hey, I'm Bruce Weinstein, and this is the podcast Cooking with Bruce and Mark.

And I'm Mark Scarborough. And together, Bruce and I have written 36, working on the 37th cookbook. More about that soon. But this is our podcast about food and cooking, the main passions in our life. We've got a one minute cut. cooking tip. As always, this is actually the first of two episodes in which we want to talk about foods we like and foods we hate. And we're each going to share our kind of love, hate lists and react to those. And then we'll tell you what's making us

Our one minute cooking tip. Stop using tongs to turn chicken and meat in a skillet, because if you are like me, you know that the skin rips, the meat sticks, no matter how much oil you put. So take a nice, flat, metal spatula, and when your meat has been in that skillet for a few minutes, and you know it's going to be good and brown, just give it a good scrape, one hard scrape. Pull the chicken skin right off the pot and you've got a beautiful brown piece of meat without any sticking.

Okay, so the writer's going to add all the caveats now. This is my job as a writer when we write recipes is to write all the caveats. What Bruce is talking about is a not using a nonstick You cannot use a metal spatula on a non stick skillet. And I'm

gonna interrupt to say, and you wouldn't even need it in a non stick skillet because there'd be no sticking to begin with.

Well, that could be true. But in any event, look at your non stick cookware. If it is at all scratched, you need to throw it out, and you need to, uh, I was gonna say toss it out, but throw it out, whatever, and you need to buy new. And two, This is the second part of this. The way it works, as Bruce describes, that you use a metal spatula to pop it up is you do have to leave, let's say the chicken thigh skin side down long enough for it to form a crust. You have to be patient. You can't do this trick. by putting it in the skillet, leaving there 20 seconds and then trying to turn it. People are very impatient with this thing. Oh, with browning

meat? You gotta

really brown the hell out of everything.

When it says brown your beef before you're making stew, brown it. Don't just gray it. Don't just look for a little tinge of brown around the edges. And if you

brown it, then the sugars, the natural sugars caramelize, and that's why you can pop it. off the skillet without tearing the skin or without tearing the beef or pork or whatever you have into millions of pieces. And again, we're talking here about land animal protein, not about fish, of course. So, yeah, who does? But, um, there you go. Well, well, no, I guess people do brown salmon skin. So there you go. Stop using tongs, but use metals. bachelor with those caveats in place. Before we get to the next part of this podcast, let me remind you that we do have a newsletter to sign up for that. You have to find our website, cooking with Bruce and Mark or Bruce and mark. com. It is under redevelopment, but it's still up and running. You'll. Scroll down the landing page and you'll find a way to subscribe to the newsletter. It comes out. I don't know, a couple of times a month, it's coming out more now that my leg is fully healed and I'm walking no longer with a broken leg. So you can sign up for that on our website and we certainly appreciate that. And it is sometimes connected to this podcast. Sometimes not. Okay, we're going to talk about what foods we love and what foods we hate, and Bruce is going to start with his love and his hate.

I'm going to start with my favorite food of all time, which has got to be prime ribs. My mom made prime ribs for every holiday, we called the Standing Rib Roast. Yes, we did, too. In fact, we called it the Standing Rib Roast. It was only as I got older that if you go out to a restaurant, a fancy restaurant, they call it Prime Rib. Lowry's Prime Rib. And it was a Standing Rib Roast. And I always wanted the end piece. I still want the end piece. It's the deco on top. Do you not ever want

the end piece? Never, never. Why don't you want the end piece? I don't like it. It's overcooked. Oh, but it's charred. It's actually mooing for me to want it. I know, but you get all that Caramelized meat on the outside and anyway, it doesn't matter because what I like and I agree with Bruce I love prime ribs and when I first met Bruce This was literally all he would make for dinner party. Our dinner parties are so much different now, but when I first met him Eight years ago, what he made was prime rib for every single dinner. And do you remember the dessert? Always

chocolate mousse. And yes,

indeed. And I like them bone in. I do not want the meat trimmed off the bone and tied back on, because really what I want is the bones.

I,

I gnaw the

bones. I don't understand why butchers cut off the bones and then tie them back on. I know they think they're making it easier for you, but it's really not easy. And it is my favorite food, which is going to lead me to my, probably one of my least favorite foods of all time. And this is a weird one because, You're couching it. Just say it. Cooked oysters. Cooked oysters are gross. Why

are you couching it? I

love, because I love oysters, but not cooked. Once you cook them, ew,

ew, they just get gross. And I totally disagree. I love fried oysters. I love oysters Rockefeller. I love raw oysters. I do not. think they get gross. I love oyster chowder. I love oysters and I love oysters. Oyster dressing. Oh my gosh. When I was a child, I would make myself literally sick on my great aunt Viola. Yes, I had a great aunt Viola on her oyster dressing, salting crackers, butter, and canned oysters.. Okay. So I'm going to push on and say what I love. One of the things that I really love in life is fried chicken. And I want to tell you that I am really picky about fried chicken. I do not like deep fried chicken, which means I mostly don't like the kind of fried chicken that you get at chain. restaurants. I like pan fried, fried chicken, not in a deep fryer. However,

you love the fried chicken in Bansham, which is Korean fried chicken, which is always a deep fried chicken. I do,

but in general, if you're going to talk about Southern fried chicken, I like it pan fried. That is, you put about. Oh, I don't know. An inch or two of Crisco. Yeah, indeed. Crisco in a skillet. You heat it to the proper temperature. You flour coat the chicken. That's all you do to it. And then you put it in the hot oil, never crowding the pan and making sure that temperature remains stable. That's how I like it. Turn it over. I am not a fan of the big deep fryer because it tends to lead to beer batters and all those. It's thick batters, and I don't like that.

Well, growing up, we never had fried chicken the way you're talking about it. We lived on something called Chicken Delight, which was a chain in Queens. Maybe they were in other places. And they deep fried chicken, and there wasn't a thick batter on it. In fact, I don't know that they did much. The thing about it, it was so crunchy and so delicious, but it got dry. And I think it got dry because of the deep frying. But they also deep fried ribs, and we get big buckets of Deep fried chicken ribs. Okay. I'm pushing on.

And I'm going to tell you that one of my hates in life, is, get ready, raw onions. I despise raw onions, I grew up with my parents ate giant slices of raw red onion on hamburger. That's the way you do it. No, no, I can't do it. I am a disaster in Serbia and Russia and places like that where they just cover the food in raw onions. I've just seen Mark when we go out to

eat and he gets salads and he picks out all the red onions. I do. He sends back his plate with piles of red onions on the side. But you like pickled red onions. I do. And you like grilled red onions. Raw red,

raw onions do not like me. And that's the whole problem with the activity. So, uh, I am not a fan of raw onions. I grew up with it. My father. Eight raw onion slices with anything. He would put a slice of raw onion on his plate and salt it. And I,

I can't deal with it. Okay, I'll put it this way. Onions are not a fruit.

And my grandmother, his mother, my paternal grandmother, my grandmother would raise onions, would grow onions, and she would go out in the backyard. I'm not making this up. Oh, in rural Oklahoma, she would go out in the backyard, she would pull up the raw onions, hose them off with a garden hose, and bite into one of them.

I'm going to repeat, onions are not a fruit. So, uh, moving on from that. She took it as a hand fruit. Okay, it's not a fruit anymore, it's a vegetable, but go on. Okay. My next love is something Mark hates, and that is a cinnamon raisin bagel. Gross. Just gross. Oh, no. Cinnamon raisin bagel is up there with the classics. It's just as good as a salt bagel and a poppy bagel. I'm sorry,

I'm gonna out jew you. I, the Christian, is out jewing you right now. I, cinnamon raisin bagels are an abomination.

Oh, when I was growing up, I used to get a cinnamon raisin bagel with walnut cream cheese.

Oh my god. And have that

with a nice iced coffee.

Just have a slice of cheesecake. No.

But see, the thing is, unlike getting, you know, cinnamon coffee cake, the dough of the bagel is not sweet, right? It's just the regular old dough. They just happen to put raisins in it and a little bit of cinnamon. So I don't know, it's not, it's just not as sweet as coffee cake and that's why I kind of like them. Mmm, gross. No, they're good. You

might as well have blueberry chocolate chip. Yeah, they're good. Peach cobbler bagels, I don't know, gross, just gross.

But what I don't like, now this has nothing to do with bagels. This is just a flavor that, if it goes in my mouth, I'll wipe my mouth out like that scene from Big with Tom Hanks when he was like 16 years old, licorice. Disgusting. Black licorice, don't even eat it around me, it's like secondhand smoke. It's just the smell of it when you're chewing it. I love

licorice.

Like good and plenty's, my mom used to eat good and plenty's in the car and I'd have to like stick my head out the window like a dog.

Well maybe part of the reason I love licorice is to say something else that I love, which is bourbon. And if you listen to this podcast you probably know that I am a grand fan of bourbon. bourbon. Um, I must admit that as I age, I can't drink it like I used to. But, uh, nice bourbon every once in a while is a really beautiful treat. I don't, uh, I don't necessarily drink many of the big brands. I find these little off producers from Kentucky and I will only drink bourbon from Kentucky with one. Weird exception, and that is I love Breckenridge bourbon from Colorado, and I love the caramel notes in it. So, mostly Kentucky bourbon, but, um, okay, I'll make an exception for Breckenridge a lot. Here's something I really hate. I hate, and this is going to kill you because this is what everybody loves, I hate too much garlic. I just hate it. When people say, oh, in every recipe I quadruple the garlic, I'm always like, why? Why would you do such a thing? I like garlic, it's not, it doesn't have anything to do with not liking garlic. I just don't. Get this whole thing of five million cloves of garlic for one chicken breast. It

depends what you do with it. If you really brown it and you get the garlic nice and toasty. I like, I like a lot of garlic. It's toasty. But some dishes need garlic. They need a lot of garlic. See,

you're taking it to the other. See, I didn't say I hate garlic. I know, but. I hate. I don't like too much garlic. I hate it when it is the

flavor. Well, but some dishes, it is the flavor. Well, like Like a lamb with 40 cloves of garlic.

But I don't like those dishes. I never liked chicken with 40 cloves of garlic. I don't like too much garlic. I love garlic with chicken. A good chicken braise in a skillet deserves a couple cloves of garlic in it. People routinely say, Oh, I triple and quadruple the garlic. I don't get it, because it becomes just this dominant, overwhelming flavor.

Did your grandmothers ever cook with garlic? No, not really.

Yeah, isn't that funny? I

mean, is it a

generational thing? No, no grandmother. I have both of my grandmothers. One had a garden, and one spent summers on a farm. And neither of my grandmothers grew garlic either.

I mean, and mine didn't. I know it's not a Jewish thing. I know a lot of Jews cook with garlic, so my grandmothers just didn't have garlic. Garlic bagels. Garlic bagels, but for whatever reason, they never ever cooked with garlic. Isn't that funny? Okay. One of the things I love. Maple syrup and it's something I shouldn't eat too much of it is pure sugar is pure carbs now maple syrup The thing is I don't love the super super dark I don't like what they used to call grade B the stuff that almost looks like molasses and everybody prizes the first syrup of the year, right? The first sap and they boil it down and it's so light in color and light in flavor. Fat. I want a nice, bold syrup, but not too dark. I like like an amber ale. I like my syrup to look like that.

Let me say I love maple syrup too. And let me say we live in New England where so much maple syrup is produced, although less and less. It's with climate change. It's moving more and more to Canada. But a lot of syrup is still produced around us and we're recording this now in early March. And just so you know, what they call sugaring season, that's when they're drawing the sap out of the trees. Sugaring season is almost over. And I think people often think of maple syrup as a fall thing, like when the leaves are turning. No, it's when the sap first starts to run. And we're just about done in our part of New England.

I know we're almost out. I should go find a nice local producer and get us some new maples. They're just not

the first run. Vermont stuff's really good. Oh, it is, yeah. I do like that Vermont stuff. Okay, anyway, yes, so I agree with you on maple syrup. I believe that a waffle should set sail on a sea of maple syrup on a plate. But you're

not going to agree with me on the next one because I cannot stand root beer. Almost as much as I cannot stand licorice. Oh my gosh,

I love root beer so much. I will

let you drink it around me. secondhand smells that bother me like the licorice. Oh, come on. I'm going to get some licorice and just eat it around

you. Um, come on. Secondhand smells. I guess this bleeds into my love too, because I actually love root beer. You even made

your own root beer syrup a few years

ago. I did. And in fact, in the book we have coming out this summer, there's a recipe, my recipe, for small batch root beer syrup that you can add to soda and make your own. I love root beer more than I can say. When I was a little kid, we would go to A& W Root Beer. This is, oh gosh, this is the early 60s. So we would go, this is when they would come out on roller skates to your car. I'm not making this up, this is how old I am. They come out on roller skates to the car and put the tray on the window, and we would order hamburgers. and root beers and we thought it was the finest thing. I mean, I would sit in the backseat of the car and we'd all order burgers. And of course I come from this very Protestant family and A& W had the Papa burger, the mama burger, and the baby burger, and we would literally order based on what we were. So I got. The baby burger and my mother got the mama burger. I know it's ridiculous, but we followed the rules always. And we can't rip here. Well, I loved her. And

maybe as a Christian thing, cause my father loved celery sodas, maybe that's the Jew thing. I can't stand celery soda. Sweet celery soda. Add that to another thing I don't like.

Since we're talking about what I hate, and since I agreed with Root Beer and said I loved it, I'll tell you what another thing I hate is sweet tea. And I am from the South, and I despise sweet tea. Like with a passion, I do not want sugar in my iced tea. Here's a really weird thing, and what I want, I say before I say the weird thing, when I was growing up, my mother made Ice tea every day. There was always a pitcher of ice tea on the kitchen counter, and we only drank it with lemon. My mother tended not to put lemon in it. The rest, my father and I, we put lemon in it, but my mother just drank it as it is. And here's what's so weird. So I grew up in the South, and it was the mid 60s, and my mother used to say that Sweet tea, well don't yell at me, that sweet tea was low class, and that we were a high class southerners and we did not put sugar in our tea, that's what she used to say, and I will tell you when we would go to restaurants in the south and get iced tea. It was not sweet. They would put the sugar down on the table. Now it seems like sweet tea has taken over the South and it's all sweet tea everywhere. I just don't like

it. Okay, and here's the thing. They put sugar on the table and you know it's a nice ice cold drink. You put the sugar in and it all falls to the bottom and it doesn't dissolve. Well, your mother would've thought we were really low class because my mother and my grandmother, both. The only kind of iced tea they made was from the packet. Oh no. It was the instant. Oh no. Sweet tea. Oh, no, no, no. In fact,

my mother would in restaurants when I was a kid, my mother would ask, is the tea brewed? She would want to know that, and then it would come. And if someone around us. put sugar in there. I said, like, get another table. My mother would kind of look over at them and then remark about, Oh my God, you know, from such low class roots. I mean, really, seriously, it was a thing. And I didn't know until I became an adult and moved. Out of the south and went back to the south. The sweet tea had just taken over the whole landscape and it was everything. I guess it's just part of my raising. I just don't like sweet tea. All right. And so

one of the things that I have learned to love as I've gotten older is smoked salmon.

Oh, well, why don't you say what you didn't like?

So as a child, I would not eat. Anything that lived in water. Mm.

As a

child. Mm-hmm When

I met you and you were in your mid thirties, you when I was still a child. Really, it was anything in that lived in water. It was my

identity. I, it was like I threw this out in front of me. If I'd go out to eat, I don't, you know, please tell your server if you have any food issues. I don't eat anything that lived in water. So It was so weird. So weird. And my, yet my family. ate all of it. My family ate smoked salmon and white fish salad and even lobster and shrimp. We weren't koshers. My family ate all that stuff. And now I love it. And I think back to all those years, all those beautiful, we called it appetizing smoked fish dinners, all those dinners with the platters. I love it. You call smoked

fish dinners appetizing, or you go to the appetizing store.

Yeah. The appetizing store. Okay. Go on. And, and All those years of not eating the lox, and not eating the smoked salmon, and the whitefish, and the herring, and oh, I'm glad I ate it now, but I really regret.

Not too long after we moved in together, uh, Bruce's paternal grandmother died, and I went to the shiva, I went to the funeral, and then the shiva. Afterwards, at, at, uh, the funeral at the lunch that was served. Of course, it was appetizing. Of course. And I had for the first time, sable. It's a deep water, very oily, white fish sable on a salt bagel. And I thought to myself, I have moved in with the right family. What is this

smoked sable?

thing that I'm having. I love smoked salmon. I love all that stuff. I love, Bruce has taught me to love eggs, lox, and onions. We fry it all together in a skillet. I, I, I can't get enough smoked salmon. Well,

you taught me to eat fish, so I thank you for that.

Sure. Okay. Sure.

And one more thing, I can't stand. It's another beverage, and it's in the sort of category of licorice and root beer. It's Amaro's, and it's those. Bitter, bitter aperitifs after dinner, you drink

them. There's a theme here, licorice root

beer, Amaro, that I don't like. Yeah, I don't care for them, but I like bitter things. So, there's just some, there's gotta be one herbal ingredient in all of them that's just getting to me.

I, Amaro, I have to admit, is a, is a take it or leave it thing with me. I mean, I'll drink it if somebody offers it to me, but I won't seek it out on my own. It, it's a little bit too astringent for me. Um, I'd rather have an espresso after dinner than an Amaro, but I know those aren't. Mutually exclusive, but I won't necessarily turn down

an

Amaro, but, um, that's the bitterness that I want. There's something about Amaro that's got a sweet edge despite the bitterness that I kind of, that's my take it or leave it. See, I've got a theme too about sweetness. So, okay, but, but, given that sweetness, here's something that I love. Okay. I love fudge. I do love fudge in almost all of its incarnations. I'm less excited about white chocolate fudges, but I do love fudge. Bruce and I have this theory that when you go into any tourist town, Any tourist town, Algonquit, Maine, Estes Park, Colorado, I don't care, any tourist centered town, that the real money must be in fudge. That's where the lines are. It's where the, there's always a fudge shop, so. And there's always a line. The real money's gotta be in fudge. When

fudge is made well, it's creamy and smooth and fabulous. It's crazy. I agree with you. But. Too often the fudge is grainy. No. And it's not good fudge.

No, no it's not. And or it's been sitting too long and it hasn't moved outta the cave. So it's dried

out on the edges and No, no,

no, no, no. It has to be super creamy. And the thing about fudge is I can eat a little bit of it, but I can't eat very much.

Well, last December when we were in Missouri, we had, uh, Mark's mom died and we had to drive to Oklahoma. We, oh my God,

you're gonna tell this story

Bucky's. Now, I had never been to a. Bucky's before. Okay. Bucky's is what I thought you were going to tell, but have to tell that now. So Bucky's Bucky's is this road stop gas station with anybody

in North America, except you knows what I didn't

know it was. And they had a fudge bar with about a hundred flavors of fudge, including banana pudding fudge, where they fold it in bits of Nilla wafers and dried bananas into their fudge. And I don't want stuff in my fudge.

So if you're traveling down the interstate, laterally northeast to southwest across Missouri, you will call through, I'm not making this up, the town of Uranus. And the

best fudge comes from Uranus. And all their billboards say.

Best fudge comes from Uranus and we'll have big fun in Uranus Uranus

fudge factory,

right? And it's amazing what you can find in Uranus. And it's a whole big trip

joint behind Uranus. Of

course there is. There Okay. So I do love fudge, but I did not get any fudge from Uranus, nor did I get any. fudge from Bucky's, but I do love really well made fudge. And here's my final one. I get the last one and it's, you're going to hear a theme here with me. Uh, something that I hate. I hate sweet cornbread. I despise cornbread that tastes like cake. When I grew up, my mother did not. put sugar in cornbread. Again, I grew up a Southerner and my mother did not put sugar in cornbread. She thought that was low class. Oh,

just like the sweet tea

neck to be a crash. He thought that was part of my dad's family, which were low class rural people. My mother did not put sugar in my grandmother, my mother's mother did not put sugar in cornbread because the corn is naturally sweet. So what do you have to put sugar in it?

Well, you need a little bit of sugar for the structure, right? Because you want that nice crumb to it. So you need a little sugar, but not much.

Oh, now it's a whole different thing. My grandmother made cornbread. What we call corn pone, which means she fried the batter in a skillet. Oh, yum. Um, but mother made cornbread and maybe mother put a little sugar in it. But I just, when I bite into it and it tastes like cake at barbecue joints, I just don't get it. I totally don't get it. Um, I want it. taste corn, cornbread. I don't want to just taste sure. Okay. Well, there's our whole list of what we like and what we hate and a little bit self indulgent, but we're going to do this again in the next episode of the podcast. So what can I say? Hey, just to remind you, we have a Facebook. group called Cooking with Bruce and Mark, and we would love to know what you love and hate. So why don't you go out to that Facebook group, Cooking with Bruce and Mark, and tell us what you love or what you hate or if you agree with us on any of these items. Okay. Up next, as is traditional, what's making us happy in food this

called turnip cake. Oh, right. And there's actually no turnips in it. It's made from grated daikon radish. Right, right. You squeeze the moisture out of the radish and you fry up dried shrimp and Chinese sausage and shiitake mushrooms. And then you. Stir fry up the radish things until they're dry. Then you add some stock and a slurry mixture of rice powder and cornstarch. It's thick and pasty. It's a lot of steps here because then you have to put it in an oiled pan and steam it and then you cool it and cut it and fry it.

And why do you like this so much?

Because I've always loved it but I made it for the first time for a dinner party last night. And it is a lot of work and it gives He

served it with pickled celery and a

sweet Soy bean, a sweet bean paste with chili crisp and the celery was pickled with star anise. It was delicious. It was just as good as I've ever had it in any dim sum house. Oh, not to pat yourself on the

back, okay. I'm good at what I do. All right, then. I tell you what's making me happy in food this week, and that is something that we've probably talked about before, and that is mootie. Passata. If you don't know about passata, passata is essentially the true Italian tomato sauce. Mutti brand is some of the best there possibly is. And just to tell, cue you in on this, you can find Mutti brand passata, P A S S A T A, passata. You can find it At world market and sometimes at home goods for cheap, believe it or not. It is still more expensive than the canned stuff from the supermarket. But Bruce has been making a lot of passata stews this winter, always with fish. So, a nice piece of cod or a mahi mahi or something inside this deep, complex tomato sauce with fennel and onions. It braises for just a few minutes on the stovetop, and we have been eating that like crazy this winter as my leg healed, and I love it. Okay, that's the podcast for this week. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for being part of this podcast. We certainly appreciate your being with us on this journey and spending your time with us.

And as Mark said, go to our Facebook group, Cooking with Bruce and Mark, and tell us what you love and hate. But also, every week we tell you what's making us happy in food, so tell us what's making you happy in food. There will be a question there every week. You'll see a post that says, What's making you happy in food this week? Let us know, because we want to know what you like in food on cooking with Bruce and Mark.