Jyoti Mukharji & Auyon Mukharji: A Casual Culinary Chat About Meal Planning.

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Joy of Cooking Podcast

Episode: Jyoti Mukherji & Auyon Mukherji: A Casual Culinary Chat About Meal Planning
Date: November 5, 2025
Production: The Joy of Creation Production House

---

Overview

This week’s episode features a lively conversation on meal planning, home cooking, and the creative process behind cookbooks with guests Jyoti Mukherjee—chef, teacher, and retired physician—and her son, Oyen Mukherjee, a musician and culinary historian. Hosts Megan Scott, John Becker, and Shannon Larson lead the discussion, which ranges from soup obsessions and Southern collards to the challenges of family cookbook authorship. The second half focuses on practical and philosophical strategies for meal planning, featuring methods, frustrations, and guest advice.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

Soup Season and Home Kitchen Joys

• The hosts kick off with what they’ve been cooking, diving into their “soup phase.”
  • John’s favorite: Shiro miso-butter-Dijon toast with Swiss cheese, broiled (00:50).
  • Megan lists recent soups: Korean kimchi jjigae, Samin Nosrat’s chicken soup, and Helen Rosner’s “Roberto” sausage, white bean, and escarole soup (02:13).
  • Shannon laments the lack of the perfect soup bowl: “Why is it so hard to find a good soup bowl? … There’s just something about them that makes it.” (03:09)

Food Travels – Savannah, Collard Greens, and Inspiration

• Shannon shares a recent trip to Savannah:
  • Highlights: Cemetery and ghost tours, dolphin tour, excellent fried chicken (“the best fried chicken I’ve ever had in my life”), and authentic southern collards (04:43).
  • Aspiration: “This winter, I really want to learn how to make good collards… I think I need to learn how to make them.” (05:12)
  • Discussion about the challenge of finding proper collard greens in the Pacific Northwest (05:30).

Mushroom Confit & Recipe Sharing

• Megan spotlights the recipe of the week: mushroom confit (06:31)
  • Shannon: “It’s one of my favorite recipes out of this Joy… they’re great on toast, with scrambled eggs, or just a spoon.” (07:24–07:43)

---

Heartland Masala: Mother-Son Cookbook Collaboration

Origins of Heartland Masala (09:44)

• Jyoti recounts her teaching journey—over 6,500 students—before writing a cookbook at the urging of her students (12:18).
  • “I have never been to culinary school… my teaching started as a fluke, really…” (12:18)
  • “When I did it, I realized… my passion to cook as a mother and my passion to teach as a little girl suddenly all came alive…” (13:11)
  • Oyen admits: “I said yes, but I wasn’t serious. It was very much bluffing… it was just my fear of saying no to her.” (15:20)

Process and Friction

• Oyen describes the evolution from a basic family recipe compilation to a book with deep historical essays and multiple authorial voices:
  • “I realized that writing yet another collection of family recipes… was of zero interest to me… The result is our strange but I think enjoyable book wherein the backbone is my mom’s recipes, but the headnotes and essays are focused on history and context.” (15:20)
• The mother-son dynamic:
  • Jyoti: “Now that I look back it just seems what a beautiful ride it was… mothers know how to forgive, forget, and move on.” (25:16)
  • Oyen responds: “Sons, on the other hand, are extremely fragile and delicate, trauma very deeply… we said some wild, very mean things to one another… a lot of crying, a lot of screaming.” (26:05)

Notable Exchange

Oyen Mukherjee:
"We're doing this, it's happening, we're going to make it happen. And there was not really a choice to get out at that point, I think." (27:52)

Megan Scott:
"You have a very good relationship. But… there were moments I will tell you… I'm sure you also had some moments where you weren't sure you liked the other person very much…" (24:44)

Authorial Voice & Navigating Disagreement

• The book uniquely features passages labeled by author, reflecting both distinct and shared perspectives.
  • Oyen: “There are two authorial voices going on… someone instructing confidently and someone who doesn't know entirely what's going on but is really trying.” (19:19)
• Addressing potentially controversial content on “curry” and beef in Indian cuisine:
  • Oyen: “In India, curry means a dish with some gravy… the word is used in India.” (21:03)
  • “Millions upon millions of Indian people… eat beef… the idea that Indians don’t eat beef is a political export of the right wing Hindu government.” (22:52)

---

Home Cooking, Recipe Testing & Teaching Philosophy

Translating Teaching into Recipe Writing

• Jyoti on the importance of using whole spices:
  • “Do not invest in powders… Buy the seeds and grind it yourself. And it takes literally two seconds to do it. The flavors in the dish are just heightened.” (33:42)
  • Tips for spice storage (buy seeds, keep extra in the fridge or share with friends) (37:34)
• Testing and revision centered around visual cues, timing, and clear instructions learned from decades of teaching:
  • “A lot of credit goes to Oyen for really expanding on the instruction part of [the recipes]… so you cannot go wrong…” (39:13)
  • Oyen: “Having my mom as a resource to just be like, ‘oh well this is clearly the thing you do,’ was very helpful in recipe testing and troubleshooting.” (43:49)

Advice for the Whole Spice Newbie

• “Get a spice grinder (or a coffee grinder you’ll never use for coffee),” buy small amounts, store extras in the fridge, share with friends as a ‘CSA’ (33:42–38:01).

---

Meal Planning Deep Dive

[45:28–55:35]

Listener Question: “I always struggle with meal planning. Any tips?”

• Megan’s method:

  • “Use what you have” system—inventory the fridge, pantry, and freezer, mark priority ingredients, brainstorm meal ideas built around those items.
  • Use tools like cookbooks, indexes, ‘Eat Your Books’ website to cross-reference ingredients (47:33).
  • Value of a well-stocked pantry (expand by picking up extras as you shop).
  • Build in easy days, leftovers, or takeout to make meal planning sustainable.

• Jon:

  • Reference to Joy’s “Streamlined Cooking” chapter (2019 edition)—decision trees for using leftovers, reinvention strategies, and practical suggestions.
  • “Highly encourage you to check out that chapter—where you make one dish, like roast chicken or a pot of beans, and we give examples of how that might get utilized throughout the week.” (49:22)

• Shannon:

  • Whiteboard or visible list for ingredients and meal ideas is key for food waste and planning (51:03).
  • “Make meal planning fun—a cup of coffee, a cocktail, and your favorite cookbooks.” (52:02)

• Jyoti & Oyen’s advice:

  • Lean on “flexible” meals—e.g., lentil stew with whatever vegetables are around, served with rice (52:20).
  • Oyen: “Having a rhythm is really grounding… whether it’s takeout once a week or making a pot of beans or lentils every Sunday.”
  • Build small, repeatable traditions (53:08–53:49)

Notable Quotes

• “Meal planning is a tyranny of choice… or the tendency to make a lot of one dish and then reheat it over and over. Just things like that.” — Jon Becker (54:41)
• “Lentils are much easier to cook than beans because you don’t have to soak them.” — Jyoti Mukherjee (55:23)

---

Memorable Moments & Quotes

• On confession and conflict:

  • Oyen: “It was not my idea to write the book… which was probably not a great idea for me to remind my mother about in those moments, but I did.” (28:35)
  • Jyoti: “It was all said out of love.” (30:49)

• On practical kitchen wisdom:

  • Jyoti: “You will see the flavors in the dish are just heightened [with freshly ground spices]. What you eat at the table is so superior to using those old powders.” (33:42)

• On cookbook lineage:

  • Oyen: “That’s a tough thing, too, given the lineage, the family lineage, part of this… there are a lot of people who are deeply invested in it, ancestral too.” (33:02)

---

What Everyone is Cooking This Week (57:31–61:30)

• Shannon: “Back from vacation, so I’m cooking… last tomatoes from the garden, tomato-centric and soup season.”
• Megan: “First delicata squash in the CSA—going to roast it with miso butter. Also, baking cookies for striking nurses using Nicole Rucker’s cold butter cookie method.”
• Jyoti: Cooking demo for a local restaurant: murgh kali mirch (chicken with black pepper), dal palak, pakoras, rice, and mango kulfi (60:01).
• Oyen: Looking forward to home cooking after book tour, “facing the tyranny of choice in a good way.”

---

Where to Find the Guests

• Heartland Masala HQ Newsletter on Substack
  • Oyen’s behind-the-scenes stories and insights into mother-son cookbook authorship, illustration, and more.
• The Joy of Cooking Podcast
  • joyofcooking.substack.com
  • Instagram: @thejoyofcooking

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:50–03:37: Soup talk, toast recipes, and the elusive perfect soup bowl
• 04:13–06:13: Savannah food tour, Southern collards
• 06:31–07:44: Mushroom confit discussion
• 08:53–21:03: Heartland Masala—How the book came to be, mother-son creative partnership
• 22:52–24:35: Cookbook’s approach to politics, the “curry” debate, beef in Indian cuisine
• 25:16–32:38: Family cookbook writing conflict, kitchen hierarchies, recipe testing battles
• 33:42–38:03: All about whole spices—buying, storing, and using
• 39:13–43:49: Teaching influences on recipe writing, recipe troubleshooting
• 45:28–55:35: Deep dive on meal planning techniques and philosophy
• 57:31–61:30: Weekly cooking plans, returning home after book tour

---

Episode Tone & Atmosphere

The conversation throughout is both convivial and gently irreverent, with plenty of candor about culinary mishaps and family dynamics. The hosts and guests openly share strategies, frustrations, and insider knowledge, all with generous humor and warmth.

---

Final Recommendation

For anyone interested in the “how” and “why” of home cooking, family traditions, and meal planning, this episode delivers depth, practical tips, and memorable stories in equal measure.

---

Notable Quote to Close:
"Do not invest in powders… buy the seeds and grind it yourself. … You will see the flavors in the dish are just heightened."
— Jyoti Mukherjee (33:42)

Transcript

[Jyoti Mukherjee]

Sa.

[Shannon Larson]

Welcome to the Joy of Cooking podcast. Each week we set the table for a discussion about recipes and stories from the authors of the Joy of Cooking, kitchen victories and misadventures, and what we're eating and cooking right now. We're glad you've joined us at the table today. I'm Shannon Larson, home cook, Joy of Cooking user and fan and collards enthusiast.

[Megan Scott]

I'm Megan Scott, co Author of the 2019 edition of the Joy of Cooking. I'm a food editor by day and avoider of dish duty by night. And soup is my entire personality right now.

[Jon Becker]

I'm Jon Becker, 4th Generation Co author and steward of the Joy of Cooking, America's oldest family run cookbook. And cheesy toast just makes me happy.

[Megan Scott]

And that's it.

[Jon Becker]

That's it. Yeah.

[Megan Scott]

Cheesy toast goes really well with soup.

[Jon Becker]

It's true. Which is why we've been getting along this week.

[Shannon Larson]

You're a match made in heaven.

[Jon Becker]

No, no, I was, I was having to write about the soup for our website that has yet to air, you know, has yet to go live.

[Shannon Larson]

But it will.

[Jon Becker]

I had to. Yeah, of course. Of course it will. It's not cursed at all. But yeah, I just had. Had to write about a soup that we were wanting to put on there and I had to write a head note remembering this toast that we served with this particular soup. That was so good.

[Megan Scott]

Talk about the toast. What's on it?

[Jon Becker]

It's a, you know, a shiro miso and butter and a little bit of Dijon. You mix that all together, the butter's soft at this, you know, you set it up for like a little while, then you smear it on the toast and it's been lightly toasted. And then you put some Swiss cheese on top and just broil it briefly.

[Megan Scott]

Yeah. Masterpiece.

[Jon Becker]

No? Makes me happy. Like I said.

[Megan Scott]

Yeah. We've made. In the past four days, we've made three different kinds of soup. So we did a kimchi jigga favorite.

[Shannon Larson]

Yeah.

[Megan Scott]

In our house. And then we did the chicken soup from Samin Nosret's new book, Good Things, which is very good. And then Helen Rosner's Roberto, which I think we might have talked about before. It's. I don't know why it's called Roberto.

[Shannon Larson]

I know. That is such a funny name for a soup. It's like just a person's name.

[Megan Scott]

Yeah. I don't know. It's very good. It's like Italian sausage, white beans, and I'm forgetting something.

[Jon Becker]

We put kale.

[Megan Scott]

Usually we put Escarole in it Because I've been growing escarole.

[Shannon Larson]

Oh, yeah. I saw you got your first full head of escarole.

[Megan Scott]

Yeah. And it was huge. Yeah.

[Jon Becker]

We only used, like, half of it.

[Shannon Larson]

Yeah.

[Megan Scott]

But so the escarole, the white beans, the spicy Italian sausage, it's just repeat so repeatable, you know? Like, we could make that once a week for the rest of the se. The cold season.

[Jon Becker]

Oh, I don't know.

[Shannon Larson]

I will come over. Anything.

[Megan Scott]

Yeah, you can come with you. But, like. Okay, we need to talk about soup bowls for a second because, like, bread bowls. Well, there's the bread bowl, but I'm talking about just bowls. Like, pottery bowls. Why is it so hard to find a good soup bowl? I feel like I'm always just shy of, like, the perfect soup bowl. We either they're either too big and deep, like a cereal bowl, or they're too shallow. There's just something about them that makes it.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

I don't know.

[Megan Scott]

I don't. Somebody needs to invent the perfect soup bowl.

[Jon Becker]

That person is you.

[Megan Scott]

No. Too much responsibility. I don't want that.

[Shannon Larson]

I agree with you. But I also like a perfect spoon, and I like a perfect fork. And I feel like, you know, there's a whole other thing.

[Megan Scott]

Yeah, it's impossible. Possible standards. What have you been? Well, you haven't been. You've been traveling right now?

[Shannon Larson]

I've been out the last two weeks. I went to Savannah, Georgia, for the first time. I loved it there. I was like, so pleasantly. I mean, I guess I had never thought about traveling there until my mom was like, let's meet up in Savannah. And I was like, okay, why not?

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

It's beautiful.

[Megan Scott]

Beautiful.

[Shannon Larson]

It's very ghosty this time of year. We went to many cemeteries, and we went on ghost tours. We also did, like, a fun dolphin tour near Tybee island, which was fantastic. Like, we just, like, leaned into all the touristy stuff. But they also have great bookshops and coffee shops and this vintage map print store that I could have spent 12 hours in. And the food was phenomenal. Like, even the touristy spots, like the old Pink House, the food was phenomenal.

[Megan Scott]

Like, what was your favorite thing that you ate?

[Shannon Larson]

So I want to make a plug for this new restaurant. I think they opened up in July called Sunday Sunday. And it's in, like, the downtown area of Savannah, like, where all the touristy places are and where you go on tours and stuff. It's absolutely beautiful. It looks like it could be plucked right out of Portland, to be honest. And it Was so, so good. And they had the best fried chicken I've ever had in my life there. So that was like a highlight. And then, yeah, we had collards and Southern collards.

[Megan Scott]

Hit different. Yeah, they hit different. They're different. They're so good.

[Shannon Larson]

And it's made me want to, this winter, really learn. And I'll probably be asking you, really learn how to make good collards. Like, spend a lot of time, let them cook down. I need to make that part of my repertoire. Not all the time, obviously, but when I want them, I think I need to learn how to make them. Because we don't go to the south very often.

[Megan Scott]

The key is you have.

[Jon Becker]

Well, the key is to find an economical source for collards in the Pacific Northwest. That is. Yeah, that is the big trick.

[Megan Scott]

That is tricky. So when you. In the south, when you go to the grocery store and get collard greens, the bunch is like, if I hold it in front of me, it will cover my torso.

[Shannon Larson]

And it's not the same here.

[Megan Scott]

Size of collard green that you want. And it you don't find. You find the little ones. And they're very nice. They. They taste very good. But you need a lot of them to make a mess of collard greens. Right. Which is the only appropriate quantity to make.

[Shannon Larson]

Yeah. I want, like, a bowl full. Like a good soup bowl full of collards. We'll get it.

[Megan Scott]

We'll get into it. We'll talk collards for sure.

[Shannon Larson]

But, yeah, highly recommend, Savannah. Great for people who are into food. Great for people who are into ghosts.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Great.

[Megan Scott]

We went there on book tour, and I only regret that we were only. We were there for like a day or two, so we didn't really get much time to just walk around and try things. But it was. It's beautiful.

[Shannon Larson]

It is.

[Megan Scott]

Yeah.

[Jon Becker]

Yeah. We should go back and get some pralines and do all the touristy stuff.

[Shannon Larson]

The touristy stuff is great.

[Megan Scott]

And before we move on, I wanted to talk about our recipe of the week, which we did not make. So sorry. But we assigned the mushroom confit on page 252. And part of the reason we didn't make it yet is because we're planning on going mushroom hunting this coming weekend.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

Yes.

[Megan Scott]

So we gotta wait until we get the good mushrooms to do the mushroom convie. But it's a delicious recipe. The mushrooms are sort of lightly preserved in oil. They're salted, and then very gently cooked in oil to kind of preserve them in the short term, you have to refrigerate and they're only good for. How long would you say they'll keep?

[Jon Becker]

I don't know. I mean, if you keep them covered, I think that they would last a while at the back, in the back of the fridge. But, you know, I mean, you're, of course you're going to be completely safe if you just try to, you know, eat them, eat them, eat them, you know, within a week.

[Shannon Larson]

It's one of my favorite recipes out of this Joy. Yeah, I love that recipe. So they're not going to last that long.

[Megan Scott]

Yeah, it's great. They're great on toast or like, how do you eat them usually, Shannon?

[Shannon Larson]

On toast. I've put them just with scrambled eggs before, like on the side, then a spoon into my mouth.

[Megan Scott]

Spoon to mouth.

[Shannon Larson]

Yes.

[Megan Scott]

My favorite. We would like to welcome Oyin and Jyoti Mukherjee to the table. Jyoti is a chef, teacher, and retired physician. She immigrated to the US from India in the late 1970s and began teaching weekly Indian cooking classes out of her home in Prairie village, Kansas, in 2010. Jyoti has since welcomed several thousand students into her kitchen, and her writing and teaching have been celebrated in press and radio outlets across the Midwest. Jyothi's team includes her husband, Julen, who is the art director, her eldest son, Arnab, the grocery shopping deputy, her middle son, Oyen, musical guest, and her youngest son, Arup, copy editor. Oyen Mukherjee is a musician, writer, and culinary historian who spends most of his time thinking about food. He studied biology at Williams College and was awarded a Watson Fellowship in 2007 to study self expression in folk music. Since 2009, Oyen has toured with and cooked for the acclaimed indie folk band Darlingside. He otherwise finds time to work in and around kitchens and farms in both his hometown of Kansas City and his adopted state of residence of Massachusetts. Welcome to the show.

[Jyoti Mukherjee]

Thank you.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

Thanks so much.

[Jyoti Mukherjee]

We're thrilled to be on.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

Yeah. It's such a privilege.

[Megan Scott]

It's really nice to have you. It's good to see you again. So I got to interview these two at Vivienne Culinary Books. A friend of the pod, Vivian, so. So it's really nice to see you both again.

[Jyoti Mukherjee]

Thank you. It's lovely to see you too.

[Megan Scott]

Have you had a chance to cook anything this week or have you eaten anything that you're excited to talk about?

[Jyoti Mukherjee]

Yes, we did get a chance to cook, and not in my home kitchen, but we did a demo at the Cooks of Crocus Hill in St. Paul, Minnesota, and we made a lentil. We Made some Brussels sprouts. We made some garbanzo beans and some lemon rice.

[Megan Scott]

Oh, I love lemon rice. That's one of our favorite types of rice to make.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

It's an excellent rice. Yeah. We also got to do a class at Zingerman's in Ann Arbor, which was a pleasure. And that was tea with fried foods. So awesome. Yeah, really enjoyable to fry things in the Zingerman bakehouse kitchen. And as far as stuff we've eaten, we're currently calling in from an Airbnb in Indianapolis for a book conference. And we went to a really excellent tiki and ramen bar in Indianapolis called Strange Bird, which has been. Yeah, I was very impressed that they had a. We shared. My mom and I have recognized, due to the amount that we've been ingesting on the road, that splitting a main and going with one appetizer is unfortunately like the right amount. So I feel great about, like, eating and not being over full at this point. It's taken a while for us to get our ordering on the road strategy down. But yeah, shared a ramen salad and some gyoza and it was excellent.

[Megan Scott]

Awesome. That sounds so good.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

And one tiki drink also that had seaweed falling out of the drink. It was like. It was great.

[Jon Becker]

Oh, interesting.

[Megan Scott]

I love the. I love the over the top garnishes with the. With the tiki drinks.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

Yeah, they went for it.

[Megan Scott]

So our tea and fried foods. Do those go together? I. I don't normally think of them as going together, but now I'm intrigued.

[Jyoti Mukherjee]

That is the norm, actually, in India. When we do high tea or evening tea, something fried is always welcome.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

Like, samosas are a good.

[Megan Scott]

Yeah.

[Jyoti Mukherjee]

Pakodas.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

Yeah. Entrance. Yeah. And there's. There are relevant apocryphal legends about deep frying in India too. If you like, think about. Or like Shah Jahan, who's the king, who had the Taj Mahal built. I said, built the Taj Mahal, but I'm sure he didn't lift a finger to build the thing, but had it built when he. The legend goes that when he moved his capital to Delhi from somewhere else, he supposedly consulted everyone except the health minister. And then the health minister showed up and was like, this water doesn't look great. Deep fry stuff. Just from a pathogenic perspective, deep frying happens at 350 plus and boiling's down to 212. So smart. Even if that legend isn't true, the people of India have gone to the trouble of writing legends about why they need to deep fry So I think that's a good sort of indicator of importance within Hai tea and otherwise.

[Jon Becker]

More excuses to fry. Sounds good.

[Megan Scott]

We love an apocryphal story on the pod.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

Good, good.

[Megan Scott]

You're here to talk about your cookbook, Heartland Masala, which is beautiful and everyone should own a copy, but could you tell us the backstory of Heartland Masala? How did this book come to be? And how did you two decide you were going to work together on it?

[Jyoti Mukherjee]

So I teach Indian cooking in my kitchen. I've been doing it for 15 years. And three or four years into my cooking classes, my students asked me to write a cookbook. And, you know, I have never been to culinary school. And my teaching started as a fluke, really, because it was a dinner that I used to donate towards a silent auction at a fundraiser for a charity. And then the fourth year I was doing it, one of the other members wanted to donate a Greek dinner. So the board member who used to run the auction came to me and said, why don't you do a cooking class? And that's how I started my cooking classes. I told her, I said, I have never done one. And she said, you know, there's always a first time. And that was the beginning of my first cooking class. And when I did it, I realized that, of course, I felt like I had achieved nirvana because my passion to cook as a mother and my passion to teach as a little girl suddenly just all came alive and came together, and I thought I was in seventh heaven. So my husband suggested, he said, why don't you do this as a hobby? And so I do have no recollection how I got my second and my third group. But like you said, I've had thousands of people come through my kitchen. I don't advertise anywhere. I have no social media presence. I do not have a website. It's all word of mouth, and it's all in my home kitchen. And to date, when I left for the book tour on September 2, I had counted 6,500 and still counting people through my kitchen till then. It has been a tremendous journey. And these are my students who have always encouraged me, motivated me, and so they asked me to write a cookbook. And my dream of a cookbook was that I would put my recipes together, spiral bind them, and their request was that every recipe should have a picture. So I was planning to put, you know, a picture taken probably by my cell phone, everything all compiled together and handing it out in my cooking classes. Ohan, at the time, used to do Some ghost writing for me because some of the journalists would tell me they wanted to put my, you know, write about me in their magazine, but they were not going to do the writing I had to do. Now, I love to teach and I love to talk, but I don't like to write. So Owen used to do the writing for me. So when this book thing came up, I asked Oyin, I said, would you like to help me write the cookbook? And then I let Oyin take it up from there.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

Yeah, I said yes, but I wasn't serious. It was very much bluffing. Yeah. When you asked the question, when did you decide to do this together? Like, there was no decision where we decided to do it together. It was just my fear of saying, my mother's a powerful woman, it's not a good idea to say no to her too frequently. So I said, yes, I'll do it, but you first you need to send all the recipes that you want in the book, which I thought was a high enough activation energy that she would never. And it took her a good like year plus to put those recipes together. So it did take a long time. But then by the time she sent them, it was very much a two frogs in boiling water situation wherein like the walls of the pot were too high. It was only slowly getting turned up. So, but there was no escape. We ended up, yeah, the frogs are cooked and we end up writing the book. Yeah. My mom's vision was like poor to mediocre iPhone photos along with like slap together recipes and just, and just go. And ideally we're pumping one out every year. She has friends in her community who like write collections of recipes and sell them as books and do that like once every year, year and a half. So she was like, if I'm doing this, I'm going to get on the train and we're going to go. And I proceeded to disappoint her deeply. I think when it became clear that putting any group of recipes together, if it was going to be held to a standard that I was satisfied with going to take a long time. And I also realized that writing yet another collection of family recipes from an upper middle class Indian kitchen in the US or the UK was of zero interest to me. There's, it's a lovely genre. There are many books that exist already. I had no desire to add to it. And so given that that was going to be like an element of our book, how to sort of like add to it in a way that would sustain me from a writing perspective, I Thought about it a bunch and read a lot of cookbook criticism and read a lot of cookbooks and talked to a lot of friends and landed eventually on history and context being a thing that was exciting to me. And the result is our strange but I think enjoyable book wherein the backbone is my mom's recipes. But the headnotes and the standalone essays are often focused on history and context, both ancient and more recent histories. And that was a lot of fun for me. But it also required an independent course of study because it's not a thing that I had done. My day job is touring as a musician. I have a background in biology, so it was not culinary history, was not a thing I'd studied. So I proceeded to do that. But meanwhile, my mother, who had expected that this thing would be done like two years before I was knee deep in books, started threatening her own death and just telling me she was and is in good health, but was just like, I could die before this thing comes out. Which I don't think was actually affected, just stressed both of us out more. But her way of turning up the.

[Megan Scott]

Heat, she really knows how to twist the knife.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

Oh, she is. I have so many stories just from even. Even on the road in the last like week. The things that she said to me are unbelievable. It's really twisting. It's not even a knife at this point. It's a corkscrew.

[Shannon Larson]

But she.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

I ended up finishing the thing eventually. Yeah, that's. That's the book. So that, that's the way the collaboration kind of took shape. My mom allowed me latitude and agency to write sort of how present the recipes. However I wanted to. Recipe testing was. It was another adventure. But yeah, that's the origin is my mom asking me and me bluffing and saying yes.

[Megan Scott]

And then, and then having to eat your words.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

Yeah.

[Megan Scott]

And much more.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

Sort of continuing. Yeah. Instead of, instead of stopping to think about what. Like there are not many mother son collaborations out there. And I think the reason is that the other mothers and the other sons know what they're doing. You know, they're way, they're way ahead of us.

[Megan Scott]

They're like, we have to preserve our relationship. We cannot be doing this.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

They've thought about it. Yeah, they've done exactly.

[Jon Becker]

I love. And I'm low key jealous of how you both have like, you know, certain passages in the book, like marked with your names. It's like there are two authorial voices going on and there's less of an attempt to try to push them together and make them, you know, Unified, whatever that means. Having the two of you kind of speaking to the readers in a different, different tone. I found it really endearing.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

Thank you very much. Yeah, thank you. An important thing for me, I think, just because, like, as a recipe translator of my mom's, there are things that I found difficult that she finds very simple. And so to have both of those voices present where you have like someone who is instructing confidently and also someone who doesn't know entirely what's going on, but is really trying what's important. And sometimes we do have a unified voice for some of the stuff where there's no label. The other reason that I thought it was important was there are a couple essays that get a little more political and just in case people get upset and want to blame someone. Given the vindictiveness that exists today, knowing that I'm the one that want to come forward, not my mother, was important for me.

[Jon Becker]

Getting back to the authorial voice. I was kind of interested in how that developed or why you guys made that decision. So that's interesting that there was that political practical concern on your part.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

Yeah, that was a more recent one, I think. Although we have two voices in the book. My mother is an excellent teacher. Loves talking, loves teaching, loves cooking, does not love writing. So I wrote the book, granted, like a lot, with a lot of input and oversight from my mom in terms of like, especially with recipe stuff, but any of the headnotes or. I wrote all of them but wanted to. It felt good also to have there be a. A little bit of a conversation so that we could, for a variety of reasons. One is the teacher, student side of it. Another one is to have my mom be able to talk about childhood things and not have that be in like a group voice. Felt appropriate. And then. And then also the. Yeah, the like in case there's. In case there's any blowback. If the book does well, some people will be upset, I think is the truth of our book. And so just to have. Give them like a little bit of a lightning rod for where to focus that anger, I felt felt appropriate to me.

[Megan Scott]

We don't need to go into anything if you don't want to talk about it. But what parts of the book do you think are like, potentially challenging for some readers?

[Oyen Mukherjee]

Yeah, totally. The two essays that come to mind I think could offend people on very different ends of the political spectrum. So on the left leaning side, I think less so now. But in like the late 20 teens, there were a lot of Indian American writers who were writing about how we should never use the word curry because it's not used in India. And I'm on board with a lot of the politics that lead to that. But the unfortunate truth is that curry is used in India. It means like a dish with some gravy. It's not a flavor, which is. And this is where things get a little conflated. It's not a flavor, of course, but in India, it is a flavor in other places, in Japan and Britain, et cetera. But I think the essay where I write about that, I tried to write about it thoughtfully, but we do have a bit of a flippant illustration that pairs with it, which is a yard sign that says, in this house, we believe curry is real.

[Megan Scott]

So I love that illustration. It is so delightful.

[Jon Becker]

I see that in the American sauce illustration.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

Thank you. Yes. Those two both sort of describe how we think of curry, just because it's a bit of a delicate topic.

[Megan Scott]

So I remember back in, you know, 2018, 2017, 19, something like that, being on Twitter when it was still Twitter, and seeing some of the conversations around curry and seeing a lot of very serious words being thrown at, you know, each other. And, you know, I think as kind of an outsider, it seemed like, okay, there are. There are these cooks and chefs who have probably experienced their cuisine, Indian cuisine, being really flattened by people who don't know anything about it. And it's fair to be, you know, upset or bummed out that that's the case. But then also on the other side, there were other Indian cooks that we were following that were like, actually, no, people use the word curry. It's a. It's a thing. And, you know, we don't have to run away from it. So I thought that was a really interesting. I had no idea that there was that kind of debate going on.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

Totally. Yeah. And there are a lot of things that are part of Indian cooking culture in history that are very much related to the colonial enterprise. The fact that tea is consumed at all in India, very much the result of the British being there. English is an official language of the Indian government, one of many, and that we use the word curry to describe stuff. So I think, like, a lot of those writers who were, I think, pushing back against the use of the term, I've now since seen write books that have the word curry in it, and there's no. No problem there. So I think the discourse has shifted a little bit. But part of the reason we have these essays is because I was on board with not using the word curry. I Talked to my mother, who is from India, and was like, I don't know what you're talking about, but that's crazy stuff. It's maybe a reflection of my own turmoil and, like, thinking about how do I. How do I present this in a way that makes sense, given what I have read and how people have been talking about it? So that's on one end. The other, the other essay that I think could upset some folks. This is more on the subcontinent, but we have an essay called A Note on Beef, describing the Western perspective on beef eating, which is this idea that Indians don't eat beef. There are millions upon millions of Indian people who do eat beef. They're often lower caste Hindus, disenfranchised minorities. The idea that is a political export of the right wing Hindu government, which is a thing that if you are, or if you're sympathetic to that government, you're probably not going to like that essay very much. And I actually toned down the illustration a little bit for fear of our illustrator getting in trouble too. It was a little more aggressive initially, and we toned it down to where now it's just a picture of a cow on a dollar bill, like showing how the cattle were currency, basically. But, yeah, those are two examples of things. If people pay attention to the book, which would be great, but also, who knows what's going to happen, that we might get some pushback. But I wanted to make sure that they knew who to come to if that was the case.

[Megan Scott]

You are blessedly not on social media, so I think you're going to avoid a good chunk of any kind of reprisals, which. Congratulations.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

Thank you.

[Megan Scott]

Yeah. I was kind of curious about your working relationship when you were working on this book together, because I know from firsthand experience working with John on Joy of Cooking, like, we have a very good relationship. But there were moments there, I will tell you. There were. There were moments. I'm sure you also had some moments where you weren't sure you liked the other person very much. Can you describe how you worked through that conflict? Because the book feels so. It feels so cohesive, it feels so right, and it feels like there's no conflict there, but I imagine there must have been.

[Jyoti Mukherjee]

We did. And, you know, me being the mother figure, of course, we. When it was, especially when we were recipe testing, because we were together in the kitchen working on the same thing, I felt, you know, Oyen was watching me because I don't like to measure, and measuring was always a challenge. So that's where our difficulties, or my Difficulties came in. But now when I look back at just seems what a beautiful ride it was. Because I'm a mother, you forgive, forget and you move on. But I'm sure Oyin has some stories to tell you.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

Yeah, so my mother believes that, you know, mothers know how to forgive, forget and move on. I, on the other hand, am a son. And as those of you who are sons know, we men are extremely fragile, delicate trauma very deeply. So they're working through some of that stuff. Yeah. I found that anytime our. The hierarchy and roles were clear or relatively clear, it's been pretty smooth sailing. So with the photo shoot, my mom ran the kitchen. I was like spreadsheeting in production mode. Very smooth with the writing of the book. My mom allowed me pretty much as much agency as I wanted to write and frame things and like had oversight and pushed back on a couple things, but that was pretty, pretty easy even on tour. Now we've been on tour since, for the last month and a half with a week and a half off here and there or once, but. But pretty much on the road and I am managing the tour and my mother is the talent and it's fine. Like that's, that's been great. She's like, she just goes where I tell her to go and she does it and, and we make sure she's taken care of and that's great. But in the, the recipe testing was where I. The hierarchy was less clear. I read a lot of recipes, certainly do not have the same amount of cooking experience as my mother. But I mistook myself as an equal for her in the kitchen, which I now know I am not and will never be an equal of hers in the kitchen in her eyes, ever. Certainly not when discussing Indian cooking. And we said some wild, some very mean things to one another. Just really, really rude, really rude things. A lot of crying, screaming. So there's a. I'm not on social media, Megan, as you mentioned, but I have been. The ways that we're getting this book out are we're touring it and I was writing a newsletter called Heartland Masala HQ on Substack and one of my favorite installments is called At Noon We Fight, which was described our recipe testing process wherein three times a week for several weeks we meet up at 10am to start cooking. We'd work for a couple hours, have a blowout fight wherein I would scream. My mom would cry. Sometimes she would scream too because she knows how to multitask. And then we would take a couple hours to just like cool off or like just whatever, leave and then get back together at 3pm the same day to just finish it out. But I think it was just like. It was not like the frogs in boiling water, what I was describing. It's kind of just like, we're doing this, it's happening, we're going to make it happen. And it's going. And there was not really a choice to get out at that point, I think.

[Megan Scott]

Was the conflict around how the recipe was being written or like, what. What was it, what was it around?

[Oyen Mukherjee]

I mean, I think there's always meta with that kind of thing. There's like meta arguments. Right. So there's like, there's the argument of what, what it's about, and then there's also like, what it's not about, but it actually is about. And so a lot of it was about measuring, not wanting to measure, and then me saying, like, if you didn't measure that, if you forgot to measure it, as I told you, we need to go back. I was running it like a lab, basically. So I don't. I don't measure. I'm not a. I'm not a crazy. I don't measure while I'm cooking normally. But like, when, when writing a cookbook, I'm. I'm measuring the things, especially my name's going on it. And it wasn't my idea to write the book too, which was probably not a great idea for me to remind my mother about those moments, which I did. Yeah, I think. I mean, the biggest problem is probably my personality.

[Jon Becker]

That's all.

[Megan Scott]

That's all.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

Yeah. Yeah. Which is a thing that I'm working on, of course. But yeah, like measuring stuff, but then like also specificity, like who the audience is. My mom would write things, like, for her classes, she writes out these outlines of recipes that are designed for people to watch her in the class and follow along. They're not designed. They're not like, tested. She wrote things like boil six eggs and then. And then we're going to deep fry those eggs. So, like, overcooking the eggs is a concern for me. I like sulfur in some things, but not in my eggs necessarily. So when I suggested we then bring a bottle of water to a boil, put the eggs in time it take them out, put them in an ice bath, and then you have the eggs, she just looked at me flabbergasted for like several, like 30 seconds, probably. It was just like, we are writing a cookbook for idiots. And then like, when it proceeded to not only denigrate me, but Also, like, the people I hung out with, like, what kind of people I'm associating with, I did not pursue. You know, I'm a musician. Is it that. No Indian parent. No. At least my parents age. No Indian parents. My parents age, like, dreamt of their children becoming an artist or a musician. My parents are cool with that. But then her, like, insulting my friends because of how I cook eggs. That. Or how. Right about eggs. That was. That was actually offensive. That was problematic. So it's just like, it was. It was about that stuff, but it was also just about, like, how we know how to get each other. I mean, I'm sure. I would love to, like, I recognize it's inappropriate for me to ask questions with you guys about what you are. Not at all.

[Jyoti Mukherjee]

Please.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

I'd love to hear more about, like, where. Where do you find.

[Jyoti Mukherjee]

Can I add one thing? It was all said out of love.

[Jon Becker]

Of course. I mean, that goes without saying, right?

[Shannon Larson]

Yeah, of course we can tell.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

Yeah. John and Megan, what are your. What are your patterns?

[Jon Becker]

I mean, I. I would defer to you, especially when it. When it comes. When it came to baking recipes, I feel like in the. The recipe testing process, we really didn't get on each other's nerves. But, yeah, I think when it came to, like, editorial decisions, especially like. Like, recipes that we needed to cut because, you know, with our book, in order to make room for new content, we. We have to, you know, trim. We have to trim quite a bit for each revision. So I think that that's.

[Megan Scott]

Yeah, I'm a little more prone to want to just cut something. John would want to keep it or let me call Ethan, John's dad, first and make sure that it's not a special recipe.

[Jon Becker]

Yeah, yeah, that's.

[Sarah (Caller Question Reader)]

Actually.

[Megan Scott]

I'm less sentimental, I think, about certain. Cutting certain things. And I'm also very. I'm kind of a taskmaster. This is the thing about me. I'm very type A, and so I need to be. If I'm not on schedule, I'm panicking. I need, like, we gotta be on schedule. We gotta meet the deadline. And so for me, I was like, okay, we gotta get this done by this day. And John is very much a perfectionist, which is.

[Jon Becker]

Well, yeah, I. What was it? I think my alternate bio for reading for this episode was if I was to write a memoir, its title would be Five More minutes.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

Yeah.

[Megan Scott]

Because it's always. I just need to go down this one more rabbit hole. Just one more rabbit hole on this ingredient or this technique or this recipe, and then I'll be done. And it's like, we've been doing this for five days. We've got to move on. I'm going insane. So I think for me, it was just like, we got to chop, chop. We have a schedule to keep. So that was the major source of conflict that I recall.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

Yeah.

[Jon Becker]

Well, you know, just shout out to my father, Ethan, for being a resource and for, you know, being there for. For us when we. When we had questions to ask or if we had questions about making big decision, big editorial decisions, you know, I would want to go to him, for him to weigh in, and then he just kind of let us. Let us alone, and, you know, we were accountable to each other.

[Megan Scott]

But.

[Jon Becker]

Yeah. Thanks, dad.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

That's beautiful. And that's a. That's a tough thing, too, given, like, the. The lineage, the family lineage, part of this. Like, there's. There's just, like, there are a lot of people who are deeply invested in it. Ancestral, too. And so for you. For you, too, to be able to, like, sort of hold that and to be given that is. That's what a gift. That's super cool.

[Megan Scott]

Yeah. People get mad when you cut their favorite recipe.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

Totally. Yeah.

[Megan Scott]

Yeah. I had a. More of a nuts and bolts question about the book because. So you put a lot of emphasis on buying and using whole spices in these recipes, and it is really important. And whole spices. We are also big fans of using whole spices. But can you give some advice to cooks who maybe aren't as used to using or buying and using whole spices in their cooking?

[Jyoti Mukherjee]

Sure. You know, when I teach, I always tell my students that not to invest in buying powders, because powders are. Some of them have an oily base. And so the. The flavors, the. The. The essence in the. In those spices kind of dissipates in the. In the atmosphere. And so their shelf life is very, very short. But the seeds, if you buy the seeds, they can be kept for 12, 13, 14 years, as long as the weevils don't attack them. So the practical thing to do is to invest in a spice grinder or a coffee grinder in which you will never grind coffee and use it just for spices. So things like cumin, coriander, cardamoms, cloves, cinnamon, that needs to be ground. It's so nice when you grind it fresh and use it, you will see the flavors in the dish that you are adding these spices to are just heightened. And what you eat at the table is so superior to using those old powders. That are sitting in your bottles or in your drawers. And so my advice always is buy the seeds and grind it yourself. And it takes just literally two seconds to do it. And of course, Indian cooking involves a lot of spices and a lot of ingredients. So my. The other suggestion I give is lay out your spices just the way it is in the book and in the same order in which the book calls for it or the recipe calls for it. You can never go wrong because you know then what comes after what, and you are ready to grind if things need to be ground. And so that is my honest and wonderful advice to, or sincere advice to all my students that do not use powders, do not invest in buying powders, because those. The shelf life there could be just even two months and depending on how long it's been sitting in the shop.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

And those powders, once, if they're too old, they're not going to hurt you. They're just going to not have flavor. I mean, they'll have flavor, but they're not gonna. You're not gonna poison me. And we have a. We have a section or a page in the cookbook that is a guide to navigating your local Indian grocery, which, if you are fortunate enough to live close enough to one, we recommend going there. It is not going to be efficient. It might not even be that pleasant. I certainly, when I walk into them, they can tell that something is a little funny with me. And so, like, I get the condescended to, but it's important to go. And it's part of, I think, the bigger story of our book, which is it's not a quick and easy Indian cookbook. There are many excellent resources you can find if what you're looking for is a quick and easy Indian cookbook. But ours, I think it's sort of like, if you're excited about taking a deeper dive, we would love to walk you through our version of that. And if you don't have access to an Indian store, then we do have a bunch of retailers in the back of our book of books. We love the burlap and barrel and spice Walla and Diaspora. Folks like you can get some really thoughtfully grown and. Yeah. Or produced spices online as well, in addition to the usual suspects of Amazon, etc. But yeah, our recommendation is going to an Indian store, getting a little lost, feeling a little out of place, and coming home with bags of stuff. That's. That's what we'd love for you to do.

[Megan Scott]

Whenever we do that, we buy way too much stuff.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

That'S the dream.

[Jon Becker]

Yeah. You know, I mean, like, you know, like, like Joti was saying in the last.

[Megan Scott]

I know they last forever, but.

[Jyoti Mukherjee]

Yeah, right. I also always tell them that if you have, if you feel you have too much to put in your pantry, then whatever is you use the seeds that you buy, put them in the bottles and what is left? If you have a fridge in the garage, store them in the fridge. They never go old on you.

[Megan Scott]

That's really good advice.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

Share them with your friends. Think of it as like a csa.

[Jyoti Mukherjee]

Well, that too.

[Megan Scott]

Yeah. That's a really good idea, actually.

[Shannon Larson]

Yes, I really, like, I need to be buying more whole spices. I will be.

[Megan Scott]

Call us first. I know every time I go over.

[Shannon Larson]

To your house, I'm like, oh, we.

[Megan Scott]

Have a five gallon bucket in our garage that is full of extra spices that wouldn't fit in the jars. So.

[Jon Becker]

Yeah, no, I mean, we, it's airtight, you know, there's no light getting in there. It's a good, good situation for stays cold, story an hour.

[Megan Scott]

Yeah, we don't have a problem. You have a problem.

[Jon Becker]

And plus, you can use our spice grinder. It's nice and convenient, like the stainless steel cup. Just take, you can just take it right off and put it in the dishwasher. It's really, it's really nice.

[Megan Scott]

Perfect.

[Jon Becker]

One question just about, you know, you were talking about, you know, you're always telling your students about the, you know, this way of dealing with spices. What translated really well for you from, you know, teaching the cooking classes to writing these recipes and writing the book? I know that there was like some, you know, there was some conflict about, you know, actually we're writing the book for idiots. But, but, but yeah, I was kind of curious like, you know, your experience as a culinary instructor, how did that translate into, into the recipe writing process? Was there anything in particular that like stood out for you?

[Jyoti Mukherjee]

So, you know, recipe writing for me was very, very hard because I never learned from recipes. I learned from my mom, my mom in law, my grandmother. And they would just add a little bit of this and a little bit of that. So I never had written recipes where I was following. So when the time came for me to share my culinary recipes with my students, it was difficult, but we, and the best part was that I would have them in the kitchen with me. So if something went wrong or if something wasn't, you know, all together, I could tell them, can you make the change in your recipe? Can you change that to maybe, you know, if there's a Half teaspoon of sugar and I needed three, four. I could tell them right away. So actually, the recipe ingredients amounts got refined as I was teaching. And when we came to writing these books, I think a lot of credit goes to Oyin for really expanding on the instruction part of it to where there are visual clues, there are time clues so that you cannot go wrong one way or the other, because you have these other things to help you identify or help you cook where you can actually visually see or time, you know, what the stuff in the. What the food in the pot is looking like at every step of the cooking process.

[Megan Scott]

Yeah, that's really important if you've never cooked a dish before because you don't know, you know, is 10 minutes long enough or maybe you need a little longer. And everybody's stove is different. So that's really helpful.

[Jyoti Mukherjee]

I have to tell you that, you know, there have been, during this book tour, there have been so many people who, chefs who have actually done dinners inspired by the book. And it has been so heartwarming to see that they have nailed the recipes that they were trying to cook. Because when they tell us we did this and it, it tasted so good, it just makes Ayin and me feel so, so wonderful. There's so much gratitude and it gives so much credibility to the dish because that's what we want everybody to be able to achieve success in what those dishes should taste.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

Yeah, certainly like any. Anytime someone makes a dish that like. I don't have recipe writing experience outside of this book. I did spend a lot of time thinking and reading about recipes and reading a lot of recipes, but there's plenty of imposter syndrome going around in my head around it. And so anytime someone makes a recipe, I feel a very grateful that they were willing to spend somewhere between 30 to 90, maybe sometimes three hours if it's like samosas making a recipe of mine or hours, and if they didn't go well, that's not a great way to pay back that gratitude. So a lot of. I'm often moved when talking to folks who made one or two recipes out of the book. But John, to answer your question from a slightly different perspective about where my mom's teaching has come in handy, I think I did do like, write the initial write up of the recipes. But where my mom's teaching was most helpful was at the back of our book, we have some 50 odd recipe testers who helped us test. And I basically sort of sent five recipes each to each of those people who then tested them and shot those rest, shot those back. And anytime there was any issue or something that didn't quite work, having my mom as a resource to just be like, oh well this is clearly the thing you do. It was like very, very. There was no thinking about, almost about like how to fix those things. And I think so we didn't actually, I don't think we leaned on her teaching as much in the initial writing of the recipe because I had a vision of how I wanted to put it. But then for that first major revision with like, with the help of testers, having her as a resource to just be like, this is, this is the thing, this is the thing. Because she's seen so many folks have little problems with this or that that she knew exactly where to go. So that was, that was for me at least that's where that showed up the most. In addition to sort of the conversations we were having when I was initially recording things.

[Jon Becker]

Yeah, no, it seems like there would be a really good opportunity to observe how people are when they're like confused I guess like with a certain dish. It would help with troubleshooting, I guess, or you know, see where the pain.

[Megan Scott]

The pain point of the recipe, you know, like what is, where are people going to get tripped up in the recipe?

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Oh, hello. I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about an easy way to enhance your meals. Whether they are a healthy vegan grain bowl or that late night snack we'll pretend didn't happen the next day. And that easy way is Marshall's haute sauce. For 15 years, chef and cookbook author Sarah Marshall has been hand making and bottling these delicious sauces. She works directly with local farmers and highlights the lovely flavors of fresh seasonal produce. They're gluten free. There are no additives, dyes, waxes or binders. And they have mouth watering combinations like serrano ginger, lemongrass or habanero carrot curry or even whiskey smoked ghost which was featured on Hot Ones. So head on over to marshallshot sauce.com that's marshallsh a u t e s a u c e dot com and see all the available sauces and spice blends. Oh, that's right. Sarah's created spice packets by dehydrating and freeze drying actual produce so you can impart flavor to your food with more vegetables. But that's a story for another day. Find all of these delicious [e-mail] and enter Haute Joy. That's one word. Capital H A U T E capital J.J. o Y one word at checkout for 20% off. That's haute joy at checkout for 20% off. And now back to the show.

[Megan Scott]

I would love to ask. I have so many more questions, but we have to move on to the portion of the show where we answer a caller question. So each week we answer a caller question, and this week we are talking about meeting meal planning. Sarah, can you read the question?

[Sarah (Caller Question Reader)]

Yeah. This came in through Instagram from Kimberly. I always struggle with meal planning in tips.

[Megan Scott]

All right. I have lots of thoughts about this. I actually have a substack newsletter that is not exclusively, but mostly dedicated to meal planning and my. My whole meal planning strategy. And so my strategy is that I. It's kind of like the use what you have method. So I'm always looking at what I already have in the fridge, in the pantry, in the freezer, and building around that. So I, I look and see what I have. I make a list, and then I usually indicate what I need to use first on the list. So I'll put a little asterisk beside it or something. And then finally, I sit down and I brainstorm things to make with those items. And so. And there's a couple ways you can go about doing that. Sometimes I just think of stuff, like, I see three ingredients next to each other and think, oh, that would be a delicious soup, or this, that would be a great bowl of some kind. But other times, it is just not coming to me. So when that happens, I'll look at one ingredient, like cauliflower, and just think of everything that I love that's made with cauliflower. So there's a cauliflower soup. Or maybe we want to make goby aloo. Or maybe we want to do, like, roasted cauliflower wedges with a yogurt sauce. So I kind of just make a list of everything I can think of to do with cauliflower. And then usually I'll hit on something that's like, okay, that's the dish I'm going to make, because I also have yogurt or I also have this other thing. Or sometimes I will look at a favorite cookbook. I'll go to the index, find the ingredient, see everything that's listed under that ingredient, and then usually something will either pop out like, oh, I want to make that, or it'll jog my brain and make me think of something else that I want to make.

[Jon Becker]

Eat your book. The eat your books website is also pretty good for, for singling out recipes that use, for instance, cauliflower or eggplant.

[Megan Scott]

Yeah, Eat your Books is a website where you can, as a member, you can insert all of your book titles, your cookbook titles that you own, and then you can use it like a search engine to search your cookbook collection for an ingredient or a recipe name or an author, or there's all kinds of different tags. And it's really helpful for this. I will say my. My strategy depends on a couple things. It depends on building up your pantry and your freezer. So having a stocked pantry, which you don't have to do all at once. Like, if you're going to the store and you're going to buy canned tomatoes, maybe pick up an extra can and just keep doing that as you're shopping. And pretty soon you'll have, like, the beans, the tomatoes, the coconut milk, and then you'll have stuff that you can just pull from, and you won't have to go to the store as much. Um, and then what else? There's a couple other things. Other strategies I've seen that I think are really cool is if you have multiple family members. Like, if you have kids, have the kids tell you what they want to eat one night of the week, and then, you know, go with that. Or, like, you can start really vague and then get more specific as you get closer to the meal. So, like, maybe every Tuesday is taco Tuesday, and then on Monday you might say, oh, okay, well, I have leftover chicken, so we're going to do some kind of chicken taco. And then I also always build in an easy day or two where I'm not cooking everything from scratch. So it'll either be like, we'll do takeout this night, or maybe we do semi homemade. Like, we will have frozen dumplings in the freezer, and I can take those and make them into a dumpling salad, or we'll have those as the main. And then maybe a couple vegetable sides. So there are different ways you can strategize. And then there's leftovers, too. So if you're gonna have leftovers, make sure to work that into your meal plan.

[Jon Becker]

Yeah, we actually have. For the 2019 edition, we added a new chapter called Streamlined Cooking where we kind of go through especially the utilizing leftovers part of that, what you were just talking about. But yeah, highly encourage you to check out that chapter. It's. I mean, we try to give examples about, like, you know, kind of a decision tree where, you know, you make one dish like roasted chicken or a pot of beans, and that this is, you know, we give some examples of how that Might get utilized and not just reheated, like, throughout the week. So kind of reinvented, I guess.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

Was this streamlined cooking a throwback to the. There was an addition to the. Of Joy that was streamlined.

[Megan Scott]

Yeah. Irma.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

Right.

[Megan Scott]

Irma wrote another book in the late 30s called streamlined cooking.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

Oh, it was totally separate from, like. It wasn't part of, like, part of the series. Got it.

[Megan Scott]

Yeah. Oh, how fun.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

Yeah. Cool.

[Jon Becker]

That's awesome. It's a deep cut. I'm really surprised that you.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

I. I made sure to read up a little bit about Googled.

[Megan Scott]

Yeah.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

I was also psyched to find that they're from St. Louis, which family connection. There are a number of things that I was excited to discover, but that was the streamline, the history of American Cooking. Going back and being able to see, like, oh, this is when people thought canned was a great idea, right?

[Jon Becker]

Yeah. It's kind of like the. We almost switched the meeting almost completely with that chapter because, you know, Irma used the term streamlined cooking for a book that she published where it's basically like, you're going to save time and energy by opening this can and that can and then combining them with a few fresh ingredients. But it's mostly cans, so we wanted to take it and, you know, and talk more about economizing on effort rather than just convenience foods, I guess.

[Shannon Larson]

I think one thing I want to add, because I have stolen your meal planning system, but one thing I want to make clear is for me, having a whiteboard on the refrigerator and putting down those ingredients and meal ideas, that has saved me, because I used to have a notebook that I would write it down in, and then I would just put the notebook away and I wouldn't look at it. But when it's right in front of me, if I open up the drawer and I'm like, oh, we have these eggplants we need to use. I just add it to my. I, like, have columns. I have, like, use column and a meal ideas column, and then I can just plug those in during the week. And it has saved me from, like, throwing out so met so much food, like leftovers or vegetables or fruit or whatever it might be. So having it be visible is super helpful, if that's possible. And one thing my husband and I do is also, if we have the time, we make meal planning kind of a fun thing to do together, like have a nice cup of coffee together in the morning or have a cocktail on Sunday night and kind of think through things. So making it, like, not something you. You're just like, oh, I just.

[Megan Scott]

Not a meal.

[Shannon Larson]

Yeah, I think that really helps, too, to, like, think of it as exciting and surround yourself with your favorite cook books and just, like, put on some good music and try to think of it as, like, an enjoyable thing instead.

[Megan Scott]

Of, like, ew thing.

[Jon Becker]

How do you guys approach meal planning?

[Jyoti Mukherjee]

You know, we also have at the back of our book, we have some meals that we have, you know, put together. Some are easy, some might be a little more time consuming. But I find for me, the easiest thing to do if I don't know what I need to make. But I do have some vegetables in the fridge, is taking lentils and just throwing vegetables in it. Whatever you have. Carrots, eggplant, beans, and sometimes, you know, you may have just one eggplant or two carrots. Doesn't matter. Whatever you have. And you kind of get a lentil stew and you make rice with it, and you're done.

[Megan Scott]

So delicious and nutritious.

[Jyoti Mukherjee]

Exactly.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

We're listening to the Steve Stando. When you're. You're the Steve Sandow hanging out on the Rancho Gordo gentleman founder and his. The strategy you all were discussing of just, like having a bowl of white beans that you make every Sunday is a great thing, but I think the. Whether it's in the form of getting takeout once a week or comes in the form of making a pot of pulses, beans, X, Y or Z every Sunday. For me, like, having a rhythm is a really grounding thing that I. I travel a lot too, or I'm on the road with. With great frequency. And so to have a thing like when I'm home, this happens on this day.

[Megan Scott]

Yeah.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

Is super helpful. And if that. If you can make that. That project also a thing that allows you to have something in the fridge for the rest of the week, even if it's just, like, a small portion of the meal, that's super helpful, I think. So figuring out, like. And everyone has their own rhythm, of course, or a different, like, way of that that'll make sense. But figuring out sort of what time of the week you can sort of devote to either planning or cooking. But, like, making space for that is, I think, a really hard thing because it's not like all of these strategies. It's. It's. They're wonderful, but they take some planning and, like, making space for that first and foremost, I think, is a really important thing. So it's just like, carving that time.

[Megan Scott]

Out, I think, and it's okay not to do it every week. Like, sometimes I just don't do it.

[Shannon Larson]

Sometimes I'm like, this is the last thing I want to do right now.

[Jon Becker]

Yeah. As kind of an icebreaker for this question, I just started making a list of things I hate about meal planning.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

Please share.

[Megan Scott]

Yeah, please.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

What did you.

[Megan Scott]

What do you hate about it?

[Jon Becker]

What? You know, just the tyranny of choice, I guess, is like, you know, you start out with, like, an infinite number of recipes at your fingertips online or a really sizable cookbook collection that, you know, you could just stare at and get a little intimidated by. But yeah, you know, or let's see, the tendency to make a lot of one dish and then reheat it over and over, just like, things like that. And, you know, I think that, you know, we. In that Streamlined cooking chapter, we do kind of deal with each of these things that I mentioned.

[Megan Scott]

But.

[Jon Becker]

But, yeah, there's just the sheer repetitiveness of doing the planting every week.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

You know, we.

[Jon Becker]

I think we talked. We answered some of these. Some of these things.

[Megan Scott]

Oh, yeah, definitely.

[Jyoti Mukherjee]

But, you know, lentils are much easier to cook than beans.

[Megan Scott]

Yeah.

[Jyoti Mukherjee]

Because you don't have to soak them.

[Megan Scott]

Yeah. They're so much faster.

[Jyoti Mukherjee]

They can be put directly on the stove. Yeah.

[Megan Scott]

And on that note, this week's Joy Scouts recipe is going to just be the roast chicken Recipe on page 407. We have a few different ways of making roast chicken in this section. I really like the high heat method. So it's. And I think that's the first version.

[Jon Becker]

Yeah. It depends on the size of chicken you have. Chicken has to be like, I mean, ideally £4 or under, but £5 or under would be great for the high heat method. Yeah.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

Yeah.

[Shannon Larson]

Like, every chicken I find is just.

[Megan Scott]

They're huge.

[Jon Becker]

Yeah. Yeah. Now it's the mythical small chicken that. That cooks evenly, but I think even.

[Megan Scott]

The five pound chicken works really well with the high heat method. And if you. If it's. If it's big, you might benefit from, if it's not too overwhelming, from spatchcocking it. So using really heavy duty kitchen shears to cut out the backbone and then flattening it. It cooks really evenly that way and it cooks a lot faster that way. So highly recommend that method. Also, we do talk about using roast chicken in lots of different ways of using it over the course of a week. In the Streamlined cooking chapter in the 2019 edition, it is on page. It's the Roman numerals for the. For 41, which is XLI. I was like, what are we doing here? But it's Menu two. And so it involves roasting a chicken and then there are several ideas for using it up throughout the week. If you have a cooking question or joy story to share, call our hotline at 503-395-8858. Leave us a message or send us a text. We would love to hear from you, Sarah. Can you please read or approach play next week's caller question?

[Sarah (Caller Question Reader)]

Yeah, this came in from Teresa. What's the trick to sky high meringue that holds its shape, doesn't shrink or weep?

[Megan Scott]

That's my mom. Thanks, mom for sending that question. So next week we will talk about how to make really good sky high meringue. All right, what is everybody cooking this week?

[Shannon Larson]

I'm back from vacation so I'm cooking which is really nice, honestly. I mean the food was great, but I love coming back and being like, oh yeah, I missed cooking. I missed my like home cooked food. We also have our last tomatoes in the garden that we're using up and tomatoes from the csa. So it'll be tomato centric and soup season. I'm all about that too. Yeah, it's time. What about you guys?

[Megan Scott]

We are getting our first delicata squash in the CSA this week, which is very exciting. So I think I'm going to just roast it with miso butter. That just sounds like a nice thing to eat this week.

[Jon Becker]

I will, I will allow. That sounds delicious.

[Shannon Larson]

It's funny, I had soup season and squash season written right next to each other.

[Megan Scott]

So yeah, I'm also going to bake a couple batches of cookies on Friday. One of our friends is a nurse and they are going on strike for better pay and higher staffing ratios, which is really awesome. So I'm going to bake some cookies and take them to nurses on Friday. Out of Nicole Rucker's book Fat and Flour, which is a book I just got, but it's really awesome. I just made a very delicious banana bread out of it. And she has a really interesting method for making cookies that she calls the cold butter method. So you don't soften the butter for the cookies. You mix it cold into the flour before adding the eggs of the wet ingredients. Very, very excited to try that out.

[Shannon Larson]

So I'm curious.

[Megan Scott]

Yeah. What about you two? Anything you're excited to eat this week?

[Oyen Mukherjee]

Oh yeah. I'm curious what the the effect of the cold butter like move is. What, what's the hope?

[Megan Scott]

Well, I think the idea, well, for one, you don't have to wait to soften for there were there were reasons. There were reasons in the book that I read and have promptly forgotten.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

Like, that's. That's standard procedure for like, laminated pastry. Right? But like.

[Jon Becker]

Right.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

Yeah, yeah.

[Megan Scott]

You add a cold and I. Yeah, I can't remember. There are very good reasons in the book that maybe I'll remember next week, but.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Cool.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

There's another restaurant in Indianapolis. We're in Indianapolis for a book conference. And there's another restaurant here called Bodhi B O D H I which we've heard great things about. It's nice to try a bunch of places, but I'm very excited to be in a kitchen soon. We're getting back to our home kitchen very shortly and to get to face the tyranny of choice that John is describing is something I'm really looking forward to. Instead of. Instead of the choice of like, meals out X, Y or Z, just meals in infinity. Sounds really good. So that's something I'm looking forward to, which is more of a philosophical issue that I'm facing, perhaps, but really looking forward to that. Maha, what about you?

[Jyoti Mukherjee]

I will be actually cooking. I'm doing a cooking demo for one of our restaurants that wanted me to host a cooking class there called Billy's Grocery. And so I will be cooking some murgh kali mirch. I'll be cooking dal palak, some pakoras, rice and mango kulfi.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

Kali mirch too, for those of you who don't speak Hindi. Is chicken with black pepper. A lot of black pepper, but it softens over the course of cooking. It's a wonderful dish.

[Jyoti Mukherjee]

And then two days later, I'm doing a class for Milk street and we will be cooking lemon rice masala, Brussels sprouts, and I think it's spiced watermelon, but I'm not sure. But we are. We are doing three things for Milk Street. That sounds so.

[Megan Scott]

Yeah.

[Jyoti Mukherjee]

A lot of exciting things to do. And then. And then I'll be back. We come back to Indianapolis for another conference and then I go home and I actually get to cook and enjoy my own cooking and eat my own cooking, which would be lovely. Even though, you know, when. When you're having to do it day in and day out, it sounds and seems so boring. But go on a book tour and you will. You love your kitchen when you come back.

[Jon Becker]

I can confirm, definitely confirm on that.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

Yeah. How extensive was. Was the Joy 2019 tour?

[Jon Becker]

How long was it we did?

[Oyen Mukherjee]

How many days?

[Jon Becker]

It was just super intense. I. I want to say it was like a month. Yeah, it was well that was more.

[Megan Scott]

It was broken up by Thanksgiving week. So we did take that week off, but we had most of November and then a good chunk of December and then a few events the following year.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

Wow.

[Megan Scott]

But it was just the intensity of it. Like it would be all day every day.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

I imagine that your all day is probably more intense than our all day. And that. Were you doing like, in addition to book talks, are you doing radio stuff and like, was it just like stacked? Yeah, yeah.

[Megan Scott]

Radio interviews, magazine interviews, live tv, recorded tv, like all the, all the stuff.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

Yeah, yeah. We've ours that. We've had a couple days that have been like full on like that, but most of our events have been like one a day. Oh, that's good.

[Jyoti Mukherjee]

That's really two a day. Book talk and dinner.

[Oyen Mukherjee]

Yeah.

[Megan Scott]

And before we wrap the show, where can listeners follow you or find out?

[Oyen Mukherjee]

We're on social media, which is exciting, but I have a substack. And so it's Heartland Masala hq. And if you're interested in reading, publishing very regularly from January until the book release in September. And cover how we designed our illustrations, how we got our photography sessions together. So if you're at all curious about the putting together of a cookbook, there's a lot in there. Also, if you're interested in mother son violence, there's plenty of that in there as well.

[Megan Scott]

It's a really great newsletter and we will link that in the show notes so everybody can access it. And we'll also have a link to buy the cookbook in the show Notes. Thank you so much for listening to the Joy of Cooking podcast. Before we go, show some love for your favorite podcast by subscribing to the show and leaving us a review. Follow us at joyofcooking.substack.com and on Instagram @the joyofcooking. Stay tuned for next week where we'll talk about meringue. And don't forget to make this week's recipe roast Chicken on page 407. Call in with questions, hopes, history, or where you find joy in the kitchen. Our number is 503-395-8858. That's 503-395-8858.

[Shannon Larson]

And we couldn't do this without our fantastic team at the Joy of Creation production house. Thank you to Dave Drusky, our production coordinator, Hayley Bowers, our audio engineer, and Sarah Marshall, our producer.

[Sarah (Caller Question Reader)]

If you love the stories we bring you each week, please consider supporting us on Patreon as an independent media company. Your support is absolutely essential. It allows us to continue creating high quality professional episodes that amplify the voices of women, small business owners, writers, artists and creatives and keep their stories free from commercial pressure. By becoming a Patreon member, you're not just supporting us, you're investing. Investing in the future of independent Media. Please visit patreon.com thejoyofcreationproductionhouse to join our community today. Thank you for listening and supporting our podcast Dreams.