Get Smitten in Your Kitchen with Deb Perelman

Annmarie Kelly:

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So I have a love hate relationship with cooking. I love gathering around a dinner table and eating, drinking, and laughing with good friends. I love conversations that stretch and linger late into the darkness as folks hang out over the last bit of sauce on the plate, the last drop of wine in the bottle, the last belly laugh at the phrase we've repeated so often it's become an inside joke. I love gathering with friends and family, but I don't always like the work that goes into the meal to get it to the table. And I hate when I follow a recipe hoping to wow people, and then the steps are unnecessarily complicated or the results are just meh. And don't even get me started about weeknight dinner mayhem. I work and have meetings, and my kids need to get to and from their myriad activities. If I try to make something new, it almost always takes 10 times too long, and then I'm pivoting to the same three meals, the tacos, chicken, spaghetti that it feels like we eat every single week.

And as bad as this is, my cooking conundrums used to be even worse. The first time I baked for my husband's birthday, I set off the fire alarm. The whole apartment building was evacuated. When my youngest kids were tiny, I remember accidentally putting the ice cream in the pantry and then trying to use it to make pancakes the next morning when we ran out of milk. I have burned, singed, and outright ruined everything from soup to pizza. So today's guest has saved me from myself. She's not just a great cook. She's been like my fairy godmother. She taught me how to roast a chicken and roll Ukrainian dumplings from scratch. She taught me not to fear mushrooms, and that if I didn't want to crank up the grill, I could barbecue ribs in my oven and no one would ever know. She and I have cooked over 100 meals together, but until today's conversation, we'd never met. Maybe she can be your food fairy godmother too. Deb Perelman is a self-taught home cook, photographer, and creator of the award-winning blog, Smitten Kitchen.

Deb likes bourbon, artichokes, french fries, things that taste like burnt sugar, and baked goods with funny names. In previous iterations of her so-called career, she's been a record store shift supervisor, a scrawler of happy birthday on bakery cakes, an art therapist, and a technology reporter. She likes her current gig, the one where she wakes up and cooks whatever she feels like that day, the best. Deb is the author of the Smitten Kitchen cookbook, "Smitten Kitchen Every Day", and her latest book that's out right now, "Smitten Kitchen Keepers". She lives in New York City with her husband and their children.

Deb Perelman, welcome to Wild Precious Life.

Deb Perelman:

Thanks for having me here.

Annmarie Kelly:

So, on the one hand, you and I met like 20 seconds ago, but I'm sure you get this all the time, but on the other hand, I feel like we've known each other for like over a decade, or at least I've known you. You've have blessed my holiday tables, your cookies and crumb cakes have earned me compliments at bake sales, compliments which I have wholeheartedly accepted on both of our behalfs, sometimes crediting you and sometimes not. We've spent birthdays together, you and me, and one truly exceptional Mother's Day Tea.

Deb Perelman:

I enjoyed those events, and I appreciate you having me there. It's wild to me. I love it. It makes me so happy. Sometimes I think of these dishes that I've created and sent off into the world having this great life, and it makes me... Okay, now I sound absolutely insane, but it makes me feel like they're my little kids going off and having a good life. Sometimes somebody would be like, "I made your cake last weekend," and we were at my lake house and they sent me a picture of this cake on a patio with the sunset behind it. I'm like, "My cake is doing so well in life." Anyway. Well, I sound unhinged.

Annmarie Kelly:

Your cake's been to Tuscany or traveled to places.

Deb Perelman:

I'm so happy for it.

Annmarie Kelly:

Oh, that's amazing. And even, I was thinking about this, beyond the food, which is immaculate, I also feel like you've been a conduit for my relationships. When my oldest daughter was, say, 13, and we could barely communicate without arguing, we could always meet each other on the pages of one of your recipes. I really do mean that. I think I said this in the pitch to your agent, I was like, your potato vareniki helped my family survive the pandemic. We limped along, but you fed us. A good friend of mine is truly convinced that your coconut cake cured her head lice.

Deb Perelman:

Oh my gosh.

Annmarie Kelly:

I'm just saying it.

Deb Perelman:

I'm going to put that right on its bio page. Skip over WebMD, and make this cake instead. It's magic. That's amazing. I hope it's true. That would be great, because those lice people cost a lot of money. Not that I know.

Annmarie Kelly:

We brought it over and combed him out and ate cake. And I'm just saying. I'm putting it out there guys. And your lasagna has occasionally saved my marriage. I have two frozen. They're in my freezer right now, just in case, for a rainy marital day.

Deb Perelman:

That's amazing. Is this the vegetable one or the bolognese one?

Annmarie Kelly:

So it depends. These are the bolognese, because my children are on a zucchini strike. I keep hiding it in things, and I tell them there's zucchini hidden in the bolognese. I prefer the veggie. They prefer the meat.

Deb Perelman:

I know we all need our arc with zucchini where we're like, "This is bland. It's slippery. It's everywhere I don't want it to be," and then ultimately you come around because zucchini is everywhere and you have to learn how to cook with it.

Annmarie Kelly:

Yeah. It is ubiquitous. But I invited you here to talk about your latest cookbook, "Smitten Kitchen Keepers", which everyone who's listening should just go ahead and go out and buy for every foodie on their holiday list. But I really did also invite you here to thank you for this utterly one-sided friendship the past 10 or 15 years where we've been friends and you didn't know it because your food has enriched my table, but you, Deb Perelman, this stranger who feels like family, you've totally enriched our lives.

Deb Perelman:

I want to thank you, because I wouldn't get to do this thing that I love doing so much if it wasn't for these experiences, so thank you. I had never in a million years thought when I started my site that there would be strangers making these recipes part of their lives, and that it would allow me to keep doing it, and so it's very significant to me that I'm allowed to. So thank you.

Annmarie Kelly:

Well, we are super grateful. And it's astonishing to me that anyone in our audience might not yet know who you are and what you're about, but for the two and a half listeners we have who don't know, I wonder if you could just begin by telling us your story.

Deb Perelman:

Sure. I started a food blog called Smitten Kitchen in 2006. I thought it would last six months, because why would you go to somebody who barely knew how to cook herself for recipes? And the opposite happened. I think people enjoyed that I figured things out as I went. And so I've had the site for 16 years now. There's over a thousand recipes on it. Should actually do a count. It's far more than a thousand. So I published my third cookbook, and it's called, "Smitten Kitchen Keepers", and it is all about recipes that I hope we will want to have forever, the kind of recipes when you're like, "This is the one. This the recipe that I want to make forever." And I hope you have that experience at least a few times while making things from the book.

Annmarie Kelly:

No, we definitely did. This is a little bit off topic because we're going to circle back around to the book, but I swear in one of your recipes from the way, way back, don't you tell us that you met your now or former husband, actually? Didn't you meet a guy on your website and marry him? Am I making that up?

Deb Perelman:

No, you're not, actually. So Smitten Kitchen started in 2006, but in 2003 everybody had a blog. So I had one called Kittens.

Annmarie Kelly:

I had a blog.

Deb Perelman:

It's not a secret. It just doesn't come up that much. And I don't know. You didn't need to have a theme or a social media strategy. There was no social media. You could just write some stuff on Typepad or Blogspot. It was fine. So that's what I was doing. And I was living in New York, finding New York quirky and amusing. I obviously have a lot of random stories I like to tell. And I was going out on a lot of bad dates and I thought, "I'm just going to write about this. This is just content." So I started writing about bad dates, and I think I got to about two before I went on one with my husband because he was reading the site. We basically just met for a drink, but we got married two years later, so I could no longer write about dating, because that would be very uncomfortable for everybody.

But what was happening, and I think it does happen a lot sometimes at these points in your life when you're like, "Maybe I don't want to go out for every meal or order in. Maybe it's time for me to start figuring out how to cook." And I thought I knew how to cook, but I realized in a very practical way I didn't know how to cook. I didn't have a go-to recipe for spaghetti or quiche or meatballs or chicken noodle soup or split pea soup or any of these things I thought I knew how to cook. But I'm really obsessed with this idea of go-to recipes. I don't want to play roulette when I make a cake. I want to know that this cake is going to work. And so that was really what I was doing. I was just collecting recipes and saying, "If you make this cake in this order and you do it this way and you bake it in this pan, it's perfect. Let me write that down and tell people so they don't make it the other way." And I just haven't stopped. It's been 16 years of that.

Annmarie Kelly:

That's bananas. So it was both useful for trolling for men and baking a cake, which I mean those are two skills. I mean, when I got married, I thought I knew how to cook, but it turns out I knew how to eat, which is not the same thing. I remember the first time I followed a recipe to make chicken stock, which was just one of those things that appeared and was always simmering on the back burner at my mom's house in the house where I grew up. I just thought, "Oh, I'll learn to do that. How hard could it be?" And it wasn't as bad as the Bridget Jones' Blue Soup twine incident, but it was definitely like that. I had used a plastic thread to tie together stuff that everyone would've just chucked it in the pot, but I was following a fancy, "Tie the bouquet together," and then it was plastic thread and the whole thing tasted plastic and I threw it out.

Deb Perelman:

Your grandmother didn't make chicken noodle soup with the bouquet garni? She didn't tether herbs from her field outside together with a little rope like a French chef taught you to? I feel like from the early days I've always bristled a little bit against chef cooking. I love going to restaurants. I love being wowed by chefs. But I've always found it strange that we've decided that these are the people who are going to teach us to cook at home. It's not the same cooking. It's not what we want to do. I want to learn from grandmothers. I want to learn from people who had like six kids and nobody asked them if they had an opinion on the best chicken stock. You just had to figure it out. And these are the people that I want to channel when I'm cooking. And maybe they were making bouquet garnis, and I think that's amazing, and I think if you find that it improves your soup, you should definitely do it, but I just think that I felt like was getting my cooking information from the wrong places from people with different goals from me.

Annmarie Kelly:

The stories you tell are really forgiving, because I would say your website, Smitten Kitchen, is a bit of an anathema to me. If I usually want a recipe quickly, we're trying chicken tikka masala for something or homemade enchilada sauce, I will go to a random site and I am going to scroll right to the recipe. I don't want to read some well-intentioned cooks insipid explanation of how she served enchiladas with cornbread, and wasn't that hilarious? I'm a jump to the recipe kind of girl. That said, I love your stories. I love the kitchen cataclysm, or the admission that she made the brownies without flour. I'm on the journey with you. Why do you serve your recipes with a side of storytelling?

Deb Perelman:

I enjoy the story. I think that a recipe without a story is just a list of ingredients. Tell me why. Tell me how. Tell me how it fit into your life. Tell me why it matters. I feel like that's interesting. I don't necessarily need to read the head note every time, that's why I have a jump to the recipe. I also don't care if you never read it. It does not hurt my feelings if you don't want to hear what happened on Thursday. It's fine. You don't have to leave me a comment about how you didn't read it either, or get really mad on Twitter about it. You could just not read it. But it doesn't bother me at all. I totally get it. I think it's interesting. Even early on the web, there were a lot of recipe indexes. You could find a recipe for anything.

But why? Why this one? What does it do different? Does it know why it does it differently? What does it do better? Is there a technique in here you want to point me to? Is there something that's going to make life easier? Is there something that's an extra step that you want to explain why it's worth it? Listen, I'm a very loquacious person, so the idea of not explaining these things, I can't imagine why somebody wouldn't want to know those things. So perhaps that's why I have the job I do. But I think it's very interesting, and I want to hear how recipes fit into people's lives. I love the comments section. I don't care if you change every ingredient as long as you're not super mad at me that it didn't work, but I don't think that happens as much as people think. So I love to hear how it worked for you at home, "Oh, I used dried parsley. I didn't have chicken legs, I used chicken thighs," whatever. Tell me. Give it to me. I want it all.

Annmarie Kelly:

I will say, when I told the kids that we were test previewing a Smitten Kitchen cookbook, we all lost our minds a little bit. They were just bananas. I let them scroll through and pick out recipes that interested them. Right away I realized that my mistake, because I had selected things like toasted ricotta gnocchi with pistachio pesto and winter squash soup with red onion crisp, and they're just like, "Ooh, cookies. French fries."

Deb Perelman:

"Did you not see the cookies, Mom?" I know. I think the-

Annmarie Kelly:

So is the content... Go ahead.

Deb Perelman:

No. I'm like, "I think they'll like the gnocchi." No. Absolutely. Yeah. My kids don't go into the book and they're like, "Oh, the winter squash soup with red onion crisp, Mom. Definitely that for dinner." They want the chicken parm. I think it's very useful to have this kind of feedback though, because sometimes those of us who cook a lot who might get bored of cooking, which is such a privilege in itself. How lucky we are to be so well fed and not worry about where our food's coming from to be like, "I'm bored of this thing where I have to feed myself." I get that. But for those of us who are, I think it can be very easy to get into this more esoteric space where it's cooking for decoration, cooking to cure boredom. And I think it's okay if you feel this way, but it sometimes can be helpful to have a kid around that's like, "Spaghetti. That looks good." To have that voice in your ear. And then you can say, "Well what can we do with spaghetti to make it a little more exciting than spaghetti usually is?"

Annmarie Kelly:

Yeah. No, we were totally in a back to school eating rut where it was like, "We're having these soft tacos that I know how to make, and we're having this particular pasta with olive oil and garlic because it's quick." So we were in a definite rut. So as a consequence, when we were previewing your book, we cooked our fannies off and we made bizarre meals. We brunch on the slumped parmesan frittata.

Deb Perelman:

How did you like it?

Annmarie Kelly:

Everybody ate it. I couldn't call it frittata for my son. I had to call it triangle scrambled eggs, and he ate it.

Deb Perelman:

How old is he? You're like, "He's 17."

Annmarie Kelly:

Yeah, he's 22. No, he's 10. So my 17 year old was all about the slumped frittata, but my son needed to call it scrambled eggs to eat it. But then we paired it with the caramelized cinnamon sugar french toast, which I was not going to make it all, because I'm like, "I already have my go-to french toast recipe," and everybody agreed that it was better. So I was not going to make it. I'm like, "This is cinnamon toast. I know how to make that." But it was so puddle-y and almost pudding-y in the middle, and so crispy on the outside. Just bananas. Someone was in a fight and came to the table to make up with the fight to be able to eat the food. I think you should call that conflict resolution-

Deb Perelman:

This [inaudible 00:17:40] is like reading a common section. Like I said, I hold my breath until I hear how the recipe goes for other people, so I'm going to hold my breath less on these recipes knowing that you tried them.

Annmarie Kelly:

Yeah, just call it conflict resolution toast, I think is what I would call it.

Deb Perelman:

I love it. I stopped making that a long time ago. I made it a bunch of times, and then my husband was really always into it. I'm like, "Well, here's the recipe, Babe," and so it's one of the five recipes of mine that's in the book but not published, well, at the moment it was, that he makes, because it's his recipe now. So he was making it every weekend for a while. It was really nice. I should remind him. Its been a few weeks.

Annmarie Kelly:

Yes, that would be a good husband one. We also made the french onion soup, and I've made french onion soup before, impatiently. And I like that you told us that the ghost of Julia Child was not going to haunt us if we didn't brown the onions more, if we didn't cook them down, but I lost track of them while I was making other things and they, just onions and butter, cooked down to that indescribably delicious jammy... It was so amazing. I've made french onion soup before, but I've never quite nailed it, and that was delightful. We've also broken all of the crocks that we used to cook that in, so we only had teeny tiny ramekins. So everyone got in that one. We got four tablespoons of soup aggressively cheesed and breaded on top. So we made tiny ones and then we just served the soup in bowls next to it.

Deb Perelman:

You could also do a casserole. You could take your dutch oven or your soup pot that goes in the oven, or you can even do shallow in a nine by 13 and put all the cheese toast on top and scoop it into the bowl. I love the idea of family style or party sized French onion soup.

Annmarie Kelly:

Yeah. That would've been a good idea.

Deb Perelman:

But you wouldn't get the individual crust on your bowl, though. I'm glad you liked it though.

Annmarie Kelly:

It was delightful. We finished that one with chocolate cake because my son wanted to have a contribution. So that was French onion soup and chocolate cake. But out of the whirlwind experience, I had two sets of questions. Some of my questions are logical, like how do you decide which recipes go into the book and go to the website? But most of my questions were just emotional and they circled around how in the hell do you do this, because I was winded after a few days of trying to cook and take notes on recipes. How do you do this?

Deb Perelman:

I don't cook like that all the time. Are you kidding me? No, I'm not going to tell you about the boring chicken cutlets I made or the leftovers we reheat. Not because I'm trying to build some image of myself as some sort of domestic goddess, I just don't think it's a very interesting story to tell. I show up when I have something to say, and when I'm like, "Let me tell you about this new thing." And when the site goes quiet, it means I wasn't doing anything interesting for a couple of weeks. This is the reality. Or the recipes aren't ready. But no, I want to tell you about the things that are worth talking about.

So no, there's already like, "Ooh, I've got a bunch of things this afternoon. I don't know what we're eating for dinner. I don't know. It's not going to be very exciting. Maybe I'll get a steak, that sounds really ambitious though." So yeah. No, these are not every day. This might be, in a good week, one or two days, have a really cool dish that's homemade and special and thought out, but the rest of the days are just regular, in praise of normal lives.

Annmarie Kelly:

Right. So you are not part robot, because I think that was one of my questions, "Is this woman part robot?"

Deb Perelman:

No, my god. No. These were the things I was excited to tell you about. I've never been interested in talking about grilled chicken breasts. I just can't do it. I've done it once, but I have to feel like I have something to say. I don't want to ask you to show up to read about something that you've already seen a million times, or it's already out there.

Annmarie Kelly:

You know what other recipe was just hilarious was the whole lemon poppy seed cake.

Deb Perelman:

You made it?

Annmarie Kelly:

I was really hesitant, because I'm like, "Wait a minute. We're just going to put this..." I felt like Cookie Monster making a recipe, just chucking a whole lemon into the food processor. There was that Saturday Night Live skit with the Bass-O-Matic. I was calling it the Bass-O-Matic lemon poppy seed cake, and then I didn't have poppy seeds, and so it was Bass-O-Matic whole lemon chia seed cake. We had some substitutions, but it was great fun to just press my terrible food processor and try to beg it to shred down a lemon. I've never done that before.

Deb Perelman:

And how did you like it?

Annmarie Kelly:

So there were mixed reviews on that one, because some of the kids were like, "I taste the pit," because you know how sometimes you get a lemon that you can tell it's too chunky, and others that are thin? I don't think it did a good enough job.

Deb Perelman:

Oh my God. I'm literally opening the book. I'm spiraling now. I'm like, "Didn't I mention about that?"

Annmarie Kelly:

You probably did. I'm not a careful reader.

Deb Perelman:

No, I have to check.

Annmarie Kelly:

You need the kind of lemon that the rest of us shouldn't be, right? You need a thin-skinned lemon. We should all be thick-skinned lemons. But I think I used a way too big one. I loved it.

Deb Perelman:

And you don't know you're getting from the store until you open it at all. It's not your fault.

Annmarie Kelly:

No. But I thought it was wicked fun. And we ate that one I think on the same night that we did the soup with the garlic and ginger, which was lovely. I make chicken soup all the time, but everyone gets tired of it, so it was a nice riff on the chicken soup.

Deb Perelman:

I like that one too, and I like that it's just a very, very, very simple weeknight-friendly... Ooh, I think that's what I'm going to make tonight. Thank you. My son was asking me. It's been a while. But I like the way you were just taking something very simple and then you're just adding a couple things, and it makes it a little more just not always grandma style. I was just remembering that in my first book I have a recipe for whole lemon bars. They're lemon bars, but they're made with a whole lemon. And that was the first time I started playing around with a whole lemon, and that was when I learned that sometimes you have these ones with like 1.5" thick skin, and sometimes you get a normal lemon, and I actually recommend it.

And I am realizing that I think when I was testing it, it worked with all the lemons for this book, so it was okay. But if you get one that's that thick, you can actually just cut the peel and the white off half of it. Leave the whole lemon inside, but you could just go cut half of the skin off, and then you're just getting half the white, and it can make it a little more muted.

Annmarie Kelly:

Yeah, that makes sense.

Deb Perelman:

I realize that it's very helpful for me to tell you this now, though.

Annmarie Kelly:

I'll just have to make it again. I also was wondering, this question I think could be two different ways, so it's either is there a food that's just too perfect that you shall never adapt because it's culinary perfection, it's out there, and you don't want to change it, or do you have an Achille's heel recipe? So I met a conductor once who admitted to having one piece that he said was just simply unconductable. So do you have something's perfect that you would never adapt, or something that you've tried a zillion times and you're like, "F it, I don't cook..." And I can't even think of anything you don't cook, because I'm like, "Scones? No, done. Broccoli, done. Colorful." I don't know.

Deb Perelman:

Oh, you don't notice what I don't cook. That doesn't mean I don't cook. I would say that I have a whole bunch of things that I don't cook, just because why would I make a croissant? I had the most amazing croissant for breakfast. I can't even explain. I have made croissants. I will never achieve this level of croissant-ing that I had this morning literally walking just a couple blocks to my apartment. I see no reason to do this. I don't make sushi either. I thought about it, but we have a lot of really great places I can get it and it's just not on my agenda. I feel like I'm not going to do it really well, and there are people who do it really well and I'd rather let them do it, and then I don't have to cook.

But, in terms of recipes that I can't get right, there's actually I would say a good several dozen of them, and those are usually I don't know if I'll ever get them right, or I tend to be working on a lot of recipes at once. Not actively, but I'll work on something, I'll hit a wall, I'll get frustrated. When I do it right, I will save all of the notes and I will try to write down what happened, why it didn't work, such as this carrot dish I made yesterday. I just can't get it right, and I feel like I needed to have a talk with myself that you've been coming back to this carrot dish trying to get it right. And so that was my note to myself on the document. And then what I'm hoping is at some point, and it's going to be so random, I'm going to be on a plane to Toronto and I'm going to be like, "I think I know what..." I'll be looking out the window and I'll remember something that I did with carrots once, or another vegetable.

I'm like, "I bet that's the thing," and then I'll add that to the new, and then when I come back to it, I'll do it. So I realize that was a very convoluted way to explain it, but I'm very often in the middle of many, many recipes that I can't get right and I'm just waiting for something to click into place or to just accept that it wasn't meant to be. I have a very old recipe on the site really from the earliest days. It's called brown butter brown sugar shorties, and it's the shortbread cookie made with brown butter and brown sugar, and they are... I cannot even explain. Just the smell of them. They're the ugliest cookie, and I have had a lot of cookies, and I have new cookies, but this is one of the best tasting things I've ever had. They don't work consistently. I mean, we're talking about 2008. That means I've been vexed by this recipe for 14 years, and every couple years I go back and I try something else to try to get them to work consistently for everybody and I don't.

And then, just a couple weeks ago I was trying to get a different recipe right, and I can't get that recipe right, and I realized that the base of it was the way to fix this recipe. I realize this is a very long explanation. I now have a solution for these cookies, and I can't wait to share it this winter. I'm just doing a little more testing.

Annmarie Kelly:

I always look out for the cookies. That's great.

Deb Perelman:

So it vexed me for a long time, and I can't wait. I literally already had one this morning along with the croissant. It's been a good day. I can't wait to share it.

Annmarie Kelly:

I'm enamored of this answer, because as a writer one of the things we're told is to always be revising, and sometimes revising means you've got to put something aside, like you're stuck on it. The character is stuck or the story is stuck or you're too close to it, you actually can't see it. So you put something aside, and I just put something aside again that I've been trying to write for years and I just haven't been able to nail it. So what you're describing makes total sense to me, because your brain is continuing to work on it even when your hands aren't mixing it right now. So that also makes me wonder if you have ever had literary aspirations beyond a cookbook. I think you're such a marvelous storyteller. Is there a murder mystery in your future where someone's poisoned by one of the dozen brownie recipes on your site, or maybe a memoir with recipes like "Water for Chocolate". But I don't know. Do you ever have aspirations to write something that's not a cookbook?

Deb Perelman:

Not really, no. It's weird. I think very much these are personal essays up front, then they relate to food, but it hasn't. I've been asked if I was going to write a book, but it's really just never... I'm happy with what I'm doing. I have written an occasional op-ed. Once in a while I'll write an article about something else. I do like doing a random op-ed here and there just to keep people awake about things I hate. I like it when people pay me to rant about things. Sometimes they're less contentious than others. This morning a friend was saying that she had to go sell cookies at a bake salad or a kid's school, and I was like, "Don't ever do the economics on it. You're going to get so mad you're going to write an op-ed," and then I remembered that I'd written one for the New York Times about how much I hate bake sales many years ago. So anyway, it went over really well as you can imagine.

So I do enjoy writing an odd piece here and there, but no, I don't think there's a novel inside me, and I think that's okay. There's enough novels inside other people. Let them get them out.

Annmarie Kelly:

Well, if you do write that brownie murder mystery, I'll be there for that. It's the content I'm here for.

Deb Perelman:

The confession has to be buried in the recipe head notes. I think somebody once sent me a tweet like this. It was like there's a murder mystery, but the confessions in the recipe's head notes, so nobody's ever read it and it was there the whole time.

Annmarie Kelly:

Deep in the comments. You mentioning bake sales made me think about the fact that I see your kids mentioned on the website from time to time, and baking with kids can be either a labor of love or hate depending on the day. Do you have any tips for successfully cooking with children without throwing them down a flight of stairs?

Deb Perelman:

See, I feel like I need to get these tips from you, because it sounds like you do it with far more grace than I do. I have to say that for me, the biggest thing has been realizing, and I don't know why it took me so long for this to click, my full-time job is not being a mom. My full-time job is this. And so if I am trying to work on a recipe or get it right, this is not the moment to have my kids. I always say, let's say you were in your cubicle at your office, would you like your kids sitting on the desk helping you? No, you would not get your work done. So why do I think I can have a kid in the kitchen when I'm trying to get a recipe right? But the kind of cooking we can enjoy is let's say it's weekend and we want pancakes, or the kids want to make a cake. I think it's if it's not cooking for work, or we're working on a recipe that's already established, or we're trying a recipe from a new book, that's fine.

But if I'm working on getting a recipe right... Again, this is really basic information I'm sharing, but for some reason it took me many years to realize why I was so stressed out when my kids were in the kitchen. It's because I'm trying to get work done. This is not the moment. I'm going to have to fully retest this when they're not here, because, yeah, they're not meant to be in the cubicle with me. So separating it. So I think weekend cooking can be nice. I think low stakes cooking, when it's something extra. I really do worry about my kids not learning enough cooking because I do it so much all day that by the evening I'm not like, "Okay, so let's do a scrambled eggs lesson," or something like that. But I'm working on it, making sure they learn a few things too.

Annmarie Kelly:

Sure. I think definitely making something that they want to make is helpful. I met someone once who had her son making a salad and he was like six. I'm like, "What's happening there?" But she explained that he was making salad from vegetables he'd grown in his garden, and we were coming over and so it was a source of pride that he was making lettuce from lettuce he picked. And so sometimes the sourcing, if they've got some ownership over the ingredients, whether it's something they grew in a garden or something they picked out at the store, they can... I don't know. My son, when we made popovers, he had the idea to put vanilla in the popovers, which, don't tell him, but it's not the most amazing idea, but sure. And we went with it, and he called it his secret ingredient. And rather than minimizing that, he's like, "Did you remember the secret ingredient?" And he would go and get the vanilla. So letting them own it and not... For me, this is where the perfectionism, I have to let go of it is. It's going to be what it's going to be.

I don't know if that's going to throw off and make it too much moisture or whatever, but let them own it. But you're absolutely right. That would not work in the test kitchen. That's definitely a weekend cooking thing.

Deb Perelman:

Well, it took me a while to figure it out too. I do like taking them shopping though. I think it can be fun. I mean, obviously usually I'm shopping during the workday or morning, my groceries, because I'm in a rush and I need to get them. But I just mean I do try to drag them along to The Green Market here or there, or just the grocery store on the corner, because I feel like they do get a lot more excited by a vegetable if you're like, "Well, what vegetable are we going to eat tonight? Do you want green beans?" "No. I don't want this. I don't want this," and then you're like, wait, but when they go to the store, they're like, "Peppers," or, "Green beans," or something we haven't had in a while and I forgot about it until the kid reminded me or they asked for a certain kind of pair, which I would not have thought to buy. So I feel like they're definitely better eaters when they've shopped for it a little bit.

And sometimes I do leave out a cookbook for them. I saw new a kids cooking... To see if there's something they were excited to try to work their way through this weekend. We'll see. Not my own though, weirdly. What's up with that?

Annmarie Kelly:

I was going to say, that's funny to be leaving out someone else's cookbook when you're... But that is absolutely how it goes. They'll get really excited about something that someone else has done. Hey, this is making me think are you terrible to invite over? Are you the most intimidating house guest and no one will cook for you? They're like, "Here's some water?" Is there a downside to being snazzy and awesome at food?

Deb Perelman:

I've heard from people that, and I'm like I don't know why, because I would love to come over. I get so excited when people cook for me. I am not judging. Are you kidding me? I am so happy that I'm not the one cooking. And also I think it's just so amazing. I know what goes into making a dish, and I think it's so cool for somebody to share this piece of themselves. It's like a piece of creative art. There's no bad art. I don't think there's any bad art that was made with love to share with people, and maybe my ex-art teacher moment is showing up, but I love it. I'm not sitting there going, "Oh this cake is dry." It's not like I'm doing it out of politeness. It's just not where my brain is at all. I'm so happy somebody's cooking for me. Please invite me over for dinner.

Annmarie Kelly:

Yeah, it's that part, like when someone is going to cook and do dishes for me, are you kidding me? That is such a gift. Okay. I know you do a ton of interviews, so I always try to ask little tiny questions at the end to just be different than other people. So these are just multiple choice questions. You just pick one. Okay?

Deb Perelman:

Mm-hmm.

Annmarie Kelly:

Coffee or tea?

Deb Perelman:

Coffee.

Annmarie Kelly:

Mountains or beach?

Deb Perelman:

Beach.

Annmarie Kelly:

Dogs or cats?

Deb Perelman:

Dogs.

Annmarie Kelly:

Crumb cake or fruit pie?

Deb Perelman:

Crumb cake.

Annmarie Kelly:

World peace cookies or Austrian raspberry shortbread?

Deb Perelman:

Raspberry shortbread?

Annmarie Kelly:

I'm going way back. I brought both of those... I always would just go on your site-

Deb Perelman:

That is very impressive. I was younger when I published those recipes. I was a young person.

Annmarie Kelly:

I used to go to a cookie, I still do sometimes, but I used to go to a cookie exchange every year, and I would just like, "Which one am I making this year" And I was stuck in the world peace rut for a little bit, and then I made the Austrian raspberry shortbread for some reason, which was a nightmare but deliciousness. And I couldn't believe I liked it even better. So yes, that's old school.

Deb Perelman:

I have a real thing for those shortbread and jam things. I know they're not for everyone. If I was trying to make it for other people and I wanted them to be happy with it, I'd probably do the world piece one. And these are, of course, Dorie Greenspan's amazing world peace cookies, would never claim ownership of them. I just share them.

Annmarie Kelly:

I love how generous you are on the site. I think for some reason there's this belief that you can only share a recipe if you've invented it by magic from scratch, that no one but you has ever cooked a tomato. It's so silly. But I love the way that you just give a nod to somebody, like, "Oh, I got this from Ina Garten and I tried this." I think that's not just generous. It's good culinary citizenship, and it also reminds us that I've never invented a recipe in my life that I could recreate it. We're all riffing on one another. It's all jazz.

Deb Perelman:

Yeah. And does the person who doesn't credit it, are they the person that invented lasagna? And again-

Annmarie Kelly:

Yeah. Ms. This Lasagna.

Deb Perelman:

We don't have to go crazy, like, "I first made lasagna from this person, and this," but I just feel like if you learnt something or you pulled something from there, this idea that it takes away from you or what you have to offer to say it, I think is so lousy, and it's led to a lot of people's voices not being heard in food, where only popular publishers' voices are heard. And I think that a lot of the reckonings that we've had in the last few years have long overdue about who gets published and who doesn't, and who gets to have ownership for their own food come from this place of people not thinking that they need to cite their sources. And you said it was generous, and thank you, but think it should just be standard professional behavior. I know when somebody's using my recipe. I know where you got it. I know when I published it. I know that nobody had published it before. And I'm not going to call you out, but I'm thinking that you're probably not the best person.

And I just think it's really not that hard, and I really want to normalize and standardize the idea that you can talk about and you should. It also makes the conversation more interesting. I told you I like the head notes because I'm in it for the conversation. I think it's really interesting. And when you say, "I first learned about onion soup from Julia Child, then I tried Anthony Bourdain's. Over the years, I've really liked this technique that I used for zucchini." That's the story. Why would you not tell it?

Annmarie Kelly:

It's sighting your influences, your literary parents is what it's called in books, so your culinary family, who it is you come from. All right. Back to my multiple choice. I got us off. Let's see, do you love cilantro or hate cilantro?

Deb Perelman:

I used to not love it, and I have come around to it because it's in all my favorite foods.

Annmarie Kelly:

I actually have noticed the presence of it, and I thought maybe you were on team didn't like. You know how for some people it's like they taste like soap?

Deb Perelman:

It did.

Annmarie Kelly:

But not everyone. Mm-hmm.

Deb Perelman:

It did, and I think I've just come around. I'm working on it. Once in a while, it's somewhere and I don't want it there, but I would say now I'm updating my taste buds on it.

Annmarie Kelly:

Gotcha. Would you rather peel an onion or peel garlic?

Deb Perelman:

Neither. I'd say garlic, because garlic, if it's nice and crisp, you just smash it and then you can peel the skin off. It's very satisfying.

Annmarie Kelly:

It is. I love the smash the garlic. It just takes out the anger. It's very nice.

Deb Perelman:

It has to be good, crisp, and fresh with a tight skin.

Annmarie Kelly:

Very true. Are you an early bird and night owl?

Deb Perelman:

Oh my god. Night owl.

Annmarie Kelly:

Yeah. I haunt the house as well.

Deb Perelman:

Morning people, how is that? It's unfortunate, because I have children and obviously you don't have a choice about this. It just means I'm tired way more often than I should be.

Annmarie Kelly:

Yeah. Hear you there. Are you a risk taker or the person who always knows where the bandaids are?

Deb Perelman:

Both. My anxiety requires me to know where the bandaids are, but no, I'd rather do things. I feel like I'm fighting off boredom very easily, and so I'm always very interested in doing something different or doing something new.

Annmarie Kelly:

Good stuff. I have a few multiple choice to close, then. Fill in the blank for this one, sorry. Fill in the blank. If I wasn't working as a food writer/cook/photographer, I would be a...

Deb Perelman:

Oh my God. I definitely would need a job job, for sure. I don't know. Maybe I would try writing for the first time. I feel like I would probably enjoy writing in some way. I might enjoy doing something food adjacent, like food styling or reci... See, I just went back to the same thing. I'm like, "Well, could I be a recipe developer for somebody else?" No, Deb. She said something different. I always thought it would be nice to make ceramics. I don't think I'm particularly good at it, but I think it would be nice.

Annmarie Kelly:

Okay. What's something quirky that folks don't always know about you? This could be a like, a love, a pet peeve.

Deb Perelman:

Okay, here we go, here we go, here we go. I have absolutely participated in them from time to time, but I don't like those grazing board things. I don't like those things where all the food, and I feel like I'm just going to offend a lot of people, because they're very beautiful. They look great on Pinterest, they look great on Instagram. I find them impractical. I find putting all these random foods together, touching each other... The nuts are getting soft from the brie, which is melting. And at the end, it feels very wasteful because you're going to have to throw away everything at the end of the night. You cannot salvage the brie wedge that's left, because it has little figs embedded in it or seeds from the crackers or somebody's touched it. Okay. I should be making food sound good, and I'm like, "Isn't that gross?" So that's one of my little pet peeves. Again, I don't mean that if you served me one, I wouldn't be so happy to eat it. I think as a host it feels impractical and a little bit wasteful.

Annmarie Kelly:

Sure. Yeah. Okay, last few here. What's one of your favorite books or movies?

Deb Perelman:

I'm going to go with movie, because I've been not great about reading books while finishing my own. It gets my brain in the wrong place. It would be good for me, but it takes me a while to get back to them. I need some plane rides and train rides. God. Okay. Why am I drawing a blank? This is not what I'm supposed to do. I don't want to say "Big Night", because that's something that everybody always talks... What is an amazing movie I watched recently? I'm sorry. I'm totally drawing a blank.

Annmarie Kelly:

Or even television. I feel like we're in the golden age of Netflix.

Deb Perelman:

Oh my God. We just finished watching "Bad Sisters".

Annmarie Kelly:

Oh, is it good? I haven't watched.

Deb Perelman:

I thoroughly enjoyed it. I just love a little dark humor. And it's about these sisters, one of their husbands dies and everyone hates him so much. He's such a horrible person in every way that a person could be, like everybody on Earth had a motive to kill him. It's not even a matter of did somebody kill him? It's like, which one of them did it? Was it all of them? And I found it thoroughly enjoyable. And it's from Sharon Horgan, she wrote it and it's her show. I'd first seen her with "Catastrophe" a few years ago, which was a great show with Rob Delaney, and it was about a marriage, but this was hilarious. So she's amazing and I loved the humor.

Annmarie Kelly:

Oh, okay. Cool. I'm going to add those both to my list because I'm always feeling like when I do grab 45 minutes to sit down to the television, I will spend fully 30 minutes of it browsing for the thing that I can't remember someone told me to watch, and then I just end up re-watching "Bridgerton", which I love, but still. All right. Last two. What's your favorite ice cream?

Deb Perelman:

I love a good pistachio or a mint chip.

Annmarie Kelly:

Yeah. Excellent. And the last one, if we were to take a picture of you really happy and doing something you love, what would we see you doing?

Deb Perelman:

I would probably be stomping around Central Park this weekend looking at leaves going, "Ooh, a red leaf." My kids are like, "Yeah, it's a leaf." And I'm like, "It's an orange leaf. This one is orange and green at the same time." I get so excited about that stuff, and I did not get up to Central Park last weekend. I'm hoping to this weekend.

Annmarie Kelly:

Oh my gosh. If it's autumn in New York, you're not really a mom if you're not tormenting your children with pictures of leaves.

Deb Perelman:

I'm going to be dorking out about fall leaves, and they were like, "A leaf. Awesome. Can we get an apple cider donut, Mom?"

Annmarie Kelly:

Oh my gosh. Deb Perelman, thank you so much for letting us actually meet you in person today. It's a fangirl dream come true. Thank you for turning your obsessive and fastidious cooking compulsions into beautiful recipes that have blessed our lives. Thank you for being here.

Deb Perelman:

Thank you for having me on. I enjoyed chatting.

Annmarie Kelly:

Thank you. And folks, Deb Perelman's latest cookbook is called "Smitten Kitchen Keepers". It's available now wherever books are sold. You can learn to make the kind of cozy chicken and dumpling soup that will just be like a warm blanket around your family as we head into these winter months. Go buy a copy for every foodie on your list, and then another one just for you. To everyone listening, we're wishing you love and light wherever this day takes you. Be good to yourself and be good to one another, and we'll see you again soon on this wild and precious journey.

Wild Precious Life is a production of Evergreen Podcasts. Special thanks to executive producers Gerardo Orlando and Michael DeAloia, producer Sarah Willgroup, and audio engineer Ian Douglas. Be sure to subscribe and follow us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

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