But most of the time, it’s really an expression of happiness, and family and togetherness. Sometimes cooking’s a solitary pleasure-pasta night by yourself when everybody else has plans. And for this book, I wanted it to be more personal, as a way of differentiating it from the first book. The first book was very focused on technique and the basic cooking foundations that have served me well. It was both planned and amplified by the wacky year. Was that always part of the plan or due to the unusual circumstances of 2020? Your family’s a big part of the book (your son Cosmo even contributes some writing). And during the pandemic, some stuff just wasn’t available so you had to kind of be flexible. So I really want to give people freedom to not worry about that. I think that beginner cooks get really freaked out if they’re missing one ingredient, and think not having it is going to ruin the dish, or substituting something else might not work. For beginner cooks, it is a way of saying, if you don’t have something, or you have a variation on something, go forward with the recipe. Yeah, I think that’s all summed up in the “Spin It” sections of the book, which was part of my first book too, and really came out of recognizing that I don’t make recipes the same way twice. One of the things I appreciate about “That Sounds So Good” is that it’s aimed at both amatuer and more experienced cooks, and tries to bridge the divide. I was really cooking so much and very aware of how long meals take to prepare, clean up, the ease of acquiring ingredients-it was just a very good way to get into a hardcore home-cook mindset. Cooking all those meals at home made the book so much better because I wasn’t in test kitchen mode and I wasn’t in just being creative for creative’s sake mode. A benefit was that I had sketched out the table of contents before everything happened, so I kind of had a roadmap and I knew what I wanted to work on. We did eat a lot of the recipes that I worked on for development for dinner. The kitchen was also a place where there were three meals a day needing to be made. So I was at home and able to focus and have very few other distractions, except for the fact that everyone who I live with was home all day. I had like six weeks of that, and then we were in quarantine. The dream for the second book was like, I was going to be working from home, I was going to have this flexible schedule, I was going to be able to really focus on the recipe development and the writing. I wrote my first book (“Where Cooking Begins,” published in 2019) when I still had a full time job. Was it difficult to put this book together during the pandemic? Lalli Music, a former editor at Bon Appétit and host of their popular web show “Back to Back Chef” (and current host of shows via Patreon and Instagram Live), spoke to Brownstoner about the ways cooking has changed during the pandemic, being inspired by the community around her, and why hosts should relax when entertaining. It all started with that feeling.”Īimed at both the beginner home chef and the more experienced kitchen dwellers, complete with alternate ingredient lists and encouragement to improvise, “That Sounds So Good” is brimming with energy and fresh ideas. “That’s obviously where my love of food came from and why I cook. “But it really came out of realizing that the most valuable and rewarding part of helping people cook is what it does in their lives,” she adds. The title comes from a phrase repeated by her father, the journalist and author Frank Lilli, when he approves of something they are planning for a family meal. That special feeling can be felt in Lalli Music’s new cookbook, “That Sounds So Good,” published by Clarkson Potter, an imprint of Random House. “There was a lot to be grateful for, but this was one of them.” “This was one thing that felt really, really special,” she says. When the pandemic forced her family inside, like so many others, she realized she could not take it for granted. It was something that always nagged at her. Before the pandemic, Lalli Music, her husband, and children would have to squeeze in time for meals between daily activities and responsibilities. “Food is a really important part of our family,” says the Fort Greene chef and cookbook author Carla Lalli Music.
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