433: Caroline Chambers

0:28This episode is brought to you by Resi and American Express. I think we're very obsessed with like sides in this culture. I don't know. We're very obsessed with having side dishes for everything. And I'm like, no, you can just eat the tacos. You can just eat the sandwiches. So those are examples of ones that don't need sides. Most of the recipes in the book are like, you know, chicken with a broccoli and something else. Like it's the whole meal.

0:54This is Taste. I'm your host, Matt Rodbard. Today on the show, I have a great conversation with Caroline Chambers. She's the author of a new cookbook, What to Cook When You Don't Feel Like Cooking. What a great title. She's also of Substack. I'm sure you're a subscriber. It's terrific. It comes out many times a week. On this episode, we talk about her new book, about living in North Carolina and Southern California, about her time spent living in New York in her early 20s. What a great conversation. I hope you enjoy it.

1:37Caroline Chambers, welcome to This Is Taste. How are you? I'm so good. I'm so happy to be here. I'm already having so much fun. We could have been recording the past hour of our conversation, but we're just starting now. So everybody gets to tune in now. Listener, we were doing a little goss off mic. We were talking about some cookbook industry stuff. We're filling all the tea. All the tea, our floor. We've got a flood in here. There's so much tea happening. There's tea everywhere. My socks are wet. We're having fun in here. Well, I love meeting you finally. We've never met before, but I've read your work, and I love your cookbook, so congratulations.

2:11Thank you. You've been so complimentary. I really appreciate that. I mean it. I call it like I see it, and I think it's a terrific book. It's a lot of real skill in there. And really, the title makes me feel, What to Cook When You Don't Feel Like Cooking. obviously that's most of us yes it's literally everyone even people who love to cook often don't feel like cooking and i would say you and i love to cook we're cookbook authors we talk about food all the time but there are still so many times when we just like cannot and this is for those times it's exactly for those times and it just is well laid out we'll get to a lot of the recipes i've super dug into it but first okay you lived in new york for years and you're back in the city and it's summer and tell me where are you eating where are you dining out right now okay so yesterday was the hottest day of summer on record to date like it was the hottest july 9th i guess on record yeah so far and so i truly was so hot the entire day that i couldn't even think about food which was so depressing because i come from i'm i now live in carmel valley california which Although beautiful, like simply the food ain't it in Carmel.

3:17I have thoughts. Yeah. I was there in January. Do you completely agree with me? Oh, my gosh. It's weird. Wow. Lots of that. We were in Monterey. We went to some spots. Carmel went to some spots. I know exactly where you went. I mean, I love driving around Pebble. Yeah, it's gorgeous. It's gorgeous. The hiking, the views. Everything is right about Monterey except for the food. And mind you, we've got some spots. We have like five great spots. but five great spots. Like, give me a break. You move from New York and like all of a sudden you have five spots and none of those are up in the valley. It sounds like you didn't choose to live there.

3:52Well, you know, that's interesting. I love living there. Let me say, I love living there. I definitely live there because my husband's career brought us there. Right. So he has a cannabis situation in Castroville, California. Yeah, yeah. And so we wound up in Carmel. And Carmel, like it rocks. I love living there. I hike every day. Like I go to the pool every day. Life is good. Don't get me wrong. But the food scene sucks. So I get here yesterday. I'm so excited for New York food. Every time I come here, I am like my days are scheduled around what I'm going to eat. One thing that I love eating because I shop around.

4:29I mean Soho in the summertime with the tourists and the heat. Like what was I thinking? But I'm about to go on book tour. So I needed to shop. And so I was in Soho. and something that I love getting a fast lunch is Hampton Chutney. What are they called? It's not Soka wraps, but help me. Have you ever been to Hampton Chutney? I've not been there, so I'm not familiar with it. So is it a flatbread, like a naan that's wrapped? It's not a flatbread. It's one of those chickpea wrappy things. Oh, it's a dosa. A dosa! Yeah! Jeez, God, my brain. It's all good. It's a dosa, and they're filled with the most delicious.

5:04So there's this one with corn and arugula and tomatoes and cheese and I think there's a meat in there but I honestly can't even remember because I didn't get it because I was too hot. But that's what I was looking forward to all day yesterday for lunch and then I was like get away from me anything that will make my body hotter. But they have all these chutneys that you order with them. There's like a peanut chutney that I've riffed on on my newsletter. You know cilantro chutney, all the chutneys and you roll it up, you dip it, you tear it. So you had the dose. I love this. take me back to when you were living here what were some of your spots okay i loved hampton chutney then too i lived on broadway and houston above what is now like a nine west i think it was like an empty like factory space and they had just like put five walls up and to make five bedrooms like none of them went all the way to the ceiling it was like the there were rats everywhere like it was a wild place to live and back then there was a dean and deluca caddy corner you remember that Dean and DeLuca on Broadway?

6:06That's the original Dean and DeLuca, the iconic location. And my roommates and I were so broke. We were all in our lower 20s working PR or marketing jobs, making such an abysmal amount of money. And we would go to Dean and DeLuca and spend our entire paycheck. Yeah. And we would just get all the most delicious things. Oh, we loved Grey Dog back then. Totally. But I think the thing about New York is just that everything, you can get anything in a matter of minutes. You can get taught, like, this is what I miss so much. So you were, like, vibing Soho. Oh, well, yeah, we were real Soho rats then, which is funny.

6:41Yeah. Because we were so poor. And so you say, like, I lived in Soho. And it's like, it's not what you think. It's a different era. It's not what you think. This is a different era, I believe, that you're talking about. I moved here in 02, and it feels like it's in that zone for that decade. Yeah, it was 2010. Yeah, 10. You know, in that decade, you could definitely live in Soho for less than you'd think, especially now, 15 years later. I can't even imagine what that place is. I'm sure it's been completely renovated to some gorgeous place now. But last night, I finally gained an appetite after sweating my entire body weight out.

7:10And I went to Via Corotta. And I got an instant table or a seat at the bar. And I ordered the salad. And I ordered cacio e pepe. And I was so happy. Were you rolling solo? Yes. Oh, my God. You had a solo day of three young children back in California. It was. I called my husband on the way. He was like, so who's dinner with tonight? Thinking I'd have it with my editor or my agent or something. I was like, I just didn't make plans. I'm alone. And he was like, you're going out to dinner alone in New York City. I hear this kid's like screaming in the background. It's like plates are crashing. And then tonight I'm going to Chouquet.

7:44Oh, you have some good spots in mind. So I'd love to hear about your New York, especially having lived here. Let's talk about Substack. Okay. Let's talk about it. You have incredible skill. I feel like there's fluency and intimacy and consistency. I'm using a lot of Y's here. I think that's why you have such a large following that we kind of get into your world. Tell me, when you launched it, what was the goal? Yeah. Okay. So we're in December 2020 when I launched it. But What to Cook When You Don't Feel Like Cooking was first a cookbook concept. So I wrote Just Married and it published in 2017.

8:20It was with Chronicle Books. Great book about like newlywed recipes to cook together with your spouse. It came out in 2017. And then I had my first son, Mattis, in 2019. And the way that I cook had changed so much between those recipes and how I was cooking now. All of a sudden, I, a person who loves food, like didn't feel like cooking. I was exhausted. I was working full time. My husband was working full time. We had this newborn like screaming at us all the time. I didn't feel like cooking a lot. So I came up with this, with what to cook when you don't feel like cooking, as a cookbook concept.

8:53And I pitched it as a cookbook to Chronicle, who had to write a first refusal on my first book, after my first book. And then to everyone, I'm sure Penguin Random House got one. You know, everybody got this pitch. And everybody said no because in two years the cookbook landscape had changed so much that I couldn't get a cookbook deal without having like a huge baked in audience. So they wanted – all of a sudden publishers wanted you to have like totally your own platform to launch your own book, right? Did you see that shift happen? We did. It did. You know, it was part of the industry, you know, acquisition strategy.

9:26I mean, it's smart. It is. It sucks when you don't have the platform and you're trying to build your platform. Yes. It lights a fire, you know, under potential authors. And clearly the fire was lit under you. The fire was lit. Because what just what happened subsequently is remarkable how big your audience became. Yeah. And how it grew. So I basically took that rejection and I like stood on it for a while. And then 2020 happened. And I was a freelance recipe developer at the time. 2020 happened. All my jobs went away. Nobody knew how to market food, how to talk about food in a global pandemic.

10:00So I took that, like, you know, you don't have a platform. You don't have an Instagram audience. You've got to grow this to have a book. And I finally was like, okay, this is my moment. Like, I don't have any other work to work on. Like, I'm just going to crank. And I started just, like, cranking on Instagram, publishing a new recipe, video, photos. This is when photos were still working on Instagram. every single day new stuff i started doing zoom cooking classes my zoom cooking classes i started like a subscription zoom cooking class so cool and it was so fun it was called kitchen table and we had this like crew of like i think i had 500 subscribers so they were paying like 30 a month to come to a weekly cooking class or you could pay 30 just for one so it was like you know people would drop in but it was a good deal to subscribe wow this was subscription economy baby this wasn't like growth hacky either you weren't doing anything like you know like paid acquisition you're like growing this which is remarkable i was cranking right it's about the cranking cranking that content like that's what i think people are like how do you how do you grow an instagram audience like you don't like show up once a day and post you're like there you're on stories you're there all day every day i think the reason for my growth is that i like didn't just show here's what I'm cooking like here's dinner I was like my kids are insane like here's how I'm still getting a dinner on the table oh they just broke that vase okay we can do it anyway I was showing like the whole deal and people were like oh her life's a shit show too like I relate to that like her life's a shit show my life's a shit show she doesn't feel like cooking but she's still cooking here's what she's cooking I can cook that and so it just became like a whole like ecosystem of like not just the food but also like he spoke to a wide audience there's like a Venn diagram you know you're from north carolina you're tarheel like there's like a lot of that happening so you're speaking to the community of the southeast the east coast midwest there's also three young children at home which is also so there's like a merging of communities who i think probably have been quite underserved by food media quote-unquote yeah and you were able to capture this needed audience through obviously ambition through cranking and through putting out great shit, which I think is what you do.

12:16I think that what you just said, though, so right. A lot of food media right now is it's awesome. I think we're in like such a great moment of food media. There's not a lot of like just quick, simple food being like popularized. Like there's a lot of like tricky ingredients and harder techniques and like things that aren't as easy for a home cook who's really uncomfortable in the kitchen. And like their mom never taught them to cook because like our mom's generation was the first generation of women who were like really working. So we like missed the cooking bone. Like it was never passed down.

12:54So all of a sudden we have people who are like, now they're mothers, they're expected to put food on the table or fathers, but a lot of mothers are expected to put food on the table and they don't know how to cook. I really simplify. You simplify, you edit. And I think I agree with you. There's a lot of food media recipe development that goes into more adventurous slash more detail. I would say the exceptions to me just off the Dome, Susie Karachi, Mediterranean Dish, Jenny Rosenstretch. I feel these are terrific authors, Melissa Clark in some ways. Yes, love Melissa. Caroline, you're so right that you're serving an audience that was needed.

13:29And what I think is also cool is that you started cooking for your husband, which your husband, he's a Navy SEAL. And that's an interesting dynamic. What's it like cooking for a Navy SEAL while your husband is deployed or working, I guess, in Southern California or North Carolina? Yeah, we moved to San Diego for where he was stationed right after we got married. Yeah, he was a SEAL, and SEALs are gone a lot. So if they're not gone on a deployment, they're gone training. They're in Florida diving. They're in Reno jumping out of airplanes. I don't know what they do in Reno. You know, they're all over the place, even when they're like not deployed.

14:09They're really deployed all the time. So the first few years of our marriage, I was alone so much. But when he was home, I had a catering business in San Diego. That was like my first real move into the food space. I had a catering business called Cucina Coronado. Not Italian. Not sure where that name came from. It sounded right. Barefoot Contessi. Oh, 100%. I was like, what would I do? She would call it this probably. And so when he was home, he was like my sous chef, my bus boy. He was everything. So like his time off of the military, he was just like slinging, you know, chafing dishes all over San Diego.

14:50But yeah, when he was a SEAL, he's out of the service now. But when he was in, cooking for him was definitely like a very high protein situation. I definitely learned a lot about like nutrition and how to feed a body that is cranking out like 5 ,000 calories a day. Yeah, that's amazing. So when you're cooking for him and you're thinking about high protein, and I think some of our listeners would love to get your take, how are you getting these calories via lean proteins and doing it in a way that kind of like he's an athlete, obviously, more than an athlete. He's a soldier. And I feel like it'd be great to hear some dishes that you cooked with him just for our audience.

15:26Oh, my gosh. There's a lot of great high protein dishes in this book. But it's the peanutty Brussels are something that we've been making. It's like a peanutty pork and Brussels is basically just ground pork and Brussels sprouts, plus a lot of like seasonings and saucy things. And that's a good example of like you're basically filling your plate with half meat, half vegetables. And it's like so filling and nutritious, but it doesn't feel like you're eating a chicken breast and a plate of, you know, roasted Brussels sprouts. It's like you're still having lean meat, lean ground pork, and Brussels sprouts, but you're doing it in a way that's like really sexy and saucy and delicious.

16:05Yeah, it's like a hash. But what's the sauciness? Peanut butter, soy, these basic pantry ingredients that just make peanut butter, soy sauce, rice vinegar. You know, it's like a basic peanut sauce. But like together, I mean, people who don't like Brussels sprouts, my dad is like a very classic 1950s man. Like he thinks the Brussels sprouts are like the grossest thing ever because his mom used to boil them. Oh, they were also— Why did they do that? They were boiling them. They also were a different agricultural product. They were actually—they tasted worse than they've been able to breed better flavors, less— Are you serious?

16:39Yes, totally. I can't wait to tell them this. I'm going to call them right after this. Less stinkiness. They've been able to—like GMOs have gone to work, which is a controversial topic, but we've actually been able to breed them to be better and cross-breed them to be— Okay, well, that was the most fun fact I've ever heard. Thank you. Trying to bring some knowledge. Literally, he ate, so I have that Brussels sprout recipe, and I think I have another roasted one in there. Maybe it's in my other cookbook. But my dad was like, I don't understand why I like these. These used to make me throw up. Oh, my God.

17:05I was like, because I'm an amazing cook, Dad. No, to your point, though, you're doing a good job, and definitely it's part of the technique. We love Brussels. Another recipe I really love is your everything spiced tuna. I've never seen that combination using. Tell me about this one. So instead of the classic like steakhouse sesame seed crusted tuna that you quickly see on each side and then you're serving with like a wasabi sauce like artfully painted on the plate, you know, this is you use everything bagel seasoning. And so everything bagel seasoning, it had kind of like a basic B ingredient moment that everyone like, I don't know, all of a sudden everyone was using it and people were sort of like making fun of people for overusing it.

17:46but I love everything bagel seasoning so much. It's sesame seeds, poppy seeds, garlic, like the granules. Oh yeah, definitely that style. Onion, is it the granules or is it powder? I don't know, but there's onion in there and what else, is that it? Salt. It's so good. What else could we want on something? So putting that on a piece of fish and then quickly searing it on each side. And by the way, I keep using the word sear but sear is an example of a word that I never use in this cookbook. Interesting. Is it too, like, it's kind of alienating a little bit? If I'm confused, if I'm not confident in the kitchen and somebody tells me to sear something on each side for three minutes, I'm like, well, that just ruined my night.

18:24I don't know what that means. Now I feel stupid. Now I'm Googling. I'm using a cookbook, but I'm having to Google. So this cookbook is, like, written and really, like, it walks you through it. I like to say it's written as if I'm standing in your kitchen, like, drinking a glass of wine with you. I'm, like, your nonjudgmental friend who's like, oh, you don't know how to cook? Like, let me show you. Instead of using the word seared. I'm like, put it in the pan and cook it on each side. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know? Like I just, I say the words that you're doing instead of like sear. Or if I do use the word sear, it's like in an educational way.

18:57I'm like sear it on each side and then I explain what that means. You know what I love about your book? I love the way you integrate real life, real world products. There's, you know, lines about Trader Joe's dumplings, Costco pesto, lotus foods, ramen noodles, which I love, and the Rios Jardim marinara. You give permission to buy products. This is no endorsement deal. It's literally like things you like. Give me a few more. I love that you do that. Oh, okay. You know what I always have in the freezer in addition to those dumplings are frozen meatballs. So you can get them anywhere, but the Trader Joe's turkey meatballs, my kids crush them.

19:36Like I make them, I make my big boys who are five and three. I make them four each, cut them in half. So it's like eight nice big hunks of meat. And they're delicious, by the way. They're like a great party appetizer. Just like serve them with some Rayo's sauce to dip it in. Like that's the meal. So I serve them four of those and they always want more. And the baby loves them. I have a one-year-old too. He crushes them. So those are always in the freezer. I also keep, and this is like kind of sad because like I'm in Carmel Valley, which is like the agricultural center of the world. But I keep frozen broccoli florets in the freezer because same thing.

20:10I can dump the meatballs and the broccoli into a pan, like heat them up. Caroline, straight talk. It's better to use frozens many times. Because it's fresher. It's fresher. It's easy. I know. It's sometimes like you get fresh produce and it doesn't look great. And it doesn't look great. Or like, I mean, there's freaking bugs all over it. There's bugs, yeah. And when I don't feel like cooking, I certainly don't feel like scraping the bugs, the tiny little bugs off my broccoli florets. Yeah. Frozen rock and meatballs from the freezer. This is all straight talk. I'm super down with this. One thing also that spoke to me, King's Hawaii rolls.

20:43Using the entire bag for a recipe. I just actually did this myself. Yes. I did a kimchi, green apple, kim and brie grilled cheese with it. Oh. On the rolls. Let's go. Let's go. That's from my first book, Koreatown. Shout out to that. But for you. Wait. Okay. In the book, is it made with King's Hawaiian rolls? Caroline, yes. We called for King's, which is a great brand. So good. And I love how in your book you're calling for using the full bag in many different ways. Yes. Give us some examples. One of my things in the book is also like trying to use the full ingredient when it's something that's going to go bad.

21:22So like if it's a one-pound bag of carrots, like I'm going to try to get you to use the whole bag. I mean obviously there's places where you just have to use a carrot, whatever. But I really try to do that because these people who don't feel like cooking, like it's just going to go bad in their fridge. And then that's a bummer. It's a bummer. And you feel shitty about it. And you're like, well, that was unproductive. There's three Kings Hawaiian roll recipes in the book. And I basically call for you to cut the entire like slab because they're connected, you know, the entire slab in half, like, you know, through the middle.

21:53So you have a top and a bottom. I have one that's like a ham and brie sandwich that's so good. It gets heated up. I think there's like a little butter on top. So delicious. And there's a chicken parm one that's like you make this like giant chicken. Cutlet parm. Cutlet thing and you bake it. It's like ground chicken with tons of spices and you bake the whole thing. You slap it right on top of there. And then there's a giant burger one and it has chips on it. So it's like a crunchy burger. So you're doing like the 12 rolls at once. All 12 rolls at once. I love that to myself too. Yes, you got to.

22:28And then you like, so you throw that giant patty on there or you throw all the ham on there and then you slice them up afterwards. You slice them up at the end. It's a great call. You know what? This is a great, this is like, I think all those are hot sandwiches in the book, but I love to do them cold. If you're just like, if you're going to the lake, the beach, the pool. Yeah. You like do that. You throw in your cold cuts, your cheese, your mayo. Like just make a basic sandwich. You don't have to fancy it up. But I like to do just like, you know, ham, some apple slices, cheddar, maybe some fig jam if I'm feeling crazy.

23:00Love that. That's some mustard. That's like low-key fancy. I'm saying fig jam's good. It just makes everything taste so good. And then you slice them up and then you put them back on that white tray that comes in, you know, and then you shove them back in the bag, twist tie it up, throw it in your cooler. The bag is also the carrying case. The bag is the vessel. I got to ask you, you're done with the pickles. You've got the brine. What is the brine doing for chicken thighs? I see you found the grilled pickle chicken sandwiches. This is one of my, so 10 recipes from the book are from the newsletter, from What to Cook, the newsletter.

23:35And they're like the cult classics. My community voted on which one should go. It was really fun. Should go into the book. And pickle chicken sandwiches were like, duh, have to. So you finish the jar of pickles. In my house, it's bread and butter pickles because they reign supreme. For sure. But in your house, it can be dill pickles. And you finish the jar of bread and butter pickles and you do not throw away that brine. The brine is vinegar. It's spices. It's sugar. It's so delicious. It's literally a marinade. So you just pour it over. Or if you're being really crazy and you feel like having a science experiment looking situation, like sort of Frankensteinian in your fridge, you put the chicken into the jar.

24:15Oh, I love that. That's what I'm thinking the whole time. Well, you're a New Yorker, but do you ever, Bubby's makes the best bread and butter pickles, and they have a Costco jar that's like the size of your forearm. And afterwards, yeah, you shove the chicken straight into the jar. It looks so foul, but it's so good. So it basically breaks down the chicken, makes it more tender. You can't do it for too long. Right, because it will break down. You do it overnight, it's too long. It'll make it, yeah. Every now and then, you know, your dinner plans change, whatever. Just pull it out of the marinade.

24:46it's okay people are always like what do i do yeah my chicken pull it out pull it out you know sit on a plate um but it breaks down it makes it really tender and delicious so we're using thighs here if you're a breast person do your thing but i use thighs and then we grill them and that sugar in the bread and butter marinade makes it so that you get the most incredible perfect grill marks like out of a magazine martha stewart living like grill marks on that chicken and then you throw it on a sandwich and it's just oh i love that and what's the condiment on the sandwich what are you doing with the condiment well you know you can do a lot of things i basically just throw pickles on but my best friend was recently in town and she likes she loves like a chicken sandwich with american cheese on it and i was like i love that i was like i don't hate this one bit she like grew up eating it by the pool i love that it was so good there was a japanese sandwich shop uh that i used to go to by union square that had did the same thing i love american cheese and grilled chicken.

25:39American cheese. What could be better? I agree. I think it's a good cheese choice. Oh my god. We can go over so many recipes. Near the end, you have two... This is funny. I loved getting to this because I was like... You are a scene. What did I do? You have these two slim traptors. You call them the obligatory greens and obligatory sweets. I feel like, Caroline, this is a mission statement to say, okay, this is cookbook so I gotta do greens and I gotta do dessert but you aren't really going hard at those two categories what's going on here okay so each recipe in the book is supposed to be a complete meal like when you're going to the lake for dinner with your friends you're packing those king's hawaiian roll sandwiches like you don't need sides just bring the sandwiches I think I think we're very obsessed with like sides you know in this culture I don't know we're very obsessed with having side dishes for everything and I'm like no you can just eat the tacos you You can just eat the sandwiches.

26:38So those are examples of ones that don't need sides. But there's also like most of the recipes in the book are like, you know, chicken with a broccoli and something else. Like it's the whole meal. And it takes, you know, whatever amount of time I said. It's the whole it's the protein plus your sides. So some of those I recognize the people because I'm one of them. Like I am an obligatory greens person. Like I like to have a little green something. You have to have them. You got to have them. So you're saying like you don't need to have like a million side dishes with like three different green preparations.