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Hey, it's Francis. This week, we're bringing you back to an episode from last year about modern hippie cooking, and we'll take some questions from you with one of my favorite chefs.
Have a listen. I'm Francis Lam, and this is The Splendid Table from APM.
So a couple of years ago, a cookbook by the hilariously unexpected title of Salad Freak burst onto the scene, climbed the bestseller list, and honestly forever changed the way I look at making and eating salads.
The author, Jess Dammack, had worked for none other than Martha Stewart herself, and honed her style of making food light, wholesome, but totally full of flavor.
Well, it turns out that the salad freak didn't come from nowhere.
She has the original salad freaks to thank, the hippies.
Her new book, Health Nut, is a sun -drenched love letter to hippie cooking, but I swear it tastes really good.
So, hey, Jess. Hi. I am so glad you can make it.
I mean, literally, because you have had, like, the busiest couple of years since we talked last. Yes, it's true.
You, so you co -wrote, not only co -wrote Benny Blanco's cookbook, but your own at the same exact time.
So congratulations.
I'm glad you made it through.
Thank you. Yeah. And you know, I have to say, it looks like you had fun making the book too, because I mean, I love both of your books.
They have so much style.
And this one is super inspired by the 70s and hippies and hippie food.
like i think you literally have a recipe in the book that was inspired by a person named isis aquarius and you know i thought it was kind of like fun and cool and quirky and then i'm like i don't know i realized like half of what i eat now was probably considered hippie food it's tofu it's whole grains it's vegetables literally granola i actually eat a lot of granola but what makes you personally connect with that era you know i my parents really wanted to be hippies there my mom was an emergency room nurse yeah my mom was an emergency room nurse for 35 years and i feel like after being in a high
stress environment like that it was hard to like truly be a hippie but they definitely you know we we spent a lot of time in vermont growing up Um, they really, I'm so grateful until I was like much too old to believe this.
I thought that soda was seltzer water with like a little bit of juice in it.
Like I hardly had any sugar growing up.
I really thought that all pancakes were like thin rubbery gray buckwheat pancakes.
Um, and you know, I grew up on a, on a little tiny Island that's literally called shelter Island.
So I didn't know know there was anything else um and i'm really grateful for that experience because i still eat that way um it's it's comfort food to me it's uh it feels really good to eat and i feel like you know so fortunate to not crave like super super sugary sweets all the time i think i do have a sweet tooth but it's like for things in this book that are like the maple syrup sweetened cookies and stuff like that.
Well, I think the difference too is like, you know, your food is delicious.
Yes. And that's important to you.
That is, you know, I really felt like it was time for this book because when so many people think about health food or hippie food, they're like, oh, it's brown rice and vegetables.
It doesn't have any flavor.
It doesn't taste good.
But there's no reason for that to be true if you're cooking with like wonderful fresh produce um you can have really delicious exciting uh flavorful food and it doesn't need to be a huge project to make it taste great yeah um it it just takes you know making some interesting combinations and having your stock your pantry well stocked with a few ingredients yeah and i definitely want to get into some of those pantry ingredients and definitely some of the techniques you really highlight a lot in the book, which I thought were really cool and interesting.
But I want to stay in the sort of 70s for a moment because I also, I was sort of joking before, like talking about like, oh, tofu is hippie food.
Yes. It's also an ancient Chinese food.
It's an ancient Japanese food.
Obviously whole grains and vegetables have been the basis of most human civilizations diets.
diets. But there is something to a sort of food aesthetic of the 70s, right, of the hippie movement that, that is connected to the other sort of cultural, you know, the bigger cultural moment.
And you do say that you had lots of cookbooks from that era that sort of inspired you.
Like the classic, like the Moosewood cookbook, which I love.
So what are some of those books?
And how do you feel like they were still relevant today?
Or how did you feel like you want to update them?
Well, Moosewood is definitely the number one source of inspiration for this book.
I have my copy right here.
This is the book that I feel like growing up, I saw this on everyone's shelf in their kitchen.
I think there are so many recipes in here looking through it where I'm like, somebody's mom made that, or I had this somewhere.
But really looking at it with new eyes, I was sort of like, what would I really want to make from this right now?
I'm not really sure.
But I just love the style of it.
I love that it's handwritten.
I have all my little pages bookmarked of different things that inspired me.
It's just, I love it because it's so well -rounded.
I don't know. I think everybody could find something in this book that they were like, oh, whether it's borscht or just a basic salad or the lentil walnut burgers, which we'll talk about later.
No, we have to talk about those now.
Yeah. And I love that you're actually flipping through this book.
Like, you really do love this book.
I'm flipping through that.
Yeah. No, I took my whole collection out.
The Angelica Kitchen cookbook is another one that I really loved.
I lived in the East Village for a long time.
And I would go to, yeah, I would go to Angelica Kitchen all the time.
They had something called a dragon bargain, which was their dragon bowl, which I actually have in the book.
It's brown rice, tofu, kale, kale, white beans, a seaweed salad, and a miso tahini dressing.
And they would have that with a soup and a piece of their cornbread.
And I think it was like, I don't know, like $15, but it was enough food for at least two meals.
So it was like, as soon as I got out of college, that was like a big source of my food intake.
Yeah, that place is classic.
And then another funny one I want to mention is this book is called Feast by the True Light Beavers.
And this is actually my old boss at Martha Stewart was Sarah Carey.
And this is Sarah Carey's family's cookbook.
She grew up on a commune in Woodstock, New York.
And this is this incredible book that her family and community made.
Her dad designed the whole book.
book. It's really, really fun.
And I told her, I was like, you know, I found a copy on eBay.
And she was like, don't make anything from the book.
It's so bad. So that really, like, you know, solidified this mission to like, make this kind of food, but have it taste great and be really appealing.
And the last one I'm going to talk about is this is a book I found at Omnivore were books in um san francisco and it's called bare feet and good things to eat and it is about this guy gypsy boots who is one of the original uh nature boys in california so he literally walked um from san francisco to los angeles and just foraged and ate dates and stole fruit from from orchards and brought this stuff down to Los Angeles in the early 60s.
And everyone thought he was just completely insane because he was, you know, making smoothies and date bars and utilizing all of the, you know, amazing ingredients that we have available in Los Angeles.
But no one was eating that way.
So once I found this book and, you know, I'm pretty new to Los Angeles.
I just just moved out here in 2020, I just became like totally engrossed with this California health food history.
And I knew that like, not only did I want to make this kind of food, I wanted to make sure that I was tapping into where did this food come from?
Who can I talk to that was part of this movement that's still around to share this?
And that became really exciting to me.
Like you you mentioned Isis Aquarian from the Source family.
The Source family restaurant was the first health food restaurant here in Los Angeles, which was started by the infamous Source family cult.
And I got to talk to a bunch of members from the Source family and learn what it was like working in that restaurant, eating in that restaurant, serving, you know, all of these Hollywood celebrities, their salads and smoothies.
And that was so cool.
It was really, really fun to talk to them, learn about this.
And the icing on the cake was I had Roger Steffens from the Family Acid photograph all of the lifestyle images of the book.
And he's been capturing California counterculture since the 60s here.
And I've been a huge, huge fan of his work.
That's so cool. Yeah, that was really, really fun.
We'll be back with more from Jess Damick, author of Health Nut.
And then we're taking your cooking questions with one of our absolute favorite chefs, Ashley Christensen of Raleigh, North Carolina.
I'm Francis Lam, and this is The Splendid Table from APM.
fox creative this is advertiser content brought to you by vitamix i just believe in simplicity and everything simplicity and food simplicity and tools i think just having one really good knife is a total game changer i love using mini whisks I love my Microplane Grater.
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I'm Francis Lam, and this is the show for curious cooks and eaters.
We're talking right now with Jess Damack, author of HealthNut, about some of her favorite ways to make light, vegetable -forward food taste absolutely delicious.
Let's get back to it with her.
Okay, so let's get to the lentil loaf.
That's the recipe that's in your book, because the idea of making a burger out of lentils is truly one of the iconic, you know, 70s food, you know, innovations.
And your recipe is inspired by that whole thing, but it looks really delicious.
It's really good. And it's, my favorite thing is people kind of want to hate on it.
I had Maddie Matheson be like my taste tester on Instagram and I filmed him taking a bite for the first time and I could see like he was totally ready to fake it and like give it a big smile.
You'd be like, this is great Jess.
And then he like he was like really surprised when he took that first bite and he's like oh my gosh, this is like, this is really good.
And he like kept going back to eat it and I was like, oh, this makes me so happy because it's so delicious.
delicious um walnuts give it such an excellent texture um but toasting them make sure that it also imparts flavor uh there's cremini mushrooms which are super flavorful when they're sauteed with garlic and onion and um you know you flavor your lentils with aromatics when you're cooking them there's some extra steps that aren't exactly fussy but just kind of taking the extra care to to make sure you're imparting flavor every step of the way makes it something that's like you're not i mean you know i do eat meat as well and i'm not like missing the meatloaf here i'm like loving it for what it is but also because it's
delicious yeah but you also have like a secret weapon in in this recipe right like you have a smoked soy sauce yeah you know when i started of this book, I wanted to make sure that it felt really accessible and I didn't want to use ingredients that were going to be hard to find or super expensive or fussy things, basically.
And this ingredient is a little bit fussy.
You can definitely buy it on Amazon.
You can also substitute it for regular soy sauce with a little bit of smoked paprika, but it's not quite the same.
But the combination of the umami and the rich saltiness of soy sauce mixed with smokiness really adds a whole new dimension to vegetables.
And I think it's a really, really important ingredient for people to have who are trying to eat less meat, who maybe are used to having a regular meatloaf or having meat several times a week and are having difficulty just adding more vegetables especially vegetarian main dishes sure this really really adds something super special to any vegetable you're making and makes it feel rich and fulfilling in a way that I don't know I haven't really found anything else like it yeah I don't have a smoked soy sauce but now I really want to get my hands on one You just need like a drop also.
It's crazy. It's really strong.
So here's another thing that I think might be new to some folks.
And as you mentioned, like you're not vegetarian, not entirely, and the book is not entirely vegetarian.
And there is a technique that you're super into because it appears multiple times, and that's cooking fish in a piece of folded up parchment paper.
Yes, I love this technique for cooking fish.
I think it's pretty much foolproof.
I'm always a little bit afraid to use that word because, of course, you know, there's always room for error.
But I think it's the easiest way to cook fish, especially if you're nervous about cooking fish in your home because it is a little tricky, right?
You know, there's a lot of information about like, oh, if you're going to sear it, you need to get the pan hot enough and it's going to stick if you touch it too soon.
Or it's going to get smoky or my whole apartment is going to smell like fish.
So this sort of just takes all of that out of the equation.
And the thing that I really love about it is it's a self -saucing dish.
So you don't need to create some other sauce to give it a lot of flavor or even make a side dish with it because you can put all of your vegetables and aromatics right in the packet and it all steams together and it creates so much flavor.
And it's so versatile.
Like truly for every season, you could have many different variations of what you're putting in these packets.
My favorite in the summertime, which is one of the recipes I included in the book, is a piece of white fish with lemon, sun gold cherry tomatoes, fennel, and a little bit of saffron, butter, and olive oil.
And it's so simple, but all of that, all of those flavors mixed together and it's just this really, really elegant, light and fresh meal that truly comes together in 25 minutes flat from start to finish.
But if you served it at a dinner party, everyone would be so excited and so impressed.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and it has this interactive element of like people opening up their packets at the table, which is always kind of fun.
But truly I served this dish to I think I had 38 people over for my book launch party.
And I just made all of the packets ahead of time and like fired as many off in the oven as I could at a time.
And it was so simple.
It's like there's nothing to clean up.
You don't leave, like, you know, stuff baked onto your pan.
I'm all about, like, as few dishes as I possibly have to do the better for me.
And that is another thing I really thought about when I was making this book.
Because I was developing two books at once, I really reached my threshold with dishes.
Anything to make anything easier was a full go.
Yeah, I'm going to think about cleanup when I go into all of these recipes.
because we're all so busy.
Everybody's doing a million things.
And I think the real message of this book was taking the time to make something healthy for yourself that doesn't have to be a huge project is what I really define as self -care.
Yeah. Well, actually, that leads me to another thing I want to talk to you about this book, which is it's a health food book.
We're talking about self -care right now i am curious about what healthy eating means to you you write this really beautiful but actually quite sort of complicating essay about how sometimes the kind of yes of course like healthy eating is good for all of us right but like sometimes it can be sort of fetishized or sometimes it becomes obsessive and and you write pretty frankly about like your own And thinking about that, your own sort of, you know, we all have struggles with body image in one fashion or another.
Talk to us about that idea and this idea of healthy eating.
Yeah, I thought it was really, it's a really important thing to talk about when you're writing a book about health food, because it is such a cloudy term.
You know, I'm not a a nutritionist. I don't have a formal education in how to break down all of these ingredients and tell anyone what's right for them and what they need in every day to be healthy.
But I think moving to Los Angeles, it's a place where many people are obsessed with not just this idea of being healthy and eating clean.
But body image is such it's it's amplified here in a way that I've never experienced anywhere else.
From, you know, driving down the street, seeing people on the sidewalk to huge billboards as you're driving down sunset, you know, watching any TV show advertisements.
And of course, social media is like the biggest example of this, right?
Like Like, we're constantly comparing ourselves to images that aren't even real at this point, which is the scariest thing.
Like, literally not real in some cases.
Truly, yeah. And to me, it all feels like a lot of pressure.
I think in this wellness space, you know, there's like Goop and other lifestyle brands, which I'm like big fans of their food and their recipes.
but some of them are really difficult to achieve on a regular basis or they're cutting out a lot of ingredients or labeling certain things as like, not necessarily bad, but like you want to avoid these five things if you're going to be healthy or whatever it is.
I think really food is so complicated in so many ways, but it's also so simple.
So much of it is doing what feels right for you and being easier on yourself.
No one from the top athletes in the world to whoever it is, everybody's just a human.
And food really is a way to fuel yourself to feel good and do the things you love to do.
But it's also a really exciting thing and a pleasurable experience.
to eat things that taste good to you.
Yeah, and that's part of health too, right?
Totally, and I think healthy food to me has always been about balance.
What can I do that, like, you know, is sort of even -keeled most of the time?
Like, what ingredients do I know I love and make me feel good that I can, like, always have around?
And for me, that looks like eating mostly vegetables, and I really enjoy that.
it's not like i'm doing this because i feel like i have to um sure and you know there are times where i'm like oh i should probably be eating more protein or you know i should do this or that but it's like i do the best i can every day and it doesn't mean i never eat like howlin rays every once in a while because it's right down the street from my house you know sometimes we all just need some hot chicken yeah i don't want to limit myself i i just want to keep myself open to situations, but do what feels right for me.
And I think sometimes just pausing and checking in with yourself is so important.
And food is a really great place to do that, actually.
Yeah. Thanks so much for coming through, Jess.
Yeah. Thank you for having me.
Jess Damick is the author of HealthNut and the bestseller Salad Freak.
You can find her recipe to be for lentil loaf at splendidtable .org.
So I have known, loved and admired the chef Ashley Christensen, owner of Poole's Diner and Death and Taxes in Raleigh, North Carolina, for, I don't know, probably like 15 years.
She is one of the most thoughtful leaders in the the restaurant business one of the most charitable and just one of the best cooks I've ever come across.
Her food is never pretentious.
In fact, half the time, it doesn't look like anything more than what you'd find in a regular family restaurant, but everything she makes has an extra twist of something special, something smart, some smart technique you may have never thought of.
To make that thing that looks familiar taste better than you ever thought it could.
So while we had a little little stash of your cooking questions built up, we thought we'd have Ashley on to help me answer them.
Hey, Ash. It's great to see you.
Hey, Francis. How are you?
I am great. Happy summer to you.
Same to you. And it is quite the summer.
Hot, hot, hot, hot down here in North Carolina.
It's hot there. It's hot here in New York.
You know, I hear like the West Coast. You know, it's just hot everywhere.
Actually, speaking of the weather, you know, you are a chef that really loves working with your farmers.
I know you're super inspired by not just seasonal produce, but up -to -the -minute produce.
How's the growing season where you are right now?
What's coming into the restaurants that you're excited about?
The growing season is incredible.
As I think you know, our first restaurant, Poole's Diner, is just less than a mile away from the state farmer's market, which is a farmer's market that's open 363 days a year.
So I feel like every week there's something new that becomes just like foundational to the summer menus that pops up.
Yeah. Like, what'd you see recently that you were like, oh my God, I can't wait to get my hands on that.
I can't wait to start.
Well, we get so excited about like corn, you know, sweet corn just is so fabulous here.
And we think about it like we think about a lot of things, just how can we capture the best, you know, ideas and taste from like eating corn off the cob, but do it in a lot of different ways.
So we think about certainly like harvesting the corn kernels, but we're making a lot of corn cob stock that we reduce down to this really amazing, sweet, intense broth that goes into all kinds of other things.
Oh, cool. I love doing that.
I don't remember the last time I made chicken stock at home, to be honest. I think people who listen to me on this show for a long time have always been like, oh, he's going to go on his like, just save all your cooking water.
every time i cook beans i save that water because that's a beautiful stock on its own but corn cob stock is really if folks have never been i mean i don't know how you do it i'm sure you do it with like some really extra smart touches but for me just like even just the total dum -dum version like literally take your corn cobs put them in a pot and just boil it until i don't even know if i time it at some point i'm like wow it tastes like corn great i just pull the corn cobs out and then just keep reducing that down until you taste it and you're like, wow, it tastes like real good corn.
And then you've got a magical elixir.
Yeah, it's that simple.
The more cobs you have and the further you can take it down and you'll see it darken and that's just that natural sugar kind of caramelizing in there.
It's so fabulous. Oh, yeah, it's great.
We don't have corn quite yet here, but you got me excited for it now.
I want to talk to you about something that I think has actually come and gone for you in North Carolina.
And that is the subject of our first call today.
This is from Daphna in D .C.
I think if I'm right, I think North Carolina cherry season has come to an end.
But up north, it's just ripping.
So here's Daphna. Okay, great.
Hi, this is Daphna calling from Washington, D .C.
My parents live in Michigan, and they have two beautiful tart cherry trees in their front yard, the Montmorency kind that Michigan is famous for.
Right now, they're picking and pitting and freezing a lot of them.
By the time we visit in a couple months, they'll have done all the obvious stuff with them, like jam and pie.
What can we make that's delicious and takes advantage of that great sour cherry flavor, but that may be a little bit unexpected?
Thank you. Well, thanks, Daphna.
It's always great to hear from a Michigander.
Well, Daphna, I think that's first off an awesome predicament to be in, to be swimming in cherries.
We don't get a lot of cherries here, but I'm going to throw in an idea here.
I love the idea of pickling the cherries.
I think it's something that I'll throw two things in here.
So pickling the cherries in kind of like a vinegar -based pickling liquid.
And we use like what we call a winter pickle because of the idea of like putting those up in the time that they're fresh.
fresh, and then later being able to get them out with kind of thinking about the spices that you might be using.
So, we'll use some more like baking spices almost, but that's very flexible.
You can do anything.
You could do fresh bay leaves or thyme.
We'll take those pickled cherries and then take some of that pickling juice and use that as like maybe the base of a vinaigrette or just, you know, pop those cherries on top of like a creamy salty cheese, something like a fresh goat cheese, or even like a shaved cheese and some fresh arugula.
And then those cherries kind of threw out with a little good olive oil.
So I love that, the idea of the tartness of the cherries, but they have this really lush kind of rich wheat intensity as well that just pairs beautifully with a pickling brine.
And then I also love the idea, you mentioned that the family would be freezing them.
So the idea of freezing them in amounts, I think it's important to freeze in smaller amounts because you're not always going to get out a bunch of cherries and make jam or bake a pie.
You might want to get out a cup of cherries and be able to start them in what would be thought of as a gastric kind of sauce.
But, you know, it can be kind of a simplified version of that where you start a saucepan with some honey and some shallots and any kind of aromatic that you want to add to it.
Drop those cherries in, probably like pulled in halves, something like that, and let it simmer up and the cherries will break down a little bit.
Then you can either just like add a little touch of butter to that or, you know, drizzle it over something again, like that creamy goat cheese for like a warm appetizer.
Or you could add some stock to it and finish like, you know, a beautiful roasted chicken or a pork loin with it.
So you've got this great kind of, you know, cherry backbone, rich sauce that does something different than just like a standard pan gravy might.
So I love thinking of these intense, luscious fruits that way and how they can be a part of savory applications as well.
Oh, I love that. That sounds so great.
You know, you mentioned freezing, and I just remembered you wrote a whole book about really using your freezer.
But when you do have a situation where you need to freeze a bunch of fruit or something, you mentioned like, oh, freeze them in small quantities, and that's really smart.
heart. It's like, you don't have like, oh, I have a half gallon of frozen cherries now.
What do I, you know, now I got to defrost the whole thing.
But are there better or worse ways of freezing things?
Yeah. I like the idea of, you know, this is a great example, something specific like cherries.
You know, you've washed them before you pit them and then you pit them.
And I like the idea of, you know, putting them in a strainer to sort of strain off that little bit of fresh juice from taking the pit out and then laying them on a sheet tray in a flat single layer, freezing them so that they freeze as individual entities and picking those up and putting them into like a Ziploc bag and just having them there where you can also just pull those out for, gosh, something like dropped into a vanilla milkshake that you're blending up at home or like a morning smoothie, you know, it's, uh, it, but it gives you that flexibility.
It drives me crazy when there's something in the freezer I want to work with.
And I'm like, but I don't want to get two pounds of something, you know, I, as a cook, I'm always like thinking about these fun little spinoff ideas.
And I usually need just a little of something to do that.
Right. That's super smart.
I love that. Um, let's go to our next caller and that is Shelby.
Shelby. Hey, Francis.
Um, I recently, um, replaced a bunch of my backyard plants with more plants like kale and broccoli.
And I don't have any broccoli sprouts yet, but I do have a lot of broccoli leaves and I know that they, um, are edible, but I don't really know what to do with them.
So any suggestions that you have would be awesome.
All right, cool. Thank you so much. Bye.
right. All right. Well, thank you, Shelby.
Uh, Ashley, I, I, we've never talked about broccoli leaves, you and I, but I can guess that we feel the same way about them, which is they are delicious and they should be eaten.
Oh, so delicious. You know, so when I'm talking about broccoli leaves, I'm literally just like when I buy the head at the grocery store, it's like those little leaves that are stuck on the stock, I will just throw them in when I'm roasting the rest of of it and they come out like crispy like chips, but I'm sure you have smarter things to do with them.
Well, I don't know about smarter, but I agree with everything you're saying.
I love the idea of throwing them into a saute of other greens to kind of just have like, you know, a little more texture and some kind of like adding a little, you know, unique dynamic to your greens.
I think if we're just swimming in these things, I like the idea of blanching them and freezing them.
Just having them in a airtight Ziploc bag, a quick blanch and shock and then putting them away.
And then they can be folded into like nice tender braised greens.
But I also like the idea of just either having a touch of a saute to them or a tiny blanch and then pureeing them into a nice green sauce.
I think they're lovely with a little bit of fresher roasted garlic, a little lemon zest. and, you know, some brighter herbs, things like, you know, if you had wanted to do like basil or mint, anything like that, pureed together and, you know, added on to some fresh grilled fish in the summer, you know, that sort of thing.
And it can also be part of something that can be folded into a soft butter to make a compound butter that if you did something like you almost almost get like a peas and carrots vibe if you wanted to toss, you know, fresh sauteed carrots in this kind of broccoli leaf, pesto butter vibe.
So, you know, like many things, you know, let it be that kind of sweet body to all these other kind of standout herbs giving you just a little a little velvet to it and a little a little more texture and that great vegetal backbone.
Oh, that's fantastic.
Yeah, I told you you'd have smarter ideas.
More cooking ideas and tips with Chef Ashley Christensen coming right up.
I'm Francis Lam, and this is The Splendid Table from APM.
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I'm Francis Lam, and this is the show for curious cooks and eaters.
We're talking with Ashley Christensen of Pools Diner in Raleigh, North Carolina, one of my favorite chefs, and we're taking your cooking questions.
Let's get back to it.
well actually part of the question i think like sort of the underlying question is you know hey like are the broccoli leaves edible um and i know shelby said she knew they're edible but i think a lot of people will just think that when they get the head of broccoli they got to pull those things off and throw them out and they throw out the broccoli stalk too which hurts my heart because the stalk is oh the sweetest part of the broccoli but um like the first time I realized, well, they're just greens like any other green.
Why not eat them? And then one day, I remember getting a head of cauliflower.
And usually the leaves are mostly cut off, but the big thick ribs of those leaves are still there.
They're kind of like the nest that the head of the cauliflower is sitting in.
I think a lot of people just cut those off and throw them away.
And I was like, well, why don't I just cook those and eat them?
Hey, it turns out also edible and also delicious.
Turnips, the turnip greens are great.
Oh, man. Beets, the beet greens are are great.
So great. You know, thinking about like the stems of the beets, that's another place where I love seeing that just like gently pickled and, you know, added into a sauteed dish or like a beet salad that's roasted beets with pickled beet stems on top.
They're full of this, like, Like, you know, just really intense, deep red, kind of earthy liquid, ultimately, that you pull out of them.
This color that you can taste.
If you tasted it with your eyes shut, you would see deep scarlet red, right?
Lots of good leaves and stems out there for sure.
Tune in to The Splendid Table to hear us talk about leaves and stems. Well, you mentioned the broccoli stem.
I mean I like that as well as any part of the broccoli, and we'll just lightly shave the outside of it, and then I cut it up into the – people will eat it and go like, what is this?
Because we've kind of peeled off the exterior, and I'll just gently saute it.
It's like a water chestnut of green vegetable.
Yeah, and it's sweet, and it's like translucent.
It's beautiful. I'm totally with you.
It does need to be peeled.
I am very big proponent in peeling, like take your vegetable peeler and peel the stalk of the broccoli.
Like you see these sort of like white fibers that are actually quite tough.
And then once you've peeled away those white fibers, then you're in this like translucent heart.
It's just, just fabulously delicious.
Hey, let me ask you this.
A few years ago, we had you on to talk about summer grilling and you blew not just my mind, but all of our minds.
uh everyone on the team when you told us oh you started like the grilled zucchini unseasoned and then you season after it comes off the grill and the reason you gave us was because oh when you cook things they get hot and they expand and the water comes out of them and then when they cool they kind of contract and they suck everything back in so when you season in this case the zucchini after you've grilled it it actually pulls in all the seasoning basically like self marinates yeah and is totally changed like i i started cooking zucchini that way other vegetables like totally blew my mind amazing
um we have a little thing over here uh about potato salad okay i love potato salad but making potato salad sometimes feels like a real challenge like the there's something about the potato that like absorbs the dressing but like kind of like hides the dressing like sometimes it feels like potato salads can get bland after you've made them them.
Do you have tips on potato salad making?
Well, I'm assuming that you're talking about because a lot of people like to cook potatoes whole.
Because if you're cutting your potatoes, you're able to season the water to the point that you're not serving it in that liquid, so that water is going to be far more seasoned and the salt is going to bring forward that potato flavor.
And then you don't have to doctor it as much with the dressing.
So if you're using cut potatoes, I think that's great.
Whenever I cook potatoes without cutting them, I usually make sure they're on the smaller side and I pierce the outside with a fork.
So it benefits from cooking inside of the skin of the potato, but also soaks in a little bit of salt from the cooking.
Now, the other thing there, I think there are a lot of folks who like to cook whole potatoes and and then tear them apart and mix the dressing in.
And so I think it's important, if you're not going to cut the potato, to dress them hot.
And it does, it has a different texture.
You get that really rustic kind of torn up pieces of potato and then little chunks of firmer potato in there.
And I think that's kind of nice.
But yeah, I mean, you got to find a way to get salt into that potato.
So much to the conversation of like the squash and grilling them.
The potato, if you're dressing it while it's hot, it's going to soak up a lot of that dressing and flavor, and it's going to go to the heart of the vegetable that's centering that potato salad.
So I kind of love that.
I'll say very quickly, I was with my friend Matthew Kelly, who's a chef in Durham, over the Fourth of July.
And he is famous for this macaroni salad that his grandmother used to make.
And we always try to make it, and it never tastes like his.
And I watched him make it on the fourth and I realized it's like this potato idea.
It's because he gets his dressing ready.
And while the noodles are hot, he dresses it because of the same thing.
It's going to like as it cools down, it's going to take that flavor back in.
Oh, interesting. Do you have like a summer dessert style?
Meaning, are you always people like, I don't eat cake in the summer or like I only eat pie in the summer or like I only eat ice cream in the summer?
Do you have like a summer dessert?
Um, well, you know, I quit drinking.
Um, it's coming up on a couple of years this fall and I have no rules anymore about desserts, Francis.
All desserts are on the table, but I have a, um, I have a real love for, you know, of course things in the season, like this is peach cobbler season and here at the house where like cup, a cup, a cup of people, you know, the the simple recipe of just having that great kind of wet batter that you pour over peaches and bake so that's it's a little cakey it's a little flaky wait what's this cup a cup of cuppa it's like a cup of flour cup of sugar and a cup of butter and it's uh you mix that together and just pour it over fruit and bake it you pour it over fruit and bake it and that's with like um
self -rising flour and there are a bunch of you know there are different versions of this but I don't know if it's, I think it's kind of a southern thing, but, you know, a layer of fresh fruit in the bottom, pouring that over the top, you know, you can tweak the salt a little bit.
I love a little saltiness in desserts that kind of resets your palate as you're eating the sweet bits of it.
So simple things like that.
I love anything custard. My mom, when I was a kid, would like during, you know, when it was berry picking season, you'd go out and take your bucket and pick all the stuff and she'd make jams and stuff.
but also having fresh berries and just custard sauce.
That was something that we always had in the summer, and I love that.
But yeah, I am equal opportunity on the dessert section for sure.
I love it. I love it.
No, I'm totally with you.
But since you talked about custard, that brings me to our next caller.
Let's go to Sandy. Hi, Splendid Table.
I love your show. I do have a dessert question.
I often make flan, and the caramelized sugar when you flip it over is really probably the best part of the flan.
However, almost every time when I flip it over, some of the sugar stays hard on the bottom of the pan, and not all of it liquefies.
So I'm wondering if that's normal and what I can do to prevent it.
I do cook it in a hot water bath, and I do let it cool slowly, and then I do flip it over after its room temperature.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thank you. All right.
Thanks for the call, Sandy.
And I love a cold, wobbly dessert anytime, but really, especially in the summer, and I love a flan.
But actually, I have not, I think I may have made one once in the culinary school, you know, like a jillion years ago.
But yeah, I think a little bit of the caramel still being in the pan is not unusual.
But when she's talking about like the sugar stays hard, is there a fix for that?
Or is that just kind of, that's just part of the deal?
Yeah, I don't think it's terribly unusual.
I love custard desserts and I love flan.
That's another thing that I kind of grew up eating and that my parents did make at home.
You know, and the thing that I love most about flan is what you're describing, that caramel part where it beautifully like stained glass stains the top of the custard when you flip it over.
And the thing that, you know, I've definitely experienced making it and having some of that kind of candy, which I think is what you're referring to.
like the some of the sugar still being like sort of resetting in the bottom and being crystallized in the bottom so um i have uh encountered that and i actually asked a friend of mine about this joanne canady brown who has a place in new jersey called the gingered peach amazing baker um and what she reminded me to do was to make sure uh while baking in a water bath that it's at least halfway up to the top of what we're baking.
So you've got a really solid, balanced heat source there.
But also to, you know, when we're making it, to make sure we set that into the bottom of the dish, add our custard and go right into the oven, and making sure, let me back up and also say that when you're melting the sugar, to make sure that you have fully melted it, that you give it a moment at that nice low and slow temperature as you're taking it there, because it's less likely to kind of set back too quickly or recrystallize.
It'll recrystallize less if we're taking it there kind of lower and slower.
And yeah, so just keep making sure that we're maintaining that that nice hot temp when we're going back into the oven so doing doing those things pretty close together but i'll also say like i don't think it's a huge issue i wouldn't get you know i i am a cook versus a baker meaning that i'm more freewheeling i'm happy when the custard sets so i'm like oh and there's some free candy in the bottom of this the thing that i am most focused on when i'm making flan that i i hate when this is um underdone it really bums me out is that the sugar is cooked far enough.
I want it really dark so that you've got that little bit of bitterness almost. It's like not overly so, but that true dark caramelization that sets color on top of that beautiful silky custard and all that sweetness.
And I think it's just one of the things that makes that dessert so elegant and so craveable is that difference in the really roasty toastiness of the burnt sugar on top.
And when I say burnt, I mean like dark, dark brown, not black.
And where that sits in juxtaposition to that silky sweet custard. And I'll just throw one other idea out there for you.
If you find yourself with overly ripe bananas on the counter, I love to take those and roast them in the skin until they're bubbly and dark.
And then I puree that pulp from the banana and I fold that into my flan and I love the flavor of those two things together.
So I'm probably not the best coach to get that sugar totally melted, but I say make sure it's dark and everybody's happy and then consider that lonely, over -ripened banana on the counter as a great addition to that flan.
Oh my god, you're blowing my mind again.
Okay, so that would be like a banana pudding flan.
Like that would be amazing.
Oh, so good. Amazing.
And roasting it in the skin.
So like that's interesting.
So it cooks in the skin and it's the coolest thing when you take it out of the oven, there'll be all this clear, thick liquid that is the sugar cooking out of the banana and the pulp itself just tastes like, I mean, it tastes like beautiful baked banana pudding.
nice and intense though so when we make banana pudding that's actually how we do it we roast the bananas and skin like that puree it run it through a sieve fold that into our pudding base collect all that beautiful you know kind of liquidy sugar off of the sheet tray as well and it just tastes like pure banana sugar and it's just gorgeous ash every time you get on the You just blow my mind nine different ways.
It has been so fun talking with you.
Thanks so much. Thanks for having me.
Great to be here. Ashley Christensen is the owner of several restaurants in Raleigh, North Carolina, including Pools Diner and Death in Taxes.
She's also the author of the cookbook Pools, as well as It's Always Freezer Season.
You can find a recipe for charred summer squash at splendidtable .org.
Well, that is our show for this week.
Thank you for listening and go make something light, fresh, and truly delicious.
We'll talk to you next week.
The Splendid Table was created by Sally Swift and Lynn Roseto -Casper, and it's made each week by technical producer Jennifer Lukey, producer Erica Romero, digital producer James Napoli, and managing producer Sally Swift. And hey, we want to hear what you think.
Send us your thoughts, your story ideas, your cooking questions any time.
Get to us on social or email contact at splendidtable .org.
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We'd love to know what you think.
I'm Francis Lam, and this is APM Studios.
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