I'm Ina Garten.
Welcome to Be My Guest, the podcast.
One of the best gifts you can give friends is spending time together.
But what's even better than that?
Cooking with them.
On Be My Guest.
The podcast new, friends and old, stop by my barn for some conversation and great cooking.
We talk about food, life. and everything in between.
Listen to Be My Guest, the podcast with me, Ina Garten, and join us wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, I'm Samin Nasrat.
And I'm Rishi Keshirway.
And we're home cooking.
For real.
I'm in my home.
I'm in my home.
But we are back after our trip to Boston.
Oh, yeah.
What did we eat in Boston, Rishi?
A lot of food.
So many desserts.
Yeah.
Rishi, we're a bad combo.
We're bad for each other.
I know, we're real enablers.
Let me order every single pastry in Boston.
Yeah, you have no self-control when it comes to buying things from restaurants, because you want to support everybody and you want to try things.
And then the restaurants have no self-control because they're all like And they give you all kinds of extra stuff.
And then I have no control because I eat all of it.
Yeah.
We ordered from Sofra, which is one of my favorites in Boston.
I was so conservative with my order.
I was like, one thing for Rishi, one thing for me, and one little soup.
And they were so cute.
And then the thing came.
Giant bag comes.
Just like every dessert.
It was all so good.
Yeah.
What was one of your favorite things from the whole consumption?
Before I met up with you in Boston, I had been in Providence to see my dad, my family.
And my niece, Asha, took me to this place in Providence called Ceremony.
And I got something called a ginger espresso fizz.
As you know, I'm new to coffee.
Like you've had it three times in your life.
Yeah, exactly.
But I love ginger and I like... fizz as a general concept.
So I ordered that and it was amazing and weird.
And I really enjoyed it as an experience.
Have you ever had something like that?
Do you know what this drink is?
No, I haven't.
But the only way I can sort of make sense of it is a pumpkin spice latte.
But Well, I know that you showed up to Boston with a bag of your favorite Trader Joe's chocolate covered honey grams.
Yep.
And then there was a flour bakery around the corner from our hotel.
So we made a pilgrimage down there and I literally bought one of everything, sometimes two of everything.
Yeah.
The day after our Boston show, I went back.
And you got more chocolate chip cookies?
I didn't get a chocolate chip cookie.
But then later at the airport I said I wish I'd gotten a chocolate chip cookie.
So this episode today is a presentation of the conversation that Samin and I had about her book Good Things live in Boston.
There's a special guest introducer.
Here's our live conversation from the Emerson Colonial Theater in Boston.
Hope you like it.
Good evening.
This is Sumesh Hirvi.
Welcome to the show.
I'm very happy to be here and happy you all can be here for this conversation about Samin's book Good Things.
Please welcome to this stage my son, Rishikesh Hirvay, and my friend, Samin Nosrat.
Thank you, Suresh Uncle.
Thank you, Dad.
And thank you to everyone who I know you come from not just nearby.
I know people make an effort to come here and it means so much to us.
So thank you.
And truly from the bottom of our hearts, like it's such an honor to get to spend this evening with you.
So thank you.
Yeah.
Yeah, let me add my thanks as well.
I'm so happy to be here with Samin on this happy occasion to talk about her new cookbook.
I'm so happy to be here in Boston.
Rishi's hometown.
Yeah.
And we've gotten a bunch of great questions which I've put together and I'm going to present to Samin and you tonight.
But first, before we get into the questions, there are some selections from Good Things that I would love Samin to read.
Samin, would you please read from page 377?
Yes.
Page 377 is the recipe for a variation on focaccia called barberry focaccia.
In Persian households, breakfast revolves around bread.
When I traveled to Iran for the first time at age 14...
I was baffled by the distinct lack of a toaster in every home I visited.
Then I realized who needs a toaster when you can get fresh, steaming hot flatbread from the corner bakery every morning?
Over the course of that summer we traveled back and forth several times between Tehran and my grandparents' citrus orchard in the north.
Perched on the lush Caspian coast, their village reminded me a lot of San Diego, where I'd spent my whole life.
Unlike my grandmother, my grandfather didn't speak English, so we learned to make do with body language and my third-grade-level Farsi.
Even so, the bond between us was palpable, and it was strengthened by our shared love of noonbarberry, a thick, chewy flatbread topped with sesame or nigella seeds.
Any time I was there, he'd get up early to drive to the next village to get a sparberry from his favorite baker.
When he returned we'd tear off pieces of warm bread to eat with sweet butter and caviar him, or feta-style cheese and honey me.
Will you follow that up by reading from page 402?
Yes.
402 is a recipe I worked on for... probably 30 years.
It's for a yellow buttermilk cake.
For a while, I called it my yellow whale cake, which you'll understand.
I was born in San Diego, but I never felt like I belonged there.
My mom, desperate to instill some sense of cultural heritage in me, and my brothers constantly reminded us that we were Iranian first and American second.
Outside our home, the messages that I didn't fit in were both implicit and explicit.
My name tumbled awkwardly out of people's mouths.
My skin tone, big nose and massive head of curls, not to mention the unruly hair everywhere else on my body, all drew attention.
I didn't want.
All I wanted as a kid was to blend in, to be normal, just like everyone else, to be known, instead of judged.
And somehow, very early on, that yellow box cake with chocolate frosting came to represent the sense of belonging that was just out of reach.
My mom wasn't much of a baker, and when she did bake, it wasn't from a box.
For our birthdays she ordered dense chocolate cakes covered in chocolate shavings from the most exquisite European bakery in town.
The cakes were beautiful.
They just weren't what I wanted.
Years later, when I started cooking and baking, I was drawn, of course, to yellow cake recipes.
But while homemade versions often tasted better than boxed due to their higher quality ingredients, their texture was always a disappointment.
Too dense, too dry, too greasy.
Nothing ever had that fork tender light as air texture that reminded me of the bake sale cupcakes and slices of birthday cakes at pool parties that always left me wanting more.
Eventually, I learned how cake mixes are made, by coating flour with tiny solid fat particles, usually in the form of shortening, in industrial-size mixers, so that when you add an egg, oil, and water at home, minimal gluten forms.
That leads to the moist, melt-in-your-mouth texture I so love.
I set out to replicate the technique using quality ingredients and eventually learned about something called reverse creaming.
It's a method popularized by Rose Levy Berenbaum, author of The Cake Bible.
Honestly, I didn't write this, but if I had just picked up a book called The Cake Bible, it probably would have saved me 20 years.
It's like right there on page six instead of the typical creaming process, in which butter and sugar are whipped together, butter very soft but still solid is mixed into the dry ingredients to completely coat them with fat, mimicking commercial cake mix.
The result was exactly what i'd been looking for.
After three decades, victory was mine, Thank you.
Thank you so much for reading those.
The reason why I wanted to highlight those two spots specifically is because those passages were about a focaccia recipe and a yellow cake recipe.
And yet they were also both about being from Iran, growing up in San Diego, and the distance between those two things, culturally and in your own life and socially, And knowing how much you've I don't want to use the word struggled.
I'm trying to find the right word, but with identity in terms of like fitting in in America, feeling like maybe not Iranian enough, maybe feeling not American enough.
Anyway, I feel your pain.
And yet you've managed to wrap that around writing about all kinds of food.
We got a question that I think also echoed some of the thoughts that I had.
So I thought I would play that.
My name is Shaila.
I also am the daughter of immigrants.
My parents immigrated to the U.S. as Parsis from India in the 1970s.
You have done an incredible job of not pigeonholing yourself as a Persian cook in a world where so much of what we do is linked to our identity.
As someone who has struggled with my relationship, with my own Indian-ness, I really connect with that.
With that being said, I will admit that Persian is my number one favorite food.
So I want to know, when you want something simple, nostalgic and representing your roots and your home, what do you cook?
Wow, that's such a beautiful question.
I just also want to say, because I think a lot of people are not familiar with the Parsi community.
So the Parsis are an ethnic minority.
I think Parsis sort of originated in Iran, but They were forced out and a lot were in India.
And so, to me, some of the best cooking in the world is Parsi cooking, which is different than Persian cooking.
It's kind of like a hybrid.
It meets in the middle between India and Iran.
And so it's like everything I love about Persian cooking, but also spiced.
And there's an amazing Parsi anthropologist and food writer, Niloufer Ichiporya King, and she's written one of my favorite cookbooks.
It's called My Bombay Kitchen.
And so for Shaila I would say please get yourself my Bombay kitchen, because there are so many simple and delicious Parsi recipes in there.
When it comes to Persian cooking, I would say the simplest thing that reminds me of a home is any chicken with the taste of saffron and lemon.
And I have a sort of a variation on that in the book.
Actually, it's called Jujicabob roast chicken.
But that saffron lemon combination is just such an Iranian taste.
It's so lemony limey.
And then I would either make like a simple crispy rice, a tadig.
I also have a recipe in the book.
But there's another Persian way of making rice, called kateh, which usually has some yogurt in it and it's kind of a little bit more pudding-y.
And so that one's a little more comfort food-y.
But I would say rice is for sure my comfort food, yeah.
Yeah.
Some of the other... recipes that you have in there, besides things like tadig, come from all over.
I feel like you've really represented the globe.
What were you thinking about when you decided to pull inspiration from different parts of the world?
As you were deciding what recipes to include?
Well, context is everything when writing about food.
I'm very sensitive to appropriation and I'm constantly sort of agonizing about like, am I doing that?
The premise of this book and I say it right there on the first page is It's everything I'm excited about.
And I'm like, oh my God, this is so good.
People need to know about this.
I want to share it.
And there were some things that gave me that feeling that it really, I sort of questioned myself.
Am I the person to do this?
Or can I do this respectfully?
So an example of where I was really failing is at some point in the pandemic I watched The Taco Chronicles, which is like a food show on Netflix about tacos.
And there was an amazing episode about tacos al pastor, which is like the street taco, where the pork's on a spit and there's pineapple on top.
And tacos al pastor comes from Puebla Mexico, where there was sort of a path from Lebanon to Puebla.
Crazily enough.
And so the Lebanese who came to Mexico, I think maybe 150 years ago or something brought with them like meat on a spit and pita bread, you know, like flatbreads like, imagine a gyros right.
Or a shawarma or something.
But they didn't have lamb there.
They had pork.
So that became, over time, Tacos al Pastor, which is such a cool story.
And we often are so committed to this idea of like capital A authenticity.
But the thing is, is like, things are always changing.
There's all these ways that people move somewhere else, they use what's available and they're cooking toward the taste of home.
And so a new thing happens.
Is that any less authentic?
No.
But I do think you have to understand and pay homage to where something comes.
So I was so fascinated and inspired by the tacos al pastor that I was like I'm gonna translate this for home cooks, but I'm gonna make it easy and delicious.
But guess what?
Ha ha!
It's not meant to be translated for home cooks, because the whole thing is that it's cooked on the side of the street like over a fire and on a spinning thing.
And I was trying to translate it to a braise and it just didn't taste the same.
And I was sort of hitting myself against the wall over and over again.
And on top of that, I was feeling this intense burden of, is this even mine to tell?
Somebody else's al pastore.
Yes.
Oh, my God.
And so, between the fact that I couldn't come up with a good recipe and I was still not sure that it was mine to tell I had to let that one go.
And there are a lot like that.
And then there are other ones where if I can write my way into a story and connect it.
So another example is there's a Piri Piri chicken in the book.
That was inspired by a meal I shared with some friends in London.
We went to this basically pop-up restaurant that was making Piri Piri chicken.
It was so good.
And I didn't really know what Piri Piri chicken was.
And I came home and I started reading about it.
And there are these chilies called Piri Piri.
Chilies that originated in South America made their way to Spain and Portugal became Piri Piri sauce, which was just like this very vinegary hot sauce that people would brush onto chicken and grill.
And then, over time, due to colonialism, that made its way to South Africa, which is really now what is the place most known at this time in history for peri-peri chicken.
And I was like, okay, how do I tell that story in a one-paragraph headnote?
LAUGHTER
And I ultimately couldn't, but I could credit the people that inspired my meal.
And I sort of asked them, I said, do your prep cooks like come from any of these places?
And they did.
So I acknowledge that to the best of my ability.
I read as much as I could about the recipe and then I did my best to make it mine.
I feel like, as long as I'm doing my homework and giving an appropriate amount of context, it feels like I'm not taking.
It feels like I'm opening a door. and inviting people in.
And so that's always sort of a test.
That I'm trying to do is either tell it in some way through my own experience, or just actually say this is Tio's recipe for Sonoratown machaca, which is delicious.
And I tell his story.
And I just say, this is really good.
It's somebody else's recipe that he shared with me.
How lucky am I?
How lucky are we?
Do you think that everybody's entitled to that same kind of freedom that you feel?
If everybody's being sensitive to context, can everybody make any kind of food?
100%.
I really liked what you said about the Parsi community and about the meeting in the middle of Iran and India.
And so I wanted to play this question.
This is Sabrina from the Bay Area.
I really like to cook Indian food.
I was brought up with it and I'm really loving all the recipes in your book good things and I wanted to know which recipes you think would pair really well with Indian food, or ones that I could change or alter a little bit to have more of an Indian taste to them.
I love this.
I mean, I am again, not an expert.
India is like a huge country with many different cuisines.
But, you know, often when I think about making things taste...
Sort of taking them toward a cultural direction or particular cuisine.
I think about the herbs and the spices that are commonly found.
And so the thing about India is like India is where pretty much all the spices come from.
And so there are so many spices used in so many different combinations.
So it really depends what it is.
That you're interested in.
So, you know, there's a simple recipe for making a pot of beans.
You could very easily adapt to that and make dal, if you made tadka or there's so many names for this.
Chonk, what's your culture's word for that?
Like the spice mixture that you sizzle in the ghee.
Yes.
Dad, what do you call that?
Fodny.
Oh, Fodny.
There are many regional names for when you sizzle spices in ghee and it becomes this kind of aromatic flavor base.
So that's a super simple way you can basically turn any soup into something more Indian-ish.
It can be as simple as a few mustard seeds, a little coriander, cumin, and a chili, right?
What do you do?
I know you make your chana.
Yeah.
And it starts with onions and garlic and eventually has cumin and turmeric and stuff like that.
That was the first thing that I learned to cook.
And then when it came time to cook other things, that was just where I would start.
I'd chop an onion and garlic and ginger, you know, and then I'd make pasta and I'd be like, why does this taste like choli?
Yeah.
You know, like when you go to a school cafeteria and no matter what they serve you, there's like this underlying flavor that everything has.
I can't make things that don't feel a little bit Indian.
Yeah, I feel you.
One of my favorite things that's truly always in my fridge, there's a garlic and herb labané.
So I think that's not that different than a raita.
So you could add cucumber to that.
You know even the piri piri chicken that I just talked about, or the jujube kebab chicken.
You could add the spice mixture into there and Indianify that quite easily.
Like Rishi says, I think if you just add a little...
Basically a little turmeric and cumin cooked in ghee to anything.
You can kind of take it in that direction.
Also one of the things I sort of stumbled into during the pandemic.
A friend bequeathed to me 14 pounds of plugra butter that she could not use before it went bad.
But it was like August and it was so hot and my fridge is very small.
So I left it on the counter for a couple of days.
And when I came back, it was like, it was an emergency situation.
And so I was like, I guess I have to make ghee now.
So I put it all in a big pot and started making ghee.
And then I had this moment of oh, I'm just going to put a bunch of cardamom in that and I'll make cardamom flavored ghee, because I love cardamom so much.
And also I was still in the banana bread baking phase of the pandemic.
So I was like, ooh, it'll be really good for that.
And so I ended up with five quart jars of this cardamom ghee and I gave some away, but it took me probably two years to work my way through it.
And I used it for all sorts of things.
I used it on popcorn.
I would melt it and drizzle it into a soup.
But I think I would use it as the base to start cooking my onions for tadka.
And so you could absolutely, I think even just adding some cardamom ghee or using that as a base for your tadka is a great way to make things taste more Indian too.
I apologize for how Iranian Indian this whole conversation is going to be.
Would you say you're sorry, not sorry?
Oh, I see.
Well, I was in Providence visiting my dad before this, in the heart of campus, so everything around me was brown.
Here's a question we got from Aparna.
Hi, Samin and Rishi.
My name is Aparna.
My question for you is about holiday gatherings since we're entering that season.
You know Diwali is coming up and I have decided this year that we are going to do a cookie exchange at Diwali of Diwali themed cookies, because why should Christmas have all the fun?
So I'm wondering if you have any other friendly competition ideas for family gatherings that are food or kitchen or cooking related.
Thanks so much.
Interesting.
Samin, would you consider yourself a competitive person?
Who, me?
But I don't know if I feel that way when it comes to food.
But Aparna's not saying give me cookie recipes.
She's saying give me other challenges to add to my cooking Olympics.
She kind of instantly turned it from a friendly –
I know, I was like a cookie exchange to a competition.
It's a competition.
I guess implicit in the cookie exchange is you're going to be judging everybody on how well they achieve the Diwali cookie theme, how good the cookie is.
I know you do a cookie exchange for Christmas often.
Yes, because to me a cookie exchange is an amazing thing because you only have to make one, but then you get.
I didn't mean it like that.
She doesn't mean to be an overachiever.
But you get so much more than you give, is what I'm saying.
Okay, here's the competition I think about.
When you say holidays, I think The Thanksgiving meal is so bland.
Oh, God, and I'm sitting in Boston, the house of Thanksgiving.
Like, oh, my God.
There are ghosts of pilgrims surrounding us.
Circling your head right now.
I will say, let's look at the Thanksgiving table and what do we see?
A likely under-seasoned turkey.
Possibly under-seasoned, but very starchy potatoes.
Possibly under-seasoned stuffing.
Once again, would you say brown is all around you?
Yeah, everything's kind of like...
Brown and starchy, likely under seasoned, you know, ooh.
So to me, what the table's missing is freshness and acid.
So I have taken a campaign to acidify Thanksgiving.
So I think a way to include people and sure make it a competition, if you want to is to invite people to create a condiment like a condiment party.
And that could be whatever feels appropriate for the meal.
Or maybe it's inspired by your own cultural heritage.
Like for me, I put yogurt in everything because I'm Iranian.
But often for Thanksgiving I suggest making a fried sage salsa verde, because then it has the sort of Thanksgiving taste with the fried sage, but also all of this like fresh parsley and shallots and a lot of like red wine vinegar.
It's just brightens everything up.
You could make your version of a chili crisp or a chili oil.
I mean, come on, Boston, you got to admit like...
You could use a little spice.
Yeah.
You could do that.
You could bring a chutney.
A chutney is not that different than a cranberry sauce.
You could even make cranberry sauce sort of inspired in the chutney direction.
What would the title of that competition be?
Like a sauce?
It's all gravy.
It's all gravy.
Thank you very much.
So you don't identify as a competitive person?
No, I am a competitive person.
We all know this.
Like, do I have to tell you what happened just like four days ago?
Do I have to tell everybody?
Everybody waits with bated breath the Wednesday after their book is published for the New York Times bestseller list to be announced.
And you just sit there waiting.
Actually, Rishi and I were in the midst of recording an episode of Home Cooking and I got a phone call, like very breathless, from my editor and agent.
They're like on a party line and they're like, we're so proud of you.
You're on the New York Times bestseller list.
It's number two.
First of all, you can probably infer from that story that they are not immigrants, because they would not have said we're so proud of you.
And then also it's number two.
And I was like, I'm really happy.
Thanks, guys.
I am so happy.
It's so awesome.
I'm so grateful.
I go to a lot of therapy, but it would be a lie to not admit that.
Of course, the thought passed my mind.
Wow, I just missed number one by that much.
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 Samay Shunkle.
He has his own shirt that says, Team Samesh 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.
Again, it's homecooking.show slash merch.
If you're a fan of home cooking and the way it's all put together but, like me, you wish it had a little less Rishi in it.
Let me recommend Rishi's other podcast, The Brilliant and Magical Song Exploder.
Rishi's the host, but he cuts himself entirely out of the interviews he does with amazing musicians like Janelle Monae, Robin Fleetwood Mac, U2 and more.
So you just hear them talking about the creative process behind the making of one of their songs.
I was actually a fan of Song Exploder way before Rishi and I became friends.
Two of my favorite episodes are the ones with Solange and Sylvan Esso.
The show is so carefully and thoughtfully made and it's just really inspiring for anyone who creates things.
Find it wherever you listen to podcasts.
Do you know what Boston's nickname is?
Not you all.
No.
No, I only know about the green monster.
Okay, on the count of three, maybe everybody can shout at Samin what the nickname of Boston is.
One, two, three.
Oh, yeah!
Yeah, I did know that!
In honor of Beantown and your competitive spirit, here's a question we got from both Anne and Liz.
So I live in Dayton, Ohio, and every year my corporate office does a chili competition.
I want to enter my neighborhood chili contest.
And by enter, I mean I want to win.
Do you have any suggestions on ingredients or methods that I could use to turn what I think is a pretty good chili recipe into an award-winning chili?
Some things that I've tried that have worked well are dark chocolate, cocoa powder, chipotle peppers salsa, pumpkin beer was really good and green chilies.
The issue every year is that some of us take it really seriously and love cooking and we make these incredible chilies, and other people, just you know, make the normal canned chili.
And the issue is that usually the chili that wins is the one that is more leans toward an Ohio-style chili can of chili, which leaves some of us feeling frustrated.
So I was hoping you and Rishi could help me come up with a chili for our chili competition that makes everyone happy and is also fun to cook.
Wow, this is hard.
Also, I don't know what an Ohio style chili is.
I don't either, but I can imagine.
My mind goes straight to chili con carne, because most of the people I know who are chili crazed are Texan.
Yes, thank you.
And in Texas, there is nary a bean to be found in a chili.
It's meat only.
Oh, see?
Yeah.
Go back to carne town, man.
Yeah.
Okay.
I think for the sake of inclusivity, except for those who are being intolerant, let's call this a vegetarian or vegetable forward or bean forward chili.
Well, here's the thing.
There are now veggie options for all kinds of chilies.
True.
You can make an impossible chili.
Exactly.
Yes, it's true.
Okay.
When you were saying that everything you made tasted like chole.
I totally also would make chili that tasted like chole.
Because I also was like, cumin goes with coriander, goes with turmeric, goes with whatever.
Like those were just sort of in my mind all lumped together.
So I would always put them in and people would be like, is there turmeric in this chili?
Like...
I'm like, yeah.
And eventually I was like, oh, maybe not the right flavor.
Now I can't tell you what's going to win your competition, because I don't know what it is people are tasting for.
But Rishi and I can come up with something kind of crazy and, I think, delicious between the two of us.
So I actually think we should go toward a Chole Chili.
Don't you think so?
A chili chili?
Okay.
Yeah.
Would you say that your more relaxed approach to cooking.
These days you think about things more chili.
Yeah.
Okay.
That's the perfect mindset to approach this answer.
It is.
But just to give some technical information to our listeners, go for your choli chili.
I would say that you gotta have some chili part and some chile part.
So chili to me has to have kidney beans.
Kidney and chickpeas are nice.
That's a classic combo.
Every salad bar in the history of the world has a kidney and chickpeas mix.
And so I think kidney and chickpeas would be a great sort of bean legume base.
You'd put chickpeas in the chili?
Yeah.
We're making chili chili.
Okay, okay.
We got to innovate out here.
It's your show.
Okay.
And then what else is in chili?
Onions, garlic.
Ginger.
Yeah.
So you follow Rishi's recipe for chole.
Then you add some kidney beans and tomatoes.
You make sure you have your delicious tadka to finish it with.
You have a tomato paste that you sort of cook into the fat, and then crushed tomatoes that we're going to add too.
What's our liquid?
Aquafaba.
Oh.
Normally.
But could you use the kidney bean?
Yeah, the bean cooking water.
Kidnafaba?
Aquakidney.
Aquakidney.
Sometimes people add a little beer.
Oh, but I think really where this choli is going to shine is the toppings.
So.
Shave.
Describe shave.
Okay.
It's made from a chickpea flour and it's fried and it's crunchy and it's like little like angel hair pasta that's been deep fried and then broken into tiny little pieces.
So like you make your choli chili and then you put your yogurt on top.
You drizzle your like ghee spices.
You top it with shave.
Definitely some cilantro.
Yeah.
Cheddar cheese.
Cheddar cheese would be, you know, you just bring it back to chili.
A little cheddar cheese.
Is that good?
That sounds good to me okay yeah, oh.
And you know how sometimes you eat chili out of a tostada bowl.
You could make like poppadums, because you want to eat like something crunchy and you want like a crispy, like a.
Yeah, this is fully not chili, it is chola.
You've just changed the vowels.
Well, there you go.
It's your curveball.
Just make choli.
Okay.
Well, we've spent a lot of time in my roots.
I thought we could go back to a couple of questions that we got.
That, I thought, really showcased some of the most Iranian ingredients.
Did you just do racial profiling for this entire episode?
Here's a question from Anita.
Hi, Samin and Rishi.
I have been buying boxes of the pitted medjool dates and putting little bits of them into my overnight oats and sometimes having them on crackers with cheese.
But I am wondering if you have any ideas about other types of dates that might be interesting to try or other recipes that use dates.
I've noticed that by the time I'm getting to the end of the box they're starting to dry out a little bit.
So I'm wondering if I should be using them at a faster speed in other recipes.
Yes.
I love this question.
I love dates so much.
And also the same thing happens to me because I get greedy and I buy a lot and then it takes me forever to use them and they dry out.
Sorry, dates.
But my number one favorite way to use up a large amount of dates is a recipe called Fruit and Nut Cake by Alice Medrich.
Alice Medrich is an amazing pastry chef and recipe writer.
She's iconic, actually.
So, in fact, what I didn't read when I read you the yellow cake head note was that the way I knew that the yellow cake was done after 30-something years was I brought it to Alice Medrich and she said it was okay.
And I was like, okay.
Okay.
So anyway, she has this amazing recipe for this fruit and nut cake, which is sort of her take on a classic fruitcake.
But it's nothing like the fruitcake that you know is hated, and so it's basically just like a large amount of nuts and dried fruits, and the two sort of main dried fruits that give it its best texture are dates and figs, because they're soft, And then you can mix in other ones.
Like I like putting apricots in, but it's a really sort of choose your own adventure type of recipe.
And you mix all this up in a bowl and you toss it with a very thin batter of brown sugar and egg and a tiny bit of flour.
And then you just bake it until it's set.
And then it makes this beautiful, very dense loaf that you can now slice at room temperature, or even I sometimes just make them and freeze them and then pull them out.
But it's like the exact perfect thing for a cheese board.
You slice it super thin.
It's kind of like a home version of those yummy Raincoast crisps.
It's so good.
I love making it and giving it away as a holiday gift.
But I also like just chopping dates up and adding them up into any cereal.
Not cereal.
Cereal's good.
Actually, she said that.
I liked that she put it in her oats because I also put dates...
And peanut butter and cardamom ghee in my oats.
But I also, I meant salad when I said cereal.
So like, and one of my friends made this recipe that she saw on TikTok, a place I've never been and I won't allow myself to go, because I'll just never, you'll never see me again.
She saw a TikTok recipe for this like basically a snap pea chopped salad.
So it was like snap peas and pine nuts and cheddar cheese and a whole bunch of herbs and a really sort of like bright vinaigrette.
And so I took that and I, changed it a whole bunch and I just made it over and over again.
I changed the cheeses and I added dates into it and it's so good.
So that one's in the book too.
I feel like we can get a sense of how familiar you are with the app by how much you enunciated TikTok.
Have you heard of it?
I also like cereal and salad being in the same possible family.
They're both a mix of things in a bowl.
Yeah, with some liquid.
Here's a question that we got from sam.
So recently i was at our egyptian grocery store and i saw sumac and i bought it because i had remembered that samin really likes sumac.
And the problem is i bought a pound of it and i know you can like sprinkle it on stuff That is not going to get me through a pound of sumac.
So if you guys have any recipes or ideas to use up a lot of sumac, that would be much appreciated.
Oh, my God.
A pound of sumac.
A pound of sumac?
Okay, for those of you who don't know, sumac is a berry.
And I didn't actually know it's so used in Egyptian food.
But in Iranian cooking, it's kind of like always on the table.
It's kind of dried and then ground up.
And it's this sort of reddish brownish powder that we sprinkle predominantly on kebabs and it sort of lends this floral sourness.
Iranians have a very acidic palate, so nothing is ready to eat until it's balanced with some sourness.
So this is the sourness We'll stir into our rice that we're eating with kebabs, or sprinkle on top of the kebabs.
And that's the main and really only way that I ever experienced it, until I became a cook and learned about za'atar.
So Zatar is a name for a wild... See, this is one of those things I love.
And also, I will never know what the answer is.
I have looked so deeply into this.
If you go to Palestine, Zatar is a wild time.
If you go to Israel or Lebanon, it might be a dried oregano.
And so it's its own thing that lives somewhere in that thyme or oregano family.
It's the name for the herb, and it's also the name for this mixture of these three ingredients, or sometimes four.
Sometimes there's salt in it too.
And it adds this amazing, very strong, very aromatic herb-ness because of said herbs.
And also this like little bit of crunch from the sesame seeds and if there's salt crystals in there.
And then, of course, some acidity from the sumac and a little bit of color, which is so nice.
And so it's a really nice thing to have.
And with a pound of sumac you could make a very large batch of za'atar and then put it into tiny jars and give it away as gifts.
I know that your childhood has been an important part, and the formation of the way you think about food and also kids have been a big part of what went into this book too.
So here's a question that we got from annie Hi, Samin and Rishi.
My name is Annie.
I am 12 years old and I was wondering if you had any suggestions for delicious snacks with proteins.
They would have to be not too messy and preferably be able to stay at room temperature, since I usually have a snack on the way to ballet in the car.
I, for a while, had been eating just plain peanut butter crackers on the way, which was okay for a little while, and then got pretty boring.
I would love if you had any suggestions for...
Quick snacks that I could make the night before or the day of that are full of protein, fresh and delicious.
Thank you.
Annie, I love you.
I think annie's here tonight.
Are you here annie, over there?
Hi okay, i love this, and also rishi's gonna be really good at this because he's really into his macros, so Like he's going to have other suggestions.
But I think about this a lot, especially because right now I'm on a book tour.
And so I often am like, what can I have in my pocket or my backpack that's going to save me?
Because I'm the kind of person, I have snacks in the car.
I have to have snacks everywhere because I just can't risk becoming hangry.
It's bad news.
So right now, my snacks of choice.
You may not like I carry around those little peanut butter packets like, so I can just squirt them in my mouth.
Just like when you're desperate.
Along the lines of desperation.
Baby bell cheeses, because they're wrapped in the wax they kind of like, will keep for a long time.
So sometimes I'll just find them in my pockets.
And also string cheese is another one.
Like string cheese has a lot of protein.
So those are sort of involved, no cooking, but they're just ready to eat.
I think if you want to have like one step of labor, hard boiled eggs.
Or you could make deviled eggs if you want to make them a little special.
I don't like it when hard-boiled eggs have a ring of gray or green around the yolk.
So I usually bring the water to a boil, cook them for between nine and ten minutes, and then I put them into an ice bath.
And that gets a really nice sort of solid yolk.
That's the kind of yolk you could like.
Keep that egg in your backpack and then you know you could also keep like a little teeny, tiny bag of salt and pepper.
And then when you're being taken after school to ballet, you can roll your egg around, crack it open and the yolk will be solid and hard enough that it won't drip all over you.
But it won't be green, which is nice.
I also think another good snack that's high protein is hummus or like a white bean hummus that you could make and have with veggies or crackers.
What's Rishi got?
Yeah, hummus and crackers, I think is a really good way to go, because you can change up the kind of cracker and change up the flavor of the hummus and feel like you're not doing the same thing over and over again.
This is my other go-to that, like a lot of times, I'll make these if I have to leave for an early morning flight.
I'll make myself two very little bean and cheese burritos and then sort of like griddle them and then like let them, you know, be room temperature and bring them on the plane.
And I have to say, they sort of temper really nicely.
You could put a little hot sauce in there if you want before, but it's just like a little packet of protein and deliciousness.
A little bean and cheese burrito is a good one.
This might be a little too deserty, but I was thinking about it because of Anita's question about the dates.
You could also take some almond butter, cut a date in half and fill the hollow of the date with almond butter and make a little like you know.
Nature's Reese's peanut butter.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They're so good.
Oh, beef jerky tuna fish sandwich, oh yeah, but the problem there is the room temperature part of it, yeah and is.
Well, there are styles of tuna sandwiches that don't involve mayonnaise.
They're not my favorite.
You could just carry around a can of tuna.
That would make you very popular at ballet.
Yeah, it's true.
What do you think, Annie?
Did you get some good suggestions there?
Was there anything useful?
Okay, good.
Okay, she's nodding.
Thank you so much for the question.
Okay, that brings us to, I think, our last question of the night.
And this one also comes from folks who are here.
This is Susan, from Annapolis, and I am going to be in Boston with my daughter Sarah, who just turned 25.
She is a chef in Asheville.
And Samin, this question is for you.
What advice would you give to your 25-year-old self as a chef?
Wow.
Where are you guys?
Hi.
Wow.
Thank you.
When I was 25, I was running a restaurant kitchen.
I was really under-resourced and it was me and a bunch of dudes.
It was not the funnest job.
What would I say to her?
Everything doesn't have to be the hardest.
I took everything so seriously.
I'm a child of immigrants and sort of really intuited that the path to success and happiness was working myself as hard as I possibly could.
And then I became a cook.
And the ethos in cooking and in kitchens.
Very much is about sort of denying your physical self and working as hard as you can.
It was sort of this message of sacrifice and put your head down and work and that that's the most important thing was really sort of nailed into me in that time of my life.
And I have spent the subsequent years trying to unlearn that.
So probably what I would tell her is like there's stuff outside of work.
And in fact, that's what makes you a whole person and a happy person and also helps you be better at your work.
You don't have to sacrifice everything to be the best, because actually like, if you're miserable which I really was you're just going to make everyone around you miserable, which I did.
And so I wish that I had learned like the real language of self-care, you know, not the like commercial one, the capitalist one, but just like.
What does it even mean to consider myself in a situation?
Which, like I said, restaurants truly like.
If you have to go to the bathroom in the middle of a shift, you have to hold it.
You don't get to go to the bathroom because if one person leaves, the whole thing is thrown off.
So there are just so many ways I learned to ignore what I needed or what was good for me, and now I'm trying to figure out how to like really pay attention to those things, and those things just make me a more sensitive person, a better artist honestly, because I think being an artist is about being able to pay attention to what's happening inside of you and what's happening outside of you.
I was living so deeply in my head.
I was not in the world in any way.
And so that's the other thing I have to say is you don't need to hear that from me, because the people I know who are in kitchens now, you know, are 25 now.
They're radical.
They're awesome.
Like they do not take what we took seriously.
You are outspoken.
You kind of know what your boundaries are.
And I really admire that.
And so just like, don't lose yourself in the work is what I would say.
How different from that 25-year-old do you feel like you are now?
Oh my God, so different.
I have so much compassion for her.
You know, I was just doing my best.
And we all are, right?
We're all just doing our best.
And I'm still just doing my best.
But there was so much I didn't understand about my own family history, like the context from which I came about.
The world about misogyny, about racism, about capitalism.
And I'm a really mushy, like soft-hearted person.
And so I just absorbed so much of the sadness and the pain.
And then I also was not always that nice, because I was kind of just always frustrated under-resourced, angry that these boys weren't listening to me.
And I have done so much work to try to be different to myself and to other people.
I have many kinds of therapy.
I have a lot of years of therapy under my belt since then.
And I think that's the other thing I would tell her is get yourself to therapy.
Well, I feel very lucky to know you and to know the version of you that's taken all of those years of learning and wisdom and put it into this book and put it into your life and put it into this conversation tonight.
So thank you so much, Samin.
Thank you all for coming.
Thank you guys all.
Thank you.
And that's it for this episode.
We made this episode with the help of Zach McNeese, Mary Dolan, Amalia Mourinho and Mimi Reingold makes our artwork.
We're a proud member of Radiotopia, a collective of independent podcasts.
You can learn more about all the Radiotopia shows at radiotopia.fm.
Our website is homecooking.show, where you can find recipes and transcripts for all our episodes.
And you can also get merch, including a Team Sumesh Uncle sweatshirt, as well as a bunch of other stuff that features the great artwork by Mamie Reingold at homecookingshow slash merch.
You can follow Rishi on Instagram at rishihirway, or subscribe to his newsletter.
Except Cookies at rishikeshsubstackcom.
And you can find Samin on Instagram at chowsamin, and subscribe to her newsletter A Grain of Salt at chowsaminsubstackcom.
Stay healthy, eat well, and take care of each other.
And thank you so much for listening.
I'm Samin.
And I'm Rishi.
And we'll be home cooking.
Some of the topics they cover include the Varsity Blues admission scandal, where wealthy parents tried to rig their kids' college applications, and the scandal in the WNBA where an owner got fined for letting players fly on private jets.
What can cheating scandals teach us about the world?
Listen and find out.
Only If You Get Caught is from Defector Media and Radiotopia.
It's hosted by Patrick Redford and produced by Alex Sujong-Loughlin.
It comes out on October 21st, wherever you get your podcasts.
Radiotopia.
From PRX.
