iliana regan transcript
Kerry Diamond:
Hi, everyone. You are listening to Radio Cherry Bombe, and I'm your host, Kerry Diamond, coming to you from Rockefeller Center in the heart of New York City. I'm the founder and editor of Cherry Bombe Magazine, and each week, I talk to the most interesting culinary folks around.
Joining me in the studio today is Iliana Regan, chef and owner of The Milkweed Inn in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Some of you might know Iliana from her celebrated Chicago restaurant, Elizabeth. Today, Iliana is earning quite a reputation for her writing. Her 2019 memoir Burn The Place was long listed for a National Book Award, and her follow-up Fieldwork: A Forager's Memoir, was just published. I'm halfway through, and it is unlike any memoir I've ever read. There are paragraphs so beautiful and evocative. They've made me gasp out loud and moved me to tears. Needless to say, I recommend it highly. Iliana joins me to talk about her new book, her Milkweed Inn, and much more, so stay tuned.
Radio Cherry Bombe is on tour. We had a great tour stop at the Graduate Hotel in Chapel Hill, North Carolina earlier this month. Thank you to everyone who joined us. Next up is our stop at the Graduate Hotel in Tucson on Thursday, February 23rd, with Chef Maria Mazon and other special guests. You can snag a ticket on cherrybombe.com or click the link in the show notes. I can't wait to meet the Tucson Bombesquad. I hope you all caught my interview with Chef Maria the other week. If you did not, be sure to give a listen. She is a force. What else? We've got two new podcasts. The first one is called She's My Cherry Pie, and it's hosted by baker, author, and recipe developer, Jessie Sheehan. In each episode, a world-class baker joins Jessie to do a deep dive into their signature baked good. New episodes drop every Saturday. Thank you to Le Creuset and California Prunes for supporting She's My Cherry Pie.
And on Thursday’s, we have The Future Of Food Is You hosted by Abena Anim-Somuah. Abena talks to the new generation of food leaders and influencers, and each conversation is so interesting. At the end of each episode, the guests leave a voicemail for their future selves. Thank you to Kerrygold for supporting The Future Of Food Is You. Listen to both shows on your favorite podcast platform and be sure to subscribe while you're there.
Now, let's check in with today's guest. Iliana Regan, welcome to Radio Cherry Bombe.
Iliana Regan:
Thanks for having me.
Kerry Diamond:
We have known you and loved you for quite some time and had the privilege of eating at both of your restaurants in Chicago. Congratulations on your beautiful book, Fieldwork, you're in town-
Iliana Regan:
Thank you.
Kerry Diamond:
... for some events. Tell us what Fieldwork is all about.
Iliana Regan:
Oh, wow. Burn The Place came out. And right after it came out, he said, "Would you like to do a narrative book on foraging?" And I said, "Absolutely." And I did have a cookbook slated to be next, but I said, "Could I please do the narrative book first," because that's like what I love to do. And as I started writing it, in the beginning I was just thinking of stories just about foraging, and here's where and when I get wild strawberries, and here's morel stuff, but then that was maybe just the very first draft. It started evolving, and I started to lean more into... Instead of essays, again, going back to stories and my family, and so it became another memoir. I started to somewhat layer it because I was like, "This is actually foraging." I'm always outside because now I'm in this place, Milkweed, in the Upper Peninsula where I'm writing it, so I'm in the woods and absorbing all of that.
When I'm writing, I'm just like, "Okay, I'll tell myself to trust your intuition." So then after the second or third draft, I start to look for symbols and themes and I'm like, “Okay, maybe more than being about foraging.” This is foraging for the past, and passions, and trauma, and going through essentially this family tree and how as a family we have all these network connections. And I was like, "Okay, that's like the mycelium, and that's like the constellations, and that's like everything that's part of the natural world. So then I began to braid the stories in a way that I was thinking about DNA and how that's twisting. I was really going at it from this perspective of how do I write these stories that feel like we're foraging, that are taking place in the woods and that are also connected in a way that mushrooms and nature is connected.
Kerry Diamond:
It seems like it's as much emotional foraging as actual foraging.
Iliana Regan:
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that as I was writing it, I was discovering what kind of writer I am with Burn The Place. I had a through line that was about becoming a chef. Sometimes people read it and they said, "This isn't really about being a chef," or, "Doesn't feel like a chef memoir." There was a set of through line that was always revolving around the food. So in this book, there's certainly some through lines that are revolving around the woods, but there is all these, like you said, emotional things going on while I'm writing, thinking about how do I tell this story that's happening now because it's one thing to write a memoir and write about all the things that have happened in the past and recalling those memories and writing them down.
And I don't want to say it's easy, but it's a different kind of writing to talk about your first love, or kiss, or drink, or whatever it is. But in this book, it's mostly talking about this year that I think that the woods and foraging became a vivid memory in my mind, which was around 1984. Also, the current time where I was spending a lot of time writing while I was at Milkweed, so I didn't have as much separation of what the story is because I was living in it as I was writing it. I think that's what took it to a more emotional place because I was like, this is where I'm at now, and I didn't have that perspective of time, so I think that's how that kind of evolved.
Kerry Diamond:
You mentioned that you were supposed to write a cookbook next.
Iliana Regan:
Oh, yeah.
Kerry Diamond:
We're all waiting for that cookbook, but you said you wanted to write this instead. Why?
Iliana Regan:
Yeah. Well, I think I'm always going to avoid wanting to write the cookbook. I've always been an off-the-cuff cook. I think one of the things that was hardest for me in my career, especially in the beginning, opening Elizabeth, is that unless it's a recipe that revolves around baking or something that's very precise, I just make the thing, even if it's something that's, I don't know, modernist I guess, where it has this little hydrocolloid or this thing or that thing or whatever, I'm still pretty off-the-cuff because I also cook with my intuition. If I'm making a butternut squash puree, sometimes the squash might be more starchy or more sweet, sometimes it might be less. It just depends, and so I always rely on my taste if I have to add more of this or that. So I've never really had a lot of documented recipes.
Now I have recipes that say, "Okay, when I'm making this thing, here's what the ingredients and here's roughly the amounts," but for the cookbook, I would have to take the recipes that I do have or the recipes that I'm going to write for it, then take it from grams and put it into cups, tablespoons, ounces or however one does that. There's a lot of conversion going on, and then I was also slated to be the photographer for it. I'm actually working on it now, but I asked my editor, I said, "Can I do a narrative cookbook?" So can I take all the stories and all the recipes that my dad has documented that were at Jenny's Cafe, which was in... I mentioned that restaurant in Burn The Place and it's in here, and I said-
Kerry Diamond:
It's your family's cafe.
Iliana Regan:
Yeah. I said, maybe I can center this book around 1970s, Gary [Indiana], Jenny's cafe, this Slavic restaurant with all the things that were happening at that time, but in each chapter embed the recipe within it as I'm telling the story. He said, "Yeah." So I think that someone who wants to take a highlighter as they're reading it and be able to make pickled pig's feet, or zrazy, or pierogi, or something, they can find it. It'll be like a little treasure map or something.
Kerry Diamond:
I was surprised you followed up Burn The Place with another fairly searing memoir. Tell me about your writing process.
Iliana Regan:
I started this in 2019, so it did take about three years to complete from the absolute start to finish. So I think... Yeah, I mean that's probably pretty quick because I also went to grad school in that time and was running The Milkweed Inn, but I'm a very routine-driven person. Aside from the routines, when I have something that I love that I can escape in, I go for it. So Fieldwork, writing for me was something that I tried to do every day. I'm also the kind of person who with my process is, even if it's crap, just get it out because I know that I'm a rewriter, so I can go back and edit. And usually once I start getting it, even if I'm feeling, "Oh, this isn't coming out," or "I'm not liking it," or "I'm not sure I want to tell this story," it still gets me to a place where maybe there is something to it.
Usually too, if I'm trusting my intuition, I'm like, "Okay, there's something there. There might be a theme or a symbol underneath that where I might be able to use that or discover something." I did write almost every chance I could. There was definitely some time during the pandemic where, originally, I thought, "Wow, I'll finish my book really quick," but then as you know, that was quite traumatic for everybody involved. There were moments where I was like, "I can't write a single thing." I think a part of me didn't want to be writing necessarily about what I was feeling at the time, although I do think a lot of that ended up in the book because I was writing it during there, so I felt like I was walking a fine line between how much of this stuff do I include and how much don't I include because it is really important to where I'm at at the moment, but at the same time, I know that people don't want to read a book about the pandemic.
Kerry Diamond:
Let's talk about the place because you referenced lots of different places. There's the Burn The Place right in the title of your debut memoir. What was that place?
Iliana Regan:
That was Elizabeth Restaurant, that memoir covered. It was not necessarily linear, just about my life and becoming a chef, a whole bunch of other things about addiction, queerness, and family. I opened The Milkweed Inn when I still had Elizabeth, but I knew that I was going to eventually transition out.
Kerry Diamond:
And you had Kitsune at the same time?
Iliana Regan:
I did. Yeah, that closed in 2019, and we also knew for probably a year that we were going to have to close. That was one of the things where I had investors, they were all really great, but we still under-budgeted. The city is so bureaucratic with things. We were delayed in our opening for 10 months, and paying rent the whole time. That was like, "Wow." We lost a lot of money that was supposed to be for cushion and just operating costs, and so by the time we opened, we were already far underwater. We made it work as long as we could, but I was stretched so thin, so that closed in 2019. I had somebody working there with me who really became a ride or die. He helped me close everything down. Then he came over to Elizabeth to be my office manager, which I also really needed at the time because, historically, I've been like the PR, HR, the sales tax person, the whole nine yards, also the chef, and the general manager, and all the things just because I've always had small restaurants.
He came over there and once we had our first small season at Milkweed, when I got back to Elizabeth that fall because we had some chefs come in and do residencies while I was gone because we kind of didn't know how we were going to operate everything together. But I got back and I was like, "Yeah, I definitely don't want to do this anymore," at Elizabeth. I love it, and it's provided me with many opportunities, but I'm certainly done with the management and just the grind of it all. Milkweed, the idea behind that was just to become a little bit more sustainable mentally in regards to the environment, like cooking for 10 people is so much less than what we're doing at Elizabeth. I'm able to forage and grow my own things. So physically, it's still a lot of work.
Kerry Diamond:
Did you sell Elizabeth or did you give it away?
Iliana Regan:
No. So I gave It to Tim [Lacey]. So I said, "Hey, this is what's going to happen. I'm either going to give it to one of you guys, or I'm going to close it just when the lease is up and call like 1-800-GOT-JUNK and chefs in the city and say, ‘Come on in, pick out whatever you want.’” But I said, "It's not worth to go through this sale of this restaurant." I know somebody would want to buy it for the liquor license, but there's so much little details we got to put together, and I was like, "Frankly, in this..." You've seen the space. I was like, "I don't think anybody's going to purchase it for enough that we would need to even make sure we close our accounts at zero." I said, "Do you want it?" And he said, "Let me talk to my wife and I'll get back to you." And yeah, he said, "Yes, let's do this thing."
Kerry Diamond:
It's very rare to have a Michelin-starred chef hand over her Michelin-starred restaurant for free to someone else.
Iliana Regan:
Yeah, but he was the ride or die. He definitely worked for it. So it's easy to say, in a way, that I did sell it to him because he was worth more than I could ever pay him, and we met at Trio way back in the day, 20 years ago. And I know his wife and his child and they're all wonderful people. I was happy to work with him in that capacity, and he still helps me with a lot of things, so I feel it's even fair to say I sold it to him.
Kerry Diamond:
And Elizabeth is still open. Is it a different name now?
Iliana Regan:
Well, yeah. I said, you can keep the name, you can keep the IP [intellectual property], you can do whatever you want with it, and he did. Once he reopened in 2021, then we finally told people because we knew about this in 2019, and then we completed the paperwork in 2020 because when the pandemic hit, I said, "Tim, do you still want it? Because if not, Anna [Hamlin] and I will figure out what to do." And he said, "Well, if I don't take it, I don't know. I'm going to have to find another job. I don't know what my job will be." I was like, "Okay, great." So we completed all the paperwork, but they were doing takeout. We are just like, "Who needs to know this information now?" I was still consulting with the woman who was doing the chef work. Yeah, so once he reopened, then we told everybody and the chef was a guy who we both worked with at Kitsune.
So Tim was like just felt right to keep it Elizabeth because it still felt like it was in the family, but I think after a year and a half of him being open in that way under that name, people still came in and asked for me because nobody's going to get the memo always that, "Oh, it's changed." I think at a certain point he's really felt like, "Okay, I got to make this my own." That chef decided to move on, so he's like, "I'm finding a new chef." This is a perfect time to close it down, remodel. He found a chef from Connecticut named Christian Hunter whose food looks beautiful, and he's got his own style.
Kerry Diamond:
I remember when I heard that you were opening this in a forest and still going to have the restaurant, and I just remember thinking, "How is she going to do that?"
Iliana Regan:
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing.
Kerry Diamond:
Why did you and Anna want to have this inn/restaurant in the woods?
Iliana Regan:
Well, I think that was something... I always wanted to do something intimate like that, and I think that was my initial plan for a long, long time. I think I always pictured it in a farmhouse way, kind of like that farmhouse I talk about that my grandparents had where there's woods but also a farm and things like that, but then it morphed as I was just every couple months would look online at places that were available. I started looking in the North Woods after I had visited a friend in the North Woods and was like, "I really love this forest environment," but the North Woods of Wisconsin, or Minnesota, or even Upper, Lower Michigan, you're still have the proximity of maybe it being 20 or 30 minutes away from a small little town and things like that.
Well, in the Upper Peninsula, things are much more remote and there's a lot more hunting cabins, and I found this one that was beautiful because even though it was a cabin for hunters, they made it like a home. There's a basement, and there's a generator, and they have this septic, and they have the well. And everything was there because a lot of hunting cabins, they might have the propane, but this had everything. You wouldn't even know that you were off the grid. The structure, it was built beautifully. It looked beautiful. It had 150 acres, and it was affordable. That was the most important part. My mom, my dad, and my sister, everybody co-signed with me because I already have a home mortgage in Chicago, so I had some help in that capacity, but they all believed in me. We got it sight unseen, which was crazy.
Kerry Diamond:
So you saw this... You saw a listing somewhere.
Iliana Regan:
Yeah, I saw pictures. Yeah, and well, we had to an inspection-
Kerry Diamond:
You're on Willow or something, Zillow. What is it called? Actually, Willow makes more sense for you, but no, Zillow. You were in Zillow or something?
Iliana Regan:
No, it was called Great Lakes Land & Realty, and it was a lot of particularly hunting cabins and things that were right up there in the Upper Peninsula. The agent, he was so lovely and nice, and he even for our inspection, rode out there with the inspector in a snowcat, which is a tractor that has an enclosed cabin and big like tank treads. We did the whole thing as it's to be done. Everything checked out, and I'm glad we got it sight unseen because we did have a couple appointments to go get it, go see it.
Those fell through because just running the restaurant things came up, but had we seen it, my wife would've said, "No way," because we would've saw that road to get there, and it would've been no. So who knows? We might not even be doing this right now, and I might still be at the restaurant hosting Harry Potter, and Game Of Thrones dinners, and fairytale meals, and doing the thing we always did, which was fun, but I might be banging my head against the wall. I certainly wouldn't have this book, or if I did, it would be very different.
Kerry Diamond:
Iliana is referencing some of the themes of the pre-fixe dinners that she did at Elizabeth.
Iliana Regan:
Yeah. And now that's become part of this experience as I talk about in Fieldwork where we have everybody meet us up at a place in town.
Kerry Diamond:
So yeah, let's explain. Yeah, so it's open from what… May to October? And how many folks can visit per weekend?
Iliana Regan:
Mid-May through the end of October, 10 to 12 guests a weekend. We do 12 in the warmer months because we have two outside tents that have platforms. They're really cute. They're some of my favorite rooms, but we wait till the warm months to do that because when it's chilly, and we have everybody inside, 12 is just a little too much to host inside. But we've made it happen, but still. So yeah, we have 10 to 12 people a weekend. We have a meet-up place, which is about an hour away from us, but again, it's in the closest small town and that actually turns out to be a Michigan Department of Transportation carpool lot. So if they drive a sedan, they can just park there. They carpool with us. If people have a four-wheel drive or an all-wheel drive, they can generally follow us, and we take a little carpool back to the cabin.
And then the same thing on Sunday, we lead everybody out. It's helpful because we can get them there. It's this kind of strange experience, but when we drive up to the lot to meet them on Fridays, we know who our group is because they're kind of standing around and people start to talk to each other because they're like, "You don't look like you're from around here." You know what I mean? So it's easy to find everybody. They see our car, we drive up, it's usually dusty or full of mud, and we're usually looking like-
Kerry Diamond:
Dusty and full of mud.
Iliana Regan:
Yeah, we also get to know them a little bit on the drive there. It becomes a really fun part of the experience.
Kerry Diamond:
Tell us about the weekend. What sort of activities do the folks do?
Iliana Regan:
So they get there generally around 6:00 p.m. after they do the carpool thing, about seven o'clock we do an orientation. Explain to them how things in the house work because being off the grid, it doesn't feel like it, but if you plug in a curling iron, the power might go out. So we give them the rundown on all the things and also say, "Hey, be careful because we are very far in the wilderness and there are wild animals and there are ways to get hurt, and we're like an hour and a half from the hospital and there's definitely no ambulance coming back here." We do the whole caution thing, but then at seven o'clock, we have our Friday night meal, which is generally... It's more casual family style. I cook everything over the open fire and we have a nice fire pit and patio in the back.
We have this fun, beautiful open fire meal. Usually, that night, people come down to the fire and we do s'mores and Anna has a little digestif cart and they all just kind of hang out, get to know each other a little bit. We also say there's no pressure. If you want to be alone, be alone. If you want to hang out, hang out. Then the next morning, I have pastries ready for them. People tend to be early birds, so they usually go take a little hike after that. Then around 11 o'clock, I have a second breakfast ready, which is a savory breakfast, and it's simple. It's like I make homemade tortillas with eggs, and nettles, and potatoes, and things like that, at least that's what the menu has been. I might change it this year. I've been playing around with bagels, so I might do a bagel bar.
Kerry Diamond:
And those are not foraged bagels?
Iliana Regan:
No. We have an ATV [all-terrain vehicle] that they can drive around in. We have archery. We have bocce ball. We have croquet. A lot of people just hang out and read, they go hiking. We have fishing gear. There's a river right down at the base of the hill, so people go fish. They don't usually have much luck, but they go fishing. We have a couple little kayaks. There's usually too many trees in the river to do a successful kayak, but people try.
Kerry Diamond:
Do you take any of the guests foraging?
Iliana Regan:
Not on those weekends, but people do go foraging. We have a foraging books section. I'll show people it and I'll say, "Here's what mushrooms are out now. Here's what they look like. Take this book with you or take pictures of it and see if you can find them. And anything you find, bring back to me and I'll try to help you identify." And it's cute, people bring them back, kind of like cats with mice giving you the little present. Here's what I found. Usually, they're just full of dirt and they throw them in a bag with all this stuff and I'm like, "I don't think I could use those today." But most of the time, they're just odd ones. And I tell people, "I'm not a mycologist, so I can't always identify," but I say, "We can look. See, if we can see them in this book and let's spore prints, and at least we can learn something today."
Kerry Diamond:
What's a spore print?
Iliana Regan:
So that's where you would take, say this tablecloth, which is blue, and you put the mushroom on it and you let it sit for a couple hours and the spores will fall out. You'll be able to see their color. And if you put it on something dark and you can't see the color, then you might want to transfer it to something white because they just fall out, but that helps you identify something. Say, if a mushroom has a lookalike, it might say, "Well, this mushroom, and that looks like this one has mauve spores, and this other one has white ones. And the white one is edible, but the dark one is not."
Kerry Diamond:
Wow.
Iliana Regan:
I don't mess around with that though. I love to do spore prints and check, but I am still so cautious. My dad made me that way. And plus again, like I said, we're far from everything. So even if it says that it's edible, and I'm pretty sure it is, if I don't know it very well, and I haven't had it myself, I just won't serve it because sometimes there's mushrooms that can give people belly aches, even if they are edible and things. So I'm very cautious about that. But so people do that stuff. Then around one or two, we have lunch. It's usually things that I've gotten from our CSA [community supported agriculture] at the farmer's market, or I usually incorporate a lot of foraged things in lunch, and that's simple. I try to do something hearty like pasta, bread, and a big salad, a little tiny dessert. And then-
Kerry Diamond:
What's something you might forage this spring?
Iliana Regan:
Well... Oh, definitely trout lilies, nettles, ramps, morel mushrooms, oyster mushrooms. So the way I like to do it is I'll take the pasta... This is kind of how I preserve some of those wild greens throughout the year is I'll make big batches of pasta, fresh pasta, and I'll put the greens in it when I blend the egg yolks. I'll Cryovac the different batches, and I'll freeze them. Let it defrost, make the fresh pasta. It's still very fresh to me, and it's lovely, and that way I get to preserve the greens. So yeah, that's really nice. I'll usually put some wild mushrooms in it, and if I have them and the greens and I use all my little tinctures, so if I have some wild vinegars I've made.
Because sometimes with the wild greens or the fruits, I'll make wild vinegars, and that's another way of preserving. And that's one thing I'm conscious of with the foraging is I never want to just serve people a big plate of this wild stuff. I'm usually preserving it in some sort of way where I can use a little bit here and a little bit here because I also don't want to take too much from nature, because that's the whole thing. It's like with Milkweed, I want it to be sustainable for the environment. I want to do it consciously.
Kerry Diamond:
You said you don't take people foraging with you. Is that because it requires too much of your concentration?
Iliana Regan:
It's just so much work because I do my foraging days on Tuesday, so I'll go out, I'll forage, bring it back, clean it, process it. So we do do foraging classes, but we don't do them on the weekends. So once a month, Monday through Wednesday, we host guests and I teach them ferments, foraging my bread and pasta, and we have casual meals. And then they get a lot of one-on-one with me in the woods and food, and it's more intimate. There's only six people. It's really fun. I love doing it. But doing that and the weekends together is a week of nonstop work. So we do it once every five weeks.
Kerry Diamond:
What becomes The Milkweed Inn? What did you know about the area around you? Did you know they were doing forestation there?
Iliana Regan:
Yeah, to a degree, but I think because we didn't travel up there first. I didn't know that we were actually on a logging path. And had I known probably a little bit more about the industry, I would've known that anything that's kind of way back in the woods is there because it's probably on a logging road, that's why the road was created in the first place. But yeah, so I didn't quite know to that degree. I learned a lot because I've sort of always read books about... I remember the book about, and I don't remember if it was a memoir, but about the woman who stayed in the tree for multiple years out in the Redwoods. I want to say it was a book in the early 2000s or late '90s. And then of course, I've read The Overstory, Suzanne Simard's book, which has come out since I've had Milkweed.
But yeah, so I've always been aware of the industry, but I guess I just didn't realize, "Wow." Literally a quarter of a mile away... The first time I met our neighbor, he said, "Well, hey, these beech trees are deceased, so next year, we're going to be logging everything. Do you want to log your place? You get some money for it," and blah, blah, blah. And I was like, "No." So I talked to a couple ecologists and they said, "If the beech trees are deceased, just let them be deceased. And if they fall over, they fall over." And I was like, "That's what I was thinking."
Kerry Diamond:
Your descriptions of the forest after the logging are so sad.
Iliana Regan:
Yeah, it looks terrible. I know that they do their best to clean up a certain amount. The loggers do, because really they're... Everyone that I've met has been very sweet out there, and it's generally some of the same companies. Yeah, they're just doing their job. They try to clean up certain parts. Sometimes it gets a little scary because you see what's left and it's... Wow, we're literally in a tinder box. Luckily, it rains a lot.
Kerry Diamond:
For those of you listening, I'm not opposed to logging because I produce a magazine on paper. You produce books on paper, and yeah, I'm a realist about those things, but-
Iliana Regan:
Yeah, it's a real thing.
Kerry Diamond:
It is devastating to read about what actually happens.
Iliana Regan:
Yeah, though there are some things that are left behind. It's actually good for some of the animals and the decay and mushrooms. I just have to trust that they're doing it the way that they're supposed to. It does make the roads crazy and everything, but it is sad to see. And I do notice how it changes the patterns of some of the animals. And I had a whole year of not really doing much aside from riding in school to watch what was happening and seeing wolves walk through our property and noticing some animals were gone and different things like that.
It was like... Yeah, the year that our neighbors were logging, Anna said many times, "The wilderness is closing in on us." And I was like, “I think that it's because we've closed in on the wilderness.” As humans, now there's all these things coming into our yard, a bat got in the house, and there's snakes in the yard and all these things, but now it's kind of died back down a little bit and the animals have kind of re-spread out because I mean, they did leave some trees for sure. They didn't completely clear cut. And those are getting taller and thriving. There's some that are still... The leaves have been brown for a while now and they're certainly dead, but-
Kerry Diamond:
And you have 10 acres, so you've-
Iliana Regan:
No.
Kerry Diamond:
Oh, you don't. How much?
Iliana Regan:
150.
Kerry Diamond:
You have 150 acres.
Iliana Regan:
Yeah. And now we have 270 because our neighbor, he... We said, "Well, we're kind of looking to rent another cabin out here for our staff members," and he is like, "Do you want to buy mine?" I said, "I can't buy your cabin. I could rent to own it." And he said, "Yeah, let's do that." He said, "I'm getting older. I want to get out of here. I really love you guys." He's got a little cabin on his property. His cabin is probably the second nicest. It's beautiful. He built it himself. It doesn't have a bathroom, it has an outhouse. It's got this little hobbit sauna where you can take a shower.
Kerry Diamond:
A hobbit sauna.
Iliana Regan:
Yes. So that's another activity our guests do. We walk them over to it and we schedule sauna times, and it's like a wood burning sauna, one of those little round ones. It's so cute. So we're renting to own his place, and he still comes up maybe once a month because he's not far. He's been fixing up the little cabin on his property, and he's going to still hunt. And I said, "Absolutely." He gives us hunted meat all the time that we're able to use, deer, moose, antelope. He goes everywhere to hunt. But yeah, he's an amazing hunter.
Kerry Diamond:
Feel like that's the universe giving back to you since you gave away-
Iliana Regan:
Oh, my God.
Kerry Diamond:
... your restaurant.
Iliana Regan:
Yeah. We got so lucky to have such a wonderful neighbor because people at first were a little concerned. It was all a bunch of old hunting guys out there who were like, "What's these kids doing out here, building an inn?" And I think in their mind they're like, "Oh, these city people, next thing there's going to be a Starbucks on the corner." But yeah, it's been okay. They've been wonderful and so helpful. It's been amazing with people who you would think maybe we wouldn't... Especially with this crazy political environment, that we would normally maybe not mix. However, we do get along. It's really a human connection because we are so far away from everything out there. We need to help one another.
Kerry Diamond:
There's so many beautiful parts of your book, I mean, lines that are practically poetry and parts that are incredibly sad, and another takeaway is just how removed we are from nature. You are in the thick of it, but just what is the toll of taking all of us away?
Iliana Regan:
Yeah, I think that's one of those things that came up intuitively, and I noticed it along the way, but this loss. And again, thinking about the family tree and the loss that we were all going through during the pandemic, but in other ways. So the loss of my sister and how that kind of changed and disrupted, but also changed the course of my life. Also, with the whole... For several years trying to get pregnant and that sort of loss and what is that like for family, and interconnectedness, and what does that mean for me and Anna, and things like that. So it was making me think of the animals in their place. I think something that was coming up a lot, especially with watching the birds, was the idea of home and nesting. So that was also happening too, the birds in a way, losing some things that were their home.
I do know now because I'm also not an ecologist or I don't study birds, but I do know that there are parts of the summer where they migrate to other places. So it wasn't necessarily just because of the logging. I don't know the whole story, but there are quite a few that move on in some state. But it's really interesting how it does happen because for me, my experience was all these trees are being taken out and there were so many birds constantly, and then just one day they were all gone. So it was interesting to think about. Yeah, I think that the logging happening at the same time, and the pandemic that was just this undercurrent. So I think that continually came up through the book.
Kerry Diamond:
How do you and Anna deal with the remoteness of it all? Because you were in Chicago for so long?
Iliana Regan:
Oh, right. I know.
Kerry Diamond:
Just surrounded by people riding the subway.
Iliana Regan:
It's hard. I love being in New York right now. This is the first time I've been back since 2019, and it's amazing to just walk up to a street corner, to cross the road, and you look at the other people on the side, and they are all so different. It's beautiful. It's almost as awesome as being in the woods and looking at all the different flora because we are kind of all these little weird mushrooms walking around.
Kerry Diamond:
The subway is the root system, huh?
Iliana Regan:
Yeah.
Kerry Diamond:
Never thought of it that way.
Iliana Regan:
Yeah. But with the remoteness out there, we have 10 essentially new friends that come every weekend because they're staying the night. Of course, occasionally people were like, "Oh, I don't really vibe with this person here or there," but usually, they've all... It's already kind of a niche thing to do, so they've looked into what we're doing, they want to be there. We all kind of vibe. We've made a lot of new friends. We've made friends with our guests in a way that we've seen them in Chicago, and also they've come back to hang out with us during the week.
Kerry Diamond:
So what you're saying is that's not so remote.
Iliana Regan:
We have friends and family come up sometimes during the weekdays when we're not doing foraging classes. Then we get out of town, we go up to Marquette, which is the small college town which is really cute, and we go to the wine store, and the fish market, and the farmer's market, and the coffee roasters, and it does feel a little bit like Beauty And The Beast when you go into the little town. So it is very small, even the... I want to say it's maybe like 20,000 people. So there is remoteness in isolation, and it does get draining after a while, but there is just enough in there to break it all up for us. And it's wonderful too, when we have people come up, who are... Even if they're coming from the weekend and we have known them because they've were my longtime guests at Elizabeth, they'll say, "What can we bring you?"
I'm not shy about it. I would say if you could go to Hema’s Kitchen and grab me some Indian food, and go to Demera and grab me some Ethiopian, and just bring it in whatever capacity you can bring it, and I will eat leftovers for the whole weekend. So, because we don't have a lot of different food, I think that's the hardest thing is being up there every single meal we have to cook for ourselves. There's no UberEats, there's no ordering pizza, nothing like that. We can sometimes bring things from town, but again, maybe the most different thing we can try to get is maybe Thai. It's just very small.
Kerry Diamond:
You are such a keen observer of nature in the book, and you did grow up around nature. You grew up on it. Was that the 10 acre farm?
Iliana Regan:
Yes.
Kerry Diamond:
Yes, okay. I knew there was a 10 acre farm somewhere. So you grew up on a 10 acre farm in Indiana and talk in your books about your interaction with nature, but now it seems like it's on an entirely different level.
Iliana Regan:
Oh, yeah, absolutely. We are absolutely in the wilderness, not necessarily walking around, but when we're driving through some parts of the woods to either go out, or if we're foraging, or walking around. Luckily, I've never encountered a bear while on foot, but I will see bears running across the path and wolves. Usually though, these are the type of bears and wolves that are not used to humans being around, so not necessarily associating with us with food, so when they hear us, they run. But yeah, I mean, it's really…When I'm out there and we're thinking about it, sometimes we get a little bit nervous and scared because we're like, "Wow, we have to be really careful." And there was something strange about me when I first got the place. I was just like, "Yeah." I had so much balls about it and cockiness. I could do this. And then, I don't know, I think the pandemic hit and other things ensued. Maybe I just got older and I started to really realize the capacity and vastness of it all.
Kerry Diamond:
I really marvel at your observations in the book though, and how you manage to convey so many of the senses, taste, sight, hearing, and just bring those to life on the page.
Iliana Regan:
Yeah, I'm always thinking about it and I'm always looking at all of these things, and I am spending so much time outside. I don't know. I think it's just because I'm so interested in it and so in love with it, I'm walking through parts of the woods, and I'm noticing when the smell changes, or noticing when the ground is different, or certain things are growing in certain areas that aren't in others because the trees are different or the shade is different. So there are all these wonderful things to pick up on when you're just out there paying attention. And I think I always have my eyes peeled because I am oftentimes looking for food, or trying to discover something, or teach myself. Once you start to see one thing, then you start to see these others also how in different ways they are connected. I think it's just one of those things like that. I'm just so interested in all of it. I can't help but pay attention to it.
Kerry Diamond:
What would you like people to take away from Fieldwork?
Iliana Regan:
This is a great question. I wanted people to know what Milkweed is like, and to know what the woods around me are like, and how I feel about them, and more about what my family was like. But I think more so, I want people to think about maybe how they are connected to the things that they love, the things that they're passionate about and not that they need to think about. Mapping it out in such a way as I had, maybe they can also discover new things about what they are passionate about, and I think with talking about Burn The Place, I wanted people to see that you can do something that you're interested in and that you love if you want to do it, because here were my circumstances and here was my path, and I still did this cool thing.
Essentially the same thing with Fieldwork, if there's something that you love, there can always be a way to figure out how to do it. There is a certain amount of discipline to it, but I think anybody can cook a good meal if they want to learn, and anybody can learn how to forage if they want to. And if you want to create AI [artificial intelligence] algorithms, I mean, and you're passionate about it, I think that there is a way for everybody to figure out in some way how to do the things that they love. Of course, there's always issues of access and privilege and things of that nature, but I still think that there's room to be inspired, and so that's what I would like to do is inspire people through the story.
Kerry Diamond:
Can we talk about you as a writer for a little bit? Because I didn't know you were a writer or had writerly aspirations when I got to know you and was lucky enough to eat at Elizabeth and Kitsune. Did you always know you wanted to write?
Iliana Regan:
I went to undergraduate for writing, so I did know that.
Kerry Diamond:
Didn't you study chemistry also?
Iliana Regan:
Yeah, so I didn't know that until I think I got to biochem, and I was like, "Oh, maybe chemistry's not for me." I just started changing up things. I took a writing course and I think that the professor and some of my fellow colleagues thought, "Oh, she's got some aptitude in this area." And then I just fell in love with it because I always loved reading. So I finished my degree in writing, and I did. I was working on books all the time as I was working in restaurants and short stories and sending them out, and I worked for a small literary publication called Other Voices for a while and interned with them. So yeah, it was always a thing for me. I focused usually more on fiction and short stories, but then this guy said, "Hey, do you want to write a book? I'm a publisher." And then that's how Burn The Place came about. I said, "Yeah, I'll give it a shot." He said, "I think you got an interesting story to tell, and I read that you went to undergraduate for writing."
That's kind of how it evolved. And I think my goal with going back to school to get my master's in writing, my goal is to eventually... Because I know my body's not going to be doing this industry forever, my goal is to maybe teach at a college or university level, maybe just do Milkweed a couple months out of the year in the summer, something like that. So I mean, that's all still in the works, and I still have many more years to still be doing Milkweed, but I'm going to be teaching a class at StoryStudio Chicago this April. ‘Food and Nostalgia’ is going to be the name of the class, and it's going to be like where we are talking about essentially incorporating recipes or food memories into a short story. So if it's non-fiction, it's about whatever your non-fiction is about, but it's also developing your fictional characters. So say you got this character, let's deepen who they are by giving them some of your food memories, but change it to them, so.
Kerry Diamond:
Is this an in-person class?
Iliana Regan:
No, it's going to be a Zoom class.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay. How can people sign up?
Iliana Regan:
I think that there will be a link on the StoryStudio Chicago website at some point.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay. Before we do our speed round, I have to ask what would you do with a city slicker like me at Milkweed? Native New Yorker, can't stand pitch black, can't stand total darkness, can't stand the silence. I have an elevated subway that rumbles past my apartment 24 hours a day.
Iliana Regan:
Well, I think we'd put you in the room that's not far from the generator. Also, definitely have you do the sauna and take out the Polaris ATV and drive that around, and you'd want to come at a time that is not in the early spring because that's when the ticks are bad, so you're probably not going to tick. So a September, October reservation would be the best because that's when there's less bugs. Yeah.
Kerry Diamond:
You don't look excited about the city slickers coming to visit.
Iliana Regan:
No, they do all the time, and it's great.
Kerry Diamond:
They do, yeah. I read your part about the ticks. I'm wearing all white. I have to ask. One of the things I do love, even though when it's pitch black outside, it freaks me out. I do love the stars. I'm so happy when I'm somewhere where I can see constellations-
Iliana Regan:
Oh, yeah. They're beautiful.
Kerry Diamond:
... and the Milky Way, and I just can't imagine what it's like where you are.
Iliana Regan:
It's wild, yeah.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay, we're going to do a speed round.
Iliana Regan:
Okay.
Kerry Diamond:
Ready? One of your favorite books on food.
Iliana Regan:
Oh, geez, louise. How fast do I have to answer this?
Kerry Diamond:
Doesn't have to be super speedy.
Iliana Regan:
I mean, honestly, it might be like Blood, Bones & Butter.
Kerry Diamond:
Gabrielle Hamilton.
Iliana Regan:
Yeah, she's an amazing writer. So yeah, I don't know if that's on food necessarily. I feel like it's about a lot of things as well, but yeah.
Kerry Diamond:
That counts.
Iliana Regan:
I'll go with that.
Kerry Diamond:
It's an incredible book. Do you have a favorite food movie?
Iliana Regan:
Mystic Pizza.
Kerry Diamond:
One thing that's always in your fridge.
Iliana Regan:
What is always in our fridge? Probably like packages of Sun Ramen noodles premade, like tonkotsu and their noodles. Kimchi is always in the fridge.
Kerry Diamond:
Do you make your own?
Iliana Regan:
We do at Milkweed, I just get like the Mother. Is it called Mother's?
Kerry Diamond:
Mother-In-Law's Kimchi. I love that.
Iliana Regan:
Yeah, I like that brand.
Kerry Diamond:
A favorite childhood food.
Iliana Regan:
Oh, definitely popcorn shrimp from Red Lobster or raspberries from the garden.
Kerry Diamond:
Snack food of choice.
Iliana Regan:
Cucumbers with MSG [Monosodium glutamate] and za'atar spice.
Kerry Diamond:
Why the MSG?
Iliana Regan:
What Anna and I do is we put a little MSG, lemon juice and the za'atar and toss it all. I love MSG. I love the savory quality of it, so yeah.
Kerry Diamond:
Footwear of choice.
Iliana Regan:
Boots.
Kerry Diamond:
Boots because so much in and out.
Iliana Regan:
Yeah.
Kerry Diamond:
Yeah. Even at Elizabeth, you wore boots?
Iliana Regan:
No, that's when I wore Dansko's. So yes, I'm always in boots unless I'm actually in the kitchen and then I'm wearing Dansko's.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay. Any motto or mantra that you live by?
Iliana Regan:
For a while it was, "It's okay, you're okay. It's okay, you're okay." But I still want to go with, "You don't have to wait for permission to do the thing that you want to do, just do it if you can."
Kerry Diamond:
Favorite kitchen tool?
Iliana Regan:
Oh, definitely, my pasta tweezers. I don't know what their technical name is, but they're like eight inch thin, long tweezers that are not necessarily tongs, but easy to twirl pasta with. I use them for everything.
Kerry Diamond:
If you had to be stuck on a desert island with one food celebrity, who would it be and why? You have your own version of a desert island?
Iliana Regan:
Well, probably Alexis Nikole, who's on Instagram as the @Blackforager because we're going to have to... Or well, can I pick two?
Kerry Diamond:
Sure.
Iliana Regan:
Okay, there's also... And I don't know if she's a celebrity, but there's a woman on Instagram. I don't even know her name, but I know that her handle is @Glitterandgills and she's a fisher woman, so that would probably be somebody great to be on an island with because somebody's going to need to fish. I can forage it, so I'm thinking about it practically.
Kerry Diamond:
Sounds like a good group.
Iliana Regan:
Yeah.
Kerry Diamond:
All right, Iliana, it's so good to see you. I could talk to you forever.
Iliana Regan:
Good to see you too.
Kerry Diamond:
Thank you for putting these beautiful books into the world.
Iliana Regan:
You're welcome. Thank you. And thanks for having me and helping me put them out there because I feel like every podcast, every event, everything helps, and I definitely get the most support from other women, and that's amazing.
Kerry Diamond:
I'm happy to hear that.
Iliana Regan:
Yeah, thank you.
Kerry Diamond:
That's it for today's show. If you enjoyed today's episode, I would love for you to subscribe to our podcast. If you're already a subscriber to Radio Cherry Bombe, leave us a rating and review. Let me know about a potential topic or guest you'd like featured on a future show. Also, sign up for the Cherry Bombe newsletter over at cherrybombe.com so you can stay on top of all Cherry Bombe happenings, podcast episodes, and events. Radio Cherry Bombe is a production of The Cherry Bombe Podcast Network. Our theme song is by the band Tralala. Thank you to Joseph Hazan, studio engineer for Newsstand Studios. Our producer is Catherine Baker, and our associate producer is Jenna Sadhu. And thanks to you for listening. You are the Bombe.