Hey, I'm Bruce Weinstein and this is the Podcast Cooking with Bruce and Mark.
Speaker:And I'm Mark Scarborough.
Speaker:And together with Bruce, we have written over three dozen cookbooks with more in the making, including the Absolute smash, best
Speaker:We love Costco, we love bj.
Speaker:We love the big box stores, and those books have sold amazing at.
Speaker:Those big box stores, which we are thrilled about.
Speaker:We're gonna talk a little bit about pressure cooking.
Speaker:In this episode of podcast, we're gonna talk about how to get over some cooking obstacles.
Speaker:We have a one minute cooking tip, as is traditional.
Speaker:Bruce has an interview with Stacey Mayan Fong.
Speaker:She is the author of 50 Pies, 50 States, a book that's actually getting tons of play right now.
Speaker:And of course, as always, we'll tell you what's making us happy in food this week.
Speaker:So let's get started.
Speaker:There are a lot of reasons people don't cook Right.
Speaker:A lot.
Speaker:And the biggest problem from not cooking is you eat more fast food.
Speaker:You eat less than healthy meals.
Speaker:Yep.
Speaker:And it, it is just not good for your wallet.
Speaker:It's not good for your body.
Speaker:Do you know that the fast food intake of the average person.
Speaker:Is really high.
Speaker:Pre age 25, you probably already could figure that one out, but it's really high, pre age 25, and then it actually
Speaker:It starts to fall and then it starts to pick up dramatic speed for people over 70.
Speaker:Well,
Speaker:that makes sense.
Speaker:I mean, look at your mom and your dad before your dad died.
Speaker:Yep.
Speaker:And your parents were in their early eighties, and your mom really.
Speaker:It didn't feel like cooking anymore.
Speaker:She quit cooking.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And so what were they gonna do?
Speaker:They went out and got, got fried chicken from the drive through window and, and they got Taco Bell, lot of
Speaker:Taco Bell, lot of Wendy's, a lot of taco.
Speaker:Be your mom loves Taco Bell and loves Wendy's Bacon cheeseburger.
Speaker:Something I don't even know.
Speaker:And hey, she's 90 years old.
Speaker:So clearly it's not doing her any bad stuff.
Speaker:She's
Speaker:going on 91.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:But anyway, yes, that is the way that fast food works out.
Speaker:But you know, a lot of people end up ordering in, in big cities using the services like DoorDash or Uber Eats mm-hmm.
Speaker:To order in, um, a lot.
Speaker:There's a lot of that that goes on because people don't have time to cook.
Speaker:And let me tell you that I am completely sympathetic to this.
Speaker:If you don't know, I am the writer in our team and Bruce is the chef and I do not fix dinner.
Speaker:Almost ever in our household.
Speaker:And if it were left to me to fix us dinner, we'd be eating a lot of cheese and crackers, which
Speaker:is a bad thing a lot.
Speaker:But I do like to make dinner and there are lots of times that I wish I could even go get something to eat.
Speaker:And we live very rurally and there's really nothing except pizza.
Speaker:So we don't.
Speaker:Eat much from fast food.
Speaker:No.
Speaker:And I should just add that we live in such a rural spot at New England.
Speaker:Sorry, this is just really sa but so rurally in New England that to get pizza means we drive to the pizza place.
Speaker:No pizza place will deliver to us.
Speaker:That's how rural we are.
Speaker:I will say however, that the fried chicken at the big Y supermarket is really, oh God good.
Speaker:And I.
Speaker:Throw it in the air fryer and it gets ri, but then I'm still cooking.
Speaker:So even though I buy the fried chicken at the supermarket, I'm still cooking.
Speaker:So here's, here's some of the problems is lack of time.
Speaker:And one of the solutions is one that has come on big time in the last decade, and that is prepped vegetables.
Speaker:And as you know, most supermarkets now from Whole Foods down to your local supermarket, all stock completely.
Speaker:Prepped.
Speaker:Vegetables cut onions, cut celery cut, uh, carrots.
Speaker:Now let me tell you something.
Speaker:What there is about, this is a lot of food waste.
Speaker:And I don't mean on the supermarket end, I mean on the consumer end.
Speaker:People get these things home, these containers of chopped celery, and they can't use it all before it goes waggly.
Speaker:So, Buy yourself some freezer bags and freeze the remaining.
Speaker:Oh, that's a really good idea.
Speaker:And it started out with mostly what you would find are like the spiralized vegetables and you can still find them.
Speaker:And they're wonderful.
Speaker:You get, you get the butternut squash and the beets and the carrots.
Speaker:That's what you had for my birthday.
Speaker:My birthday was back last month in June, and oh, I asked for, Uh, for us to split a porterhouse, which we did, we love splitting a
Speaker:And so we split a porter.
Speaker:Jacks breath.
Speaker:Jacks breath.
Speaker:And it's true.
Speaker:And, um, I asked for spiralized butternut squash in a chili crisp, crisp vinegarette to go with it.
Speaker:And you had it?
Speaker:I did and it was delicious.
Speaker:And the spiralized stuff was what was out there.
Speaker:You could still get it, but I remember when we lived in New York and this was, you could just
Speaker:Italy the giant.
Speaker:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker:You know, the Italian food warehouse with restaurants and Right.
Speaker:Stores, everything in it.
Speaker:In New York, they actually had a vegetable concierge and you could go buy vegetables at any of the vendors they did and drop it off
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker:This is not giving average listeners guides to how to pre how to, to, well, if you don't deal with vegetables,
Speaker:no, because if you don't have time, you don't have time to go to eat Italy.
Speaker:Oh, yeah.
Speaker:And also it's a little bit expensive.
Speaker:So let me say this.
Speaker:If you don't know pressure cookers do cook things much more quickly.
Speaker:And one of the things we've learned, cuz we have now written what Five pressure cooker books all through the Instant Pot.
Speaker:It kind of crazy.
Speaker:But one of the things that we learned is the promise of the Instant Pot is that you put everything in it, you put the
Speaker:And what people we've discovered, readers resist.
Speaker:Is doing other things like taking the lid off and then taking the meat out and then crisping
Speaker:This is what people don't wanna do.
Speaker:They wanna take the lid off and see their dinner.
Speaker:Well, part of it is you don't have the time.
Speaker:You don't wanna take the time.
Speaker:But the nice thing about cooking in the pressure cooker or the instant pot, is you don't always have to do that.
Speaker:You can make risotto a delicious, creamy, cheesy, butternut squash, mushroom, you name it, risotto, seven minutes, no stirring.
Speaker:Nothing to do after you take the lid off.
Speaker:And let me make a shameless plug here on the podcast for our book, the Kitchen Shortcut Bible, because we
Speaker:And what I mean by that is you take all the ingredients for a slow cooker, braiser or stew,
Speaker:You shove that bag sealed up in the freezer.
Speaker:Then when you're ready, you simply, you don't defrost it, you pour it frozen, you chip it out of that
Speaker:You get it in the slow cooker, you put the lid on, and eight hours later, at the end of the day, it's dinner.
Speaker:So you can kind of prep this on the weekends.
Speaker:Mm-hmm.
Speaker:And make big bags of braises and stews.
Speaker:That way you don't have to worry about having time in the morning before you leave the house to go to work
Speaker:One of the other big problems that people have with cooking is they don't do it cuz they hate the mess.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Now I do.
Speaker:I hate the mess.
Speaker:You know what?
Speaker:I made smash burgers for dinner last night.
Speaker:Oh.
Speaker:Talk about a mess.
Speaker:And they got bought super fatty ground beef from a Whole Foods and it was a mess.
Speaker:It splattered everywhere there was grease.
Speaker:Splatters on the back, splash on the refrigerator, smell like a cheap diner.
Speaker:The house still smells like a cheap diner and yeah, it was a mess.
Speaker:So I understand you don't want to do that, right?
Speaker:So don't make smash burgers.
Speaker:Make one pot dinners, right?
Speaker:You can make one pot dinner.
Speaker:You could.
Speaker:Take a jar of marinara sauce.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And you could throw frozen meatballs in it.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:In a pot.
Speaker:And you could even get this, throw the raw zdi in there with like a quart of chicken stock.
Speaker:And it'll all cook together and a zdi absorb it.
Speaker:That's another shameless plug for our book, the Kitchen short cut Bible.
Speaker:Cause we have recipes in the kitchen shortcut Bible for one.
Speaker:Let's say one pot chili Mac.
Speaker:Yep.
Speaker:And it's the pasta and the chili.
Speaker:And.
Speaker:Everything in the pot at the same time on the stove, and there are a ton of one pot cookbooks out
Speaker:there.
Speaker:I interviewed kwoklyn wan a few months back.
Speaker:Yeah, that's right.
Speaker:He's an Asian chef in the UK and he just wrote a book this year called One Walk One Pot, and his recipes
Speaker:I, I, I, so, so I'm gonna forward us a little bit and it was great.
Speaker:Mm-hmm.
Speaker:And you're right about all that.
Speaker:But one of Bruce's suggestions, and this just kills me about if you hate the mess, is invite a friend over and tell them that
Speaker:up.
Speaker:I know what, we have friends who would do that.
Speaker:I would never take that deal.
Speaker:No.
Speaker:But we do have friends who would do that.
Speaker:Really?
Speaker:Oh.
Speaker:I can, I'm not gonna name them cause they're probably listening.
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker:Wait.
Speaker:So I'm gonna stop.
Speaker:Mm-hmm.
Speaker:And say that you are super type A controlling.
Speaker:So you would let someone clean up Absolutely.
Speaker:Your pots
Speaker:Absolutely.
Speaker:But they, but if you're the kinda person who would, then you should invite friends over to do that.
Speaker:you'd no more let anyone clean your pots,
Speaker:but I'm not.
Speaker:Not cooking because I'm afraid of the mess.
Speaker:I'm the one who made the smash burgers.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And then cleaned them up.
Speaker:Yeah, I know.
Speaker:I, I can't imagine this one.
Speaker:I can't because it's so, uh, why do I wanna say disheartening?
Speaker:Now I have to tell you that Bruce and I have a system for cleaning.
Speaker:You probably know this, but we throw.
Speaker:Big, huge, giant dinner parties, multi coarsed plated like a restaurant.
Speaker:It makes the smash
Speaker:burgers look like it's clean.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Plates go down on the table.
Speaker:We serve it like restaurants serve from the right and I don't know what all wait, serve from the
Speaker:Anyway, I mean, we really do.
Speaker:We put the plates down simultaneously.
Speaker:We do the entire big Fandango, and these are multi-course affairs, but we always say, That, uh, since we live so rurally
Speaker:And it goes really fast to have a system.
Speaker:And I'm not gonna actually go into all the details of our system because I think you have to make a
Speaker:Lemme just say one thing is that I don't clean pots till the end, so I find that pots in the sink are disheartening.
Speaker:They also take up a lot of room.
Speaker:I know, and I find it just disheartening to have a big pot in the sink, and I'm cleaning that and looking at a counter full of plates
Speaker:Because it makes me feel as if there's less to do by the time I get to the pots.
Speaker:Very important is you run the dishwasher in the middle of dinner.
Speaker:I do.
Speaker:And I know a lot of people don't like to do that cuz the dishwashers are loud.
Speaker:But we bought a new dishwasher that is so quiet that we could run it.
Speaker:You don't even know it's going well.
Speaker:Also, we don't live in an open, well we did live in an open concept home, but we've made it a closed concept home.
Speaker:So we have a door on our dining room and, uh, we can't hear.
Speaker:I mean, you know, we, we.
Speaker:Can't hear it from the dining room cuz we close it off.
Speaker:So, but, but that saves so much time and so much mess when you do that.
Speaker:So when Mark clears a course away, he loads a dishwasher.
Speaker:Even if it's half full, even half, half it.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:So that way after dinner when everyone leaves, we empty it and we can fill it all back up again.
Speaker:It very little to, to do by hand if it's, yeah, if it's half full, I run it on a quick.
Speaker:A light wash cycle and you know, I just spread the plates out and I spread the glasses out so that there
Speaker:And I just, I, I do that and then, you know, it's really easy suddenly because some of the dishes are taken care of.
Speaker:This is all part of the problem of mess and why people don't cook for themselves, but they also don't cook
Speaker:What's wrong with people?
Speaker:I, shopping is the best part of cooking.
Speaker:Uh, I love supermarkets.
Speaker:I love going down.
Speaker:Every aisle.
Speaker:I like looking at new things.
Speaker:I find a new pasta, a new sugar, a new nut, a new something that I never to tell you that never saw
Speaker:before.
Speaker:I have to say that when we travel, Bruce goes to supermarkets as a destination.
Speaker:You go to the markets.
Speaker:like it's a museum,
Speaker:you can learn so much about a place by seeing what people buy to eat.
Speaker:It's great.
Speaker:And I do that not just when we go to Europe or we go to South America.
Speaker:I do that when we go to the south or we go out west or we go to the Pacific Northwest.
Speaker:True.
Speaker:True.
Speaker:I mean, no matter where we go, but I love shopping.
Speaker:If you don't like shopping, then buy your food online.
Speaker:Have it delivered, have someone else send it for you.
Speaker:Or use meal planning, you know, services and have your meals delivered to you.
Speaker:You could still cook them, but you don't have to go shopping.
Speaker:So there are so many ways around shopping and uh, yeah,
Speaker:it's true.
Speaker:You can see this and it's really wild to watch like the difference in fresh.
Speaker:Fish, all those kind of things.
Speaker:And then to have it delivered too.
Speaker:Yeah, why not?
Speaker:Is always a kind of an amazing thing.
Speaker:Something we live too rurally for.
Speaker:But I like to go shopping, so it's a good thing.
Speaker:And if you don't know how to cook, of course we're gonna say that you should buy cookbooks.
Speaker:Of course you know that you should buy our cookbooks.
Speaker:Of course.
Speaker:And you know, I'm gonna tell you to watch our TikTok channel cooking with Bruce and Mark and you
Speaker:But there are actually.
Speaker:Other sources and one of them, uh, is craftsy.com.
Speaker:Mm-hmm.
Speaker:C R A F T S y.com.
Speaker:There are tons of cooking classes there.
Speaker:Another one is called Chef Steps.
Speaker:There are lots of places where you can learn the basics of cooking.
Speaker:In fact, Bruce.
Speaker:Has basically upped his game with Chuan food by watching a ton of YouTube channels.
Speaker:I have fallen in love with these two.
Speaker:It's Amanda, her name is Amanda.
Speaker:Don't know her last name.
Speaker:She lives in the uk.
Speaker:She's Chinese and it's Amanda Tastes is the name of her YouTube channel.
Speaker:And then the Taste Show with Chef John, who is a SIS one chef.
Speaker:I have learned so much from them and upped my sis one game.
Speaker:So you have, you can too.
Speaker:Yeah, it's, it's a great resource.
Speaker:Thank gosh for these things.
Speaker:I know a lot of cookbook authors get really mad at the internet because it's so cut into book sales, which it has.
Speaker:Listen, there's no doubt about that.
Speaker:But there's another way that it's kind of fantastic because you can learn so much.
Speaker:You can learn anything.
Speaker:I'm watching very obscure preparations of, you know, some hand Chuan hand meat pie.
Speaker:Mm-hmm.
Speaker:And you can learn so much about how to actually shape it and form it.
Speaker:Better, or I say it as the writer better even than you could by reading instructions in a cookbook.
Speaker:Well, one of the things that helps with cookbooks is when they have lots of pictures, of course, and we are gonna talk in
Speaker:So you could see what things look like as you cut them, shape them and br them.
Speaker:So you can go to YouTube and see some of that.
Speaker:Or you can get a book like our upcoming look and cook.
Speaker:And then you could do it that way.
Speaker:up next, as is traditional.
Speaker:Our one minute cooking tip,
Speaker:replace your salt shaker with a salt cellar.
Speaker:Salt cellar's.
Speaker:Basically, it's just a fancy word for a little bowl.
Speaker:Salt cellar.
Speaker:You mean a guy that comes in your kitchen and sells you Salt every day.
Speaker:C E L L A R.
Speaker:Because it is easier to throw in a pinch or two while cooking.
Speaker:If you just grab it, you just reach your hand into that salt cellar, get rid of the salt shaker.
Speaker:If it's humid, you're not gonna get anything out of it.
Speaker:It gets clogged up.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And you just, you can't even.
Speaker:Get a sense of how much is coming out.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:Don't keep a salt shaker by your stove get a salt cellar.
Speaker:It is, it is really crucial.
Speaker:And you know, I mean, it's easy to, it's easier, at least for me to know how much salt I'm putting
Speaker:Mm-hmm.
Speaker:If I pick it up with my hands and sprinkle it on, I see it.
Speaker:Exactly going on and I can control the salt content better.
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker:Before we get to the next segment of the show, let me tell you that it would be great if you could rate the show, if you
Speaker:Thank you very much for doing that.
Speaker:We certainly appreciate that in the vast landscape of Food and Cooking podcast.
Speaker:Thank you so much for supporting ours and being a part of it.
Speaker:We see the likes and the comments that come through, for example, on Apple Podcasts, and they.
Speaker:Really, honestly give us motivation to keep going.
Speaker:So thank you so much for doing that.
Speaker:Up next Bruce's interview with Stacey Mayon Fong.
Speaker:She is the author of 50 Pies, 50 States.
Speaker:This is a book that's getting a ton of play right now, and it is so amazing that Bruce landed this
Speaker:Today I'm having a lot of fun speaking with Stacy mei yan Fong, author of 50 Pies, 50 states, an
Speaker:Welcome, Stacy.
Speaker:Hey, thank you so much for having me.
Speaker:I'm so happy to be here.
Speaker:Hey, you start your book with two simple yet deep questions.
Speaker:They are, where are you from and where do you call home?
Speaker:So tell me how these questions informed your journey to write.
Speaker:50 pies, 50 states.
Speaker:So I basically started the project because I was trying to figure out like what home really meant to me.
Speaker:Um, I was born in Singapore, grew up in Indonesia and Hong Kong, and then decided to, um, go to college in Savannah, Georgia.
Speaker:So a real journey.
Speaker:And when I moved to states, All my friends would go home during the holidays to like the house that they grew up in.
Speaker:They could see their same bedroom that they had when they were like 16 years old, like before they left for college.
Speaker:And because I moved around so much as a kid, like I didn't really have that.
Speaker:And even when we were living in Hong Kong, we moved apartments and houses a lot as well cuz of my dad's job.
Speaker:So, I was trying to figure out like what home really meant to me.
Speaker:Like when you grow up, you're kind of taught like home is your house where your family is, right?
Speaker:Like that is.
Speaker:Home.
Speaker:But what I've come to realize through baking all these pies and my time in America is that home really is just a mindset and
Speaker:And I kind of got to do that exploration in the most delicious way.
Speaker:And what I've learned is that everybody loves pie.
Speaker:And even if you have like a funny story where like you baked a pie and everything went.
Speaker:Like it's still a funny story and everybody still talks about it.
Speaker:It's like kind of the most like tender and wholesome thing cuz like even bad pie is good, but like bad cake is terrible, you know?
Speaker:Hey, you offer up a few pies before you begin your journey across the US pies that.
Speaker:Represent your childhood and the places you grew up, like the Vivid Green Paden cream pie.
Speaker:Tell me about that.
Speaker:Basically, when I started the project, I just baked through all the 50 pies, but I.
Speaker:When I was putting together the book, I thought it'd be really important for people to like get to know me
Speaker:Mm-hmm.
Speaker:So I decided that I was gonna bake a pie for Singapore where I was born in Anisha, where I
Speaker:Um, and then also a pie for.
Speaker:Savannah where I went to college and then Brooklyn where I live now.
Speaker:Mm-hmm.
Speaker:And so it's kind of like, you know, going on four dates with me before you decide if you would like to
Speaker:So tell me about the vivid green cream pie.
Speaker:It looks amazing.
Speaker:pandan is a flavor that's very common in Singapore.
Speaker:It's kind of like, it's a green leaf that makes this like beautiful neon green color, like naturally.
Speaker:And it's got kind of like a floral coconut kind of flavor and.
Speaker:It's a very important flavor for me growing up because there's this one bakery in Singapore called Bungo on solo, and every time we
Speaker:And I was always so annoyed that I had to carry this big box, but so happy that I had it.
Speaker:For breakfast the next day when we got home.
Speaker:And just kind of like that taste and set memory.
Speaker:And then also for the pie, I decided to take a play on a ground cracker crust and I did it with Conan, um, cream
Speaker:He was my best friend.
Speaker:He has since passed, but he would feed me these Conan biscuits all the time whenever I went to his house, mostly
Speaker:So he would just feed me these crackers to.
Speaker:Make me shut up, but also because he loved me, so I thought I would combine all of those into a little pie for Singapore.
Speaker:That's a great story.
Speaker:So let's.
Speaker:Go on.
Speaker:One more of those dates with you before we get to your American pies.
Speaker:I love that the pies are sweet and savory.
Speaker:There's a savory Hong Kong style macaroni pie.
Speaker:What is that?
Speaker:And how is a pie made with overcooked macaroni and spam?
Speaker:So comforting and delicious.
Speaker:So in Hong Kong there are these, I would say they're like Hong Kong style diners called Cha Changs, and
Speaker:People in Hong Kong's take on western cuisine.
Speaker:So there's this one, like when you enter a chohan, you order, you get eggs, you tell them how you would like
Speaker:So there's like deep fried french toast.
Speaker:Or my favorite is this macaroni soup, and there's no such thing as al dente.
Speaker:The macaroni is hammered.
Speaker:It is so soft, but it's so, so delicious and it's basically like, Cream of chicken soup and broth, macaroni, like,
Speaker:And it's kind of like the most like comforting way to start your day.
Speaker:And I thought it'd be really funny to like, Put it into pie form.
Speaker:So it's like kind of a mix between like quiche and this macaroni soup and because like pie is very comforting
Speaker:So it's like a combination of the two of them.
Speaker:As we go through the states alphabetically in your book, we get not only a delicious recipe for each
Speaker:So you clearly did a lot of research on the US to write this book.
Speaker:What was the most surprising fact you discovered about any one state?
Speaker:I feel like it's not really a fact.
Speaker:It's more like when I got to South Dakota, I was like really stumped at what I was gonna do and I.
Speaker:Because the universe does wonderful things.
Speaker:My buddy Matt, who got the Massachusetts by, he had just done a graphic design project for a bunch of historians that, um, their
Speaker:And I thought, oh my gosh, like I should talk to them.
Speaker:So I ended up emailing Eric and Eric.
Speaker:Um, gets the pie in the book and Eric invited me out to South Dakota.
Speaker:So I ended up flying out to South Dakota to meet him, and Eric introduced me to Sean Sherman, the
Speaker:And so for the South Dakota pie, I did a sunflower milk and wild rice pudding pie with a bergamot and berry tooth sweet.
Speaker:And then like a crunchy maple papita crunch on top with a blue corn crust.
Speaker:And all of that is inspired by Native American cuisine, which is something that you don't really see a lot in
Speaker:You know, you can get like Szechuan food and Korean food and Chinese food and Mexican food and like
Speaker:It should be as common.
Speaker:And it was like, it's so seasonal.
Speaker:It's textural.
Speaker:It's so wonderful that like, yeah, I just.
Speaker:For the small amount of knowledge I know about it.
Speaker:Now I just want to go fully deep dive into it.
Speaker:What's intriguing to me is your pie from Iowa, a sour cream raisin pie, a meringue top beauty from a state where I
Speaker:So you didn't tell me about this pie and why you chose it to represent Iowa.
Speaker:So it originated in Iowa from like I believe like German immigrants.
Speaker:And I actually learned this from someone that I met in an Uber pool named Jane.
Speaker:She ended up getting the North Dakota pie cuz she's from North Dakota.
Speaker:But she told me all about like the origins of sour cream and raisin pie, which in theory sounds
Speaker:But this is also coming from a girl whose favorite ice cream flavor is rum raisin.
Speaker:And I was six years old, so who knows what I was doing, but it's.
Speaker:Kind of like this beautiful mingling of like flavors that are very common in Europe that were brought
Speaker:And the thing, like something that's preserved under a meringue top, like it stays fresher
Speaker:So it's like, the thing with pie is that even during times of like seasonal depression, like people have
Speaker:How like the sour cream and raisin pie came about was so that they could have pie in the winter months using like dried
Speaker:wild blueberries, are some of the best things to come from Maine.
Speaker:I am thrilled that your recipe for wild blueberry and moxie pie says frozen berries are just fine
Speaker:Let's talk about the other ingredient, moxie for those unfamiliar with it.
Speaker:What is it and how do you use it in a
Speaker:pie?
Speaker:One of the coolest parts about America is there's so many like regional sodas and I mean, I did learn about this because of
Speaker:What I found so cool about Moxie is that it never really passed the Northeast.
Speaker:Like it's a very like concentrated like Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, that area.
Speaker:And I would say it's like the flavor profile is kind of like a bitter root beer.
Speaker:I'm someone that like loves like ANM Amara or an aperitif, and it's kind of like the soda version of that.
Speaker:Mm-hmm.
Speaker:And so I thought it'd be really cool to like counteract.
Speaker:Kind of the sweet tartness of a wild blueberry with something that's like a little more bitter and herbaceous.
Speaker:So I reduced, um, the moxie down to a syrup, which I thought would be pretty nice way to like flavor the rest of the pie.
Speaker:Mm-hmm.
Speaker:And yeah, I think frozen blueberries are totally fine.
Speaker:Like most of the time when fruits are frozen, especially Wyman, that's my favorite frozen brand of fruit.
Speaker:Like they are frozen at like the peak of.
Speaker:Freshness and like the peak of flavor.
Speaker:And sometimes you can't get that like from a fresh blueberry, like half of it might be like too hot or something.
Speaker:And so they're like a little moldy, like frozen fruit is fine, like home, like store-bought pie crust.
Speaker:It's fine too.
Speaker:There's a whimsical pie in your book that is so satisfying to you.
Speaker:Look at even the photo and the recipe.
Speaker:It's from Nevada.
Speaker:Tell me about the all you can eat buffet pie.
Speaker:So for Nevada, I was really stumped at what I could do to represent a state as grand as Nevada.
Speaker:So I thought that I would focus on the Nevada that I knew and that was Vegas.
Speaker:So my dad used to work in the hotel industry, so uh, me and my sisters went on a business trip with him to Las Vegas and.
Speaker:It was just like seeing everything in excess.
Speaker:Like, you know, we grew up in Singapore and Hong Kong.
Speaker:Everything's like smaller, like fridges are smaller.
Speaker:Apartments are smaller, and everything in America just seemed so vast and wide.
Speaker:And the thing that I thought was so wild was the all you can eat buffet.
Speaker:And the buffet was, um, Invented in Nevada, which is pretty cool too.
Speaker:And so I thought it'd be really fun if I challenged myself.
Speaker:It made an all you can e buffet into a pie.
Speaker:So, and I literally was just like staring at my kitchen and I looked at my cornbread pan, it's like a lodge cast
Speaker:And I was like, oh, like half of it could be savory, half it could be sweet.
Speaker:And then I was like, okay, I'm gonna look at the all you can eat buffet menus of every single.
Speaker:Um, major casino on the strip, and then I wrote down like the common denominators between each one.
Speaker:And so when I blind baked the crust, the crust became like little pie compartments that I could fill.
Speaker:So on the savory side, it's an herb crust and it goes shrimp cocktails, Caesar salad, crab
Speaker:And then on the.
Speaker:Sweet side, it's an all butter crust and it's um, cheesecake chocolate mousse and ice cream sundae and a fruit tart.
Speaker:And it's like one of those things where like when you're in Vegas, like you do get to have your pie needed too.
Speaker:Mm-hmm.
Speaker:And I wanted to kind of like have a funny play on that.
Speaker:Like in pie form,
Speaker:you could make that pie for a dinner party and it's like all the courses all along.
Speaker:Exactly.
Speaker:Exactly.
Speaker:It's, it's your own little pie tasting menu.
Speaker:You have everything
Speaker:from pulled pork pie from North Carolina to wild rice pudding, pie from South Dakota.
Speaker:What advice do you have for someone who's about to use your book and make their very first pie?
Speaker:I think start with your state if you want to, or honestly, you can do what I did when I started the project and
Speaker:That's kind of a nice place for you to begin and.
Speaker:Yeah, like my advice is just if making the crust stresses you out, then buy a store bought crust, then focus on the filling.
Speaker:It's kind of like com compartmentalizing your thoughts to make them as digestible as possible.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:I love that you are willing and encourage people, if necessary, use frozen fruit.
Speaker:Use a pre-made crust, but to explore.
Speaker:The entire country full of pie fillings from sweet to savory that you have in your book.
Speaker:Stacey Maam Fong, author of 50 Pies, 50 states and immigrants.
Speaker:Love letter to the United States through Pie.
Speaker:Great.
Speaker:Good luck with the book and thank you for sharing some of your insight with me this morning.
Speaker:Thank you so much.
Speaker:This is a very wonderful way to start my day.
Speaker:I bet you she gets a lot of pushback about people saying, oh, I'm from Iowa.
Speaker:That's not my policy.
Speaker:Well, she did.
Speaker:She had to choose something that represent well.
Speaker:She chose a person.
Speaker:Each state has a person, and then that person influenced her.
Speaker:Pie.
Speaker:And some of them are really interesting.
Speaker:Some of them are really in grand.
Speaker:I mean, you know, my grandmother was from Oklahoma and my grandmother made the world's best lemon marine pie.
Speaker:And so I think of Oklahoma and Lemon Maren pie, but I know that most people don't make that connection.
Speaker:That's your personal idiosyncrasy.
Speaker:It is.
Speaker:It's totally my.
Speaker:Personal idiosyncrasy and I think about my grandmother's lemon Marrin pie and to me that's Oklahoma.
Speaker:But I guess there would be a lot of pushback in this cuz there are a lot of pies that are more around.
Speaker:There are, but so many of them were just so original.
Speaker:Like her all, you can eat buffet pie from neada.
Speaker:It's like, like wow.
Speaker:It's like, wow,
Speaker:God, it's the old days.
Speaker:I remember being a college student going to Las Vegas before I'd go hiking with friends out in Utah.
Speaker:This is really a million years ago, and we would stay at the cheap Las Vegas hotels back in the
Speaker:Stay in them.
Speaker:You don't want to stay in though Circus.
Speaker:Now they're circus.
Speaker:God, you can get a room for $19.
Speaker:Get 19.
Speaker:Anyway, they were cheap back in the day.
Speaker:They were all cheap.
Speaker:Even the fancy ones and the buffets were always free.
Speaker:Now like the Bellagio, the most
Speaker:60, 70 bucks.
Speaker:Yeah, really expensive and we would go and carb load before we went hiking at the free buffet.
Speaker:It's so very funny though.
Speaker:Buffet pie.
Speaker:All you can eat.
Speaker:Buffet up next.
Speaker:Pie up next as is traditional.
Speaker:The answer to the question, what is making us happy and food this week?
Speaker:hunan preserved mushrooms.
Speaker:Preserved mushrooms, and we are having steamed silk and tofu that is gonna be covered in a spicy sauce.
Speaker:Spicy sauce, spoon preserved mushrooms and my homemade chili oil and ginger and scions.
Speaker:Oh, I'll let you know how that goes.
Speaker:I think it is the same thing for me and believe it or not, um, Bruce made a dish the other day with spicy preserved
Speaker:Bit of porking cabbage dish with the preserved urging tau chilies and they are hot.
Speaker:They are hot and spicy and sour and preserved, tasting a little.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:That sauce, that sauce that you use them in is very traditional, very authentic to Sichuan and in the US
Speaker:That's actually what that is.
Speaker:If you look in a lot of cookbooks like Fusha, Dunlop Cookbook, Dunlop, she refers to it as fish flavor.
Speaker:Pork and that's has nothing to do with fish, but those are the sauces that would've been put
Speaker:So, but are these are all with the
Speaker:make feeling that when we went to Mr.
Speaker:Ye in Dallas when I was a child and we got pork surfer right, they aren't using fermented preserved or it's real.
Speaker:They're actually really hard to find.
Speaker:The mala market.com is a place when they have them in stock, you can get them there.
Speaker:And I just actually ordered a jar from yami by.com and they're.
Speaker:They're really good, but they're not easy to find.
Speaker:No, it's difficult.
Speaker:No, it is difficult to find.
Speaker:So that's the podcast for this week.
Speaker:Thanks for being a part of it.
Speaker:We appreciate that you're on this journey with us, and we hope that you do in fact, find the time to cook and time to make meals for
Speaker:the people.
Speaker:And please go to our Facebook group Cooking with Bruce and Mark, join the conversation, share with
Speaker:We would love to.
Speaker:To hear that and we would love to have you back for another episode.
Speaker:So subscribe and you won't miss this song.