Robert Andreozzi is the Providence-based chef and co-founder of Pizza Marvin and Club Frills. Before opening Club Frills and Pizza Marvin, he worked across the United States and in Italy, and is bringing what he learned back to his restaurants in Rhode Island. I met Robert when I visited Providence in late 2025, and more recently, we sat down to talk about how he thinks about Providence’s growing and changing food scene, and where his restaurants fit into that.

Brianna Plaza: Can you tell me about your background?

Robert Andreozzi: I went to a traditional college and I had thought about culinary school but my parents told me absolutely no way. But as I started to think about what I was going to do with my life, I started thinking seriously about culinary school. I went to Johnson and Wales in Colorado, and after nine months there, I worked at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, and then at El Post in New York City for a few years. That took me to Italy, and then back to Colorado, and I made my way back to Rhode Island in 2017.

I opened up a restaurant in 2018 and learned a lot about restaurants and partnerships throughout that process. Eventually I moved on and opened up Pizza Marvin in 2020.

Brianna Plaza: Why was a cocktail bar the next step after a pizza shop?

Robert Andreozzi: It’s not to say I hate pizza — I don’t hate pizza - but I don’t consider myself someone who is particularly thrilled with the dough making process. Pizza Marvin was an amazing business opportunity that was more about memorializing my partnership with Jesse Hedberg and an ability to work through COVID. We opened in December 2020. It was obviously a weird time but the economics of the deal were really strong.

It’s been my goal to own a restaurant group that changes the way that Rhode Islanders think about dining, and bringing back what I’ve learned in other cities. I want to have an impact on the food and beverage landscape in Rhode Island. It’s a bit self-serving, but I want to be able to go out and enjoy these places and be proud of them.

It blossomed into something a lot larger than we ever imagined and it took us a minute to stabilize ourselves. From the beginning, Jesse and I had been pretty aligned about what our goals were in working together and what types of restaurants we wanted to open. I just never imagined that opening a pizzeria in our community was going to be our foundation. If you can open a place that becomes your foundation, you can take more interesting risks in the future.

Frills was about celebrating Jesse as this creative figurehead and building around that. Without Marvin, I don’t think we would have been able to afford some of the equipment at Frills or take some of the creative risks we have. It’s not to say it’s Frills is a vanity project, but we’re more interested in pushing the scene forward in an impactful way.

Brianna Plaza: Club Frills felt more interesting than any other cocktail bar I’ve been to in a while. How do you think about menu development?

Robert Andreozzi: Jesse is our creative director and what drew us together is that we have a shared sense of creativity, but Jesse’s imagination is elite and anyone who has worked with him would say he’s a gift. I’ve learned a lot about what it means to work with a creative and what works and what doesn’t. We’re sometimes still figuring that out because structure can feel quite stifling for someone who has a different creative process than I do.

At Frills, we haven’t had a lot of turnover on our menu since because it’s been a lot about strengthening our systems. Drinks have come and gone, sure, but we’ve worked for formalize a R&D process where anyone from the team can submit an idea. We all sit down and discuss and decide what’s worth exploring. We really have to give some direction and say, what are the boundaries we can work within? If things are too open-ended, you can get lost in the creative process for too long. It’s also thinking about how to maximize all of our equipment. Putting things in a box and trying to bounce into the walls and corners helps with our creative process.

We’re never really worried about making something not delicious. There’s enough people who have discerning palettes on the team where nothing bad is ever going to go out.

Brianna Plaza: You talk about changing the way Rhode Islanders think about dining. How will you lead that charge?

Robert Andreozzi: New York isn’t a fair comparison because it’s New York. But everyone takes so much pride in their neighborhood and good quality rises to the top in a very meaningful way that it doesn’t here in Rhode Island. We tend to celebrate mediocrity in a way that maybe other cities don’t. But I think that’s why I’ve liked settling here in Providence because the diner here is becoming a lot more educated. That allows us to take more risk. But I think that people’s version of fine dining here in Rhode Island is still pretty basic. People are very value-oriented here.

My goals are that people are more in tune and proud of our food systems. Local isn’t always the best option, but I think we should be celebrating our local farms and getting out and going to the markets. I think the best restaurants celebrate great quality, great sourcing, and great practices. I envision a scene where there’s a lot of competition, and I am not continuing to go to the same few restaurants every time I go out.

Brianna Plaza: Do you think the market can support that interest?

Robert Andreozzi: I think so, but Rhode Islanders are just really averse to change and slow to adapt. But I think competition is great because then the middle starts to look a lot different. Some restaurants are celebrated and I’m like are you kidding me? But if in 10 years, that becomes the worst restaurant, maybe that’s an incredible thing.

Every restaurant serves a different purpose, we all know that. But I use the example on our street. A bar just went out of business and we’re hoping a cocktail bar goes in there. That might seem like a wild thought, but we understand that people aren’t sitting at Club Frills for a few hours, it’s a stop along the night. You can create a cocktail trail and utilize the neighborhood. We need to do a better job of concentrating our offerings so that if one has a wait, you can just go down the street. We need to stop being afraid of competition.

There’s a lot more collaboration and support in the restaurant industry than maybe 10 years ago. I think people are realizing a rising tide lifts all boats. We need peers that prop you up and are not looking to have the same dinner three times a month. Diversity is good.

About 1 hour from Boston and 3 hours from New York City, Providence, Rhode Island is a food lover’s dream that often falls under the radar. Providence is one of the oldest cities in the U.S., so there’s a constant dynamic of old and new. Established, old-school eateries that have been around for decades. New school cocktail bars, pushing the boundaries of what a cocktail can be. Chefs influenced by deep local culture and newer immigrants, using the bounty of the nearby Narragansett Bay in interesting ways. Providence’s food scene punches well above its weight.

In late November, GoProvidence invited me to town for a culinary-focused weekend to get a better sense of what the city has to offer. The team made an itinerary with a few Rhode Island institutions and some newer spots, and I since I had been before, I added a few of my favorites and a handful of recommendations from locals. Needless to say, it was a very packed 48 hours of eating.

When we arrived, we checked in and headed to Track 15, the food hall across the street from our hotel. Located in the old Union Station, it’s a new project from a group of developers that have been at the forefront of revitalizing downtown. “Food brings people together,” Christopher Marsella tells me, “We weren’t interested in doing a traditional restaurant, but we have a long-term interest in the area.”

Marsella is the president of the organization that spearheaded the project and he and his team knew the food had to be local. “We wanted to showcase Rhode Island.” They ate their way through the state over 18 months, talking to people and putting together a list of their favorite spots. “We knew certain types of food we wanted because we had already designed the kitchen. But we had to think about what made sense.”

After I returned from the trip, I chatted with Robert Andreozzi, a local chef that runs two of the buzziest newcomers to Providence: Pizza Marvin and Club Frills. He’s worked in kitchens all over the US, but eventually made his way back to Rhode Island. “I think my goal here is that people are more in tune with and proud of our food systems,” he told me, “I think people celebrating local farms is great.”

When asked if the small city can support the growing restaurant scene, he’s confident it can. “I have a vision where there’s lots of competition and I am not going to the same few restaurants every time I go out. I think people are realizing that a rising tide lifts all boats.”

It’s easy to overlook Providence, but their rapidly growing food scene is proving that Providence can play in the big leagues.

Providence is great for a long weekend away. Here’ are a few spots I’d hit:

I love a good cocktail, but I don’t necessarily seek out cocktail bars. They often come across as overly fussy and complicated, which takes the fun out of drinking. Club Fills is not that. They have innovative cocktails that push the boundaries of technique and ingredients. Get the jello shots if they’re available.

Pizza Marvin is from the same team as Club Frills and they serve up a menu that’s inspired as much by regional cuisine as it is by the pizza joints of our youth. The pizza and non-pizza items alike are fantastic, the vibes are high, and the drinks are strong.

Uyghur cuisines blends Central Asian, Turkish, and Chinese flavors, and is centered around lamb, hand-pulled noodles, and cumin-grilled spiced meats. Jahunger was my first introduction to the cuisine and I have not stopped thinking about our meal. The hand-pulled noodles are a must order.

Part raw bar, part cocktail bar, Gift Horse is a seasonally-minded restaurant that’s great for a well-crafted cocktail and New England seafood.

For all the spots we visited, plus recommendations from locals, you can check out my Google map here.

Many thanks to the very chic Graduate by Hilton Providence for hosting us during our visit to Providence, as well as the team at GoProvidence for organizing the trip.

Last fall, I was invited to visit Providence, Rhode Island, a relatively small city with a quickly growing food and drink scene. I had been twice before, but for very short trips, so it was fun to visit for a few days with a fully packed culinary itinerary. On that trip, I talked with a lot of really great hospitality folks, so this is the first in a series of issues about Providence.

Patrick Maguire is the Director of Marketing at Narragansett Brewing, a 136 year old beer brand based in Providence, Rhode Island. In his role, he is responsible for the larger distribution of their beer, as well as all the tap room marketing.

We chatted about the brewery’s history, its evolution from a legacy to modern beer brand, and how they adapt to changing consumer tastes.

Brianna Plaza: Can you give me a brief history of the brewery?

Patrick Maguire: It’s been around for a long time, 135 years. It was New England’s largest brewery throughout the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s. Through a flurry of different sales and ownership changes, the brewery just got knocked on its face.

By the 80s, production had been moved out to Indiana, so the beer started losing its identity then. The brewery eventually closed in New England, and it changed owners a few other times. It ended up within the Pabst brand for a bit and by then, the brand was pretty much on its deathbed.

In 2005, the brand was bought by Mark Hellendrung, who is still our president today, alongside a group of Rhode Island investors, and they’ve spent the last 20 years rebuilding the brand. We’re one of the top craft breweries in the country, and in 2024, we were named BrewBound’s large brewery of the year.

It’s been this great underdog story where the brand was nearly dead and gone, and we’ve been on this revival arc for the past 20 years. We’re definitely a regional brand, but we’re the little engine that could, and we continue to stay positive and above the line.

Brianna Plaza: How do you think about the beers you sell in the tap room, what gets distributed where, and how you expand the brand with varieties people might not know about?

Patrick Maguire: I think the tap room’s a great way of trying new things before we sell it via distribution. There are opportunities that if a beer does well within the tap room, we can at least open up distribution locally and get it into more packaged stores and hospitality businesses.

That’s what the tap room is all about. People know us for our lager, but we’ve also had a porter, a bock, an October fest — over time, those went away. With the tap room opening up in 2021, it was an opportunity to bring back the craft and heritage side of the business. Last year, we released O’Neill’s Irish Red Ale that did really well, so this year we’re doing it again and producing more and getting distribution out into different areas locally.

Brianna Plaza: During Prohibition, Narragansett brewed non-alcoholic drinks. How does Narragansett lean into that history and adapt to peoples’ drinking habits?

Patrick Maguire: It’s something we continually talk about. We’re known for American-style lager, so we don’t want to veer too far from that. Everyone is doing NA, but we don’t want to jump in just to jump in. We’d rather do it with some thought. Is there a need in the market for us to have that? It’s not something we necessarily need to work on unless there’s an opportunity to with distributors. We want to be thoughtful with the legacy of the brand.

Brianna Plaza: I really like the Narragansett branding and it’s interesting that it hasn’t changed much in its history. How do you think about that longevity?

Patrick Maguire: I think the Hi Neighbor! aspect of the brand is very ownable and iconic, so why would we get away from that? I feel like there are always these historical connections to the Narragansett brand.

There’s this water cooler effect that the brand can bring with these stories and memories. That’s really where the Hi Neighbor! mantra is just so true to the brand ethos of being inclusive and neighborly.

So for me, that’s the trademark that has stood the test of time and not necessarily something we need to get away from. The brand is the stories and the neighborly approach, and that’s something we should hold on to.

Brianna Plaza: How do you stay relevant as a legacy brand?

Patrick Maguire: The history and heritage still play a part. When people are looking for an American-style lager and seeing what’s out there that’s not necessarily Anheuser-Busch — there’s curiosity that comes from that. There’s a little bit of if you know you know about this brand, so that gives us a bit of that edge when it comes to relevancy.

The flavor and quality of the lager itself, especially when you compare to other inexpensive American-style lagers, holds up pretty well against other brands. People have intrigue and interest in the brand and the brand story, so they pick it up and try it. The quality is what keeps them coming back.

Last week, New Yorkers went on an emotional roller coaster. As we rounded out the weekend and started the week, the weather rose above 60 degrees and on Monday and Tuesday it was mid-60s and sunny. Glorious by anyone’s standards. By Wednesday, the weather started to cool a tad, then on Thursday we had almost all the weather possible: rain, snow, and wind. To say that people were less than pleased is an understatement.

On Friday, the weather leveled out a bit to sunny and cool, and it was a perfect day to visit the farmers’ market to seek out my favorite shoulder season produce: chicories. These beautiful bitter greens are the stars of this time of year: they show up to the markets before other traditional spring produce like asparagus and ramps, and their bright pink and green hues give me the jolt of life I need to carry me to warmer weather.

Normally I just toss them in salads, but I wanted to force myself to do literally anything else with them. A spring-y pasta with peas came to mind, and the peas balance out the bitterness of the greens. Peas aren’t in season yet here, but fresh or frozen from the store work just fine.

Now that chicories are starting to show up at local markets, I hope that means more spring produce is on the way. The temp has dropped back down to the 30s again, so I’ll have to keep my sweaters at the ready for a few more weeks. But when peas, ramps, and asparagus show up, know that relief from the cold is on its way.

Pasta with radicchio, pork, and peas

This dish comes together quickly so make sure everything is ready when you start. If you think you don’t like bitter greens, they get mellowed out while cooking, so this might be a good place to start.

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Colu Henry is a Hudson, NY-based cookbook writer that focuses on elegant yet approachable recipes, and her work has been featured in the New York Times and Food & Wine. I spoke with her in late 2023 about her path to cookbook writing, the philosophy behind her second book Easy Fancy Food, and more.

Today, I’m back with a followup conversation with Colu as her third book, Better at Home, hits shelves this week. We chatted about about the inspiration behind the book, the styling process, and how to stock your pantry for the book.

Brianna Plaza: When we last spoke, book three hadn’t been planned yet. Can you talk to me about the new book, Better at Home?

Colu Henry: I actually had a two book deal, but I hadn’t really figured out what that book was going to be, so that’s probably why we didn’t chat about it. Better at Home came about very organically. My husband, Chad, and I will chit-chat in the morning over coffee and I’d be like, “What do we want to do for dinner, do we want to go out?” And we’d go back and forth and he’d be like, “It’s better at home.” And I always thought, “You’re right, it is better at home.”

So the title happened that way and set me on this path of reflecting on where I’m at in life and where a lot of my peers are. I love going to restaurants and love supporting restaurants, but I think for me, as I am getting older I don’t want to go out as much. How I cook in Hudson and how I cook in Nova Scotia are different, but in both situations, we’re having people over or going to someone’s home. So the book feels very, very true to who I am and what I am doing right now.

Brianna Plaza: Based on the proposal you sent and what was published, how far is the current book from the original idea?

Colu Henry: The proposal really had nothing in it other than 100ish recipes and the rest was to be determined. I feel very lucky that Abrams [the publisher] trusts me. I sent through the concept and my editor Holly was like, “I’m obsessed with this concept.”

And sometimes it’s the opposite. Easy Fancy Food took a bit more workshopping, but this book just landed.

Brianna Plaza: Is this book more for elevating your everyday or for having people over?

Colu Henry: I think it’s a combination of both. I was shooting a video last week for the lamb chop recipe that’s in the book. It’s got a salad of pickled shallots, charred dates, crisped garlic, and toasted nuts. That takes 25 minutes. Could it be a weeknight meal? 100% Could I share that at a dinner party? Absolutely.

Brianna Plaza: I really love the styling in the book. Can you tell me a bit about the design process?

Colu Henry: It was a really fun process. My husband and our friend Martin shot the book this time. They’re both artists and I’ve collaborated with them both before, but we’ve never done anything this big, so that was really cool. I worked with the same food stylist as Easy Fancy Food.

The creative direction I gave was that I wanted the book to feel lived in and I wanted it to feel like old money. I wanted it to feel like we were shooting it at our crazy aunt’s house. We could have new things, but we don’t. The props were a combination of my things and some prop house stuff.

Brianna Plaza: How should I stock my pantry to cook through this book?

Colu Henry: The way that I organized the pantry section in this book is very deliberate. I use a lot of specific ingredients like Castelvetrano olives or Calabrian chilies or harissa paste, and you’re going to see those ingredients come up a number of times in the book, and that’s by design.

I feel like a lot of times, people write books and they ask you to buy one-off ingredients that you don’t use again. I wanted to find a way for cooks to say, “Okay, I made the picatta-like chicken, what else in the book can be made with the leftover olives that I have?”

I try to be mindful of what I call the dusty drawer problem. I want to avoid spices and ingredients sitting around and not being used. I love using dried mint, which I feel like is under-utilized in the States. I call for it quite a bit in the book, and I keep that idea in mind so cooks can be more resourceful.

Shop some of Colu’s essential pantry items: cumin seeds, dried mint leaves, fennel seeds, Diamond kosher salt

Brianna Plaza: What’s your favorite recipe in the book?

Colu Henry: It’s so interesting because two weeks ago, we shot like 10 videos and I remade some of these recipes I haven’t made in two years and I was like, “These are so good!” I was surprised at myself, even though that makes no sense at all. But when you revisit your recipes or someone else makes them, I remember how good they are.

There’s a really fun recipe for a shrimp toast that uses ‘nduja, fennel, and lemon. I love dim sum and going out for Chinese, so it’s my non-Cantonese take on shrimp toast. I also really love this braised pork that uses both Calabrian chili paste and Cento hoagie sauce and it’s delicious.

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Cappelletti in Brodo with Mortadella Meatballs

After a long, rewarding day making tortellini in brodo with my dear friend Steph, we both agreed the leftover stuffing would make great meatballs. It got me thinking . . What if I was to turn the recipe upside down and instead of making freshly stuffed pasta, make the meatballs the star of the show and serve them in broth with small pasta? I did, and it is a winner—not to mention a whole lot less of a lift. If you don’t want to make the soup, make the meatballs anyway! They’d be delightful tossed in a red tomato sauce and served on their own or with spaghetti. They also freeze very well should you want to batch them ahead of time.

Serves 4

For the meatballs:

4 ounces (115 g) mortadella, roughly chopped

4 ounces (115 g) prosciutto, roughly chopped

8 ounces (225 g) ground pork

Nutmeg

1⁄4 cup (13 g) finely chopped fresh Italian parsley

1⁄2 cup (40 g) panko bread crumbs

1 large egg

1⁄2 cup (50 g) grated pecorino cheese

For the soup:

6 cups (1.4 L) low-sodium chicken broth

6 ounces (170 g) dried cappelletti pasta

Chopped parsley, for garnish

Grated pecorino, for serving

Freshly ground black pepper

Make the meatballs: Preheat the oven to 425°F (220°C). Line a sheet pan with parchment paper.

In a food processor, combine the mortadella and prosciutto and pulse until it has a similar consistency to the ground pork.

In a large bowl, combine the mortadella/prosciutto mixture, ground pork, nutmeg, parsley, panko, egg, and pecorino. With your hands or a large spoon, mix together until everything is well combined. With damp hands, roll the pork mixture into balls 3⁄4 to 1 inch (2 to 2.5 cm) in diameter; it should yield about 20 meatballs.

Place the meatballs on the lined pan and bake until they are cooked through, about 12 minutes, flipping halfway through to ensure both sides get golden brown. (Alternatively, you could pan-fry these in olive oil, but I don’t. I’m a lazy cook and prefer this tidier version.)

Meanwhile, for the soup: In a pot, bring the stock to a boil. Add the pasta and cook according to package directions, stirring frequently to ensure it’s not sticking to the bottom of the pot.

Divide the meatballs among bowls and ladle the broth and pasta over top. Sprinkle a bit of parsley over each serving and pass more pecorino at the table. Finish with a few good turns of black pepper.

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Sana Javeri Kadri is the founder of Diaspora Spice Co., a farm-to-table spice company that puts equity, transparency, and high-quality products at its forefront. Asha Loupy is Diaspora’s long-time recipe editor. Together, they wrote The Diaspora Spice Co. Cookbook which is out today! The book is a highly personalized guide to cooking with spices and incorporating South Asian techniques and flavors into your everyday home cooking. To write the book, they traveled to their partner farms across India and Sri Lanka to gather heirloom family recipes and then adapted them to a global pantry. The recipes are highly cookable, incredibly delicious, and rooted in seasonality and freshness. We chatted about their path to writing a cookbook, working with their farming partners, and adapting South Asian spices and techniques to American kitchens.

Brianna Plaza: Can you both start by telling me how you got into the spice and cookbook writing business?

Asha Loupy: I got into the food business because I loved to cook. I started cooking when I was four years old, but I knew from a very young age that I didn’t have the disposition to work in a restaurant kitchen because I think if someone yelled at me, I would cry and walk out. My mom was an elementary school librarian and I loved cookbooks, so food writing just seemed like a really natural path to go down.

Out of college I worked for a specialty food company and learned a lot about ingredients. It was when I was working there that I learned of this woman that was bringing in turmeric. Then I bought it myself, and I tasted the turmeric that Sana was bringing in and I don’t think I’ve ever tasted real turmeric before. I started cooking with it and started tagging and tagging Diaspora on Instagram.

Sana Javeri Kadri: She very much slid into my DMs.

Asha Loupy: We started building a relationship that way and then I met Sana at different food events that we were both at, me as a grocery buyer and her as a purveyor.

One day she posted a cryptic story about needing 10 hours of work from someone and I reached out. She said she needed a graphic designer, which wasn’t me. But as the business grew, I came on part-time to help Sana start including recipes on the site. That then blossomed into coming on to work on the cookbook.

Sana Javeri Kadri: I was born and raised in Mumbai, and I moved to California for college. After college, I moved up to the Bay Area and started working at a specialty grocer. I was working on their marketing team, and I realized that even though they were bringing the most beautiful peaches and greens and fresh things, the minute something came from South Asia, it was inherently cheap and there was no transparency. The concept of farm to table was kind of thrown out the window.

This was my first job out of college, so at the ripe age of 22.5, I quit and bought a one-way ticket to India. I was like, “I am going to research turmeric.” My parents — who had partially-funded my college tuition — were horrified. I had pitched this story to Anthony Bourdain’s Roads and Kingdoms about who was growing the turmeric for this Golden Milk latte boom, but they were going to pay me $300 and my flight to India was $1500, so it was never a mathematically sound venture.

There are all of these beautiful, regenerative farms all across South Asia, and they don’t have access to markets. They’re just selling to the regular commodity market, and their product is mixed In with all this terrible stuff. The more I learned, the more I realized that the farmer in the conventional spice trade doesn’t make any money and the customer gets really stale products. With spices, fat is flavor, so the more oil content in spices, the more you will taste it on your palate, and the less you have to use. So customers were getting spices that had no oil content left in them at all.

So Asha never having tasted turmeric like this before was probably the thing I heard the most in the first couple of years in the businesses. People didn’t know how turmeric was meant to taste. I started with one farm and one spice in the fall of 2017. We sold out our first 2017 of turmeric in four days, which was amazing because I didn’t have an audience.

The Diaspora story has been so rooted in community rallying around us. Now, we work with about 140 farms, we’re in about 600 stores, and we have about 160,000 customers. I think the magic of Diaspora has been that we have this community of people who love us and that we are very accountable to. In a lot of ways, a book that highlights the people that grow the spices so that the people can be inspired to use the spices was a natural extension of the work.

Brianna Plaza: How do you find your sourcing partners?

Sana Javeri Kadri: It’s much easier because I’ve been in the game for almost nine years, so we’re kind of known. Between Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, if there’s a farmer who’s regeneratively growing a spice or an herb, they’ll probably contact us. We’re known enough that people will say hi, or if we’re looking for something I will reach out to our partners and they will put me in touch with other people.

Back in the day, it wasn’t easy at all. I would say the first five years was me spending about three months of the year in India just visiting farms. I think I spoke with about 14 farms before I was able to finalize a fennel farmer. It took months before I was able to finalize our pepper partner. I joined a natural farming WhatsApp group and I would search for cumin and if I got any hits, I would then send voice notes to random farmers who didn’t speak the same language as me and hope they get back to me. It was a lot of showing up via trains, planes, and buses with my bad haircut and jumpsuits being like can I buy some spices?

I would show up to their harvest and buy the entire year’s crop and they had no idea if I’d even pay their bills. Money is the best indicator of trust, so we’d always pay on time and always buy what we promised.

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Brianna Plaza: Why did you decide a cookbook was the next evolution of your brand?

Sana Javeri Kadri: I am very much a CEO who lives in spreadsheets and does managerial things. I have always wanted to write a cookbook, but skills to write a cookbook I did not have. So when Asha joined us in 2020, we started tossing around the idea a bit.

There were a few routes we could have gone. Asha was already developing beautiful recipes for our website that were spice-forward, but were pretty California-ish, which is how we eat and cook. Another route was recipes that I grew up cooking and my origin story as the origin story for the business, since spices are rooted in India and I am rooted in India.

Growing up in India, I had a pretty colonized childhood because I went to British schools. So when I think about black pepper, I would think about British tomato soup or a steak with a pepper sauce. I had no idea pepper was indigenous to South India. Or something like cardamom, you think about cardamom buns more than anything else, which is such a European mindset. It comes down to who had the power to create the archive and write down recipes and push culture forward.

I think ultimately, it was like let’s go to the people who grow these spices and see what they do with it. And this is where Asha really came in. She figured out how these recipes could work in an American kitchen. It cannot be a three-day process or rely on the fresh harvest of some obscure vegetable. How do we adjust for that?

We wrote the proposal in 2021 and then really committed to the book for half a decade.

Brianna Plaza: You talked about adapting the book for American kitchens. I’m curious why you wanted to do that.

Sana Javeri Kadri: Ultimately I’m a business that sells spices to American and British home cooks. I don’t sell to Indian home cooks yet because we’re an export business. So my recipes have to be accessible to the people cooking with the spices. Not a single one of our farm partners has an oven, but an oven is a very significant American home appliance. American home kitchens don’t have giant sil battas to grind their own spices, we’re going to do it in a blender. So, for me, I want to make the recipes accessible to my customer and I want them to be cooked as broadly as possible. It’s not a cookbook specifically or exclusively for our farm partners. It’s about spreading the culture further and making it as accessible as possible.

Asha Loupy: I think in making this cookbook, because we’re also a company that sells spices, we want to make it so people actually cook out of it. We don’t want it to become this beautiful coffee table book that’s intimidating. I think one of the things I always hear people say when you start talking about South Asian cooking is I’m really intimidated by it. The ingredient lists are really long. There are techniques that I don’t necessarily know. I wanted this book to honor everything that we had learned in our travels, but also make it a book that can be a gateway into South Asian cooking in a very new way that’s not butter chicken, that’s not palak paneer.

We really wanted to showcase the spices and make it a book that is going to live in people’s kitchens and that they’re going to come back to. Even if they aren’t familiar with a certain technique, it will help them become more comfortable with using spices in general. When you’re selling a product, you don’t want someone to buy a jar of something and they put it in their pantry and have it languish there for years. Like I said, I worked in specialty food before this, and one of the things when you’re selling a product is you don’t want someone to just buy a jar of something and then put it in their pantry and have it languished there for three years. I want someone to make something and then feel empowered to keep using the spices and to be able to experiment and play with them in the kitchen.

Sana Javeri Kadri: To Asha’s point, what people have said to me over the years is, I love your company, but I don’t really cook South Asian food. I think my first response would be, the pepper you have doesn’t have to be used in just South Asian food. I’d also say now with this book in hand, now I have something else to teach you. So much of our job is education. When I started the company, no one was thinking about fresh spices — people would look at me like I was crazy. We’ve done a lot of education over the years on it, so I think a book is the next frontier of our education.

Brianna Plaza: How did you decide on what recipes to focus on and did you tailor the recipes to your product line?

Sana Javeri Kadri: We very much did not tailor the recipes to the products. Our top-selling products are spice blends, and there is not a single spice blend used in the book because our farmers make their own blends. I sell more popcorn seasoning than anything else. I would say this book is about teaching people how to use the fundamental spices. We’re pretty clear when we say you can use our spices and there’s a note about how we tested this book with our spices, but you don’t have to use ours. This is about spice education, it’s not about Diaspora branded content.

Asha Loupy: On the road, we learned about 170 recipes. We’d go to a region, go to our farm partners, and be in the kitchen with the women there. But we would also have a day or two in a city in that region eating the food so we could get as wide a breadth of the region’s flavors. We’d taste different versions of dishes that I could taste and remember as much as possible. I had a tiny pink notebook that traveled with me everywhere.

On our break days, I would sit for a few hours and put all of my notes into Google Docs and start thinking about how I might adapt something when I got back to the States and was recipe developing. We knew this book was going to be very veggie forward, so I made a big veggie list and it was a list of all the possible veggies you could buy in the United States. We’d get these long, detailed research reports from our researcher before we met with our partners, and I would reference the list, and we’d discuss the gaps we needed to fill.

We ended up with about 120 recipes, which we submitted, but we were told we needed to cut that, so we painstakingly took it down to 85.

Sana Javeri Kadri: There were a lot of Zoom calls where we were like, you can keep this if I can keep that. A couple of the recipes we cut got put into a booklet that people got when they preordered. I think we have several thousand pre-orders right now, but out of those, about a thousand people have downloaded the pre-order booklet and started cooking their way through it, which has been really cute.

Brianna Plaza: How do you think about the fact that there are probably a million versions of these recipes and people likely have a lot of thoughts about what’s “authentic”?

Sana Javeri Kadri: I will never be able to sell or name a chicken recipes that represents the entire state of Andhra Pradesh because the state probably has over a million chicken recipes. What I can say is that our version is authentic to a personal experience.

Asha Loupy: There are so many ways that these dishes are cooked. We’re translating these recipes from a specific family. There are probably millions of people who are cooking these recipes, but they’re not written down.

Sana Javeri Kadri: Most of what we have documented in the book has not been archived before. There’s probably an oral history to it, and it’s very regionally important, but especially in English, it hasn’t been written down. It’s also really important to document these recipes and then be as historically and culturally accurate because we have both the privilege and the burden of being the archivists.

Brianna Plaza: I am actually fairly unfamiliar with South Asian cuisine. When I get this book, where is the best place to get started?

Asha Loupy: The singju is a great place to start because it’s a cabbage salad. In Manipur, the salad has a bunch of crunchy things in it and a bunch of fried things. We ended up doing oven roasted beans and crushed up ramen. I grew up eating this very vinegary cabbage salad that you top with crushed ramen noodles and brought to backyard barbecues. It is very reminiscent of that in my mind, and it uses I think one spice. So it’s a short ingredient list.

The cherry tomato and edamame salad is based off of a soybean salad that we had there and when I first made it, I cooked dried soybeans and then I was like, what am I doing? They have edamames in the store. And the Sri Lankan dal is also great.

Sana Javeri Kadri: I feel like once you learn how to make dal, what you’ve learned is how to cook aromatics and spices at the beginning. You’re adding your liquid, then you’re cooking the spices some more, and then you’re adding toasted spices and oil on top. So you’re immediately understanding how you need to layer spices to get depth of flavor in a dish, and I feel like understanding that technique then unlocks something like a curry.

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Happy Sunday and welcome to another issue in my unofficial series on Polish cooking.

A lot of cultures have some sort of cabbage roles and the Polish are no different. Ground meat and rice, minimally spiced before being rolled in blanched cabbage and covered in a tomato sauce; my dad has called this an “incredibly boring dish.”

And maybe that’s not totally fair, but he could be haunted by the memories of being forced to eat this as a child. But I think it’s somewhat blandness leaves some room for exploration to make it as exiting as you want. I like the original, but I wanted to give it a more exciting, modern update. Even in the version from my grandmother, there’s not a lot going on, so I thought it could only be up from here.

Polish cooking doesn’t use a lot of spice, but the usual suspects of Eastern European cooking like dill, horseradish, and paprika do tend to show up, and cinnamon and cardamom also show up a lot in baked goods. But instead of being used to pack a major flavor punch, they’re more used to gently enhance a dishes flavor.

I decided to use curry powder because, well, I had some, and it also seemed like a flavor profile not out of the realm of Polish cooking. Most curry blends usually have similar warming spices to cardamon and cinnamon, and more international flavors are starting to show up in modern Polish cooking, so the turmeric and cumin in curry powder felt like a nice fit. Plus, curry ketchup is an elite dipping sauce, so I thought the curry powder would go well with the traditional tomato sauce.

One update I needed to make was making a better sauce than the customary (including in my grandmother’s recipe) canned tomato soup as sauce. I updated it using a bit of cumin and paprika with canned tomatoes to bring a lightly smokey element to the dish.

These aren’t traditional but to me, they fit nicely into the canon of modern Polish food.

Curry powder-spiced cabbage rolls

This is a more modern version of a very traditional Polish dish, but doesn’t stray too far from the original. It’s cozy and doesn’t feel as dense as the versions I had when I was a kid. This is a standalone complete meal, but because I’m me, it goes great with an acidic salad.

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Jing Gao is the founder and CEO of Fly by Jing, a company selling non-traditional, but very personal chili crisps and noodles rooted in Sichuan ingredients and cuisine. Started in 2018, her business really took off in the early Covid years when everyone was cooking at home. She started with a chili crisp and has expanded to a variety of sauces and noodles, as well as dried peppers, tools, and other ingredients. Fly by Jing’s Sweet & Spicy Sichuan Chili Sauce has had a spot in my fridge off-and-on for years, and their noodles have been a great addition to my pantry for quick lunches. Jing and I chatted about her deeply personal interpretation of Sichuan cuisine, changing perceptions of Chinese food, and her brand being an on-ramp to new flavors.

Brianna Plaza: Tell me a bit about your background and why you founded Fly by Jing.

Jing Gao: I was born in Chengdu, which is the capital city of Sichuan, which is the food capital of China. It’s one of the great cuisines in China. I grew up moving around a lot; we lived in Europe and Canada. Growing up, I was always the odd one out, especially in European countries, and I felt very disconnected from my cultural heritage and identity.

In my 20s, I had a job opportunity that brought me to China, and that’s where I started to peel back the layers and search for my identity and found some answers through the food culture. It was a very personal journey to get into food. The more I dug into it, the more I realized how much depth this 5,000 year culinary heritage has that isn’t being translated in the west.

I quit my job in tech and founded a restaurant in Shanghai that was championing modern Chinese flavors in a fast casual format. I also had a blog about Chinese food culture which really allowed me to go deep into the history of and shine a more respectful light on Chinese food.

I spent some time in my hometown and studied with this incredible master chef and learned so much from him about ingredients of the region. They’re so high-quality and so rare and hard to access, even within China. There are negative biases in the west that Chinese food is cheap and unhealthy, and it’s almost self-perpetuating because Chinese people are being told that no one is going to pay over a few dollars.

Being able to use these incredible ingredients and the pursuit of self expression is how Fly by Jing was born. Jing is my birth name and Fly restaurants are these hole in the wall spots that are so delicious and a cherished concept in my hometown. They attract people from all over and they’re a great socioeconomic equalizer. I was really inspired by that, so I started a series of underground supper clubs called Fly by Jing, which lead me to popups in Shanghai and all over the world.

These dinners would allow me to share these flavors with a wider audience, but I had to bring all the ingredients with me in my suitcase. You can’t just replace these specific ingredients with something else. People really responded to these flavors that I love and grew up with, and there just wasn’t a lot of access to them outside China. So I started to think about how to make them more accessible, and I started to bottle some of these sauces that were part of my recipes. It would help me save time when I got to a new country because I was carrying a chili crisp instead of the raw ingredients, and I realized that these are actually self-stable products. Maybe I could jar it and share it more. It was really driven by this desire to share flavors and change the narrative around Chinese food.

Fly by Jing is my own personal lens of what Chinese food is. Sharing a very personal slice of what that means to me and hopefully creating the space to allow more people to be able to share their unique stories. Chinese people are not a monolith, and there are so many different voices and each one deserves a place.

Brianna Plaza: How do you find your sourcing partners?

Jing Gao: When I was studying with that chef, we literally would just go and visit places, and that’s how you build relationships. You’re not just going to the grocery store to buy ingredients, you have to go and meet people.

The Sichuan pepper we use is grown in the mountains four hours from the city. We’d have to go there every August because the harvest happens once a year, and once it’s sold out, it’s done. The factory where we get our fermented fava beans has commercially available products, but they also have this secret room where they have the stuff that’s been fermented for 5 years and has this magical depth of flavor. So you have to really integrate yourself to where the food comes from and respect the time and effort it takes to cultivate these relationships.

Brianna Plaza: You talked about this notion that Chinese food should be cheap, so how do you think about your higher price point and where you fit into people’s everyday lives?

Jing Gao: I think there’s two parts here. I think the first part is economies of scale. I think most people conceptually understand why McDonald’s has cheap prices vs your local mom and pop store. But when it comes to ethnic cuisine, something gets forgotten. I hear a lot of people say things like, why is this ethnic thing expensive when it’s not “supposed” to be? It’s this pervasive idea that’s gone back for centuries that Chinese immigrants who ran restaurants or laundromats had to adapt and had to be cheap.

There’s also so much nuance which is why there exists this kind of hierarchy of taste, or why we ascribe certain values to different cuisines. French and Japanese are at the top, Chinese and Vietnamese are at the bottom. It has very little to do with the food and everything to do with how we view the people. It’s very intertwined with the immigrant story.

100 years ago, Italian food was also looked down on, and now you can go to a restaurant in New York and a plate of pasta is $40 and people don’t think twice. And yet, you try and charge more than $5 for a plate of noodles and people are up in arms. But the thing is, if it can happen to Italian food, it can also happen to other cuisines. It happens over time as culture shifts and socioeconomic patterns evolve. It’s not overnight.

We’re a small business that doesn’t have the economies of scale of a large corporation. Lao Gan Ma is a brand that is known for Chinese flavors and it’s also a billion-dollar corporation, but it’s very nostalgic and very rooted in emotion for Chinese people. We have a small team and we’re operating in places where these products aren’t traditionally sold and we’re trying to increase access. Being on the shelf of a Target comes at a high cost.

We’re also trying to shift the perception that Chinese food has to be cheap.

Brianna Plaza: There’s also sometimes this obsession with authenticity can be such a loaded word, especially with non-Western food. How do you think about authenticity and your products?

Jing Gao: Authenticity is another very fraught topic which is linked to cost. It has to do with us keeping something in a box and saying it cannot evolve. These are the things we heard when we started Fly by Jing. Everything from I’ve been to China so I know what Chinese food is or This doesn’t taste like what my grandmother used to make. All of these things are attempts to keep Chinese food in a box and to claim ownership over it. We do this with ethnic cuisines but not others.

This is where that authenticity conversation comes in. I think in recent years there’s been a more nuanced conversation around authenticity, especially when it comes to the Asian diaspora. We realized there’s not just one type of Asian. There are so many shades of Asian, so there has to be a nuance in how we talk about our experience and it should be from a personal standpoint, all the way down to our food.

I trained under a Sichuan master chef and use ingredients only from that region. In some ways you could argue that’s more authentic than anything you can find in America because of how rooted in tradition it is. But at the same time, there’s 18 ingredients in our chili crisp and they probably have not been put together in that way before, so it’s my personal lens.

Since we first launched, we’ve had a few iterations on packaging, and we’ve had to adapt in how we tell our story. There was a point when our packaging said, Not Traditional but Personal, but it didn’t say authentic. There was a Venn diagram illustration and in the middle it said, this tastes different.

When I shared this with my family in Sichuan for the first time, they were like this is good but it’s different, I’ve not had something like this before. These products are a unique, personal expression, and that should be allowed.

Brianna Plaza: How do you scale your products and maintain their quality and flavor, especially with so many specific ingredients?

Jing Gao: We have not changed our ingredients or methods since the very first day that we scaled up production. Obviously, cooking something over a stove in a tiny apartment kitchen is not going to translate directly to making something at scale. But the production is still very small batch and it’s a very precise craft.

On the ingredients side of things, we use the same suppliers for our ingredients since day one. These are such high-quality ingredients that I had a hard time finding a manufacturer who would be willing to even take on this project because they were all like, you’re crazy. Why would you put ingredients in there that cost more than the retail price of similar products?

The cost of our materials and labor is more than the retail price of the mass-produced brands. When it comes to Asian ingredients, people seem to have a problem when you charge a higher price point, but we lack the economies of scale to be able to compete with these behemoth companies.

As we scale and get more leverage to be able to negotiate better pricing with our suppliers, we want to make sure that we’re passing that along to the consumer. A few years ago, we implemented a price decrease of 30%. We were able to get those price decreases because of packaging, logistics, and shipping costs without affecting the quality of the ingredients.

We want these flavors to be in as many people’s hands as possible.

Brianna Plaza: So, you’ve got chili crisp, noodles, and hot pot packets. What are you working on next?

Jing Gao: We think about how to bring more people around the table, and how to make it easier and more accessible for people to enjoy these flavors. Because as much as Chili Crisp has crossed over into the mainstream, the majority of Americas still don’t know what it is. We’re in 4,000 Walmart stores but there are places where people are seeing us for the first time. As we grow and innovate, we want to think of ways to make it easier for people to come into the brand, experience these flavors, and create an on-ramp for them to experiment a bit, get their toes wet, and go deeper.

Noodles were a part of that. You might have to explain chili crisp, but you probably don’t have to explain noodles to most people. As we grow, we’re going to keep thinking about we make things to adapt to who we’re serving, which is a modern America person. The modern American is busy and wants to put food on the table in 10-15 minutes. How do we help them do that in a way that is true to us?

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50% of proceeds from new paid subscribers will be donated to the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota, a non profit providing assistance to people with families detained by ICE. I’ve already raised $50!

Though I am half Polish, I didn’t really grow up eating a lot of Polish food. We mostly ate seasonally and locally, with a lot of Mediterranean, East Asian, and Mexican flavors. We’d occasionally make fruit pierogi with my grandma, and we had gołąbki (stuffed cabbage) a few times, but I really don’t have a lot of memories eating Polish food.

As an adult, it’s still not a regular part of my diet, but it’s been something I’ve been craving more and more. I’ve grown to love fermented foods like sauerkraut and living in Brooklyn means I have pretty easy access to Polish restaurants and markets, so I probably have it a handful of times a year.

At a recent gathering, I was expecting a little bit of Polish food from the Eastern European host, so I was pretty let down by a full spread of Italian cooking. The food was good, but I wanted potato dumplings, ya know?

I called up my dad to talk about Polish cooking and he told me that we didn’t eat a lot of Polish food simply because it wasn’t really popular in our house. I asked him for a family pierogi recipe, and after calling one of his cousins and coming up empty handed, his advice to me was, “look online.”

I scoured pierogi recipes online and read through a lot of posts on the Babas Ukrainian Kitchen Facebook group (the Polish one hasn’t accepted me yet LOL), and there are a lot of opinions on how to make pierogi. Of everything I read, the only through-line was flour and salt. Whether or not you put butter, sour cream, or potato water into the pierogi dough was up for (a heated) debate. Most recipes called for an egg, so I went that route. I had a lot of extra sour cream and I used that alongside a little butter for tenderness and structure.

The green chili & cheddar route is completely non-traditional, and according to my dad:

It’s a sarcastic and playful thing he always says when he’s suggested something extremely left field like green chili & cheddar pierogi. But when I am making up my own family traditions, it’s sometimes necessary to go a little rogue.

I hope you’ll join me — and these pierogi — in hell.

Green chili & cheddar pierogi

These are definitely a bit of a project, but perfect for days when you want to stay inside. They work as a dinner entrée when served alongside kielbasa and salad, but also work great as part of a party spread. They’re fun to make as a group if that’s your vibe. Folding takes a little practice, so I’ve included a short how-to video.

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Today, 50% of proceeds from new paid subscribers will be donated to the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota, a non profit providing assistance to hundreds of people with families detained by ICE. I’ve already donated $100 on behalf of the readers of this newsletter.

A few weeks ago, I hosted my first pop-up at Time Again, a bar in New York’s Chinatown. And as I was trying to explain to my parents what a pop-up was, I realized that not everyone is familiar with the concept. Very simply, a pop-up is a chef or restaurant that pops-up to cook at a location on a temporary basis.

I set a goal last year to cook more in public but I didn’t do much to act on that goal. I had always been under the impression that you needed a sizable audience to successfully host a pop-up, or that you needed a really niche idea. I also didn’t even really know where to get started — I see a lot of people hosting pop-ups, but I don’t ever learn how it all works.

I talked to my friend — a person who hosts very cool pop-ups — and she suggested I come up with menu ideas and reach out to restaurants. But I was always stuck in this mentality of no one will want to host me, I don’t have enough followers to even get people to come, and putting yourself out there is really scary, so I just never made any moves.

But finally one day, I did.

I had been keeping a list of places to reach out to, and one day I came home in a fit of motivation and reached out to the first one on the list. I expected to have to pitch myself and a menu, but all the bar needed to know what dates I was interested in. I went with January 4th to quietly ease back into work after the holidays. I also admittedly wanted a date where I knew it would be quieter.

I decided to serve chili which was a half-joking suggestion from my friend Peter but I thought it could actually be pretty fun. Chili is cozy and satisfying and fun and unique, and I loved the idea of having it in a bar with a nice glass of wine. To prepare, I did some research in the form of a reconnaissance mission to Costco. I priced out all of my ingredients, supplies I might need, and walked down every aisle to make sure I wasn’t missing anything.

When I initially planned this menu, I thought about doing a few different things: a few types of chili, a salad option, an option to have pasta with your chili (how I like it), a dessert. But the more I thought about it, I wasn’t convinced I could prep, store, and serve that many different components, so the menu had to be paired down to just chili and toppings. I also debated charging extra for toppings, but ultimately landed on a single price that included everything: $13 for meat and bean and $10 for the vegan chili. I based the price on costs, but ultimately it felt like a shot in the dark.

I was told to plan for 100 people which is a lot — a big enough number that I momentarily thought about backing out. But since I intentionally picked a quieter date, I planned for a more manageable 75 people instead. I’d cooked for 25+ people at multiple Friendsgivings, and 75 felt like less of a leap.

I picked two recipes I’d made before and tweaked them to make them my own. Alison Roman’s Gorgeous Chili and the NYTimes Cooking Vegan Farro Chili also had a lot of overlapping ingredients so I could smartly shop. I made a few updates to make both options gluten free, and I added in more chilies and spices to make them a bit more Southwest-y.

Promoting this was where I dropped the ball a bit. I posted it on Instagram and texted a bunch of friends, but I failed to mention it in this newsletter. I got a handful of messages after saying they would have come if they knew, which was a reminder to even share with folks you don’t speak with daily. I learned you don’t need a huge following to host a pop-up, but you better be prepared to promote it heavily.

The Monday before the pop-up it was finally go time. I shopped for almost everything on Monday and Tuesday and tested the limits of storage in my fridge. On Wednesday (New Year’s Eve), I made all four batches of the vegan chili, and on New Year’s day I peeled myself off the couch around 4pm to make two batches of a meat and bean chili. Friday I made the final four batches of meat and bean chili. Throughout the week I did some other prep like making pickled onions and pickled chilies, but a lot of the toppings prep was saved for Saturday and Sunday.

My brother came in for 48 hours because he hadn’t visited his favorite sister in a while, but also because he wanted to experience a pop-up on the prep and production side. He had a red eye Friday night and after a morning nap, he, my boyfriend Andrew, and I rolled out Saturday mid-morning to run a few errands (pick up tortillas and get extra cheddar at Murray’s), but mostly to have a nice day bopping around the city.

Sunday we got Dim Sum in Sunset park, did some final errands and prep, and at 3:15, it was showtime. Time Again’s kitchen is an extremely barebones operation so not only did I do all the prep at my house, I also had to bring cooking equipment with me. I brought chili and toppings, but I also brought pots, my induction burner, a warming mat I borrowed from a friend, and serving utensils.

At 5pm sharp, my friends showed up, which actually was pretty helpful in easing my nerves. I could practice taking orders and getting them right with people I knew. By the time I started to take orders from people I didn’t know, I had a better system to take orders and serve.

We stayed at the bar until 9:30 and I served about 22 servings of chili, a handful to people I didn’t know. One woman came in because she saw the chili posted on instagram, which was cool. I served someone at 9:30 after we’d packed up because I could tell they really wanted chili but felt bad about asking. Someone asked me about hosting a private party and another woman tried to order a negroni from me, two things I couldn’t help with.

All in all, I made $305 with tips. Which if you look at my expenses, is a loss. The cost of food ingredients was ultimately not crazy because I mostly shopped in bulk at Costco, but the gluten free lager was an expensive surprise. My brother brought green chilies from New Mexico and made red chili gravy for the toppings bar. The biggest expenses were large containers to store the chili and the required cabs there and back.

I had a lot of leftover chili which is now nicely packed away in my freezer, and so far has been given away as a thank you for a favor, brought on a ski trip, and I even think a colleague is going to buy some. About a dozen tortillas went home with my brother in exchange for the chilies, and I’ll happily eat the rest. The extra cheddar and sour cream will be used for an upcoming recipe for this newsletter, and the extra bowls and cutlery will be used for future parties and pop-ups.

I didn’t sell out but that’s ok. I learned a lot, had fun, challenged myself, and as a bonus, have some cozy leftovers for the rest of winter. Now that I’ve hosted my first one, I have the confidence and knowledge to do more.

I don’t have my next one planned yet, but stay tuned to this newsletter and Instagram for updates.

Hawa Hassan is a Somali-American author and chef who won a James Beard Award for her first cookbook, “In Bibi’s Kitchen.” Her second book, “Setting a Place for Us,” shares recipes and stories of displacement, resilience, and community from eight countries impacted by war. We chatted about her path to food, the challenges of sharing recipes that aren’t your own, and authenticity’s role in sharing stories.

Brianna Plaza: Can you tell me about your background and how you got into food media and cookbook writing?

Hawa Hassan: I was born in Somalia in the late eighties in the midst of conflict, and in the early 90s, my family and I moved to a refugee camp in Kenya. While we were there, it became obvious that we weren’t going to be going home anytime soon, so my mom signed up for sponsorship to America. It was her plus 5 children and she quickly realized that it wasn’t easy to take everyone. An opportunity arose to relocate me and 9 others to Seattle, and from 1993 to 2008, I didn’t see my family. Not only did I have to assimilate to a new place, but I was also disconnected from my own family. When I reunited with my them in 2008, I was living in New York and they were living in Norway. It quickly became obvious to me that we had lived very different lives.

This is a long way of saying this, but I got into food in a search for my own identity. I was in search of a better story of who I was and where I came from. I was really excited to not only examine my own story, but examine it against the backdrop of so many other people’s stories.

Food for me became a vehicle of advocacy because it’s a window into a world that I hadn’t been a part of for a long time. I thought there would be an opportunity to be able to take other people along the journey and it feels like that’s what I’ve been doing.

Brianna Plaza: Setting a Place for Us is your second book. How did you decide on the countries and recipes you wanted to feature?

Hawa Hassan: All of the countries in the book are chosen because of conflict and instability, refugees and migration, humanitarian concerns, and historical and cultural significance. Many of the countries in the book are told from a particular lens and I wanted to challenge us to say that there’s a different way to look at them.

We don’t have to tell everything from a single origin story and we should let people tell their own story. We are constantly being fed a narrative, and I think often times, we don’t question it enough. I’m not a historian, I’m not a politician. I’m just somebody who is wildly curious.

There are eight recipes for each country. My team and I spent hundreds of hours reading books, watching videos, and speaking to people from these communities to figure out what the top recipes were.

Brianna Plaza: How do you think about authenticity and its role in sharing these recipes?

Hawa Hassan: When we talked to the grandmothers for In Bibi’s Kitchen, it was translating recipes like, “it’s a little bit of this and a little of that.” I was physically catching their pinch of salt to measure it. We would record videos of recipes being made and then translate them for home cooks.

This time around there was so much already written about these foods. And so I think for us, the challenge was how do you mimic these flavors in everyone’s home that’s going to buy this book? There were a lot of suggestions that were made. If you don’t have cilantro, you can use dried coriander, and vice versa.

The authenticity part didn’t really come into play, but I think the challenge of it all was how do you honor these recipes that aren’t your own? How do you describe it in the way that an Egyptian person would? Those are the things that I was most worried about.

There are QR codes in the book where you scan it, it will read the recipe for you, and from somebody who speaks that language, and most likely was born and raised in that country, reading it. So those are the kind of things that I was mainly concerned about.

Brianna Plaza: Were there any challenges in sharing stories and recipes that aren’t your own?

Hawa Hassan: I think the biggest challenge is letting people tell their own stories and not inserting myself. I am just a carrier of the story and I can’t tell it for them. I think sometimes people struggle with picturing themselves in the story, but that’s not me. There are some similarities in our stories, but there’s also so much power in the differences.

Being a fly on the wall and reading and researching, but also not assuming. Being curious and asking questions. Those are the things that came in handy for me.

Brianna Plaza: How did you source the recipes and stories?

Haha Hassan: Each recipe was research and found by my team, and we did a lot of it over Zoom. Some countries I visited. I went to Beirut, and it was important for me to see what Lebanese kitchen looked like. That way I could advise my team — maybe we were told a dish was actually more Syrian than Lebanese, so then we’d find another dish that represented Lebanese cuisine better.

We tried really hard to talk to people who have the knowledge about these recipes. There’s a spinach dish in the Congo chapter and the cultural editor for the book is Congolese. She was adamant that the name we were calling the dish by an incorrect name. It took us months to understand what wild spinach might be. We yielded to the people who were raised with the experience of those recipes and cuisines.

Brianna Plaza: Did you feel that you needed to adapt some of these recipes for a Western audience?

Haha Hassan: Not in this book. This book, these recipes, and these flavors are so incredibly approachable. I think the American home cook is incredibly sophisticated and much more curious than they’re given credit for.

In this book, a lot of my work has been done for me in that I’m not teaching them about Egyptian cuisine. What I’m trying to do is tell them a new story about what it means to be Egyptian and what the country is like and what their food is like. There’s nothing that we recreated to be more palatable.

Buy Setting a Place for Us

Salads sometimes get a bad rap, but I have to admit something: I unapologetically and unironically love salad. I grew up in a salad with most meals family, and as an adult, I eat salad for (or with) a handful of meals a week. I love that they’re endlessly customizable and because they largely depend on what I have on hand, no two salads are alike. It’s a meal I look forward to and never tire of.

The biggest complaint I hear about salads is that they’re boring and sad, but I am not sure those people have ever had a good salad. Store bought dressings are usually not great and pre-bagged lettuce can leave much to be desired. Good salads demand bold dressings, a variety of textures, and a striking blend of vegetables to make them interesting and delicious.

When I make a salad, I generally follow a set of “rules” that guide me toward salad greatness. Rules that are meant to be broken and adapted to your tastes and mood. Rules that become so second nature that you’ll wonder why you ever bought dressing.

1. Build out your core vinegar collection. Balsamic and red wine vinegar are essential, but a good apple cider or rice wine vinegar can take you pretty far. I always have lemons on hand and I use them a lot in salads, and oranges are great in dressings too.

2. Seek out interesting vinegars. I’ve started buying vinegars as a travel souvenir and my collection now includes an heirloom apple cider vinegar from Vermont, sherry and cava vinegar from Spain, and a lambic beer vinegar from Brussels. Specialty stores and local markets are good places to start.

3. Play around with vinegar combos. You don’t have to use only one vinegar, and some of my best dressings have been a combo. Sherry vinegar + apple cider vinegar. Apple-infused balsamic + lemon. The possibilities are endless.

4. A little bit of mustard acts as an emulsifier to better blend the oil and vinegar.

5. But also think beyond mustard. Miso and Indian chutneys are emulsifiers too.

6. Salad needs crunch. It can come in a variety of forms, but crunch adds essential texture. Think bread crumbs, nuts, or crunchy vegetables.

7. Add a touch of sweetness by using maple syrup or agave nectar.

8. Change up your lettuce by adding kale, bitter greens, herbs, or micro greens to introduce different flavors and additional textures.

9. Use your best olive oil. A salad dressing is where you’ll taste the olive oil the most, so use the best you can afford.

10. Salt, spices, and aromatics are essential. A healthy pinch of salt helps bring all the flavors together, but dried herbs and garlic are also nice additions.

When I was thinking about this issue, I knew I wanted to reach out to Will Cooper, a private chef for an ultra high net worth family living on a sprawling estate in the English countryside. As part of their daily meals, he makes the cheeses, breads, cured meats, and vinegars from ingredients grown and raised on the property. He’s a master of flavor and I needed to know more about his vinegar making process.

For the curious amongst you, using fruit, botanicals, and herbs to flavour vinegar is a technique that many of us use in dish development. Quite simply, you need a good quality vinegar and something with a good flavour profile to enhance it.

Your vinegar should be neutral like apple cider vinegar or white vinegar (a note: balsamic works too). And the trick with flavouring is to find an ingredient or combination that you like and to simply let them sit in a jar in a cool dark place for as long as you can manage to be patient.

Most recently I used the last of the Yellow Pershore plums from one of the trees here to flavour a few litres of apple cider vinegar, and now even after a week, a deep golden colour has developed, rich with the smell of fruit. You can use fruit, seeds, and flowers to flavour vinegars — all very different but they all have their uses in the food that I work with, whether that’s dressing vegetables, deglazing pans of roasted meats, or as an addition to desserts.

Chicory salad with fig-balsamic vinaigrette

The fig-infused balsamic is assertive and flavorful. I use a bit of apple cider vinegar to add a bit of lighter acidity while still maintaining the fig-forward flavor. This salad works great as a side or even better as a big ass salad for dinner.

Serves 4+

For the dressing

4 tablespoons fig-infused balsamic vinegar (recipe below)

3 tablespoons apple cider vinegar

1 cup olive oil

2 cloves garlic, grated (my favorite microplane)

2 teaspoons dijon mustard

Kosher salt (1 teaspoon to start, plus more)

A few cranks freshly cracked black pepper

For the salad

1 small head radicchio, chopped or torn

1 bunch tuscan kale, inner stem removed, chopped or torn

1 small head green lettuce, leaves torn

1-2 scallions, thinly sliced (a finely chopped shallot or red onions work too)

Parmesan, for grating

Crunch salad topper (recipe below)

To make the dressing, combine everything into a jar and vigorously shake for 30 seconds. Taste and add more salt or pepper if desired.

Combine the greens and onions. Starting with a little at first, toss the greens with dressing until coated and add more to your liking. I find that bitter and more robust greens need more dressing. Top with a shower of parm and crunchy salad topper.

Fig-infused balsamic vinegar

An easy infusion that packs a punch.

1 bag dried figs

1 16 oz bottle balsamic vinegar

Note: You don’t need an insanely expensive balsamic here, but I suggest not getting the bottom of the barrel cheap stuff. I like a slightly viscous balsamic and Trader Joe’s Aceto Balsamico Di Modena is a good option.

Slice the dried figs in half. Pour the balsamic in a jar, add figs, cover, and gently shake a few times. Let sit for at least a week, gently shaking the bottle a few times a day. You should go longer, but I found at about 8 days, the fig flavor really started to come through (and I was getting impatient). Taste and decide when the flavor is right to you.

Strain (you can squeeze excess balsamic out of the figs if they look particularly swollen) and store in an airtight container.

Use in dressings, to drizzle on fruit, or to dip with bread.

Crunchy salad topper

This is very much a formula to riff on, so swap in other things depending on what you like.

1 cup panko bread crumbs

1 cup unsalted sunflower seeds

1 cup pistachios, roughly chopped

Olive oil

Kosher salt

Heat a skillet on medium-high heat. Working in 3 batches, add 1 tablespoon olive oil and gently stir the bread crumbs, seeds, or nuts until toasted, about 3-5 minutes. Add a pinch of kosher salt, mix, and let cool. Once cool, mix together, and store in an airtight container in the fridge. The shelf life is quite long — my current jar was made in November and it’s still crunchy.

Looking for more? See all of on hand’s salad recipes here.

It’s during this time of year that I seem to be frantically trying to figure out meals more often than not. Most days, I can’t believe I have to figure out what to eat again. I tend to rely on pantry staples and leftovers to pull together a meal, which usually means a lot of salads and rice bowls. But when I was recently rummaging through my freezer, I found some frozen ground chicken and I knew what to do.

Over the summer, I grabbed ground chicken on a whim while picking up things to grill. I turned them into chicken burgers with a Thai-inspired pesto that ended up being the star of the show. I have made these chicken burgers (with sauce and without) a handful of times since then, and they recently came to my rescue when I didn’t have a plan for dinner.

On they’re own, the burgers are simple enough that you can take them in any direction you want, and they’re great to keep around in case you need a meal rescue like me.

Plus! I am doing a holiday giveaway for subscribers, and because you’re a reader, you’re already entered!

It features 2 boxes of artisanal pasta from Sfoglini, 2 cans of superb smoked salmon from Wildfish Cannery, a cute coffee mug from Jono Pandolfi, and a goofy-cute kitchen towel I picked up in Dublin. Plus, Sfoglini and Wildfish Cannery have both been featured in this newsletter which is a fun bonus! These items make a great gift or you can keep them for yourself.

You can refer other readers for additional entries. Head here to get your referral link.

Giveaway ends December 21, 2025. Giveaway winners will be alerted by Substack DM or email—be sure to check your messages. If there’s no answer within 1 week, prize will be awarded to someone else. U.S. addresses only and no purchase necessary.

Chicken burgers with a Thai (ish) pesto

The Thai(ish) pesto came from a moment where I was trying to use up some extra Thai basil I had in the fridge. I leaned on a lot of the ingredients and and flavors of a Thai basil stir fry you might get from takeout, and I think it’s a fun direction to take otherwise simple burger. That said, this chicken burger stands on its own, so you can go a traditional burger route or even use it as meatballs.

Read more

Hello there,

If you’re in the US, I hope you had a nice time celebrating Thanksgiving, whether it was with family or going out to eat like I do. If you’re outside the US, I hope your Friday was nice and chill while most of the US is out of office. No matter where you’re located, I am thankful that you’re here reading this newsletter.

Today, I have a recipe from the on hand archives that’s great with all that leftover turkey you likely have. It’s a cozy chili that’s relatively simple and is a great companion to some Black Friday shopping.

Black Friday is a great time to get deals on gifts for loved ones, but more importantly, it’s a time to grab a few things for yourself. Regardless of who you’re buying for, the on hand gift guide has a lot of great ideas for every type of person in your life — and most things are on sale. Here are a few of my favorite deals:

• Bookshop.org is offering free shipping on all orders, so now’s the time to grab a new cookbook

• Murray’s Cheese is offering 25% off site wide with code 25CHEESY

• Burlap and Barrel is offering 10%+ all orders

• Plus a bunch of options with discount codes: Wildfish Cannery (onhand20 for 20% off), Sfoglini (readonhand10 for 10% off), and Exau Olive Oil (briannaplaza for 15% off)

The recipe is free today so everyone can enjoy the post-Thanksgiving chili. Become a paid subscriber to get more recipes.

Turkey Chili with Corn and Green Chilies

This was originally published using chicken, but I’ve adapted it to use leftover turkey. If you’re sick of turkey, that’s fine too, just follow the directions for chicken instead. This chili also freezes well so you can save some for a quick lunch during there rest of the holiday busy season.

Serves 4-6

3 tablespoons butter

1 medium yellow onion, diced

1 medium green pepper, diced

1 large jalapeno pepper, diced

4 cloves garlic, diced

3 tablespoons flour

8 cups chicken broth

1 cup half and half

2 teaspoon chili powder (or more)

1 heavy pinch red pepper flakes (or more)

Few dashes Worcestershire sauce (if you don’t have, you can skip)

2 (4 oz.) cans mild green chilies

1.5 lbs boneless, skinless chicken breasts (or shredded leftover turkey)

1 (15.5 oz.) cans cannellini beans, drained

2 (15.25 oz.) cans whole kernel sweet corn, drained

To serve

Avocado, diced

Chips or warm tortillas

Shredded cheese

Hot sauce

Heat a large, heavy-bottom pot over medium-high heat. Melt the butter and add the onions, green pepper, jalapeño, and a pinch of salt and cook for 5 minutes. Add the garlic and cook for 1 minute.

Add the flour and toss to coat. Cook for 2 minutes until the raw flour smell is gone.

Add the chicken broth in small splashes, stirring continuously. Add the half and half in the same manner.

Add the chili powder, red pepper flakes, a pinch of salt, Worcestershire sauce and green chilies. Bring to a soft boil and cook for 15 minutes, uncovered, then reduce to a simmer.

If using left over turkey: simmer uncovered for 10 minutes, then add the leftover shredded turkey, corn, and beans to simmer for 5 more minutes. Adjust for salt and pepper if needed.

If using chicken: season each side of the chicken with salt/pepper. Add the chicken to the pot and let it simmer gently for 15-20 minutes, uncovered. About halfway through the chicken cooking, add the corn and beans. Once the chicken is cooked through, remove it and shred it. Return to the pot and adjust for salt if needed.

Serve with avocado, chips, hot sauce, and shredded cheese.

Recently, I chatted with Alison Roman, the New York Time’s best-selling author about her new book’s focus on pantry ingredients, making simple feel special, doing more with less, and what’s in her freezer. Her book, Something from Nothing, helps you make the most of a well-stocked pantry, with recipes that are intuitive and deliver maximum flavor. Today, we have a recipe for Crispy Schnitzel with Browned Butter Radishes, a casual recipe that’s great for weeknights and the upcoming busy season.

PS - if you’re shopping for the holidays, Something from Nothing and many other great items are in the on hand gift guide!

Crispy Schnitzel with Browned Butter Radishes

Call it schnitzel, tonkatsu, or Milanese: A crispy pork cutlet is one of life’s greatest pleasures. Fatty pork chops coated in crunchy breadcrumbs and fried in your largest skillet need little more than a dusting of flaky salt and finishing squeeze of lemon to be one of the shiniest examples of “something from nothing.” Because I live to simplify, this version is decidedly casual and requires little to no technique or fuss. The chops don’t need to be pounded (though they can be if you’re feeling moved), and I won’t ask you to engage in a multistep dredging process ( just press your seasoned pork into a pile of breadcrumbs—they’ll stick, I promise). While boneless or bone-in pork chops both work, I prefer bone-in because I find nibbling on the crumb-coated bone to be extremely delightful, an experience not to be missed.

Serves 2

2 bone-in or boneless pork chops (rib or loin), cut about ½ inch thick (approximately 6 ounces each)*

Kosher salt

Freshly ground black pepper

1½ cups panko or fresh coarse breadcrumbs

¼ cup neutral oil, such as grapeseed or canola, plus more

4 tablespoons unsalted butter

2 tablespoons capers, drained

1 bunch radishes, with tops on if you like, cut into quarters

Flaky sea salt

1 lemon, cut into wedges

Season the pork with salt and pepper. Place the panko in a sheet pan or baking dish and season it with salt and pepper. Working one at a time, firmly press both sides of each pork chop into the seasoned panko until the chops are evenly and well coated.

Heat the oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat; it should evenly coat the bottom of the skillet. If it doesn’t, add a bit more oil. Place the pork chops in the skillet and cook, pressing lightly to make contact with the skillet, until deeply golden brown, like the color of a well-baked croissant, 3–4 minutes.

Using tongs or a spatula, flip the pork and continue to cook until it’s well browned on the other side, another 2–3 minutes. Transfer the pork to a plate, platter, or cutting board lined with paper towels and season with salt.

Wipe out the skillet and return it to the stove over medium-high heat. Add the butter, letting it sizzle, brown, and foam. Add the capers and half of the radishes, seasoning them with salt and pepper. Toss a few times, just to wilt the radish greens, if they’re still on, and to evenly coat the radishes with the browned butter and capers.

Divide the pork chops among plates and nestle in the butter-tossed radishes and capers, along with the remaining raw radishes. Sprinkle with a bit of flaky salt and serve with lemon wedges alongside for squeezing over.

*Note: Most prepackaged pork chops are, in my opinion, cut too thin, which is bad news for anyone looking for a giant, juicy chop but excellent news for anyone looking to make this crispy, breadcrumb-coated number. About ½ inch thick, these thin chops require no further pounding, making them ideal for a casual crispy pork cutlet.

Buy Something from Nothing

It’s nearly the middle of November and that means one thing: the holidays are upon us whether you like it or not. If you work in marketing (me) or have turned on a tv (all of us), the holidays have been here for a while. But by this point in November, it doesn’t feel crazy to be thinking about gifts, which is why I am excited about on hand’s first ever gift guide!

Gifting is highly personal, but if anyone on your list likes to cook, eat, host, travel, or read this newsletter, you’ve come to the right place! These gift ideas are based largely around things I own and love, and a few things I’ve had my eye on.

Some gifts are more design forward, while some might be more practical. Others go well together: a Fellow coffee mug and a bean subscription, or a custom market tote with produce bags and a nice notebook to jot down recipes. Many of the gifts come from on hand alumni who have been previously featured in this newsletter (marked with*), which thrills me. And I even have a few discount codes listed below as well.

No matter who you are buying for, there’s surely a few items to spark some ideas. And if nothing else, never overestimate the power of gifting a nice bag of beans — trust me, it’s awesome.

A heads-up: some links are affiliates so I will earn a commission if you make a purchase. A portion of commission I earn will be donated to Feeding America, a nonprofit network of 200 food banks leading the fight against hunger in the United States.

Gifts for the host

1. painted table runner | 2. hand blown wine glasses | 3. large glass pitcher | 4. hand-painted, ceramic trivet | 5. colorful glass vases | 6. Boos block | 7. Murray’s Holiday Sampler* | 8. beeswax tapered candles | 9. Sonos Roam speaker | 10. Crow Canyon serving tray | 11. vintage cabbage serving platter | 12. Pulltap wine key | 13. Nights and Weekends by Alexis deBoschnek*

shop all

Gifts for the chef

1. Olympia Provisions European sampler* | 2. Mitica Negroni Blue* | 3. Yes, Chef ceramic spoon rest | 4. Burlap & Barrel peppercorns | 5. Sfoglini pasta club* | 6. Exau olive oil* | 7. food themed tea towel | 8. Gray Kunz sauce spoon | 9. Maldon sea salt tub | 10. The Cook You Want to Be by Andy Baraghani* | 11. pairing knife made with recycled Maldon plastic | 12. All Clad saucier | 13. Peugeot pepper mill | 14. smoked king salmon from Wildfish Cannery* | 15. custom apron

A few discount codes!

• onhand20 for 20% off at Wildfish Cannery.

• readonhand10 10% off at Sfoglini

• briannaplaza for 15% off Exau

shop all

Gifts for the farmers’ market enthusiast

1. Spice House blends | 2. Hulken wheeled tote | 3. Anova vacuum sealer | 4. Adidas Sambas | 5. seasonal produce calendar | 6. produce bags | 7. Kiehl’s Creme de Corps lotion | 8. french fries baseball hat | 9. Rancho Gordo desert island sampler | 10. Jono Pandolfi bowl | 11. A notebook for jotting lists | 12. ceramic egg tray | 13. Something from Nothing by Alison Roman* | 14. Fish’s Eddy ceramic basket | 15. custom market tote

Use code brianna5 for 5% off at Hulken.

shop all

Gifts for the traveler

1. bar matchbook series | 2. fancy sherry vinegar | 3. Away aluminum bigger carry-on | 4. Evans Brothers coffee subscription | 5. ceramic soup spoons | 6. Kings County Distillery aged whiskey set | 7. custom luggage tag | 8. Fly By Jing noodle + sauce set | 9. Fellow Carter mug | 10. custom passport holder | 11. Salsa Daddy by Rick Martinez* | 12. Marcato Atlas pasta machine | 13. Burlap and Barrel fundamentals collection | 14. Topo Designs dopp kit

shop all

Gifts for the on hand reader*

1. Rome by Katie Parla | 2. NA Superclasico apertivo | 3. Pearl River Mart ceramic bowl | 4. Pet Project syrah | 5. First Generation by Frankie Gaw | 6. The Woks of Life by Bill Leung, Kaitlin Leung, and Judy Leung | 7. Raffetto’s fresh pasta | 8. The Marigny pinot noir | 9. Nom Wah frozen dumplings | 10. Brooklyn Cider House cider | 11. Easy Fancy Food by Colu Henry | 12. Swick Wines pinot gris

shop all collections

Alison Roman is a New York-based cook, writer, and author. Her first three books, Dining In, Nothing Fancy, and Sweet Enough are New York Time’s best sellers, and her fourth book, Something from Nothing, comes out on November 11th. She also writes “A Newsletter,” is the creator of the YouTube series Home Movies, hosts the Solicited Advice podcast, and in 2023, she opened First Bloom, a small grocery store in the Western Catskills.

In a previous life, she worked in restaurants, worked for magazines, and had a column in a newspaper before going freelance and writing cookbooks.

I regularly reference her books, and as you can tell, she’s booked a busy, so I was excited to grab time with her early fall. We chatted about her new book’s focus on pantry ingredients, making simple feel special, doing more with less, and what’s in her freezer.

Brianna Plaza: How did you get your first cookbook deal?

Alison Roman: I was approached by my first editor. She wrote me out of the blue and said, “I noticed that all my favorite recipes from Bon Appétit had your name on them and I said I have to meet this person.” I was 30, 31 at the time and I thought, I am too young to write a cookbook.

At that point, I had been working in food for 10 years — restaurants for 6-7, editorial for 4. People who wrote cookbooks were much older in my eyes and I just didn’t feel like I had been doing this long enough, that I was ready.

But my editor was like, “I think you’re ready. It takes a long time to write a cookbook.” I got an agent and turned an offer into a two book deal and started writing cookbooks. Then in 2019 I signed another two book deal right before Nothing Fancy came out. Something From Nothing is my second book in that two book deal.

Brianna Plaza: Tell me about the inspiration behind Something from Nothing and why you wanted to focus on pantry ingredients.

Alison Roman: I had been spending a lot of time upstate [New York], and cooking upstate is very different than cooking in Brooklyn. Living in New York City, if you need an ingredient, you leave the house, and 10 minutes later you have what you need, or you can have it delivered within 20 minutes. It doesn’t matter how far-flung or hard to get. We have incredible farmers’ markets everyday. Anything you want is within reach.

Being upstate, you have more limited grocery store options. The farmers’ markets are less frequent, the seasons are much shorter. And so in the dead of winter, if you have to make dinner and you’re missing something, you’re like, well, the grocery store is closed and I only have what I have, so I am going to make dinner with that.

I was forced to cook a little bit differently and a style of cooking followed suit. I also think I realized that that was how I cooked anyway. It didn’t feel particularly challenging, but it didn’t feel like I was giving anything up.

Brianna Plaza: Is your cooking style something you feel that you’ve refined over time or did you land on it early on?

Alison Roman: I think it’s still a work in progress. I mean, Dining In came out when I was 32, and now I’m 40. I think if anyone looks at their life over the course of eight years, they’re probably like, “Oh yeah, I don’t wear that anymore.” We all change. We all grow. I think evolution is a natural product of time and aging.

I think that’s all to say that I am still who I am, and my food is still my food, but I have evolved. And I think that discovering one’s style is always a work in progress.

But that said, I’d been cooking for almost 10 years before my first book. The style that I had when I first started cooking was very different than what I produced in my first book. And I’m really glad that I had all that time to figure out what my style was before I wrote my first book.

Ultimately, all of my recipes could really appear together. There are similarities across all of the books because it’s all my food. So whether or not you’re honing in pantry staples or having people over, I think the through line is that my cooking style has always really leaned heavily on making something from nothing. Doing more with less.

Brianna Plaza: How do you make simple recipes feel special?

Alison Roman: I think for me, simple is not boring in the right hands. But I also think that so much of food these days is designed for the gaze. It’s designed for people to look at and watch it be made. Does it make a good video? Does it play well on social?

But not everything does. Sometimes the best, most delicious things aren’t very interesting to watch. This is a brown book and that was intentional. That was a choice that I made. To me, that’s not boring. I think that cooking and ingredients are inherently interesting.

We should all slow down a bit, and take some time with things, and appreciate stuff for what it is, instead of breezing past everything and on to what’s next. Because you know what? A boiled potato is really good. And why is it good? Because you put a little butter and salt on it and it’s amazing. That’s not a recipe in the book but it could be.

The writing is such a big part of this book, and hopefully all my books, because I am really passionately telling you why this is good and why you should make it because I really believe in it and that it’s not boring.

You’re getting something out of it, even if there are only five ingredients.

Brianna Plaza: Why did you decide to put some of your existing popular recipes in the book?

Alison Roman: Because I didn’t want them just to live on the internet. The internet is a place full of information, but it’s just the internet. A book is a book and for me, I like to open a book and read it. I think having a collection of recipes that belong together is really important.

There are a lot of recipes that I’ve written that are popular that didn’t make it into this book because they didn’t fit the ethos of what this book is about. I think it speaks to the fact that I’ve been cooking this way for a long time and it resonates with people. Now you can find these recipes in a book and to me, this book really feels like who I am.

Brianna Plaza: Tell me about your brainstorming and recipe development process.

Alison Roman: I think for the book, I had to think about if it fits with the concept of the book. Does it feel balanced? Does it feel like food I want to eat right now? Am I excited to make it? Then I go from there.

There are a few recipes that didn’t make it in after the fact because I was like, okay, it’s too many of this, or too much of that.

The newsletter is very of the moment, I don’t really think about it. It’s very authentic in that I am not very calculated. There’s no editorial calendar. I think it’s very reflective of what I’m eating and what I’m cooking and how I’m living, which is a challenge when you’ve just have a baby and you’re not cooking, so you’re not really writing. Or you’re eating an English muffin, and you’re like, well shit, what am I going to write about?

Trying to get back in the swing of things when your lifestyle is not conducive to cooking all the time is a challenge. And even right now I am heavy into press, and trying to plan a bunch of things for the fall, which means I’m busier, which means it becomes more challenging to cook for fun and leisure, so then you end up cooking for sustenance, and that’s not always the most beautiful or interesting. So I think a lot about how to turn that into something that people want to cook and read.

Brianna Plaza: What keeps you motivated?

Alison Roman: I think honestly, I’ve always been really self-motivated because there’s no plan B for me. I never had a safety net. If I didn’t work, I didn’t make money, and if I didn’t make money, I couldn’t pay rent. I’ve never lost that feeling of just having to make it work, and I have to work hard to earn a living to live in New York. And now I have a baby and it feels like there’s even more pressure. It is a very weird provider mentality to realize I have to take care of my family, my baby and myself.

I don’t think I’m a workaholic quote, unquote. But I’ve always been really focused on making things, and I think that I don’t feel at ease unless I’m making something. And I think that is just how my brain works. The idea of going on vacation is so unrelaxing to me, unless I have a project, unless I’m working during vacation (don’t worry, I’m in tons of therapy.).

Brianna Plaza: Have you felt at any point that you’ve made it, or is there a point where you might feel that way?

Alison Roman: I’m trying to feel that way, because if I don’t feel that way now, when will I feel that way? The bar keeps moving and always will, but if you can’t stop and appreciate what you’ve done, when can you? And this year, I had a baby, and a pretty intense and borderline traumatic birth experience, and finished a book, and then promoted the book in the same year — it’s a lot.

When I first wrote my first book, I was like, “I’m going to win a James Beard award,” because that was the only metric of success at the time. And of course I didn’t, I wasn’t even nominated. And then I quickly got over it. And I realized that that wasn’t actually that important, and what is important is that people actually use the book and cook from it. Hearing from people saying that, “You changed the way I cook. You’re important to my family,” is actually important. That actually means I’ve made it.

That’s the metric of success that you actually have to start judging yourself by, and the external validation becomes less and less important. People are a bottomless pit, which is why social media exists. How many subscribers and likes is enough for you to be like, I’ve done it? That number will always change and it becomes impossible to keep up, which is why you have to really define success for yourself.

Brianna Plaza: My last question is somewhat obscure and mostly for my personal curiosity. Recently you’ve become a freezer person, so as a person who loves her freezer, I have to ask what’s in yours.

Alison Roman: Well, I’ve been making baby food. I’ve been doing purees, and I get those silicone ice molds and I portion the food in those because they’re the perfect size. Then I pop them out and put them in a Ziplock, and then we can defrost them as we need them.

Otherwise, I always keep chicken in my freezer. I always keep ground meat because if I don’t know what to make for dinner, if I’m having people over, I’m like, “Oh, I can make a meatball or I can make a bolognese.”

Anytime I get something where I’m like, “Oh, I’m not going to get through this,” now, I just turn into a puree and I freeze. Blueberries, I cook down, add sugar, and freeze it. Any sort of greens, I cook down with a head of cauliflower and some lentils or rice and broth, and freeze it. Oh, I always have broth. Sometimes there’s a bolognese, sometimes there’s beans.

Some puff pastry is always in my freezer because a pot pie is never far. And we’re entering pot pie season, thank God.

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Way back in June, I interviewed Mathew Scaletta of Wildfish Cannery, a family-owned cannery on Prince of Whales Island, Alaska. I ordered a bunch of their products as part of my research and their canned salmon is very, very good. I used a few cans in simple lunch plates and salads, but I was looking for more interesting ideas when I came across salmon and quinoa patties on their site.

I tweaked their recipe with what I had on hand, got over my general lack of interest in quinoa, and made a creamy slaw to go with it. I tested out this recipe a few times, getting the balance right between the salmon, quinoa, and breadcrumbs. The result is satisfyingly crispy and crunchy, but feels healthful and not remotely boring. Perfect for a weeknight and interesting enough for the weekend.

Salmon & quinoa cakes with lemon-pepper slaw

What I like about these is that you can eat them with a bun for a non beef burger option, but without the slaw, they also work as part of a salad or rice bowl. You can also swap out the za’atar to take it in another culinary direction.

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Jay Rushin is the CEO of H&H Bagels, a storied New York City-based brand that’s been around since the 1970s. After a very tumultuous history, Jay acquired the brand in 2014 and has been working to bring the bagel company into the modern era. We talked about the brand’s wild history, how they’re staying relevant, and the logistics of selling thousands of bagels around the country each day.

Oh, and his go-to order is a bacon, egg, and cheese on a plain bagel.

Brianna Plaza: H&H Bagels has been around for quite a while and has a lot of history, from multiple owners, a couple bankruptcies, and an owner indictment. How has the company navigated so much and stayed alive?

Jay Rushin: It’s definitely been eventful. The original founder was from Puerto Rico and came to New York in the mid 1970s. He saw a small bagel operation on the Upper West Side, acquired it, and renamed it after himself and his cousin: H&H Midtown Bagels. He then opened another location on the Upper East Side and called that one H&H Midtown Bagels East.

A couple years later, they went bankrupt for the first time, and the two locations went to auction separately. He won the auction for the west side location, but not for the east side location, so the two locations essentially got split up into two different ownership groups.

Then in 2011, there was a much more well known bankruptcy where he drove everything off a cliff. The Upper West Side location and a factory in New Jersey were shut down, the IRS seized his assets, and he had to spend his weekends at Rikers. Since the Upper East Side was under different ownership, it kept doing its thing and never shut down.

I’m working on Wall Street looking for a business to acquire and I came across H&H. There was a group of owners that had operated the brand for about 10 years and they were looking to get out. I was attracted to this great brand that has so much pop culture and New York history, so I found it really intriguing. I had been a lifelong foodie and I was attracted to the food industry coming from Wall Street. I thought it fit my skillset and I thought I could turn it around.

I am the world’s worst salesman but I feel like the company sells itself. I was presented a good opportunity to step in and try to be an entrepreneur.

Brianna Plaza: How do you stay relevant in an expanding bagel market?

Jay Rushin: We’re staying relevant by going national. We don’t think we need to stay in New York to be relevant. We’ve got five operating locations in New York, which is plenty. We’ve currently have a couple licensed locations out at the airports, which has been nice for the brand.

But pretty much 100% of our focus is growing nationally. We opened our first location outside of New York in Boca Raton last September. We’ve got a whole host of openings over the next six months. So we’ve got a lot going on right now.

Brianna Plaza: Do you think you lose bit of bagel credibility as you expand beyond the city?

Jay Rushin: Maybe we’ve lost some already. The reality is, we’ve modernized our entire service model and our entire brick and mortar experience, and that’s what has afforded us the opportunity to go national. But maybe New Yorkers still want the 1980s version of what bagels used to be.

We think people want nicer places to eat and get their food. We haven’t changed our process or our recipes and if anything, we’ve improved the quality of our products over the last decade plus. We continue to strive to meet those consumer needs.

Brianna Plaza: I grew up in places that are not known for bagels, and we had a lot of mediocre chains. How do you convince consumers that a national chain has good bagels?

Jay Rushin: All of our bagels are made here in New York City, so worldwide they will be authentic New York City bagels. We use the highest quality flour unlike many brands on the national stage. We crack fresh eggs. We slice fresh avocados. I mean, up and down the entire brand, we care about food quality and that kind of differs from the other national bagel chains.

Making bagels is not easy and making them at scale is infinitely harder. It has taken us a long time to get our 20,000 sq foot bakery in Queens to be able to support our growth and produce a high end product at scale.

Brianna Plaza: With a production facility in Queens, how do you maintain quality as your bagels travel further away from the facility?

Jay Rushin: Every location will receive product from Queens and bake them off in specialized ovens and be able to put out hot bagels all day long.

They are fully made then kettle-boiled, which is unusual for our scale. It’s very difficult to make tens of millions of bagels a year and still fully kettle-boiled, but we do. Then the dough is then slightly baked just to form the circle, then flash frozen and shipped to warehouses across the country. They’re delivered to the locations and those locations then do the full finishing bake-off.

We developed this process through like five years of R&D.

Brianna Plaza: How did you refine that process? To be able to cook something in New York and make sure it holds up in the travel process.

Jay Rushin: One of the good things about our history is that we’ve always done a fair amount of wholesale business. We were already comfortable making and handling large amounts of bagels. We had already been sending our bagels around the country, so the logistics and transportation of bagels didn’t scare us. We had been exporting our bagels to Taiwan and South Korea over the years which gets you more comfortable with the logistics of moving bagels around.

If you’ve never done that before and you try franchising nationally, then you have to figure all these logistics out, it’s almost too high of a mountain to climb. We kind of reversed it. We already knew how to move bagels, so then we went and open more locations.

We already knew how to make high volumes at a high quality, but modernizing that process and using better equipment was a long process. We had to get our heads around finding new vendors and ovens that could do a better job than the old fashioned ovens that we had.

We then had to perfect the whole process. Where can we maximize the quality for the end consumer? Where in the manufacturing cycle do you stop the process to then restart in another place? We probably went through thousands of hours of testing and iterating.

It’s a process but I am thankful we at least knew how to move bagels around the world. That removed one very large challenge from the equation.

Brianna Plaza: Is the menu the same at all locations or does it localize?

Jay Rushin: For now, pretty much every menu is the same. We have a pretty concise menu, especially in the bagel world. Since I took over the company, our menu item count is down about 75% and we focus now only on egg sandwiches and spreads. If you want something like a salad, you probably shouldn’t be coming to H&H.

By focusing on a smaller menu, the products end up being better because you can focus on higher quality products. You have less inventory and products you have to worry about. There’s less mistakes from your employees because you’re not trying to make 150 items, you’re just making 40 really good ones. A smaller menu benefits everyone up and down the line, all the way to the consumer.

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When I first moved to North Jersey for college in 2005, one of my first introductions to Italian-American culture in the Northeast was The Feast of San Gennaro, an annual festival held in mid-September in Manhattan.

For about 10 days, part of Soho becomes a frenzied carnival of Italian-American culture, packed to the gills with food vendors, people eating and drinking in the street (mostly behaved) and Italian music booming from every restaurant.

The lines tend to be long, and the sausage and pepper stands are organized chaos. The guys manning the grill are sweaty and curt, ready to take your order with little patience for indecision. You choose between spicy and regular sausage, giant coils sitting on the grill crisped and ready, and they’re pilled into a roll with a scoop of peppers and onions, cooked in the salty fat of the pork. It’s messy and glorious.

This recipe is the more relaxed, sit down version, but still suits the vibes of early fall. The nights are starting to cool down, but summer bell peppers are still available at farmers’ markets. It’s the perfect recipe to ease us into the next season, blaring Italian music optional.

Pork chops with vinegar peppers

This dish has all the flavors of sausage and peppers without the side of chaotic festival. It’s relatively simple so you can tackle it on a weeknight, yet refined enough that it’s great for an elevated weekend meal. Serve with a light red and enjoy while sitting outside to take in the last bits of warm weather.

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