a question for Samin about the cookbook.
I'm curious if there is a recipe you really wanted to put in there but couldn't, and what is that recipe?
And Rishi, I have a question for you.
If you had a cookbook, what would it be called?
Thanks so much.
Oh, you go first.
Very nice to include me.
Absolutely not necessary.
I like how you acted surprised when you're the one who added it.
I thought so.
A question from the audience for me?
Oh, God.
Okay, let me think about this.
This is the look Rishi gets on his face when a pun is coming, and it's really, really painful.
No, I mean, this one came just today, so I didn't have a lot of time to think about it.
But I was thinking that you know as, living in a vegan household, as I do A lot of times, a lot of sort of vegan food is like a delivery method for condiments.
The veggie patty or the veggie burger.
The sweet potato.
It's just like you can switch the brands or whatever, but essentially it's really about what else goes on it.
And I think it would be nice to have a book that's only for the ways that you might dress your burgers, like all the different things.
Because I love when I go to a restaurant and they have, like you know, all these different burgers where you can get like the mushroom Swiss burger and the California burgers, but they're all like beef burgers.
So I thought it would be nice to have.
Could you have a cookbook?
That's just all the ways to do the veggie burgers.
And then you could call it only burgers in the building.
They liked it.
Okay, what's the recipe that you would have liked to have?
There were a bunch that we had to cut for a variety of reasons.
Space was one.
Sometimes a lot of my food is brown so it doesn't photograph that.
Well thought, maybe I just couldn't include because they were ugly.
On behalf of your food, I'm sorry actually.
And one of the ones that got cut that is really good and I still make all the time is I got really into ground turkey, speaking of burgers, and so I was like oh, how do I just make like a turkey burger or a little turkey patty, just like as moist as possible?
And I was trying all these different things and And at one point I was like, oh wow, like let me try grating some zucchini into it, because zucchini is just all water, basically.
So I did that and I added soy sauce and toasted sesame oil and ginger and garlic.
And it kind of had this like Korean-ish flavor and you could eat it on a little bun with gochujang and kimchi.
And I brought them over to Monday dinner and I was so proud.
I was like, I really nailed this, guys.
And Sarah took one look at it and she's like oh, it's just like Otolenghi's iconic turkey and zucchini meatballs.
So I actually did keep that one in with that story saying, like, I tried.
But in the end, it didn't make the cut.
But it's a good one.
I highly recommend the Otolenghi's turkey and chicken and zucchini meatballs.
Yeah.
I'm glad that happens in other mediums.
I mean, there's so many times when you write a song and you work so hard on it and you're like oh, and the melody it just came to me.
It's so catchy.
You're like, oh, God, I'm a genius.
And then you wake up the next day and you're like, oh, right.
I wrote a Beatles song.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We have this wonderful question that we got that I'm very excited.
This is the one question that I did tell you about beforehand, a little bit.
Oh, a little bit.
I tried to keep the questions in home cooking and, for these events, try to keep them a secret from Samin, but she needed a little bit of preparation.
I have no game face, so I like can't pretend.
So I gotta be surprised on stage.
I was trying to structure this as you know the beginning of the book and end with the end of the book.
You saw how the first part of that one We'll see how this goes.
But here's a really lovely question we got.
This is Maria.
I was talking to my friend Lauren, who should be in the audience with me in San Francisco on Saturday, about an episode where you had a question from David in Chicago who had a two-kilogram jar of maraschino cherries and swimming in a pool called Refrigerator 1957.
I think about that episode a lot, and it converted me to sardo cherries.
I was wondering if you could share with us another poem about food that you really love.
What a lovely question.
That poem, Refrigerator, 1957, is by Thomas Lux, one of my favorite poets.
And that is probably my all-time favorite food poem.
I asked Samin if there was another food poem that she loved.
And she said, yes.
In fact, there's a poem that I was considering ending the book with.
Yeah.
This is one of my favorite poems.
I actually have it printed and pasted right behind my computer.
And it's called Perhaps the World Ends Here.
It's by Joy Harjo, our former poet laureate.
And it's so beautiful.
And in so many ways it captures how I feel about cooking and the feeling that I wanted to convey in this book.
The world begins at a kitchen table.
No matter what, we must eat to live.
The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table.
So it has been since creation, and it will go on.
We chase chickens or dogs away from it, babies' teeth at the corners.
They scrape their knees under it.
It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human.
We make men at it, we make women.
At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.
Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children.
They laugh with us at our poor falling down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.
This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.
Wars have begun and ended at this table.
It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror, a place to celebrate the terrible victory.
We have given birth on this table and have prepared our parents for burial here.
At this table, we sing with joy, with sorrow.
We pray of suffering and remorse.
We give thanks.
Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.
Thank you all so much.
Thank you.
Well, that's it for this episode.
Thank you so much for listening to this special live one.
And we're going to have more of these soon because we're doing a bunch more of these events.
I'm really grateful that you came to do this event with me and that we're going to do so many more.
And, just like always, Home Cooking is made by us, with help from Mary Dolan, Amalia Mourinho and Zach McNeese.
And Mamie Reingold does our original episode art.
We're a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collective of independent listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts.
You can learn more about our shows at radiotopia.fm.
You can find recipes, transcripts, and resources at homecooking.show or shrimpjenga.com.
And we also have new merch at homecookingshow slash merch including a Team Sumesh Uncle sweatshirt.
Also, order Samin's book if you haven't, you sillies.
Oh, thanks.
Well, until next time, stay healthy, eat well, and take care of each other.
I'm Samin.
And I'm Rishi.
And we'll be home cooking.
Radiotopia.
From PRX.
