583: Double Dating with the Obamas with Journalist Michele Norris

24:00And then eventually, when he met my mom, wound up moving to Minnesota. So she learned how to expand to a more southern palate when she married my father. So I grew up on a lot of what you would call soul food. But my mom was really adventurous. And I think Julia Child had something to do with that podcast that comes up over and over and over again, how much she influenced a generation of women. Jacques Pepin also. They were watching PBS. Mom was reading National Geographic, which arrived in our house. And we were not allowed to cut up the National Geographic when we made collages. Oh, no, keep them pristine.

24:38And my dad had the binders for them. And then the basement in our rec room, they had all the binders. But she would read about food from distant cultures. And then she would try to make it at home. So we had weird spices. What's weird to you then? Well, so. It's an interesting, what is weird? Okay, lemongrass was weird when I was growing up. Remarkable, you had lemongrass in your household. Well, we had a large Vietnamese population in Minnesota because of both the Lutheran church and the Catholic church. opened their arms to after the fall of Saigon and a lot of Vietnamese families moved to Minnesota.

25:12And so that started to show up at the farmer's market. And mom's like, oh, this is let's let's experiment, you know, with this sumac. You know, not something that a lot of people had in their their kitchen cupboard. You know, mom was willing to try things. Some of it worked. Some of it was, you know, we kind of stir around on the plate. But what about Scandinavian cuisine? Was your kitchen inspired by that? You know, I would not say that we had a full embrace of Scandinavian cuisine. It was not a palate that mom or dad really liked. It's very juniper berries. You know, it's a bright, sharp palate that we didn't do a lot of.

25:55However, at Christmas, we did it more in baking. Of course. So those little lattice cookies that people would hang on those little trees, you know, and with all the powdered sugar, we would do some of that. Pickled herring. Yeah. My parents loved pickled herring. On like rye or on like some like thick bread. Vasa brad. Yeah. You know, that very hard tack. Exactly. You know, they would have that on vasa brad. There's something about the contrast of a pickled herring and that really hard bread that works. And the brown, the pumpernickel version of that, the hard kind of. So they liked that. Gefiltefisch, which is not, which I think is actually Jewish.

26:37Yeah, that's a Jewish dish. And as a Jewish person, I can't imagine somebody eating that without a holiday requiring them. I'd reach for Gefiltefisch, but I meant to say lutefisk. Okay, lutefisk is. That's what I meant to say is lutefisk. That can be a tough hang. Like I said, there was, you know, they didn't, but, you know, we were surrounded, though. I mean, I went to school with I think there were a couple kids named Nels in my graduating class. I mean, it was, you know, a lot of Olsen's, a lot of Lundgren's. So that was that was in our orbit. Yeah. But it wasn't necessarily on our table. Let's talk about the show Your Mama's Kitchen.

27:13You know, you ask celebrities and cookbook authors and folks like Roy Wood Jr. the simple question, you know, what was served in your mom's kitchen? And what does the simple question allow you to do as a journalist? What does this tell you? It opens up a world of possibilities. I knew that because, Matt, in the years that I hosted NPR, the standard question when you have to do a mic check. Yeah. But you need to, you know, someone needs to look at the levels, make sure. And I have such a low voice that there's a lot of, they used to say there's a lot of smoke in my voice. So they'd have to make sure, and I'm a low talker, that we were at the same level.

27:55So you have to get someone to talk. And I would need them to talk for a while so they could ride the levels. And the standard question was always, what did you have for breakfast? And the answer was never long enough. Like we never found the person who said, I made overnight oats and I added pumpkin, chia, blah, blah, blah. You know, it was always coffee or toast or something. So I started to ask different questions. And for a while, it was to use paper or plastic when you go to the grocery store. And then paper was basically outlawed. And so that was not a good question. So I came up with a series of questions that I would ask people.

28:23Your first summer job. Do you remember what you wore to prom? That's fun. That is a fun one. And that would be a good podcast at some point. That's a really fun one. Yeah. What did you wear to prom? Or what did you do for fun on a Saturday night? Tell me about your mama's kitchen. And tell me about your mama's kitchen always opened people up. no matter if they had, you know, we were talking to, I remember, a banker from here in New York. After the crash, someone who was, you know, held responsible, and I asked him, tell me about your mom's kitchen. His shoulders loosened. He told me about how his dad earned the money, but his mom grew the money.

28:58And we had a totally different interview because I got him into a different frame of mind with that question. So when we ask that question of people, it is the same question over and over and over again. And it takes you in completely different directions. And it's a way to learn someone's origin story. And the theory of the case, Matt, is that you're not just fed in the kitchen. It's your first classroom. It's where you learn about justice and generosity and grace and grievance. It's where you learn how to argue well or not. Right. It's where you learn about abundance or scarcity. All these things are where you first sort of learn how to handle these issues, these emotions.

29:47And so we talk to people who are fairly well-known, and yet we learn something about them that often they've never talked about, that many people don't know. Or, you know, from a slightly—you get to see their life from a slightly different facet. Yeah, when you ask somebody to go back to childhood or go back to young adulthood and the topics discussed at the table and the culinary side of it, the way that the dishes are served and forced out. This is such a rich text. And I think with the Roy interview, which I love, and I'm going to link to that one, you know, we talked about growing up in Alabama.

30:26Yeah. And I guess my question is, how do you get the conversation moving beyond this is the food? Is there like a trick to getting them into that headspace? Roy is a good example of that because his parents were like ships in the night. Yep, I remember. His mom was working. She was in school. His dad was a journalist. And he's Roy Wood Jr., Roy Wood Sr., well-known journalist in Birmingham, who was always out in the world. You know, so when he wasn't on the air, he was emceeing some function. He was, you know, he was just gone. And so food was not like, was not their love language in their family.

31:09So the conversation quickly shifted from what they ate to how he had to learn how to feed himself and how he had to learn how to cook for himself and how he had to, you know, he talked about how he wasn't really, he's a very adventurous eater now, but he wasn't an adventurous eater when he was young because you just had to figure out, okay, what am I going to, I need nutrition. Where's it going to come from? He talked about going overseas – or not going overseas, but leaving town on a trip, on a school trip. And he said, you know, if I had this much money every day, no, I'm not trying spring rolls.

31:45No, you know, guacamole, no, thank you. I'm not going to try that because if I try guacamole and I don't like it, that's my food money for the day. I'm hungry the rest of the day. But then he goes back a little bit further, and a lot of people also talk about their grandparents and the distance between their grandparents and their parents. And sometimes their grandparents didn't have much, and sometimes their parents had a lot more. In his case, his parents didn't cook a lot, but his biggest food memories, the most vibrant food memories for him, come from visiting his grandmother. His family has roots in Tennessee and Mississippi, and going back to her kitchens, and that's a very Southern tradition.

32:28I mean, it's amazing. Where people would send you further south to go to the grandparents. It's amazing how the simple question can get to that point of migration and family history going back generations. It's a true attribute to your ability as an interviewer, but also why food is such a rich text. And we talk about it a lot on this show. Well, can I just give you an example of that? Sure, please. Because there's something, like I talked to Conan O 'Brien. Yeah. And he talked about being in a big family. Stephen Colbert talked about this also, also in a big family, and how to this day he eats so fast.

33:02Because of the many brothers and sisters. Yes, because if you wanted seconds, you couldn't get seconds unless your plate was clean. So you had to hoover, you know, everything down to get to it. But then when Conan started talking, a lot of stuff came up about how he learned how to be funny. And then he got wistful about his mom. And he lost both, you know, his parents recently, you know, one after the other. And when I heard that, I thought immediately of the stories that he told. But he talked about his mom was one of the first women to graduate from an Ivy League law school who then went to work in a white shoe law firm in Boston.

33:39And she was so smart, but she was never allowed to have the sort of same – the status that her peers had in the law firm. And he told the story that has stuck with me that, and again, it wasn't about the kitchen, but it was about food and about how the lesson that she taught her kids and where it came from. He finally realized where it came from, telling her kids always be an upstander, like stand up for other people. she was in a big case and you know those wood panel boardrooms that they have in a law firm their client was coming to meet with them but they wouldn't allow her in the room because she was a woman and he said if i'm honest it probably had something to do with her being irish too you know because in yeah in boston in the 50s 60s it was a different era so she had to sit outside at a card table.

34:33And a few of the lawyers said, you know what, I'm going to go have my tuna fish sandwich out with her. If being this close to power means I have to do this to one of my colleagues, I'm not going to do that. And he said that lesson always stuck with him, you know, be the person who would step outside of that space of power and instead be with your cherished colleague and show that person respect. And I tell my kids this story now, you know, and this is the dilemma. Who would you be? Be the person. Be the one who goes outside and sits at the car table with your colleagues. And, you know, Conan clearly had a really tight crew with his at the Harvard Lampoon and on his late night.

35:17So it seems like he probably took some of that ethic in the way he ran his business. Your production is part of Higher Ground, which is the Obama's production company. You've had Michelle Obama on your show and you talk about the business that's, you know. This episode is brought to you by Aura Frames. If you're one of those last minute shoppers, you might know the feeling. Ideas are running low and the clock is ticking. Here's a fun idea. Aura Frames. Aura Frames is the solution with a gift that feels personal, a little curated, and sent with love. And a gift that can be purchased in no time with a few clicks of the mouse.

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38:29That's butcherbox.com slash taste. Don't forget to use our link so they know we sent you. It takes place at the kitchen table, at the dinner table. What's it like talking with the first lady, former first lady? What's it like talking about the business at the kitchen table with the former first lady? It's got to be, as a journalist, a really special moment. Well, it's unusual for me because she is one of my closest friends. We've known each other for a very long time. And the kitchen table metaphor is the one that we use in our life. It's where we talk to our kids, sit down. You know, we have to have a talk.

39:12We have our own kitchen table talk. So it's a place where I can let down my hair and she can let down her hair. But it was really interesting to talk to her about her kitchen table because, you know, she's done a few books now, a few book tours now. Here at Crown Publishing. Here at Crown Publishing, yes. We published, you know, two books and then the journals that go along with those books. Absolutely. Bafo book tour in both cases. Stadiums. Stadiums all across America. And I did some of the interviews on the book tour with her, traveled with her throughout the entirety of the second book tour.

39:51And she's done umpteen interviews, been on the cover of all kinds of magazines. And yet when we sat down and talked to her about her mama's kitchen, talked to her about Marianne Robinson and the kitchen that she ran on Euclid Avenue on the south side of Chicago, we learned things about her that she had not shared before. Because she talked about the business that happened at the kitchen table. And that was where she had a cousin who came back and went to college and came back with a big Afro and a different attitude, talking about this thing called feminism. And how some of the Southern, you know, because in Chicago, most black folks do come from the South, looked at that and were like, what is this new attitude that, you know, you're talking about you're going to do this and you're not going to do that.

40:28And Michelle, a young Michelle Lavaughn Robinson looking at that and being intrigued. Oh, there's another way of being in the world, you know, and talking about that, talking about bills that were paid or weren't paid, talking about images that when you listen to her talk about her life, suddenly she's not just the forever first lady. She's a young woman that you recognize taking that old princess phone with the long 10-foot twisty cord and taking it into the bathroom so she can have a conversation with this guy that she's sweet on that her parents and her brother Craig, you know, aren't going to hear.

41:07That's an image that suddenly she's not just an icon. She's always an icon, but she's not just an icon. She's a young girl that you relate to. And you think, I was living that life too. When she talked about the table with the stains on it and the cigarette marks on it, suddenly people become closer to the ground, you know, for us. And you understand that that's where she developed so many. And these are things she didn't even write about in her book, you know, that she was really able to open up and talk about. But – and that's the beauty of a question like this. The kitchen – the work that I do in most of the stories that I try to tell and present to the world, whether it's through the podcast or through my journalism or through the work at the Race Car Project, is to try to help people see other worlds but also see themselves in those other worlds.

42:03It's like holding up a mirror and a window. That's what good journalists do though. I hope so. That's a tenant to what journalism is about. Back to the former first lady. When the Obamas entered the office in 2008, it was obvious that there was a big change happening with food in that administration. I think mostly about Michelle Obama's garden. I went back and listened to an old piece that you were part of on NPR about the first harvest of the garden. Of course, Sam Cass was the White House chef at the time, and he wasn't like other White House chefs. He was really about wellness and fitness and really sustainability, all the buzzwords.

42:51Being so close to the Obamas and having such a deep interest in food, he must have played a role in influencing a little bit. But I want to know, did that initiative, upon reflection, where we're at today, did it help? I'm not going to take credit for that. That was Sam and Michelle. Yeah. That was Sam and Mrs. Obama. I'm not giving you credit. I'm just saying you probably— No, but I'm just going to be clear. All credit goes to Sam on that. Okay. And she had an interest in food because she's always been—you know, she'd long been on a fitness journey herself. She had seen what happens if you eat a diet of southern soul food.

43:26You know, it's delicious, but it's not always good for you. She had been on a journey with her own girl. She's written about this where a doctor said, you know, I think it would be good if you sort of looked at the diet that you're serving at home to make sure that your kids are on a healthy path. So she brought that into the White House. And I think the larger issue for them, and this is something that I think historians will come to understand when they just look at the pictures at the White House and when they look at the cadence of the events that they were doing. More children entered the White House in that eight years than I think have ever entered the White House in the, you know, up through the 43 previous presidents.

44:05They just decided that this is the people's house and by people we mean the kids too. So there were kids at that White House all the time in tours, in workshops around poetry and fashion and literature. And the garden was a big part of it. And so, yeah, I do think it made a difference. The industry fought it and talked about it being the introduction of the so-called nanny state. But look what's happening now. I mean literally right now. Arkansas is talking about changing their whatever they call food stamps in that state requirement so that you have to limit the amount of money that you spend on junk food, fast food, high sugar soda, sodas or pop or whatever you call it.

44:46And West Virginia just passed bands of many different dyes. West Virginia, of all places, is being progressive. Well, I don't know that they would use that word, but, you know, when it was introduced by the Obamas, it was certainly called progressive. Yeah, yeah. You know, in Louisiana, where the food stamp program is called the Louisiana Purchase, for real, you know, they're now introducing these kind of standards. The moment I realized it, I was in Hershey Park, the amusement park, which is actually a great amusement park. It's a great one. It's underrated. Yes, it is underrated. It is underrated.

45:19I had an event near there and, you know, life works in funny ways. Something didn't work out. So my son had to come with me. And my mother was living in Washington, D.C. at that time and she had to come too. Drove him up. So, you know, I was like, I got someplace I got to be and you just have to come with me. And to sweeten the pot, I said, well, stop it. Hershey on the way home. And so we went to Hershey Park and, you know, zoomed through. My mom had a little scooter and we were running to keep up with her on this little scooter. And we went to get lunch. And there was a salad bar over in the corner.

46:02And, of course, you know, my son goes straight to food on a stick. Yeah. You know, something he could dip, you know. And my mom said, I think I want a salad. So I went over and I started to get a salad. And the woman who was helping me said, this is our Michelle Obama salad bar. Oh, my goodness. They were so proud of the fact that they went to the people at Hershey and they said, the first lady says we need to be eating better. And so we are they petitioned and they created this salad bar. And the woman told me that this is in honor of our because people always talk to particularly women of color, but not just women of color.

46:39People would call her our first lady. They felt a connection to her. And I, you know, later told Michelle about that. And I don't know Michelle Obama about that. And I don't know how long that salad bar lasted, but that was just a small measure of the impact that, you know, that she had. I think you used the word historians will prove. And that's what we can't judge this administration until long after there and many administrations follow. Last question about the Obamas. What's the double date like, like in current times? You mean to go out on a double date? Well, it's always loud, a lot of laughter.

47:14And they, you know, they always like to go out. That was another thing that was really good for Washington. And New York. Yes. Incredible patrons to restaurants here in New York. And you don't understand what that does for the restaurant industry to get that kind of endorsement. Estella, the restaurant Estella and Houston Street, Obama's, you know, were there with frequency. Yeah. Yeah. Like when you asked me the question afterwards, I thought, I didn't mention Tessa. I love, you know, the restaurants, because it's hard. You know, restaurant, running a restaurant is really hard work. And living in the White House is also hard.

47:54And so a lot of people just cloister themselves and, you know, and decide, well, we're not going to go out because we have to have service and we have to enter the side door and we have to. And they figured out that, yeah, we can go out into the world. We can show people that we support the city. We can show people that the city is a safe place to be because the District of Columbia sometimes is seen as the District of Calamity and people are afraid to, you know, come into town. Can we really go to that part of the city? And they were adventurous eaters. And so they liked to go out and whether it was with a group of, you know, her with a group of girlfriends or a circle of couples that they would go out with or, you know, when the girls were still living in the White House, taking the girls out and, you know, being a family that was out on the town.

48:39What's trying to create normalcy, right? And like part of a normal family is going out to dinner at a restaurant in a normal part of town with normal surface. Well, and part of life is also, you asked about the double date, is also holding on to your friends. Oh, sure. You know, your friends keep you grounded. Your friends keep you sane. Yeah. And that's part of a message, you know, also that she actually writes about that. And there's studies that tell us now, you know, a good circle of friends will add 10 years to your life. I love that. I think it's right. I know it's right. Yeah, there's no, I think, I know that's right.

49:14You know, the laughter, the wisdom, just knowing that you have someone. The texts. Yes. The texts, the group texts. And that's like our future friend circles are all going to be in text. Well, texts are fine, but make sure you see each other every so often. Great reminder, Michelle. Well, especially, frankly, as you get older, you know, you need to do wellness checks on people. And just, you know, because when you look people in the eye, you can see, okay, I see something that you're not saying on text. Yeah. You can't hide from your real feelings when you're in person unless you're a psycho. Yeah.

49:51And the other thing is you have found family. Let's just say this. Found family is a treasure. You are given the family that you're born into in life. And sometimes that is a treasure on its own. And sometimes it's a little more complicated than that. And we'll just leave it at that. We'll leave it at that. But found family is a treasure. And if you have someone that is not a blood relative but feels like it, hold on to that person. I can't let you go without talking about the race card project. I was recently introduced to it, and I'll link to it on the show notes. I spent, I think, 90 minutes just pouring through these cards, a simple concept that you've come up with.

50:39it's really important right now in 2025 to read these messages. Explain what the Race Car Project is. So I wrote my first book, actually, Penguin Random House book, published under Pantheon with a wonderful editor, Errol McDonald. So shout out to Errol. It was called The Grace of Silence. And it was about all the things I learned about my very complicated racial legacy in my family Because my parents saw some stuff and never talked about it, you know, in Jim Crow America because they wanted us to soar. So they didn't feed us their stories of disappointment and in some cases degradation and how steep the hill was for them because they didn't want to put rocks in our pocket.

51:24They wanted us to soar. I learned some of these things and wrote a memoir. And when I went out in the world, I knew I would be talking about race. And at that time, I thought, no one wants to talk about race. I mean, no one wants to talk about race. So how am I going to – I'm on a 35-city book tour. This is a chance for me to learn something about America. I think Americans actually have lots to say, but I have to get them to unfold their arms. And so the idea was this simple question. Tell me about race, but you only get six words. Six words. Yeah. Six words. Yeah, just six words. And it's – you can do a lot with six words.

51:59You can do – that's the proof there. You can put a whole lot into a small package. And I didn't want to say, give me a sentence because people would, you know. M dash is compound sentences. Exactly. You know, you get into like a 65 word sentence. And then if you ask for a paragraph, what is this? A, you know, an essay? Is this an entrance exam or something? And so just six words. And it fit on a postcard. My parents were postal workers. It was an homage to the Postal Service, I guess, in some way. And I printed 200 postcards. And, you know, this is when I was on book tour for this first book. Didn't know what it would become.

52:33But the cards just kept coming back. And then I got the publisher to print cards. And I was working with someone great in marketing named Katie Friedman. Shout out to her also who said, you got to keep going with this. I love that. And then I printed cards. Melissa Bear, who has been with me since the very beginning, she knew printers all over the country. I was going to Salt Lake City, Utah, found a printer, printed out a bunch of cards there. And I was leaving Coast Cards everywhere I went when I was on book tour. I was leaving them in bookstores. I was leaving them in coffee shops. I was leaving them in Bibles inside of hotel rooms.

53:02I was leaving them all over the place. And then thanks to social media, the cards started to come in. You know, a group of soldiers were sitting around, and they all sent their cards in from Afghanistan. We started to get cards from Brussels and a group of students in South Korea. And then teachers started using it in the classroom. So here we are almost 14 and a half years later, and we have officially archived more than 700 ,000 cards. It was 500 ,000 when the book was published. The book, Our Hidden Conversations. That's from 700 ,000? Yes. Wow. And they still come in every day. And so we post some of them on the website so people can see them.

53:43Where do they come into your house? No, well, the postcards, there are still postcards that come in. I got a big stack of them from Ohio recently. And then I got a stack. I was recently in South Carolina where a group of people all had book talks about the book, Our Hidden Conversations. And I got a stack from South Carolina. But most of the submissions now come in digitally. So the vast majority of them come in digitally. Which is what I was experiencing by visiting the website. When you look at this collection in 2025 coming in and, you know, the six words are published with diverse viewpoints, what does it tell you about America in this very unique time?

54:26Well, it tells me that I created this project based on an incorrect premise that no one wants to talk about race. Obviously, a lot of people do. They're just looking for the right on-ramp, you know, a place where they can have their say. A lot of the people who share their cards are – in the 14 years that I've been doing this, the majority of the years, the majority of the stories have come from white Americans. Newsflash for me. I did not expect that. I'm a woman of color. I'm a black woman talking about race. Put the basket on the table. I thought it would primarily be people of color who showed up to tell me about their experiences.

55:00It means a whole lot of white Americans feel like they're left out of the conversation about race. It means that we have, you know, for all the stories that we've collected, if you think about it, the burn rate, the number of people who come and just lurk like you did but don't necessarily share a story. So if you figure we have this many stories that we've archived, think about how many people have just come to the site to take a look, to roam around in someone else's life and see how someone else thinks. So I think we're more curious than we understand about each other. And maybe we're looking for tethers of understanding, not necessarily to agree with people, but to have a sort of a better understanding.

55:43And it also tells me that everybody has a story. Yeah. Everybody has a story. And sometimes you have to tell that story because someone else needs to hear it. To be clear, too, it's the six words and then it follows with a paragraph or an essay. So there is some elaboration, which is important. Which is the nice thing about people doing it online. Online, it's easier. Because we added two words, anything else, and then people could explain. Anything else, and then you add them more. I just have to ask you, you know, right now, looking at the submissions, you know, how much of it is about DEI? How much is it about DEI laws being repealed, DEI policies being revoked in the private sector?

56:25And then, of course, the current administration's point of view in DEI. I dipped in, as I mentioned, and it's from all over the spectrum. Lots of thoughts on DEI. Yeah, that is, you know, I liken the archive and the book I describe it as a form of social dendrochronology, dendrochronology being the study of tree rings. If you cut a tree down, the tree rings will tell you the story about the life of the tree and the surrounding environment. So the tree rings will tell you if chemicals were introduced into the soil. They will tell you about development that happened nearby. will tell you about the cycle of nature, whether there were natural disasters or acid rain or whatever.

57:12This archive, bookended by the presidencies of Barack Obama and the second presidency of Donald Trump with a global pandemic in between and economic tumult and the rise of AI and migratory patterns all across, all of that is captured in this. And so, yes, DEI now is one of the tree rings, is one of the things that we're hearing, the rise and fall, the rise of some of these programs in the wake of George Floyd's death and the death of these programs, the elimination of these programs, you know, under Donald Trump's second presidency. So, you know, people are talking about sometimes DEI specifically, but sometimes they're also talking about the things that are kind of ancillary to DEI.

57:57It's coded. I mean, coded language. Coded or sometimes not even just coded, you know, like, you know, people who feel like if you can interrogate some of the issues at the core of the discomfort with DEI when you understand that, yes, for some people, they feel like if one group of people are being included in the process, that means that they perhaps are taking jobs away from other people who are more worthy. The idea that some people, that if you have DEI, that means that You're lowering standards to include a broader class of people as opposed to just saying we're going to look for talent wherever it exists.

58:35And that means we're going to be studying a broader pool of people. So it's really instructive to be able to hear from people that you might not agree with, that you might not understand, you know, to get a sense of this. And then on the other hand, we are we have been quietly called into places. in some cases in very red stretches of America, politically red stretches of America, where we're called into work with a small factory or in one case, a very big factory, quietly called in to do work. They wouldn't call it DEI work, but the person who runs this factory says, hey, I've got a lot of people here who don't agree with each other.

59:12They show up for work with MAGA stickers on the back of their cars and their trucks. And then I've got other people who show up with, you know, they bring tamales in their lunchbox and they have Spanish language stickers and they listen to, you know, music, Tejano music. And, you know, this group doesn't get along with that group. And then this group, you know, over here, they keep to themselves and they're all, you know, people of color. And in that case, then they separate themselves because some of them are from the South and some of them are, you know, Northerners who found their way. He's got all these fiefdoms and he realized this is undercutting productivity.

59:45So politically, I'm on this side of the table, but I got to figure out how I get all these people in this space to exercise this thing called teamwork. When they call you in, what does that mean? When they call you, are you reporting on this dynamic? No, I actually come in and I use this. I use the race card project because what happens is you can use the archive at the race card project to set the stage for a really interesting conversation. So you don't walk in a room and say, tell me about yourselves. You spend some time looking at the, as you did. You share some of the thoughts for the past couple of years.

1:00:18Yeah. And you ask, you put together a deck or you put together, you ask them to go on the website. There's different ways that we do it. Yeah. But they talk about, they explore other people's stories. And then they're talking about other people. And then toward the end, you say, well, okay, well, let's talk about. Write your own. Yeah. Write your own and talk about yourselves. That's cool. And in every case when we've done that, whether it's in, whether they've used it in the military, the Justice Department, a couple government agencies in the past have used it. embassies have used it. Schools have used it all across the country.

1:00:49What it does is it creates a trust dividend. So people have a conversation. They don't agree with each other. There are usually a few fireworks in the room. I like trust dividend. You know, people, more than a little tension in many cases. But they survived. Nobody spontaneously combusted. You know, there weren't fristikuffs. They had a rich and yeasty conversation where they didn't necessarily agree, But they learned about other people. And in every time we've done this, and sometimes it is a little bit like juggling chainsaws, it's nerve-wracking and it's a little bit scary to do it. But at the end, people realize, oh, OK, I don't like you.

1:01:28I don't like your politics, but I know a little bit more about you now. And that's a trust dividend that you can use going forward to figure out how people can continue to work with each other and row in the same direction, even when we don't agree with each other. And we have to figure out how to do that because as a country, we are becoming increasingly divided. And there are people who are seemingly invested in those divisions. It's called the Race Card Project. I'm linking to it in the show notes. Please give it a look. I might do my own postcard. I think you should. I think I'm going to do that.

1:01:55You should do it too. Michelle, and this is Tase. So we asked guests about the discerning taste. So to close this interview, here's a little rapid fire, fast and furious taste check. Are you ready? I'm ready. The best fruit. Mango. You answered that very quickly. But what makes a great mango for you? A great mango is a bad mango is disappointing when it's too hard. That is true. But I love when it's soft and it has just a little bit of bite. And the magical thing that I like to do is squeeze a little bit of lime on mango. Always. And it just opens up that sort of— The sweetness, it adds— It does something to it.

1:02:31It does. It's science or something. But yeah, mango. I answered very quickly. I was tempted to say peach. But you can get mangoes all year round. You are guaranteed a good mango all year round when you're not guaranteed a good peach all year round. There's been a couple bad years here in New York State with the peaches. Stone fruits have not been good, but I'm hoping for this year to be a good year. The worst vegetable. Lima beans. Yeah. Fair. Like why? Why? I've grown to—I actually kind of sort of like them now because I've learned how to season them. Growing up, they tasted like candle wax. Yeah, they didn't.

1:03:10They had the consistency of candle wax. Are these canned you're doing? We didn't—we had fresh butter beans, which are slightly different than lima beans, but lima beans were frozen. Right. That's typically how you get them today. Yeah. You think about canned lima beans as being, as a child, the worst food. Well, they had that gloopy, glappy, kind of greeny, slimy kind of stuff in it. Where lima beans, I actually have used lima beans, frozen lima beans in soup. And I've made it work. If not for gumbo, I might have said okra. Yeah. But, you know. Okra gets beat up on a lot during this question. But I think I've had defenders say it's just about cooking it correctly, obviously.

1:03:59Well, we just talked to Wendell Pierce on your mom's kitchen. Wendell Pierce, great. Yes, he's this week's episode. Love that. And his mama says she has the secret to cooking okra, which is to, if you're sauteing it, don't put any oil in the pot. The slime will emulsify the pot and it'll take the slime out. And then you get something that has got a little bit of heft to it without that. You know, when we were a kid, we used to call okra soylent green. Yep. Because of the texture. But, you know, okra, to me, gumbo is not gumbo without okra. Hot, dry pan, no oil. That's the tip. I like that. Do you have a typical breakfast?

1:04:31At this point, it's usually a boiled egg and some fruit. Mmm. What's the fruit choice? Well, mango. See question one, answer one. See answer one. Often mango. I like mango with blueberries. It's a wonderful combination. I go through phases. Like for a while, my go-to breakfast was cottage cheese and blueberries. I love that. You're kidding. I'm such a defender of cheese and cottage cheese and blueberries. You're kidding. I'm a huge defender. Because most people are like, eww. Eww, right? What are you doing? Yeah, it actually, that was. I love it. And then I do like in the summer, my go-to breakfast is a piece of really good bread.

1:05:10I often use the Genesis bread, the sprouted wheat bread, toasted with butter and sea salt and a fresh garden tomato. And it tastes like a tomato tart. And sometimes I'll shave a little cheese and put on it. But just summer tomato. Yes. A great breakfast open-faced sandwich. Perfect. The best dessert. There's two people on my shoulder right now. One of them is saying, lemon meringue pie, lemon meringue pie. And the other one is saying, strawberry rhubarb. I'm a pie person more than a cake person, although I love a good pound cake. Oh, wow. That's a good one. Oh, I love pound cake. I love pound cake.

1:05:52You can't hold back. I love pound cake. And I love one of my closest friends, who's also an author and published a book called Grown Woman Talk here with Crown, is Sharon Malone. She was on the show, and she makes pound cakes all the time. It's her—I think it's how she deals with stress. She's always making pound cakes. And so you want a friend in your life like that. And I love pound cake the next day. This is a good breakfast also. Slice a piece of pound cake, put some butter in a pan, preferably a black heavy skillet. Okay. Put the pound cake in the skillet, in the butter. Into that. in that and let it get brown on both sides and then take fruit and put the fruit in the pan for just a minute and macerate it and put it on top.

1:06:40I'm thinking like strawberries, cherries. Yeah, it's like dessert for breakfast. It's kind of like a version of French toast but without the egg wash. But with pound cake. Is there a restaurant you wish you could bring back from the dead? The Bite. Tell me about it.

1:06:58Actually, I have two answers to this too. One of them actually did come back. The Convention Grill. So the Convention Grill is a old-fashioned diner in Edina, Minnesota, just outside of Minneapolis. I grew up on the south side of Minneapolis, so the far south side, the next suburb is Edina. It was in Edina, right by the lakes. Lake Harriet, which is the lake I grew up. There are lakes all over in Minnesota. It was an old-fashioned diner. The waitresses were, you know, white. They dressed like Laverne. Not Laverne. The show Alice. You know, the white uniforms with the little hats and everything.

1:07:33Fantastic patty melts, fantastic malts, fantastic french fries closed, went out of business. And that one came back. So that one is resurrected. You said, you know, wished could come back. That one came back. The bite did not come back. And I grieve it all the time. It was a similar setup. The bite is a, it was, it was in, it's hard to talk about in the past tense. It was in Manempsha, which is a little fishing village on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. And it was, a teeny restaurant that's the size of most people's closets, and they've fried some food in that little space. So you would go up to Manemshah's on the tip of the island, and it's west-facing, so you would go up there and watch the sunset at night.

1:08:14You'd get fried fish, fried clams. Oh, yeah. You know, just fried, fried, fried, fried, fried zucchini, fried mushrooms. It was all fried. I think they maybe had a burger on the menu, but I never got that. It was just all fried foods. And I talk about it now. I can smell it. I can think about trying to jockey for the parking space. I can think about the rush to get there before the sun falls. And, you know, paper, scissor, rock, who has to run to the bite and stand in line with food and get there in time so you can eat the food while it's hot and watch the sun fall. And it closed a while ago. And I keep driving by that little shack and hoping that someone will hang a shingle and bring back the bite.

1:08:52What's your favorite city to visit for food outside America? Thailand. Tell me about it. Why? The food is so vibrant. It really is. I mean, and unusual and surprising and layered and beautiful. And from north to south, it's so different, right? Bangkok just blew my mind. You said city. I said, and I answered for the country. So Bangkok. I will take the country, though. Bangkok. Yeah, Bangkok. It's great. I have only been once and it was – and I had a sense of what I thought Thai food was. Sure. And I was just totally wrong. Yeah. I was totally wrong. Vietnam, you know, going through Vietnam, Hanoi, you know, might be a close second.

1:09:38Yeah. Because, again, I thought I knew what Vietnamese food was and had no idea. I love that sentiment. Americanized Vietnamese food can be quite different. It's very different. Yeah. It's very different. The flavor profile is just, you know, people talk about things that dance across your tongue. That was the first time that I actually experienced, okay, now I know what this means. Right. Last one, your favorite sandwich. Reuben. Wow. A really good Reuben. Do you have a spot that you pick it up in a restaurant setting or do you make it yourself? I have never made a Reuben myself. You know, I guess I could.

1:10:14I eat sauerkraut a lot. You could. It's good for you. So at this stage in my life, I started eating a lot of sauerkraut. much to my family's chagrin, I think. But where do you get it? Where's Good Rubin? Yeah. In New York, there used to be a deli, was it called Kaplan's? Okay. It was over by, where, F.A.O. Schwartz. Oh, like in Midtown East? Used to be. Yeah. In L.A. Cantors. Oh, yeah. That's my spot. And growing up in Minnesota, there was a place called the Lincoln Dell. Oh, wow. Which has now been replaced by a restaurant called Yum and Yum is, as the name suggests, delicious. But they don't serve a Reuben anymore.

1:10:57And I actually, you know, when I talk, you said favorite sandwich. It's not a sandwich I eat all the time. I mean, BLT was a close second. Like I love, love a good BLT. You got those Minnesota summers with those tomatoes. Yes. Definitely. And, you know, I love a good summer tomato. But I didn't say BLT because BLTs are not consistently great. Absolutely not. Through the months, January through June, you really can't get a good BLT. You're getting, you know, those little hard pink tomatoes. And they don't always get the bacon right. And I know I'm sounding a little bit fussy right now. But a Reuben, if someone has got the sauce to put a Reuben on a menu, you figure out they know how to do a Reuben.

1:11:32And it's usually going to be, you know, a pretty good Reuben. I mean, I guess a close, if I were ranking a number three, might be a club sandwich, which is always a safe choice if you're in a hotel. Yeah. If you don't, you know. You've got to go club if you don't want to think about the rest of the menu. Yeah. And a burger is sometimes you just don't know what you're going to get. and, you know, a good club sandwich. But now you're making me, I have not had a Reuben. I'm trying to think about the last time I've had a Reuben. It's been a hot minute. I think I need to get a hot Reuben. You've got a craving here.

1:12:03Michelle Norris, this has been so much fun. Thank you so much for joining us. Matt, thank you. This has just been yummy. Thanks so much.

1:12:13Erin Gleason, welcome to This Is Taste. It's great to speak with you. How are you doing? I'm great. Thanks so much for having me. I love this conversation. We reconnected at a bat mitzvah. Yes, I love it. And your husband was the rabbi. Amazing. Yes, he was. And you were there. And I was there. A good friend, Jeremy and Tova and Penelope was the bat mitzvah. And I was like, oh, my God, I know that person. Same, same. Yeah, it was great. And we and we kind of reconnected because we worked together a few times when I was editing a long forgotten city website. And you and I used to go to events and cover them.

1:12:53You were shooting and I was reporting. Oh, man. Yes. Many years ago. Well, it really taps into your career because you you have this wonderful career where you did photojournalism, then you did fine art photography, and then you have a new book, The Watercolor Feast. But take us back. Do you remember when we covered like the Top Chef season three launch party? Do you remember that? I do. I do. I remember sitting backstage with you and talking and sort of waiting for the moment to go out and take some photos. But I love that you remembered what that event was because I was trying to remember. I literally do have no memory of covering it.

1:13:33And the only reason I remember is my Gmail had the assignment that I assigned you. I love it. But yeah, like we covered we covered lots of cool things in New York. And tell me a little bit about your your photography background, because this book isn't about photography. It's about watercolor. And you've got this incredible The Forest Feast series. We'll talk about that. But when you when you first started shooting, what were you shooting? Yeah, so I moved to New York right after college to become a photographer. I didn't really know what that meant, but I felt like New York was where it was at.

1:14:09I had a photography professor in California at UC Santa Barbara that was from New York and had us read the New York Times Magazine all the time looking at the photography, and I just really wanted to get there. So I started out working in a couple different photography studios, and I worked at Clondin Nest Traveler magazine as an intern in their photo department. And I wasn't really sure which direction I wanted to go in photography. But after working for a couple years for very different types of photographers, like a National Geographic photographer, a still life photographer, a commercial food photographer, I ended up going back to school to get an MFA in photography, thinking that it might be nice to be able to teach photography in addition to working as a photographer.

1:14:59So yeah, I went back to school and worked on it. You went back to school and you, which interestingly, you did your MFA thesis with the pastry chef Will Goldfarb. And I loved that reference because Will is an absolute legend in the New York City restaurant game. I think he lives in Bali. I'm not sure, but tell us a little bit about the thesis. yeah so you know in grad school they would send us out to take photos and um sort of see what we brought back and I just kept bringing back food photos like at street fairs or farmer's markets or restaurants or whatever and I was you know vegetarian so um I was always really drawn to like the desserts and the colorful things that I could always try um and I think I read an article about Will Goldfarb, I think it was maybe in the New Yorker around like 2006.

1:15:53And I just thought, oh my goodness, this guy is using art as his, you know, he's using food as the medium for his art, just in a way that I didn't see anyone else doing at the time. You know, the molecular gastronomy scene was big, especially with pastry chefs around that time. A lot of people that I I was sort of a lot of pastry chefs that I was looking at were kind of coming out of WD50 with Wiley Dufresne and opening their own restaurants and doing these really creative things around pastry. And I'm certainly not a chef. I didn't go to culinary school, but I was just drawn to food as a medium.

1:16:33So anyways, I just read this article about Will and I thought, oh, my gosh, I would love to work with this guy. And so I just went into his restaurant one night by myself and I sat at the bar. It was a tiny, tiny little space. His restaurant was in Soho called Room for Dessert. And I just sat at the bar and he was behind the bar. And I just started talking to him, which is like really not my personality. I'm much more like introverted and shy. But I was just like struck by what he was doing. And anyways, he was super receptive. I told him, you know, I'm working on an MFA thesis in photography.

1:17:04I'm shooting a lot of desserts. Like I would love to photograph your food. And he said, great, like come on in. And so I spent a couple months going in several times and shooting on a sandwich board on a stool in his front window of the restaurant during off hours when nobody was there. Bob Truitt was one of the pastry chefs working under him at the time. And Bob made most of the desserts for me. I think he was probably like, what is this girl doing and why I'm making her desserts? desserts but I ended up turning it into a limited series uh art book specifically for my thesis and it went along with an exhibition I blew up a lot of those desserts um and they were in like a gallery show but I used um his dish uh as inspiration so he had he gave me the recipes for each of his desserts and um they had wild ingredients that I didn't even know what they meant recipes themselves were broken down into grams and all these like it was like a graph or something like I couldn't even read it but I pulled from his ingredient list and did my own work of art with similar ingredients oh like here's the yeah so each page of this book was a diptych so on one side was his dessert and on my on the other side was my kind of work of art using similar ingredients but they were these sort of like abstract still life things shot usually on a light table.

1:18:35So like little floating ingredients and it's hard to describe. Sounds amazing. Were you tasting the desserts along the way? Like what do you do you have like one dessert that you remember vividly like the way it was built or constructed? I called my little art book, which was not published. I self-published it and it was really mainly for the exhibition, but I called it a photographic exploration of molecular gastronomic desserts. Nice. And it's called the Room for Dessert Cookbook. One example of a dessert in the Room for Dessert Cookbook that I created for my exhibition was called Infants. This is Will's title.

1:19:15And some of the ingredients listed were Lucky Charms, cotton candy, a meringue, a toast creme glacée, and milk jam. and his plated version of that is a long tray with four different kind of items one is a bowl with this kind of cotton candy slu like coming out of it another is maybe some sort of ice cream with some I don't know chocolatey cereal looking items one is a little structure made out of rectangular marshmallows. And then there's this huge meringue that's kind of like seated in front of the entire platter with a stencil, maybe with some sort of like cocoa powder, but it says the word lucky.

1:20:05I love it. I mean, it's so playful and flavor wise, from what I was told, I never actually went to Room for Dessert Center. I don't have a memory of it. some of the most exquisite pairings and creative pairings around. It's a shame. Yeah, it was amazing. Yeah, it was really, really so creative and so inventive and so different for the time and very exciting. I thought it was really cool what he was doing. Yeah. So, yeah. So my interpretation of that dessert has kind of a series of ingredients all shown on a light table. There's like a line of marshmallows, a line of crumbled cereal, a line of meringue, a line of Lucky Charms, a line of some sort of flour that I think he had in there.

1:20:52Anyways, it's sort of like a graphic visual interpretation of the ingredients that go into that dish. Because when you look at the photo of the dish or if you order that dish at the bar, you probably can't really tell what's in it. So you end up working with two terrific chefs, Elizabeth Faulkner and Pichet Ong. uh piche is a good friend had been on the show a couple times what was that like were you working on book projects or was it more for the restaurants so i ended up after working with will i really wanted to dive into pastry photography and so i ended up uh approaching several different pastry chefs uh piche and elizabeth were two of them um and i was working on a sort of photographic series that I was hoping to turn into a book.

1:21:40It didn't end up becoming a book, but it became an exhibition. But I was just really interested in, you know, people using color and texture and food and really interesting in different ways. And I wanted to document it. So I would, you know, I was working as a volunteer food photographer for the James Beard Foundation for a couple of years while I was in grad school. And that was really a great way for me to get introduced to a lot of chefs in New York and around the country who would come in for these special meals. And I would take photos, but it also gave me access into like the best kitchens in New York City, photographing, you know, some of the most amazing chefs and dishes.

1:22:20But kind of through connecting with the James Beard Foundation, I was able to reach out to a bunch of different chefs and ask them if they wanted to be part of my photo project. So while I was in San Francisco, I reached out to Elizabeth and asked her if I could come in and shoot a bunch of her dishes. And so they made me a bunch of dishes and I sort of in exchange gave them all the photos. And then I used the photos for my own project. Same with Pichet. I got to know him. He's so wonderful. And I went and photographed at Kong and did several kind of shoots with him that were mostly just like creative collaboration exchanges.

1:22:54I think I might have been sent to Kong once on assignment. But anyways, I was just kind of creating a portfolio. And I think, you know, later that led me to, you know, shooting cookbooks and doing other publishing related projects. But at that time, I was really just portfolio building. I mean, you're tapping into some amazing places when dessert counters were flourishing in New York. You know, Pong and Room for Desserts are just a couple. The pastry program at WD50 as well. it feels right now in New York, there isn't as much emphasis on plated desserts as this period, at least in their own space.

1:23:37And I think that's probably an economic issue more than anything. I'd love to see a return to dessert counters and dessert only spaces where you can pay some money and get like three or four courses or more. I would love that. Yeah, me too. Well, let's talk about Forest Feast. You know, this is such an incredible series that you launched in 2014. And you've written several books under that banner. And it's impressive that you have such a body of work here. And these books sell too, which is like, we don't talk too much about numbers on the show. But like, clearly, just looking at your Amazon and just in general, the word of mouth, these are popular books.

1:24:21What inspired you to create the series Forest Feast? yeah so um around uh 2011 my husband got a job in california and we left brooklyn and just kind of you know this is like the silicon valley area which i grew up in california but a couple hours from there so i didn't really know it and i thought we would end up living in palo alto or mountain view um but just by chance this little cabin in the woods popped up on craigslist and we thought okay you know maybe we'll try this for a year it sounds kind of like a fun adventure and suddenly we we had just gotten married and I was suddenly like in this cabin in the woods unpacking and my husband was going to his job every day and I was like what do I do with my life I just left my entire career I felt like everything I had worked for for like almost 10 years in New York was suddenly like poof and I was hoping to you know reconnect with you know, new editors and new publishers in San Francisco.

1:25:21And I, I just needed to make a new body of work. I was showing them a lot of these kind of very minimalistic looking photos that I had taken at Michelin star restaurants in New York. And they were sort of like, Oh, those are nice and very slick looking, but do you have anything like on raw wood? You know, like, yeah, that like California aesthetic, great. That's a little bit crunchier. And I was like, okay, living in a cabin in the woods, I can do this. So I just started taking photos and I got really bored of my kitchen table and started walking plates outside. And we had just started getting this farm box of local California produce.

1:25:57And I was making very simple dishes, just myself, like a lot of salads and appetizers and things that I was just trying to make them colorful and interesting to photograph because I suddenly didn't have this network of chefs to make things for me. So, you know, I'm very much a home cook and always love to like throw dinner parties. So I was like, I can make some cute stuff to photograph. So when I think back to that time, it was like suddenly everything came to a halt. And I didn't have any editors or assignments or anything happening. And I didn't have children also. So I could just really dive into this creative project.

1:26:34And I started the Tumblr as a way to kind of flesh my ideas out and just post. and I wanted to just have news photography online in the form of a link that I could email to like the new you know editor at whatever company in San Francisco and say hey this is what I'm working on that keep me in mind for any assignments that come up and little by little that tumbler started to grow and I think it's because I was shooting kale salads on mossy logs and like you know roasted carrots on a stump that had just been chopped down and they're kind of just you know very nature filled and sort of very different looking than probably a lot of the photography that you saw in food blogs.

1:27:17This is like around 2012. And they just sort of started to get picked up and other blogs started featuring my blog. And I never set out to be a food blogger. And honestly, I didn't even read that many food blogs, but I was having fun with it and just diving full in on kind of experimenting because I was like, I don't have anyone to please. I'm going to make this fun for myself. And I had in New York, I taught photography at FIT at the Fashion Institute, and I taught Photoshop mostly. And I was always interested in layering photos in Photoshop. So instead of just typing out the recipes on my new blog, I started using my handwriting and I would write on paper, scan it, and then overlay it on the photo.

1:28:02And then I needed titles and I couldn't find a font I liked. So I would start painting the title of, you know, kale salad or whatever it is and putting that like overlaid on the photo also. So they became these kind of like photographic collages that represented recipes. And I think that was, you know, Instagram was brand new at the time. Pinterest was brand new and these like new visual formats just like, it just went really well. So before long, an editor, I'm sorry, an agent, a book agent reached out to me and said, I think you should turn your blog into a book. And I said, I don't think I'm ready for that.

1:28:39She said, no, I think you are and I'll help you do it. So we spent several months writing a proposal that she then sent out. And that became my first book that came out in 2014. That's incredible to hear about the early visually driven internet and how, you know, this, this really simple idea. And like, of course, your immense talent exploded on the scene. And now, correct me if I'm wrong, you have four books in the series. Is that correct? Forest Feast? Yeah, there's five actually. Yeah, five. Five books. Man, and like you have different themes and really what's it been like continuing this series and talk a little bit about the other books.

1:29:17Yeah, so the first one is just sort of very simple, all the books are vegetarian, Very simple vegetarian, kind of vegetable forward, produce driven recipes. My whole kind of theme starting out was like something that feels easy enough for a weeknight, but special enough to serve at a dinner party. A lot of them have like very few ingredients, like five ingredients or something. You know, because I'm, you know, a home cook, there's often not a lot of like complicated ingredients to find. It's often roasting vegetables with olive oil and salt and garlic and sort of focusing on simple things. So the first book is just sort of basic like salads, mains, appetizers, drinks like that.

1:30:04And then the next one is called The Force Feet Gatherings, and it's all about entertaining. So it's like menus for different parties that you might post. So like if you're having people over for brunch, there's like a brunch menu and here's four or five things that you could make and actually have enough time to do and prep for. And there's little, you know, tips for how to make a centerpiece and all these little like fun kind of styling things that I love to do also. And yeah, I guess like the unusual part about my books also at that time was that I wanted to be the photographer, the food stylist, the prom stylist, the graphic artist, like the graphic designer.

1:30:47You designed your book? Yes, I design every page. I lay the text. I do everything. And, you know, there's a designer at Abrams, my publisher, that like polishes it all up and puts it in the right format to be printed at the end. But I design every page and it's my handwriting throughout. And, yeah, I lay out the whole book. And so it's like one big art project for me. I do all the things. It's amazing. It's something that I think some of our listeners who are considering book projects or journalism, it's such a great example of how if you teach yourself or get schooling in all the elements of a book, you can really do something special.

1:31:28And, you know, I love that you have your handwriting in books still because that, you know, that had its moment. Right. And then it kind of like left. Yeah. But like it doesn't matter for you. Like Moosewood. Right, right, right. Right. But the cool thing about your projects and your books is that it's like become quite timeless. It's not like a trend. You've been doing it for so long. I love that. Yeah, that's nice. It's cool. It's fun. You know, I think people were publishers were hesitant to let me do all the things. But Abrams was open to giving me a lot of creative control. So that's why I chose them.

1:32:02And this leads to your latest book, which is is not a cookbook. it is an art book and I really really enjoy it I I think in my mind strive to to create art and I'd love to to get out the watercolors if I if I had you know if I had watercolors and you're you're inspiring me because you know watercolor feast is is incredible and and it really talk tell us a little bit about how you set up this book. Sure. So, um, you know, coming off of the last couple of years, I feel like what struck me was that people are really looking for ways to be creative. And I think watercolor is one way that is really easy and approachable and, um, you don't have to have any experience and you can just kind of like sit down for a few minutes and play around with watercolor and, um, It feels really productive and creative and relaxing and meditative.

1:33:05And yeah, I just think it's really accessible. So I wanted to kind of present a format that was simple enough that people would actually try it. So these are like 15 minute tutorials. There's 40 of them. It's fruits, vegetables and edible flowers. So each tutorial starts out with a color exercise. So, for example, for the orange painting tutorials, like here's how you paint a little orange. you start out and I say what colors do you see in this in this fruit um maybe you see brown and green and a couple shades of orange maybe yellow and so I suggest just doing like an abstract color exercise by just painting stripes of those colors next to each other and it just takes you know a few minutes but gets you used to the medium and also it's beautiful like in the end you have this little abstract postcard that you can send somebody um and I suggest that all the paintings in this book are done on postcard sized paper because I think I think it feels less precious and you know if you're painting on a bigger piece of paper it feels like you need to make it good because it's like big so if you just paint on a postcard it's like more um I don't know approachable less intimidating um so then I show in a few steps usually like you know four to six steps um how to paint an orange like start with a circle then fill it in then dip your brush get it really wet and add more and then add a leaf and add a stem like that um and then there's also a recipe and then so like for this one um i say this is each one is just a recipe idea so it's not a full step-by-step recipe with measurements so this says make a salad on a potter by topping peeled slices of orange dried cherries capers red onion mint pistachios olive oil salt and pepper and I have a photo of that that orange like that citrus salad so the idea is that you paint the orange and then you eat it very cool to incorporate um some cooking into it and I also like how you use like salt uh as a texture enhancer and you're you're kind of it's like multimedia in a way yeah and I try to sort of um teach some watercolor techniques throughout the book without making it technical.

1:35:17Like I very specifically did not use all the technical terms that one might learn in another watercolor tutorial book. So I just sort of explained it in like, I don't know, normal language. But yeah, so for example, like the painting tutorial for the lemon to get that kind of like pocked texture of lemon peel, you can paint yellow on the page. and then while it's still wet, sprinkle a coarse salt on there and let the whole thing dry and then sort of use your hand to scrape off the salt and it leaves this sort of textured effect. Yeah, so trying to like bring the food into it as well. Yeah, I think it's cool to do, it's like a little bit of cooking happening on the paper.

1:36:09And Aaron, let me ask you about the, just the watercolor medium. What's so special about it, you know, versus oil or photography or all the other ways you can capture food? You know, watercolor, it seems, is a certain, there's a certain energy there. There's some practicality there. I'm not, I think last time I was watercolor, I had single digits as my age. So I need to pick up some watercolors because it looked just like the way you wrote the book. It's like so inviting just to start working on it. Oh, that's nice. But tell us about the watercolors. Well, I do think it's something that a lot of kids do.

1:36:50And it's like, why along the way do, like, we give our kids all these art supplies to play around with. And then along the way, you know, we start to think, oh, I'm not as good of a painter as that kid. And then later it's like, oh, maybe I'm not really an artist. And so I'll just stop. But I think watercolors are accessible because they're self-contained. um there i suggest buying like a dried palette not the little tubes because i think it's just easy to pull out quickly it's not as messy um it's not as much of a process it's just more immediate um but you know a lot of people say like watercolor is not a very forgiving medium which is true like it's hard like if you make a quote-unquote mistake um then it's a little easy a little harder to like cover it up versus with oils.

1:37:45You know, going into oils is a whole project, a whole process. You need like more face and a canvas and like, you know, a palette to squeeze out all the colors. It's like a whole process of, you know, the fumes and cleaning your brushes is harder. You need some chemicals and like, you know, it's just a lot more. So I like the simplicity of watercolor, but I think like cooking, it's sort of like you just have to let go a little bit. Right. You have to experiment a little bit and you have to kind of be okay if it doesn't seem quite right or if it needs something else, you just add it or you just maybe start over if you really don't like it.

1:38:29Yeah. So I think it's, I like that it's not so forgiving. I think it's a good practice. and I sort of encourage in the book like if you make a painting that you don't like just put it aside and get another piece of paper like just keep going or just go over it like I was I've been doing all these YouTube videos in preparation for this book launch I'm going to have a bunch of videos that go with each tutorial you could watch me paint while you're looking at the book and I was painting a strawberry the other day and you have to let the the red part completely dry before you add the little seeds and I didn't let it dry completely so one of my seeds when I tapped it was the dark brown on the red it like bled I was like oh no that's a mistake but then in the video I just kept going and I was like you know what this happens and either I could set this aside and start over or I could just use a tissue and blot it and go over it with a little red and notice that that spot looks different than the other spots and it's just fine you know you just have to kind of like let go and keep going and remember this is more about the process than it is about the final result and it doesn't need to be perfect and I think with a lot of my recipes in the books I try to create like just in general in all the books I try to create recipes that are somewhat foolproof like I would love to do a book that well this is sort of this kind of book but I would love to do a book that just doesn't have any measurements and it's just like throw things together which is really hard for some people I think my brain works more that way to sort of toss things together but um like i am not a baker because i have a hard time being super precise yeah and i had a lot of recipe testers help me with my loose recipes to get them to a place where they work for people but um i like the idea of letting people use their own creativity in cooking and i think you'll never get there if you're following not you'll never get there but it's it's a different way of getting there if you're following super precise instructions rather than, you know, if you do a sprinkle of sesame and you do it one time, you add way too much.

1:40:37You're like, next time you remember, okay, a little less sesame. Yeah. So there's a creativity that you can allow if you give fewer instructions. Absolutely agree. And I think once you start getting those postcard-sized pieces of paper, you pick them up and you start getting your watercolor collection together and you start trial and error. It's like any cooking, you start to get into a routine. You start to grow and get better, really. And I see the watercolor practice being very similar to home cooking. So I think a lot of our listeners will be interested in picking up your book. I think they're both about slowing down, too.

1:41:18It's like, you know, they're both creative acts, cooking and painting. They're both about kind of slowing down and being present in the moment and noticing what's happening. Yeah. And that's really in any form. That's really good for us. Aaron Gleason, this has been such a pleasure. Thank you so much for joining This Is Taste. Thank you so much for having me, Matt. Great talking with you.

1:41:41This Is Taste is hosted and produced by Eliza Abarbanal and me, Matt Rodbar. The show is edited by lead producer Clayton Gumbert and supervised by Pat Stango, Director of Media Production and Development at Penguin Random House. Thanks to Shalia Harris and the production team at Penguin Random House. Theme music by Steve Rydell. Logo and guest illustrations by Ellie Skrzat. Visit Taste Online at tastecooking.com and make sure to subscribe to our newsletter to keep updated on all cool things in the world of taste.