🥔 Food People, Parent Picks: Jessica's Favorite Things
The Big Delicious Life recipe developer on the pantry staples, baby pouches, and one small appliance that keeps a Chicago weeknight moving.
Food People, Parent Picks: we ask our favorite chefs, food writers, and industry insiders who we interview in our Order Up! Series to share the products, books, and bites they can’t live without.
🥔 One Potato is a reader-supported newsletter — Subscribe to receive our Order Up! interviews and our Food People, Parent Picks series weekly.
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.