360: Christina Chaey

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0:32Gentle foods, I think the term can encompass a broader variety of foods and dishes. But to me, I think ultimately the main criteria is, is this food supporting me? Whatever that means to you and whatever that might mean at the time. This is Taste. I'm your host, Eliza Barbanel.

0:59Christina Che is a writer and recipe developer based in Brooklyn. A former Bon Appetit food editor, she's currently writing the newsletter Gentle Foods, where she shares essays and recipes rooted in cooking how you want to feel. It's so special to catch up with Christina in the studio about her background working in magazines, expanding the concept of wellness food, and making her very own cookbook.

1:29Christina Che, this is Taste. Thank you for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me. What's up with your breakfast routine these days? Have you had something good today yet? I have a big day today and I'm not going to be home for a while. So I did two eggs. Well, I fried four eggs. I gave two to Matt and some spinach. And then I just bought a very expensive overnight oat thing when we just got our coffee. Oh, yeah. The blue bottle overnight oats. Which I'll have later. I know. I hate that they're good, but they are pretty good. No, I mean, it's a very like midtown state of mind to be in to get those, but they've done me right before, I would say.

2:07It's annoying because I have a quart of muesli at home. And if I had had more time, I would have eaten that. I'd save like$10. I think of you as a muesli person. I don't know why. Maybe when we worked together at Bon Appetit, you would like eat that sometimes, but it just feels kind of right. Oh my God, dude. Moo Moo Muesli is my shit right now. Sorry. Can I curse? Yeah. Especially for Moo Moo Muesli. What a name. I've never heard of this before. It's M-U-M-U. Okay. Muesli. But you know, the mascot is a cow. Yeah. And it's really good. The The recipe on the back of the bag is what I use, and it's, you know, kind of Swiss bircher style.

2:51So you do the muesli, which is a mix of oats and dried fruit and nuts and flax, whatever. And then you add milk and yogurt, and then you grate a whole apple in with the peel and everything. And then you just kind of let it marinate for 30 minutes until it all just becomes like mushy. And then I've been adding hemp seeds and chia seeds to it because I'm trying to excavate and eat through my pantry, which is going to take the full year. Yeah, I was like, what is this deep sigh about? And then you finished the sentence and now I'm getting an understanding. Well, I think by the time this episode comes out, I will have written this newsletter about this journey.

3:43And we can talk about the newsletter later, obviously. But I have been planning on writing this newsletter about how I'm trying to eat through the pantry. And I'm trying to do my best to not allow myself to buy anything new until I eat through everything that's there. Not everything, but. But maybe give me like a top line. Like what are the things in the pantry that you are burning to make your way through the most? One pint of dried hominy. Oh, OK. So like pozole every day. Yeah. Which is an amazing food. But I'm just like, girl, why didn't you just buy the cans? Yeah. Could you bake with it?

4:22Haven't thought about it yet. Come back to it. Clearly avoidant. Let's see. A jar of sun-dried tomatoes. Ooh. taking suggestions by the way pasta obviously right I feel like it was such a like 2010 chicken alfredo kind of moment but it sounds delicious to me do you remember two years ago when I feel like sun-dried tomatoes were having a little comeback and that's literally when I bought them no but you were like I don't know it was like a good street style moment like what inspired you in the first place you just saw them I honestly think I bought them in Woodstock and then I on vacation and then I brought them back and now I still haven't used them.

5:02I like a vacation pantry bag because I too have done that before where I've seen something like incredibly specific that I've been like, oh, I'm the person where I'm going to use this in my life. And then I come back home and it's like, wait, why did I do this? I mean, that's 70 % of my pantry. And then everything else would be like 100 bottles of various regional cuisine condiments. So that's, can you tell it's giving me a lot of stress. I know, but I do think like you probably are making progress and it's going to feel good when you're done. Are you having like a tally of every jar you complete or something maybe to reward yourself?

5:38That's a good idea. I haven't decided if I'm going to list out every item, you know, in a public forum. Oh, it could be just for you maybe. But I think like having a little checkoff list on your pantry when you finish something like to me, that's kind of kind of like how my motivation works, you know? It's same for me. And I have been doing that for years. When we were still doing Healthy-ish, I wrote a newsletter about that once. I was going to say, this does sound familiar to me. It was about a freezer edit. And I was just documenting everything that was in the freezer so that I, one, knew what was there, and two, was on the hook to use them up.

6:17The other reason why this pantry clean-out thing is so on my mind is because this past weekend I just hosted Chopped. Like the TV show? Yes. Well, Chopped is a cooking tournament that I've conducted with friends for the last 10 plus years. But the funny thing is I had never watched an episode of Chopped until the night of this most recent Chopped that we did. And not until like the very end of the night when we were all drunk. It's funny because Chopped, the tournament, has withstood so many exes, former friends, randos, you know, they all come through and move on and Chopped lives on forever.

7:01And so basically how it works is we always have three contestants. Someone volunteers to host. So I hosted this most recent time. Each of the three contestants gets the same mystery basket with three mystery ingredients, and then they get one hour to create a main dish from those ingredients. But they also have access to anything that's in the fridge or the pantry at the host's home. Okay, so they had a lot of choices at your house. What was in the basket? And then were you the judge? So anyone who attends who's not competing is a judge. OK. So one of the main criteria is that you have to produce enough food so that everyone who is attending, aka judging, can have a taste.

7:56And so, yes, I was one of the seven judges or something. What was the basket? The basket, I came up with this basket, I think, primarily. And I thought it was pretty good. It was collard greens, canned tuna, and coconut meat, like big chunks of coconut meat. And that was your kind of like curveball ingredient in the basket, kind of? I sort of thought all were a little curveball. I think that it's more about the combined effect. Yeah. I'm just imagining as a cook, like maybe working with fresh coconut meat is the thing that would be the least familiar for folks, depending on who it is. But the combination is interesting.

8:39What was the winning dish? Well, the winner is being very secretive about revealing that they've won because they're waiting for these film photos that we took from the competition to be developed before revealing. But I think those will be out by the time this airs. So the winning dish was a tuna Wellington. Whoa. It was crazy. It was so delicious. So a Wellington, you know, is some sort of meat wrapped in puff pastry. It usually has a layer of duxelle, which is like a sort of savory mushroom paste-like thing. And so this person made shiitake and red curry paste duxelle that they layered with the tuna.

9:30And then I think they wilted collard greens and they put some coconut in there. They baked that. And then on the side, they made a scallion oil, scallion and coconut oil mixed into mayonnaise so that it became this pale green mayonnaise that was delicious. They also put on in a very decorative, pleasing manner. And the whole thing, it was phenomenal. Wow. Okay, well, now I'm inspired to do Chopped with my friends. I feel like this is really fun. Honestly, it's amazing. And it's amazing to me because we'll fall off. We'll not do it for years. And then we'll just pick it back up again. And, you know, this was over the weekend.

10:12What day is today? It's Tuesday. I'm like still cleaning. The one downside. But it is so much fun. OK, well, friends come and go. Chopped is eternal. This is my takeaway. Is that like maybe I can borrow like a spreadsheet or something from y 'all to do my own? I think you'll have to make your own spreadsheet. We are not that organized. OK, fair. You don't want the rival network coming in. I get it. I'll do my own. So I wanted to talk to you a little bit about Bon Appetit, which is where that we met and worked together. And I think that's something that you and I have in common is that we have like a journalism school background that then like came into food media.

10:50Oh, right. Yeah. The same journalism background. Northwestern. Go Cats. Not that we overlapped, but we did both go there and then use that like hard news. This is how you report a sports story training that we had to pivot into food media. So I guess I'm curious, just looking back, what drew you to food media in the first place? And how do you think about it now? Did you ever take Charles Whitaker's magazine feature writing class? Okay, I took a class with Charles Whitaker, but he was not my feature writing teacher. But this man is a legend in the Northwestern Journalism School. He's the dean now, right?

11:29He is the dean now. man, truly an icon. Okay, so I took his feature writing class my junior year of college. And one of the assignments we had in that class was to write a profile, interview and write a profile of someone working in the industry who had a job that seemed cool. And the person I chose was a former food editor at Bon Appetit. And I had no idea at the time that was going to peak a potential career direction for me, which is ironic because the whole point of the assignment was like, find someone who has a job you think is cool. But then I actually completely forgot that I interviewed that person for years.

12:17And I don't know, it just didn't really occur to me that there was a path in this world and in this industry until way later. I was working as a tech reporter at this magazine called Fast Company. How did you get into food then? Well, so I was doing this job and it was not really something that I felt, I don't know, I felt whatever about it. I think I felt very lost about what I was interested in writing about I didn't know yet at the time that I didn't like reporting. And I was living in my first apartment in New York. I was living in Prospect Heights back when that was a thing you could do fresh out of college.

13:08I paid$875 for that apartment. Wow. And it was like as big as the bedroom that I have now, 12 years, 13 years later. Anyway, so what I did a lot in my free time when I was just not really happy at this job and kind of lost overall was I cooked. And it was it was voracious and it was my primary hobby. And it was also, I think, a way that I coped with anxiety and uncertainty. And yeah, it was it was just something that very quickly became this really important part of who I was and how I expressed myself. And then totally by coincidence, I ended up getting this, it was supposed to be a temporary production gig at Bon Appetit.

14:06I was hired to produce like a series that we, oh, it was the predecessor of the food lovers. No, no, no. It was the food lovers cleanse. Yes. And then it became the feel good food plan. Yes. Yes. Yeah. So you actually left BA. I think you were gone when I started and then you had came back. And everything that I was hearing about you is that you had left to go be a line cook and that you were coming back after that. Is that true? Yes. Okay. So I'm curious, leaving the magazine, going into the restaurant, what was a culture shock moment for you? And then also maybe leaving the restaurant, coming back into the magazine after?

14:44Yes. So I left to go cook at this restaurant that is no longer around, unfortunately, but it was the restaurant at the Whitney Museum. Untitled? Untitled. Right. That's the title of the restaurant. That's the title. Yeah. Yeah. Forever memorialized, by the way, in the opening scene of the first episode of And Just Like That. Okay. Actually, I was about to say that, which is insane that I also know that. But very strange. And I think the restaurant was already closed by the time that episode came out. Uh-huh. Anyway, so, yeah, complete culture shock. I went from working this desk job at a magazine, overall pretty chill, I guess, to fast and furious and always stressful, always crying.

15:41environment where it just felt like there was no there's no middle ground between zero to 100 in terms of stress level it's like you walk in your stress levels 100 this is why i can't watch the bear yeah i've heard this from people but okay ham and sola were telling me for a long time that they couldn't watch the bear and i was just over at their house and they were watching the second season with their infant daughter and they were like totally over it and their favorite parts were the stressful parts because it felt the most relatable to them. So they were over it, meaning like they were over the fear of watching it.

16:13They were like, oh, we our favorite scene in the whole series is the ticket scene when all the tickets are coming out, you know, like first season or second season for a season. Oh, OK. So I did actually watch the first season. That's when they realized the delivery is not connected to the main ticket system. Yeah. Which they're like that happened to us. We only had one person quit that day. Oh, my God. I mean, yes. Things like that, you know. So I don't know that I'm quite where they are at in terms of being like, wow, that's my favorite scene. You're earlier in your processing. Yeah. That's OK.

16:46Yeah, perhaps. But I imagine you learned a lot of hard skills that maybe you had been hearing about or like wanting to incorporate into your work in some way. And that must have been really rewarding. Yeah, I mean, the skills and the training that I got when I was there, I think, have continued to influence how I work at home. And certainly when I later joined the BA Test Kitchen as a food editor formally, and also, you know, whenever I've done pop-ups or events, it informs everything about the way that I work. You just learn a very specific system for, you know, everything from how to properly wash and store produce to how you organize a dry pantry to how you prep and how to prioritize what to prep and, you know, all these things.

17:44And yeah, it's nice to apply those things without the stress of everything else about that experience. Yeah. I want to talk about something that's maybe like the opposite of that experience, which is the concept of gentle foods. Maybe could you give like a brief introduction into like what a gentle food is for people who maybe don't read your newsletter or the other ways that you've talked about gentle foods? Sure. Gentle foods are born from a desire that I and I think many others have to feed ourselves in a kinder, gentler way that prioritizes listening to yourself, taking cues from what's around us, the seasons of our farmers, and deprioritizes notions of how to perform health, quote unquote, the way modern toxic diet and wellness culture says we should.

18:30it's a great groundwork and i think that like when you had first been writing about gentle foods it was a very specific moment in time which was march 2020 um we were still working together then yeah well we were in the office and we all had to go home it was like the very very beginning of of the pandemic right so i guess i'm curious about how your concept of like what is a gentle food like specifically and like the kind of recipes you're thinking about has evolved since that first moment. Because when I think gentle foods, I think of like coddled eggs or like rice soup. Yeah. Very like things you don't have to chew.

19:06But I think it's probably more than that, right? Yeah. Yeah. I think that's that image is conjured up for a lot of people when they hear the phrase. And I think that's that's not that's not wrong. That's totally, I think, what I had in mind when I first started thinking about this concept back in March 2020. I was going through an emotional and mental place where I was just feeling super chaotic and uncertain and very anxious, as was everyone, about the future and what was going to happen in the beginning of COVID. And as I always have found myself turning to food to help me kind of make sense of what was happening around me.

19:53And a lot of the things I ended up cooking for myself in that time were, yeah, things like poached eggs, not hard fried eggs or, yeah, gently simmered pots of beans and stuff like that. And, you know, rice porridge, things like that. I do think that there is a broader definition or I think the term can encompass a broader variety of foods and dishes. But to me, I think ultimately the main criteria is, is this like, is this food supporting me? whatever that means to you and whatever that might mean at the time. You know, I think in a certain moment, in a certain time, ice cream can support me. I think in another time, an ice pot of soup can support me.

20:56And I think ultimately it's less about what is the food and more about the philosophy of just being a bit more intentional, about trying to listen to what your body is saying that it wants. Yeah, definitely. I think that is like the through line because in your newsletter, like you're not just doing recipes also, but there are essays and kind of all of these other things that I really like because to me, it's kind of like world building and expanding this idea of like what wellness means. And as we've mentioned a little bit on this episode, when we worked together at Bon Appetit, we were working on this website, Healthyish, that was kind of like an anti-wellness wellness space is maybe how I would explain it.

21:37It was definitely like of the like late 20 teens to 2020 era of food that I think is kind of different than now. But I guess I'm curious how you kind of ground yourself in this idea of like anti-diet wellness food. I know that you also are doing this Nourish Yourself cooking program with Brooklyn Strength that seems to be like kind of cool. How did that come together? The collaboration with Cadence Dubuze, who is the owner of Brooklyn Strength, which is a virtual like Pilates, kettlebell, now yoga studio. She had been offering this course called Nourish Yourself for maybe a year or two before we started collaborating on it.

22:24And I think she, as a fitness person with a very specific sort of expertise, was interested in collaborating with someone who perhaps brought a different perspective and a different expertise. And so she had always wanted to work with a food person. And I had always really loved the concept of the program that she was already offering, which was very simple. It was just like, let's figure out how to get you to engage with food in a way that's not shrouded in guilt or shame. simple enough concept, much more difficult and layered and nuanced, I think, in practice, which has definitely been my own experience and the experience that I've observed from others who I've experienced either in this course or either, frankly, just everywhere in my life.

23:20I think that we're so obsessed with thinking about food and at the same time don't know how to feed ourselves. And I've just seen those themes come up time and again with just in casual conversations with friends, et cetera. And so this program is this seven-week series that is a combination of self-paced lectures, some recipes, and other kind of food and cooking tips and strategies from me. We're doing a live cooking class in this series, which I think will be really fun. And then we have this Discord community where, you know, that's just been a really critical piece of just creating this supportive, nonjudgmental place for people to just really be frank about what feelings they're experiencing, what they're struggling with, and then everyone kind of helps out.

24:27Yeah, I think that sounds really crucial as an element to it. And I guess in terms of the recipes, I'm curious, like maybe what's one recipe that you're doing for this that you think is a good fit for the series? Because I would imagine that it's not like, you know, quote unquote, healthy cookie dough or something like that, but something that's like nourishing on a deeper level. Right, right. So for the live cooking class that we're doing as part of this series, I'm going to be teaching soup, soup, but I'm keeping it kind of purposely open-ended because I think it's going to be a choose-your-own-adventure bean slash legume plus vegetable soup.

25:03So the idea being that I want the people in the class to feel empowered to be able to make a version of the soup template that we're going to be following, even if you don't have every single thing that is listed in a specific recipe, which is where I feel like a lot of people end up getting hung up and, you know, you don't have one or two things and you think like, I can't make this. When in fact, I think that one of the most empowering things about learning how to feed yourself in a more supportive way is really understanding how to work with what you have. Yeah, I totally agree. And I think that like the rise of matrices or formulas instead of recipes is really cool because like I think a soup is like one of the best ways to have that.

25:49But there could be like a pasta formula or a salad formula or something else that I think is like also kind of capitalizing on the flexibility part, which is cool. Yeah. And I think it invites just more of a sense of openness and curiosity. And I think there can be so much fear around cooking, too, which is a sub theme that I've noticed in the Nourish Yourself folks. And that's been really interesting for me to learn about. As in like fear of messing something up that you've invested resources and time and obviously like ingredient cost into. Exactly. Time, energy, all this shit. Like you went shopping for this stuff.

26:27I totally get the concept that you don't want to go through all of that and then end up with something that's just not great. Yeah, I get that. Sometimes when I make something bad, like I just sit with it for a second because like, I don't know, I think I think of myself as like a pretty good cook. and like I cook for myself all the time, but sometimes you make something that's just like actively bad. And it's honestly like a good learning experience because I'm like, where exactly? Like, how did I get to this point? You know? What was the last thing you made that was like bad? I just made something that was like too salty.

26:58I made like a sausage kale stew. I think what happened is that like my girlfriend and I were cooking together and we both were salting and like not telling the other person if I had to guess in hindsight. But it just was the kind of thing that like, you know, I was like, oh, let me add more vinegar. Like I was really trying to offset the salt And ultimately, at a certain point, I just had to accept that like I couldn't I didn't know what to do. You know, it's just like a little too salty. And that was OK. Did you add more water or did you try to dilute it away? I did try to dilute it. But then I was worried about like I should have added more water.

27:28I think I was worried about like diluting it too much and then it would be like not that salty, but then not that flavorful in general. So I ultimately decided to just like, you know, I added some vinegar, add a little bit of sugar because I was like, maybe that would help. And then I just kind of like ate it on bread. Adding the sugar maybe was not the good idea. No, those are smart. You know, I don't know. Smart ideas. And I was telling someone about it and they're like, oh, don't be hard on yourself. And I was like, no, like, I'm not. Like, it just actually wasn't good. And I think, like, that's okay to be able to say that because then hopefully I can avoid it next time.

27:57Yeah. Yeah. So I want to ask you about your cookbook collection because apparently you have over 120 cookbooks. Are they organized? No. No. How do you do you do you find things in them or like what's the what's the plan of attack? The plan of attack, I would say, is I often look through multiple at a time. I'm often reading five of them at a time, much to the chagrin of my partner and roommate. I think his pet peeve is finding like an open book on the couch and it's open to a specific page. And he knows by this point that it's like open there for a reason. So like don't move it. But he just wants to sit on the couch.