How to Be Part-Time Vegetarian and the Magic of Summer Corn with Jenny Rosenstrach of Dinner: A Love Story

Adventure and Fun
Written By Season Four
 

Show Snapshot:

Love food but dread making your nightly dinner? Want to eat more veggies, less meat? Meet Jenny Rosenstrach -- cookbook author, former magazine editor, and the creator of Dinner: A Love Story, the award-winning website and newsletter devoted to the family diner. 

An OG foodie, her articles and recipes have appeared in The New York Times, Food52, Real Simple, Martha Stewart Living, and Bon Appétit, where she was a columnist for six years. But best of all – she makes making dinner easy and fun.

Now, with her latest cookbook, The Weekday Vegetarians, arriving at the end of August, she will have you stalking your supermarket’s veggie aisle with glee. So, if you want easy, fresh big yum plant-based recipes for the end of summer and beyond, you will not want to miss this show.

In This Episode We Cover:

1.    How Jenny made the move from magazine editor to cookbook author – no culinary school required.

2.    Life is complicated. Dinner doesn’t have to be.  

3.    How a meat-obsessed family made the move to part-time plant-based and lived to tell the tale.

4.    Jenny’s favorite cookbooks, pantry superheroes, cooking tools, and more.

5.    Yes, you can turn picky eaters into food lovers.

6.    What to cook all year long, what’s best in summer.

7.    The Italian cookbook every home cook needs.

8.    Jenny’s go-to dinner party dish.

9.    The one ingredient you’ll never find in Jenny’s grocery cart (it’s a shocker).

Quotable:

The Weekday Vegetarians is all about how my meat-obsessed, Shake Shack-loving family, all just kind of decided that we were eating too much meat and we wanted to dial back, but still not give up meat entirely. So, we came up with this loose rule that we would only eat meat on special occasions or on the weekend. So, from Monday to Friday, every dinner, and every meal is mostly plant-based.

People want accessible, simple, wholesome, delicious food. And that’s the only way I know how to cook and it’s the only kind of recipe I write. What’s the point if you’re making food that most people don’t have time to cook?

 

Transcript

Katie Fogarty (00:00):

Welcome to A Certain Age, a show for women on life after 50 who are unafraid to age out loud. I’m your host, Katie Fogarty. 

I hope you’re listening to this episode on a full stomach because I’m about to make you hungry, very hungry. Listen in. Warm shrimp salad with butter beans, grilled soy-glazed pork chops, strawberry rhubarb crisp. Are you drooling yet? If you want to dive into any of these divine dishes and more, please meet Jenny Rosenstrach. Jenny is a cookbook author, former food editor, and the creator of Dinner: A Love Story, the award-winning website and newsletter devoted to the family dinner. And OG foodie, her articles and recipes have appeared in The New York Times, Food52, Real Simple, Martha Stewart Living, and Bon Appetite, where she was as a columnist for six years. Her latest cookbook, The Weekday Vegetarians arrives at the end of August. Packed with easy, fresh, big yum recipes, it will have you stocking your supermarket's veggie aisle with glee. Welcome, Jenny.

Jenny Rosenstrach (01:03):

Hi, so nice to be here.

 Katie (01:05):
I am so excited to have you as a guest. We’re gonna talk all things food in a minute but I do just wanna just share very quickly that I’ve been such a fan of yours since I started reading your blog and when you agreed to come on the show, I was jumping up and down, screaming, and I texted my husband and my best friend Katie and I was like, “Guess who’s coming on my show? [Jenny laughs] Jenny from Dinner: A Love Story!” 

Jenny (01:30):

Can you say that louder so my children can hear you? [Katie laughs]

Katie (01:34):
I knew they were the only two who would share my excitement because my husband loves to cook and my friend Katie loves to cook and loves to eat and she knows how much I love you. She actually gave me a copy of your cookbook, not knowing that I had ordered. So, I actually have two copies of your cookbook on my kitchen shelf. So this is like—

Jenny (01:53):
Is that Dinner: A Love Story, the original?

Katie (01:55):
Yes, Dinner: A Love Story, the original. So this is a big thrill.

Jenny (02:00):
Well, thank you, that’s a very flattering introduction so I appreciate it very much. 

Katie (02:05):

Well, I’ve been a total fan. You launched, so that cookbook, the one that I’m talking about that I have two copies of, I think that came out in 2012. But, you were a food editor before that, right? And you had worked on other cookbooks and you had been doing food thing for a while. I would love it if you could just tell our listeners a little bit about your career and how you got started in food.

Jenny (02:26):
Yeah, sure. I mean I wasn’t actually ever a food editor, I was an editor at a bunch of magazines and I just always loved food so I found my way, always weaseling my way into the food department. But back then it was like, before like, blogs and the internet made everybody an expert. [Katie laughs] There were food people and there were the writing and word people and I was like the word person.

 Katie (02:52):
Got it.

Jenny (02:52):
You had to have like, a degree from like, you know, a culinary school to work in the recipe developing department, or you had to have a lot of experience in the kitchen and testing. So, I was always the one who sort of came up with the ideas for food stories and features but I wasn’t the one actually developing the recipes. That to me felt like something that rocket scientists did and I didn’t realize like, one day, someone was like, “Oh, you could write your own recipe.” And I was like, I can’t do that are you crazy? That’s the food person thing, not the word person thing. And so, anyway, it took me a little bit of time to get the confidence to write recipes but that began in magazines like in the early 2000s, I worked at Real Simple and then at the magazine Cookie, which was a parenting magazine, I was doing the same thing, just editing food and features. And while I was there, I got the chance to work on a book about, I was again, the word person, just making sure everything made sense in a book about feeding picky kids, or not just picky kids, but just a book about feeding your family.

Katie (03:55):
Sure, any kids.

Jenny (03:56):
And I loved it, I loved every second of working on it and so when that magazine went under I decided I could figure out a way to talk about that topic. I had two young girls at the time, 8 and 6, and I really loved to cook and I loved coming home and feeding them, which is, you know, not every day obviously, but I found it to be more of a challenge than a source of stress and I felt like maybe that would help people. So, I launched Dinner: A Love Story with that in mind, and yeah, that just became my, you know, my journal basically to write about all things food and all things dinner and specifically feeding kids. But now, those kids are both off to college in the next month so…

Katie (04:42):
Wow.

Jenny (04:42):
…it’s gonna have to be a little bit of redefining there.

Katie (04:45):
So, how old are they now?

Jenny (04:47):
17 and 19.

Katie (04:49):

Okay, so you’ve been doing this for almost a decade. And I think that really, that sort of aligns to where my own kids were because I have a 21-year-old, an 18-year-old, and a 14-year-old. So right when you were doing the blog, I was a fan of the blog before I became a fan of your cookbook, because I too, I was like, “What you guys want dinner again? Every night? Come on!” And it’s a challenge, you work, you have a full plate, all this stuff. And part of it I think what connected me to your work, and I’m sure the rest of your audience, you’ve got a big audience, is that you’ve made it super accessible, you obviously love food, you love your family and you really kinda married those two and you made us feel like we could do it. We could feed our kids healthy, kind of fun food, get them into eating, get them into sitting around the table and I think that was a big part of the journey. 

But, you know, it’s interesting because I didn’t realize, or maybe I knew and forgot, that you were more of the word person than the recipe person. So, when you were creating your own food as your kids grew up and now you’re creating your own cookbooks, do you rely on other cookbooks and cooking shows for inspiration, or have you now stepped into test driving your own recipes and sort of creating things from scratch, or is it an amalgamation?

Jenny (06:07):
Oh, I mean, it’s a very mysterious process how recipes get invented, but yes to all the things you said. I get ideas from cookbooks, from my friends, from Instagram, from restaurants, from watching what my kids order at Chipotle, you know. It’s sort of this…I don’t really understand how it works but now I’m fully a recipe person and a word person, I think. [laughs] But I was just talking about this with someone, another recipe developer, how funny the process is. The reason I like to think that people like my recipes is because they’re 100% the recipes I cooked for my family, and often they’re just like, you know, if nobody’s watching when you’re cooking, you’re making the simplest food. You’re making like a roast chicken and maybe roast carrots with, you know, some sort of fun herb and a green salad. That’s a dinner. And people want accessible, simple, wholesome, delicious food. And that’s the only way I know how to cook and it’s the only kind of recipe I write. So, often I’ll make something, I’ll have something in my head, and then I’ll make it and then I’ll put it on the table and be like, this is really good, maybe I should write this up for the next book and then for the life of me I can’t remember what I did, it’s so funny. [both laugh] So then I have to recreate it and it’s never like, exactly the same. I never use recipes when I’m cooking for myself unless it’s like out of Langley or something complicated. But it’s just interesting, I just feel like I do try to listen to myself when something is really simple and delicious, I try to just flag it to say this is something that’s a Dinner: A Love Story recipe because people will actually make it for those nights that you’re talking about; just busy nights, and nights where you don’t feel like cooking.

Katie (08:07):
Yeah, absolutely. Part of what I think I always connected with your recipes and your food, it reminds me of why I like Mark Bittman, or why I like the Barefoot Contessa because it’s just delicious food that’s pretty straightforward and it’s sort of, I don’t want to say it’s easy to make, because I have messed up everybody’s recipes, but it does feel like it’s possible and it’s accessible. It’s not like a purée, or a foam, or something complicated.

Jenny (08:38):
Foam, that would be funny. [both laugh] I do feel like what’s the point if you’re making food that most people don’t have time to cook? There’s a place for that, there are some people that are lucky enough to use love the process of cooking. And I’m like that sometimes, like on the weekends I love to like, figure out what to make in the morning and then maybe go to some specialty market and shop for it and do whatever, like an hour of marinating. If I have time, I like it. But the reality is, in our lives, most people do not have that time so the ones that I try to latch onto are the ones that don’t require a lot of ingredients and don’t require a lot of time but are also healthy and, you know, hopefully, family-friendly. But it’s a lot, and I don’t expect every recipe to hit every mark but I try my hardest. 

Katie (09:33):
And there are so many options. So I have a question for you because I have a shelf full of cookbooks in my kitchen. I love cookbooks, I love looking at the pictures, I love hearing the stories, I love how cookbooks today, including your own, have become almost like memoirs where you really learn about someone’s personality by how they entertain, how they feed their family. I really adore them. But I have absolutely no knowledge about how one gets made. I would love it if you would just share that with us. I know every recipe in your books has been tested in your own kitchen, eaten by your family. But do you test them multiple times, do you choose recipes for your cookbooks that you know are gonna photograph well?

Jenny (10:14):
It’s different for every book. I would say the first book I wrote, Dinner: A Love Story was the easiest book I ever wrote because it followed…I kept a journal where I wrote down every single dinner I made from February of 1998 until, I’m still keeping it, so until now. So, that’s what? 23 years' worth of dinners. I don’t put recipes in that, I just write exactly what I made.

 Katie (10:41):
I have to stop you, this is a very big journal. [laughs]

 Jenny (10:45):
It’s actually not, it’s two volumes now, but believe it or not, you can fit like 25 dinners on one page and if you go back and front, then it’s actually like I put like, I think probably about 12 years in one journal.

Katie (11:00):
That’s amazing, I love that.

Jenny (11:02):

It’s really fun. It’s deranged, I realize, [Katie laughs] but it made writing the first book so easy because I was like, "Oh I’ll just look at the journal, and the ones that come up over, and over, and over again, I know are the hits." So, that was really easy, because I was just like, and it was also like this book that was just ready to pour out of me because it was my first book.  

The latest book that I wrote, The Weekday Vegetarians, is all about how my meat-obsessed family, or not meat-obsessed, but it’s a Shake Shack loving family, that we all just kind of decided that we were eating too much meat and we wanted to dial back, but still not give up meat entirely. So, we sort of came up with this loose rule that we would only eat meat on special occasions or on the weekend. So, from Monday to Friday, every dinner, and every meal was mostly plant-based. So the book is called The Weekday Vegetarians and it’s all about that. And this book was a completely different process of writing because I was writing it as I was figuring it out myself. Which was fine. It went to the printer 3 months ago and I already have a million more things I would add to it. So it’s more of a day-to-day journal as opposed to my first book which was, in summation, here’s everything that I’ve learned so far. So, they’re all different. 

To get to your question about testing the recipes. I have a team of testers who are pretty casual. They’re not professionals, they’re just people who I trust a lot and they love to cook and they have kids or they have people who they are feeding at their table who are slightly challenging maybe. Because I just wanna make sure that these recipes feel real and that the people are actually eating them. So I really, for my old books I had professional testers and they were great, but yeah. I dunno…

Katie (13:08):
That’s so fascinating, professional tester. That sounds really like a fun career. What about photography? Do you pick the photographer? Does the publisher book the photographer? How does that work?

Jenny (13:20):
It can be either one but mostly just because I’m so enmeshed in the food world, I know a lot of people and I’ve worked with a lot of different photographers and the photographer I worked with on this last book, on The Weekday Vegetarians is Christine Hahn, and she’s just remarkable. She’s so easy to work with and she shoots food really beautifully, but she also shoots lifestyle, which I like. So, there’s so much energy and good light and happiness in all her photos and I really wanted to communicate that. So she’s just a wonderful person to work for. But, yes the publisher has to sign off. It’s very important that the photographs look good in a cookbook.

Katie (14:02):
Yeah, that’s for me, such a big draw, it really pulls me in. And when you said lifestyle, that’s the feeling on your website. Your website has you know, it looks like there’s a cutting board as the backdrop and there are you know, napkins. There’s like a chalkboard feel, and you feel like you’re actually in somebody’s home. I think to see the food plated and styled that way makes it so inviting. I love that. I’m excited.

Jenny (14:29):
Yeah, it’s real.

 Katie (14:30):

I’m excited for everyone to get a chance to see it. I’m so curious though, I want to hear a little bit more about your family’s pivot into making plant-based eating a bigger part of their life because my daughter who is 21, who has food allergies, became a vegetarian probably 3 to 4 years ago, and it’s really been fun, but also challenging. We’re gonna take a quick commercial break but when we come back from it, I want to hear about how you got your family on board and about some of your favorite recipes. We’ll be back after a quick break.

[Ad break]

Katie (16:11):
Okay, Jenny, we’re back from the break and I wanna hear about how your family got on board with becoming more plant-based. We are including more and more plant-based recipes into our lives because my daughter is a vegetarian. We make a lot of deconstructed meals where we’ll do taco bowls and my sons will put on steak and chicken and she’ll do barbecued cauliflower or something. So we do a lot of that. But I’m curious, how did you get everyone on board with veggie? Was it a family decision, was it something you encouraged? Tell us.

Jenny (16:46):
Yeah, I mean, basically, the beauty of having older kids is that they’re bringing ideas to the table as much as you are and they were reading about what was happening to the environment and they were coming home and talking to us about how we could make such a difference by dialing back on meat. We’ve been doing the Meatless Monday kinda haphazardly over the years but we really felt like we could do better than that. I was at an advantage that I had two, three willing players in this game and so they all wanted to make it work, which was nice. But you know, if you don’t have that situation, there are so many ways to do it. Because I mean, first of all, if you looked at your repertoire of meals right now, I’ll bet you could come up with like, six or seven that are plant-based already without even really ear-marking them that way. Right, do you?

Katie (17:49):
Sure. Yes, absolutely, absolutely. 

Jenny (17:51):
Because when I did that I was like, oh, we have salad pizza all the time, everyone loves that, we have black bean burritos, everyone loves that, we have butternut squash soup. I mean, we had tons and tons of them. So like, in some ways, if you’re cooking for little kids and you have those to lean on, you might wanna just not even tell them you’re going plant-based. We didn’t just sit down and say, we’re gonna do this. I kind of did it on my own and I remember my daughter like, even though she was totally on board with not eating meat, she kinda said to me after like two weeks, “I haven’t really seen a piece of chicken on this dinner table for a little while.” [Katie laughs] So, it did take her a little while to pick up on the fact that we were doing it. I just didn’t announce it, and I think in a lot of ways that helped and it made me realize that you can do it. The other thing you can do is what you said you were doing with your family is like, always have options just for everybody. You have the tacos and you have the beans and the avocado and everything, but you also just have a small thing of the steak or the turkey or whatever else your kids like. But they get used to seeing the way it’s supposed to look, which is just plant-based. But no one’s gonna starve if there’s something waiting in the wings in the beginning and I think that’s a nice way to ease into it.

Katie (19:17):
Yeah, it makes so much sense to just figure out the recipes that we’re cooking all the time. Because we also do a lot of things, like, when you said your sort of go-to recipes, all summer long, we’ve been eating this arugula, watermelon, feta salad and we will occasionally put shrimp on top of it or grilled flank steak for the people in the house who are eating that. Whereas my daughter might be having grilled tofu. So you know, you can always figure out ways of mixing and matching a little bit, but—

Jenny (19:47):
Yeah. It’s hard in the beginning but then you see you can do it. Another thing that we did a lot was we looked at our old favorites that did have meat in it and thought about ways like, oh would they work if we just gave them a makeover? And some of them don’t necessarily work.

Katie (20:06):
What’s an example of something that does work?

Jenny (20:08):
For instance, if you’ve read the blog you’ve probably made this. We have a turkey chili that we’ve been making forever.

Katie (20:15):
Yes.

Jenny (20:15):
It’s a really basic turkey chili recipe, and so we just decided to, you know, slowly omit the turkey. It calls for beans, I think the original recipe called for black beans. We slowly started upping the beans and decreasing the turkey, and then eventually the turkey just disappeared altogether and it was fine. You could probably do that with like, chicken noodle soup, I’m thinking. I dunno, you could have…there’s no recipe for this in the book, but I’m just thinking you could do vegetable broth with carrots and onions and probably no one would really know.

Katie (20:56):

Exactly. You know, it’s funny you mention the chili because I don’t think this was your recipe but my husband makes this wonderful black bean chili, and this is not gonna be the culinary term but he like, smashes the beans so they become almost like a paste. It really has like a richness to it, where they’re not stand-alone beans. If you can imagine like muddling your chili. [laughs]

Jenny (21:22):
Oh yeah. No that sounds delicious. Good consistency, kind of.

Katie (21:27):
Yeah, exactly. It has that meatiness to it, which is so amazing.

 Jenny (21:32):
I’ll also just say, this is something that I’ve done, cooking for kids in my whole career but I really kind of upped the ante with it with vegetarian cooking but I made a point to always, especially in the beginning, there’s a whole chapter in my book about this called “Making Sure You Have a Hook” and there always needs to be one hook on the plate, meaning one thing on the plate that you’re excited to eat. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be super healthy, it can be like yogurt flatbread. I have like a kind of a spicy red lentil stew in the book and no one was really that excited about eating it, but then I added a homemade flatbread to it—and homemade flatbread is as easy as making pancakes, it’s so easy, and if you add yogurt to it, it just gives it a nice tang, and you know, fresh warm bread right out of the skillet, that’s the most exciting thing you can put on the dinner table in my house.

Katie (22:33):
Oh my god, my 14-year-old, yes, he wants to come to eat with you. He is all about bread, that sounds yummy.

 Jenny (22:38):
Yeah, and if you’re scooping up the lentils with that, then they aren’t gonna be so hard to choke down. And I have tons of hooks like that and suggestions in the book. A hook could be, my daughter loved Cesar salad dressing, so we started just having Cesar salad dressing in the refrigerator all the time and using it for every salad or using it on chickpeas. 

 Katie (23:09):
I saw that I think on your social media recently. It was like, Chickpea Cesar salad, I was like that sounds so delicious. 

Jenny (23:15):
That is literally the recipe that converted—

Katie (23:18):

And you roast the chickpeas, just to be clear, it’s not like hummus-y chickpeas. 

Jenny (23:22):
That’s one of the hooks. Basically, you can roast them, or your can pan fry them in a deep skillet, but yeah, you just toss them in olive oil. If we’re doing it in a skillet, you pour like a generous amount of olive oil in the pan and then you just add your chickpeas as dry as possible just because they’ll spit otherwise, and then just keep them still, you don’t have to toss them constantly, you want them to get crispy over medium heat. Toss, toss, toss. Maybe 8 to 10 minutes later, using a slatted spoon, you take them out, out them on a paper towel-lined plate, add salt, pepper, cayenne, smoke paprika if you want, or none of those, or just salt and pepper, it’s fine. But then that’s like, that to me has kinda replaced the chicken pieces for the thing I kind of default to when I’m like, what’s my protein tonight? I’ll use those crispy chickpeas in a Cesar salad, that’s my kids' favorite dinner now. Or I’ll add it to that yogurt flatbread with like, some tamarind sauce and some yogurt. Or I’ll add it to a bowl with barley and in the winter some Brussel sprouts and some sort of nice dressing. So it’s like the beginning of dinner and that’s…I’m lucky in that I’ve convinced my kids to like them. [Katie laughs] Chickpeas when they were just kinda raw and whirled into hummus didn’t excite my children at all, but shocking when you fry them…

Katie (24:54):
Of course, everything is good when it’s fried. It’s funny that you said that with the yogurt too because we stumbled across this recipe, I think it’s on the Smitten Kitchen, another blog that I follow and it’s the same thing, it’s like roasted chickpeas with smoked paprika, which is so divine and I had never used it before. She does it with roasted sweet potatoes which are cooked kind of in like a honey chili sauce, and it’s like hot and smokey, but then you serve it with greek yogurt that you’ve mixed lemon into so it’s like, it cuts the heat, it’s so delicious.

Jenny (25:27):
I think smoked paprika is a very crucial ingredient in a vegetarian pantry because it kinda mimics the bacon-y flavor that you can, you know, it makes up for a lot that’s missing.

Katie (25:45):
Yeah, it’s so good.

Jenny (25:46):
Some people feel very strongly against it but I use it, I have a recipe for—

 Katie (25:50):
I feel very strongly for it, I think people need—

Jenny (25:52):
It can be overused I think. But I have a recipe that I make all the time called, smokey tangy pinto beans that are like the base of a burrito bowl and you basically just add pinto beans, they can be canned, obviously drained. You sauté onions and garlic and maybe some red pepper flakes and you add tomato paste and the beans then add smoked paprika, garlic, I can’t remember what else. It’s like a smokiness and then you take them off the heat and you pour red wine vinegar into them so they’re kinda tangy and smokey and they are delicious like on, just on brown rice with just your classic kind of burrito bowl top things, or they’re just delicious on their own. The smokiness really gives them the depth, even if they’re canned. I think smoked paprika helps to hide a little bit of the tinniness that you can get from canned beans if you’re using beans from a can.

Katie (27:01):
This is making my mouth water. I was joking at the beginning that people are gonna be hungry. We’re recording this close to lunch time and all I want are smokey pinto beans right now. Food is such a big part of our lives and I think it’s such a big part of what makes summer fun because we eat stuff in summer that we don’t get other times of the year. I mean it’s watermelon, popsicles, lobster rolls, all of this delicious stuff. Do you have a go-to summer dish?

Jenny (27:29):

Yeah, I mean…

Katie (27:31):
How about for weekday dinner, and then a go-to summer dish for like, when you’re like splashing out and it’s a party and you’re entertaining?

Jenny (27:39):
You know it’s funny, when I’m having a party, I’m entertaining and splashing out, it doesn’t look that much different from my normal [both laugh] dinner table. I don’t know how to use that gear, I’m literally always in the home, homey food that everyone recognizes and likes gear. 

Katie (27:56):
Good, that’s a good gear.

Jenny (27:57):
I would say like, so a go-to, like if it’s a fish night, our salmon salad is pretty popular on the blog.

 Katie (28:07):
That is one of my favorite—I’m sorry to keep interrupting you, but I get so excited because that is literally one of my favorite dishes from Dinner: A Love Story, and I can still remember serving it to my kids, and my husband’s like, "I don’t know if they’re gonna eat salmon,” and it became something that we all love to eat, so I want to thank you for that. 

Jenny (28:23):
You’re very welcome. I don’t know why that recipe is so appealing but it is, and it’s so simple.

Katie (28:28):
Oh, it’s so yummy, and the avocado and the potatoes and the green beans, I mean it’s like summer in a bowl, it’s yummy. 

Jenny (28:35):
We eat it year-round, but right now, when we’re recording this in early August, this is the prime time to make it just because the corn and the tomatoes are good, and also you can grill the salmon as opposed to just roasting it which I think adds such a nice dimension. But for people who are listening, who don’t know it, you basically toss grilled salmon with vegetables that have all been boiled in the same water, so it’s also a really easy, minimal pot dish. You simmer your corn and your green beans and your potatoes and you keep scooping everything out with a slatted spoon. And then you toss that with the tomatoes, and cucumbers, and scallions, and whatever dressing you want. I use a really basic, all-purpose red wine-based vinaigrette but really anything you want, and then herbs. And it’s so hearty, and filling and healthy and I just never get sick of it. So, that would be my go-to favorite summer meal for right now. 

 Truthfully, I would make that for guests too. I really, I swear to god I make the same thing every time people come over, [Katie laughs] but I love a just, there’s a picnic chicken on my blog, where the hardest thing about it is you have to marinate the chicken pieces in the marinade for 24 hours. It’s like soy sauce, orange juice, olive oil, smoked paprika, kind of marinade. And there’s onion and garlic and you make the in a blender and then you marinate the chicken in it and it gets so flavorful. And then you grill it and you can make it ahead of time if you want because it’s like, great at room temperature, it’s great warm. And then the salads is where I kind of go off. Whatever is fresh at the market, I’ll just surround a big platter of that picnic chicken with some kind of special salad, like if it’s tomato season. Even just sliced tomatoes with—

Katie (30:34):
Yes, like red onions. We love sliced tomato, red onion, balsamic. I love that you said you have to like get a little bit organized and do it 24 hours in advance because I do think that sometimes when you marinate stuff, it really does make such a difference.

Jenny (30:46):
Yeah, it does, it does. And like, I made the mistake of writing recently like, oh my god that picnic chicken… Because my neighbor, this is how my life is, everywhere I walk people are like, “Oh your picnic chicken is marinating in my fridge right now.” It’s so funny, on my block, everyone is always cooking what I’m making, but one, my neighbor was like, “Oh I’m gonna make it tonight and I’m just gonna start marinating it now, do you think it’ll be okay?” And I was like, “Of course it’ll be fine. How bad could it be?” I got the text from him the next day being like, “Not as good as 24 hours.” I was wrong. But I think maybe he was comparing it to the 24-hour one. If you’re just having it you know, like having never tried the 24-hour marinade—

 Katie (31:29):
I’m sure it’s still delicious. My husband is very organized and very much a 24-hour-marinator, and I’m very much your neighbor, where I’m like let’s just throw some stuff on this and hope it works out. [laughs]

Jenny (31:43):
I love something like if you can think ahead to do the 24-marinade, it’s so nice because that’s like all the work.

Katie (31:50):
Yeah, totally. Marinades are magic, they make all the difference. 

So Jenny, I wanna ask you a question. When I look to see about having you on the show and figuring out how I could get in touch with you, I Googled you and I was trying to find your phone number, and then I just approached you through your website and you said yes, which made my day. But when I did Google you, not like a creepy stalker but just as research, I saw a piece that you wrote recently for The New York Times called “Seven Cookbooks for Summer.” I’m gonna put a link to that article in the show notes, I’m also gonna put a link to that delicious salmon salad in the show notes, but I wanna ask you, was it hard to select only seven books? And for our listeners, if they were gonna pick one, which is the one they shouldn’t miss from that list?

Jenny (32:35):
Oh boy, it is really hard.

 Katie (32:37):
[laughs] I’m putting you on the spot. 

Jenny (32:38):
No, no, no. it’s really hard to pick those books, I have to say. I’ve done that roundup…The Times does a fall cookbook roundup, and a spring/summer cookbook roundup so I’ve done a couple of those before, and a) it’s a lot of work so every time they assign it I’m like, do I really wanna do this? But it’s all work that it’s nice work if you can get it kind of work. So, I always end up saying yes, of course. And yeah, and then I get just tons of cookbooks sent to my house and I get to pour over all of them and read people’s personal stories. I’m such a sucker for the ones where they’re like love letters to their mothers, you know, those kinds of books.

Katie (33:22):
Yes.

 Jenny (33:23):
Where they just don’t know how they learned to cook and then here are these unbelievably simple, beautiful, gorgeous recipes. But I would say, this year’s crop, the Hetty McKinnon book is amazing, To Asia, With Love. She would laugh if she heard me say this because there’s literally not a platform that I have access to that I haven’t promoted it on. I just really love her book. She’s Australian born to Chinese immigrants and she basically found, she was always trying to assimilate like by, she wasn’t really, she didn’t really discover who she was until she started cooking her mother’s food. Her food is just a mash-up of traditional Chinese cooking but also with western influences and she just really, her flavors are flavors that I love. And the book is called To Asia, With Love and I’ve been cooking from it all summer, I just love it.

Katie (34:18):
It sounds fabulous, I’m sorry to put you on the spot. I know picking a favorite out of that list is probably like picking your favorite child but that one does sound really special. 

Jenny, we’re approaching the end of our time together, but I thought we could do something fun that I’ve been doing this season if you’re up for it. It’s kind of a speed round, would you be willing to do this with me?

Jenny (34:37):
Sure.

Katie (34:37):
This is like a bing, ba-da-bang, quickie quick quick. So, favorite vegetable.

Jenny (34:44):
Tomato.

Katie (34:45):
Most underrated vegetable.

Jenny (34:48):
Zucchini, at least in my house. I grew up loving zucchini and my family just hates it and it makes me crazy so I still have yet to figure out ways to glorify it, but yes, underrated in my house, not in the world.

Katie (35:02):
The poor zucchini. Okay, pantry superhero.

Jenny (35:07):
Pantry superhero…wow, that is a really hard one. Let me think, I’m like completely blanking—

Katie (35:19):
I think smoked paprika belongs on that. [laughs]

Jenny (35:19):

Sure, smoked paprika, just because it’s yeah, a tip of the tongue but…Oh my god, I’m not in my house right now or else I would open the pantry. I mean, like really good olive oil, obviously, is crucial to everything.

Katie (35:32):
That’s a good one. How about this one, might be easier. Never in your grocery cart?

Jenny (35:38):
Never in my grocery cart, olives. I don’t like olives.

 Katie (35:42):
I can’t get behind that one. [laughs]

Jenny (35:45):
No one can, it’s very strange, I don’t expect anyone to get behind me honestly.

Katie (35:50):

Okay, you will pry this kitchen tool out of my cold, dead hand?

Jenny (35:55):
Wooden spoon, slatted spoon, or a spatula, I use those on repeat.

Katie (36:00):
Okay. The one dish that cannot be F-ed up.

Jenny (36:07):
I mean, I love a braise, you know you can’t mess up a braise. Like a braised pork shoulder or a braised chicken. The more you forget about it and ignore it, the better and meltier and more tender it gets.

Katie (36:22):
Yes, I agree. That’s a very forgiving cut of meat and a very forgiving treatment. How about, this one might be a little tricky, it’s a little bit what we just did, but your favorite cookbook hands down. Not just your summer cookbook, but what is your go-to? What is your cookbook bible?

Jenny (36:38):
I mean, that’s literally impossible, but I will tell you the one that is the most sentimental is Marcella Hazan’s, Classics of Italian Cooking, which is where my husband gave me—oh no, sorry, oh my god I completely made that up. I bought a copy on my way home from Italy, where I was with my soon-to-be husband. I went up to the bookstore and I said I want to learn how to cook as they do in Italy and I was like 21-years-old and I was literally cooking with garlic powder instead of real garlic and didn’t know the difference. And he handed me that book and I like, to this day, I always think of that as such an amazing moment, that he knew to do that. Marcella Hazan is obviously the master, and her way of cooking is just like, simple Italian food, that’s my jam.

Katie (37:29):
I love it. We have that on our shelf too, it’s a great one. Okay, here’s my last one, all winter long, I wait to eat this summertime favorite.

Jenny (37:38):
Oh I mean, I just wrote about this yesterday but corn and tomatoes. Don’t ask me to choose but the two of them together, we’ve had them for dinner almost every night since we’ve been on vacation. I don’t even have to come up with new ways to eat it. I’m happy to eat a tomato raw and corn on the cob with butter every night and be happy.

Katie (37:57):
Yum, I’m with you. Only in summer. Jenny this has been so much fun and I’m not even kidding, I’m going to literally hang up our call here and text my friend Katie and just tell her how much fun I had. I so appreciate you finding time to squeeze the show in, I know you’re on vacation. I loved hearing about The Weekday Vegetarians which is coming out, and I would love fo you to tell our listeners where they can keep finding your food recipes and all your inspiration and where they could find the book and when it’s coming.

Jenny (38:28):
You can find my book, the weekday vegetarians anywhere books are sold and you can find me on Substack, I have a newsletter that I send out once a week, it’s called Dinner: A Love Story. And I’m on Instagram @dinneralovestory and on Twitter @dinnerlovestory, no “A”. But yeah, all the usual places. 

Katie (38:50):
Thank you so much, Jenny, this was an absolute blast, I will be cooking you all summer long.

Jenny (38:54):
[laughs] I hope cooking my food and not me.

Katie (38:56):

[laughs] Yes, yes. This wraps A Certain Age, a show for women over 50 who are aging without apology. I hope you’ll join me this Wednesday for a special birthday show. That’s right, A Certain Age is celebrating one year of podcasting and aging out loud. Tune in Wednesday for a show of birthday fun, giveaways, and more. 

And next Monday we have the last of our August shows. I’m joined by the founder of Campowerment which brings the spirit of summer camp fun, community, and personal development to women across the country all year long. 

Special thanks to Michael Mancini who composed and produced our theme music. See you next time and until then: age boldly, beauties. 

Season Four
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A Certain Age Turns One! A Birthday Show with Host Katie Fogarty
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A Love Letter to Parents + New Americans with Author Angie Kim