Sirius XM Podcasts So, Samin, this is the second time that you're joining us here on The Sporkful.
No, it's more than that.
Well, I'll tell you why it feels like more.
Well, we did that because I did the pasta thing and we did one.
Oh, right, right, right.
You're right.
Sorry.
And we did one.
You lost it.
We re-recorded it.
Yes, that's.
And then we did the pasta one.
So you've been on three times, but you have.
Oh, and you and Rishi.
And we do cookies.
You're just like.
Sorry.
You're erasing me from history.
Sorry.
This is The Sporkful.
It's not for foodies, it's for eaters.
I'm Dan Pashman.
Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people.
Now, one quick note before we get started.
It's that time of year, friends.
I want to hear your New Year's food resolutions for 2026.
Send me a voice memo with your first name, location, and address.
Tell me what food you resolve to eat more of in the new year and why.
Send that voice memo to hello at sporkfulcom and you just might hear it in our year-end show, when I will also be revealing my New Year's food resolution for next year.
All right, let's get into it.
This week on the show, I'm talking with Samin Nasra.
As you heard, she's been on the show many times, four to be exact.
The first time, we did a long-form interview, and we really hit it off and became friends.
So she was the one I called when I needed help naming my pasta shape, Cascatelli.
And we've stayed in touch over the years.
I even went to her house a few years back.
So now that she's got a new book out called Good Things, I wanted to have another nice long chat to catch up.
Now, first, a quick recap of Samin's backstory, which we covered the first time she was on in 2018.
She's from San Diego.
Her parents came to the U.S. from Iran.
And being the child of immigrants.
Samin said that from the time she was young, she always felt a lot of pressure, both from her family and from the outside world.
Here she is during that first appearance on our show.
I felt like I was always in two worlds.
Like going to school, I wanted to be a good student.
I wanted to make my parents happy.
I wanted to make them proud and I wanted to succeed.
So I worked really hard and I did my best to sort of fit in.
And I figured I sort of told myself the story that if I worked really hard and sort of succeeded, that maybe nobody at school would notice, wouldn't notice that I wasn't just like everyone else.
That feeling that success would fix these issues followed Samin into adulthood.
She worked her butt off, getting into the food industry in college.
Her first job was as a busser at the legendary Bay Area restaurant Chez Panisse.
She also harbored dreams of being a writer while working in other high-end restaurants and cooking in Italy.
Her twin passions of food and writing finally came together in one of the most successful cookbooks of the last decade Salt Fat Acid, Heat.
Recently, Samin said that her whole adult life was a trajectory towards that book.
It sold over a million copies.
Samin followed that up with a Netflix series of the same name, which ratcheted up her stardom to a whole new level.
Now, Samin has a new book, Good Things, Recipes and Rituals to Share with People You Love.
It's been eight years since Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat came out.
And in this conversation I was most interested to talk with her about those eight years in between dealing with the success of her first book and TV show falling into a period of clinical depression, finding her way out of that and then channeling it all into her new book.
One of the things that helped Salt Fat Acid Heat connect with so many people was the way Samin wrote it.
She very intentionally tried to come across as your kitchen friend.
I wanted you to know so clearly that I would do it this way.
And like one of the most beautiful sort of compliments anyone's ever given me is my friend Lex's mom, Barb.
One year for Christmas, she wanted to make a beautiful beef wellington.
She was like had made some big like reduction sauce.
But the dinner time was fast approaching and the sauce was still too watery.
And I was in the kitchen.
She was, like, stressed getting everything ready.
And I was like, oh, it's fine.
Like all we have to do is just set up four pans, you know, and divide the sauce and crank them up and it'll reduce faster.
And she was like, what?
And so we got the meal on the table or whatever.
And, like, the next day she called.
She's like, you know...
Every time I'm in the kitchen with you, it feels like I'm in the kitchen with my own mom.
Like it feels so comforting in this way where I know like you have my back.
And I was like, oh, that's a really nice thing.
I sort of was like, well, maybe I can be that for you.
But in some ways, this kitchen friend approach worked too well.
Right.
You know, the book and the show were a little more than a year apart in coming out.
And so already with the book, there was plenty of that sort of people feeling very close to me.
But the show was just to another level because people see you and they feel like they know you.
I think people really had developed a very deep parasocial relationship with me which I could not have anticipated or understood or wrapped my mind around.
I think it's natural.
It's totally natural.
And it's not like that it's not genuine.
Of course, the silliness, the warmth, the openness, the curiosity, those are absolutely parts of me.
It's just that there's a lot of other parts of me that don't make it on the camera.
This relates to a clip I want to play for you, Samin.
Oh, God.
This is you on Brene Brown's podcast in 2021.
Wow, you went deep, Dan.
All right, let's hear this clip.
I think people think I'm just the one version of me that's edited and put out on a podcast or on a TV show.
And the thing is, I'm not an actor.
That's really truly me, what you see on the TV show.
It really is truly me.
But it's just one part of me.
I'm also kind of a huge bitch.
Like, I'm really judgmental, most of all, toward myself.
I'm an incredibly critical person.
You know, I'm not pure niceness and joy.
There are a lot of difficult things in all of us.
Is the name of this episode going to be like, Samin is a huge bitch?
We'll see how it goes.
Okay, great.
Well, Samin, if you'll humor me, I'd like to do a little exercise with you.
Let's just for a minute set aside Samin the kitchen friend.
Okay.
I want to talk to Samin the judgmental bitch.
Oh, okay.
I've never been readier.
All right.
What's the worst thing about food TV?
The fact that everything is a competition is so dumb.
I think it's because they've like the executives have stumbled upon a production formula that's relatively inexpensive and sort of gets enough views.
And it's really dumb.
Like, it's just really dumb.
It's not actual cook.
It's just really stupid.
What's the thing about food influencers that gets you most pissed off?
I think for me the thing that makes me the saddest, and I find myself sometimes being like I should do this.
Like, I should do affiliate links.
I should do ads.
And then, anytime I get close to doing it, there's just like a deep depressive, like dark hole of sadness inside of me, where I'm like this is what the world has become is just all affiliate links.
Right.
I don't know, man.
It makes me so sad for the state of the world.
All right, we're getting a little off track.
Let's try to stay angry here.
Okay, okay, okay, okay, sorry.
Sorry, sorry.
We crossed over into sad.
I got to go back to judgmental.
Okay.
All right, last question.
That's it?
I was just getting into it.
What's the most overused ingredient and why does it make you so angry?
Oh, I love burrata so much.
There's a weird way where ingredients like burrata some of them that are rich and like, have a certain amount of like it's often from a Western culture but like international cachet become like a symbol of your refined taste.
And so then there's a way where like there's just a burrata salad everywhere you go or whatever.
First of all, all burrata is not created equal.
The burrata itself.
Big time.
And then also, like, I don't know.
I don't always want, like, want to eat your weird hothouse tomatoes in February.
Like, I just, I don't know.
Like, there's other ways to be creative.
I would add, if I can tap into my judgmental bitch.
The biggest problem with burrata in restaurants, at least in America, is that it's cold.
Yes.
They take it out of the fridge.
Yeah.
It has, you know, 50% of the flavor that it would have had if it had been sitting out.
Yes.
But I was just in Italy and I had burrata there and there they just leave it out on the counter.
Yeah, because it's also made fresh every day there.
Right.
And that's the real bummer for me is that there is like one sort of mediocre burrata place and then all the rest comes from Italy.
And so it's not fresh.
Right.
It's like 10 days old.
It's starting to get a little tangy and fizzy and you do not want to eat that.
I do not want to eat that.
So that's Samin's judgmental side, but that's not really the person I saw in our first interview.
To me, she came across as very earnest.
In fact, as I learned, she had a practice of writing down a list of her hopes and dreams.
But I wondered how Samin feels about that list now.
I want to play for you, Samin, a clip from the first time you were on The Sportful.
Oh, terrifying.
Okay.
Okay.
This is 2018.
Okay.
This was after the success of Salt Fat Acid Heat, the book on the eve of the release of the Netflix series of the same name.
And this was when you had mentioned that you had a manifestation journal.
Oh, yeah, my manifestation journal.
And I asked you to read something from it.
Okay.
So this is you reading in 2018 from your manifestation journal.
Okay.
Read me the first page.
Okay.
So it just says long term.
Find the thing I love to do.
Do it well and make enough money doing it to live comfortably.
Okay.
I think I'm like getting there on that one.
Okay.
Fall in love and have and sustain a healthy relationship with a smart funny handsome confident caring, steady man.
Not yet.
Has not happened.
Raise at least two healthy children.
Nope.
Has not happened.
Publish.
This is so specific.
This is so specific.
Publish four books popular, well-reviewed books that I am proud of by good, well-known publishing houses.
Okay, well, I did one.
What are your thoughts hearing that?
I mean honestly nothing about that list is that embarrassing or intense, but something about hearing my voice.
It just makes me really sad.
Why?
I mean, if you don't want to go into this, we don't have to.
No, no, no.
I just am trying to find words for it.
I've just spent so much time trying to like do all the things a person's supposed to do in their life and feeling like I'm failing at it and I feel like I can hear that inner voice, like you know.
I mean, it was just such an intense time like it's such an intense thing to like spend your whole life trying to be like recognized for the thing you're doing, trying to do a really good job, and then getting that attention in that like massive tidal wave.
It's so... It's just, it was so much.
And even there was like almost like a frenetic energy in the way, like I was talking and reading.
Um...
I mean, that person is also me.
It's not completely gone.
I haven't totally healed that.
And I still have that journal.
I still open it once or twice a year and write in it.
I think it's nice to have dreams.
I just... I don't know.
One of the things you talk about in the new book is that after that success...
Which you know, I think to the average outsider would be like this was your dream and you attained your dream.
But that wasn't how it felt.
And as you talked very openly, that actually triggered an intense period of depression.
It was a really lonely time.
I didn't have help.
It was just me.
Just me checking my email.
Just me getting a million texts from people who I hadn't heard from in 30 years.
Just me like getting stopped on the street, like people would grab me.
They would grab my clothes on the street when they recognized me.
I mean out of, out of like excitement and joy, but still there was just a way I got like lost and eaten up and I also like I'm still a brown people pleasing girl.
And so there was like a rage inside of me.
There was a loneliness, a sadness, like there was a lot of it I hated.
But you can't show that because you have to.
And I also am and was so grateful.
So you have to hold all this stuff in.
And then in my own regular life at home.
I mean I have wonderful friends, but even a lot of those friends like in some ways I felt very separate from, because
Again, like, what author doesn't dream of selling a million books, you know?
And there's just a lot of cost that comes with it and toll that I did not anticipate or understand would happen.
And I didn't have anyone to talk to about it.
And I didn't have any way to let it out.
I was holding so much inside.
Roughly around that time.
You came and visited.
Yeah, I came and I happened to be in the Bay Area.
I dropped your line.
You said, sure, come on over.
And yeah, I mean, you were you were not in a great place.
No, it was hard.
I'll be honest.
I left there like a little worried about you.
Yeah, I remember that was a bad time.
Yeah.
It was almost like, where's Samin?
I certainly in that depression lost sort of my desire to eat and my desire to cook.
And so if I'm not curious, if I'm not interested, then there's like, why am I even doing this?
I don't know.
You said you were subsisting on like Trader Joe's pizza half the time.
Totally.
I had a lot of Trader Joe's pizza.
Coming up, Samin finds a ritual that helps her work her way out of her depression, with the help of some ruined pork.
Then she tells me what she's done in her new book that she swore she would never do.
That's after the break.
Stick around.
Hope you're hungry because it's time for some ads.
Welcome back to The Sporkful.
I'm Dan Pashman.
Last week on the show, man, we get into some big issues.
We talk about the cooking fat wars.
In America, the cooking fat you use, whether it's lard butter, shortening oil, it's long been a signifier of health, virtue and class.
So what is it about fat that gets us so riled up?
Well, reporter Adjoa Jimabrempong looks at how our attitudes towards certain fats have changed over the years, including how that played out with former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
Eleanor Roosevelt is like a margarine influencer.
Now just imagine her doing like the little influencer hand with the stick of margarine.
Come with me as I go to the store to get some good luck margarine.
Get ready with me with my margarine tips.
In this episode we also get into the rise of Crisco, the trans fat debacle of the 1990s and, of course, the panic around seed oils today.
In the end, we ask, what does all this say about food culture and about America?
It's a really good one.
I hope you'll check it out.
It's up now.
Okay, back to Samin Nasrat, whose new cookbook is Good Things.
Even as Samin was questioning everything after salt fat, acid heat she had a book deal for the follow-up she had to fulfill.
She had multiple concepts for it that she ended up throwing out.
She even tried to cancel the book contract.
She really was lost, not just emotionally, but creatively.
Then, during one of her lowest points, she had an epiphany.
She was watching Taco Chronicles on Netflix and there was this episode about Tacos al Pastor, the ubiquitous Mexico City taco filled with pork cooked on a spit.
For the first time in a long time, Samin felt inspired.
Because I had sort of lost my appetite and lost my own like direction and like even curiosity.
If there was a whiff of interest or curiosity, I was like holding on to that for dear life.
So the fact that I was like, wow, these tacos look good.
I was like, I wish I could make that at home.
Turns out that premise is just inherently flawed.
Like you cannot translate like this thing that cooks on a spit in Mexico. to your house oven.
It's just, it's never going to be the same.
So I was probably on my third or fourth try.
Every time I was doing like a four or six pound pork shoulder or whatever.
But I live by myself.
So that means every failure is something then, that I'm going to have to eat for the next.
You know, 37 meals.
So every bite is kind of a reminder that you haven't Yeah.
Which, like, I'm already depressed.
And so there's just this way that, like by the time I had gotten this one in the oven, I knew it wasn't right.
And my friend texted right when I was putting it in the oven.
She said, can I come over?
And I said, oh, yeah, I'm just ruining some pork.
She's like, what's going on?
I was like, oh, I'm just I can't do this.
And then I'm going to eat the whole thing by myself.
And she was like, you can bring it over to our house.
Like, we'll help you eat it.
And so...
This felt like this lifeline.
I was like, really?
I can bring dinner over to your house and you'll let me do that?
So it was a perfectly good meal.
But it was just more than that.
Like there was just warmth to the night.
There were kids being chaotic.
It was so comfortable and cozy.
We all, I think, had a really nice time.
And we were like, should we do this again next week?
And they said, yeah.
So we just kept doing it.
And it just became sort of an anchor in our week.
And we were probably doing it for like eight months before it really clicked.
Like oh my gosh, like this is a weekly dinner ritual, which is something I have been dying to create in my life and, for a million different excuses, not been able to over the last several years.
And I had always envisioned that it would be something I do, I host, it's at my house.
And this was different than that.
And I think because it looked different, it hadn't occurred to me that it was the same thing.
Why was that something you wanted so badly?
I think in a way it actually speaks to the fact that even before I could see it, I knew I was not rooted in my own life and I was really lonely.
I have always just focused on my work first.
That's a really sad and lonely way to be.
Even when the work is things that you want to do and actually quite social and you have a big social circle around it.
There's an emptiness underneath.
Samin already had a model for a weekly dinner ritual.
Her friend Greta had been hosting one for years in New York.
And Greta became almost philosophical about the dinners, thinking about them as a real anchor of her life.
That's why Greta gave Samin a 1951 book called The Sabbath by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.
He talks about the importance of the Sabbath as a weekly ritual, a time for rest and connection.
Samin didn't grow up with any religious tradition, but she grabbed onto this concept.
And she came to understand that weekly dinner with her friends as this same sort of sanctified weekly ritual.
And it felt like if I could have a way that guaranteed that I saw the people I love on a regular basis in a non-stressful way.
I think that's part of it too, is people keep calling these Monday dinners like dinner parties.
And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no.
It's not a dinner party.
Because a dinner party is something like...
But I think it's an idea, like a formality.
There's an invitation.
There's like you think for days or weeks about the menu you're going to serve.
And this is not that.
This is actually everyday life.
And that's exactly what makes it so special.
These dinners became the heart of Samin's new book, Good Things.
In it she writes about the joys of eating in community and she lays out how you can build your own weekly food ritual.
She also gets really personal throughout the book.
It's almost like that kitchen friend of yours has become a closer friend.
Now she's confiding in you.
She tells you about her depression, stories from her childhood, details of her Monday dinners and lessons she's learned.
Just as with salt fat, acid heat, Samin knew good things had to be in her voice her perspective on cooking.
But it is a departure in one critical way, which I asked Samit about.
A lot of the approach of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat was this is like a cooking class in book form.
It's less about a collection of recipes.
It's going to teach you the principles of cooking.
You even like actively resisted having recipes in the book.
This new book, though, has recipes.
Surprise!
So what happened?
I'm a hypocrite.
You write that at times, putting together a book of recipes felt like a betrayal to yourself and your readers.
Yes.
It's never been lost on me that I have railed my entire professional career about recipes and then produced a book of recipes.
However, I think two things happened.
One...
I always believed that once people learned these four elements sort of how to use them that it would change the way that they cooked for the better in like a big, big way.
And by and large, that has been the response is people say things like, this changed the way I cook.
I'm such a better cook.
But I think what I didn't anticipate is that also in these last eight years there has been a lot of feedback of people wow, like your buttermilk chicken, we make that every week.
Or the lasagna is my birthday meal.
The individual recipes have found meaning for people in their lives too.
But it seems like in some ways this book is still not a totally traditional collection of recipes, because there is still built into it a lot of opportunity for improvisation.
There's a lot of recipes that are like, throw these things together.
It doesn't have a measurement at all.
And so I feel like there is still a kernel of, Of that idea.
I'm always me.
You know what I mean?
Like I'm never going to not be me.
The places where I give less detail or less instruction are places where I feel like it's actually less important.
Right.
When you write recipes like that, I think it's also trying to communicate to people like.
It doesn't have to be perfect.
There's more than one way to do this, and you can still have great results.
Which also sort of feels like you trying to talk yourself out of your own tendencies towards perfectionism.
On many levels, that was the project of this book.
You know I'd have an idea for something.
There's these quesadillas I started making, where I would take Oaxacan string cheese and put it directly in the pan and let it brown, because it browns and sizzles so beautifully.
Right, almost like halloumi or something.
Yeah, and then just put the tortilla on top.
And then if I had something from the garden, a squash blossom or zucchini or corn or whatever, I would sprinkle it over the cheese, then put the tortilla.
But then I'd get this amazing, super crisp golden brown cheese.
I'd flip it.
It was an open-faced quesadilla.
And I was like...
This does not need a recipe.
Like, do you know what I mean?
There's just, and I'm like, do people look at me like?
She wrote a whole new book and she gave me a recipe for melon balls, carrot sticks and an open face quesadilla.
Like this is recipe.
This is cookbook.
Yeah, totally.
Like this is not what what am I paying for or whatever?
Well, also, you know, not every book has to be Michelangelo's David.
Totally.
Just make people happy.
And that's also great.
Samin sets up the book as her little box of treasures.
So there are some of those smaller delights, like the open-faced quesadilla, or roasted almonds with fried sage, or a miso and labneh onion dip.
Oh, man, that sounds good.
I want that one.
There's even a little aside, not really a recipe, about olive oil fried bread.
There's a whole section on cooking with mostly pantry staples.
There are also more elaborate dishes like piri-piri chicken lasagna with homemade fresh pasta sheets and cuckoo copra, a Persian riff on spinach pie.
When I picked up the book, I immediately zeroed in on one recipe in particular.
You have a recipe for warm castelvetrano olives.
Oh!
Oh, I see where you're going, Dan.
Now, I love a Castelvetrano olive.
I know you do.
Probably my all-time favorite olive.
Me too.
It's my favorite.
But your recipe calls for them unpitted.
Now, we've debated this before.
Yes.
I only buy pitted olives.
I know.
I was just in Italy last week and there was olives on the table and I put one in my mouth.
Of course, it has the pit inside.
First of all, when the pit is inside the olive, it robs you of a lot of the experience of like biting through the olive to experience the meatiness which is part of what I love about an olive.
I like judging the meatiness of an olive by the distance my tooth gets to travel to the pit.
Yeah.
But, you know, I want to bite through it.
I understand.
And I also feel like just the process of having to navigate the pit distracts from the enjoyment of the flavor of the olive.
Because now I'm like— How do you feel about cherries?
I take the pits out of those, too.
You pre-pit cherries?
We have a cherry pitter in our house.
Wait, you don't just eat a bowl of cherries?
We have a cherry pitter in our house.
I have a cherry pitter, too, but I use it when I make a cherry dessert.
No, I take a bunch of cherries.
I'll take like 20, 10 or 20 cherries.
Whoa.
I'll pit them all, and then I eat them, and I enjoy them very much.
Okay.
But anyway, these are all my objections to the pit.
Number one, it takes away from the texture.
Number two, it takes away from the flavor.
Number three, no graceful way to get rid of the pit.
Amazing.
How do you respond?
Okay.
I've come closer to your side.
Okay.
And even just last, literally last night Greta, my Sunday dinner friend who I'm staying with.
She now has two little kids.
And she was just saying, she's like, I only buy pit at Castelvetranos now.
Okay.
And guess what?
Like, I use them so much more.
I find myself adding them to salad.
I find myself cooking with them.
Like, they're just ready to go.
And I was like, oh, interesting point.
I like that.
I often have both.
You're going to come back in seven years to me and I'm going to have fully swayed you.
Yes, but I don't think it's ever going to happen for cherries.
Okay.
You have seven salad dressings in the book and three uses for each, which I'm very excited about.
I don't know why, but I cannot for the life of me make a good salad dressing.
Why?
I have followed recipes.
It's because you know the secret ingredient?
What?
Olive pits.
That's what I'm doing wrong.
But I love a decision tree.
You have boiled.
Spring vegetable matrix.
Roasted vegetable salad matrix.
Tomato salad matrix.
Summer salad matrix.
All these different things are like if you have this, use this or choose from this different category, mix and match.
This to me feels very in keeping with salt, fat, acid, heat.
Yeah.
The thing I am still ruled by is very much like how can I communicate to you all of the possibilities?
And some things like the dressing itself might need a very like precise list of ingredients and like the order in which to combine them.
But in general in daily cooking in life, it sort of comes down to like what's in my fridge or what's in my pantry or whatever.
And so...
I wanted to sort of take into consideration the actual variables in daily life and end up with something good for whatever your situation was.
There's a lemon miso, like creamy lemon miso, sometimes poppy seed dressing.
You can leave the poppy seeds out if you want.
That dressing is so good.
The idea of like...
For me limiting you to only one salad by saying like, mix it with these little gems and put these things, or whatever.
Right, it has to have these greens, it has to have this dressing.
Makes me really sad, because to me, I want you to know, man, this thing is awesome.
I can use it 50, 100 million different ways in my house anytime.
But also, I know it can be overwhelming to know how to pair things.
So that was why I sort of came up with these decision trees to sort of hold you by the hand, to take you toward that possibility, so that whatever situation you're in, you can adapt to it pretty easily.
I do feel like there's something about this cookbook that is, in its own way, kind of revolutionary, which is how deeply personal it is.
And you're really sharing a lot of yourself.
How did you think about that part of it?
Well, there are two parts of it.
One is I have been through so much sort of up and down and gnarly stuff in the last several years that I felt like people need to know what I've been through.
They need to know what I've been through so they understand why this is meaningful.
But also, I think, a lot of how I found my way into an individual recipe, like even the introduction of the chicken chapter.
I'm like, what is there to say about chicken?
I'm like, here's some chicken recipes.
I like chicken.
You like chicken.
Go cook them.
And in the end I had to just tell a story about.
My favorite little moment when I'm cooking chicken is you roast a chicken, you carve it, you bring it to the table, you go back to the kitchen and you pick all the stuff off the carcass before you sit down.
Like, which reminds me of like some of my favorite moments working in professional kitchens, because professional cooks are always eating the little ends and bits of things which are sometimes the best part.
For sure, yeah.
You know, and I was like, this kind of shows you like what chicken sort of symbolizes for me.
I have to give you something very personal to make it be unique.
In a recent interview, Samin said that when she started the book tour for Good Things, she said a little prayer to herself that it would be different this time.
In other words, she was praying that the new book wouldn't trigger the same sort of spiral that Salt, Fat Acid, Heat did.
Now, a few months later, she's at the end of the tour.
So I asked her, has it been different this time?
Yeah, you know, this is my very last interview before I go home.
Congratulations.
Thank you.
And I survived.
I'm tired.
I'm chewed up for sure.
But I'm not, like, worn down to the bone.
I still have things I'm excited about.
Yeah, I'm so excited to go home and see Fava.
Fava being your dog.
Fava being my dog, yeah.
It has been different, and I'm really proud of myself.
What do you attribute the difference to?
I have so much more help than I had.
I don't feel alone in the way that I did.
I was really managing so much by myself.
So now I have help.
Yeah, I have the grounding of a group of friends and a girlfriend.
I have like people who are checking on my wealth.
Not that, again, I have amazing friends.
So it's not that people weren't checking on my welfare before.
It's just that I'm more connected to that.
When I go home it's not like I'm going to be like this sad place that I'm returning to.
That's been neglected.
Like there's care there.
I live in a community.
You're more connected.
Yeah, and also I was more protective this time.
Last time I gave everybody everything that they wanted.
I never said no.
I sat after every book tour event and I signed books for three to five hours.
I took pictures with every single person because it felt so amazing that anyone would care.
And it still does feel so amazing, but now I know if I do that, I'll be sick.
I need to rest.
So there was just a lot more protection this time.
What have you added to your manifestation journal recently?
Oh, man.
You know what?
I haven't opened it in a long time.
I usually do it around my birthday, which was a couple weeks ago, and I haven't done it.
So I've actually been thinking it's something I need to do.
Sometimes I think it would be really lovely to sort of melt away and disappear into obscurity and never do anything and put it out in the world.
But that makes me sad, I realized, because I want to make stuff.
And I want to give it to the world.
So I will continue to do that.
I think I need to spend some time like figuring out what that is.
And that'll go in the Manifestation Journal, like what I would like to do and make and how I would like to sort of shape my life in the next coming time.
Thanks so much.
That's a wrap.
Thank you, Sabine.
That was really lovely.
And you're so thoughtful.
And I really like talking to you.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
I always enjoy talking to you.
I'm done.
You're done.
You survived.
That's it.
Crack open the champagne or whatever it is.
Martinelli's.
Yeah.
That's Samin Nasrat.
Her new book is Good Things, Recipes and Rituals to Share with People You Love.
And hey, exciting news.
If you subscribe to the Sporkful's email newsletter, we'll enter you into a giveaway to win the book.
We'll be choosing one lucky winner to enter.
All you do is sign up for our newsletter.
If you're already on the list, you're already automatically entered into this and all of our giveaways.
So sign up by December 23rd at sporkful.com slash newsletter.
Again, that's sporkful.com slash newsletter. open to U.S. addresses only.
Next week on the show, it's our second annual salad spinner year in review.
Yasmeen Tayyag from The Atlantic and Helen Rosner from The New Yorker join me to talk about the year's biggest, wildest and silliest food news, as well as their own picks for favorite and least favorite trends.
That's next week.
While you wait for that one, check out last week's episode.
It is a survey of 150 years of cooking fat history in America.
And I think it'll give you a lot to think about.
And hey, did you know you can listen to The Sporkful on the SiriusXM app?
Yes, the SiriusXM app.
It has all your favorite podcasts, plus over 200 ad-free music channels curated by genre and era, plus live sports coverage.
Does your podcasting app have that?
Then there's interviews with A-list stars and so much more.
It's everything you want in a podcast app and music app all rolled into one.
And right now, Sporkful listeners can get three months free of the SiriusXM app by going to SiriusXMcom slash Sporkful.
This episode was produced by me, along with managing producer Emma Morgenstern and senior producer Andres O'Hara.
It was edited by Camille Stanley.
Our engineer is Jared O'Connell.
Our interns are Morgan Johnson and Jasmine Sutherland.
Music help from Black Label Music.
The Sporkful is a production of SiriusXM Podcasts.
Our executive producer is Camille Stanley.
Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.
And I'm Natambi Peters, living in Long Beach California, reminding you to eat more, eat better and eat more better.
Now I want to do a deep dive on Dan and then do this to you, give you a dose of your own medicine.
I'm ready.
I'm ready.
Great.
