Episode 105: Kitchen Shortcuts, Our Favorite Cookbooks, Fermentation

This week's guest, Amanda Feifer
This week’s guest, Amanda Feifer

Did you know that Chipotle recently unseated Subway as America’s favorite “healthy” fast food chain? In this week’s episode, we discussed the Business Insider article that explained this passing of the torch and shared our own thoughts on the two restaurants.

One of our favorite Philly-based fast casual spots is Farmer’s Keep. (Correction: this is the restaurant’s name, not “Farmer’s Table” as Joy said in the podcast.)

marisa's cookbook wall
A segment of Marisa’s cookbook library. We told you it was a lot!

The cookbooks we discuss as our longtime loves are:

Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone and Joy of Cooking 

We’d love for you to share your own go-to cookbooks in the comments here.

Our guest today was Amanda Feifer. Check out her blog, Phickle.com, and preorder her book, Ferment Your Vegetables.

In our discussion of tomatoes, Marisa mentioned her tomato jam recipe which is definitely something you should make if you have a lot of tomatoes on your hands.

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Episode 104: Cooking for the Week, Unsung Restaurants, Sarah Grey

SarahGrey

 

Entertaining was a theme this week–and we weighed in on The Kitchn’s 5 Ways to be the Best Dinner Guest Ever. (Sound advice here, but we don’t agree with everything in that piece!)

On the heels of Adam Robert’s recent Amateur Gourmet blog post titled OK I Lied: It Sucks to Cook After Work, we discussed our favorite strategy for making it not suck: Cooking once and eating all week. (One of our favorite sources of inspiration here is An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace)

We chatted about our favorite local unsung restaurants and sources for surprisingly great take out though–we freely admit that sometimes we just don’t want to cook either.

It was our pleasure to talk to Sarah Grey, who wrote about her Friday Night Meatballs events for Serious Eats and watched the story go viral last year. (Since we recorded this episode, we learned the piece was selected for the 2015 edition of Best Food Writing. Congratulations, Sarah!)

And finally we discussed cooking with ground beef. We were choosing local, grass-fed, small-scale ground beef even before this week’s bad news about ground beef.

If you like what you hear, make sure to subscribe! Bonus points if you rate us or leave a review. Follow us on twitter @localmouthful and help us spread the word about the show.

Episode 103: No Cook Meals, Carbs and Your Health, Madame Fromage

Our guest, Tenaya Darlington aka Madame Fromage
Our guest, Tenaya Darlington aka Madame Fromage

First up in episode three, we talked over a recent Washington Post story about the common (and controversial) practice of working in coffee shops. (Do you have opinions? We’d love to hear them in the comments here.)

Marisa explained that she enjoys working at Nook and Good Karma Cafe and shares her tips on being courteous about it. Joy can’t get much writing or editing done in cafes, but she does have a lot of meetings at Chhaya. Share your favorite spots with good coffee and strong wifi in the comments.

Next we tackled no cook meals. Listen for all the great tips, but a couple recipes we mentioned were this one for Chilled Cucumber and Avocado Soup and this one for Veggie Nori Rolls.

With several recent studies on the topic of carbs and health in the news, we shared our approaches to eating the starchy stuff. It turns out we both love one particular low carb recipe–Green Chicken from Nom Nom Paleo.

This conversation may have backfired: just talking about it made us hungry for our favorite breads (from High Street on Market) and pasta (from Zeppoli restaurant).

Our interview this week features Tenaya Darlington, whose blog Madame Fromage is a cheese-lover’s dream. If you enjoy what she had to say us, buy her first book, Di Bruno Bros. House of Cheese, and pre-order her second, The Modern Cocktailer.

If you like what you hear, make sure to subscribe! Bonus points if you rate us or leave a review. Follow us on twitter @localmouthful and help us spread the word about the show.