KEEP DINING IN with Alison Roman

hello good afternoon um thank you so much for having me I am extremely excited to be here if you'll excuse my phone usage I'm just doing it to keep myself on track um while I do this which is actually the first time I've done a solo talk that's not just me in my kitchen alone or on a panel so bear with me here so in the event you found yourself here by chance I kind of wanted to give you a little background as to why I'm here which to be honest was extremely honored but also surprised to be asked because I have never given a talk like this before and thought am i interesting enough to give a talk like this but I hope so and I guess we'll find out so when people ask me what I do for a living here's a blonde picture of me I I went back to my natural color a week ago that's not part of the presentation but I didn't have a current image so so when people ask me what I do for a living I feel like no matter what the day the week is or who's asking you're gonna get a different answer because what I do I think is is very multi faceted and can't really really summed up in one word so the short answer is that I'm a writer and the other short answer is that I'm also a cook so I write recipes and I write about food I write about our lives as it pertains to food and because food and recipes and cooking is something that most of us do at least once a day multiple times a day whether or not we enjoy it I feel like it touches some part of our life that extends beyond the kitchen and you know the long answer is that I am also a photo shoot producer and a creative director and a social media manager and a dishwasher and a personal grocery shopper and a and a so you know a million other things and I feel like anyone in this room if you ask yourself the same question what's the short answer and the long answer it's probably just as long and but you know the interesting thing about that is is that now in I feel like especially if you're a freelancer the type of work that you do it's really not enough to do one thing you can't just say I'm a writer you kind of have to be incredibly multifaceted and good at every single part of those things and so while I still struggle to be good at things like the personal assisting part of my job responding to emails on time and things like that I feel like I you know and struggling every day to be the best at a million different things that I was never really trained to do so a few the recipes that I that I do have become pretty popular in the past few years um where you'll find these recipes I have cookbooks I have a biweekly column in The New York Times and a monthly column at buona mattina magazine and so the primary thing that I feel like I focus most on is my cookbooks because that to me is the truest expression of who I get to be I have a wonderful editor which I'll tell you more about later but that kind of just lets me be me and I'm not trying to fit into any one sort of demographic or publication because writing for both New York Times cooking and Bon Appetit you kind of have to take into consideration their audience and their viewership which as you might imagine is actually a lot different than then I thought anyway I thought anyone reading go to petite is surely reading New York Times cooking and anyone who's read my book surely subscribes to bone Appetit and that is not true there are people that have never heard of me that subscribed to both people that have had my cookbook that have never read the New York Times it is a very different scenario so a few of the recipes that I've done have become popular and I thank the internet Thank You internet specifically Instagram I owe so much to you it's a real give-and-take so there's been the cookies which is a salted butter Chocolate Chunk shortbread cookie with salt the stew which is a spiced chickpea stew with tumeric and greens and then more recently this little lady on the left this chicken number has become pretty popular it's a slow roasted chicken with lemons and carrots but I will move on to those later so a lot of times I hear from people that I get reached out to a lot thanks to the glory of Instagram how do you do what you do and how did you get there and it seems like you came out of nowhere what an overnight success and I'm sure as with anything that is perceived to be an overnight success that is just not true and for anyone that it is true well I am very jealous because that seems a lot easier than what I did which is spend a lot of years doing a lot of different things so to be brief I basically I did a pretty unorthodox journey to where I ended up today but I feel like every step of the way led me to where I am so when I was in college I did the same thing I did sort of growing up and in high school especially which was instead of doing homework or schoolwork I cooked because what is more fun then homework cooking is more fun so I sort of started teaching myself reading cookbooks and they weren't home cook cookbooks they were the French Laundry cookbook and El Bulli cookbook and cookbooks that were definitely not meant for an eighteen year old to be cooking out of any college dorm but I did my best and it wasn't that I was cooking from these books as so much as I was learning from them what I really enjoyed was the people that were writing these books had this perspective and an opinion and on food and cooking and I never read these books and then made a Demi gloss or tried to turn a strawberry into a piece of jelly like I more use these books as inspiration and really felt like their passion for food and restaurants was contagious and these people worked so hard to strive for perfection everyday in their restaurants and it showed in the pages of these books and the photography was amazing and they were in faraway places and it was really exciting to me so basically after reading these books and graduating from what was a bowl of fried rice with an egg on it - slightly more advanced things I decided that I was going to leave college so that I could work in a restaurant and my mother was thrilled as I'm sure you can imagine I think she actually started crying and said I can't believe you're dropping out of college and I said I'm not dropping out of college I'm just leaving college for a little bit um which I thought was different but I definitely dropped out and she's like you're gonna work at Hot Dog on a Stick which if anyone here is from the West Coast it's a chain of corndog restaurants delicious there are worse places that you could work and but I I said no you know this is it this is a career path I feel like I feel like this is a calling that I had and you know before I experienced that I thought I never thought I would be a professional cook it wasn't part of my plan I thought that will be a hobby that I have forever but you know when people say what you want to go to school for or what do you want to be when you grow up I sort of just thought oh well I'll be a writer and then well that's gonna be hard cuz I didn't you know I was I was journaling I was writing diary entries I wasn't you know a writer I was like well maybe I'll be a teacher and now it's funny because I find myself kind of in both positions of teaching and writing through writing and so I left college moved back to Los Angeles and decided that I was going to enroll in culinary school and before I did that I went to this restaurant that I really loved and had gone to a few times it was a fine-dining restaurant in Los Angeles it's now unfortunately closed but I decided that that was a good place to start I don't know why like instead of going to any other entry-level restaurant I went to a fine-dining Michelin star or not Michelin star James Beard winning Food & Wine best new chef winning restaurant and decided to just bang on the back of the door and see who answered and asked for a job highly recommend that technique it worked for me they were very surprised so I went to the restaurant went around the back literally knocked on the back of the door and said can I speak to the chef I was 19 and they're like who are you it's like my name is Allison and they're like okay so they went and got the chef who he actually was gone for the day but the pastry chef answered the door and he said I'm Ron how can I help you and I told him the situation and said I'm gonna enroll in culinary school I love cooking I love this restaurant I want to learn from you and I don't have any experience I've never done this before I have no idea what it takes but I know that I want to do it I want to try and he said well here's my advice to you which is don't go to culinary school he's like I'll save you the forty five grand and why don't you just come work for see if you like it because in his experience at the time granted this is 15 years ago right in his experience a lot of people did the culinary school thing and then graduated and then we're $50,000 in debt and then realized I hate working in a restaurant because working in a restaurant as I soon found out it was extremely hard and so I said okay sounds great what a deal and so I took the job and essentially worked for seven dollars an hour cutting marshmallows in the back of a windowless room and I was so happy I was so happy except for the times that I was crying which was as often as I was happy and I had a boss who you know would look over my shoulder and if I wasn't cutting things in a perfect straight line he was very French and very disciplined two things that I was not and still am NOT and he would tell me that I would be nothing if I couldn't figure out how to cut a marshmallow in a straight line ever and I just put burst into tears and I would walk home and I would call my mom and just be like what am i doing I'm sad but I didn't want to tell her that she was right so I said but I like it but I love it and I'm gonna keep doing it which was also true so I eventually worked my way up from the you know prep side of things to working service in the restaurant which is where I really fell in love with food and with cooking there was a certain adrenaline rush and energy to working in a restaurant the same things that makes it hard the intensity are what I enjoyed about it and I think that you know part of the problem of being in school and why I didn't like it was because it felt like I could never accomplish one task it was - there was just too much out there and I couldn't focus and working in a restaurant I thought okay well this is extremely focused and I have a prep list and then I have tickets that come in and I'm making something and then you clean up your station and at the end of the night you go home and it's over the next day you do it all over again and I loved it and I loved it for about six years and then I became tired of it so I moved to San Francisco was working in restaurants there and just kind of became burnt out I feel like you know if you or someone you know has ever worked in a restaurant you understand that those hours are really intense and when you're 21 22 23 it's not a problem and you can work 12 hours a day drink all night and wake up and do it again but as I was getting older and having done it for so long I realized that it was not for me so I thought well how can I maintain my love of food and work in food and do something different and this was before this was before iPhones that's weird this is definitely before Instagram the internet was a thing but it was not what it is today and so finding out what kinds of jobs were available in the field that I had chosen to be in was really challenging and so I sort of had to just kind of talk to people and say well I'm looking to work in food but I don't really know what that means and I'd be like okay we'll get back to me when you do because that's not helpful so I was working in a restaurant at the time in San Francisco and I was a sous-chef I was in charge of teaching people essentially how to run the pastry station to make breads we were doing croissants we were doing amazing you know petit fours and four-course dessert tasting menus it was very elaborate and very special and very exhausting so I decided to leave and I was gonna go to New York for three months I was gonna take a break I just needed a break so I told my boss okay I'll be back in three months he's like great see you in three months I moved to New York for a month and I call him and I say I'm never coming back I am and this I am just not coming back to California not anytime soon and he's like I had a feeling that would happen so he was correct and I had gotten a job working at milk bar which is a Momofuku restaurant and they had just opened it was sort of this brand-new sort of tiny bakery and amazing energy really small team we were making soft-serve ice cream in the basement of a restaurant and it was weird and sweaty and we listen to loud music all day and wore bandanas and it was very cool it was like the sorority I never belonged to and I told myself okay I worked there for six months while I find another job that's not in a restaurant because I left San Francisco to not work in a restaurant and found myself at a restaurant because I needed a job so I did that for a while helps Christina Tosi with her first cook and that is where I kind of had a lightbulb moment where I thought wow okay this is where I want to be this is a thing that is involving food I'm teaching people but I'm not cooking for other people I'm showing other people how to cook and so I thought okay well this is this is the move this is where I want to be this is where I feel myself gravitating towards and so I decided to leave put out the feelers and say okay I'm gonna get another job somewhere somewhere that's working with cookbooks or a photographer or if I don't know what because again I didn't really know what was out there and I ended up meeting somebody who knew the editor-in-chief of bone Appetit magazine they brought me in for a job interview and I was more nervous than I was today to get on the stage to talk which was quite nervous and I had never been in an office building before I had never my mom's calling not now mom I'm busy oh sorry so I went into this job interview I was in the Connie Ness building where was four times square at the time and I wore a hilarious outfit that looked like I had borrowed my mother's clothes or something because I didn't know what one wore to a building of you know for a job interview and I it's I still laugh at myself it at like what I thought it was gonna be and what I thought I was getting myself into so I met with the food editor and he said do you have any experience and testing recipes and I said oh yeah I stunts I test recipes all day long which was about 10 percent true I had tested some recipes before and but not really and I knew that I knew how to cook I knew I knew how to cook well and I knew that I was smart enough to read recipes and understand what was wrong with them so he brought me in for a trial period not unlike a restaurant trial where they kind of test you to see if you can hang and they showed me a picture of biscuits and they said we need you to make a recipe that matches this photo because what happened was we had the recipe worked out they shot the biscuits on set that doesn't match like the chef did at their own thing and we have no idea how to track down the recipe and this was like a real story they weren't testing me although I do think they were kind of testing me and so I did it I I had worked at luckily enough after I left milk bar I had gotten a job working at this biscuit restaurant and because a friend of mine owned it and I said listen I need a job that I have zero responsibility I am gonna be so checked out of this job I just need you to pay me whatever minimum amount you're gonna pay me to do a task for eight hours a day so I can pay my rent and she's like no problem I'm gonna we're gonna make biscuits for eight hours a day great so I did that and what are the odds that the first thing that they asked me to do is this test is make a biscuit and so I felt like the luckiest person on the planet and so I made biscuits and it worked I I did the thing I looked at the picture and I thought okay well this is not a cream biscuit this is a butter biscuit and this is not a drop biscuit this is a rolled and cut biscuit and just kind of use my deductive reasoning and came up with this thing and they're like great okay we want to come back tomorrow and I said yeah which I wasn't sure if that meant I had the job because I still didn't really get hired full-time for another year but I kept coming back and they seemed to not mind so so when I started I was just testing recipes and what that means is somebody gives me a recipe that has already been written developed either by a chef or somebody else and I just cook it as it's written the way that you would at home and that is just a tester and so I'm cooking it and it either works or it doesn't it says it serves four it ends up serving eight it says it takes twenty minutes it takes an hour you call for this ingredient in the instructions but not in the ingredient list like looking for things that would trip up any person China actually executes the recipe at home and I was sort of the last line of defense it was okay this recipe should work it should give you good results let us know if there's a problem if it doesn't and through doing that I really sort of started to cultivate what made a good recipe and how you at home because I was basically playing that role would in any way perhaps mess it up and I messed up a lot of stuff and then I started to kind of understand where it was gonna mess up before I did it so I would look at a recipe and I would call for one cup of water and say you know that's not gonna be enough water I'm gonna change it cook through it and then turn it in again to my editors and they would say oh great catch yes it should have been four cups of water whatever and so through that they started to trust me a little bit more I got hired full-time and they enlisted me as a recipe developer and in that time I was still testing other people's recipes namely chef recipes and that would come in from a restaurant we would ask oh we we got to get your recipe for that salmon you have on your menu they would submit the recipe and it would be just an absolute disaster zone it would be calling for like 12 pounds of salmon and the measurements were off and they were making it in a steam oven and using cryovac machines and all sorts of things that home cooks just simply did not have access to so it was sort of my job to reverse engineer those recipes to work in a home kitchen using a Pyrex baking dish and an oven that is maybe 25 degrees hotter than it should be and a too-small refrigerator and all that sort of stuff and so I actually really missed that part of the job I really loved doing that and I felt like it was a little bit of doing the tech t'v situation where I had to reverse engineer things and having worked in a restaurant I understand that when a chef says a baking dish they mean like a baking dish this big that nobody owns and so you kind of have to figure out okay well how am I gonna work that into how am I gonna reverse engineer that so that works in my oven that has a 9 by 13 Pyrex and so eventually after I was doing that they started letting me develop my own recipes and my first recipe story that I was assigned was a story about pies and I laughed now because this story was so complicated it was unnecessarily complicated and so this was one of the pies this was a plum pie sounds extremely simple and I was very proud of it it is ridiculously complicated and not anything I would ask any of you to do in this room and I'm sorry that I ever did I wanted you to make a crust and then a cream filling that had to set and then you spread it on the bottom then you were gonna roast plums and then you were gonna make a glaze and then you were gonna put the plums on top of the chilled filling and then glaze the plums and then chill that whole thing and that it just was too many steps too complicated I'm sorry that I that I did that but what I learned in this process was nothing and the reason being is that we didn't have the internet we didn't have Instagram we didn't have comments there was no comments so imagine her without a comment section wow what a world and yeah it's very funny exactly they know what I'm talking about and so during this time at the magazine we were sort of living in blissful ignorance about what people were actually cooking and how they were cooking it and what was gonna resonate with our readers and how to get people back in the kitchen and you know there were people that were into food because their parents were in a food they read Gourmet magazine they read bone Appetit magazine they read food and wine they it was already in their blood that was you know they grew up with it they had it around they enjoyed it they had cookbooks that were passed down to them it was just something they already did but it's the food community was not like what it is today and there just wasn't the knowledge there wasn't the sharing of information in the way that there is now we got a lot of handwritten letters to the editor complaining about some Thanksgiving issue from 1992 and you know things like that occasionally but we didn't have any feedback so we were kind of just making recipes that we thought were cool and you know I think this is a really good example of me letting the ego talk rather than trying to provide a service so I wanted to show you how cool I could make this pie like how complicated it was gonna it tasted great don't get me wrong but it wasn't helping anybody it wasn't doing anybody a service and around this time this was gosh probably 2012 baby and somewhere around here shortly thereafter the internet happened in a way that it is what we know it to be now it just started to come along and Conde Nast which owns bone Appetit among other titles is notoriously heel dragging when it comes to accept seeing the internet and things that kind of move media forward so we had a web team that was in charge of the website and it was maybe three people at the time and the editors of the magazine just thought the website how annoying didn't pay any attention to them they had no funding they had no way to grow and the people that worked on this website were like raising their hands they're like we think this is the future and they're like yeah yeah we're trying to make a magazine over here and at the time it was like well print will never die how could it it's amazing and important and so well one of what a group of those people was very wrong and so obviously it became a lot more important to have an internet presence they had to grow the website they had to create content for the website that was different from the print because what they were realizing was that it didn't translate the things you wanted to read in a magazine we're not always the things you wanted to read on your phone or on your computer and it was just a different demographic and they had to create a way to kind of share content in a completely new and different way and there were a lot of other companies that had thought of this five ten years before kind of Austin but we're they're catching up and so basically we started getting feedback on recipes and there there were comments and there were questions and suggestions and people started kind of reverse developing recipes and content to suit the internet which is where things get weird this is Thanksgiving nachos not my proudest moment and I'm sorry again but it was it was a request it was a request from our website and they said we think Thanksgiving nachos will do really well on the website and they were absolutely correct and this is the kind of food that in my gut I was like you know this feels weird I don't like this this is not the kind of thing that I want to be making this is not the kind of thing I want to be known for I was embarrassed deeply it was it's like you take your leftovers and you pile it on top of corn chips and they put a bunch of other stuff I don't know a user imagination they giving nachos I'm sure you can piece that together free recipe you're welcome and so basically this is it was like an ignorance is bliss until it wasn't and now I sort of started thinking well is this the kind of stuff I should be doing and I started questioning everything I sort of started to lose my voice I started I started to feel well I should just do more nacho content then and I should just do weird cheesy recipes and all this stuff because that's what the people want right and this was around the time also that I was starting to write a little bit more and I was pitching articles like how to bake your vegetables in a salt crust because people would click on it or you know then I was pitching things that I thought were interesting to other people but I didn't really care about like how to ferment your pickles at home in a crock and let me tell you that the Venn diagram of people who want to poem ferment their pickles in a crock and the people that read Bon Apetit column was like this big there was like no overlap in this community and so probably the best advice I ever received was from my editor at the time and who has since turned into a really great friend of mine and after I'm telling her well I think we should do is you know I want to tell people how to lacto-fermented goals at home and she looks at me and she goes ok who cares and I was like oh my god so rude I can't believe she would say that to me and she's like no no I'm not trying to be mean but like who cares about this and I thought well I don't really care and she's like exactly so if you don't care about it is anyone else gonna care about it and the answer was no so I kind of started to recalibrate the types of food that I wanted to make and I realized that I had to kind of stop paying attention to what I knew to all the information that was out there to the comments section to the people commenting on Instagram to the people that cried out more Thanksgiving nachos and do what I knew to be good and real and you know honest food and the stuff that I thought was really delicious and so then there was sort of the you know Instagram played a huge role in the next few years and this was probably the first recipe that achieved like what I would say internet success for the magazine and it's a salted butter apple galette and it looks amazing yes but it's also really simple it's a pastry crust it's apples some brown butter a little sugar and salt that's it and it's kind of the like okay pre pie post you know if you don't if you want to not just buy something but you're also like I'm not making a pie this was kind of the dessert that you would make and people started making it and they're like this is so easy this is amazing this is incredible even I can do it and that really resonated with me they even I can do it mentality and not just was this delicious but it also looks really nice and the cool thing about it is that no matter who made it it kind of always looked the same but different and you could always recognize it it was really had like a look to it and everybody's was different but good and I think that that really empowered people to make their own version and some people put it in a circle and some people made it in a rectangle or a square but regardless any combination of apples butter sugar and a pastry crust is going to be delicious that is nearly impossible to mess up and I didn't make this recipe with the thought that it was going to be successful or that I was going to achieve success with it it was more just what I thought was good and delicious and the amount of effort that I was willing to put in and so I started developing recipes that you know the busier I got the less complicated my food got and I'm sure that you can relate to that the busier you are the less effort you're gonna put in and it's not because you don't want to it's not because you don't want something fun and delicious and exciting it's just that there's just literally no time so the types of recipes that I ended up doing you know kind of started to fall into the weeknight friendly category but you know I was also working in a Test Kitchen that we had a dishwasher and we had people dropping for us for groceries and cleaning up after us and you know we could just kind of breeze in and out and we had all the space we needed we had a walk-in refrigerator we had you know immense counter space we had every resource available to us if we needed a hard-to-find ingredients somebody would bring it to us the next day it was not troubling or difficult to create sort of anything we wanted so the idea that you know we're gonna create something that maybe you don't have all that access or don't have all that space it's hard to imagine so you kind of let your imagination go wild and you do things that to you as a professional might be easy but you as a home cook might be like yeah that's that's not actually that easy and you know the point came for me and my time at Bon Apetit where I realized that I had to leave I there was no room for me to grow it was clear that I was never gonna have my boss's job and I'm not sure I even wanted it if I could and I decided to leave weirdly enough I ended up working for BuzzFeed which is an Internet company as I call it and it was a weird choice for sure and every time I told somebody that I was leaving the magazine to go work there they kind of said what really even if like if they had even heard of it cuz a lot of people I told her like what's the BuzzFeed and I had a friend who worked there and it was promised to me we were gonna revolutionize the way people cooked on you know through the internet and all this stuff and that sounded really cool and promising the idea that you could build something new and I lasted about eight months because I absolutely hated it because what it was was essentially all of the same stuff I hated about the Thanksgiving nachos just every day it was like every day was Thanksgiving nacho day it was the worst and because the sort of the way that they created their content was to look at what people wanted and give that to them there was no cultivating of new ideas there was no saying okay what if or okay we know this works but let's do something different it was kind of like if they knew something worked and they knew people wanted it they were gonna give it to you until you were so sick of it you never wanted to see it again and that is just not how I want to work or live my life or cook food so I left and fortunately I was able to leave because I had received a advance for a book that I had signed up to do and it came in a really great time I was approached by an editor and she said I realized that all of my recipes that I've ripped out of the pages of Bon Appetit magazine had your name on it she's like it took me too long to realize that but I I finally realized they all had your name and that was very flattering and I had no idea what I wanted a book to be I had no idea that I could even write up I hadn't thought about writing him so long that was you know not attached to a magazine that was not in a house voice or a house style so the idea was extremely daunting but also really exciting and that's when these cookies came to be which is really my little my firstborn really they came out of the cookbook dining in and when I was developing them it was sort of like I didn't really think anything of it I thought I wanted to make a really good cookie I have a lot of opinions on chocolate chip cookies mostly that I don't think they're that good I feel like they're too chewy or too hard or too much chocolate or I don't know they're just never right and even if you think they're right someone else is gonna argue with you because they're extremely personal and there's about 400 different ways to make a chocolate chip cookie and I did not want to compete with any of them because I knew if I said this is the best chocolate chip cookie somebody would argue with me and tell me why I'm wrong and I was not trying to participate in that type of conversation so I made something else and that was a shortbread that was essentially a chocolate chip cookie but I didn't call it that which kind of let me off the hook so when when now when people talk about the best chocolate chip cookie I am left out of the conversation entirely which I am extremely happy about and so a cookbook as you know is a book it is a paper it is bound it's a real-life object it does not come on the internet you cannot look at it on your phone it is something you hold and you cook out of and that to me is really special it's it's terrifying because it's permanent and in a culture where if you work on the internet you can change something if there's a mistake you can edit it you can take it down you can whatever but a book is permanent and that's really appealing to me and so I wanted to make something that was classic and timeless and that people really used and the way that it works is that you don't know what's gonna be cool or popular in a year but unfortunately you have to make these a year in advance sometimes longer and it takes about a year and change to produce the book from when you're finished so by the time it comes out everyone's like are you so excited and you're like no I want to throw it in the fire because I'm so sick of it it is old to me I've moved on but you have to get excited about it all over again even though you've read it 400 times and you would change half of it if you could but this recipe for whatever reason was was the recipe that caught on and I remember when the book came out I had a event at Bon Appetit magazine they threw a little party for me and I editor-in-chief Adam came up to me and he was like so what do you think is gonna be the salted butter galette of this book what's gonna be the break out recipe and I said oh definitely the anchovy butter chicken for sure it's so delicious how could it not be the most popular recipe in this whole book it's like a whole chicken you smother it with this garlicky anchovy butter and it roasts with croutons and onions and it's just impossibly good it was not that recipe it was this recipe it was the cookie of course not the anchovy butter chicken because why would that be the thing I don't know um anyway he was right that it wasn't gonna be that recipe and so the book came out in October 2017 and around I would say January of 2018 I started to notice through my Instagram that people were tagging me a lot in this particular recipe and you know this was before you could before I sound like a thousand years old the internet was really fast okay this was before you could just share images from other people freely on Instagram you had I had to take a screenshot on my phone and then save it to my my images and then repost it it was a lot of work I actually hired somebody for a brief time to help me with it because I could not keep up with the amount of images that were coming through but for me it was a really cool way to kind of showcase again how people were cooking these recipes and I thought you know if other people see that they're cooking from this book that might inspire you to cook from this book and it wasn't about the perfect image or the food looking perfect or it them doing a good job or a bad job it was that they were cooking and that was all that mattered to me is I wanted to get people in the kitchen and I got a lot of people saying oh is this right I couldn't find this I use this instead great awesome love it and through that just kind of started to encourage people that that was the message it wasn't about perfection it wasn't about doing it right it wasn't about following something to a tee it was about reading something and feeling inspired to cook at home or instead of going out or instead of ordering seamless or instead of you know making popcorn for dinner which is something I do all the time but this was the recipe that sort of caught on and because of that it got written about in the New York Times and then Bon Appetit and then Smitten Kitchen popular bloggers and basically every blog ever that talks about food was talking about these cookies and what I started to realize was that even if people didn't know who I was they knew these cookies which is someone called me the mother of cookies like this is like a game of Thrones thing I don't know but it was true and these became more popular than me or the book which was funny but I was grateful for and again it was just about even if it didn't look just like this picture it looked like a you know they could tell that it was the cookie and it became this kind of community that people were talking about and it was the first one that I had really seen something come out of a book and translate to the Internet in a way that didn't feel forced I didn't try nobody else really tried it just kind of happened organically and I think it started to set in motion that these people were really cooking and someone called it a viral recipe which I always kind of took issue with because having come from a website like BuzzFeed where that was a sort of a dirty word to me and because a viral recipe sort of indicated that there was a gimmick behind it that there was a something interesting to look at but not something you were going to necessarily make it home things like taking you know I don't know making waffles out of stuffing or nachos out of Thanksgiving leftovers but this was a viral recipe and that people were actually cooking and and making it and after the book came out then I became a columnist for The New York Times I had been contributing sort of semi-regularly and um finally they asked what did I want from the column and I said I would like to be a colonist I would like to have more words and I would like to tell more stories and I would like to have more recipes and they said okay so that was like oh that was easy but again I had spent you know nine years cooking to be able to ask for that I guess so not that easy um and so this was sort of again a very scary thing because you're tempted to give people what they want and you kind of have to know when to listen to that and when to not and so I could have very easily just tried to make a hundred different shortbread cookies and hope that they were as successful or popular as the first one but really what I wanted this column to be was easy weeknight meals that were never gonna be in my book because they were just sort of a different breed I had to really think about it okay what are what are the recipes that are gonna appear in my books and one of the recipes that are gonna appear in this column which is gonna have a completely different audience and so this was one of the recipes that came out a year after my book in October of 2018 and it's a spiced chickpea stew and it did really well people really liked it a lot and again it was sort of the same thing where people were cooking it and when someone else cooked it then it got their friend to want to cook it and then when that person cooked it another friend wanted to cook it and so this wasn't really advertised any differently than any other recipe in my column or on you know in a magazine or anything but it really caught on and people started making it and it did I think better than the cookies which is really crazy and to me this is a total like fluke I have no idea why this became so successful I think the cookie is easy cuz you're like oh well it's butter and sugar and chocolate and like yeah it's easy to love it's it's a cookie right everyone loves cookies but this is like basically a vegan stew and there's just zero reason why this should have been as successful as it was um but again people started sharing it and making it and cooking it and saying oh I I got rid of the garlic because I don't like that but added extra onion or I took out the yogurt on top and made it vegan or I used mustard greens instead of kale and people were having a conversation about food about cooking and that was really really exciting for me and I realize kind of the reason I do what I do and um feel extremely fortunate that that was sort of the case for this guy as well but you know there's always the comment section which which we love I don't have a side of that but feel free to look it up yourself but it's one of the more commented and rated recipes on the New York Times cooking site and most people absolutely love it and the more successful it became I was on The Today Show making it I had you know done interviews I had people were just like oh the stew this do this do and then came the backlash of is the stew even that good or like do you like it do people even really like it or you know why is it so popular and people started really hating on the stew but I suppose you can only achieve that if it's successful so I feel grateful for it anyway but you know it raised a lot of questions people said why didn't you call it a curry it's a curry it has spices in it and I thought well I'm extremely considerate of that you know in a recipe developing perspective of cultural appropriation and would never take credit for something like that and if I called it a curry I feel like I would be doing people a disservice because it's not and I don't know how to make traditional curry I hope to learn one day but this is not that this is sort of like you know has turmeric and garlic but I think it's something totally different and I had conversations with those people and again because the internet exists I was able to have those conversations and listen to them and they listened to me and it was really nice to have a dialogue and and then there were the people that said well the chickpeas could get crispier if you put them in the oven you know and I thought oh I know if you don't think that I know that I thought about that but if I had asked you to take the chickpeas and then roast half of them in the oven while you're cooking the other half stovetop and then use that as a garnish you're probably gonna look at that recipe and say that's a few too many steps for me I'm probably not gonna make that and so by doing the chickpeas on the stove and then saving some that are a little bit crispy and then putting them on top you kind of get the most best of both worlds but it's that kind of cognitive thinking about a recipe or I'm surely thinking about you at home making these and it's not about what to be is gonna be the fanciest technique or like the most mind-blowing result it's about are you gonna really make this and that is the objective across the board and so this is from my new book nothing fancy it comes out in October it's kind of the same type of mentality and because of the first book when it came out I not that many people knew who I was if you read bone Appetit magazine you may have heard of me but I had really nothing to lose I was sort of like well people are they're gonna like this book or they're not and I can't really help it either way but I'm gonna be as me as possible I'm gonna be honest I'm gonna create recipes that I think are useful and helpful but you know oh well if they don't and because it experienced you know somewhat of a success story in the publishing world anyway which the numbers are very funny when look at like what what an article in BuzzFeed when people think it's successful it's like three million views and for a book to be successful it sells like thousands of copies but with the second book I had to kind of stop myself from looking around me so much and stop myself from thinking what do people want like should I make more Stu should I make more cookies I actually have one cookie recipe in this book and I almost cut it because I was like I can't put another cookie recipe into this world that I just have to take a break because it's just gonna compete with itself I can't and I won't and but you know kind of trying to tune everything out and again find your voice of thinking what are gonna be the most useful and helpful recipes to people and this book is more geared to kind of having people over in a very unfunny casual way to kind of encourage you to not have to wash twenty eight pans and take eighteen days to cook dinner for four friends on a Saturday or a Tuesday so thinking of that and keeping that in mind trying to create a new book of recipes that were just as useful without you know kind of tuning out like the ketogenic stuff and including instructions for an instant pot and making things vegan when they didn't have to be and all the stuff that I know to be successful because if you look on the Amazon homepage of cookbooks it is a wild place let me tell you that it's all ketogenic is all instant pot it is all vegan it is all diet it is all celebrity chefs and you look at that and say well should I just make a ketogenic book should I just do instant pot recipes and I I'm sure I could figure it out I don't really know what ketogenic diet is but I'm sure I could google it and find out and but but looking at that information knowing what sells knowing what's successful and saying I'm not gonna do that I'm gonna do something else and China stay true to yourself is extremely hard and increasingly difficult when the more information we have I was recently quoted in an article as saying that I don't read cookbooks and I don't follow food media people on social media and I got a little bit of like you know a lot of people were like congratulations good for you me neither but some people were like well how do you like isn't that ignoring your community isn't that how do you stay engaged how do you you know make connections with people in your industry and the answer to that is that I have friends in the industry and there are people respect and we have real-life conversations we go out for coffee we go out for drinks we connect in other ways we collaborate on events and book signings and align ourselves in different ways and I think that the more information you have on these phones it can be really detrimental to your creative process no matter what you're doing and for me it's it's you know no more so than the food industry because if you know a recipe is gonna be really successful because it was for somebody else it's really hard not to think well should I be doing that because it's already proven to be successful and so blocking a lot of that out was instrumental and kind of staying true and I think anybody should also sort of take that road if they are in that kind of creative environment because there's a lot of noise out there and the internet as proven can be a really fun and kind and exciting place to share information and support one another but it can also be really challenging and detrimental to your creative process so I think it's very selective and it is completely revolutionized home cooking and the types of home cook out there and how they participate if you are yourself doing that at home and you know now it's like I go out to dinner I'm cooking with friends and like do you need to take a picture of that I'm like no no that's okay we don't need to take pictures of everything this is just for us we're just having dinner but it's really tempting to compete in that world and to document everything and to share it all and you know I I think it's important to take a break from that as well so while beneficial I and has definitely helped me in my career I think that you know the Internet is a weird and scary place so my my motto is don't read the comments and and hopefully that's helpful for you guys as well I'd love to take some questions if anybody has any even if it's a fake question [Applause] yes hi put aside so I could enjoy it in your recipes are simple everyone could go through check the ingredients you could substitute I like the little stories explaining that you could try this or do it that way whatever but thank you very much awesome thank you so much yeah I feel like the substitutions in a recipe have proven to be the most helpful not just for me but for other home cooks I try to shop only at grocery stores that you know anyone else was shopping I don't go to specialty stores unless I'm doing a photo shoot and I need something to look especially nice but you know where I say like you can definitely use kale or mustard greens or Swiss chard and I mean that and then sometimes I'll say I wouldn't recommend using anything but kale for these reasons because I've done it and failed so I I want you to have the most success but also the most flexibility and I feel like that's where home cooks really become empowered to kind of make something their own which is really exciting yes you do get to use the microphone yeah oh thank you has your creative process been influenced at all by what I believe to be a real trend in plant-based protein cooking yeah so the way that I describe my cooking I think it's like I'm definitely an omnivore I eat everything except for I don't like bell peppers but I yes that's yeah that's what I'm talking about this lady also knows bell peppers not that good and I am an omnivore and I believe in eating all the meats if you want all the vegetables I my food habit happens to be very vegetable heavy because I think vegetables are just more interesting than protein for the most part I tend to eat protein when I'm eating with other people and I'm cooking for just myself it's mostly vegetarian not on purpose but just because I'm not gonna open up a pack of chicken thighs for myself but I think as our community changes and the world changes and we have more conversations about sustainability and the types of food you should be buying at home reducing your red meat intake and protein intake finding more vegetable recipes or vegetable based recipes or grains is that are interesting and dynamic and and satisfying in a way that you don't even know you're not eating meat is important and even if I wrote a book that had no meat animal protein in it at all I would never call it a vegetarian cookbook because I think that that's labeling something and it makes you feel like you're being deprived of something and you know someone like my dad for example would be like oh I'm not a vegetarian I won't buy this book but he loves vegetables so I think that it's about reframing the conversation and saying vegetables and plants and grains can be just as interesting and dynamic satisfying and hearty as an animal protein and you know that doesn't mean there won't be like cheese and an insane amount of olive oil involved because chances are there is but you know it doesn't mean you need to have steak every night or you know some sort of protein I think there's a lot of different ways we can eat but I am definitely a trend averse cook and cookbook author because trends die and I would like to stay as classic and relevant for as long as humanly possible and so trying to find ways that kind of sustain that interest and by avoiding trends I think is actually really helpful even if it never achieves that peak popularity as other trendy things might somewhat frequently um I have a younger sister who I think just gets really daunted by cooking she's food poisoned herself a couple times oh my god she gets better I must help please do so I was wondering basically how can I help her like where can I point her besides getting her a copy of dining in where should she start that's a great question and I feel like starting anywhere is a good place to start and I think that kind of like my attitude towards college where I thought oh this is too much you kind of have to focus on one thing you want to focus on boiling an egg cooking a pot of rice making pasta with butter and cheese start small I think that's so often what happens is people think I can't cook and they look at these recipes that are probably built for like a level 2 or level 3 person and they either mess it up or they feel bad about themselves for not coming out properly they're starting to lofty I think that you kind of just need to manage expectations and say okay I'm gonna do some reading I'm gonna learn about what makes a good salad even if it's just lettuce greens lemon and olive oil and salt right or how to boil an egg and and start there and I think that like anyone like riding a bike or any sort of task that we learn for the first time having any sort of small amount of success in that process encourages you to do it again and more often and if you do something and you're not good at it immediately chances are you're gonna either want to walk away or feel frustrated or bad about yourself and so I think that it's really all about like finding a way in and finding one thing that you can have success with one thing that you can feel good about yourself after doing and that is the best feeling in the world is when you've never done something before and you try something new and you're like oh that wasn't scary I did it is it right oh okay great you know and wanting to try something more and new and that's how you kind of level up like nobody starts cooking professionally nobody starts being a great home cook it comes from making a lot of mistakes from burning a lot of things I still burn things I put a I put a piece of salmon in the oven the other day that when I was recipe testing for a cake and I was rushing and I was busy and I shoved the salmon in there forgetting that the cake was in the oven and it wasn't fully baked yet and the cake flipped upside down the batter went everywhere all over the bottom of the oven I just had to laugh and be like what a rookie mistake I've been doing this for 15 years and I still do stuff like that probably cuz I'm not paying attention but point being is that you're gonna you know encounter complications and roadblocks and there's so much out there now I feel like getting her you know three cookbooks um and just saying okay these are and flagging some recipes that you know to be simple and being like we're gonna cook these together if you don't live in the same area do it over the phone I know a lot of people that do sort of virtual cookbooks clubs with each other which is really cool and I just bought my younger sister a set of knives because I came over to her house and she was cutting with like essentially a plastic serrated knife for everything and I was like you're gonna hurt yourself this is not gonna work for you so she told me that as soon as she had a knife that actually cut something she started cooking more I was like oh funny how that works so tools and reading material I think are the best places to start ah hi I'm curious about clearly comments and the feedback loop was very important in kind of launching this era of your career but now at this point it's you don't read the comments or they're not an important part of that that feedback loop so I'm curious a little bit about that evolution and your thoughts on it yeah I mean honestly I have never read the comments I have have editors that read the comments and they tell me what the comments say but I have never done that because the first time you read something really negative about you on the internet you want to never read it again and so it came from videos of like this girl's voice is annoying too she's cutting her onion wrong to this person's done because they blob you know anything a person on the internet will say that is negative they will say it and if it's your article or your video it'll be about you and I was just not here for that negativity and I felt like that was making me not want to put work out into the world and so I felt like the best thing I could do for myself was to kind of just not pay attention to that and I have editors that say hey we've been getting a lot of comments that you know there's too much sugar in this one recipe and I'll look at it and go oh gosh that's a typo it should be 1/4 cup not a half a cup or whatever and when something is a problem I get I am aware of it I am alerted to it there's a few typos and dining in in the first edition this one that you guys could buy out here I think is all fixed but there was one recipe where you forgot to I forgot you me it was my fault I forgot to tell you what to do with an extra half a cup of blueberries and I was mortified when I discovered this mistake but I was alerted to this mistake by people who were reading the book and they were like hey love the book huge fan just FYI there's a maybe a mistake and I was like oh my gosh thank you so much and that's the kind of feedback that I welcome that I want and I asked my best friend all the time like what she's probably my most honest critic and I'll say like was there something missing from the book that you wished you had and she would give me her feedback and say well we live in LA and we're not gonna turn our ovens on in the summer so I'd really appreciate more up more stovetop and grilling recipes and great point we live in the East Coast bubble over here so so that kind of feedback I constantly welcome and I and I do read a lot of the comments and on here it's really easy to get that feedback and kind of questions and I love to engage with people that have honest questions or having trouble with something I will always help you if you're having you know tricky recipe or you think something's wrong with it or you've made it a few times but it's just not quite right I want to help you what I don't love is when people say needlessly negative things or you know Oh for the stew it's like because I call for two cans of coconut milk this recipe serves four to six people to 15 ounce cans of coconut milk I've tried the recipe with one can of coconut milk and guess what it is not as good it is just not as good so I called for two and some people were so upset that they were gonna ingest two whole cans of coconut milk and I'm like well that's if you eat the whole pot yourself because if you're just doing four servings then you're eating you know a third or a half a can and you know it's not like I'm asking you to eat this stew every day my goodness and you know so that sort of energy is you know if that's what you want to do because you're upset that I'm asking you to use two cans of coconut milk then that's fine but I I don't want to then all of a sudden make diet food because that's the feedback I've been getting because that's not who I am how I like to eat so anyone else yes short question yeah where do you get your ideas from where do I get my ideas from that is a great question yeah so since I kind of entered the phase in my career where I found to have external things in my world be less helpful than helpful I think that travel is probably the number one source of inspiration because I find that the way that people cook in other parts of this country of the world to be endlessly fascinating things are so regional and nothing is one-dimensional and what I've experienced and especially going to different countries like there are just a million ways to cut a scallion there are a million ways to cook with a tomato there's a million ways to use vinegar in your food and eating and traveling has been you know absolutely an endless source of inspiration every time I go anywhere I discover something and that doesn't have to be an exotic location it can be anywhere so when I travel that is my number one priority anyone who's ever gone anywhere with me knows that whether it's a market or a restaurant or you know anywhere in between that is why I'm there and that is what I want to do and that's how I feel like you learn a lot about a culture but also to me is just quite inspiring like the the markets especially the types of vegetables that are available there are the types of things that are grown the things that like you don't see where you live and again that can be you know 50 miles upstate or it can be in Italy or it can be in Asia or whatever but there is just I don't think that I would I think if I went everywhere on the planet I would not feel like I was ever covering all the ground and like I think you can just be so so inspired that way and that's why it accepts me when people go to like they go to they travel abroad and they go to these restaurants and they're like to have any burgers and you're like what you're in Italy why are you ordering a burger it's like well it's just like what I really want and my parents really travel this way and it drives me insane and I'm like you're in Italy like go get the pasta go get the thing you know and I don't know it's I think that whenever the next time you go somewhere if you think okay I'm gonna try one thing that I've never had before I've never heard it before you will absolutely find yourself inspired by that thing the next time you're in your own kitchen will they be taking you out for pizza before you leave New Haven so I unfortunately have to run slightly after the book signing but I have have been - I'm gonna say these wrong it's a pizza right that's what that's what it's called here okay I've been yeah a pizza one Oh a piece Oh see I see I don't even know if I don't get it to it today I will be back for it absolutely but I've been to Frank Pepe's the am I saying that right I'm in a Sally's I've been to bar and I think that's it I'm like what else am I missing oh wow okay we're we need like a comment box where you put in all your favorite pizzas and I'll have to come back and try them all because I pizza is my number one favorite food not ashamed to say it I it's I can't make it at home well unless I make like a grandma style which is pretty good but I that is you know if I can't make it better myself I will always go out for it and pizza is at the top of that list oh you didn't more often than I should yes you are fast with that microphone you're running around so you mentioned traveling is that like a big part of your inspiration so how do you find these restaurants and places to go when you are traveling like is it always a fancy like rated restaurant or are you also looking for holes in walls like how are you finding the places to go so I mostly find places through I do a lot of research online I look at other blogs I look at lists but the best recommendations always come from a person I prefer holes in the wall - real restaurants or fancy restaurants or rated restaurants I just don't ever think that the food that you have there is as good and I like for example when I go to Mexico City I almost never eat a restaurant I eat pretty much exclusively from places on the street because the food is so far in a way better than anything you can have in a restaurant in my opinion and I feel like that's also getting more to the heart of the culture there and you can see what they're doing more I don't it's really exciting to eat of those kinds of places and you know it depends on where you are there's what I went to Tokyo for the first time this year and I got every single commendation from a person that had been and loved to eat and kind of what I did was I tallied up my recommendations and said okay well this place has eight recommendations this place you know that it this place has only one but it speaks to me wherever I'm just kind of looking at what people recommend looking them up myself and saying that's where I want to be that's where I want to go and you know sometimes you go to a tourist place and the reason it's a touristy place is because it's really really good and I don't think that just because it's touristy means it's bad or not worth your time there's a million restaurants that are way too crowded and really annoyingly touristy and they're amazing and they're so fun to eat at and I love that kind of stuff then there's also places that I've never heard of that somebody's like I swear to you you have to find it it's in the back of an alley you're gonna drive yourself crazy finding it they're probably not even open they keep weird hours but you have to try the you know whatever there and those are always really worth experiencing I got a recommendation to go to this sushi restaurant in Tokyo from my photographers that I work with on my cookbooks and my column and they were in Japan maybe a year or two before me and they said okay you're gonna go to this place it's not on any lists nobody's gonna tell you to go there but we're gonna tell you to go there it was really remarkable it's a husband-and-wife team oh that's how I felt when I love to leave Tokyo and you know they're like it's not gonna look like much there's no real sign in front but go for lunch you should just try should just trust us so I go in and they're kind of mean and I was like oh this is awkward and I wasn't sure there was a language barrier and and they asked you how they how you found that place and I said oh my friends Michael and Nicole and they looked at me in their light and I was like they're Canadian really tall guy beard and then short woman with dark hair and they're like oh and they went into the back and they got an iPad and they showed me their picture and they were like these people and I was like yeah and then they were like oh come on in and started speaking English and we're like treating me like I was their family and it was amazing experience it would cost me about 40 US dollars the best sushi experience I had the whole time I was there I would have never found it had they not shared that with me and then they took a picture of me on their iPad so next time any of you go there make sure that you I'll show you my picture but that that kind of really special place it had no Michelin stars it wasn't on any blogs nobody had written about it but it was a special I started crying when they showed me their picture because it was like they were there with me and they were in Canada and I was in Japan and the whole thing was really crazy but those types of things where if you go to a restaurant that someone you know once had an emotional experience or connection too chances are you will have that same experience and the best restaurant doesn't always mean the best food or the most highly rated or the most written about it is a different type of experience altogether and it's a lot more soulful that way I think ok so you showed us three of your most favorite or most successful recipes what would you say would be your other ones that maybe haven't gotten as much buzz that you would say we should start with a B have your book um one really popular one is a slow roasted salmon that is probably the second most popular recipe from the cookbook and I did a version of it for bone Appetit many many years ago and then kind of simplified it and updated it for the cookbook and you can actually find it also a New York Times cooking but it's basically you take a big piece of salmon big fillet in cooking fish as largely as possible I don't make small fillets I think that's when it overcooks becomes tricky I prefer cooking it in a large fillet prevents over drying or overcooking you take it you put it in a baking dish you cover it with a lot of olive oil salt and pepper and then you layer on some citrus slices and this can be just lemon just orange a combination of both people have used grapefruit and you pop it into a 325 degree oven for 8 to 12 minutes depending on how large the fillet is I've done this with a 1 pounder with a two and a half pounder to feed more people and take it out of the oven it's just pink it's like medium rare I would say which is how I think you should be eating your salmon and super super silky very very tender and then you finish it with a showering of herbs you can use whatever you want I like to use dill cilantro parsley and a little lemon zest and that's it it's extremely simple maybe four ingredients and pretty much endlessly referable I feel like you can add fresh chili or chili flake you can add thinly sliced fennel you can add radishes at the end you can do a lot of different things with it but that technique and that type of recipe is kind of like I feel like what I stand for and unfortunately now I can't write a better salmon recipe so kind of did myself a disservice there but that one there was a spicy brush room noodle soup that did really well and a creamy cauliflower pasta that's probably the other most popular one and those are you can find on the near times anyone else cool well thank you guys so much for having me [Applause] [Music]

Channel: International Festival of Arts & Ideas

Views: 49,408

Rating: 4.9123631 out of 5

Keywords: alison roman, cooking, keep dining in, bon appetite, tasty, recipes, home cooking, arts, ideas, international festival of arts & ideas, new haven, connecticut

Id: 8DJILjmRntM

Length: 65min 52sec (3952 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 17 2019