Here’s a preview from KCRF: Request a free sample lesson of the “Kids Cook Solo” program, so you can see if it’s a good fit for you and your family!

You can find all of our BONUS Educational Cooking Activities & Holiday Recipes right here!

The 4th of July is one of those days with a lot of waiting built into it. Waiting for the grill, waiting for the parade, waiting for it to get dark enough for fireworks. Somewhere in that stretch, kids get restless and the kitchen gets hot.

Here’s a small thing to do in that gap. You put cream, a little sugar, and vanilla in a bag, drop it into a bigger bag of ice and salt, and shake. A few minutes later the liquid is ice cream (OK, sometimes a lot of minutes later…). No machine, no churning, no oven — just a bag, some ice, and hands that get a little cold.

It’s also a real science moment hiding inside a snack. Kids get to watch a liquid turn solid in their hands and feel why the salt matters. You can make it red, white, and blue if you want by adding strawberries, blueberries, or some drops of food coloring for festive holiday colors, or leave it plain. Either way, you end up with something to eat.

💐 4th of July Bag Ice Cream Lab: Shake a Liquid Into a Frozen Treat

Click the button below for a downloadable PDF worksheet for the Fourth of July Bag Ice Cream Activity, and read on to set it up:

4th of July Bag Ice Cream Lab Worksheet

Tools You’ll Need:

• 1 small zip-top bag (sandwich size) — this holds the cream

• 1 large zip-top bag (gallon size) — this holds the ice

• Measuring cups and spoons

• A clean kitchen towel or oven mitts (the bag gets cold to hold)

Ingredients:

• ½ c. half-and-half, whole milk, or heavy cream — whatever you have

• 1 Tbsp sugar

• ¼ tsp vanilla

• About 3 cups ice

• ⅓ c. salt (table salt or rock salt both work)

Optional: a few berries to stir in, or a drop of food coloring if you want to go red, white, and blue.

Learning Goals

Kids see a liquid become a solid right in front of them, which usually feels a little like magic until they do it themselves. The salt is the surprising part: ice on its own isn’t quite cold enough to freeze the cream, but salt mixed into the ice makes it even colder, so the cream firms up. Kids can feel the outside bag go from cold to really cold, and they can taste the difference between still-soupy and scoopable.

There’s nothing to get right here. Even noticing one thing — that the bag got colder after the salt went in, or that the cream got thicker the longer you shook it — is the whole point. It’s science, but it tastes like dessert.

Age Modifications

Younger Kids (Preschool–K):

• Let them do the shaking and the feeling — cold, colder, thick, frozen

• Help them spot the moment the liquid stops sloshing

• Skip the measuring; just let them pour what you hand them

Middle Grade (Elementary):

• Let them measure the cream, sugar, and salt themselves

• Have them guess how many minutes of shaking it’ll take, then check

• Compare the consistency of the bag before and after the salt goes in

Older Kids (Upper Elementary–Middle):

• Try making two bags side by side: one with salt in the ice, one without. Which one freezes? (The plain-ice bag usually won’t.)

• Time how long the shaking takes and write it down

• Ask them to explain, in their own words, why the salt makes the ice colder

Parent Notes

This one is messy in a good way: cold hands, a little salt water on the counter, maybe a bag that wasn’t sealed all the way. None of it ruins the activity. If you want fewer moving parts, use one bag and skip the side-by-side salt test. And if a kid loses interest halfway through the shaking, that’s fine too — you can finish it for them and still have the taste-test conversation.

If you only do one thing: right after you add the salt, have everyone touch the bag and say whether it feels colder. That one moment is the whole science lesson, and it takes about ten seconds.

PHOTO

Activity Flow

1. Mix the cream. In the small bag, add the cream, sugar, and vanilla. Push the air out and seal it well. Ask: “What do you think will happen to this when it gets really cold?”

2. Build the ice bag. Fill the large bag with ice, then add the salt right on top. Before you seal it, have kids feel the bag — cold, but fine to hold.

3. Tuck the cream bag inside. Nestle the sealed cream bag down into the ice, then seal the big bag.

4. Shake. Wrap the bag in a towel and shake, squish, and toss it for about 5–10 minutes. Trade off when arms get tired — this is a good team job.

5. Check it. Open the big bag and feel the cream bag. Still liquid? Getting thick? If it’s still soupy, seal it back up and shake a little longer.

6. Feel the difference. Have kids touch the outside of the big bag now. Ask: “Is it colder than before we added the salt?” That extra cold is what freezes the cream.

7. Scoop and taste. Open the small bag, scoop into cups, and add berries on top if you want. Talk about what changed from when you started.

Happy Independence Day from all of us at One Potato!

🥔 One Potato is a reader-supported newsletter — Subscribe to receive our Order Up! interviews and our Food People, Parent Picks series weekly.

Subscribe now

Earlier this week, we talked with Jamie Milne, one of the original food influencers and the creator of Everything Delish, about the Toronto table she grew up at: Shabbat dinners, her grandmother’s shake-and-bake chicken wings, her mom’s strawberry-pecan salad, and the open-door welcome that shaped how she feeds her own two kids. As always, you can revisit that interview right here! And preorder your copy of Everything Delish on Bookshop or Amazon.

Today we’re getting practical. From the three things always in her fridge to the store-bought shortcut she swears by (reluctantly), the tool that lives on her counter, and the soup she makes when she needs to feel warm and loved — these are the picks that actually make Jamie’s kitchen run. Tired-parent approved.

Three pantry or fridge staples you always have on hand?

Dijon mustard, mayo, and olive oil.

You call yourself a “schmear enthusiast.” What’s your current favorite schmear, dip, or spread?

Whipped feta, hands down. It’s a dip, it’s a schmear, you can just plate it — it goes with everything. It’s basically my personality.

The realistic dinner you make for the family without even thinking?

Oven-roasted salmon. It’s super simple: just Dijon mustard, olive oil, lemon juice, salt, and pepper. I serve it with a black kale salad with currants and toasted pine nuts, and an easy dressing of olive oil, lemon juice, rice wine vinegar, and honey.

A store-bought shortcut you swear by, no apologies?

Okay, I’ll admit it: jarred garlic. I really don’t love it, but if you’re making something super garlicky and you don’t feel like getting your hands all garlicky, it’s there in a pinch.

Favorite kitchen tool?

Right now, my microplane and my mandolin. The mandolin has a hand guard, so it’s actually safe to use. The microplane saves me on garlic, and I use the mandolin to slice onions really thin — I love keeping a big jar of pickled onions in my fridge.

Pregnancy craving with Blake?

Nothing to do with pickles, surprisingly: Honey Bunches of Oats with really ice-cold milk and ice cubes in it. It had to be freezing cold. I ate it constantly.

Your husband, Brandon, is a great cook too. What’s his specialty?

Meats. He’s amazing at it and loves to smoke them. We have a Traeger and love having family over to smoke any kind of meat. He makes the best ribs and steak.

Grab-and-go toddler snack you keep stashed for hangry moments?

A pouch. We love our pouches; the Serenity Kids ones are great. But I also make a homemade granola and put it in a bag for Jack. It’s one of the few things I make that he’ll actually eat. He’ll ask, “Are there chocolate chips in it?” and I say no — it’s a raisin, but he’ll never know.

A cookbook author or creator you always turn to?

Two I love. Adeena Sussman — an incredible cookbook author, a huge mentor and inspiration to me [Bookshop, Amazon]. And Carleigh Bodrug from PlantYou, a close friend for years. She brings such a great flair to vegan recipes and makes me want to be more innovative about working plant-based options into what I do. [Order Carleigh’s book PlantYou Quickies: 140+ Nourishing Plant-Based Recipes for Busy People on Bookshop or Amazon]

Your favorite seasoning, sauce, or finishing touch?

Maldon salt, for sure — you’ve got to finish with it. And I love making a quick dressing for everything, even just an herby oil with fresh herbs, garlic, and oil. It takes an extra five to seven minutes, but it’s worth it, especially on proteins.

Your comfort meal — when you’re sick, or just need to feel warm and loved?

Matzo ball soup, for sure. With really fresh challah on the side.

Note: This newsletter may contain affiliate links from our friends & sponsors.

🥔 One Potato is a reader-supported newsletter - Subscribe for weekly Order Up! interviews delivered to your inbox!

Subscribe now

Everything on One Fork: Jamie Milne on Flavor Combos, Family, Online Community, and Cooking With Kids

Jamie Milne can tell you the exact moment she cried over a tray of chicken wings. She was testing a recipe for her first cookbook — her Bubby Ruth’s shake-and-bake wings, all flats, the way she demanded them as a six-year-old — and when she finally got the breading right, she sat down and wept. She hadn’t tasted them since her grandmother passed, right before her wedding.

That’s the thing about Jamie, the creator behind Everything Delish: the food is never really just the food. She grew up in a Toronto Jewish home where Shabbat dinner was non-negotiable, the door was always open, and somehow there was room for twenty people at the table. Her grandmother pickled everything. Her mom put grilled pineapple next to honey mustard and made it work. Food meant everyone was welcome.

We talked with Jamie about all of it: the recipes she’s carrying into her own kitchen, the cheesecake-on-a-stick that took her from 10,000 to 100,000 followers in a matter of hours (before “social media influencer” was a known thing), the teacher’s brain she still brings to every recipe, and the gap between the meals she plates for the internet and the beige food her two-year-old actually eats.

Jamie isn’t sharing recipes to increase her follower count (but of course, go follow her on @Everything_Delish on TikTok and Instagram). She’s building the foundation of food, family, and memories of a table her kids will remember the way she remembers her grandmother’s.

A Conversation with Jamie Milne, Everything Delish

Introduce Yourself: I’m Jamie Milne, the creator of Everything Delish, and mom to Jack (2 years old) and Blake (2 months old!).

I’m a first-time cookbook author, and my debut cookbook — also called Everything Delish — comes out September 1st, 2026. My husband and I live in Toronto.

You grew up in a Jewish household where Shabbat dinner was non-negotiable. Is there a food memory that still shows up in the way you cook?

Both of my grandmothers were a huge inspiration. We come from a family that’s always together, and always together over food: Shabbat tables, Sunday brunch, an afternoon snack, all of it centered on community.

One of my grandmothers, who lived in Toronto, made the best shake-and-bake chicken wings. I still dream about them — lubby but crispy, with the most amazing breading. Everyone laughed because I needed my own tray at six years old, and they had to be flats. No drums.

She passed away right before my wedding, and I always knew she’d be part of Everything Delish somehow. My parents helped me recreate her recipe, and Bubby Ruth’s Shake and Bake Chicken Wings are in the cookbook (all flats in the photo, dedicated entirely to myself). When we finally nailed it, I cried. I hadn’t tasted them in so long, and it brought me right back to those Shabbat dinners. She pickled everything too, like strawberry jam, kosher pickles, red peppers I’d eat by the handful. She instilled that whole home-cooking atmosphere in me.

You’ve talked about how your mom has an instinct for unlikely pairings — grilled pineapple, honey mustard, cinnamon sugar. How do you know when a weird combo actually works?

Growing up, I’d look at my mom’s plate and think, why is everything touching? I didn’t get it until I started doing it myself, needing every flavor and texture in one bite. When I started talking about it online, I couldn’t believe how many people agreed.

Honestly, I never really think anything is weird, because everything on my plate feels intentional to me. But here’s a real one: when I was nine months pregnant, I was making a snack mix that I wanted to include something sweet, salty, and chocolatey. I had this wild craving for wasabi peas. I accidentally dropped in chocolate-covered raisins and thought, this does not go. Then I ate it and it was incredible! My husband looked at me like I was crazy, but the wasabi pea and the chocolate raisins somehow worked. Even the accidental combinations can turn into something delicious.

Are there recipes from your mom or from Jewish holidays that you’re carrying into your own kitchen for Jack and Blake?

My mom’s house was like my grandmothers — we had an open-door policy. Anyone could come over for dinner, lunch, Shabbat, brunch, and help themselves to the fridge. The one thing she always made was her strawberry pecan poppy seed salad. My friends still ask for “Susan’s salad,” so I told them, don’t worry, it’s going in the cookbook.

That welcomeness is what I want in my own home. I had such a good relationship with food growing up because of how warm my parents were about it. Last year we hosted Passover for twenty people; honestly, they didn’t fit in our kitchen, but we made room. That’s why I build my recipes to scale: for one person, two, a whole family. I want everyone to feel like they can make it, for any occasion.

When did you realize Everything Delish was more than a side hustle?

This is wild to reveal now, but I was embarrassed of Everything Delish at first. It was almost a secret with my friends. I’d say, you can see my recommendations, but the public can’t.

Then I was substitute teaching, and there was this cheesecake on a stick at a food truck from Heirloom here in Toronto. It was a huge hunk of cheesecake, bigger than my face, smothered in milk chocolate, wrapped in Nutella and every nut you can think of. I made my sister-in-law come film it with me at 8 p.m. in the pouring rain. I didn’t think anything of it, and it went insanely viral. Literally hundreds of millions of views.

This was before the algorithm: no brand partnerships, no licensing. It was the wild west of Instagram. A few days later, 9gag, part of Unilad, reposted me to their 86 million followers, and I went from 10,000 to almost 100,000 followers within hours. I ran out of a seminar to call my dad and my boyfriend (now my husband) and said, “9gag just posted me.” They said, “gag what?” That was the moment I thought, I have something here. I started reaching out to brands like Unilever — no contracts, just e-transfers. That’s how it became a business.

You have a master’s in developmental psychology and education. Where does your teacher brain show up when you’re writing a recipe?

I say I’m teaching every single day. I want people to believe that if I can do this, they can too. In a saturated space, no one can replicate your story, so I lean into storytelling in my voiceovers.

The teaching shows up in the simplicity. I’m a home cook trying to reach home cooks, so I won’t grab a random spice no one can find. I try to keep recipes under twelve ingredients, and I always give swaps and variations because I want everyone included, not left out. I actually treat recipe development like lesson planning: organized, intentional. With two kids it’s harder now, but that’s still the goal: simple enough to reach everyone.

One of your viral videos was about anxiety and using cooking as an outlet. How did sharing that vulnerability become part of Everything Delish?

I always say people come for the food but they stay for the story. That’s how you actually connect. I don’t want people to think of me as someone cooking as just a face and hands and dishes on a screen who they know nothing about. I want you to know me.

COVID was a pivotal moment. I’m a hypochondriac and a germaphobe, and the state of the world was freaking me out. So I talked about my anxiety, and how I channeled it into content because cooking was my escape. I’d say it over a voiceover while I made something simple like tomatoes and burrata, whatever. People came for the food and stayed because they connected to what I was saying. I want you to feel like you’re talking to the girl next door, the built-in grandmother and college friend you want to cook with.

Plating beautiful food with a newborn and a two-year-old is hard. What does the gap between internet and reality look like for you?

There are content days, for sure — though honestly, I haven’t filmed since giving birth. I’m only going back this week, so my content might look a little different. Maybe not as aesthetically perfect.

When Jack’s in daycare, I have more flexibility to make things look nice. But the recipe is always simple at its core; it’s something I’d make on a weeknight, just plated a little prettier. Other times I’ve got my phone propped on the wall, I’m in stained sweatpants with coffee spilled on everything, cooking the actual dinner while Jack hopefully sits nicely beside me. I’m not throwing a dinner party for thirty-five and pretending I did it effortlessly as a mom of two. That’s not my page. If I can cook it, anyone can.

A lot of parents feel like failures the second their kid won’t eat what they made. Your whole job is making food look easy — what happens when Jack won’t eat?

Oh, I turn to social media and ask, what do you do when your child throws their entire plate on the floor and now the dog’s eating it? Welcome to my life.

It’s this crazy pattern. We’ll have two days of Jack eating everything and I’ll say to my husband, are we okay? And he says, don’t jinx it. Then the next day he won’t touch the mac and cheese he loved yesterday. Someone told me years ago: when food is your whole life, your kid will be the pickiest eater. That’s exactly what happened. My son is eating something beige 90% of the time.

I do try to sneak things in — I’ll cook mac and cheese in bone broth, add cottage cheese or a blended cauliflower sauce. He’s randomly obsessed with peas, so I lean into that, plus chicken and turkey burgers and meatballs. But sometimes my husband and I are making two different meals, one for us and one for Jack. That’s the reality.

After more than a decade of social media, what did writing a cookbook let you put on the page that a feed can’t?

The cookbook process was daunting. People made me nervous about it, told me I had to finish it before I had kids. Honestly though, I loved it! It brought me back to cooking; I fell in love with it again. By the time it comes out, it’ll be almost four years since I started.

With social media, we test everything, but it doesn’t go through the same execution and testing as a cookbook. When you’re writing a cookbook, there’s a whole team and so many more eyes. You’re also thinking about swaps and variations you don’t always consider for a quick video, such as dairy-free, vegetarian, and so on. And it made me sit and ask where my inspiration actually comes from: how I grew up, what I loved in my mom’s cooking. The hard part was keeping it a secret. On social media I ask my community what they want that week — a cozy stew, a soup. With a cookbook, you don’t have that.

Did Jack’s presence change the recipes, or what you considered simple enough to include?

I was pregnant while recipe testing, so I just kept getting more uncomfortable as my due date got closer. If something was too tiring to make at four or five months pregnant and in pain, I didn’t want it in the book; I wanted simple, nothing that keeps you on your feet forever. And I was hungry and impatient, so no, I’m not proofing dough in the fridge for twenty-four hours. How do we get that proofing down? How do we make pita at home faster, because that’s my craving and I want it now? Without realizing it, being pregnant shaped so much of what recipes made it in.

Your mom didn’t sit you down to teach you to cook — she just cooked, and you absorbed it. Will you be deliberate about teaching Jack and Blake, or let them absorb it the same way?

Because I absorbed it naturally and it was never forced, I really hope they fall in love with it on their own. It’s funny — Shabbat dinners are annoying when you’re a teenager and want to go out with your friends. But what I’d do now to be back at my Bubby’s apartment, taking in every moment.

When I left teaching to become a blogger — and that many years ago, “content creator” wasn’t even a term yet! — my parents said, what are you doing? But they supported me when a lot of other people didn’t, and that shaped the kind of parent I want to be. I want my kids to pursue whatever they love. And I hope they love my food. My son and I already love my husband’s, he’s an incredible cook.

When they grow up, how do you hope they’ll describe your food?

My husband would say cheesy, saucy, and snacky. But I want it to be filled with warmth and love, the kind of food I grew up with. Both my parents worked and we still had a full meal on the table every night, together. My husband grew up the same way. No matter how busy our days are, we show up and eat together every night, even when Jack is being a little tyrant and throwing his plate. That’s the beautiful part of parenthood right now.

You were pregnant with Blake while getting ready to launch the book. Did that feel different than when you were pregnant with Jack?

Funny story I haven’t shared online yet. My original publication date was March 3rd, 2026. I found out I was pregnant in September, and my OB told me I couldn’t go on a national book tour in the U.S. at 31 or 32 weeks pregnant. So I’d just peed on a stick and had to call my entire publishing team — two days before I was supposed to announce the book to the world.

My team is all women and they were incredible: “No sweat, Jamie. This is beautiful.” They pushed the date to September 1st. Having that extra time, knowing the book would land while I was postpartum, made me work right up until I delivered. A lot of what I was putting out became postpartum- and pregnancy-friendly. Now I’m one month postpartum, filming for the first time tomorrow, and I see recipes from the book in a whole new light.

Tell us a cooking skill you use all the time that you think every home cook should know?

Barbecue. For so long I watched my mom grill — she was “girls who grill,” four-foot-eleven, out there in the Canadian winter making sure food got on the table no matter what. I was always a little anxious around the barbecue, but watching my husband enjoy it got me into it, and now I can’t wait to grill dinner tonight.

Once you know how to turn it on and off and understand the gas lines, it’s so simple and so flavorful. It doesn’t have to be a huge hunk of meat. You can grill romaine for a salad, put salmon on a plank, do fruit and veggies. We’re about to enter Jamie’s grilling season, where I make every bowl possible with everything from the grill...and everything in a bowl. Stay tuned!

Follow Jamie at @Everything_Delish on TikTok and Instagram

& Don’t forget to follow us on IG @onepotatobox ❤️

🥔 One Potato is a reader-supported newsletter — Subscribe to receive our Order Up! interviews and our Food People, Parent Picks series weekly.

Subscribe now

Earlier this week, we sat down with Danny Freeman (cookbook author, stay-at-home dad, and the voice behind @dannylovespasta) for an Order Up! conversation about grief, second careers, raising kids who eat vegetables on their own terms, and the bowl of handmade pappardelle his grandmother used to slip him at family dinners. You can check out that interview right here.

Today, we’re getting practical. Below, Danny shares the three pantry staples he always keeps stocked, the appliance he’d defend forever (it’s a bread machine, and yes, it’s back), the comfort meal he makes when someone in the family is having a hard day, and the one thing he tells Italian-American purists they’re allowed to buy in a jar. These are the picks of a guy cooking for two young daughters and a vegetarian husband in real time: useful, opinionated, and refreshingly free of “from-scratch or bust” energy.

One dish from your grandmother that you make exactly her way, no changes?

I make several different tomato sauces. The Marcella Hazan butter-and-onion sauce for a quick weeknight pasta. A cherry tomato sauce in the summer. But on the weekend, I make my grandmother’s. You cook sausage right in the pot with the tomato sauce and basil and let it simmer for hours. That’s the one I don’t change.

Three pantry staples you always keep on hand?

Kosher salt and flaky salt, always both. Balsamic vinegar, for dressing vegetables, sandwiches, anything. And yeast, because I like to make bread at night when I’m not driving to the store.

The obvious ones (flour, sugar) are always there too. But yeast is the one I’d panic without.

The one dried pasta shape you always have on hand, and the sauce you most often pair with it?

Rigatoni. I always buy rigatoni. I pair it with that same Marcella Hazan butter-and-onion sauce, or just butter and cheese, fettuccine-style. [Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Italian Cooking Bookshop, Amazon]

Kitchen tool worth having around all the time?

A food processor. I use it constantly, including for pasta dough. I don’t always mix by hand the old-fashioned way; I throw it in the food processor.

And a garlic press. I know some chefs are against them. I use mine all the time.

One big kitchen appliance splurge?

A bread maker. They were peak in the ‘90s and fell out of favor, but I love mine. I have the Zojirushi: really good quality, really good bread. Dump it in, two hours later you have a loaf.

Store-bought item you don’t apologize for?

Frozen vegetables. I always have bags of them in the freezer. And the taco seasoning packets. I know I could mix my own spices, but the little packets are easy.

Weeknight dinner everyone will eat without negotiation?

Minestrone soup, especially in cold weather. I make a vegetarian version so my husband can eat it too. It’s a use-up-whatever-vegetables-you-have meal: I throw in pasta, rice, barley, whatever I’ve got.

Thing you tell people they don’t have to make from scratch, even though Italian food culture says they should?

People will disagree with me on this, but I think it’s totally fine to use a jar of pasta sauce when you need something quick. A homemade tomato sauce is easy to make. But if you’re making lasagna, stuffed shells, anything with a lot of other components, just use a jar. It’s fine.

A favorite cookbook besides your own?

Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything Vegetarian [Bookshop, Amazon]. Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Italian Cooking [Bookshop, Amazon]. Those big encyclopedia-style cookbooks where you can look up basically anything and it’s there.

For inspiration, I love Frankie Gaw’s First Generation: Recipes from My Taiwanese-American Home [Bookshop, Amazon]. Beautiful, creative, very personal.

When someone in your family is sick, sad, or had a hard day, what’s the comfort meal?

For everyone except my husband, chicken noodle soup. I make my own broth using a rotisserie chicken from the grocery store. Since the chicken is already cooked, you can get a really flavorful stock in a couple of hours of simmering. So much better than buying broth in a carton.

One thing you’d tell your 2020 self?

Just embrace it. I spent a lot of time then (and a few years after) being really nervous. Did I throw away my life as a lawyer? Am I going to fall on my face? Being a content creator is precarious in a lot of ways. You can be successful one day and flop the next. But I’d say: embrace whatever comes. It’s all part of the process.

Note: This newsletter may contain affiliate links from our friends & sponsors.

Danny Loves Pasta [Bookshop, Amazon]

Italianish: Modern Twists on Classic Italian Flavors [Bookshop, Amazon]

🥔 One Potato is a reader-supported newsletter - Subscribe for weekly Order Up! interviews delivered to your inbox!

Subscribe now

The Pasta That Started It All: How Danny Freeman Turned Grief Into a Cookbook Career

As we close out Pride Month and a June (Father’s Day month) full of conversations with dads we admire, we’re honored to share our final Pride 2026 Order Up! with cookbook author and stay-at-home dad Danny Freeman, the voice behind @dannylovespasta on IG and TikTok and YouTube. (And if you missed our first Pride interview this month, you’ll want to check out that interview too: Order Up! A Conversation with Justin Burke, Pastry Chef, Queer Food Writer, and Author of Potluck Desserts.)

Before Danny was Danny Loves Pasta (before the cookbooks, the TikTok account with millions of followers, the colorful Peppa Pig ravioli), he was a picky little kid in his grandmother’s kitchen in upstate New York, watching her quietly hand him a bowl of cavatelli she’d made just for him. That bowl, in a lot of ways, is where his whole story begins.

Danny was a housing attorney at a nonprofit when his first daughter was born in July 2020. His Italian grandmother died a few months later, in early January, the same week his paternity leave ended. So at night, after the baby went down, he started making fresh pasta using his grandmother’s recipe. Kneading dough was the thing that kept her close. When he finally posted a video about why he was really making pasta, the response wasn’t about the dough. It was about the grief: other people were trying to learn their grandmothers’ recipes too, even when their loved ones were no longer with them.

What followed was a slow pivot: out of law, into a full-time creative career, into two cookbooks (Danny Loves Pasta and Italianish), and into the dad life upstate with his husband and two young daughters. In this conversation, Danny talks about coming out to a loving Italian-American family that stayed close, the chosen family of his twenties in New York, why he doesn’t sneak vegetables, and what he hopes his girls will one day remember about family meals.

Danny isn’t trying to preserve his grandmother’s exact recipes for his daughters. He’s trying to preserve the feeling of being fed by someone who loved you, and pass that feeling on, one slightly imperfect kitchen night at a time.

A Conversation with Danny Freeman, Cookbook Author and Stay-at-Home Dad

Introduce Yourself: I'm Danny Freeman. Online, I'm Danny Loves Pasta. I'm a stay-at-home dad, a cookbook author, and a content creator. My husband and I have two daughters: a five-year-old and a two-year-old

I've written two cookbooks, Danny Loves Pasta and Italianish, and done a bunch of TV cooking segments. But most of the time, I'm home with my kids, developing recipes and making videos.

What’s one memory of cooking with your grandmother?

I was a picky kid. My mom’s a great cook, my grandmother was a great cook (Italian side of the family, lots of food), but I didn’t eat much of it. Holidays were big at my grandparents’ house. Christmas Day, all this seafood and meat. The kids sat at the kitchen table, and right before dinner, my grandmother would pull me into the corner by the fridge and hand me a bowl of cavatelli with marinara. “This is for you. Don’t let anyone see this.”

It was handmade pasta, made just for me. I felt sneaky and special at the same time. Looking back, that was her considering me, putting something extra on the table because she knew I wouldn’t eat the rest. It made me feel really loved.

Your daughter was born in July 2020. Your grandmother passed away in early January. How did sharing recipes online come out of that time?

We didn’t go home for Christmas that year because of COVID, the first Christmas of my life away from family. So I made fresh pasta at home, just for me and my husband, using my grandmother’s recipe. A couple weeks later, in January, she died. The same week, my parental leave ended and I had to go back to work. New baby, no sleep, couldn’t see anyone. It was a lot all at once.

Making fresh pasta was the thing that helped. It’s meditative (kneading the dough, working with my hands), and it made me feel close to her. After my daughter went to bed, I’d go to the kitchen and try different doughs and shapes. I started posting pictures on my personal Instagram, then made a TikTok account just for me. I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t show my face. It was just, “This is the dough I made today, this is the shape I tried.”

About six months in, I posted a video where I talked about my grandmother and why I really started making pasta. That was the video that went viral. People commented that they were trying to learn their own grandparents’ recipes, or had lost someone and wanted to keep that food alive. That’s when it took off in a different direction. Less novelty, more story.

You grew up in an Italian-American family that didn’t moralize food. What carried over into how you feed your own kids?

I never thought about this until you asked, but my parents didn’t do the “eat your yucky vegetables first, then you can have dessert” thing. They didn’t talk about food as good or bad. But we still ate well: always a salad, baked chicken cutlets, my mom made pasta sauce every Sunday. Very little takeout, almost no frozen meals.

I try to do the same. I don’t say “three more bites of broccoli and then you can have cake.” Food isn’t junk. Some things are just sometimes foods. Before dinner, I’ll put out a plate of cut-up vegetables and let the kids snack on those. I picked up the neutral framing from my mom without realizing it.

You moved to New York after college, came out, and spent your twenties in a different food world. Did any of that shape how you think about food and family now?

Yeah. I wasn’t cooking a ton in my twenties (we had a tiny kitchen), but food and community went together. Happy hours after work. Dinners at a friend’s apartment. My husband and I would each meet our own people and sometimes converge later. The point wasn’t where we ended up. It was being with people.

When I was a kid, food was family. In my twenties, it was chosen family. Now I’m back to family, living the dad life upstate. I appreciate that whole arc more now than I did at the time.

Your grandmother got to meet your older daughter once. What was your coming-out like in your family, and how did that shape what you wanted to pass down?

My coming-out was relatively smooth compared to a lot of stories. The harder part was internal. My grandmother was always loving and accepting; she got to know me as a whole adult. Both my grandparents spoke at my and my husband’s wedding. My grandfather turned 101 this year!

When my grandmother died, it hit me so hard that my daughter would never know her. She met her once at about a month old, in masks, outside. There’s a picture. That’s it. There was a little desperation early on: how do I keep her alive for my kids? Over time, that’s shifted. It’s less about her specifically and more about the feeling she gave me. The values, the traditions. When my kids look back at holidays and gatherings, I want them to feel something like what I felt.

You were a housing attorney at a nonprofit before any of this. Does any of that show up in how you cook or talk to families online?

I used to think of those as two separate lives, but nothing really is. The court work helped me get more comfortable speaking. I’m a shy person, but standing in front of a judge every day forces you to just go and do. I’m actually more comfortable doing live TV than recording myself at home. On TV you can’t second-guess yourself.

The other thing is empathy. All my clients were low-income families facing eviction. For us as attorneys, court is our day-to-day. For them, it’s terrifying. I had to learn to slow down and see people outside their worst moment. That carried into everything: being a parent, being a person online, remembering that everyone is dealing with something.

Was there a moment you knew you weren’t going back to law?

I went back after parental leave on Zoom courts, juggling my daughter’s nap schedule with hearings. Steve and I tried not to schedule meetings at the same time, which was basically impossible. I took a year of unpaid leave to figure it out. By the end of it, I’d had my first brand deal (Hidden Valley Ranch, a thousand dollars) and thought, “Okay, maybe this can be something.”

Even when I told them I wasn’t coming back, I was nervous. But if it didn’t work out, I could always apply for legal jobs later.

What’s been the hardest part of being a stay-at-home dad?

Practically, the sleep. My daughters are not great sleepers and I’m the one who gets up with them, multiple times, every night. But the bigger thing is how fast it goes. I look at pictures of my daughter at three and she’s five now. I love who she is at every stage, but I want the old ones back too.

I carry some guilt around the cookbook years. We had part-time help, and I’d spend that time writing instead of with her. Even though I’m with her 80% of the time, I look at the 20% I wasn’t and wonder if that was the trade I wanted. I try to stay present now, because I know I’ll feel this way about right now, eventually.

Your first book, Danny Loves Pasta, is full of colorful, playful pasta: Peppa Pig ravioli, tie-dye dough. How much of that came from your older daughter?

A lot of it. I wrote the first book during her nap time, back when she wasn’t in school. When she woke up, I’d give her a ball of dough on one side of the counter while I tested recipes on the other. The Peppa Pig ravioli was the first character one I made for her. That started a whole run of playful shapes.

She still makes pasta with me. I give her colors and a rolling pin and she rolls out animals, and then she always wants to cook them. They come out as thick, weird blobs. We cook them and try them anyway.

The second book, Italianish, came out of a stretch with a colicky baby and a picky toddler. What did writing that book teach you that the first one didn’t?

After my second daughter was born, I didn’t have nap time to work with. She only slept on my chest. We survived on takeout and vegetables out of the fridge for a while. When I started cooking again, I needed quick meals that still felt fun for me. I get bored making the same thing every night, even if my daughter wouldn’t.

Italianish merges that creative energy with real, everyday cooking for kids. Things my mom would make. Flavors my older daughter likes (spaghetti and meatballs, basically), twisted just enough that I’m not bored. A quick bread with meatballs on top instead of pasta with meatballs. Same flavors, one step sideways.

The book has separate indices for sauces and meatballs. Was that always the plan, or did it emerge?

My original plan was to organize the book by cook time: 15-minute meals, 30-minute meals, weekend projects. We didn’t end up doing it that way, but I kept some of that practicality: a time index up front, plus a sauce index and a meatball index with five different meatballs, including a vegetarian one for my husband. People can mix and match without flipping through the whole book.

There’s a lot of “kids will only eat this if you sneak it in” content online. What’s a feeding hack you’d actively warn parents away from?

Neither of my kids is especially picky, so I’m not going to come for parents doing whatever it takes. Hidden veggies are fine. I have one recipe that blends vegetables into a cheese sauce, and I’ve recommended pureeing a red pepper into pasta sauce when a friend’s kid is really struggling.

But I don’t lean on it. I want my kids to absorb quietly that vegetables are good in their own right. I remember when I was a kid, on a lot of kids’ TV shows, the bit was “ew, yucky broccoli.” The good thing is, I don’t see that being done anymore. I don’t want my kids absorbing that. We do a lot of vegetable plates with balsamic to dip. My older daughter eats cherry tomatoes for a snack. After school they want ice cream. Sometimes we get ice cream, but I bring a bag of cut vegetables or blueberries too. The bet is that if vegetables aren’t framed as the gross thing, they’ll just be part of the rotation later.

If both daughters are in the kitchen at the same time, is it total chaos, or managed?

It’s managed chaos when we’re baking. My five-year-old cracks the eggs (pretty good hit rate) and the two-year-old adds the flour. When I’m cooking something hot, they’ve invented this thing where they pull baking ingredients out of the pantry and make their own “dough.” Half a box of baking soda, some tapioca balls from the back of the shelf, anything they can talk me into. They roll it out, shape it into cookies, ask me to bake it. 100% failure rate.

Steve will sometimes say, “Why do you let them do that?” because it’s a giant mess. But they’re occupied, they’re being creative, and I can keep an eye on them. I’m probably more lenient with kitchen mess than most.

What’s one cooking skill you think every parent should have in their back pocket?

A simple stovetop mac and cheese. The boxed kind is great (my daughter loves Annie’s), but stovetop mac is a dump-everything-in-the-pot meal. Whatever cheese needs to be used. Whatever quarter-box of pasta is left from another night. My daughter loves it with peas or broccoli. You can add pepperoni or leftover meat. It’s cheesy, so kids will go for it, and it cleans out the fridge at the same time.

Follow Danny and all his content on all the things: TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube under the name @DannyLovesPasta.

& Don’t forget to follow us on IG @onepotatobox ❤️

One Potato is a reader-supported newsletter - Subscribe for weekly Order Up! interviews & more Bonus holiday activities delivered to your inbox!

Subscribe now

A Note for Father’s Day from Ted: How a dad takes care of his family…making sure they are fed fully!!

The gyro is Greek historical/classic street food of layered of meats cooked on a vertical rotisserie, sliced thin and served in pita w/ the traditional toppings. In America, mass-produced gyro (think the gyro cone w/ pressed meat) was created in Chicago in the 1970’s and since then, has become the quintessential Greek food, the Gyros Sandwich!

The beef burger is my connection to Chicago’s history of being the center of America’s meat packing industry, where innovation like refrigeration & revolutionary processes helped transform food in America, all the while employing waves of immigrants.

The tzatziki is my mom’s recipe that she always made for us, and of course, my favorite!

There are so many things I love about this elevated concept. I love the way that it brings together my heritage’s archetypal sandwich with Chicago’s meat history with my mom’s recipe … tying my culture & home town & growing up in Chicago and visiting family in Greece. I love how it’s piled HIGH, but still very supported and doesn’t fall over … like Chicago is the city of big shoulders, each component of this burger supports each other to elevate it!

It’s the typical way that a dad takes care of his family…making sure they are fed fully!!

Serve it with loaded Greek fries. These fries are topped with crumbled feta and some dried Greek oregano. Greek street food will often have a few fries in it; I wanted to showcase them next to the burger.

And just like every Greek, we always ask for a little extra tzatziki on our gyro sandwich, so I served up a little extra on the side.

This Gyro Burger w/ loaded Greek Fries is something I would serve at any of my tailgates and inside any stadium. Enjoy!

Gyro Burger w/ Loaded Greek Fries

Recipe by Ted Pappas

This burger version of the classic Gyro Sandwich will have your tastebuds saying “Opa!”. The homemade Tzatziki provides the perfect balance to the well spiced ground lamb and ground beef mixture.

Servings: 3 Burgers

PREP TIME: 20 min. | COOK TIME: 10 min. | TOTAL TIME: 30 min.

Ingredients:

For the Burgers

• 3 Brioch Buns

• ½ lb ground lamb

• ½ lb ground beef – 73% lean / 27% fat

• 1 tablespoon onion powder

• 1 tablespoon garlic powder

• 1 tablespoon dried Greek oregano

• ½ tablespoon ground cumin

• ¼ teaspoon ground clove

• ½ teaspoon Kosher salt

• ½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

• 1 Cucumber, thinly sliced

• 1 Beefsteak tomato, thinly sliced

• 1 Red onion, sliced into thin strips

For the Loaded Greek Fries

• Your favorite Fries (Frozen)

• Crumbled Feta

• Dried Oregano

• Olive Oil

For Yiayia Nancy’s Tzatziki

• 1 English cucumber

• 3 cups full fat Greek yogurt

• 3 tablespoons fresh dill

• 2 teaspoons fresh mint

• 2 cloves garlic, minced

• 1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice

• 1 tablespoon Greek Extra Virgin olive oil

Directions:

1. Bake your fries: While your going to be making your burgers, pre-heat your oven and bake your French fries according to the package.

2. Make your gyro: In large mixing bowl, thoroughly combine lamb, beef & all spices including the salt & pepper.

3. Shape your burgers: Divide lamb & beef mixture into three equal portions and form into round patties. Press the meat together firmly enough that it holds together, but do not overwork the meat mixture. Making an indention into the center of the patty will prevent it from puffing in the center while cooking.

4. Grill your burgers: Place patties on medium-high grill. In order to achieve a good sear, make sure to not move the patties until ready to flip. Flip each patty after approximately 4 minutes.

5. Remove from grill while medium-rare (approx. 130-135 degrees) and allow to sit for 1-2 minutes. Removing the burger from the grill and allowing it sit will ensure it is not overcooked and all of the juices do not run out. While resting, toast buns directly on grill.

6. Assemble your loaded Greek fries: Remove fries from oven and load with feta. Crumble feta and drizzle w/ olive oil & dried oregano to your heart's desire. Add a squeeze of fresh lemon juice.

7. Assemble your burgers: Assemble with lamb & beef patty, tzatziki, tomato slice, cucumber slices and onions.

Tzatziki (prepared in advance)

1. Grate cucumber, on a course grater, into a tea towel or cheese cloth. Strain out all liquid and set aside.

2. In large mixing bowl, combine yogurt, cucumber, dill, mint, garlic, lemon juice, 1 tbsp of the Greek olive oil, and salt & pepper.

3. Top with remaining 1 tbsp of Greek olive oil.

To mark the day, we’re sharing an essay from our Community Voices series — authentic stories about families and food. In this one, writer Gordon Haber turns a small kitchen habit (saving stale bread to make breadcrumbs) into a question he keeps circling back to: what does it actually mean to be a good father? It’s funny, honest, and a little tender, and it has almost nothing to do with breadcrumbs. We hope you love it.

🥔 One Potato is a reader-supported newsletter - Subscribe for weekly Order Up! interviews and other Specials delivered to your inbox!

Subscribe now

Pen Parentis, a national nonprofit that helps writers stay on creative track after having kids, is proud to sponsor Community Voices X Pen Parentis. Their Cycle of Support includes membership, mentorship and accountability meetups for writers of any genre. Also explore the parent-writer experiences of famous authors on their YouTube Channel @PenParentis - More info at writerparentannex.com

You don’t have to be a member of Pen Parentis to share your story - send us a DM or click the button below to learn more on our Submission Guidelines page:

Submit Your Story

The Breadcrumb Project

By Gordon Haber

1. Keep the old bread

The rounded sourdough ends, the stale bits of challah. The hot dog buns from the back of the freezer. It all goes into a bag in the fridge, and when the bag is full, you make breadcrumbs.

My wife likes to hand me a leftover crust and say, “This is for your breadcrumb project,” as if I were a food artist. It’s a thing: I know an artist who raised, slaughtered, roasted, and consumed a pig. She got grant money to document the process.

My inspiration was more prosaic. I don’t like wasting food. I’d been cooking a chicken once a week and feeling weird about chucking the remains. It’s easy enough, if you have the time, to use the carcass to make soup, and I wondered what to do with all the bread we were throwing out.

Deeper associations do come up. Roasting the chicken, making broth the next day, freezing it in batches—it all makes me feel connected to my grandfather, who loved feeding his grandchildren.

Years ago, I’d spend a week or two with my grandparents every summer at their Catskills bungalow colony, where everyone spoke Yiddish. Every night, before bed, my grandfather asked me, solemnly, what I wanted for breakfast. When I visited him on breaks from college, he made a chicken and sweet potatoes and (best of all) the lightest, mildest gefilte fish you’ve ever tasted. It was how he expressed his love.

My wife tells me, “Food is your love language too.”

2. Preheat the oven and cut the bread into chunks

400º? 450º? I can never remember, so let’s say 425. Meanwhile, slice the bread into chunks an inch or two square. (The stale bits take a little elbow grease.) Then spread them out on a sheet pan, crumbs and all.

It’s good for a man to spend time in the kitchen. It’s good to clean as you go, so you don’t leave a mess. And it’s good for your son to see you doing it, cooking and cleaning, so he understands there is no division between “man’s work” and “women’s work.”

Out of curiosity, I recently read Scott Galloway’s Notes on Being a Man. He defines masculinity as a “three-legged stool”—a man “protects, provides, and procreates.”

This sounds great at first glance. At second glance, don’t women do that too?

I have mixed feelings about Galloway. Reading his book, I had the impression of a man striving for sincerity and kindness. And he has great advice. For instance, “success comes when you put in small, consistent amounts of effort, every day and every week.”

And: “The greatest, most specific skill a young man can develop is his willingness to endure rejection.” To that I’d only add “gracefully.” A girl doesn’t want to go out with you? Endure it, gracefully.

At the same time, Galloway is very concerned about testosterone, to the point where he gets injections. He reflexively discusses women in terms of hotness. Money is a preoccupation. For all his vulnerability, he’s unable to release himself from superficial versions of masculinity, which, to me, suggests he is actually insecure about his masculinity.

Also, Galloway never once mentions cooking.

3. Bake until crispy

Somewhere between toasted and burnt. You might pull out a bigger chunk and slice it to ensure that it’s crispy all the way through. So maybe ten minutes? Fifteen?

Here is what occurred to me while working through this recipe. I’m not interested in masculinity, really. I care about being a good father. That is, in addition to protecting and providing for my son (which is my wife’s job too), I should be preparing him—for life, for work, to stand on his own.

When he started high school, he was nervous about the subway. I rode with him to help him get used to the route. One morning, I said, “You’re in charge. I’ll follow you.”

He was dicking around on his phone, and we got on the wrong train. When he looked up and realized the numbers were going up, not down, he was pissed.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because you’re in charge.”

For the rest of the ride, he kept muttering, “I can’t believe you wouldn’t just tell me.”

But the next week, he said, “I can do this on my own now.”

These days, he takes the subway all over the city with his friends. It’s a freedom that was unimaginable to me as a teenager, and I’m so glad he has that independence. But a few other situations are difficult for him. I won’t write about them, because that’s family business. I will say that at times, I wonder if I’m failing him.

I once asked my brother if he thought I was a good father.

He said, “The mere fact that you’re asking the question is a good sign.”

It was a helpful thing to hear at the moment, but lately I’m not so sure. Yes, it’s a good sign, but it’s only the starting point.

4. Grind the chunks in a food processor

When all the bread chunks are nice and crispy, take them out of the oven and let them cool. Then stick them in a baggie and smash them with a kitchen mallet, because it’s fun. Get the food processor out and grind the bits in batches until you have, indeed, made breadcrumbs.

Finally, put them in a container in the fridge. How long will the breadcrumbs last in the fridge? Who knows? I usually use them all up in a few days anyway.

We recently watched that manosphere documentary with the boy, which left me astonished at the stupidity of human beings, especially men. I was also relieved that my son believes that all these influencers, and the young men who follow them, are idiots.

I did find it interesting that the influencers’ signifiers of masculinity pretty much align with Scott Galloway’s—women and money, self-mastery and power. There are important differences, though—Galloway truly wants to see young men better themselves in positive ways, and he hasn’t achieved his success through mockery and cruelty.

How exhausting, this alpha male business! The idea of feeling uncomfortable unless you’re dominating people. The constant lookout for challengers, the constant readiness for confrontation. Surely, the man striving to be an alpha is the most insecure and anxious person in the room. Because the true sign of confidence isn’t dominating the room; it’s not giving a shit about dominating the room.

What if masculinity isn’t about domination? What if it’s about your grandfather, at 9pm, wanting to know what to cook for you ten hours from now? What if it’s about using the breadcrumbs to make meatballs while the spaghetti cooks and the marinara reduces in the cast-iron pan, and serving it all up for your family to impart a simple message: here, I made this, because I love you?

About:

Gordon Haber’s recent fiction includes the short story Home Economics, about high school in 1949, in Cagibi; and The Pikeman, about New Amsterdam in 1643, in Greyhound Journal. His novel about the Korean War is coming in 2027 from EnvelopeBooks.

His nonfiction writing on religion and culture has appeared in ARC, the Forward, and other fine venues. You can see his author pages here.

He does not live in Brooklyn.

Where to find Ted:

• Instagram: @teds_everyday_eats

• MasterChef: Global Gauntlet (Season 16) on FOX, Wednesdays 8/7c — streaming next-day on Hulu

Original April 2025 Order Up! interview: A Conversation with Ted Pappas, Great American Recipe contestant, dad, and home cook

🥔 One Potato is a reader-supported newsletter - Subscribe for weekly Order Up! interviews delivered to your inbox!

Subscribe now

Father’s Day is this weekend, and we’re excited to be catching up with one of our favorite One Potato dad’s: Ted Pappas. A little over a year ago, we chatted with him about cooking saganaki at Bears tailgates, learning Greek food at his mother’s elbow, and packing his daughters’ lunches between architecture meetings. He had just wrapped a turn on PBS’s The Great American Recipe, and we learned a little about what it takes to step onto a national stage as a home cook; well, he’s done it again, and in an even bigger way.

Since we last talked, Ted went through one of the longest, most thorough audition processes in food television — and he came out the other side with a white apron on FOX’s MasterChef: Global Gauntlet, representing Greece on Team Europe. The show’s airing now on Wednesday nights, streaming next-day on Hulu.

Filming is complete. The show is on its June hiatus for the World Cup, which felt like the perfect window to ask Ted what the experience was like. We talked about how he got there (a five-month application process, a phone call out of the blue), how the show’s “Global Gauntlet” theme tied straight into his Greek-American heritage and Chicago upbringing, why he still calls himself an amateur, and how his daughters — now 14 and 16 — feel about being girl-dad to a guy on national TV. We also talked about what’s coming next: this Saturday, June 20, Ted is back as our guest writer with a Father’s Day bonus recipe, sharing a Greek-inspired burger he made in one of the early MasterChef grilling challenges. Stay tuned!

Welcome back, Ted. It’s been a year. Catch us up — how did MasterChef happen?

It’s been a really fun year. The short version is I’d actually applied for a previous season of MasterChef and didn’t get on. Then in the middle of last year, one of the producers reached out to me directly and said, “Hey Ted, we still have your application. Would you be interested in applying for the upcoming season?” That ended up being Season 16, Global Gauntlet — though at the time, I had no idea what the theme was going to be.

From there it was about five months of phone calls, Zoom interviews, sharing photos and videos of family and friends, lifestyle videos, food I cook, stories about my heritage and culture. After all of that, they offered me one of the spots in production.

Once you’re in, you have about a month to get your life in order — wardrobe, work, family logistics — and you start preparing recipes and dishes you might want to present to the judges. You don’t know yet exactly what you’re going to cook, but you go in with ideas.

When did you actually find out the theme?

Not until we were on set, filming. They don’t tell you ahead of time. You pick up little hints from what they ask about — your family, your history, the stories behind your food — but the theme itself isn’t announced until you’re there.

When they did announce it, my mind started racing. Global Gauntlet — an international competition timed to the World Cup coming to the Americas. First-generation Greek on my dad’s side. Third on my mom’s. A grandfather who ran restaurants in Chicagoland in the 50s and 60s and a family restaurant in the 70s. The whole Greek-diner-in-America story that so many people grew up with. And of course, Chicago itself, which is a huge part of who I am as a home cook.

It was a lot to take in. But it was also a real gift. The theme let me bring all of those layers into the kitchen with me.

Walk us through the format. What does Global Gauntlet actually look like?

The show is divided into four regional teams: Americas, Africa, Asia Pacific, and Europe. Five home cooks on each team, twenty home cooks total competing for the title of MasterChef and a quarter-million-dollar prize.

The premiere on April 15 was the Europe audition episode, which is when I got my white apron. To get the apron, you cook your audition dish, present it to Chef Gordon, Chef Tiffany, and Joe — and you need three “yeses”. That’s the gate. Once the auditions for all four regions are done, the team competition begins. Each week, somebody puts their apron down and goes home. That’s the basic structure, but there are always surprises in the MasterChef kitchen. You don’t ever fully know what’s coming.

You first applied for MasterChef and didn’t get cast. You’ve cooked on The Great American Recipe. You have a following on Instagram. And yet you still call yourself a home cook. Is that a deliberate choice?

It’s important to me, yeah. I joke with my friends that I want to retain my amateur status, like in the old Olympics. You don’t want to go professional. You want to keep that home-cook identity, because that’s where the cooking actually comes from for me.

The thing about home cooks is, we’re where we are because of family, history, and culture — not because we went to culinary school and worked in a professional kitchen. Our craft was honed at the table, by the people who fed us. On MasterChef, we get to take those dishes and present them to chefs who have tasted everything in the world. That’s a wild feeling. Being one of the twenty who get the white apron, after everyone who applies, I don’t take that lightly.

How do you prepare for something you can’t predict?

You can’t, fully. You try to study the show’s history: what kinds of challenges have come up before, what skills they tend to test, and you build a little mental playbook. But the truth is, you cannot plan for what actually happens in that kitchen. What you can do is prepare yourself to pivot, to adjust, to think clearly when things go sideways.

The challenges are challenges for a reason. The pressure you see on the show is real, and it’s probably magnified about ten times in real life. The cameras catch a lot, but they don’t catch all of it.

We talked last year about your daughters being big fans of having you around for lunches and Greek dinners. They were 13 and 15 then. How did they feel about you going off to film this one?

They’re a little older now, which made everything easier, practically and emotionally. My oldest has her driver’s license, so I didn’t have to worry about the school-pickup logistics in the same way I did when I was on The Great American Recipe.

But what’s really fun is they get a kick out of it. They help me with my Instagram posts. Earlier this year I did a post tied to the Met Gala — we have this old water tower in our town that has steps going up to it, and a friend came along to take pictures of me up there wearing the white apron Chef Gordon signed for me. I showed my oldest the shots and she said, “No, don’t post that one. Do this one instead.” She was right. They’re a real part of all of this now, in a way they couldn’t be when they were little.

And they get to eat very well around here, which doesn’t hurt.

Are they cooking with you, or are they happy to let you have the kitchen?

They know I’m Type A in the kitchen. When I’m cooking something specific, especially something I care about, it’s all me. They’ve learned to read that.

But where they actually take the lead is baking. I’m not a baker — that’s not my wheelhouse. So when there’s a baking project, I step back and let them run it. They get to do more, they’re more part of it, and I get to be the assistant for once. That’s some of my favorite time with them. It’s a different dynamic when you’re not the one driving.

In a girl-dad world, the kitchen is one of the places we get to spend real time together, and I’m grateful for it.

What do you hope readers take from watching you on the show?

Probably the same thing I’d want anyone to take from a home cook stepping into a professional space: that you don’t need a culinary degree to make food that matters. Skill matters, but so does the story. Where you come from, who you cook for, what’s on the table at your family’s house — that shows up in the food, whether you mean it to or not. The judges can taste it. So can the people at home.

The dishes I made on the show are rooted in things my mother taught me, in the Greek diners my grandfather and our family ran in Chicago, in the way we eat at home now.

Where can people watch — and what’s coming next?

The show airs on FOX, Wednesdays at 8/7c with episodes streaming the next day on Hulu. Right now we’re on a hiatus while FOX runs World Cup coverage, so it’s actually a perfect window to go back and catch up on the audition episodes and the start of the team rounds. The new episodes pick back up on Wednesday, July 15th.

And this Saturday, June 20, I’m coming back to One Potato as a guest writer with a Father’s Day bonus recipe — a Greek-inspired burger I made for one of the early grilling challenges on the show. It ties into an episode you can stream right now while you’re waiting for the season to come back. It’s a good cookout dish and it means something to me. I hope you’ll make it.

Catch Ted on MasterChef: Global Gauntlet, Wednesdays on FOX, streaming next-day on Hulu. Follow him on Instagram @teds_everyday_eats, and check back this Saturday, June 20, for his Father’s Day bonus recipe.

🥔 One Potato is a reader-supported newsletter — Subscribe to receive our Order Up! interviews and our Food People, Parent Picks series weekly.

Subscribe now

Earlier this week we talked to cookbook author Leigh Ann Chatagnier (Modern Cajun Cooking, Natural Baby and Toddler Treats) about raising her ten-year-old son Parks with the 80/20 rule, the way she learned to cook from her mom in Tennessee, and the decade in Louisiana that taught her the “holy trinity” of ingredients. If you haven’t read it yet, go back. It’s the why behind everything in this piece. Check it out here.

Today we’re getting practical. From the seasoning that lives on her counter to the kitchen tool she didn’t know she needed until she had it, Leigh Ann shares the staples, shortcuts, and small splurges that make her kitchen actually work, including the store-bought thing she’s stopped apologizing for and the muffin she makes on repeat.

Three fridge staples you always have on hand?

Eggs. You can make a meal out of eggs at breakfast, lunch, or dinner.

Something fresh. Whatever vegetable I have at the moment. Lettuce, cucumbers, whatever’s in season.

Good condiments. A few Asian ones I always keep on hand, the basics like ketchup, mustard, and mayo, and a good barbecue sauce. You can turn a basic piece of anything into something delicious with the right sauce.

Three pantry staples you always have on hand?

Rice, beans, and breadcrumbs. The beans go in the crock pot. The breadcrumbs go on top of fish, into meatballs, or onto a chicken cutlet. I use them constantly.

One ingredient anyone curious about Cajun cooking should stock?

A good all-purpose Cajun or Creole seasoning. Mine is Tony Chachere’s. There’s a homemade version in my cookbook too, which I’ll make up in a mason jar and seal tight.

A store-bought shortcut you’re not embarrassed about?

Chicken nuggets. I have a favorite brand, Parks has a favorite brand, and they live in our freezer. Sometimes dinner is a chicken nugget salad or a chicken nugget wrap. You can do a lot with chicken nuggets.

Frozen fruit and vegetables, too. A couple of bags in the freezer always come in handy.

And store-bought dumplings. If your mom didn’t pass down a dumpling recipe, the grocery store has good ones. Save yourself the time.

A kitchen tool that earns its counter space?

A good knife. That one’s non-negotiable. The other thing I can’t live without anymore is kitchen tweezers. The giant kind. I use them constantly: flipping tortillas on the stove, pulling pickles out of a jar, lifting things out of hot pans. They live on my counter.

And my immersion blender. So much easier than pulling out the food processor if you just want to blend a sauce or some cottage cheese. Anyone who doesn’t own one, get one.

A cookbook besides your own that you reach for?

My friend Dina Deleasa Gonsar — Dish It Girl Dina — just released a new cookbook that combines recipes with devotions. It’s family-friendly, very unintimidating, and she breaks everything down. Easy recipes anyone can cook, with little encouraging notes for moms throughout. At the Kitchen Sink: Recipes to Fill Your Table, Words to Fill Your Heart; A Cookbook [Bookshop, Amazon]

Beyond that, I tend to reach for cookbooks from specific cuisines I want to learn from. That’s where I need a recipe more than for the food I already know how to cook.

Go-to before-school breakfast?

I used to make everything from scratch: homemade muffins, banana bread, oatmeal every morning. Now? Store-bought organic mini pancakes with sausage links on the side. Peanut butter toast if we’re really in a hurry. Comes in clutch every single time.

The one thing I do still make on repeat are my easy chocolate muffins. Parks requests them constantly, and I love them because I can sneak protein in. I’ll pair them with scrambled eggs, sausage, or bacon. He’s a sweet-breakfast kid, but he needs the protein. Kodiak waffles also live in our freezer.

The meal everyone in your house eats without negotiation?

Spaghetti and meatballs. Always. Meatball night is a favorite for both Parks and my husband.

Comfort meal you make when someone’s had a hard day or they’re sick?

Chicken noodle soup. It’s Parks’s absolute favorite. He gets excited about it even when he’s not sick. It’s a hug in a bowl.

Kitchen splurge that was actually worth it?

My oven. When we redid the kitchen, I went for a six-burner, industrial-style range. If nothing else got upgraded, that did. It was worth every penny.

And a good Dutch oven. Two sizes, if you can swing it. They’re expensive, but they’ll last for the rest of your life. Heavy bottom, oven-safe, simmers all day. Worth the splurge.

A recipe from your baby and toddler cookbook you still recommend to new parents?

The mini zucchini muffins. People send me photos of them all the time. Their kids have grown up with that recipe and they’re still making them weekly.

And the chicken meatballs with coconut rice. Same. Those two travel through the years.

My best friend’s daughter is Parks’s age, and she still makes the zucchini muffins almost every week. Recipes that stick around like that are the best feeling.

One last thing for parents who feel overwhelmed?

Keep offering. They might not eat it today. They might not eat it for two years. Eventually, they’ll try it.

And try serving things differently. Parks won’t eat plain jasmine rice in a bowl. But if I form it into a little ball? He’ll eat it. Sometimes the trick is just changing the shape.

If you’re intimidated to cook, just start. Pick a few dishes your family loves and rotate. It’s okay to cook the same thing every week. The basics, done well, are delicious.

Books, Books, Books - by Leigh Ann Chatagnier

Modern Cajun Cooking: 85 Farm-Fresh Recipes with Classic Flavors [Bookshop, Amazon]

Natural Baby & Toddler Treats: Homemade, Nourishing Recipes for Baby and Beyond [Bookshop, Amazon]

Note: This newsletter may contain affiliate links from our friends & sponsors.

Books, Books, Books - by Leigh Ann Chatagnier

Modern Cajun Cooking: 85 Farm-Fresh Recipes with Classic Flavors [Bookshop, Amazon]

Natural Baby & Toddler Treats: Homemade, Nourishing Recipes for Baby and Beyond [Bookshop, Amazon]

🥔 One Potato is a reader-supported newsletter - Subscribe for weekly Order Up! interviews delivered to your inbox!

Subscribe now

Every Year Is Different: Leigh Ann Chatagnier on the Long Game of Feeding Kids

Leigh Ann Chatagnier is the cookbook author behind Modern Cajun Cooking and Natural Baby and Toddler Treats and the writer behind My Diary of Us, which she started before blogging was really a thing. Her food is fresh, fast, and built around what’s in season. Her son Parks is ten. He loves Indian food and crawfish. He won’t eat rice, despite his Cajun heritage. Some nights, he just wants a chicken nugget salad.

In this One Potato interview, Leigh Ann talked to us about the Tennessee summer meals her mom made from the garden, the Louisiana decade that taught her the Holy Trinity, and the 80/20 rule she’s landed on now that Parks goes to friends’ houses and stops at Chick-fil-A after practice. There’s a soft case for getting a good knife. There’s permission to use pre-chopped butternut squash. There’s a chicken noodle soup that’s basically a hug.

When we talk about the family tradition and the recipes at the table, she names something most food people don’t: every year is different. Last year he ate it; this year he doesn’t. The goal isn’t perfection; it’s helping a kid grow into an adult who’ll try anything. All you can really do is keep cooking the basics well, keep offering, and let the rest go.

A special note from our friends at Raising Healthy Families:

A Virtual Camp That Gets Kids Off the Screen

The honest hesitation about a virtual summer camp is almost always the same one: another reason for the kids to be on the iPad. We share that hesitation, and so does Katie Kimball, which is why every #LifeSkillsNow workshop is built around a short, hands-on “mission” the kids do *after* they close the laptop.

That means a workshop on gardening sends your kid out to plant something. A workshop on car care sends them to the driveway to check the oil. A workshop on calm bedtimes turns into a try-it-tonight script. Season 5 has 100+ of these, completely free during camp week (starting June 8), with 15 early-access workshops you can start the day you register.

👉 Get Your Free Spot

A Conversation with Leigh Ann Chatagnier, Cajun Food Writer and Cookbook Author

Introduce Yourself: I’m Leigh Ann Chatagnier. I’ve written four cookbooks, and I’m the recipe developer and food photographer behind My Diary of Us.

I live in Texas with my husband and my 10-year-old son, Parks. My first cookbook, Modern Cajun Cooking, came out when I was pregnant with my son, Parks. My husband is from Louisiana. We lived there for ten years before moving to Texas, so that book was my love letter to the food I fell in love with there. Right after Parks was born, my publisher asked if I knew anyone who wanted to write a baby and toddler cookbook (hint hint, nudge nudge). I was already developing recipes for him, and those recipes became Natural Baby and Toddler Treats, a book that goes from first bites to the family table.

Parks is an adventurous eater…but he also won’t eat a sweet potato!

What did meals look like in your house growing up in Tennessee?

My brother is diabetic, so my family ate pretty healthy my whole life. Back then, juvenile diabetes was managed mostly through food — it’s so different now — so my mom was always focused on protein, vegetables, and fiber. Everything was made from scratch. Biscuits. Garden vegetables.

One of my favorite meals from her was a summer dinner of fried pork chops, fresh tomatoes from her garden, pinto beans, squash, and raw onion on top. I don’t have that recipe written down anywhere, but it’s one I want to put on the blog this summer.

I don’t really have one signature recipe of hers that I make all the time. It’s more that I cook the way she taught me: grilled protein, whatever vegetables are in season, a good pasta dish. Her approach is the foundation. The recipes are mine.

How did you start learning the food side of your husband’s family in Louisiana?

His mom isn’t really a cook, but his dad is an amazing seafood boiler. They had a crawfish business his whole life. Most of what I learned about Cajun food, I learned just by living in Louisiana for ten years. Food is the center of every gathering down there. Birthdays, weddings, just hanging out, there’s always a pot of something.

I’d go places with him, eat things, and figure out which dishes I loved. By the time I was developing the cookbook, I knew his favorites. Modern Cajun Cooking isn’t specific recipes from his family. It’s the food we fell in love with together, and my spin on the classics.

Looking back at the strict, whole-food approach in your cookbook, anything you’d do differently now that Parks is ten?

Honestly, no. If I’d had a second kid, I would have had to be more lenient. I didn’t even let Parks taste sugar until he was two, which would have been totally unrealistic with an older sibling around. But I wouldn’t change how careful I was about real food early on.

What’s changed is what I can control. He’s ten. He goes to friends’ houses. He gets Chick-fil-A with his buddies after practice. So I’ve landed on an 80/20 rule: if he’s eating well at home eighty percent of the time, the other twenty percent is fine.

At home, I cook how I cook. If I make squash and onions and I know Parks won’t eat them, I give him the protein with avocado toast on the side. The goal isn’t that he eats everything I make at ten years old. The goal is that he’s an adult who’ll try anything. My husband grew up not eating particularly healthy and was way pickier than me when we met, and now he eats everything. That’s what I’m aiming for.

Is there a meal that surprises you that Parks loves, or one he still won’t touch?

He loves Indian food. This week I made tandoori chicken with gobi, which is yellow roasted vegetables, and he was into all of it. When he was a baby I used spices in his food, not heat but cumin and warm spices, and I think that’s why he doesn’t blink at those flavors now. We cook a lot of Asian and Indian food at home. We’d rather cook than eat out most of the time.

What still blows my mind is that he won’t eat a baked potato. Or mashed potatoes. Or rice, which is wild, because he has Cajun heritage. Rice is in everything down there. He’ll eat steak. He won’t eat a loaded baked potato to go with it. He doesn’t even really care about French fries. Take them away from him and he won’t notice. I will eat all the French fries, so that part hurts me personally.

Fresh and easy sometimes pull in opposite directions. How do you hold onto both?

It depends on the person. Some people don’t mind chopping. Some people will not pick up an onion. Both are fine.

What I tell people who say healthy cooking is too hard: it doesn’t have to be. The grocery store has chopped onions in the produce aisle now. There’s pre-chopped butternut squash. There are bags of stir-fry vegetables ready to go. Frozen vegetables have the same nutrients as fresh. There’s no rule that says you have to chop a butternut squash yourself for it to count.

So I try to listen to what someone means when they say easy. For one person, easy means no chopping at all. For someone else, easy means a meal that comes together in thirty minutes. Once you know what easy means for you, you can stop making excuses and start making dinner.

What does a regular Tuesday night dinner actually look like at your house?

Last night was burgers on the grill, oven fries, and corn. Monday was grilled chicken on a big salad, with avocado toast on the side for Parks, because he doesn’t love a salad unless it’s Caesar.

On rotation any given week: a grilled protein with salad, salmon with broccoli and rice or potatoes, taco night (which can be tacos, taco salad, or quesadillas depending on who’s at the table), burger night, and a good chicken salad. Easy, and on repeat.

Are you a Sunday meal-prep person, or a go-as-you-go person?

Go as I go. I cannot decide on Sunday what I want for dinner on Tuesday.

I can meal-prep lunches: boiled eggs, tuna salad, chopped vegetables for snacking. But dinner I figure out as I go. I usually shop Monday morning for two or three days, then shop again later in the week once I know what our weekend looks like.

What I do use Sunday for is a slow recipe, something I never have time for during the week. Homemade meatballs simmering all afternoon. Something in the crock pot. Not meal prep so much as a meal that gets to take its time.

For a parent who isn’t a confident cook, where should they start?

The basics. I did a whole back-to-basics series on Instagram a couple of summers ago: how to grill a chicken breast, bake a piece of fish, sear a pork chop, roast a whole chicken, cook pasta to al dente, make a good stock.

If you can do those things, dinner stops being intimidating. You can throw a piece of fish in a skillet and roast some vegetables, and that is a complete meal. People want to make casseroles and complicated stuff. You can make a really delicious dinner with a few good basics and the right seasoning. Get the basics down. Then you can start playing.

Cajun food can feel intimidating to start. Where would you tell someone to begin?

The “holy trinity” — onion, celery, bell pepper. Nine out of ten Cajun dishes start there. And a good Cajun seasoning. Mine is Tony Chachere’s. There’s a big shaker of it on my counter. I even put it on cucumbers.

Then pick one dish you love and make it. Don’t try to learn ten Cajun recipes at once. Pick your favorite, and master it. The first time might not be perfect. Cajun cooking takes attention, and a roux will burn if you walk away from it. But the next time it’ll be better. A lot of these dishes are weekend recipes for me now. They take time and love. That’s why they taste so good.

A recipe from Modern Cajun Cooking that Parks finally came around to?

Parks was a baby when the book came out, so he was too little to try anything then. Now? He loves the New Orleans-style barbecue shrimp, the saucy, French-bread-for-dipping kind, which is also one of my husband’s favorites. And he loves the gumbo. My husband says it’s Cajun approved, which is the highest compliment. Parks loves the andouille sausage in it. He’s come around to crawfish, too. He’s a full Cajun food kid now. Just don’t ask him to eat the rice on the side.

Beyond the food itself, what do you hope Parks remembers about how he was fed growing up?

That it was happy. That he was loved. The same way I remember the kitchen with my mom.

I’ve always had him in the kitchen with me, even just hanging out. I tell him he has to learn to cook, because he might not marry someone who cooks. I want him to leave for college with the basics.

And anytime he writes a school note about his parents, he writes about my cooking. Every time. I hope that’s something he carries with him.

Last one: what’s a cooking skill every home cook should practice?

Two, actually. Chopping, and the knife you chop with. I recently made my best friend, who’s not a confident cook, order a good knife while I was standing in her kitchen. She’d been telling me chopping was the worst part of cooking. Now she tells me she doesn’t mind it anymore. A good knife is the difference.

And cooking protein. How to cook a piece of chicken for example. People are afraid of chicken. They’re so scared of undercooking it that they overcook it into rubber. Or they undercook it and never want to eat chicken again. You have to get comfortable with how it feels, what your pan should sound like, when it’s ready to come off. That’s just practice.

Get good at chopping. Get comfortable with protein in general. And then just keep trying things. The more you cook, the more you trust yourself.

Follow Leigh Ann on Instagram @mydiaryofus

& Don’t forget to follow us on IG @onepotatobox ❤️

🥔 One Potato is a reader-supported newsletter — Subscribe to receive our Order Up! interviews and our Food People, Parent Picks series weekly.

Subscribe now

Earlier this week, we kicked off Pride Month with our Order Up! conversation with Justin Burke — pastry chef, queer food writer, and proud One Potato dad. We talked about the ten-year fight to publish Potluck Desserts: Joyful Recipes to Share with Pride [Bookshop, Amazon], the queer potlucks that carried him into chosen family, and the loaf-pan dessert his almost-eight-year-old son Jasper invented that ended up saving the book. Families come in all shapes, sizes, and colors — and if you haven’t read that interview yet, this is your sign to go read it now. [Click here!]

Today, we’re getting practical. Justin’s running down his three pantry staples, the kitchen tool he’s still trying to convince everyone they need, and the trendy ingredient he politely wishes we’d all stop buying. Plus the cookbooks, snacks, and store-bought shortcuts earning their keep in his big, gay, happy kitchen.

Three pantry or fridge staples you always keep on hand?

Whole-fat Greek yogurt, cornmeal, and buttermilk. Always. Living in the South means there’s always buttermilk in the fridge. With those three things, I can almost always pull something together — pancakes, biscuits, a cornmeal griddle situation.

The weeknight dinner currently on repeat?

Saucy rice. I love saucy rice. I think it has to have a real name, but in our house it’s the same idea every time: shaved pork or beef, Korean barbecue spices and sauce, rice, scallions, sesame. It’s never exactly the same thing twice, but it’s the same kind of thing — and it’s my comfort food.

A dessert every parent should have in their back pocket?

A layered pudding dessert. Some people call them “delights,” some call them “yum yums,” some call them “lushes.” I have three in the cookbook: Malt Chocolate Delight, Pistachio Delight, and Blackberry Yum Yum.

The bones are simple: pudding (boxed or scratch — I’m not judging), graham cracker crust, fresh whipped cream or Cool Whip, layered in a casserole dish or individual cups. Kids can help. It teaches patience because the whole thing has to chill. They get to lick the spoon. Done and done.

A store-bought shortcut you’re not embarrassed about?

Puff pastry. I had to make it in restaurants. I am not making it at home. Store-bought is more than good enough.

The kitchen tool earning its counter space?

A juicer. I just got one this Christmas, and it’s pulling its weight in more ways than I expected. Obviously you can make juice and drink it.

But you can also cook with it — I make carrots braised in their own juices, which is just carrots on carrots and it’s wonderful. For desserts, a juicer does a lot. I think we need more juicer education in general.

A cookbook (besides yours) you turn to?

Two. Eric Kim’s Korean American: Food That Tastes Like Home [Bookshop, Amazon] for inspiration — he’s a real storyteller. That book taught me what it looks like to tell a story through food.

And Casey Elsass’s What Can I Bring?: Recipes to Help You Live Your Guest Life [Bookshop, Amazon] for midweek, in-a-pinch cooking. Casey co-wrote about twenty cookbooks before his own came out in 2025, the same year as mine. His recipes are real. Real food, real approach, and you’ll learn from them.

Jasper’s after-school snack that prevents a meltdown?

Moon Pies. He’s such a little Southerner. He’ll come home and ask, “Where’s my Moon Pie?” If it’s not a Moon Pie, it’s potato chips. He’s easy.

A comfort dessert for when Louis or Jasper has had a hard day?

Yellow cake with chocolate frosting. That’s the one. Every time.

A trendy baking ingredient nervous bakers do not need?

Dubai chocolate. I’ll get hate mail for this. I don’t hate it. But it has become the new pumpkin spice — and not everything needs to be it.

A pistachio cake with chocolate frosting is a pistachio cake with chocolate frosting. We don’t have to pay $25 a chunk to feel like it’s special.

The one thing a first-time nervous baker should stock before they even pick out a recipe?

Butter. Good butter. Both salted and unsalted. You don’t need more than that to start.

A make-ahead, freezer-friendly dessert worth keeping on hand?

Cookie dough, portioned and frozen, so you can bake off as many or as few as you want.

Cookie bars: bake, slice, freeze.

Icebox cakes: freeze whole, then let them come to temp. All of it travels from freezer to table with very little fuss.

Note: This newsletter may contain affiliate links from our friends & sponsors.

Last June, we sat down with Chef Tatiana Rosana and Sako Gordon of Ayako & Family for Pride Month. This year, we’re starting it off with Justin Burke — pastry chef, queer food writer, and author of Potluck Desserts: Joyful Recipes to Share with Pride (it’s the one-year anniversary of his cookbook’s publication date!). He’s also a dad and husband writing into the parts of queer family life that food media so often leaves out.

Small Bites: We love #LifeSkillsNow! This free camp helps kids build true independence — the kind that comes from mastering a skill, not just keeping themselves entertained for a few hours. With topics like cooking, budgeting, gardening, and even managing big feelings, it’s like a mini life toolkit that’s easy to use (and fun). 👉 Learn more here

🥔 One Potato is a reader-supported newsletter - Subscribe for weekly Order Up! interviews delivered to your inbox!

Subscribe now

Folding in the Cheese: Justin Burke on Pastry, Pride, and Real-Life Queer Family

Justin Burke is a pastry chef, queer food writer, podcast host, and dad to almost-eight-year-old Jasper, who is co-parented across four dads and one very tolerant rescue dog. His debut cookbook, Potluck Desserts: Joyful Recipes to Share with Pride [Bookshop, Amazon], took ten years to land — ten years of agents and publishers who couldn’t square food with queerness, or queerness with the messy domestic reality of folding laundry and packing school lunches. If that sounds deep, you’ll want to continue reading for an incredibly thoughtful interview that touches on everything from nervous bakers, to chosen family, to queer life as it happens at the kitchen table on a Tuesday night.

Potluck Desserts is a book built for the person standing in their own kitchen for the first time, scared of failing. That includes a recipe by Jasper himself, Tastes Like Cookie Dough Fudge, one from his husband Louis, and a structure organized by baking pan because, as Justin points out, the hardest thing about a potluck is getting the thing from point A to point B (point A being your oven and point B being…someone else’s backyard?).

We talked about queer potlucks as oral history, why Jasper thinks they’re famous because they’re on Instagram, the rule his family has about tasting things you didn’t like last time, and the one cooking skill he wishes more home bakers got comfortable with — it involves a spatula and a Schitt’s Creek reference (IYKYK).

This conversation is for the parents teaching their kids that food is bigger than dinner, and for the nervous baker who reads a recipe like it’s a contract. Justin’s reminder is simple: you can live a full life anywhere, and you don’t have to wait for permission to start.

A special note from our friends at Raising Healthy Families:

All The Things Your Kids Are Capable Of…And More!

There’s a moment most parents recognize — the one where you realize your kid is way more capable than the version of them you’ve been working around. Maybe they pour their own cereal for the first time, or fold a fitted sheet without help, or save up for the thing you assumed you’d end up buying. #LifeSkillsNow is built around that moment, and built to make more of them happen.

Now in its fifth year, the free virtual camp from Katie Kimball at Raising Healthy Families is bigger than ever — 100+ brand-new workshops, more kid-and-teen teachers on screen than any year before, and a full week of programming that includes everything from gardening basics to building credit to what to do if you get pulled over. Camp opens June 8. Registration is free, and you can start exploring the early-access workshops right away.

👉 Save Your Spot

A Conversation with Justin Burke, Pastry Chef, Cookbook Author, & Queer Food Writer

Introduce Yourself: I'm Justin. I'm a pastry chef, queer food writer, recipe developer, and cookbook author. I host and produce a podcast called That Ate, and I do community organizing in the queer space.

My husband, Louis, and I have an almost-eight-year-old son named Jasper. We co-parent with my ex-husband and his husband, so Jasper has four dads. He's grown up with that since day one. It's just a very big, gay, happy family.

Let’s start with a very Pride-month question: You've said your first queer potluck changed your life. What shifted for you in that moment?

I was 18, living on my own, working at Disneyland. It wasn’t the potluck food that stood out to, but the people — I’d grown up in a small, conservative desert town. All these different races and cultures and genders in one room. I hadn’t been around anything like that before.

Food clicked for me later, after I’d moved around, gone to grad school for food policy, worked in nutrition with public schools. But to really understand the bigger picture, queer potlucks are doing something specific. Queer history is badly documented — we’re only now starting to capture it. Potlucks are how a lot of it survives. You eat something, you ask who made it, and you find out it’s the brownies that used to get made at HIV and AIDS clinics in the 80s. You’re learning legacy through food. You’re meeting your chosen family. For a lot of us, that’s where it all starts.

How did food go from background to career?

I quit a full-time job on impulse, walked into a restaurant, and said I wanted to be a pastry chef. That was the start. But the career really took off when my co-parent and I started building our family. Becoming a dad raised the stakes on everything, including what I wanted to put into the world about food. I didn’t force the food career. I let it come to me.

*Potluck Desserts: Joyful Recipes to Share with Pride.* That title is doing a lot of work. How did you land on it — and how did you fight to keep your husband and son in the book?

This book took me ten years. Ten years of doors closing because publishers and agents couldn’t see why being queer had anything to do with food. The kitchens I’d worked in had the same message — it’s not safe to be queer here, and if you are, you’re in pastry. I’m a living stereotype.

What I kept seeing in the queer cookbooks that did get published was one of two things. Either the author was queer and the book pretended that didn’t matter, or the queerness got flattened into a caricature for pop culture: drag queens, camp, very Instagram. Both versions cut out the parts that look like my life, that look like any day-to-day family life: a kid, a husband, school drop-off, dinner at home in Columbia, South Carolina.

When my agent Sally Eckus finally connected me Countryman Press, I cried in the pitch. I’d basically given up. They gave me full autonomy — the recipes, the voice, the visuals. My only hard rule was: do not put a rainbow on this cover. Potluck Desserts was a placeholder title for years. I kept thinking I’d come up with something more clever. When we got to print, they said, “No — that’s the name.” They were right.

Jasper came up with one of the recipe’s in the book? *Jasper’s Tastes Like Cookie Dough Fudge.*

Year two of writing the book, I hit a wall. I was convinced the recipes were bad, I was doing too much, I was doing too little. Jasper was three-ish at the time, and he grabbed my hand and basically said, let’s just make something. He’s a real empath. He could feel I was stuck.

I told him to grab whatever he wanted from the pantry. He came back with graham cracker crumbs, sweetened condensed milk, coconut, peanuts, chocolate chips, and marshmallows. I figured, fine, we’re making something for fun — it doesn’t have to be good. We dumped it all in a bowl, packed it into a loaf pan, let it set in the fridge.

That night we cut into it. He took a bite and said, “Mmm. Tastes like cookie dough.” I tried it. He was right. Louis tried it. Same reaction. I refined the quantities, and it went in the book. Jasper got me out of the rut. Louis has a recipe in there too.

Jasper doesn’t fully grasp the dedication yet, but when he sees the book in a store, he points and says, “That’s your book.” When he sees us on Instagram, he tells me we’re famous. I keep trying to explain that having social media doesn’t make you famous, but I’m losing that argument.

You’ve talked about queer domestic life — folding laundry, regular Tuesday dinners — being the part of queer food media that gets missed. Why does that matter so much to you?

Media has shown one slice of queer life: bars, restaurants, clubs, drag. Important spaces — but they’re not the whole ecosystem. We’re also working nine-to-fives, taking care of kids, looking after aging parents. We drive to the bar from our homes. We go back to those homes.

When I became a parent, I went looking for resources on queer family life and couldn’t find much. Friends were reaching out about surrogacy, and I had to keep saying, “I don’t know — we’re figuring it out together.” The home was missing from the picture. You don’t have to live in a brownstone in Boston or NYC to live a full queer life. You can live anywhere. I wanted the book to reflect that.

What has feeding Jasper on a normal night taught you that fifteen years in professional kitchens didn’t?

Jasper used to eat anything. Now he’s an opinionated almost-eight-year-old who suddenly doesn’t eat chicken tenders. Joke’s on us.

Our rule is: you have to try it. Every time. Even if you didn’t like it last time — palates change. And when something gets rejected, we don’t get angry or shame him. We ask why. What is it? Flavor? Texture? We want him to learn to describe what’s going on instead of defaulting to “I don’t like it.” Honestly, sometimes I have to remind the grandparents to do the same.

We co-parent, so Jasper isn’t with us every day. When he is, we eat at the table as a family. Louis does most of the cooking at home — I need a break from food work, and that trade is fair. When Jasper’s here, he has his stool. He’s been taught to use a knife and the induction burner. I decided early on not to be anxious around him in the kitchen, because kids absorb that. I’m sweating internally and acting calm externally.

You’ve said you didn’t want to write another elaborate pastry book that no one would actually cook from. Who did you have in mind when you were writing?

Me. The version of me that was new to baking, nervous, self-taught. I think we’ve forgotten that there’s always a beginner — there’s always a nervous baker. Most cookbooks ask the author to flex everything they know. People expected my first book to be French technique stacked on American comfort, all the flash. I wanted to meet the novice exactly where they were.

So I told the publisher up front: these are novice recipes. We’re building skill. I won’t call for a kitchen scale. Even a seasoned baker or a professional chef can pull something from it. I’m self-taught, so I break rules I never learned in the first place. If a recipe calls for a boxed cake mix, fine. We’ll put a homemade topping on it. The point is that you should be proud of what you bake, not embarrassed about how you got there.

The book is organized by baking pan, with recipes tagged by time. Where did that structure come from?

I had too many recipes to sort into the usual categories — cakes, cookies, pies — and they didn’t divide evenly. I woke up in the middle of the night and realized the actual problem at a potluck isn’t what you made, it’s how you get the thing from point A to point B. It’s the vessel. So I built the chapters around that: sheet pan, casserole dish, loaf pan, and so on. People keep telling me they love it. (”Oh, I don’t have sheet pans” — okay, you should probably get one, but I won’t push it.)

For time, I used broad strokes: 30 minutes or less, an hour or so, better made the night before. When I first started baking, I would read a recipe like a contract. If it said an hour and I finished early, I figured I’d done something wrong. If I went over, I figured I was slow. Loose time ranges give a nervous baker room to breathe.

Tell us about *That Ate*, your podcast. Is there a conversation that’s stayed with you?

That Ate is a queer food podcast, brand new — we’re in season one. It’s an extension of what Potluck Desserts started: queerness and food and how they intersect with culture, race, gender, money, the whole thing. Potluck Desserts was my story. The podcast is everyone else’s.

The episode that sits with me most is episode two with Telly Justice, the chef behind Hags in New York — the trans-owned restaurant. I was always called “too sensitive” as a kid. She said the queer and trans community are beautifully sensitive people — sensitive because we’re kind, because we understand how brutal the world can be, and because we know how powerful it is to put a plate of food in front of someone and say, I hear you. Let’s eat. That stuck with me.

If a parent wants to help their kid see more of the world through food and storytelling, where would you tell them to start?

Cook with your kids in your own kitchen, and pick something that has a story behind it. A family recipe, something cultural. Take the benchmark off the table — don’t make it about whether they actually eat it. Just get them in there. Cookbooks have stories too — start there. If you have cultural food festivals nearby, take them. Kids have no barriers. They’ll absorb everything as long as you don’t put your own reactions in front of them. Jasper went to an empanada festival recently and came home schooling me on empanadas.

One cooking skill you think more home cooks should practice?

Folding. Specifically, the proper use of a rubber spatula. When a recipe says fold, people improvise — including my own mother — and the cake suffers for it. Take the spatula around the edge of the bowl like you’re going around the world, then flip everything from the bottom up to the top. Reverse and repeat. As Schitt’s Creek told us: fold in the cheese. David Rose was right.

Follow Justin on Instagram @justintsburke, subscribe to on Substack, and subscribe to That Ate the podcast (YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts)

& Don’t forget to follow us on IG @onepotatobox ❤️

🥔 One Potato is a reader-supported newsletter — Subscribe to receive our Order Up! interviews and our Food People, Parent Picks series weekly.

Subscribe now

Earlier this week we sat down with Noah Galuten — cookbook author, TV host, and the chef behind on Substack — to talk about feeding a family without pretending it’s simple. We covered the trade-offs of a Tuesday night dinner (pleasure, nutrition, money, time), why he’s a self-described fiber acolyte, and how he handles “no” at the table without making it a fight. If you missed it, Noah’s realness is worth checking out. Head on over here to read the full Order Up! interview.

Today we’re getting practical. Noah’s sharing the pantry and freezer staples that get him through a chaotic week, the rice-cooker-plus-grill move he leans on for fast family dinners, the one weeknight bowl his whole family actually eats without negotiating, and the comfort soup his kids always ask for when someone’s having a rough day.

Three pantry or fridge staples you always keep on hand?

Dried beans, dried pasta, and sauerkraut. I make my own sauerkraut when I can — it’s shelf-stable, healthy, and you can throw it into a turkey wrap in a pinch. I was raised to believe you should always be ready to cook for eight people who showed up in the middle of the night. I’m a mob wife about it — I want to be ready to make spaghetti pomodoro or pasta e fagioli for Fat Tony and his six cousins. So canned tomatoes are also always on the list.

Frozen peas are the best frozen vegetable — they freeze well, they cook fast, and in a pinch you can make a cacio e pepe with peas instead of pepper.

If someone has only grilled burgers and hot dogs, what’s the next dish to throw on the grill?

A pork souvlaki pita. Or chicken, or beef, or mushroom — whatever you want. It’s wild to me that people aren’t doing this more. If you think about a burger, you’re patty-ing meat, slicing onions and tomatoes, making a sauce, grilling, building a handheld with starch. Souvlaki is the same amount of work. Butterfly some pork chops, marinate in oregano, olive oil, lemon juice, and garlic. Make the tzatziki ahead. When it’s go time, grill the meat, grill a pita, and layer everything. People will be blown away.

Weeknight dinner you make in your sleep?

The easy answer is spaghetti with tomato sauce — can of tomatoes, done.

The real one is soborodon — Japanese ground chicken rice bowl. Ground chicken in a pot with sake, soy, and mirin. Stir it with four chopsticks. Spoon it onto rice. Fast, easy, comforting.

My “nutrition dad” version: I grate cauliflower (or buy cauliflower rice) and cook it right alongside the chicken. It takes on the texture of the meat, adds a ton of nutrition, and extends the protein. Almost one-to-one cauliflower to chicken. They house it. Soy sauce on top. The whole family eats it. [Check out Noah’s recipe on his Substack!]

One vegetable that’s better on the grill than anywhere else?

Broccolini. Especially in season, you get those little crispy edges.

Jimmy Nardello peppers are also incredible on the grill. They’re a sweet pepper, edible seeds, great raw or cooked, so you can get a blackened side on the grill quickly without overcooking. In the book I toss them in a red yuzu vinaigrette — red pepper fermented on top of red pepper. It’s a hit. (Corn, sorry, is at its best in a crab boil.)

Kitchen appliance that’s worth its weight in gold?

The rice cooker, no contest. You can set it hours ahead of dinner and it’ll have perfect, hot, fluffy rice waiting whenever you get back. It also reheats rice well. My kids would eat rice with soy sauce and cucumbers all day and be perfectly happy.

A blender is the other one, especially with picky kids. My wife and kids don’t love the skins on regular tomatoes, but cherry tomatoes have higher pectin, so blending makes a bright, fresh sauce that emulsifies fast and doesn’t need to thicken the way most fresh tomato sauces do.

A cookbook besides your own that you love?

Shizuo Tsuji’s Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art [Bookshop, Amazon]. It’s how I learned to cook other cuisines growing up, pre-blog era, when cookbooks were the reference point. There are obvious flaws in the publishing industry around who was historically allowed to write those, but the Tsuji book was foundational for me. I’ve evolved my own version around my taste over the years.

The other is The Woks of Life [Bookshop, Amazon]. Their book and their blog are incredible, and wok cooking is a secret hack for feeding a family. If you have a moment to mise everything out in advance, you can have a stir-fry on the table in four minutes.

Favorite seasoning or sauce?

Soy sauce. Easy answer. And an underrated one: Yondu. It’s a Korean condiment, and it’s a great way to add flavor to something, especially for vegetarians. Vegan fish sauce is honestly the best way to describe it.

Meal everyone in your house eats without negotiating?

That soborodon is a big one.

The other is my fiber dad turkey chili (it’s on my Substack). Red lentils dissolve into ground turkey and take on the texture of ground beef, so you get more protein, more fiber, more beans, less meat. Then I set up the condiment bar — chips, sour cream, cheese for them; yogurt, hot sauce, lime, cilantro for me. They put their toppings on and they eat the thing.

Comfort meal your family loves on a rough day?

Chicken soup. Always. I keep a vat of chicken broth ready for the moment somebody starts to come down with something, though that’s more or less constant now because my son’s been sick for two years straight thanks to preschool. The version I do is what I call Jewish-Italian chicken noodle soup, from my first cookbook: egg noodles (or sometimes shells), classic carrot, celery, onion, parsley, with Parmesan grated on top. The Parmesan makes everyone happy.

Note: This newsletter may contain affiliate links from our friends & sponsors.

Small Bites: This year’s #LifeSkillsNow camp goes places we did not see coming — there’s a three-part series filmed inside a suit shop teaching young gentlemen how to pick, wear, and care for a suit. Plus chivalry, table-setting, and writing a real letter on real paper. Free virtual camp from Raising Healthy Families. 👉 Register here

🥔 One Potato is a reader-supported newsletter - Subscribe for weekly Order Up! interviews delivered to your inbox!

Subscribe now

From Vegetables to BBQ to Bedtime: Noah Galuten on what changes when feeding a family becomes the lens for everything you cook

Noah Galuten is a cookbook author, TV host, and chef whose Substack bio reads “feeding my family and overthinking it so you don’t have to.” Reading him, you get the sense he’s not here to save you from anything. He just refuses to pretend it’s easy.

Noah trained under three of the best mentors in completely different worlds: vegetables with Jeremy Fox, barbecue with Kevin Bludso, pizza with Frank Pinello. He helped write On Vegetables, opened Bludso’s Bar & Que, wrote Don’t Panic Pantry, and now writes I’m Legally Required to Feed You on Substack. His new book, Grill Time: Why You Should Be Grilling for Better, Healthier, Easier, and More Delicious Meals: A Cookbook, lands in May, 2026. He also co-hosts the podcast “Food Parents” with Lesley Suter, hosts BBQ Smokeout on Tastemade, and is raising a two-year-old and a four-year-old with his comedian wife in LA.

It’s the reality of feeding a family while doing five million things simultaneously that really resonated with us at One Potato; he doesn’t pretend to have it figured out. He’s honest about the gap between knowing what’s nutritious and getting a four-year-old to eat it. He thinks about fiber. He thinks about why you should salt your steak two days before you cook it. This is a conversation about reordering your priorities once kids show up, and why a little planning ahead might be the most useful skill in the kitchen.

A special note from our friends at Raising Healthy Families:

The Skills That Schools Don’t Teach Anymore

Most parents we know are quietly carrying a list of things they wish their kids were learning — how to handle money, how to fix a hole in a sock, how to set the table for a holiday meal, how to talk through a hard conversation without shutting down. The list keeps growing, and the school day keeps shrinking. Katie Kimball built #LifeSkillsNow because she was watching the same gap.

Season 5 brings 100+ free workshops from over 70 experts, organized into tracks like Finance, Etiquette, Hands-On, and a brand-new Leadership lineup. Each workshop ends with an off-screen “mission” so the learning actually moves out of the screen and into the kitchen, the garage, the backyard. Camp officially opens June 8, but registering now opens up 15 early-access workshops you can start this weekend.

👉 Register free for #LifeSkillsNow Season 5

A Conversation with Noah Galuten, Chef, Restaurateur, & Cookbook Author

Introduce Yourself: I’m Noah Galuten.

I'm a cookbook author and writer, and now also a television food show host. I've got a two-year-old son, a four-year-old daughter, a dog of indeterminate age, and a wife who is my age.

What did food look like growing up, and how did you get into cooking?

My parents divorced young, so I bounced between two homes. My mom was the serious food parent; her mother was from Italy, making me one-quarter Italian. I grew up on this California–New York–Italian filter: turkey bolognese, beans and tomato sauces, minestrone.

Growing up in LA, the movie thing was demystified for me. But cookbook authors and PBS chefs like Lydia Bastianich — those felt like a different world. I studied literature and playwriting and cooked for everyone in the dorms. When writing didn’t take off, I ended up writing about food for local papers, $40 a blog post, while waiting tables.

How did I become a chef? I interviewed Kevin Bludso for LA Weekly, we hit it off, and decided we needed to bring real Compton BBQ to LA. I was originally going to be the GM, by the time we found a space I had been training for months on the BBQ; Kevin said I was the only person he trusted with his food…so I became the chef. Seventeen panic attacks later, it worked. After that I was culinary director for a restaurant group, then helped Jeremy Fox write On Vegetables. The pandemic hit, my book stuff started taking off, we had kids. Writing cookbooks from home felt better than being in a kitchen 110 hours a week.

You named Lydia Bastianich, Marcella Hazan, Edna Lewis, and Ming Tsai as early influences. Anything you didn't fully understand about their work until you started cooking for your own kids?

Once you cook for your own kids, the first instinct is to cook what you ate growing up. The food that’s loaded with memory. I did the homemade baby food thing because it wasn’t that hard for me — farmer’s market produce and chickpeas, blended, portioned, frozen. Once a week, done.

But I think about more than nutrition now. I want my kids to have a healthy relationship with food. I don’t want to be the dad yelling about broccoli, only for them to leave home and house Snickers bars in college. And I try not to be the dad who sneaks vegetables in. I want them to actually understand what’s in their food. The hard part is recipe development is hard to do with a four-year-old. It’s “Daddy, can I help you cook?” And that’s amazing, and also… not right now, Daddy’s working! Ha!

From On Vegetables to Bludso's to Don't Panic Pantry — what's the thread for you?

Curiosity really. That’s it. I’ve been incredibly lucky in the breadth of mentors: one of the best Michelin vegetable cooks, one of the best barbecue people, Frank Pinello on pizza, Ari Kollender on seafood. Now I’m writing about pizza and vegetables with Sarah Minnick in Portland, which is a dream.

You learn from incredible people, then filter it through your own taste and what you care about. Sometimes the journalistic side comes back in — I once spent a year and a half reporting on what’s in a box of chicken broth. Right now I’m reading a lot about ocean farming. Having kids focuses everything. The longer-term effects of what I do matter more now.

What inspired you to launch your Substack, I’m Legally Required to Feed You? To write about the dad side of the equation?

Part of it was wanting more autonomy with my writing and income; pitching less, doing what I want. But the subject was obvious. Once you become a parent, everything you do gets filtered through that lens. Speed, nutrition, sustainability, money — it all runs through what I’m making for my family.

Every once in a while you hit on a dish everyone in the house likes, and you think, now I get why people find three dishes and rotate them every week. But the moment you feel like you’ve figured out how it works with your kids, it changes. The parent thing where someone tells you, just wait, six is brutal; or just wait, pre-teens are coming. I think the real reason that works is nobody remembers what happened two years ago. They’re talking about what’s hard right now.

You've described the Substack as breaking down the trade-offs between pleasure, nutrition, sustainability, money, and time. How do you do that math on a Tuesday night when everyone's tired?

Set yourself up for success, or at least try to make things a little easier. Stock your freezer and pantry with things you can throw together in a pinch. The most dad thing about me happened before I was a dad: I got a reach-in freezer in the garage. When I make chicken stock, I make a lot. Same with tomato sauce and soups. I just made a giant pot of split pea soup, and of course nobody else wants to eat it. So it's me eating soup alone while feeding everyone else something else.

Your bio is “feeding my family and overthinking it so you don’t have to.” What’s one thing you’ve overthought and figured out, and one thing you’ll keep overthinking forever?

I’ve become a fiber acolyte. Long-term health, all-cause mortality, body function — fiber is one of the most beneficial things you can do. A lot of the highest-fiber foods — lentils, split pea soup — my wife and kids are not pumped about. Our house turns into a lot of bean work.

The thing I’ll keep overthinking is the balance. There’s a tipping point where you over-vegetable something and they eat none of it. In my twenties in New York, when I wanted pasta, I’d try to force a bunch of zucchini into a tomato sauce that didn’t need it. Eventually I figured out I’d just eat two raw zucchini while I cooked dinner. That doesn’t work the same way on kids. But I’ll catch myself saying things like, eat your garlic bread and then you can have more broccoli — which doesn’t totally make sense, and also does, because if they just eat the broccoli they’ll be starving later, and I’d like to sleep tonight.

On the Food Parents podcast, you’ve talked about your house rules: no short-order cooking, most dinners get made in the kitchen, shortcuts and store-bought are okay. Which has been hardest to hold the line on?

Short-order cooking. I gave up on it at breakfast — they want different things, I have it dialed in, I just make it. Dinner is harder. There’s a stress around it I’m still trying to handle better. You end up with the whole dinner being you telling people to eat their dinner, which is not a great way to eat dinner.

My son’s a monster who shoves food in his mouth. My daughter holds court and barely eats. My solution has been: do whatever you want, but if you’re hungry later, this is your food. The kitchen’s clean and she’s still nibbling one noodle. You can fit eight in your mouth. I promise. A lot of it is learning how to model the behavior I want from them. Your energy and your mood are the loudest thing at the table, and I’m not always great at that.

One of your pieces of parenting advice has been that it’s your job to say no — and to teach your child how to hear and live with no. How do you do that at the table without making dinner a fight?

Saying no to a treat is easy. You can be upset, we’re not going to fight about it, you’re just not having that. The harder one is fighting them into a yes. I don’t want to force them to eat anything. But I do want them to try. Our rule: you don’t have to like it, but you have to try it. A real bite — you can’t lick something and know if you like it. Chew, swallow. Now you have an opinion.

And the big one I’ve learned — don’t reinforce the things they say they don’t like. If a kid says, I don’t like mushrooms, and the next time you’re at the store you go, oh, we can’t buy these, you don’t like mushrooms — you’ve locked them in. I tell my kids taste changes. Things I didn’t like as a kid I like now. I keep reintroducing. They don’t have to like it. But it’s an open conversation, not a rule. My daughter didn’t like raisins for six months. And then she did.

You’ve talked about wanting to build a family food culture that protects a healthy body image. What does that look like in practice?

The truth is I don’t fully know yet — I’ve got tall, skinny kids with great metabolisms. For me it’s about balance and exposure. Sometimes the value isn’t nutritional, it’s cultural — going to a Korean restaurant and having them try something we’d never make at home. Trying things. Reintroducing things they didn’t like six months ago. Not making anything a permanent rule. That’s the conversation I want to keep open.

Your new book is Grill Time! What makes the grill faster for weeknight family cooking?

Two things. Cleanup — brush the grates and cleanup is done. No oil spatter, no four pans to wash. And you can cook multiple things for multiple tastes at once. Chicken, shrimp, and asparagus on the stove in three pans is a nightmare. On different sections of the grill, it’s nothing.

Pair the grill with a rice cooker. Put rice on, go outside, grill chicken or steak or mushrooms or asparagus or cauliflower, come back with a tray of food, hot rice waiting. That’s a huge move. Writing a grill book as my second book meant I got to draw on every technique and mentor I’d had my whole life. It poured out of me.

You’ve written that 40% of the recipes are vegetarian. Intentional, or did it just come together that way?

That’s just how I cook. I’m probably 60–70% vegetarian in my own life. With grilling, the lazy assumption is meat. You can have seven chicken recipes; you can also have seven vegetable recipes.

I’m a less-and-better person when it comes to meat at home. Higher quality, smaller amounts, used to accent a dish. Joking aside, there’s a version of this book that’s just put olive oil and lemon juice on things and throw them on the grill. My parents were hippies. My stepdad’s still vegetarian. My wife wants to be vegetarian but craves meat. I’m pretty sure mine is the only grilling cookbook in history with a split pea soup recipe.

The book has a recurring feature called Dad Hacks. What’s in one, and what would you tell a parent who hasn’t really grilled before?

A Dad Hack is something practical that makes the whole thing more doable. Having a rice cooker going while you’re outside is one of the best moves you can make.

The grilling-specific one: most gas grills don’t get as hot as a restaurant grill or even your own stove. So if you try to get crust and char on both sides of a burger or asparagus or broccolini, you overcook it before the second side colors. The fix is to commit to one side. Let it go until it’s gorgeous, then flip it for 30 or 60 seconds just to finish. You’ll get the texture you want without overcooking.

Forethought is its own Dad Hack. If I have an hour while the kids are still asleep, I can throw a marinade together and dinner is mostly handled by noon.

You co-host Food Parents with Lesley Suter (though currently on pause for your book tour!). What have you only understood by interviewing other food-writer parents out loud?

That you have no control over what your kids do. Whenever I talk to parents of twins, I’m like — your kids are completely different. Maybe just let it all be what it is.

What I love about the show: Lesley was a hardcore food parent when her kids were the age mine are now. Then it gets beaten out of you, and you become Instacart McDonald’s mom. So she’s rooting for my failure to make her feel better. And I’m digging in to prove her wrong. That’s real parenting — turning parenting into a blood feud with a dear friend.

When your kids are adults and they think back on the food of their childhood, what do you hope they remember?

I hope some of the food I loved is the food they loved. But the bigger thing is I want them to know how to feed themselves. There’s a lot I can’t control, but if they can do their own laundry, cook themselves a meal, and say please and thank you, I’ll have done okay.

What’s one cooking skill or technique that every home cook should practice?

Forethought. Small steps in advance change everything.

If you’re cooking a steak in two days, salt it now and put it in the fridge. If you’re roasting or grilling a whole chicken, salt it and let it sit open-air. It seasons the whole thing through, dries the surface so you get better color, and preserves it a little longer. If you’re shopping Monday and cooking Wednesday and wondering whether you can buy it two days early — yes. Salt it, fridge it, you’ll have a better dinner.

The other: freeze things when they’re at their peak, not right before they go bad. A big pot of soup or sauce or ragù — freeze what you know you won’t eat that night. And don’t be afraid to freeze something and wait until you’re actually excited about it again. The fourth night of minestrone is a slog. Freeze it. Pull it out in two weeks. Dinner’s ready. You’ll feel like a hero.

Follow Noah on Instagram @galuten and subscribe to on Substack

& Don’t forget to follow us on IG @onepotatobox ❤️

🥔 One Potato is a reader-supported newsletter — Subscribe to receive our Order Up! interviews and our Food People, Parent Picks series weekly.

Subscribe now

Earlier this week we talked to Ashley Cameron, the former labor and delivery nurse and mom of three behind Love & Cookies, about growing up on her family’s pecan farm in New Mexico, baking with her son Charlie through his Kawasaki disease recovery, and how those long afternoons in the kitchen turned into a clean-label, butter-based cookie company. You can revisit that interview right here.

Today we’re getting practical. Ashley shared the pantry staples that anchor her chaotic-but-fed weeknights, the kitchen tool she’ll one day pass down to her kids, the snacks that keep three active kids out of meltdown territory, and the one ingredient swap she swears by for better cookies. Quick, specific, and immediately useful — the way good notes from another mom always are.

Three pantry or fridge staples you always keep on hand?

Butter, always. In the pantry, protein bars — my kids thrive when there’s protein on hand. In the fridge, sliced cucumbers, grapes, strawberries, and a container of hummus. That’s the standard “throw it in the car and feed everybody” combo.

Your go-to weeknight dinner?

Grilled chicken, broccoli, and rice with some kind of teriyaki or sweet chili sauce on top. We rotate through it two to three nights a week. Hands-down staple.

One store-bought item you always grab for busy nights?

I cook from scratch a lot, so this is genuinely hard. But — Trader Joe’s frozen pizzas. Throw it in the oven, it’s done, everybody’s happy. That’s the emergency play.

Kitchen appliance or tool you’d replace immediately if it broke?

My cast-iron skillet. It cooks everything. It’s perfectly seasoned. Dish soap is not allowed near it. It’s on the list of things I want to one day pass down to one of my kids.

If a parent wants to start baking with their kid for the first time and not lose their mind, what should they make?

Chocolate chip cookies. Always a good place to start. Two tips: slightly under-bake them — don’t over-bake — and follow the recipe exactly the first time. You can get cute on round two. If you don’t know how it’s supposed to turn out, you won’t know what went wrong.

Of all the Love & Cookies flavors, which one is your current favorite — and which one do your kids fight over?

My current favorite is our new lemon cookie. So good. But my kids are obsessed with our pumpkin chocolate cookie, our holiday flavor — they will literally fight over them. At home I make a cream cheese frosting to put on top, and it turns into a whole thing.

What snack do you keep in your bag or your car for the meltdown moments?

Chomps beef sticks for the hangry-and-grumpy emergencies. For when they’re being good, I keep a stash of dye-free Giggles — the little fruit snacks with the fun facts on them. My youngest gets dragged to all the big-kid stuff, so when he’s being exceptionally patient, he gets a pack of Giggles. (Don’t tell on me.)

Favorite cookbook for dinner inspiration?

A few. The fun one is my grandmother’s OG Betty Crocker cookbook — published in 1961. I love pulling it out to see how far we’ve come. For everyday cooking, I love The Defined Dish [Bookshop, Amazon] and What’s Gaby Cooking [Bookshop, Amazon]. Both have great stuff.

Baking ingredient worth splurging on?

The inclusion. That’s baker-speak for whatever you’re mixing in — the chocolate chips, the dried fruit, whatever it is. That’s the flavor people taste in the final cookie. Splurge on really good chocolate. And on butter. Quality of butter and quality of inclusion are where you’ll feel the difference.

Your go-to school-morning breakfast?

Credit where it’s due — my husband is the breakfast guru. The two staples are sausage and egg breakfast tacos, which we make almost every morning (very Texas of us, I know), and gluten-free pancakes that I sneak protein powder into. If you’ve got a 12-year-old boy hitting a growth spurt, you understand. You have to put protein in everything or he’ll eat you out of the house.

Your family’s comfort meal when someone is sick or sad?

The Defined Dish’s Herbed Healing Chicken Soup [Bookshop, Amazon]. Hands down. The kids ask for it by name. I’ve made a few small tweaks for the family’s preferences, but that’s the comfort meal in our house.

A kitchen item that was a splurge but earned its place?

My cast-iron skillet, again. A really good, high-quality cast-iron skillet is expensive — but it lives in the same spot, gets cleaned the same way every time, and one day, one of my kids will inherit it.

One affordable tool or ingredient swap for parents getting into baking with their kids?

Skip the silicone baking mats — use unbleached parchment paper. This might sound nitpicky, but those silicone mats are full of microplastics, and high heat is not a great mix with that. Unbleached parchment paper goes on every baking sheet I use. Roll it up, throw it away, and your pans don’t stick.

And on tools: I only cook with wooden spoons or metal spatulas. I don’t keep silicone or rubber spatulas in my kitchen.

Note: This newsletter may contain affiliate links from our friends & sponsors.

🍽️ We talk about Raising Healthy Families a lot around here, but #LifeSkillsNow is the version that goes wider — gardening, money, gratitude, basic tools, sewing, even stopping a bleed. Season 5 of their summer camp opens June 8 and registration is free. Worth a look while there’s time.

🥔 One Potato is a reader-supported newsletter - Subscribe for weekly Order Up! interviews delivered to your inbox!

Subscribe now

Founder Ashley Cameron on family, healing, and Love & Cookies

In 2019, Ashley Cameron’s five-year-old son Charlie spent months at home recovering from Kawasaki disease, an inflammatory heart condition that nearly went unrecognized. After treatment, Ashley asked Charlie what was the one thing he wanted to do, his answer was simple, “bake cookies with mommy.” So thats what they did. Cookies, dozens at a time, every flavor he could think of. Some afternoons there were a hundred cooling on the counter.

Ashley grew up on a pecan farm in New Mexico, where her grandmother and mother baked cookies most nights of the week — with lots of recipes featuring pecans, of course. She trained as a labor and delivery nurse and spent years delivering babies. The cookie company wasn’t planned. It was what she and Charlie did to fill the days. When friends started asking to buy them, then COVID hit and the requests didn’t stop, the home operation outgrew its kitchen. Today, Love & Cookies is a clean-label, butter-based frozen cookie dough sold at Sprouts, Wegmans, H-E-B, and Thrive Market. The recipes are her grandmother’s and her mother’s. The name came from her husband Cash, walking into the kitchen one night and saying, “There’s nothing better than a mommy’s love and a really good cookie.”

Ashley talked with us about the slow, scary road to Charlie’s diagnosis — the missed signs, the visit with a high-school friend that may have saved his life. She explained why Charlie’s story now lives on the back of every package, and how the Kawasaki Kids Foundation backpack program grew out of that decision. And she gave us her case for real butter.

The story isn’t a tidy redemption arc. It’s about what families do when there’s nothing else to do, and how that ordinary time can turn into something none of them planned for.

A special note from our friends at Raising Healthy Families:

You Don’t Have to Wait Until Camp Week! Get a Head Start on Summer

Camp officially opens June 8, but the part we keep telling friends about is the early-access stretch happening right now. When you register for #LifeSkillsNow Season 5, you immediately get 15 workshops to dive into — some of the most popular from past years (a five-minute clean-up routine, the famous build-your-own pasta salad bar, “what to do if you get pulled over”) plus three brand-new Season 5 previews.

That’s enough material to fill a few weekend afternoons or a stretch of slow May evenings, and it gives kids a feel for whether the full camp is something they’ll want to dive into in June. Registration is free either way. 👉 Claim your free pass

A Conversation with Ashley Cameron, Founder of Love & Cookies

Introduce Yourself: I’m Ashley Cameron, owner and founder of Love & Cookies. I’m a mom of three: Charlie, who’s about to be 12, Carlysle, who’s almost 10, and Hank, who’s 8. Boy, girl, boy. I’ve been married to my husband for fifteen years this June. We met our freshman year of college.

Love & Cookies is pre-portioned gourmet cookie dough that you’ll find in the freezer aisle at grocery stores across the country — clean label, butter-based, made with all the things you want and none of the things you don’t. The goal is simple: become America’s next favorite cookie, and end up in everyone’s freezer.

Tell us about baking with your mom and grandmother growing up. What stayed with you?

I grew up on a pecan farm in New Mexico, and my grandparents lived on the same property. From the time I was very small, my grandparents had dinner with us five nights a week, sometimes seven. My grandma is about to be 90!

When you grow up on a farm, you’re raised a little differently. You use what you have. The food in our house was always good. And my mom and my grandma made these incredible cookies — every cookie had pecans in it, naturally.

What I remember most isn’t the baking. It’s our friends coming over, the joy on everyone’s face, and eating Miss Susan’s and Miss Betty’s cookies until the trays were empty. That’s the core memory.

Your kids are growing up around those same recipes, but now they’re a business. Has that changed how they relate to baking?

Let me set the tone for our house: five type-A personalities under one roof. The opinions are strong, they don’t always match up, and you can imagine what dinner is like.

The big shift is with Charlie. He’s started cooking actual dinners with me this year, and watching that sense of independence grow has been one of the best parts of being his mom. My daughter is starting to come along too — I’ll ask her to peel cucumbers for the salad or slice the carrots. We put music on, we talk about our day. It’s become one of the best parts of the house.

The kids are proud of the cookies in a way that surprises me. They are really proud of what we built and seeing our products on shelf. They’ve had real influence over the recipes from the beginning. We have a pumpkin cookie in our holiday line that I went through a thousand renditions of — they hated every version at first, and now it’s their favorite. There’s still flour everywhere. We still do a lot of R&D together.

What does dinner actually look like at your house on an average weeknight?

Chaos. We’re an active household — sports, soccer practices, the works. So I cook a lot of quick meals built around protein and vegetables. My kids have been good eaters since day one, which I know is a gift.

The standard go-to: grilled chicken over rice with steamed broccoli, teriyaki or sweet chili sauce on top. Rice bowls. We eat that two or three nights a week because it’s easy and everyone’s happy. Charlie is learning how to grill, so sometimes that turns into a steak night.

Six out of seven nights, we eat dinner together. It’s probably my favorite part of the day.

You’re a former labor and delivery nurse. Tell us about Charlie’s Kawasaki disease diagnosis and what that journey was like.

This is a loaded question. A lot of mixed feelings, because his road to a diagnosis was not straightforward.

A quick primer: Kawasaki disease is an inflammatory heart condition in kids. Symptoms include a high fever for 7 to 10 days, bloodshot eyes with no drainage, a “strawberry tongue” where the blood vessels rupture, swollen and peeling hands and feet, and sometimes a full-body rash. You don’t have to have all of them. In severe cases it can cause aneurysms and lasting damage to the heart.

Charlie was five. He got sick on Halloween night of 2019, in the middle of kindergarten. The fever spiked overnight to a scary high. The next day he was barely moving. I was a nurse, but my background was OB — I’d delivered babies. I had read about Kawasaki maybe once or twice in school. It wasn’t on my radar.

We took him to the doctor. They said it was probably a virus. By the next visit, his hands were swollen and peeling. The doctor mentioned Kawasaki — but Charlie had tested positive for two other viruses, so they decided that was the explanation. By Friday he was so dehydrated we had to take him to the ER. They gave him fluids and sent us home.

Then it was Thanksgiving, and we drove to New Mexico to be with my family. He didn’t have a fever anymore but he wasn’t himself. Pale. Sleeping constantly. While we were there, my daughter got an ear infection. I called my high-school friend, who’s the local pediatrician, to fit her in. He asked if anyone else in the house was sick. I described Charlie’s whole story. He said, “Has anyone talked to you about Kawasaki disease? Nine times out of ten when I’ve seen this, that virus can actually trigger it. The worst thing that happens if you go get an echocardiogram is they tell you his heart is normal.”

If he hadn’t said that to me, I don’t know that I would have followed up. I would have just thought he was bouncing back slowly.

We scheduled the echo for the Monday we got home. This is where being a nurse came in — I’ve been in enough ultrasounds to know that when something’s wrong, it starts taking too long. We were 45 minutes in. An hour. Charlie was being a trooper.

Charlie had significant dilation in multiple coronary arteries. Three of his four heart valves were leaking. His left ventricle wasn’t working the way it should. The doctor — who happened to be the Kawasaki specialist — looked at me and said, “No wonder he doesn’t feel good.” We were inside the 30-day window, which meant they could still treat him with IVIG to try to stop the inflammation.

He was admitted that day. Two days of IVIG, which has hard side effects — he ended up back in the hospital with aseptic meningitis afterward. Then years of at-home treatments to support his heart healing.

I have this core memory from when I was 20 weeks pregnant with him, the doctor pointed at the ultrasound and said, “Look at this textbook picture of a heart.” That moment kept coming back to me. His heart was so perfect once and it changed in an instant.

Baking with you became a huge part of his recovery. What was it about that time together?

Charlie was on so many medications he couldn’t go anywhere. I would have taken him to Disneyland the same day if he’d asked. But he just wanted to make cookies with me. Every time.

The name actually came from one of those days. We’d baked easily a hundred cookies. My husband walked in, looked at the counter, and said, “There’s nothing better than a mommy’s love and a really good cookie.” I went, “Love & Cookies.”

Love & Cookies was born.

What’s your advice for parents going through their own hard season — a diagnosis, a loss, a long stretch of uncertainty?

Two things.

First, find your people. Find a support group, find others going through it, lean on the village. Especially if you have other kids. I had two other children to keep parenting through this, and I needed people around me who could help carry that.

Second, give yourself permission to let other things go. The house being a mess didn’t matter. The laundry not being done didn’t matter. I had to consciously say: this is the priority. Everything else can wait.

When did baking with Charlie shift from this is helping us heal to this could be a real business?

It was gradual. We were coming up with crazy flavors together, learning what worked and what didn’t. A friend asked if I’d bring some to a team party. Then someone asked to buy them. I said, “I’ll just make them for you.” She said, “No, no — I want to pay you.”

That started a ripple. Charlie and I did it for fun — little bakery boxes, him as delivery boy. A tiny home-kitchen operation.

Then COVID hit. I assumed people would stop wanting cookies but the opposite happened. The home business exploded so fast that within nine months I’d broken six KitchenAid mixers. I had a 20-quart commercial mixer on my kitchen counter and flour on every surface. My husband finally said, “This isn’t working anymore.”

We found a 900-square-foot space in our community where I could bake. That was the turning point. People kept asking if we’d sell the cookie dough. So we did.

I’ll add this: our retail partners really care about clean ingredients — Sprouts, Thrive Market, Misfits, H-E-B, Wegmans. They’re known for being picky about quality. That says something about the product itself.

Every Love & Cookies flavor is named after someone in your life. How do you decide who?

It’s special to have a cookie named after you. I mean, it’s fun. Our chocolate chip cookie is the Charlie Cass — Charlie’s full name. We call it the OG, the cookie that started it all.

Other flavors are named after my other kids. My husband’s name is Cash, so when you put our names together, you get Cashly — and yes, we have a Cashly cookie. From there, it grew to family and close friends, mostly people who really showed up for us when Charlie was sick. The village I keep talking about. They were so excited.

You use pasture-raised eggs, European butter, unbleached flour, no preservatives. How do you think about clean ingredients without making parents feel like every snack is a moral test?

Our product is still very much a cookie. But I’m confident in what’s in it.

Unbleached flour, so no chemicals. 100% real butter — because butter can come with additives and partially hydrogenated oils, and you don’t want those. Clean, simple chocolate. Pure cane organic sugar. Real eggs, real vanilla. Nothing artificial, no added preservatives or food dyes

The whole idea is: if you’re going to bake cookies with your family, these are the ingredients you’d reach for anyway. It’s still a cookie. It’s still a moment of joy. With a busier life — and I’m feeling that more as my kids get older — I can’t always do it from scratch the way I want to. I love that I can pull these out of the freezer, that Charlie can bake them himself.

Life is balance. If you’re going to have a sweet, it might as well be a good one.

Baking with kids sounds magical. It also looks like flour everywhere and raw egg on the floor. What’s the reality?

One of the actual benefits of frozen cookie dough is that you skip the mess — but the mess has its own value too.

I’ll be real: when they were little, of course there were times I was frustrated. “Why is there flour on top of my head? Did you really have to drop that egg again?” I’m a human. I have a big personality. So yes, there were those moments.

But at the end of the day, we ended up with a really good product and a really good time. Everyone got something out of it.

Love & Cookies partners with the Kawasaki Kids Foundation and sends cookies to newly diagnosed families through your backpack program. What does it feel like to be on the giving side now?

I was raised in a very giving family. My parents put their time and energy into others, and that shaped me. So when we started this, I knew if it became a real business, it should also be for a good cause.

The most powerful piece is awareness. Charlie’s story is on the back of every bag. People Google Kawasaki disease because of it. I get a handful of emails every year — I’m not exaggerating — from people who say, “I read your story, I bought your product, and six months later my child or grandchild was diagnosed. We knew what to look out for and ask for because of you.”

That is why we do this. It doesn’t matter how many cookies we sell. If we can help save a kid’s heart, that’s the whole thing.

We’re so lucky Charlie is doing well. Not every family is. We want to support the ones who aren’t.

Charlie is thriving now. He’s been described as the family jokester. What does he make of his story being on the back of every cookie bag?

He’s actually my most introverted of the three. He gets excited in small groups but goes shy in public. He thinks the bag is cool. He likes being able to share his story. When the brand first launched and he was little, he asked, “Mom, am I famous?” I told him, yeah, buddy. You’re famous.

One cooking skill or technique you think every home cook should know?

Butter. I cook with a lot of butter. I don’t use a ton of oils, or beef tallow. There are so many clean options for greasing and substituting, and butter actually makes food taste better. That’s the one. Use real butter. Skip the spray pans and the nonstick stuff. Keep your food as clean and good as you can.

Follow Ashley and Love & Cookies on Instagram @getloveandcookies and on TikTok

& Don’t forget to follow us on IG @onepotatobox ❤️

The Camp That Teaches What Schools Stopped Teaching

At One Potato, we look forward to a handful of events every year, and the #LifeSkillsNow registration kickoff is one of them. We’ve recommended Katie Kimball (read our interview with Katie here!) and Kids Cook Real Food for years, and the summer camp she and her team build under the Raising Healthy Families umbrella keeps getting better — bigger, broader, and more aligned with what our readers tell us they actually need at home.

Season 5 opens for camp week on June 8, with registration free and open right now. If you’ve never done it, the short version is: 100+ short video workshops taught by over 70 experts, organized into tracks like Finance, Cooking, Gardening, Hands-On, Tech Savvy, Health & Wellness, Etiquette, Leadership, and Neurodivergent Families. Every workshop ends with an off-screen “mission” — a small, real-world challenge that turns the lesson into something the kid actually does.

I Want This for My Kids!

Why We Love #LifeSkillsNow — and Why Season 5 Might Be the Best One Yet

Katie started Kids Cook Real Food because she watched her own kids gain confidence at the cutting board and noticed how that confidence quietly leaked into everything else — homework, chores, conversations with adults. Parents in her courses kept asking for more: what about money? What about laundry? What about helping their kids handle hard conversations? #LifeSkillsNow grew out of those questions, and five years in, more than 85,000 families have come through the doors.

Season 5 is built around the gaps schools keep widening. There’s a full Finance track that walks kids through compound interest, credit, the real cost of driving, and the math behind a first home. A new Leadership track includes how to build a personal “life map” and a be-brave workshop. The Neurodivergent Families track our readers ask about every year is back, with sessions on executive function, sensory smarts, anxiety, and getting unstuck. There’s a brand-new gardening series — vegetable and flower — that runs across multiple workshops.

For parents who hesitate at the words “virtual camp” (we get it — we do, too), the off-screen design is the whole point. After each workshop, kids close the screen and complete a hands-on mission. A workshop on gardening sends them outside to plant something. A workshop on car care sends them to the driveway to check the oil. A workshop on writing letters has them mailing one to a grandparent. The screen exists to teach the skill, then the family closes it and goes to use it.

Keep it specific to One Potato and kids in the kitchen: The Cooking for Everyone track has homemade Japanese onigiri, allergy-friendly blueberry oat cake, and Veggie-Loaded Double Chocolate Muffins from Levi Jensen and his daughter (who steals every scene). The Teens Cook track has burgers and fries with whole wheat buns made from scratch.

Tell Me More!

The full camp is free for the week of June 8, and registering now opens up 15 early-access workshops you can start this weekend. If you find that your family loves the format, the team also offers year-round #LifeSkillsNow mini-series packages — themed bundles of the most-requested workshops, available for a one-time cost with no subscription. Whether your kids walk away knowing how to balance a checkbook, plant a tomato, write a thank-you note, or unclog a drain, they’ll have skills that schools don’t usually have time for and YouTube doesn’t usually frame this well.

👉 Get Your Free #LifeSkillsNow Season 5 Pass

Here’s to a summer of small skills that add up — one tourniquet, one tomato plant, one tied tie at a time.

You can learn more about Katie and Raising Healthy Families on the website, and follow her over on Instagram @raisinghealthyfamilies

& Don’t forget to follow US on IG @onepotatobox ❤️

Note: This newsletter contains affiliate links for Raising Healthy Families and #LifeSkillsNow Season 5. We’ve been recommending Kids Cook Real Food for years, and we believe in the mission at #LifeSkillsNow so much that we’d be sharing the camp every spring whether the affiliate relationship existed or not!!

🥔 One Potato is a reader-supported newsletter — Subscribe to receive our Order Up! interviews and our Food People, Parent Picks series weekly.

Subscribe now

Earlier this week, we talked to Jessica Lawson — the home cook, recipe developer, and Chicago mom behind Big Delicious Life — about how she stopped being a short-order cook for her almost-two-year-old, why she focuses on the week instead of the day, and the strange permission of starting a food blog in the early months of the pandemic. If you haven’t read it yet, you definitely should!

Today, we’re getting practical. From the three pantry staples she refuses to run out of, to the toddler snacks her daughter actually eats, to the kitchen appliance she swears every house should have — Jessica shares the stuff she really uses on a Tuesday night when everyone’s tired.

The three pantry staples you refuse to run out of?

Butter, cheese, and beans. Why would you ever run out of butter or cheese? And we have probably twenty cans of five different kinds of beans in the pantry at any given time. There’s no reason to ever run out.

Beyond Kerrygold, what do you mostly buy at Costco?

Black beans (sorry to keep coming back to beans). And flour — King Arthur is a much better deal at Costco than anywhere else, especially if you bake even a little. My nieces come over and tear up my kitchen for their baking experiments because I have all the equipment and all the sprinkles.

Berries, too. If you have a toddler, you know — the berry budget is real. We hit Costco just for the berries.

The cobalt blue Le Creuset — what’s your favorite meal to make in it?

Cast iron is what I reach for most. I love an enameled cast iron frittata — pretty enough to bring to the table, and it goes from stovetop to oven without a second thought. That’s the bar. There’s no point in owning a pan that can’t do both.

Invest in your kitchen. You’ll thank yourself. It’s like sleeping on a good mattress.

Weeknight dinner you can throw together on autopilot?

Beans and greens, every time. Or anything Mexican-inspired — tacos or quesadillas. I love Siete Foods. I always keep their tortilla chips, salsas, and seasoning packets in the house, plus beans and a stocked freezer. At any given time, with no grocery run, we can put together some kind of Mexican-inspired meal.

You’ve talked about being a baked-oats-for-breakfast person. Current go-to version — and does Leni eat it?

We’re in a banana bread baked oats phase. Bananas in our house live a precarious existence — they’re either being inhaled or going black on the counter. Banana bread baked oats are the answer when they’re on their way out.

Leni thinks it’s a muffin. It’s a complete breakfast. We’re calling it a win.

One marinade, rub, or sauce that makes everything taste better?

Chimichurri. If you go a little overboard at the farmers market on herbs, or you grow them and don’t know what to do with the abundance, throw them in a mini food processor with acid, olive oil, salt, pepper, and a little garlic.

It’s perfect on vegetables, on any kind of meat, on roasted anything. Keep some in the fridge and you’ll elevate every simple meal that week.

A healthy-ish snack Leni is into right now — store-bought, homemade, or combo?

Honestly, mostly store-bought. We’ve got to take our break somewhere. She goes through pouches like crazy — a few Cerebelly flavors are still in rotation from her baby days. We love Once Upon a Farm tractor wheels and Yumi bars. Those are our go-to bags-in-the-stroller snacks.

At home, it’s berries — see Costco above. Or a baked oat from the weekend, which she calls her “special muffin” and asks for by name. She’s also weirdly into hard-boiled eggs right now, which is a great snack to be weirdly into.

Joy of Cooking is your most-loved cookbook. Any newer cookbook or recipe creator you’re vibing with?

I’m old-school — I read New York Times Cooking almost every day, and I subscribe to America’s Test Kitchen.

For creators, I love bloggers who actually teach you how to cook. Marta at Sense & Edibility is one I keep going back to. She’s a chef, her recipes are Puerto Rican and Caribbean, and her writing is so detailed — she’ll explain why a flavor combination works or why a method matters. Eden Grinshpan is another one who teaches like that. Both worth following if you want to learn while you cook.

One kitchen purchase, big or small, that genuinely made things easier after becoming a mom?

An air fryer oven. We use it every day. Toast, leftovers, frozen Little Spoon meatballs, the occasional chicken nuggets. It heats up in seconds, you can walk away from it, you don’t have to fire up the whole oven for one thing.

With a family of three (two and a half, really, if you count the toddler), it’s the one appliance that earns its counter space every single day.

A sneaky one most people don’t have but should?

An immersion blender. I don’t have the kitchen real estate to keep my big blender out, and the idea of dragging it out of the cabinet means most of the time, I’m not actually making the smoothie.

Immersion blender — sauces, smoothies, pureeing soup right in the pot — it’ll change your life. A lot of them come with a tall skinny cup. You plunge it right in, and you’ve got a smoothie.

A favorite dessert or sweet treat?

Anything chocolate and peanut butter. But honestly, ice cream. Give me ice cream and cookies, and ideally both at the same time. If anyone ever asks me what I want for dessert, the answer is ice cream with cookies in it.

Note: This newsletter may contain affiliate links from our friends & sponsors.

🥔 One Potato is a reader-supported newsletter - Subscribe for weekly Order Up! interviews delivered to your inbox!

Subscribe now

Jessica Lawson on letting dinner be ritual instead of performance

Jessica Lawson is the home cook and founder behind Big Delicious Life, (@bigdeliciouslife on Instagram), a recipe developer, a blogger — and also a landlord, a part-time nonprofit director, a consultant, and a mom to an almost-two-year-old who, on any given day, may or may not be a vegetarian.

She describes her own brain as a browser with seventy-five tabs open. The kitchen, she says, is the only place that quiets it down. At the stove, her attention narrows to one thing at a time — what she’s smelling, touching, hearing, tasting.

Our conversation moved through how she stopped being a short-order cook for a picky toddler, why dinner has become more about ritual than nutrition in her house, the case for ingredient prep over meal prep, the strange permission of the early pandemic, what it really felt like to turn the thing she loved into something that pays the bills, and why she’s not too worried about AI coming for food blogs (”AI will never be able to taste anything”).

When we talk to food people who are parents, we learn valuable lessons: that even when food is your whole life, feeding your kid still humbles you. Jessica isn’t pretending she’s solved it. She’s just figured out the meal doesn’t have to be perfect. The point is that everyone sat down together. The rest, as her pediatrician keeps reminding her, you can balance out by Friday.

A Conversation with Jessica Lawson, Big Delicious Life

Introduce Yourself: I'm Jessica Lawson. I'm a home cook, a blogger, and a recipe developer. I live in Chicago with my husband, Matt, and my daughter, Leni — she’ll be two next month.

We also have our 100-pound Cane Corso, Mika. My background is actually in education and nonprofit management, but I've cooked my whole life.

Your grandmother didn’t cook from recipes. What did you absorb from watching her?

She was completely intuitive. I don’t ever remember her staring at a recipe or measuring anything. She’d say, “Cook it until it looks like this. Until it feels like this. Until it smells like this.”

That’s part of why I gravitated to cooking. My mind is always going — recipe development is one of about 8,000 things I do at once. I’m a landlord, a mom, I still run my nonprofit in the Dominican Republic part-time, I do consulting on the side. But when I’m cooking, it’s the only time I use all my senses on one thing. I don’t turn on the TV. Maybe a little music. I’m looking, touching, smelling, tasting, listening. Is it sizzling? It’s the only activity where my mind actually slows down.

Your grandmother’s pound cake shows up at every family gathering. Is there a dish like that you imagine becoming an anchor for Leni?

I don’t know if I have one yet — she’s almost two, and her preferences change daily. But we make a lot of soup, and beans show up constantly. Leni might actually be a vegetarian, weirdly. She loves beans, my husband loves beans, and so do I.

There’s a beans and greens recipe on my blog that’s almost embarrassingly simple — garlic, chicken broth, beans, charred greens. I make it at least once a week, sometimes more. Nobody gets sick of it.

When Leni’s old enough, what are you most looking forward to teaching her in the kitchen?

Mostly just having her in the kitchen with me. We have one of the little toddler kitchen towers for her to stand on, and Leni asks questions while I cook. When I involve her in the process, she’s more open to trying things.

Picky eating has been hard, but I’m not giving up. I keep putting everything on her plate. I’m trying to live by this rule — I can’t remember who said it — that our job isn’t to make them eat. It’s to provide what and when, and they decide if and how much. Easier said than done. Toddlers are very strong-willed tiny people.

What does dinner actually look like in your house? What surprised you about feeding a toddler alongside two adults?

I try not to be a short-order cook. We might save the ribeyes for Friday after she’s in bed, but in general I’m making one meal. If something’s spicy, I’ll just take a few of the same components, prepared a little differently, so she has a version of what we’re eating. She’s also more likely to try something if she sees us all eating it together. If all she eats is bread, fine. Dinner is more about ritual — being together. She can leave it on the plate. The point is sitting down together.

So you’re looking at nutrition more holistically?

My pediatrician always tells me: focus on the week, not the day. I try to make sure breakfast and lunch are solid. Lunch is when she’s most hungry and there are other kids around — she goes to school three days a week, and they serve a kind of farm-to-table organic lunch. She eats 90 percent of it. If I served the same thing at home, it would end up on the floor. Peer pressure works.

Why do you think kids eat differently away from home?

At home, they know the fridge exists. They know there’s applesauce in there. They know there’s cheese. They can see the bread on the counter. And they do not give up. So you pick your battles.

At school, the food is the food, and that’s it until they get home. Just keep putting the plate down. Sometimes she eats it. Sometimes she doesn’t.

Was Leni always into beans, or did you build that habit? Any advice for parents trying to bring legumes into rotation?

I love beans. They’re versatile, affordable, filling, pantry-friendly, and there are so many kinds. You can turn them into a salad, a soup, a burrito, a dip — pretty much anything. Just keep offering them.

And don’t set the narrative out loud that “she doesn’t eat this.” Leni is extremely smart. If I say she doesn’t eat green vegetables, she’s going to agree with me.

Your philosophy is “healthy-ish — no restrictions.” What does that look like in practice, and what do you hope Leni absorbs?

Mostly, I focus on whole foods and fresh ingredients. But if it’s a meal salad with a little fried chicken and some cheese, that’s fine — there are still more vegetables in there than in a burger and fries. And the burger and fries is fine sometimes too.

Eat to feel good. Usually, when you feel good, you look good.

You’re known for “sneaky vegetables.” What’s a recent win — and what hasn’t worked?

I’m rethinking “sneaky” actually. A chef friend told me once, “People who don’t like vegetables have never had them prepared correctly,” and that stuck with me. So less about disguising vegetables, more about putting them everywhere — in pasta, in salads, in soups — and finding ways to make them actually taste good.

Would I have eaten broccoli as a kid if it hadn’t been drowned in cheddar cheese sauce? Probably not. So if that’s how we’re doing it, that’s how we’re doing it. Nobody likes extremes. Nobody actually wants to eat only salad and smoothies for a week. It’s not sustainable, and it’s not enjoyable.

You say most of your recipes have readers shopping the perimeter of the grocery store. For a parent overwhelmed by that idea, what’s a realistic first step?

Ingredient prep — not meal prep. I take an evening or two a week to prep components. Things I can mix and match. Get a rotisserie chicken, throw it over a salad one night, make tacos the next.

This is what I told my sister, who just had a baby — if you’re making soup and you buy a bag of carrots, celery, and onions but only need a couple of each, chop the entire bag, sauté a big batch with a little broth, and freeze it. Next time you want soup, drop it in the pot, add stuff. Done.

And learn to store your produce when you get home from the store. Slice the cucumbers. Prep the celery and carrots. So when you want vegetables on a Tuesday night, you’re not chopping eight thousand things.

Make a batch of salad dressing too. A mini food processor, oil, vinegar, herbs, mustard. Better than store-bought, cheaper, lasts a week or two. You’ll never go back.

Big Delicious wasn’t supposed to be a career. What’s been the hardest part of turning what you love into something that pays the bills, and what have you wanted to protect?

I’m a queen of the pivot. Before this, I co-founded Mariposa, a nonprofit in the Dominican Republic, then came back to Chicago and spent five years at the local PBS station doing engagement work. By the end of 2019 I was burnt out, looking at having to job hunt in 2020 — and then the pandemic hit. Everyone started cooking, friends kept calling for recipes, and one night I drank an entire bottle of wine and decided I’d start posting my dinners on Instagram. That was Big Delicious. I didn’t make money for over a year.

There’s a misconception that food blogging is a hobby — a cute thing housewives do on the side. It’s absolutely not. Most people who try this never get to the point of monetizing.

Technology is always shifting. What was right last year is wrong this year. I started obsessing over photography. Then reels happened, and suddenly you needed to be on camera. Advertising changed. Now everyone’s buying everything on Instagram, there are influencers everywhere, and you don’t know who to trust. So you really have to be authentic.

Knowing what to say yes to and what to say no to was a hard lesson. The first time you get a paid offer, your instinct is yes. But — would I actually buy this product? Would I use it? It’s okay to say no to money. I learned that one the hard way.

And the bigger you get, the bigger the job gets — SEO, audience growth, email marketing, recipe testing. It’s too much for one person. The big bloggers aren’t really bloggers anymore; they’re employers. They have teams.

What I want to protect is recipes that actually work, and being honest with people. Everyone’s panicking about AI right now — AI recipes, AI scraping content. But here’s the thing: AI will never be able to taste anything. Everything is going to change. The one thing that’s been consistent since humans walked the earth is that we eat food, and we generally eat it together. That’s not changing.

Has anything from being on America’s Test Kitchen: The Next Generation carried into your weeknight cooking?

Reality TV is a lot. I’ve never felt that much pressure. We were filming during COVID — isolated in a hotel, away from family, with the lights and cameras right in your face. The challenges are real. You have a minute to decide what to make.

But being on the show, you learn how much you actually know and you learn to trust yourself. Cooking is a lot more forgiving than baking. I bake — but you won’t find layer cakes on my blog, because baking is scientific, and those people are real technicians. With cooking, if you have a general sense of what flavors go together and roughly how much of what, you’ll be fine. If you can read, you can cook.

What’s something about feeding a family you wish someone had told you before you became a parent?

How hard it is. My mom stayed home, cooked every night, packed every lunch, made breakfast every morning. My sister and I never understood why she made it sound like such a big deal. Now I get it. Deciding what everyone in your house is going to eat every day, for eternity, is a lot.

I love cooking for my family, but even I get burnt out. It’s not always glamorous. I don’t pull together beautiful meals every night for a husband and a kid who eat everything I make. That’s not how it goes here either. So letting go of some of the pressure, finding small ways to make it easier on yourself — that’s most of it.

What’s one cooking skill you use all the time that home cooks should practice?

Eggs. Knowing how to make eggs perfectly, in at least one way. They’re nutritious. You almost always have them. Most kids will eat them. Learn to scramble them well. Hard-boil them well. Make an omelet, a quiche, a frittata.

A frittata saves us at least one night a week — usually Thursday, when there are some sad vegetables in the fridge and everyone’s done with the week. Breakfast for dinner, all the food groups, a little fun. Friday or Saturday is takeout or a restaurant, and Sunday we’re back to meal planning.

Follow Jessica on Instagram @BigDeliciousLife

& Don’t forget to follow us on IG @onepotatobox ❤️

Small Bites: #LifeSkillsNow Season 5 Registration is Now OPEN!

🧁 This Mother’s Day Bonus Activity sends kids into the kitchen to bake muffins for Mom and everyone else who mothers them — a small, doable taste of what it feels like to cook for someone on purpose. If yours catches the bug, Katie Kimball's #LifeSkillsNow Season 5 camp is the natural next step. Camp opens June 8, registration is free, and one of the 15 early-access workshops you get the day you sign up is Veggie-Loaded Double Chocolate Muffins with Levi Jensen and his daughter — basically next weekend's project, ready to go. 👉 Learn More & Register here

Check out last year’s Mother’s Day Breakfast Nachos 2 Ways, with recipes for kid-friendly single-serving microwave directions for the littlest ones to cook up a storm on their own, and a family-size sheet-pan recipe for older kids.

You can find all of our BONUS Educational Cooking Activities & Holiday Recipes right here!

Mother’s Day usually shows up the same way every year — brunch reservations, a card, maybe pancakes if someone’s feeling motivated. This year, we wanted to put something more hands-on in front of kids: one batch of muffins, a few small bundles to deliver, and the chance to thank a few of the people who help take care of them — Mom, of course, and also grandmas, aunts, stepmoms, dads, the friend whose kitchen your kid raids for snacks.

This is a layer-on activity. The recipe is forgiving on its own — chocolate or apple muffins, whichever your family is in the mood for. What turns it into a lab is what happens around the bowl: measuring full vs. half cups, watching wet ingredients meet dry, comparing batter before and after stirring, counting muffins out into bundles. Kids practice real cooking math (fractions, ratios, sequencing) and real cooking observation (smell, texture, color).

It doesn’t need to be polished. A few muffins on a paper plate with a kid-scribbled note is plenty. The point is the doing, and the small, specific act of sending a kid out into the world (or into the next room) with something they made on purpose for someone they love.

💐 Mother’s Day Bake & Share Muffin Lab

Click the button below for a downloadable PDF worksheet for the Mother’s Day Muffin Baking & Learning Activity, and read on to set up the activity:

Mother's Day Bake & Share Lab Worksheet

Pick one muffin recipe (whichever your family is in the mood for):

• Chocolate Muffins — cocoa, chocolate chips, the easy yes for chocolate kids.

• Apple Applesauce Muffins — honey-sweetened, applesauce + diced apple, lighter and a little less sweet.

Tools & Ingredients You’ll Need:

• Muffin tin + paper liners

• Measuring cups and spoons

• Mixing bowl + whisk or wooden spoon

• Small paper bags, parchment squares, or a few small plates (for the bundles)

• Paper + crayons or markers (for notes)

Learning Goals

When kids bake to give, two small things happen at once:

• They get a real, hands-on experience with measuring, sequencing, and watching batter become bread — sensory cooking that scales to any age.

• They make a tangible decision about who matters to them and why. Putting three muffins in a paper bag for grandma feels different than putting three muffins in a paper bag for the neighbor who picks up the mail.

It’s flexible. Younger kids can scoop and stir. Older kids can plan the whole delivery: count the muffins, write the notes, decide the route. And the recipe is forgiving enough that the activity doesn’t fall apart if a measurement is a little off or a kid sneaks a chocolate chip.

Age Modifications

Younger Kids (Preschool–K):

• Pour pre-measured ingredients into the bowl

• Stir the batter with a wooden spoon

• Place liners in the muffin tin

• Decorate the paper bags with stickers or scribbles

• Be the official taste-tester (can you count the number of chocolate chips allowed?)

Middle Grade (Elementary):

• Read the recipe out loud and call out the next step

• Measure dry and wet ingredients with a parent nearby

• Scoop batter into the muffin tin (about 2/3 full)

• Write a sentence on each note (“Thanks for picking me up from school”)

• Help count out the bundles and label the bags

Older Kids (Upper Elementary–Middle):

• Run the recipe top to bottom with light supervision

• Plan the delivery — addresses, route, who gets how many

• Double the recipe if the list is longer than the original batch

• Try one substitution (oat milk for buttermilk in the apple version, dark chocolate chunks instead of chips in the chocolate version) and notice what changes

Parent Notes

A few real-life things. The list of people you share with can be very small. One muffin in a napkin handed to a stepdad at the kitchen table is the activity. You don’t need a delivery route. You don’t need cute liners. You don’t need to make a card if your kid doesn’t want to.

If your kid pushes back on the “people who care for you” prompt — or if the question itself opens up something hard about a parent who isn’t around — let it be quiet. Cooking together is enough on its own. The naming part is optional.

If you only do one thing: ask one question while you’re measuring. Who’s someone who’s been kind to you lately? That’s enough to make this meaningful.

Activity Flow

1. Pick the people. Before you start baking, sit with your kid for a couple of minutes. Ask:

   Who are the people who help take care of you? Who shows up?

   Write the names down on the worksheet. There’s no right number — three is plenty. Five is also fine.

2. Set up the kitchen together. Lay out the ingredients and tools. Let your kid pick which muffin recipe — chocolate or apple. Read the ingredient list together and look for what you already have. Ask:

   What’s something you’ve never measured before?

3. Measure with intention. Let kids handle measuring as much as possible. Talk about full vs. half cups, level vs. heaping scoops, why we sift cocoa powder, why we don’t overmix. Slow it down on purpose.

4. Mix and watch. Pause before and after stirring. Ask:

   What changed? Can you still see the separate ingredients? What does the batter smell like?

5. Bake. Use the wait time to plan the bundles. How many muffins per person? Will you draw a card or write a note? What do you want it to say?

   For little kids, thank you is enough. For older kids, ask them to name one specific thing the person does.

6. Cool, divide, deliver. Once the muffins are out of the oven and cool enough to handle, split them into the bundles you planned. Add the notes.

   Deliver in person if you can, leave on a doorstep if you can’t. A photo text to a far-away grandma counts.

Happy Mother’s Day from all of us at One Potato! 🌻