592: Meera Sodha on Falling Back In Love With Cooking

0:28This episode is brought to you by Resi and American Express. That's the reason why cookbooks are so much more magical than the online world. It allows you to sort of get lost into a world of desire. You allow yourself to be tempted, don't you, by the titles and the pictures and the photos of the food. This is Taste. I'm your host, Eliza Barbinell.

0:59Mira Soda is a cook and food writer based in London. Mira's best-selling cookbooks and weekly Guardian column, The New Vegan, are some of my favorite sources of cooking inspiration. But like anyone, she experienced burnout that led her to fall out of love with food. Today on the show, Mira talks about finding her way back into the kitchen and how that experience inspired her new book, Dinner, an honest and helpful guide to getting the most important meal of the day on the table.

1:28Mirasota, this is Taste. Thank you for coming on the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. I'm super excited to speak with you. I'm delighted to speak with you. I feel like I know you because I've cooked your recipes so many times, but this is the first time that we've actually chatted. So I feel a little bit nervous in an exciting way. Well, it's thrilling to hear. It's nice to hear that across the pond, you're cooking my food. That's really wonderful. Yeah, exactly. I think East is the book of yours that I cook from the most. It's definitely the most banged up, like grease splattered book, which I hope you take as a compliment.

2:05I do. When I write my cookbooks, and I mean, there's only four of them. I think that's my dream is that they live in the kitchen splattered. You have to prise the pages apart, the spine's broken. I mean, my publisher would hate to hear this, the amount of, but I want them to be battered and taped together again and recipes passed on. That's my dream. That's great. Yeah. Well, I'm really excited to speak with you about about dinner, which is your newest book. Before we get into that, I want to give just a little bit of context into who you are and the perspective that you bring to food, maybe especially for a listener who hasn't had the opportunity to love and cook from your books as much as myself.

2:51And I'm wondering if you could tell me an early food memory that you have from growing up. So I grew up in a farming area of England called Lincolnshire. It's in the northeast. it's very agricultural and so it's where around a third of the uk's produce is grown and so the fields are flat it's it's like fenlands it's very fertile um there are cauliflower everywhere you look there's sweet corn kale cauliflower rapeseed famously potatoes there's like pig farms and then um every october september october there's lots of shooting that goes on um And so, I mean, I grew up with like a potato farm just behind my parents' house.

3:39And this was like a very, it's a very seminal thing for me. We had a great community. We were in a tiny village and my mum was always being given all sorts of bags of things that were growing in people's gardens, whether that was courgette, rhubarb. Oh, sorry, courgette is, let me think. Zucchini, but you're British, so it's okay. Right, I'm forgiven. Okay. and one time there was a brace of pheasants that was slung over the door and so the pheasants were basically tied I think at the neck or the legs and they were just slung over the door handle and we predominantly grew up eating vegetarian food and that's certainly how we mostly ate in our family and so my mom opened the door and screamed so loud to see these pheasants these dead pheasants being hung on the door handle almost as if it was you know waking up with like a horse head in your bed it was kind of like that and it was so shocking but it was sort of given to her out of generosity um and and it was really nice what happened afterwards um the neighbor across the road um showed her and then plucked all the feathers off this bird another neighbor helped her to sort of process it, I think.

4:52And then my mum curried it and everyone came together to eat these pheasants. And I think that sort of informed my point of view in a couple of ways. And that's because I suppose I come from a Gujarati community and Gujaratis are from the west coast of India. and when those communities came over to the UK they cooked very traditional food and and that was a way of them keeping in touch with their past I think and keeping that alive and my mum was actually incredible at taking whatever grew locally and and cooking it in a Gujarati way and and I grew up with that and it was quite innovative and quite unusual because if I Even now, if I go to my aunt's houses, or my aunt and uncle's house, but my aunts are doing the cooking, they'll be cooking very, very traditional food.

5:52And I'm talking about recipes that are hundreds, hundreds of years old. And so I love British seasonal produce and I use it whenever I can. And also, I guess one of the other things is that my mum always shared. She didn't have an ego. She was an amazing cook. She was self-taught or taught by my grandmother. learn, you know, it's how recipes will pass down. But she was always open to learning new things. And that's when I feel most alive is when, you know, I think food writers, you kind of possibly have this point of view. It's like, well, you must know everything. You're the food writer. It's like, well, actually, we all have so much to learn.

6:29And I love learning new techniques. I love being in people's kitchens. I'm always open to new ideas. And I think that's what's so brilliant about food is that there's never just one way to do things. So I want to speak to you about dinner, which is your most recent book. The tagline is 120 vegan and vegetarian recipes for the most important meal of the day. I think a lot of people have heard historically that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. So I'm curious why you think dinner deserves that title. I think in the modern world, I would say dinner is the most important meal of the day because we lead increasingly busy lives and breakfast can be eaten solo in a cafe at home it's you know it could be cereal it could be muesli it could be fruit it could be yogurt you know whatever it is you're not really engaging with it in the same way that you do perhaps with dinner because you're just probably eating the same thing and it happens day in day out and it's the same with lunch like lunch for me is leftovers or you know eating between meetings or cooking or whatever I mean whatever it is but it's um I think dinner is the most important meal of the day because it's like a whatever type of day you've had it's a response button you've had a terrible day like making something meditative and delicious that you love or that can give you comfort will will can change that it can bring you back together again with people um it's it's just a sort of it's a chance to reset and connect um and come back together and be creative or just to create something soothing.

8:05And so I love dinner. I love dinner for that reason. Yeah, you know, I had like half a banana for breakfast today. So clearly, I agree with you that, you know, I think my efforts are better spent elsewhere. And reading the introduction to this book and articles you've published about the process online, it really feels like it was created as part of this larger journey that you went through of feeling, you know, a deep cooking burnout, maybe in other parts of your life as well, but cooking is part of, you know, your actual job that you do in addition to the thing that we all do to feed ourselves and then kind of trying to overcome that.

8:40And I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit about kind of what that process was like. I'm not still not sure what to call it. It was extreme burnout or a breakdown, but basically I woke up one day and I didn't want to cook and I barely wanted to eat and I'd fallen out of love with food and life in general. And I had to take a step back from work and work for me looks like recipe development on a regular weekly basis because I have a weekly column in the Guardian. And in terms of how I came back to it, it was very specific. It was almost a moment. And that was that my husband, Hugh, had been doing all of the looking after of our children and the house and me whilst I was having this breakdown.

9:31And he'd been doing all of the cooking. And then one day he was starting to crack himself. And he said, I would love it if you could make me something. And it was less him saying, please cook for me. I'm bored of cooking now. And more that he just he needed some love himself he needed um yeah to he needed to feel like someone was caring for him too he was struggling and I ran into the kitchen and it woke me up and I grabbed a pan and I went to the store cupboard and I picked up some lentils some coconut milk some uh tinned tomatoes all the aromatics that I keep in the freezer door you know perennially and I made this Malaysian dal curry which I love I love dal it's very comforting for me but also Hugh and I had eaten bucket bucketfuls of this in Singapore and we both fell in love with it and I felt so different in that moment and I felt like my spectrum of feelings had sort of gone from something that was very narrow to very broad I felt alive again I felt like this fizziness in my fingertips and and fresh air in my lungs and and I was thinking about that and why that might have been why it felt so different and I thought I think this might be because I'm doing something this is this has been led by my heart and by my belly and it's it's um and I had a I had a purpose I did it out of love um and and so I promised myself and and just to sort of um and this was different and and and I'll explain why because the previous 10 years I'd been cooking I'd been cooking for the column and I'd been cooking for this um a national audience and I'd been cooking to publish books and and so you know it was very different suddenly kind of cooking like this um and so I promised myself that I would cook out of pleasure and and then I just started to write these recipes down because I was keeping a diary in any case and I wrote them down in a sort of food diary or a notebook that I keep by the microwave and in there we put family recipes.

11:39Hugh and I would both record family recipes and the intention with this orange notebook is to give it to our daughters when they leave and so they're just our beloved recipes and um and I just noticed that you know this is it didn't happen very suddenly and immediately and mostly I was cooking things like scrambled eggs or omelets I ate a lot of eggs and um and a lot of rice and then and then actually this notebook filled up and I and I started to realize these things about dinner that planning it um in just the planning of it I felt comfort and I felt grounded and I felt like I could make a plan and cooking literally going from A to B was reassuring it's something that is actually a very meditative lovely process and then being able to share something with the family around the table was also incredibly lovely and again that was also very different to my food writing life where I had been testing recipes and I might have been cooking or like trying to make a lime pickle for a day.

12:49And obviously I couldn't give that to my baby and my toddler or to Hugh for dinner. And so life changed very slowly. And I just thought, wow, dinner is amazing. It has this sort of amazing power to it that I never really appreciated. And I really wanted to share that with people. and so I spoke to my editor about it and she was very keen the truth is it was messy it wasn't this very you know spreadsheeted coordinated planned thing like perhaps some of my other books where I wanted it to be messy and organic I wanted to this sounds a bit woo woo but I wanted to find myself again through the food I wanted to find what I loved and what gave me pleasure and what I wanted to share with my friends and family around the table.

13:43And so that's what I did. It's taken me years because, you know, it just has. That's how long it took. You know, I started to experience this burnout in 2021 or late 2020, 2021. And then the book came out in August last year. and in in the US it's just come out on the 1st of April so um it's not you know it's taken a long time to kind of get there and I I wasn't um intensive about it and I made sure to to dedicate my life to um to pleasure in a way because that's where I think joy is and purpose is and so that for me looked like spending time with my children and picking them up from school, doing yoga, going to Eppin Forest, which is very close to where I live, swimming, you know, all those sorts of things, hanging out with friends.

14:44Living life, yeah. Living life, basically. And I think with hindsight, I hadn't quite realized this when I was going through it. But this, I think, was sort of an interesting thought for me, and perhaps it might be for you and the listeners, is that I'm from an immigrant family. And so my parents had to survive when they came in. They had very, very little money and they worked incredibly hard. And there was an awful lot of pressure on me to do, to sort of achieve. And I think because I wanted to kind of achieve things and to thank them and to show them that I was doing what they'd set out for me uh work became part of my self-identity and achievement did and so um and that's not good I think for a life well lived or it certainly wasn't for me and I think sort of caused my uh my breakdown and so I really wanted to sort of live this life that actually wasn't led by achievement and work but it was actually led by the things that I love and when I think about food the reason why I fell in love with it in the first place was because my mum used to cook this food and it brought us together at the end of the day and it brought the family together and we interacted with the world outside of us the farms the communities the the grocery shops the people that we shared the food with and it's just sort of it can be if if you let it be at the heart of everything that you do pleasure food and so that was really how I approached writing dinner From February 20th to March 7th, dive into Canada's biggest culinary festival, Montreal en Lumière, an exclusive partnership with the McCord Stewart Museum and its exhibition, On the Menu Montreal, a restaurant story.

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18:38Terms and conditions apply. And it's really special to, you know, hear you speak so honestly about the process. And I think what you're speaking to is such a, you know, a classic problem of when the thing that you love becomes your job, all the things that kind of get lost around the way. And even the fact that, you know, you said you've done your previous books, maybe there's a process, it's in spreadsheets, it's organized. I think it's really helpful to have a process. But sometimes if you just jump back into that process, you lose those kind of moments of discovery and magic that are why you fall in love with something in the first place or that kind of lead to these unexpected possibilities.

19:16And I think that like the resulting book does feel really organic and like it feels like recipes that, you know, you actually do make at home all the time as opposed to maybe things that have so many components and you live on the shelf but don't necessarily come home with you. And something that I wanted to talk about in the book is I love how it's kind of structured in multiple ways in the beginnings. You have it kind of structured by like the hero ingredient. You have it structured seasonally. There's like an alternative contents of the ways that things are being cooked, like in the oven versus one pot.

19:52Did you always want to have kind of these multiple breakdowns or how did you conceive about the structure of the book? I have always loved multiple ways into cookbooks because I think you can have a main structure, but typically it won't really cover all of the different aspects of how you feel when you think, what do I want to eat tonight and so I love multiple contents and so when it came when it comes to the main contents I've organized it by main ingredient and that's because largely when I'm at home and I'm thinking what do I want to eat tonight I think I kind of go into the I'll see if there's anything on the side like some juicy tomatoes or I'll go into the vegetable or in the fridge or the pantry and I'll have a look at you know the pulses or something like that and really that's how I do how I kind of work out dinner and then maybe I'll think well do I want some rice or some noodles or do I want a curry or some soup or a salad you know and and I might think about what's in season so um and that you know that's lovely we do I've got a farmer's market fairly nearby.

21:05I'm in London now, so not surrounded by fields. So I'm very reliant on the farmer's market and the grocery market to sort of see what's in. And I might see something that I like. And so the main structure is, you know, by main ingredient, and then I've got a sort of seasonal contents. And then I've got an alternative contents. And that is, you know, like, I can't remember exactly what I put in there. I think I've put my favorites list in there because people always say, oh, what are your favorites? And I thought, you know what, I'm going to tell you what my favorites are. Yeah, I love that. I've never seen the recipe developer's favorite section in the book, but it makes so much sense.

21:43It makes so much sense, doesn't it? I would love to know about other food writers' favorite recipes that they've written, because those are the recipes that I want to cook. And I've got, you know, sort of noodles, rice, picnics, date night. I don't remember exactly what I've got in there, but it's kind of different ways into the book. And then And obviously, the interesting thing about cookbooks and life today is that most people, I think, when they're looking for recipes online, will search by ingredient. And then, like, let's say you have tomatoes and you fancy a curry. You might put tomato curry into your search bar.

22:19and in that respect the index is even though it's at the back of the book is actually the most it's the least charming and magical way that you could get into a book but it's so vitally important and so that's that's the fourth way in which is how I seek it it's how I think how I think that most people actually use cookbooks to find what they want I don't know what you what you think about that? I don't know. I think it depends on how people are using the cookbook. I think for myself, it's probably like when I don't know what sounds good to me for dinner, that I'll think about what cookbook I want to, you know, re-dig back into or someone whose food I really like.

23:05And then I normally just kind of flip through. And, you know, obviously I think photos are so important in books for this reason. I look at what looks delicious or what sounds delicious and kind of, or like what you're saying before, what I have in my fridge that I need to use up. But the index certainly has everything in one place. You're right, actually. I think I hadn't really taken into account that it doesn't allow for the, that's the reason why cookbooks are so much more magical than the online world is that it allows you to sort of get lost into a world of desire of what, you know, you allow yourself to be tempted don't you by the titles and the pictures and the the photos of um of the food and so it excels the the fantasy of all of the potential dinners you could have and then it's about exactly what do i want tonight exactly i want to talk a little bit about just the development process so i know that you were kind of maybe meandering more like coming up with recipes together were there any recipes in the book that when it came down to like actually you know writing it down properly cross testing it like was everything kind of like equally easy because you'd cooked them before were there any recipes that you kind of sat with and spent more time perfecting I will cook things a couple of times over partly because I'll get so excited about the first version of it and if I think it could be a bit different or a bit better or could be tweaked I'll do it again but I'm trying to think of what I might have spent a lot of time with i think the one that was quite important to me um this is a bit of an odd story but um maybe for the last decade i've been looking to figure out this is like an insight into the mind of a food writer i like to set myself a challenge every now and then of how to get rid of a glut and i mentioned earlier that my mum was sort of given this bag of zucchini or courgettes um or maros or whatever it was, just because there's so much, so much grows, right?

25:05When it grows, it really grows sometimes, especially in the summer. And so one thing that we always have in our family is a bag full of carrots. I don't know if that's a thing. I do too, yeah. Okay. But carrots, I've always seen them as like a bit of a side thing. And I was like, oh, I really want to work out how to turn these into a main meal. And it was like a silly little puzzle I set for myself and then I finally cracked it um and that was that was that was real joy when I did because I really wanted to it to have those sort of deep curry coconutty flavors that you get from a Malaysian curry laxer um but sort of also equally be quite simple to do so that was like my mountain to climb alongside and I would highly recommend it please make it not in the summer you won't want to eat it in the summer although maybe you will the strange thing about eating hot soups hot noodley soups is in Southeast Asia I wouldn't bat an eyelid when it's like 40 degrees eating something like that but in England I think about it as a sort of wintery thing to eat but the other one and I should have maybe have said this first is I have a recipe in this book for a vegan cheesecake which is the most craziest thing because I think it really gives you an idea of how far we've come in our innovation of trying to create vegan cheese and that was disastrous many times over when I tried to make it and then I reached out to the online community and that is also one of my greatest joys these days is that people are so open to sharing things and I said you know it keeps on splitting I can't get this to work but I'm sure it could and then this guy Matthew got in touch with me and he said I think it might be the you know the composition of the coconut oil versus the whatever it was in in the particular cheese that you're using and so eventually I worked it out with his help and it felt like it felt so triumphant I almost wanted someone to just give me a gold medal for it because I think it was like alongside childbirth one of the most difficult things that I've ever done in my life um so I can get a little bit like that it is mostly intuitive and mostly very easy and like what do I you know some scrambled eggs or omelets and that are um all you know gorgeous noodle dishes but occasionally it's so I quite like the uh sort of the challenge of doing something um because a lot of vegan and vegetarian food I think also is that because we know a million and one ways to cook chicken but how do you extract the most amount of flavor out of a carrot how do you create a vegan cheesecake these things have to be they're kind of I think you know that I think a lot of people who are working in vegan food and I don't count myself in this you know they're very innovative very sort of the leading leading the charge when it comes to innovation and food and I and and I know I've I've gone on for a little bit but I just have to say one thing and that is that I went to, I was recently in New York and in LA, but I really feel like a lot of New Yorkers are leading the charge when it comes to innovative ways to cook vegetables.

28:37Like the food that I ate in restaurants over there was astoundingly good. Oh, what did you have? I'm so curious. Well, now here's the moment when I'm going to forget everything I ate. did you go to um did you go to superiority burger okay yes I did and I came back and I made the collard greens sandwich I love that sandwich almost immediately it was absurdly good and also I love the process of cooking it because you get the biggest pan that you have and the most amount of collard greens and then you just stir it once every five minutes until it reduces down to this elemental gorgeous buttery flavor and then grate some cheese into it and I was like wow this is like a four ingredient recipe that's like one of the best things I've ever eaten um so I'm very thankful to um Superiority Burger and Brooks Headley he's just he's just a genius Yes.

29:42But also I went to Noora in Brooklyn and I had some fantastic stuff there. And the Four Horsemen, which wasn't as vegetable heavy as a menu, but everything that I ate there was like the flavors were so precise. You could put them on a pinhead. It was fantastic. Yeah. I love all of those places. I think you did a good job while you were here for sure. Great. And I'm glad that New York and L.A. are coming through on the plant-based food front. I think maybe L.A. is more known for that than New York, but I think there's a lot of exciting vegetable-based stuff happening here still. Yes, loads. I wanted to ask you about another plant-based recipe in this book that uses ingredient I've never heard of before, which is vegan haggis.

30:37How is that possible? Like, what is that? It shouldn't be possible, should it? And I'm sure there's still a lot of Scots out there that are probably quite angry about the vegan haggis. Apologies. No, it's not. It's actually made by a Scottish company, the vegan haggis. So I didn't shy away from using ingredients that are available quite widely here that might be like semi pre-made already. and um and one of those ingredients so this vegan haggis is made by a company called McSween's and they're a Scottish company and it's the most widely available haggis in in the country and so they sell loads and loads of haggis and then they came out with a vegan haggis and and it I can't tell you how well it works it's a combination of vegetables and pulses and and um it's it's because and and And it has this incredible savoury flavour, this gorgeous sort of nutty, crumbly texture.

31:43And it's great. It's absolutely fantastic. And it's very rich as well, which you can't say a lot of vegan food, but it's perfect. It's a perfect substitute, I'd say. There's actually loads of people, although they're quite familiar with haggis, like haggis will, someone should record people's facial expressions when you mention the word haggis here because the actual the meat version of it because it has got um now i'll probably get this wrong but i i don't know if it's tripe or sheep stomach or you know there's various inwards of different animals in there and um and there's quite a lot of people who shy away from the actual original version of it so in many ways i think the vegan version is a more palatable version for the the the people yeah yeah i mean according to wikipedia which is never wrong obviously um haggis consists of sheep's pluck which is heart liver and lungs and then it's mixed with onion and spices and suet all of these things and i guess i feel very american because i've never had haggis i think it's actually illegal in the united states so i'm trying to imagine what this tastes like is it similar at all to like a soy chorizo alternative in terms of this like crumbly spiced texture or is that like just completely different in your eyes uh so i haven't i haven't tried the soy chorizo i think that might be specifically american um but what it tastes like is um like imagine the best um like imagine a very traditional stew or like even a french stew but you've got a lot of herbs in there but they're kind of the wintery herbs um and they're in sorry for pausing i'm trying to say herbs instead of herbs and no no that's how you want rasemary and thyme um quite rasemary and thyme heavy onion heavy so you've got a lot of base flavor in there bay leaves things like that and then on top of that you have like potentially a sofrito but it's cooked down and so you put your celery and your carrots um and and this all creates this beautiful flavor and then layered on top of that now i can't remember exactly what um next we put in there um into their particular vegan haggis but let's say nuts and lentils for example um and so you just have like a a very like like almost like a very flavorful nut roast and and so it sort of comes in this sausage form it's big sausage and then it sort of turns into a bit of a crumble when you open it and then you can fry it quite hard and it's one of those incredible things for cooks because it's almost like you can't go wrong with using this ingredient it has such a wide bandwidth to it and I love recipes like that it's like don't worry about it it's not as if you bake it for an extra five minutes it's going to be a disaster it's um it's a pre-made ingredient you can keep on adding more flavors to it if you wish you can you know put it into dumplings and pies and or just eat it as it is and um yeah it's a it's a fabulous it's a fabulous thing um and sorry like one other thing that I thought might be helpful is that in some ways if you think about sort of the same flavors that you get in a traditional English sausage if you're familiar with that that sort of sausagey flavor but just like more crumbly and nutty and lentily right I think the flavor is probably quite different to soy chorizo but the like crumbly aspect is similar and maybe on your next trip to the to the U.S.

35:23it might be something you'd be interested in trying thank you I'll pick some up um I think one of the interesting things about being a recipe developer and a cookbook author online in 2025 is like people are making what you cook and sharing it on social media and tagging you and you have this kind of connection with this audience of cooks that are making your food and I'm curious if there are any recipes from the book that you've seen folks making a lot so far any kind of like crowd favorites? Yes I can definitely that is what's amazing about it so you get this sort of instantaneous feedback um so a lot of people love the sticky mango and lime paneer naans so um paneer is a sort of very fresh compressed cheese quite similar to halloumi um but it's not salted and so you can throw lots of flavor at it and this is a super quick almost a 10 minute um recipe where the key ingredient is actually mango chutney which forms part of the glaze and um it's cut through with some fresh lime juice so it's super delicious it's this fried paneer with this um mango chutney and lime glaze and then there's a sort of fresh cabbage and lots of mint and coriander whatever herbs you've got um all rolled up in a naan and so lots of people have been cooking that um the kimchi and tomato spaghetti has had a lot of love the malaysian dal curry people do i still cook that like every other week um and i have a batch in my freezer always oh my gosh i almost forgot to tell you about the baked butter paneer curry now i didn't really believe you could actually bake a curry and then i tried to i love butter butter paneer and it's kind of based on the butter chicken it's like a tomatoey spicy creamy curry it's gentle and it's satisfying and you can always put anything into it but I love putting paneer into it's quite rich um it works so well in the oven I think people have been going bonkers for that one um yeah that one's that one's actually a real winner they all sound so great I think um the like butter paneer is like such a hard thing to not want to eat all of the time that it makes total sense that it would be popular in that kind of way.

37:53And I feel like, you know, we're talking about this experience of feeling cooking burnout, which I think a lot of people can relate to and kind of finding your way back into cooking again. But I know like, you know, life is still busy. I'm sure there are still moments in time when putting dinner on the table is harder than others. And I'm curious if there are any like pantry or fridge or freezer staples that you kind of rely on to keep on hand because you know that it'll be like a really great shortcut to dinner yeah so i um in our family we eat a lot of rice and um and i so i always overcook rice uh and keep it in in some tupperware in the fridge and then it's it's even better the next day because you can fry it up and i always also keep um silken tofu which is um you can get this beautiful silken tofu here i don't know if it's also available in America which is very fresh but it's actually got a relatively long shelf life to it but it's like custardy and silky and beautiful um I'm not saying it's as good as fresh silken tofu but it's almost as good as fresh silken tofu and the the benefit is it it just lives in the stall cupboard and so I will fry the rice with the silken tofu any vegetables that I have and I will top it with crispy chili and oil and and maybe maybe an egg I love to make some soy marinated eggs and so I tend to have those in the fridge always as well and it sounds like a very simple meal but it's just absurdly satisfying when you're too tired to cook and um and you just need something it's always what i want to eat um so i love that i love that meal but also i find myself using condiments a lot i rely a lot on condiments because i call them sleeping giants because they just sort of deploy so much flavor and again you just need um maybe something starchy uh like a base or even something like an aubergine and um and then either gotcha or kimchi and you can you can build a meal so i use kimchi for example as a base to a tomato spaghetti and we eat that a lot with these sesame breadcrumbs um i use this a lot in um taipei these pancakes that i make um at home and i will just sort of put it through the middle with whatever cheese we have in the fridge and my girls absolutely adore that and we all love it and it's just a nice thing to eat you've just got you give everyone a pair of chopsticks and you can have it on your lap in the garden it's just a lovely simple thing to to cook and gotcha jang I think is an amazing ingredient because of the funk and the heat and the sweetness it performs on so many levels and I use that in pasta sauces in stews there's a pasta the gotcha jang vodka pasta in the book, which is a really fun sort of extra dish.

41:01But it's lovely just to sort of, you know, you can kind of turn it into a sauce if you like. And I do, I think as long as you've got rice and vegetables and either eggs or tofu and a condiment, you can always build a meal. And so that's what I, that's how I tend to build meals when in that sort of way when you're like, I just need something and I want it to be good. And I don't want to have to order something on DoorDash or delivery, which is our version of that, to kind of come because I can't be bothered. Yeah, I completely agree with you. And I think reading your book, it's really clear that you're somebody who loves condiments, appreciates a good condiment.

41:42I cook a lot with lao gama, chili oil at home, but you use a specific kind in the book that I'd never heard of before that has like kohlrabi and peanuts and tofu in it. And I'm just immediately going to the store after this to try to find it because it sounds so delicious and a little bit more like substantial and hefty than like the traditional kind of soybean chili oil that I used before. Yeah, it's fantastic as a product. It's really simple, but it's really clever because it's, again, like just one ingredient that you can use in a recipe and you can use it in many different ways um and what i like about it is you've got those lovely red peanuts that are really stay incredibly crunchy in that oil and you have these like quite um these fried tiny chewy cubes of tofu and it's not that hot and so you can kind of add as much or as little as you like but the recipe that um i was introduced to it by my friend ben who's a fantastic cook and i always want to know what ben's eating because he's always cooking the best food out with my friends with apologies to my other friends but he made he he sort of fried this aubergine and some celery and I I'm not a big fan of celery um and um but and then he braised it in some vinegar soy um and this uh laogama kohlrabi um and tofu um chili crisp and it was one of the nicest things that I've ever had and like a celery just turns into this you know it's a difference between a cat that's ready to get its claws out and very punchy and like a lot of attitude and this pussycat that's just purring it's very soft very delicious um these braised aubergines just soak up all of that sauce um it's ludicrously addictive and I think I think my friend Ben's a genius he really is so that's I tell everybody about that and I feel like I can because it's um it's his recipe but it's so good it's really good and i would recommend it is something that's really widely available now um well not widely available as in all supermarkets but it's not difficult to find um and there's there's also a lot they've got another um like a black bean version which is also very delicious if you're if you find them buy them all they're all wonderful Yeah, I have two already, but I think I could use some more in my fridge.

44:09And we're lucky to have a lot of good Asian grocery stores here in New York. So I think that will be something that I seek out. I think I'll seek out a lot of things for this book. Hi there. It's Matt, co-host of the show. We are currently running a This Is Taste listener survey, and we'd love to hear from you. Do you have a guest request? A restaurant you wish we'd visit to talk about on Three Things? What about a lesser-known cookbook author who deserves a spot in our studio chair? You can let us know by clicking the link in our show notes to complete the survey. It will only take a couple minutes, I swear, and will help us continue to make the best show possible.

44:47That's the This Is Taste listener survey, link in our show notes. Today's episode is brought to you by ButcherBox. As a food writer, I can be a little skeptical about subscription cooking boxes you hear about on podcasts. There's big talk about cooking simplicity, but you're usually left with disappointment after smashing that promo code. Now, Clayton, have you ever tried one of those subscription boxes? Yeah, Matt, my friend gave me a code for that one that has all the chopped vegetables in little baggies. I felt like a drug dealer trying to cook dinner. Yeah, man, I have so been there. Butcher Box is a true exception.

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46:04As an exclusive offer, our listeners can get free protein in every box for a year, plus$20 off your first box when you go to butcherbox.com slash taste. Visit butcherbox.com slash taste to get this limited-time offer and free shipping always. That's butcherbox.com slash taste. Don't forget to use our link so they know we sent you. I guess to close today, I want to play a little rapid fire taste check game with you. So I'll make you play favorites kind of, and I'll ask you some questions and you can just tell me what comes to mind. Okay. Okay. Your favorite cookbook right now that isn't your own.

46:43Okay. The one that I've got out at the moment that I think is really fun is, it's called Cool Pasta by Tom Jackson. And I think the tagline is something like the new pasta salad or reinventing the pasta salad. And I love this book because I, before, you know, I mean, maybe for the last three decades has been like two pasta salads that we know as Brits and then Tom's come along and it feels like it's sort of quite a niche thing. And actually it shouldn't be a niche thing because pasta is amazing and pasta salads are always amazing. and so he's expanded this all out into a book and it's like highly original and it's brilliant I haven't cooked from it but I can't wait to cook from it it just sounds it's great cool pasta I love that okay um your go-to picnic meal um my picnic so I did actually have a trade picnic the other day and I made um I specifically made um the superiority burger collard greens and made myself a focaccia sandwich to eat.