The Season 2 Trailer for The Chefs Without Restaurants Podcast

Welcome to season two of the Chefs Without Restaurants podcast. I'm your host, Chris Spear. On the show, I have conversations with culinary entrepreneurs, and people in the food and beverage industry who took a different route. They're caterers, research chefs, personal chefs, cookbook authors, food truckers, farmers, cottage bakers, and all sorts of culinary renegades. I, myself, fall into the personal chef category, as I started my personal chef business Perfect Little Bites 10 years ago. And while I started working in kitchens in the early 90s, I've never worked in a restaurant unless you count Burger King. I'm really excited to share Season Two with you. I've taken the past month off to record a bunch of new shows and get them ready for release. The show will be returning next week on Tuesday February 2nd, 2021 with culinary historian Michael Twitty. Michael's book The Cooking Gene won the James Beard award for Book of the Year in 2018. You'll also be hearing from Chef Shola of Studio Kitchen. He's currently working up in New York at the Stone Barns center with Chef Dan Barber, doing a month long residency. I speak with Daniel Gritzer from Serious Eats, Christina Pirello of Christina Cooks, chefs Matt Collins and April DuBose, Laurie Boucher who's known on Instagram as @Baltimorehomecook, and you'll hear from Matt the Butcher. These are just a few of the guests that I'll have on the show this season. For a taste of our conversations, you can hear some clips from these episodes in just a minute. I'd love it if you'd subscribe to the show. And if you listen on iTunes, a rating and review would be great. Also, I'm launching a Patreon so that listeners can help support the show. And if you have a business and would like to sponsor a few shows, I'd love that. Please reach out to me at ChefsWithoutRestaurants@gmail.com. And thank you so much to all the listeners. I really appreciate your support. I had so much fun doing season one, and I'm really excited for season two. Now, let's hear some of those clips.

As African Americans sort of, like, got further and further away from the Jim Crow South, from the slavery south, the surrogate south...there was also this absolute severance with certain foods. For example, everybody else is like lima beans, butter beans, and I'm just like, oh my god, get away from me. And you know, I don't know what it means to have a satisfying meal of cornbread and beans. Because we didn't have eat, that ish man. My grandmother would make chitlins for my uncle and for my grandfather. But she cussed her way through, and she detested it. I mean, there was no scrapple in my house. There was no pig feet in my house. And that was because we simply decided that was no longer going to be part of our repertoire.

After my mother passed away, I decided to move to Philadelphia, from Florida where my dad was. My brother was in Philly. So I was like, Well, I'm just, you know, come up to Philly, new life, new whatever. And six months later, I get diagnosed with what would be considered stage 4 leukemia, although they don't stage leukemia. And I remember sitting in the doctor's office thinking, like, Are you kidding? And they wanted me to go immediately to the hospital and start treatments. And I said, Well, what are the chances and they said, well, you're terminal, and they kept saying terminal, Terminal Terminal. And finally, I'm so frustrated. I'm like, that's a big building at the airport. What do we do? And they said, we'll try everything we can and I thought oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, I'm not No, I'm not spending whatever time I have left sick and bald like my mother, I'm not doing it. I don't want to lose my hair. I don't want to be sick. I'm afraid of needles. No. So they agreed to let me go home and think about it. And I sat in my apartment for 24 hours and thought I'm just gonna move back to Italy.

You know I have a recipe for romesco sauce. And for years and you know cooking in New York City and seeing recipes here everybody it's roasted red bell peppers, roasted red bell peppers, roasted red bell peppers, and you just you know if you don't, if you don't stop to dig into it, that may it may one may just assume that romesco sauce is in part based on roasted red bell peppers. And it's not roasted red bell peppers. Not that it's there's nothing wrong with using roasted red bell peppers. It's an entirely rational choice when you cannot get the peppers that are more commonly used in Spain. To it's a it's an entirely different pepper. It's not a bell pepper. It's not fresh pepper. It's a Dr. Pepper, it's not roasted, it's you get that complex flavor from the fact that it's a dried pepper. The point isn't that you have to use the nora pepper. But it's helpful to know that isn't it?

I think one of the biggest things that people don't discuss when entrepreneurship is how lonely it is, and lonely in a way that people really don't understand where you're going, because a lot of people working on the fact they like the dependability of it, but entrepreneurship is not that way. Right? Not at all. Not at all. You're your own best resource and entrepreneurship. If you're an introvert, it's even more difficult. You know, you know, if you have some character flaws in there, that you're working out, how to talk to people, how to present yourself, how to be more confident, you know that you have a skill, you know, but are you confident enough to do it, being able to ask for help? There's so many different downfalls that can happen during entrepreneurship that people don't discuss. And that is okay. That is okay. If you mess up and a whole bunch of people see that you mess up. It's okay.

Yeah, it took a while to get to the delicious part. But my relationship with food was good. No one in my family was that great of a cook, my parents had separated when I was pretty young. And so I started just, I don't know, I guess copying like chocolate pan or Emerald or whatever, and just trying to cook. And then I guess I had my mother tried to turn me into like a cash cow. Like very unsuccessfully, like, I guess this is before like Flynn, McGarry, she wanted me to have like some like, kid chef book thing. And so but she her approach was awful and actually made me not like cooking for a while. Or she would go to like the doctor's office and get like one of those like cooking magazines and try to get me to recreate it and take the picture on this awful photo and like an awful picture to like pitch it to somebody. And I was like very adamant about not doing it. And then it became this weird project she tried to do for a while. And then luckily for me, she gave up.

Cultural appropriation is a problem in society, food is not necessarily the place to start with that argument. Racism is cultural exclusion is not allowing people to move into certain neighborhoods, again, which all go back to like some sort of, you know, race based unfairness in many ways, or culturally based. And then there's the whole idea of through cultural appropriation, where it's like, somebody makes a strong case to promote something through the eyes of another culture. Like, for example, if somebody food or wine magazine wants to do a story about hush puppies or fried green tomatoes.And rather than understand that, you know, slaves were given like good tomatoes at the end of the day, just bad environment is that maybe like the only way you can eat them? You know, they have like Paula deeds, sons, like talking about, like, texture and all this other bullshit, you know, that's cultural appro riation.

You know, people have been asking me through the years to teach them how to make pasta, my husband's colleagues, friends, and I thought, Oh, I wonder if I could do this and maybe design a couple of unique pasta classes and see if anyone will hire me. I thought, Oh, I'm in culinary school gives me a little bit of legitimacy. So I sort of spent a few months and put together some unique classes. And I went door to door I just you know, pestered people. And before I knew it, I was hired at the chef shop in Baltimore, Baltimore, chefs shop, kitchen studio, cooking school and a few other places. And so that's sort of, and I realized very quickly, they didn't really care about culinary school. They just cared if I could make pasta and teach it to others successfully. So that's sort of how I got into the teaching part of it.

We walk up this platform, and we're looking down into this box. And he's like, Alright, man, you ready? And I'm like, Yeah, I guess so. Like, I don't know. So he lifts up this huge sliding door. And this. I mean, it had to have been 1500 pounds. You know, cow came in, and I'm like, Oh my god, I don't even remember the last time I've seen a cow up in person, you know. So he takes this modified 22 spring action. It has a hollow tip. four inch bolt. So, you know, he clicks a thing, boom. And I mean, it was just the most insane thing I had ever seen. The professor came up to me and he's like, hey, so what did you think about your day? And I was like, I don't I don't know what to think about it. Like, I have no idea how to articulate what I just seen, you know, like, so he's like, do you want to join the apprenticeship program? And, you know, I was shaking my head no and say yes.