Posted: 16 Mar 2021 03:03 AM PDT

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Posted: 15 Mar 2021 07:57 AM PDT

On this week's episode of Working, Rumaan Alam spoke with New York Times best-selling author Julia Turshen about her new cookbook, Simply Julia. They discussed how her family influenced her path to her profession, why she focuses on building a positive relationship to cooking and eating, and how her new book differs from her two previous ones. This partial transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Rumaan Alam: In Simply Julia, you write directly to your reader. You say, "I'm a home cook, just like you." What does that mean to you? Is a home cook different from being a French chef? What's the difference?

Julia Turshen: Some French chefs are home cooks, but for me, when I say very proudly and unabashedly, "Hi, I'm a home cook, and I'm a home cook who writes for other home cooks," what I mean is my work comes from my home kitchen to yours. I'm not a restaurant chef, I'm not a caterer, I'm not a TV chef. I'm not any of these other things that are all fantastic—that's just not me.

I want to be very clear about who I am and who I'm writing for. When I say "I'm a home cook," I want to establish: we are in the same space here. I am not in some more authoritative space speaking down to you. I'm on the ground with you. I have cooked at home every day for many, many years, and I'm really delighted to have the opportunity to share everything I've learned so you can skip ahead and be hopefully as comfortable and as calm as I feel in my kitchen, because it's the place where I feel the least anxious in my life. I feel plenty anxious in other areas, but I know cooking at home stresses so many people out, and I want to alleviate that as much as I can.

Speaking of cookbooks, I've heard you describe your own childhood poring over the cookbooks in your family kitchen, and you didn't even go to culinary school.

No.

If you were an 11-year-old at home looking at Moosewood, or whatever it was you were looking at …

That's so accurate, yes.

Why is it then that you chose a formal academic education at a liberal arts college, versus an experience of culinary preparation that has to do with going to school and getting a degree or certificate?

What a privileged, amazing choice I got to make to a) get a higher education, b) get to choose what that was, c) get to choose something that is not necessarily all that "career-oriented." I studied poetry and creative writing, and I think that has laid amazing groundwork for the work I do as a cookbook author. In terms of making that choice, I've been interested in food forever—since I was really, really young, always so interested in the kitchen. It's always where I wanted to be.

I grew up in a house that was a publishing house. My parents both worked in publishing, so I was exposed to books and magazines at such a young age. I'm sitting in front of my bookshelf right now. This is one of many, many bookshelves in our house, and it's filled with cookbooks, and this is a fraction of them, and many of them are the ones I grew up with. I had that early exposure, which let me know that there's more than one road to go on for whatever you're passionate about.

For me, it's always been food, and a lot of adults in my life would say, "Are you going to go to culinary school? Do you want to have a restaurant one day?" because that makes a lot of sense. If you're into food, that's the career. I just have never been interested in that, and I've always been interested in this intersection of cooking, and writing about cooking, and tool-giving. I feel what I do as a cookbook author is just try to give tools. That feels like something I'm very connected to and really enjoy doing.

In terms of studying poetry, I write recipes for a living. No, they're not poems, but I take a poet's approach to it: I try to be as descriptive as I can, and I try to not have that description go on and on and on. I try to keep it really economic, very clear, like a lot of my favorite poets. I want someone when they read my recipe to be able to imagine what this smells like, what it looks like. That education was really, really useful because I tend to go on and on, and studying poetry is helpful when it comes to editing myself.

We've articulated that there's a couple of ways to be in the space of cookbooks, food, and publishing as a larger part of the media economy. There is the home cook—that is the path that you have chosen. There is the celebrity—when you see a famous person's visage on the cover of a cookbook. There's the serious trained chef, who's going to tell you that you have to buy a sous-vide tool or whatever. Then there's the kind of restaurant cookbook where it's like, "You love going to Babbo? Here's how to replicate that experience at home." Have you found in that economy that there's a hierarchy in terms of what people's training is? That someone who is a credentialed chef maybe feels that a home cook has less authority inside of that system?

I see these mostly perceived hierarchies. I've collaborated on a ton of books in addition to doing my own, so I've had many perspectives about cookbooks, and I think about them all the time. The advice that I've given to everyone I've collaborated with, the advice I've given to anyone who's asked me about cookbooks and getting into them, and the advice I try as best I can to follow myself, is to only write the book that only you can write, which sounds easier than it actually is to do.

When I apply that to myself, I don't want to be artificial about who I am. I'm not a restaurant person, and if you're coming to me for restaurant food, you've come to the wrong place. I'm a daily home cook who believes that that is a valuable thing, and that's what I try to express. I hope that that connects with people, and I think it does, because I think there are more home cooks than there are restaurant cooks, or TV cooks, or celebrity cooks. But it is hard to put out creative work that you use to pay your mortgage and all that stuff, in a world that prioritizes things like celebrity and perceived hierarchy.

To listen to the full interview with Julia Turshen, subscribe to Working on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or listen below.

Amazon Prime's Vegan Cooking Show Scores 8 Award Nominations - The Beet

Posted: 15 Mar 2021 10:32 AM PDT

Amazon Prime's first vegan cooking show New Day New Chef is proving the popularity of the plant-based movement, scoring not one, but eight nominations for this year's Taste Awards. As the highest awards for food, fashion, and lifestyle media, the Taste Awards showcase the brightest and best of current media. The nominations underline just how popular this plant-based cooking show became over the course of the last year. After debuting in the United States and the United Kingdom in 2020, the Amazon Original became the first completely vegan cooking show, breaking into an untouched market with obvious success.

The show is now championed by eight nominations that include Best Reality Series, Best Green or Organic Program, Best New Series, Best Health & Fitness Program, Best Filmed at Home Episodes or Film, and Best Series Pilot. Both Best Filmed at Home Episodes or Film and Best Series Pilot will be the viewer's choice.

"We are delighted to be nominated. It's our mission at New Day New Chef to bring vegan cooking to a mainstream audience, so to be nominated in the same category as well-established traditional food programs is a great honor, and it means we are on the right track, New Day New Chef producer Eamonn McCrystal said. "All this as we are about to embark on the filming of our new season gives us a great boost after a difficult 2020."

Author and journalist Jane Velez-Mitchell hosts New Day New Chef where she features celebrity co-hosts, famous vegan chefs, and taste-testers that rate the dishes cooked on the show. The show's popularity has skyrocketed, and after initial availability was limited to the United States and the United Kingdom, the show expanded to Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and Canada.

New Day New Chef has partnered with Support + Feed founder (and Billie Eilish's mother) Maggie Baird in a special season titled after the non-profit. Support + Feed is a vegan non-profit initiative that helps provide plant-based meals to people experiencing food insecurity across the country, created in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The season features Baird and her children Billie Eilish and Finneas. The special season focuses on supporting local vegan restaurants in Los Angeles, New York, and Philadelphia with the additional goal of supplying plant-based food to homeless shelters, senior centers, and children's charities.

You can vote for New Day New Chef to win a viewer's choice Taste Award here.

What to Cook Right Now - The New York Times

Posted: 15 Mar 2021 07:30 AM PDT

Good morning. Everything changed and then nothing changed save the seasons, it sometimes seemed, and now it appears as if a whole lot is going to shift, slowly at first and then possibly in a rush. Maybe we'll be back in restaurants in a serious way, crushed together for brunch. We could find ourselves crowded three deep at a bar. We might be doing the middle-seat elbow shuffle during a flight to Chicago. Could be we dance at a wedding or cross an international border. Someday we might shake hands with a stranger again.

I think we'll keep cooking, though. I hope we do. The year was awful, scary and sad, but it'd be a shame to put the experience of cooking so much during it to waste, to abandon the care with which we've approached our meals just because it'll be possible to gather in crowds. People who once stored sweaters in their ovens became accomplished bread bakers over the past 12 months. Cup ramen royals mastered new recipes: Taiwanese beef noodle soup (above), say, or one-pot pasta with ricotta and lemon. Those who told friends they couldn't boil water now know how to braise, to sauté, to roast. I hope they'll treasure those skills for a long time, even as we move into our uncertain future together.

You're a better cook, probably, than you were a year ago. You could probably make this salmon and couscous salad with cucumber-feta dressing for dinner tonight. (If so, definitely save the feta brine, so you can make this roast chicken later in the week.) Or keema, Indian spiced ground meat, to eat with dinner rolls and a dollop of yogurt. Or skillet chicken thighs with broccoli and orzo. Or chile-oil noodles with cilantro.

I think it would be aces to bake this Campari olive oil cake this week. And to cook this jalapeño jangjorim with jammy eggs as well. (As Eric Kim notes, the leftover sauce is incredible on rice with a drizzle of sesame oil.) Maybe I could knock out a freestyle chicken Parm for lunch, serve it on a hero roll? When I get back to the newsroom, there'll be no more of that.

But you make your own decisions. There are thousands and thousands more recipes to consider waiting for you on NYT Cooking. If you haven't yet subscribed, you should subscribe today. A subscription unlocks all of our tools and features and supports our journalism along the way. Then browse what we've got. You can save the recipes you like. You should rate the ones you've cooked. And you can leave notes on recipes, too, if you like, if you've come up with a hack or substitution that you want to remember or share.

Meanwhile, we are standing by to help, should anything go sideways in your cooking or in our code. Just write: cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you. (You can also write to me: foodeditor@nytimes.com. I read every letter sent.)

Now, it's nothing to do with sweating onions or coddling eggs, but you should spend some time with the music issue of The New York Times Magazine today, featuring Dua Lipa, Phoebe Bridgers, Taylor Swift, Moses Sumney, Bill Frisell and more.

I liked this Xander Peters story in The Bitter Southerner, about the fight to save Florida's Indian River Lagoon.

And can I interest you in a virtual tour of "Goya's Graphic Imagination" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art?

Finally, wow, "Hoosiers" turns 35 this year. Watch that tonight after dinner and I'll be back on Wednesday.

from What to Cook https://ift.tt/2Q0VlS2

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