Hey, I am Bruce Weinstein and this is the Podcast Cooking with Bruce and Mark. And I'm Mark Scarborough, and together with Bruce, my husband, we have written 37 cookbooks, including the latest cold canning, small batch, two jar, three jar, canning without any need for a pressure or steam canner. You make a small batch of what? Help me here. Oh, strawberry jam, red, current jelly, kimchi. Mm-hmm. Sauerkraut. Fudge sauce, corn relish, bennel relish, pickle relish. There's all kinds of chili crisps. There's salsa matcha. If you don't know about that, you need to know about them. There's even dessert, sauces and liqueurs. Anything you can put in a jar and stick in the fridge or the freezer. For Well in the freezer indefinitely. That's all part of the 425 recipes of that book called You can find a link to buy it even in the player for this episode. But otherwise, we're not talking about that necessarily. We're gonna talk about a one minute cooking tip, and then the big part of this podcast is about nostalgia in food and cooking and why it's such. Big part of food and cooking and the culinary landscape, and then we'll tell you what's making us happy in food this week. So let's get started.

Our one minute cooking tip, put your dogs and kids out of the kitchen while you're cooking. Basic, basic, basic. In our cookbooks,

we refer to that as put furry, well wishers and small children out of the kitchen. Our dog

has a habit of constantly coming over to the stove. Mm-hmm. When I'm cooking. Mm-hmm. Now, unfortunately, we haven't. Open floor, plant house. And unless I put him in the basement, there's no way to keep him out. But you should try and keep them out. Every time I open the oven, he's trying to stick his head in there. It's

like not a good thing. And this is, here's what's really wild, is we don't feed our dog any people food. So the dog is there just because the dog knows, has figured it out, or knows something, or there have been splashes on the floor. 'cause he does tend to lick the floor Incessently endlessly. Yes. Yeah, so it just because there are splashes of grease, or this is out on the floor anyway, to keep yourself safe, put your dogs and maybe your cats and your little children out of the kitchen while you're cooking. There's hot things going on that can get burned. You can fall backwards or trip, oh gosh. Um, it's just best to put all that out of the kitchen when you're seriously cooking. Okay. Before we get to that next part of the podcast, lemme see. It would be great if you could subscribe to this podcast. If you could rate it, if you could like it, if you could even write us a review, even nice podcasts. That really helps thanks in the analytics because we are otherwise unsupported and this is the way that you can, in fact, support this podcast. Okay, we're gonna talk all about nostalgia. Hmm. In cooking and food.

I wanna start this by asking you a question. Okay. Can you explain what nostalgia actually is?

Oh, it's, that's really a hard question. So what generally is understood as nostalgia is a sentimentalization of the past that is. Things that have happened in the past are stripped of much of their larger meaning, and they are sentimentalized. That is, they are turned into a feeling of vibe, usually good. That usually is the implication of Sentimentalization and then. Um, you know, anything that else is surrounding that is taken away and you're left with this kind of good vibe based on a past experience. People have all kinds of nostalgia for, um, childhood places, childhood restaurants. They have, uh, nostalgia of course, and we're gonna talk about this for childhood food and how that impacts the food industry. It's this idea that somehow what happened in the past was better than now. Simpler than now, and

probably better than it actually was back then too. Oh, it is. That's why I say

it's stripped of all its complications. It's like

when somebody's spouse dies and then 20 years later they were the sainted person in their life when all they did was complain about them. That's not

technically nostalgia because generally we think of nostalgia as a cultural trend rather than a personal trend. I mean, yes, people can be nostalgic for something, but we generally think of that as fitting into a larger cultural rubric. Like, um, people are nostalgic for the place they grew up. That's because they believe most people are nostalgic for the place that they grew up. So we tend to think of it in terms of more groups of people are nostalgic and your nostalgia fits in with a larger group of people.

Well, right now, the people that are really leading the nostalgia craze in terms of food are trend marketers and influencers,

right? Yep. They are. Become big. You probably know this already. People, uh, have made careers out of cooking recipes from the 1940s and the 1950s. Uh, currently there are several people making big careers in the influencer space, you know, outta cooking from church cook. Books in the forties and the fifties

Baking yesterday year. Yeah. Yeah.

And some of them are, uh, bringing back these old recipes as, wow, aren't they great? And some of them, there's one guy, particularly on a TikTok who cracks me up, who is always making something hideously disgusting out of a church. Cookbook often with gelatin. Yes, often with gelatin. And then he's, uh, basically gagging as he eats it. He just cracks me up. He's just always dressed up in some, he's a large man and usually dressed up in some giant fairy costume or something. So, uh, he makes me laugh out loud. But yes, that, that is part of it. Is this baking yester year, bringing back these really mm-hmm. Old kind of, um, recipes. Uh, you should know that right now, if. If you're my age, you'll be horrified by this. But you should run right now that the marketers and influencers are particularly focused for no nostalgia on the 1990s and early two thousands, but it's

still 1990. In my head. It's still 19. That's, I'm still 30 years old. I will always be 30 years old. That's, that's really nice. And so what they are bringing back and talking about and showing are things that we lived on back then. Things like Chicken Caesar. Yeah, chicken Caesar

salad is, yeah.

Big right now. Well, I always loved it. I still love it. I love to make it for dinner. And one thing I've never made, but that I see a lot on social media for nostalgia or pizza rolls. Yes. Remember those? Those pizza, pizza oven rolls are to Totino's pizza rolls. Basically, they were burn bombs. Yes. They were. You, they were. Put those in your. Toaster oven, and then you would think they're cool and you bite them, and then within 10 seconds the skin is peeling off the roof of your mouth.

And I think the biggest trend right now, or the biggest, um, nostalgia trend for 20 something influencers, people in their twenties is the vinetta. And if you, that dessert, if you're my age, you remember the vinetta and the vinetta was so fancy. Mm-hmm. I mean, if you had vinetta, you were upscale. We just, we just ate. Fricking Oreos. But you know, meta

basically, if you don't know it was frozen, right? It like a Sara pound cake in a metal container, right? And it was a layered loaf cake with cream, and it was Italian, supposedly it was kind a

Swiss roll, kind of pseudo

Tyra masseuse, Swiss roll mash. That you got frozen with

chocolate. Right. I'm surprised given that I grew up in the south. We didn't call it Vata, but um, 'cause of vina sausages. But, um, anyway, yeah, this is, at least the

VTA doesn't have any jelly.

This is huge. Yeah. This is a huge trend that there are influencers making vitas, recreating them. They're people, they weren't that good. And I grew up with them. I don't know. It seemed like the absolute height of sophistication. Remember the commercials? They served them in coops. They would cut the pieces. Mm-hmm. And put them in coops on the table and oh my God. It just seemed so Doris Day Fancy

and then you can drink with them the general foods, international coffees. There you go.

Flavored.

There you go. Sweetened powdered. There we

go. I think that one of the things that we've seen over our career is that, uh, since the 1990s when we started writing cookbooks, late 1990s, 1999 was the first one, but since we started writing then we have seen a consistent nostalgic trend for baking. Mm. It has. Absolutely consistent, and it always seems to come in a wave. And the, you know, recent bakers, the people who are baking now, the 20 something influencers who are baking, it's again, it's as if this is coming out of nowhere and oh my gosh, we're making cakes again in pies. But I have to say that in what, 25, 30 years of doing this, we've seen this baking wave Crest and crest. Mm-hmm. And Crest. And Crest, it's a continual re invoking of a nostalgic

thing. It's interesting because there are so many categories. Of cooking that was done back when we were kids from casseroles, right. To hot pots, to ground beef things. Right. And yes, they all have their few moments, but baking is the one that continually comes back. It does. It continually comes back and, well, because it's so comfort, seems

comforting. It, it always seems new, right? When it comes back, it always seems like it's just coming back into vogue and you hear all these marketers and PR people talk about, oh, baking is really coming into vogue and, and you think if you like us and you've been around the block a few times, you think. Well, it's been in vogue like 20 times. Mm-hmm. In the last 30 years. I, I think that there's, uh, there are trends right now. You may know them for trad wife. Explain what that is, please. Traditional wife, a trad wife, a traditional wife, someone who stays home, makes dinner, does the laundry, cleans the house, takes care of the children, and there are all kinds of trad wife influencers online. Now, I don't wanna make. Fun of this. Mm-hmm. But I have to tell that's it's a

valid lifestyle choice.

I have to tell you that there are some tra wife satire accounts. Well, they're hysterical. That are absolutely hysterical about, you know, my children wanted water this morning, so I went out to our glacier and chipped off a piece and blah, blah, blah. My child wanted to

thank you know, so I chopped down a tree and poked it.

And and made paper. Yes. I know there's these satire tread wife accounts, but T tra wife is a big thing right now and it is really, truly, honestly, a moving trend in the marketplace. And tread wifes, I think, go back to this trend of a simpler time. I don't wanna get into politics of this. Mm-hmm. And glorious stein. And all that kind of stuff, but they go back to allegedly a simpler time. Now you and I are from this simpler time. We are. We're from the sixties and the seventies. And we can say, I think unequivocally that it was not a simpler time. It

wasn't a simpler time. We had a different experience though. Your mother was a little bit more of a trad wife. My mother, no, my mother was fully a trad wife. She

got up and made you a hot breakfast every morning. Single morning until I went to college. My mother got up 30 minutes before I got up and made a hot breakfast.

As soon as I was tall enough to reach the cabinets, my mother's like, you're on your own. You know where the cereal is. As soon as I was tall enough to reach the buttons on the washing machine, my mother's like, do your own laundry. And as I, so I didn't kind of grow up with that.

As I've said repeatedly, my mother washed and. Ironed the sheets twice a week and sometimes three times a week.

Right. No, we didn't have such a thing in our house and my mother didn't bake either, so it was a whole this, when I see this, there's no nostalgia for me 'cause I didn't grow up with it. But there is something nice about it. 'cause I'm like. Hmm. That kind of would've been nice in a way. I mean, this has

been around forever when we were kids. Uh, as I say, we grew up in this alleged simpler time. Let me tell you that waiting in line at gas stations for gasoline in your car for an hour and a half during the gas crisis. Hmm. Uh, watching Nixon implode on television, watching the Democratic at. Convention explode in Chicago. There was no simpler time back then. No. Nothing was simpler. Watching our parents go through marital distress and difficulties. It, there was nothing simpler about a childhood.

No, but everybody thinks that 20 years before them was simpler. No matter when it is. If you talk to people in the fifties, they'll tell you the thirties were simpler. People in thirties, oh, nobody's gonna say the

thirties. Simpler, I'm sorry. Okay. Alright.

Alright. The people in the forties would say the twenties were simpler and people in the, okay.

Maybe people in 19 hundreds or the 1880s were simpler. I don't know. Nostalgia, I don't know that I can say that since, you know, uh, um, my other part of my life is worrying about. 19th and 20th century culture to teach it in classes. But I can't say that nostalgia was as big a movement in the 1880s as it is

now. When, when electricity came into houses, didn't, people weren't in nostalgic for time when there wasn't electricity? No. They were afraid

of electricity, but they weren't nostalgic. No one kept gas. Flames on their walls because they wanted them. I've never heard of such a thing. No. In fact, they were afraid of electricity. Uh, there was all kinds of fear. Do you know this one we're way off topic? When electricity gave me to homes, people were convinced that it leaked out of the sockets into the room. Well,

gas did, so why shouldn't electricity?

So electricity was leaking out of the sos. There were all these things where people allegedly burning up in their houses, in their apartments 'cause the electricity was leaking out of the sos. This is not true. That makes

sense that you would think that because gas did leak out and

kill you. Right. But again, I think that soldier is particularly a piece of 20th century and now 21st century consumer culture and it is invoked by marketers who did not exist in 1880. No. And it is this way in which childhood is seen as something better now. Yes. Did Charles Dickens write novels about orphans and children because of his childhood? Yes, he did, but it wasn't as nostalgic. In fact, part of what Dickens was doing was rehearsing the grime grit and crime that he grew up with as a little child in novels like Oliver Twists. So, you know, despite musicals about Oliver that clean it all up, Oliver Twist is a rather. Dirty book. It's, it's a rea it's a rather difficult story full of hideous antisemitism. So, um, I don't know that it's so nostalgic.

Okay, well I'm gonna get nostalgic today 'cause I'm going to the supermarket later when we're done with all of this recording, and I am going to get you. Some TV dinners. Oh, some box mac and cheese. Maybe I'll get some yodel if I could find them. Oh,

no thank you. No, thank you. I think, I think that nostalgia is particularly a problem for North Americans, for Canadians and US citizens. I do in terms of food, because I think, for example, the French are not necess. Nostalgic about croissants.

Well, okay. How can they be? Croissants are part of their everyday life and have been for decades and decades and decades.

Well, you could say, if you wanna push this is, you can say that croissants for them has become a, um, what do we say? Petrified nostalgia. That it's, it's set in place and it can't be moved now. Yeah. Ossified

part of the culture, right? It is. But so much of French food is like that. There are governmental agencies to regulate what baguettes must be like. There are what croissants must be like. There are what peaches must be like, right? How much sugar there are in plums,

but I would argue that. Two, uh, there are all kinds of pastries in Dutch culture, in Austrian culture, in Czech culture, and those pastries are not necessarily nostalgic because they are the same generation to generation. There's this kind of stability and it doesn't really take part of this North American nostalgia thing to hearkening back to a simpler time. I think it's part of adulthood. You know, the loss of what you had as a child, no matter what else. And yes, there were gas lines, and yes, Nixon imploded and Spiro Agnew imploded. And yes, the Democratic Convention exploded and all that kind of stuff happened when we were kids, but still in, nonetheless, we were outside playing my world. We were outside playing with the hose in the backyard. I don't know what you were doing, but we were riding our bikes and playing with the hose, so. It is this callback to um, uh, simpler timing. Is there something that you had as a kid that now formed some kind of nostalgia for you in terms of

food? Oh, it was penny candy. On Penny Candy. There was a little store, just the name. What are you? Victorian Penny Candy. But you could go and it was basically bulk candy, but you could buy it by the piece. And the piece costs two or 3 cents. We're talking. Mary Jane's and Yes. You know Little Taffies. Yes. And I would go to this little store called Docs. Of course, it was called Docs. And in the front counter there were all these open boxes of bulk candy. And I could go and buy pieces and I would hide them under my bed. My box Spring had a zippered cover and I would hide them and I would eat candy all night and my teeth brought it out by the time I was at high school.

Yeah. Well, okay. I'm noic. That is a nostalgia. That sounds like a nightmare. I'm nostalgic for my teeth. Oh, okay. Well, I think mine, uh, would have to be Dairy Queen. Oh. Uh, would be soft serve ice cream because when I was a kid, so I would spend the summers with my grandparents in Oklahoma that my great grandparents had a farm and they all kind of decamp to this farm in the summers. And I would spend the summers, a lot of the summers out there at that farm. Okay. Anyway, my, there were dairy queens around, uh, Oklahoma City at the time when we would come back into the city, and I should just say there were dairy kings and dairy queens, and my grandmother would only let us go to Dairy Queen. It was, I think it was her, um, Gloria Steinem thing, I guess. And it, and we would always get, of course, a cone, a sauce, serve cone at Dairy Queen and. I am very nostalgic for that. And, uh, dipped

in red

or chocolate. I didn't like them plain when I was a kid. No, that'd be dipped. Well, excuse me, it's my nostalgia. Um, I like them plain as a kid and um, it is just a kind of piece of nostalgia. And we have sent. Stopped at Dairy Queens because we'll pass one somewhere and I'll be like, oh, dairy Queen. And I tell you, it's just not the same. It tastes now weird to me. It doesn't taste like it's real ice cream. No. It's your partially hydrogenated gum based beverage. Yeah. No it's not right. It it. Not what it was, but I still keep going back to it, even though I know that it's not the same as when I was a kid. I still will pass a Dairy Queen like we on vacation. I'll be like, oh my gosh, we gotta stop at Dairy Queen. Hope Springs Eternal. Hope Springs eternal. There are lots of ways that nostalgia has shaped our food career, I think. Right.

Well let's start just with Ice cream. Right. Ice Cream was the first book we ever wrote. Right. And ice cream really was something for you that was nostalgic. It was for me too. We used to go to Carve and I do have big nostalgia for that soft serve. And then the big stews from our Instant Pot Bible and Instant Pot books. Those are the stews my grandmother made all the time.

Well, yeah, I think, uh, just to blow this out just a little bit and explain it a little bit, I think the ice cream thing is right because when we wrote the ultimate ice cream book and the ultimate frozen dessert book, the making, homemade making of ice cream was just coming back on trend. I think a lot of people had grown up with it with churning the ice cream. And now we suddenly had this advent of the home ice cream makers that had their own chill unit and all that kind of stuff. That's really interesting. Or those ones you put in the freezer, those canisters, and it was. All kind of part of this trend backwards.

That's really interesting because your reaction to that was because your grandparents turned ice cream. So that reminded you of that. And for me, I do. When you take that homemade ice cream outta the machine, the texture reminded me of that soft serve we used to get as a kid that I loved. We never made ice cream, but it it. Pressed all those buttons of that ice cream I just got. But I just say, I

don't think that's just for me. I think that has to do with the, the millions of ice cream machines that were sold on QVC. I think a lot of people were in my shoes that they grew up with churned ice cream at home and suddenly it was back in vogue. And people wanted to know how to make ice cream at home. And again, there's this, what were they called? Do VAs or something? Oh God,

that was the first one. Yeah. Yeah.

Where you put the canister in the freezer and then you hand cranked it. Yes. And you hand cranked it occasionally. And then the machines started coming out with their. Own compressors in them, which we got several of those machines to test for the books. And a big part of our early career was the diet industry. And that was happening just as the obesity epidemic was striking across North America.

Big part of our career was writing for Weight Watchers. Right. And cooking light and eating well. Right. And we were able to jump on those trends and just, you know. Do really well in that category.

And I think it's really interesting. I mean just, just as a thought experiment, I think it's really interesting to think about thinness in the obesity epidemic as a nostalgic component. And it's why people ran to diets. Now, listen, they ran to diets because it's unhealthy to be very overweight. It's unhealthy to. Too much, I dunno, ice cream, for example. Of course they, and, you know, cardiovascular disease was on the rise. That's all the truth. And yet I think there's also this component to it that supposedly this is not true. Uh, the fifties and sixties were thinner times. Mm-hmm. And so in the eighties and nineties, people were looking back to these thinner times. I mean, listen, all you have to do is look at Alfred Hitchcock and know that they weren't thinner times, but it wasn't still. But it's

easy to be nostalgic about a time when you might have been thinner. Mm-hmm. When you were, certainly, when you were younger and you've. Felt better and you could wear mm-hmm. Clothes. Mm-hmm. That you felt better. Mm-hmm. Wearing, it's very easy to do that.

It's all about recapturing youth, right? Mm-hmm. I mean, the diet industry was about recapturing your twenties or even your teens and getting back into the dress you wore, getting back into some outfit that you wore. That was a huge part of our early career. It was, I, I, I should say that we started writing for weight watchers.com. When Weight watchers.com was this kind of, as we always say, the poor stepsister of the Weight Watchers empire, and literally the first meeting we had was Weight watchers.com was in an empty, open office space in Manhattan. Do you remember this? We went up to a floor of a building and it was like. Empty except for like two desks, just kind of Jake leg set, somewhere in the middle of the room of this giant open space. And we were so dis wires hanging down from the ceiling. And it was, it was, it was nothing. It was, 'cause everybody thought online was nothing.

We were so disappointed that we weren't writing for the magazine. Like, uh, we were, meanwhile we had that column online for 14 years. Yeah. Meanwhile, and

meanwhile, eventually the.com took over everything and ran the magazine essentially out of. Business and ran most things outta business in the Weight Watchers world because of course the online site became everything, but when we first went there, it was nothing. Yeah. It was literally, nobody knew what it was and, um, and how it would go. I think that there's a way, even that our current book, cold Canning is part of a bit of nostalgia, don't you?

Well, yeah. The idea of putting up things for the winter of saving the fruit, saving the vegetables, canning your own. Yeah. The nice thing in our book is you don't have to deal with the hassle that it was when our grandparents did it. Nothing in our book is processed. Nothing is put in a steam can or no boiled. Yep. No bottles are boiled to. You're not boiling, you're not processing, you're just. Making some jam. Putting it in a jar and putting it in the freezer. Freezer. And

I wanna say that I think, and this is a very controversial sentence, and I'm gonna really get flat for saying this, but I'm gonna say it, I think people often think of nostalgia in food when it comes to the boomers. People like me or the or the or, the. As they call them geriatric Gen Xers. Yeah. We're

not boomers. We're geriatric. Yeah,

we're geriatric Gen Xers. But, um, nonetheless, uh, they think about nostalgia when it comes to these people, but I actually think that millennials are particularly susceptible to nostalgia. I think that that is that sourdough craze with. Millennials. That whole chickens in the backyard in Brooklyn craze, they are particularly driven towards some kind of rural, nostalgic pastor. The Kin remember Kin Folk Magazine where everybody stood around and preached skirts and fields and ate, I don't know, ice cream out of the container. But that

makes sense 'cause they were the last generation before. For the digital change. They were, they came over the digital change. They, we came over it too, but they were the last ones that grew up with analog, anything.

Right. They, they started out at five years old analog, but then by the time they were teenagers, they had did all changed to digital. Yep. But we came over it as adults that change. Yep. And that may be part of why it seems to me that millennials are. All very suscept to it. When we did, um, demographic research for cold canning, what we discovered is that canning searches on Google, I know this is really weird to talk about, but the canning searches on Google, things we do worry about. Um, we're particularly big in people. Um, age 30 to 45, which means you're talking about essentially millennials. At that age, and those are the big people searching for canning recipes, big demographic, searching for canning recipes online.

Every millennial out there listening buy a copy of our book. Cold Canning. You're like, if you know a millennial, buy a copy of cold canning for the millennial in your life.

Yeah, it is. True, but the canning that we're doing is really simple. And one of the things that's interesting, I think about the nostalgia, particularly as it affects millennials in food, is that many of them are nostalgic for much more complicated things. Mm. Like sourdough starters and like, you know, the appropriate Victorian sponge. And it's really weird the the way that nostalgia can play out because it can lead to an idea that it used to be simpler than now. It also can lead to this idea that things were more complex and so better, they were harder.

I think there's a, and so they were better. There's a fine line between going from nostalgia to fetish.

Well, there is, oh my gosh. But it, I don't think it's a fine line. I think it just shades right off into fetish. And you could argue that. The French aren't nostalgic for croissants that the ants have become, uh, fetish. Oh, absolutely. For many French people. Absolutely. Um, but that's a whole different discussion and one not suitable for this podcast. So, okay. Before I get to the last part of this podcast, let me tell you that of course we have a TikTok channel cooking with Bruce and Mark. There's a YouTube channel, it's not very active, called Cooking with Free Saint Mark, but

there's a ton and

ton and ton of videos there, there, there are. Many videos out there, hundreds. Um, and, uh, they're of course a very active TikTok account. And let me see that there's a Facebook group cooking with Bruce and Mark, and this episode will be posted there. You can tell us what you're nostalgic about with food. Okay. As is traditional, the last segment of this podcast, what. It's making us happy in food this week, and I'm gonna start, okay, so what's making me happy in food this week is Bruce steamed Chinese ribblets slash That

was mine.

No, that's mine. We can both have it. But last night for dinner, uh, Bruce, Bruce spent the whole day out. He was running around the state, literally running around our state doing various things and came back home and I couldn't believe you wanted to cook dinner. I kept saying, don't you wanna go out to eat? And it's a long way. It's a 20 minute drive even to a mid. Place from where we live. So he kept saying, no, I don't wanna get in the car again. So he steamed Chinese ribs. Okay. So since this is your, so you explain, this is making me happy what it is.

These are Cantonese, ribs and black bean sauce. So you must, if you cheated and put, uh, a hot Fresno on top of it, I, I put put some little hot sliced red chilies on them, which usually is not Cantonese. So you have to have your ribs cut into one to one and a half. Inch sections. So the each piece is just, you know, bite size. You can get them that way at an Asian market, or you can go to Costco, which is where I found them already. Cut that way. Then you cut through each piece of bone, you separate them all, and then you marinate them in oyster sauce, light soy, dark soy, little salt, MSG, a little sugar, a little shing, cooking wine. Mm-hmm. MSG. There it is. I also put, um, a pinch of ground up, dried Chinese, tangerine, peel, and star anus. And a little corn starch, and you let that marinade a bit and then you steam them in a bowl in a steamer and about 30 minutes and they are just spectacular.

Okay? There is no way anyone would define this as an easy recipe, and I couldn't believe you did it. I thought it was an easy recipe. Okay. It's not. I'm, I'm here to just tell you. Um, it's not, and we would be slapped down by both our editor and our copy editor forever calling, anything like that easy. So, no, it's not easy, but it was spectacular. Delicious. Oh my God. I couldn't believe you put all that effort into it after having driven all over the state all day. But you did. That's what I went to for dinner. It was really delicious and we ate it with. Deemed Chinese, what was it? Uh, it was one

of those choice sum, or, yeah, it was a leafy green with a long stem and it wasn't bok choy and

no,

it wasn't bok choy. I don't know the name of all of

those Asian greens. Yeah. One of those Asian greens with little yellow flowers and pieces of it. Right. So anyway, and rice, uh, yeah, it was really good. That's what made me, I guess, both of us happy in food this week. Okay. So that's the podcast for this week. Thanks for being a part of our audience, and thanks for being with us on this podcast.

And let me add that in a world of AI now where you don't know what's real and what's not, when you're listening and watching things online, know that everything here on Cook at Bruce and Mark is real. Everything on our TikTok channel or the videos on Instagram, everything is real. We are not using ai. So you know what you're getting? You are getting Bruce and Mark when you watch or listen to cooking with gru.