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00:00
This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking to Mike McCormick at Homecooked Magazine. Good afternoon, Mike. How are you? Good afternoon. Doing great. Thanks for having me. Are you in Oregon? Is that right?

00:24
Yeah, our company is based in Oregon. I'm just south of Portland, our warehouse and a lot of our team is in Eugene, but primarily in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. Oh, I've heard it's beautiful there. It is. And, you know, we get a lot of grief about the rain, but honestly, you know, most of the year it's pretty, it's pretty tough to beat. I've been around lots of places and I keep coming back. So. Nice.

00:49
Okay, well, tell me about yourself and about the magazine. I see that it's very new. Yeah, so I've been in publishing for about eight years. We have three magazines. One we started in 2016 called Quilt Folk. And so I've been in the magazine space for a number of years, but Homecooked is really very new. In fact, we officially launched December 1st. So it's about, you know,

01:20
month and a half old, but we've been working on it for well over a year. Okay. And how did it come about? Whose brainchild was it? Yeah. So, like I said, I've been publishing for a while and had had the idea for Home Cooked for a number of years. And really, the idea was pretty simple. We just wanted to try to create a print magazine that sort of embodied everything we loved about.

01:48
home-cooked meals, we wanted to try to put that in print. So of course, the tastes that are familiar that we love, but also the faces and the people and the conversations, the plates, all the little things that go into making home-cooked meals feel warm and special. We said, well, can we recreate that in a print magazine? And so that was the simple kind of genesis of an idea. And then of course, it's just a lot of work to try to...

02:17
to make that happen and we've got a great team of people who love print. So our company is fully committed to print magazines, which I know is a little bit different in this sort of era. But that was the idea. And we felt like we've been doing this for a while. We had a business model that kind of made sense. And so I felt like the right time to kind of dive in. Okay. So here's the question that I was left with after I looked at your Facebook page and your website. And I'm...

02:46
I may be playing a little bit of devil's advocate here, but I don't think so. A lot of people these days don't cook anything from scratch. They don't use their beautiful kitchens for anything except a show place to have their friends come over and have a cup of tea or a drink of wine. And so why did you think there was a market for this magazine?

03:12
Yeah, I think that definitely what you said is true, but I think it's a big world and there are a lot of people who use their kitchens in pretty interesting ways. And if you just look at my family or my friend group, we've got people who kind of run the gamut. And so, you know, it's a big enough space. Everybody eats food is kind of a cultural touchstone for all of us in one way, shape, form. And so the idea with Home Cooked was...

03:41
It's not just for people who make everything from scratch or for people who maybe do it all the time, but it's for people who, like I said, appreciate a home-cooked meal, whether you're the person making it or enjoying it, all those kinds of things. And for that, I mean, there's just, I don't know, there's so many people who can resonate with that idea. And with home-cooked, it was kind of like, how can we create a big enough table where...

04:07
everybody feels sort of welcome here, whatever their relationship to cooking or food is, you know? Okay, that's a valid answer. I just was very curious because my kids are all grown. My oldest is 35, my youngest just turned 23. Oldest is a girl, the other three are boys. And one of the rules in my house, I've mentioned on the podcast before, is that they all had to know how to cook a dinner and a dessert that they would be proud to serve their friends.

04:36
before they moved out. And I cooked from scratch all the time with them growing up and they kicked in, they helped, they joined in. And every single one of them really does enjoy cooking from scratch. And I've been told that I was kind of weird making that a requirement. The other requirements were that they could do their own laundry and wash their own dishes because you know, being a human is important.

05:01
I can tell you from my experience a little bit, and this might surprise you or not, but I was really fortunate. I grew up on a 10-acre berry farm. For a long time, we lived in a teeny little house there until I was 14. We didn't run the farm the whole time, but we did on the second half of that. From the time I was about nine years old. My mom was a really good home cook, I would say.

05:31
didn't make fancy meals. They were simple, usually like protein, like mashed potatoes and green beans or something like that. But nine nights out of 10, there was something home cooked on the table and maybe that 10th night we would get takeout or something. But she was a great, great home cook. And so I was the benefactor of that. I enjoyed that, but I myself didn't pick up cooking and still to this day.

06:01
really don't. When I was 18, I had the great joy of chasing my dream as a professional baseball player. I was drafted in high school and the week of my last final exam, I left for West Virginia and spent the next five years traveling the East Coast playing baseball. So I left this farm and this life and this wonderful mother who…

06:29
made meals that I kind of took advantage of, or took for granted I should say, to a place where I was eating out basically 99% of the time. Whatever was open at night, it could be a waffle house or Applebee's or a gas station or something like that. So it made me really miss and appreciate what I had growing up and also later in life. It was one of the things that I kind of…

06:58
long for and missed during those years playing baseball. So I didn't pick it up, but I appreciate it in a totally different way. And then fast forward, I ended up meeting my wife a few years later who comes from a large Italian family. And every Sunday we do family dinners where big meals are made and there's crazy cousins and chaos and noise and all these things. But it's a really important tradition to them. And now I get to.

07:26
kind of benefit from that as well. So I'm embarrassed to say that I'm not a cook, but I'm somebody who appreciates food and what it means for families. And I've been very blessed to have a number of women in my life who make great food. Awesome. Italian food is the best. It's so versatile and you can make so much of it and feed so many people at once. I just, I think it's great. Okay. So food is...

07:56
Food is wonderful. I have been sick for the last week, and food has been very boring to me because it doesn't taste like much. And I'm very much looking forward to the first meal I have next week, where it tastes like food again. And it reminds me every time I come down with something that messes with my taste buds, that food is an event. It should be something that is honored and cherished as you eat it. And so food brings people together.

08:26
And when people ask me about why I wanted to cook from scratch, why I learned to cook, it was because if you eat out all the time, it's expensive. But if you learn to cook from scratch, it costs you less money to eat better food. And we had a family of six, my husband and I and the four kids. And trying to keep those little boogers fed was a trick. It's a lot of work to

08:55
meet everybody's desires on what they want to eat six nights a week, you know? For sure. And so when people are asking me questions about, you know, my husband lost his job or I lost my job, how can we cut corners? The first thing I tell people is learn to cook. And also, there's real satisfaction in making food from scratch yourself and sharing it with people you care about. Because

09:24
They're benefiting from what you made, but you're benefiting from the giving of it. And so when I saw your magazine, I was like, that is such a beautiful idea. And your magazine isn't just recipes, it's the stories of the people who are doing the cooking. And I looked at your description on your website of the different featured people and such great stories. I mean, you said,

09:52
I read something that you guys make sure that you send your writers and your photographers to the place to interview the people in person. And that must be so much fun for them. It totally is. And to your first point, I mean, food is definitely a love language for a lot of people. And it's the way that people express creativity. It's the way that they get to your point. There's a practicality to it too, whether you're feeding your family.

10:20
looting new skills or just seeing the joy on someone's face when they taste some...