Lidey Heuck Transcript
Kerry Diamond:
Hi, everyone. You are listening to Radio Cherry Bombe, and I'm your host, Kerry Diamond. I'm the founder and editor of Cherry Bombe magazine.
Today's guest is Lidey Heuck, the culinary creative and recipe developer behind the website and Instagram account, LideyLikes. Her debut book, “Cooking in Real Life: Delicious and Doable Recipes for Every Day” is out tomorrow, and she joins me to talk all about it. I learned a lot about Lidey during this interview that I didn't know, like how she got her job with Ina Garten. Yes, Lidey worked for the Barefoot Contessa and her job with another Cherry Bombe favorite, Erin French of The Lost Kitchen. If you've watched “The Lost Kitchen” series on the Magnolia Network, you might have seen Lidey doing her thing. As you will soon learn, Lidey is a good reminder to go for it if there's something in life that you want. Remember, don't be the one to say no to yourself. As we learn during the Liz Moody episode earlier this year, that is fast becoming 2024's motto here at the pod. Stay tuned for my chat with Lidey, which was recorded at Newsstand Studios in Rockefeller Center.
This episode of Radio Cherry Bombe is supported by OpenTable. We are so excited that OpenTable is once again partnering with Cherry Bombe on our Sit With Us Community Dinner Series, which highlights amazing female chefs and restaurateurs in the Cherry Bombe and OpenTable networks. I hope you all have the OpenTable app on your phones. Thank you to everyone who joined us in Miami last week at Chef Eileen Andrade's restaurant, Amelia's 1931. It was a great night of connection, community, and of course, delicious food. This Wednesday we'll be in Philly at Fork, Ellen Yin's Restaurant, and then next Wednesday, March 27th, we'll be in DC at Chef Ria Montes' Estuary. For tickets and to learn more about the OpenTable and Cherry Bombe Sit With Us Series, visit CherryBombe.com.
Today's episode is also supported by Pernod Ricard, creators of Conviviality. Pernod Ricard is a worldwide leader in the spirits and wine industry, and embraces the spirit of convivialité, as we all should, and is focused firmly on a sustainable and responsible future. Their prestigious portfolio of brands includes classic names beloved by bartenders and mixologists around the world. There's Jameson Irish Whiskey, Absolut Vodka, the Glenlivet single malt scotch, Martell Cognac, and Codigo 1530 Tequila, just to name a few. If you are a regular listener, you know my preferred drink is always bubbles, so I love a glass of Perrier-Jouet champagne to kick off a special night out, and I also love a champagne cocktail. My favorite is a French 75, which you can make with Perrier-Jouet Grand Brut, and some Malfy gin. That sounds lovely, doesn't it? To learn more about Pernod Ricard, head to Pernod-Ricard.com. And don't forget, always drink responsibly.
Now, let's talk to today's guest. Lidey Heuck welcome to Radio Cherry Bombe.
Lidey Heuck:
Thank you so much for having me, Kerry.
Kerry Diamond:
Lidey, there's so much I don't know about you. I don't even know where to begin.
Lidey Heuck:
Wow.
Kerry Diamond:
Where are you from?
Lidey Heuck:
Okay. I'm from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Kerry Diamond:
Oh wait, I knew that part.
Lidey Heuck:
That's okay.
Kerry Diamond:
Yeah. Was it a foodie family?
Lidey Heuck:
It was and it wasn't. My immediate family was very much not a foodie family. Both my parents worked full time for the newspaper in Pittsburgh, and food was just kind of another part of daily life. It was nothing that anyone got particularly worked up or excited about. We had plenty of good food and we made Christmas cookies and all the normal things that families do, but it was never sort of the focal point of our family life. My mom's extended family who also lived in Pittsburgh was, I don't know, food obsessed. My grandfather worked full-time as a professor, but he loved cooking more than anything else, and would spend his weekends just food shopping. That was his hobby. He in turn passed on that love of cooking to the sons in his family. So my mom has five kids, three brothers, all of the sons really learned to cook and love cooking, but my mom didn't "inherit that gene," as she always says. The family cooking gene.
Growing up, we would often go over to my grandparents' house for a Sunday dinner or a holiday, and it would be this absolute feast. My grandfather was Italian American, so it would be meatballs, sausage, red sauce, tons of that white Italian bread with butter, and that was absolutely the whole point of being together, was the food. And so I had these two very different opposing experiences with food growing up. And I talk a little bit about this in the book of how it's a good example of how different people think about food, and the way we cook and the way we eat is determined by so many different factors in our lives.
Kerry Diamond:
It's so funny you brought up the Italian bread, because I grew up on Staten Island in a neighborhood that was very influenced by Italian food, and we called it Italian bread. It might've even been a baguette for all I know, but my mother would send us up the block to get what we called Italian bread.
Lidey Heuck:
And was it kind of thin crust, squishy inside?
Kerry Diamond:
Mm-hmm.
Lidey Heuck:
Yeah, really moist. We never had bread and butter at home. Having bread with butter was such a treat. So I have these vivid memories of just slathering on the butter.
Kerry Diamond:
And your parents, they worked for a newspaper. What did they do?
Lidey Heuck:
They did, yeah. My mom for a very long time was the film critic. By the time I rolled around, my brothers rolled around, she had switched to the social pages of the paper, so she covered benefits and cultural events. And my dad was the business editor. So two very different ends of the spectrum.
Kerry Diamond:
How interesting. Does your family have exceptional taste in film?
Lidey Heuck:
I think my mom does, although she also loves a good rom-com. She has very high and low taste. She would regale us with stories when we were younger of the days when local newspapers would send their film critics to the Oscars, so she had met all these movie stars and she has great stories.
Kerry Diamond:
Oh, that's fun. And how about your dad? What'd you pick up from your dad as a business reporter?
Lidey Heuck:
My dad left the newspaper when I was 12 or 13 and started his own magazine about Pittsburgh. The thing that I learned the most from him was this idea of taking a risk and making your life what you want it to be and making your job what you want it to be, because I think he was not happy there any longer, and he wanted to create something that was his and where he could be creative and write and lead the direction. And so I think that's something that I've always looked up to and maybe internalized along the way.
Kerry Diamond:
Does the magazine still exist?
Lidey Heuck:
It does. It's called Pittsburgh Quarterly. Check it out.
Kerry Diamond:
All right, Pittsburgh listeners, you need to go subscribe. Yeah, I love it. And it's print?
Lidey Heuck:
Yeah, it's print. It's got some longer form pieces and I do a recipe in it, definitely writing has always been a big part of my life and a big part of my family's life.
Kerry Diamond:
You go to college...
Lidey Heuck:
Yes.
Kerry Diamond:
What did you think you would graduate and do for a living?
Lidey Heuck:
I thought that I would do something with writing. I've also always loved to write and it's the thing that I've felt that I'm the best at, so that felt like the natural career path. And I thought maybe publishing, you think about, what can an English major do? And your mind goes to newspaper, magazines, publishing, I'm sure there are other options, but those were the big ones. So I always sort of thought that's where I would end up, but I remember being a senior in college and feeling like, "I don't know if I would just want to go right into a desk job and be there forever." I've always liked to do things a little bit spur of the moment and kind of go with my gut. I was thinking about, what could I do that might be just a fun first job out of college instead of buckling down right away?
Kerry Diamond:
When did food get layered over all this? You mentioned your grandfather. When did you start cooking?
Lidey Heuck:
I cooked a little bit in high school and baked like a lot of kids do, but it wasn't something that I ever really enjoyed or thought much about until I was in college. I went to school at Bowdoin College in Maine, which is in a very small town and it's very cold and dark in the winter. My friends and I started cooking for fun and having little dinners, and I think that was where the seed first got planted. And I had always loved the Food Network. I was very much of that generation. I had always been interested in cooking, but it just had never really occurred to me that it was a career path. I think unless you're in it, you have no idea the wide variety of jobs you can have in food.
Kerry Diamond:
You graduate, you want to do something fun, your parents aren't putting pressure on you, I'm guessing, to get a solid job.
Lidey Heuck:
They were putting the pressure on me. They didn't say, "Oh, do whatever you want and we'll bankroll your lifestyle." There was the expectation that I would get a job and support myself. They have always been of the mindset to just go for something that you love, so I always kind of felt like maybe I could have the two meet and do something and make money and do something I loved.
Kerry Diamond:
What did that become post-graduation?
Lidey Heuck:
It actually happened before I even graduated. Everybody was rushing around trying to figure out their plans, and I kind of dreamed up this crazy idea in my head that I could go and work for Ina Garten.
Kerry Diamond:
You manifested this?
Lidey Heuck:
Well, I had a seventh degree connection to her. "Maybe I can get an email to her." And that was it. That was all I had, and I thought, "And maybe she'll like the email and she'll want to hire me."
Kerry Diamond:
Did you share this with anyone?
Lidey Heuck:
Yeah, I remember it so well. I shared it with all my best friends who knew me by that point and were not totally surprised, but they were like, "Okay, go for it."
Kerry Diamond:
Did you tell your parents?
Lidey Heuck:
I'm sure I told my parents at some point. I remember my dad not getting it at all, as a non-food person. I don't think he'd ever seen “Barefoot Contessa.” He was confused. Because to him, he was like, "This doesn't make any sense. You've studied English and you're going to make cupcakes with someone." He just couldn't really compute why I was doing it.
Kerry Diamond:
How long did it take you to craft that one perfect email?
Lidey Heuck:
Oh, I'm sure I wrote it immediately and I obsessed over it for hours.
Kerry Diamond:
Hours, I would've obsessed over it for weeks.
Lidey Heuck:
What can you say? What can you get in writing then make it short and to the point? And I basically said, "I'm Lidey..." I was 21, "I would love to come and help you do social media." Because that was sort of what I thought I could bring to the table, and the only thing. I had been following Ina enough to know at that time, she was only on Facebook. This was pre... I guess Instagram existed, but she wasn't on it. So I was like, "This is something I could help with." And I said, "I'd love to come and meet you if you're up for it." I was incredibly lucky in that she happened to be looking to hire someone to help her with social media, so the timing was unbelievable.
Kerry Diamond:
It's like buying a lottery ticket.
Lidey Heuck:
I should have bought one that day. I think she had taken out... I don't know if it was an ad or something, but she had posted something, like a job listing somewhere, that I didn't know about. And so I got in my car, I drove all the way to the Hamptons where I'd never been-
Kerry Diamond:
From Maine to East Hampton, wow.
Lidey Heuck:
From Maine to the Hamptons, you have to take three ferries, I arrived at midnight, it's pitch black, I was staying with a friend of a friend, and I got up and I put on my pantsuit for the interview because I wanted to be professional.
Kerry Diamond:
Oh, bless you. You wore a pantsuit to the Ina interview?
Lidey Heuck:
I did.
Kerry Diamond:
What color was it?
Lidey Heuck:
Green pants. Well, I guess it wasn't a matching pantsuit, but I had a green cropped pant and a blazer and these crocodile loafers from J. Crew Outlet. I was prepared how I knew to be prepared. I sat down with Ina, we had a great conversation, I brought with me this little plan that I had put together, that was just some ideas and things I thought she could do to help. I just did the best I could, I had no training in social media, and as we all know, it was such a different landscape. This still feels like recent past to me, but in terms of social media, it was so long ago that things were very different.
Kerry Diamond:
Wow. That is an incredible story.
Lidey Heuck:
It is pretty incredible.
Kerry Diamond:
And she hired you? Or she said, "I'll get back to you"?
Lidey Heuck:
I think she said, "I'll get back to you." We had a long... I was there for a couple of hours and she said, "I'll get back to you." And I remember thinking, "Well, I don't know." I had nothing to compare it to.
Kerry Diamond:
And you'd never been to the Hamptons before?
Lidey Heuck:
I'd never been to the Hamptons.
Kerry Diamond:
So this was in the summer, if it was post-graduation.
Lidey Heuck:
No, this was maybe March or April.
Kerry Diamond:
Oh, wait, this was before you graduated?
Lidey Heuck:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. All my marbles were in this.
Kerry Diamond:
Oh my gosh, that's so funny. I always tell people you can't get a job in media until you are free to take that job, because media is not looking to hire people six months ahead of time like banks maybe used to be.
Lidey Heuck:
There's no program that you're entering that you have your spot in.
Kerry Diamond:
Exactly. Like consulting companies, all the folks who hire really early, yeah, that's not media. It's like, "We need a body. Somebody just quit, you can start in two weeks." But you were doing this in the spring. Wow. So you said to her, "I can start in June"?
Lidey Heuck:
Absolutely. I think we set the start date, I want to say I had a week, maybe, after I graduated, to pack up all my stuff and go to the Hamptons where I was going to live full time. And it sounds really kind of wild in retrospect.
Kerry Diamond:
Your first experience of the Hamptons was essentially living and working with Ina Garten.
Lidey Heuck:
Yeah.
Kerry Diamond:
Where did you live?
Lidey Heuck:
I found a little house. It was really tiny, just outside East Hampton Village. I got really lucky with the housing. It took me months and months to find somewhere. There's just not a lot of places for a 22-year-old to rent. And yeah, a little house with a chain-link fence, and it was one bedroom, one bathroom, little kitchen, it was cute.
Kerry Diamond:
That sounds nice, yeah.
Lidey Heuck:
Yeah, it was really nice. It was sort of a funny... All my friends ended up... Most of them ended up in New York, so I would often come into the city on the weekends so I could see them and then I would go back to this oddball life that I was living in the Hamptons. But it was actually really fun and there were enough people sort of my age who were there for various reasons that it actually was pretty easy to meet people because everyone just wanted to know, "Who else is here?"
Kerry Diamond:
Now, what kind of jobs did you have during college?
Lidey Heuck:
I always worked during the school year for the alumni office, writing Christmas cards and doing whatever, little stationery. And then in my internships in the summer, I did one for Anthropology where I had a copywriting internship and I wrote copy for the website and drafts of things for the catalog. After my junior year, I interned at HBO in LA. That was sort of the more fun way I could think about doing something in writing was TV and entertainment, but I just didn't love TV enough.
Kerry Diamond:
What did your job with HBO entail?
Lidey Heuck:
My internship was a lot of personal assistant type stuff. A lot of errands, I got to sit in on some creative pitch meetings, but it was very administrative. It was still a great intro to that whole world. I came away from it feeling like, "This is really exciting, but it isn't my passion." TV shows are not the thing that I stay up late thinking about and dream about. So it was fascinating to be a part of that world, I also felt like maybe LA isn't the place for me. I don't know.
Kerry Diamond:
Ina Garten is essentially your very first boss. That is incredible. What did you do for Ina? You got her on Instagram?
Lidey Heuck:
Yes. So when I first started, she was just on Facebook and maybe Twitter and had a newsletter that she sent out. We got on Instagram and I basically set it up for her so she could kind of play around with it. I knew she would love the snapshot casual nature of Instagram at that time. And I think we did Pinterest, but that was really only a part of what I did, just because we weren't doing enough social media for that to be full-time. So I also helped with a lot of personal assistant type stuff like grocery shopping, running errands, traveling on her book tour to events and helping get ready for TV and cookbooks. What happened over time is I had this sort of inside view to everything that was going on behind the scenes with her business, like how a cookbook is made, how a TV show is made, which was just fascinating, and most of all, how Ina wrote her recipes.
Slowly but surely I started getting in the kitchen a little bit more and testing a recipe or two or being there when she was testing things and just lending a hand. I don't know, something about it kind of struck a chord with me, and there's something really fun about the precision element, but also the creative element, which is throwing something to the wall and seeing what sticks. And just the challenge of starting with an idea in your head and fine-tuning it and honing it until it's this perfected dish. After maybe, I don't know, a year or two of doing that and doing more recipe testing for her, I started just playing around with writing recipes on my own. I'm scared to even look at them at this point. It was fun to take the things that I was learning at work and go home and play around and kind of do my own version of things.
Kerry Diamond:
Ina is clearly a great business person to have had a career as long as hers, to have had such a consistent publishing career with all those bestsellers. What are some of your biggest takeaways from the time you spent working with her?
Lidey Heuck:
Gosh, there are so many. One really big one is you have to know what you want and trust your own opinions, your taste, your vision. In a creative field, you end up working with a lot of different people, and I think Ina always stays really true to what she wants, what she believes, and she doesn't let herself be swayed from that. And I think especially as a first-time cookbook author, for me, going into that process, having a photo team, it was hard for me to go in and say, "This is what I want." But I was trying to channel my inner Ina and say, "Trust your vision because at the end of the day, this book is going to be a product of your vision, and if you let everyone else cloud your ideas, it won't be what you want it to be."
Kerry Diamond:
Channel your inner Ina. I love that.
Lidey Heuck:
Exactly. Channel your inner Ina.
Kerry Diamond:
We all have a little inner Ina inside us, right?
Lidey Heuck:
Yes.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay. What else did you learn from Ina?
Lidey Heuck:
The biggest thing I learned is really how Ina creates and test recipes, which I think is different from how a lot of other cookbook authors do it. She's so methodical. She takes so much time and care and tests these things over and over again. She always felt like at the end of the day, the product is the recipe, and it needs to work and needs to be easy, well-written, clear, and if the recipe can't stand on its own, then you don't have anything. So I've definitely internalized that and I test my recipes over and over again. I always have that voice in the back of my head like, "Is it perfect? Is it perfect?" Because if it's as good as it can be, anyone who's making it is just going to have an easier time and be more likely to come back to that book or that website. It's easy to get caught up with content creation, doing all this fun stuff and making the videos pretty, and at the end of the day, what's really the most important is that the recipe itself works and it's delicious.
Kerry Diamond:
We'll be right back with today's guest. You all know this, but March is Women's History Month, and of course Cherry Bombe is celebrating. I want to give a special thank you to Walmart for supporting Radio Cherry Bombe throughout Women's History Month, and for Walmart's commitment to empowering women all year long. Walmart is a big supporter of female entrepreneurs and carries an incredible range of female founded and fueled brands. Brands like Goodie Girl, the gluten-free cookies and nostalgic flavors by Shira Berk; Packed Party, the party essentials, travel accessories and tech company founded by Jordan Jones; and The Honey Pot, plant-derived female care products founded by Beatrice Dixon. Check out these brands and more of our female-fueled favorites over at Walmart.com/CelebrateHer. If you didn't write that down, you can find the link in our show notes.
For this episode, we're spotlighting legendary restaurateur, Cecilia Chang, best known for her groundbreaking restaurant, The Mandarin, in San Francisco. And for introducing Americans to regional Chinese cuisines. Born in China in 1920, Cecilia left the country in 1942 and made her way to Tokyo where she opened her first restaurant, Forbidden City. She opened The Mandarin almost 20 years later and gained a national following for both the food and the hospitality. Cecilia co-authored several books including “The Seventh Daughter” cookbook and “The Mandarin Way,” which combine memoir and recipes. As Alice Waters said of her friend, "Cecilia Chang is that rarity in any culture. A true grande dame, a woman of real and lasting influence."
So you worked for Ina for how many years?
Lidey Heuck:
It was like six, six and a half years.
Kerry Diamond:
That's a long time. Wow. And then what'd you do next?
Lidey Heuck:
Towards the end of my time working for Ina, I was starting to itch for another project, just something that felt like a challenge. And I had started doing my own recipes, so I was like, "Maybe I could have my own career in food," and I just didn't really know what it would be, but I knew that I wanted some sort of other food world experience outside the test kitchen atmosphere. I decided maybe it should be a restaurant. And I knew that I would not hold up in a fast-paced New York City restaurant. That's not my personality. I'm a little more laid back than that. But I had loved The Last Kitchen and had been reading about it for years, having gone to school in Maine and just loved this idea that it was all women who worked there. So again, I kind of got this little idea and I thought, "Well, maybe I'll see if I can get a meeting with Erin French," who's the chef and owner of The Lost Kitchen.
Kerry Diamond:
Had you ever eaten there?
Lidey Heuck:
No, never eaten there. And that was part of the allure of it, was the elusive way you had to send a postcard.
Kerry Diamond:
I think Erin's been on the show a few times over the years, so I'm sure some of you have heard the interviews, but The Lost Kitchen is the restaurant in Freedom Maine, where you have to send a postcard in advance to get a reservation. But it's very hard to get a reservation there.
Lidey Heuck:
Yes.
Kerry Diamond:
So you were like, "Okay, I can't get a reservation, but maybe I can get a job."
Lidey Heuck:
I did not send her a postcard, but I got her email address and wrote her an email and I said, "I'm going to be in Maine. I'd love to come chat." And one thing I've learned, I think from both of these experiences with Ina and Erin is if you can meet with someone in real life, if you can figure out a way to get face to face with them, I think it's a really good idea and just so much easier to connect than sending emails back and forth.
Kerry Diamond:
So then you did the reverse of what you did with Ina. You got in the car and you drove to Maine.
Lidey Heuck:
Yeah, I go back to Maine.
Kerry Diamond:
So did Erin respond to the email? Did it take a while?
Lidey Heuck:
I don't remember if it took a while, but I know she did respond and she said, "Oh sure, come by, and I'd love to meet you." Really nice. It was the off season for them too. So it was, I think, her slower time of year.
Kerry Diamond:
We did a cover story on Erin. So I have been there. It's a two-hour drive from Portland, Maine.
Lidey Heuck:
Yeah. My now husband and I were going to Maine, we were going to go see friends, so I think it was part of another trip, but I would've gone just to see Erin. And I said, "I'll do anything. I will take the garbage out, I will chop onions until I'm crying," I didn't have much to offer her because I didn't have any restaurant experience. So I just said, "If you'll have me, I'll do anything." So she said, "Okay, sure." So this was in the fall of 2019, to paint the picture. And I had let Ina know that I was going to be leaving at the end of that year. This was set, our plan for The Last Kitchen was set for the summer of 2020. So anyway, 2020 comes, to kind of keep busy, after I left my job with Ina, leading up to the summer, I did some private chef work. By this point, I was also doing recipes for New York Times Cooking, which was a huge thing for me, because it really gave me the confidence to feel like I could make it on my own.
Kerry Diamond:
How did you break into that? Because that's a goal for a lot of people.
Lidey Heuck:
I got connected to the New York Times through someone I worked with with Ina, and at the time they were looking to add a lot of contributors for their website and app. They were growing a lot at that time, so I feel like they were really generous and gave me a shot. I still remember how nervous I was before submitting those first recipes. And they're still two of my most popular recipes so I feel like it worked out okay.
Kerry Diamond:
What were the two recipes?
Lidey Heuck:
There was a sheet pan salmon nicoise, which is a great one. Everyone loves a sheet pan. And another one was a fun play on a picnic potato salad with mashed chickpeas and herbs.
Kerry Diamond:
In the little bit that I've gotten to know you, you're so modest. You're not charging through life asking for things that you want, but at the same time, you clearly are very good at asking for what you want because that's how you've gotten to this point.
Lidey Heuck:
I guess so. I don't think of myself as someone who's barging into rooms and saying, "Read my resume."
Kerry Diamond:
You are not.
Lidey Heuck:
But I have felt so much respect for the women who I've been fortunate to work for, and I think so coming to them from a place of, "I admire you," and being modest, I'm honest about what I can bring to the table and just seeing if they'll give it a shot. I think I've just always had this attitude of if you do it the right way, what's the worst that can happen?
Kerry Diamond:
We had Liz Moody on the podcast, I think the start of the year. Liz is so brilliant. She does a lot of, I don't know if she would call it self-help, that I call it self-help work. Liz's latest book is “100 Ways to Change Your Life,” and one of her top pieces of advice that's in the book is, don't be the person to say no to yourself.
Lidey Heuck:
I love that.
Kerry Diamond:
And I feel like you are very good at not saying no to yourself.
Lidey Heuck:
It's hard. I say no to myself in some ways all the time with self-doubt, and I think on the inside, I have the insecurities that we all have, but I also think if I don't make things happen, they're not going to happen. Once you've done it, once you've put yourself out there, once it gets easier. And there are things that haven't worked out. It's not like everyone's just like, "Oh, here. Here's this and here's that." And there's a lot of waiting and following up. I've gone after the things that have been really, really important to me, but I think really thinking hard about what you want and why you want it is really important before you go out and just ask for it.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay. You left us on a little bit of a cliffhanger. It's 2019, you agree to go work for Erin French in 2020, what was your start date supposed to be?
Lidey Heuck:
I can't remember, but I think it was maybe late May. I was going to start as the restaurant was ramping up to open for the season. I remember talking with my dad before I even left the job with Ina in the fall, and he was saying, "Are you sure you want to just quit your job and figure it out? I think there might be a recession next year." And I was like, "Recession? I'll figure it out." His prediction did come true that 2020 was not what we expected. But I had a phone call with Erin sometime in April and she said, "Look, I don't know what's going to happen. We can't open now. We want to open some way in the summer, but I don't know..." No one knew what was going to be possible. She said, "You're welcome to come and show up, but I can't promise you any number of hours or I can't promise you that it's going to be what we thought."
And at that point, I was doing recipes for the Times, I was doing a bunch of virtual cooking classes and trying to make cooking videos. I thought, "You know what? I can do all of that in Maine." And I had already rented this little apartment in Belfast which is near Freedom, so I said, "Let's do it." And it was not the summer, of course, that anyone thought it was going to be, but for me it was a really incredible experience and I'm so glad that I did it despite not knowing, because I think I was able to leave the house and go somewhere new and have this new experience every day. And it was a really interesting time to be working in a restaurant.
Kerry Diamond:
Did you know that Erin was filming a TV show and that there would be cameras there?
Lidey Heuck:
I didn't know until I got to Maine, and Erin said, "We're doing a TV show, would love for you to be a part of it." Just in the sense of working on the staff with everyone else. I was like, "Okay, great." I remember it was my first day at the restaurant. The Lost Kitchen opened for lunch primarily for the summer because it could be outside and it was just easier. And so my first day, Erin was like, "Okay, I'm going to have you break down 40 or 50 raw chickens into pieces to make fried chicken." They were filming that day. And I think I had maybe, working for Ina, broken down a chicken once. I'm sure she showed me how to do it a few times. But it's one of those things if you don't do it again and again, you look at this thing, you're like, "Where do I start?" And I was on camera, and it was just excruciating. I was so slow at everything that entire summer. I remember being like, "I don't know if I'm cut out for this, at the end of the day."
Kerry Diamond:
Were you able to go back and watch the show? Or was it too painful to watch?
Lidey Heuck:
I did. No, I did watch it. I don't think that the... Maybe the chicken cutting did make it. I watched it and was not totally proud of my performance in every moment. But I also think it was maybe relatable for people watching at home. There was one scene where I'm making an herb bundle that went on the fried chicken. It was like rosemary and lavender, and she'd stick it right in the fried chicken, so it smells really good when she serves it. And I was sitting there with Kerry, who is another one of the women at the restaurant, and we're on camera and we're making the herb bundles, and she had a pile of 40 herb bundles and mine was like 12. I just was so slow, and in the show she goes, "Lidey's a little slow." And it was true. I don't think I'm cut out for restaurant work. It's not who I am. But it was really incredible to work in a restaurant and see what it's really like and be a part of that.
Kerry Diamond:
Erin French is another very smart, very creative human being. I'm sure you learned a ton from her, and not just that you didn't want to work in restaurants. What were some of the takeaways working for Erin?
Lidey Heuck:
This was a takeaway, particularly because of what happened with COVID, but just seeing Erin and her whole team, but especially Erin, adapt to the ever-changing situation and really figure out, how can I make this restaurant run? And she is so incredible. In the beginning of the 2020 season, her purveyors and the farmers she sources from, no one was buying from them so she decided to open a farmer's market so people could shop for produce to bring home.
Her community is always in the back of her mind with every decision she makes, and I think it's so important, and I think it's really easy to just be focused on yourself and your goals and your success, but I think bringing up the people who are around you and making them feel part of it and also sharing your success with them is really huge. And that's one thing that I've learned from her. There's so many. How to make food look so incredibly beautiful, you can't even believe it. She uses a lot of edible flowers that I had never dealt with, so I've learned the names of a lot of them and which ones you can eat and which ones you can't eat.
Kerry Diamond:
And Erin has great recipes also. I love her cookbooks.
Lidey Heuck:
Her cookbooks are truly a work of art. And also her food and her recipes are really accessible for home cooks because her food is really simple at heart, and she uses really good ingredients, but a lot of the food are things that home cooks can easily make at home. So absolutely, her recipes are great.
Kerry Diamond:
Let's talk about this cookbook.
Lidey Heuck:
Okay. I can't believe it.
Kerry Diamond:
It's so exciting. We're going to celebrate with a fun party-
Lidey Heuck:
It's going to be so exciting.
Kerry Diamond:
... with lots of our friends. I've got the book in my hands and I'm looking at the pretty end papers, which are the pages right inside when you open the book. Looks like you're very inspired by a dish towel fabric, if I had to guess.
Lidey Heuck:
I was. I really wanted the book to feel homey and cozy. So a lot of the prints and the textiles throughout are meant to feel like something that you would have at home.
Kerry Diamond:
“Cooking in Real Life,” Cooking IRL, how'd you come up with the title? That's always such a hard part.
Lidey Heuck:
It was hard, actually. Long, long lists of ideas and food words and just crossing things out and writing other ideas. I think it's really hard because in some ways you feel like you're minimizing this giant book that you've written into one phrase, and it's hard to come up with a perfect phrase. There was also something moody about the title that I liked. “Cooking in Real Life,” I kept thinking to myself, "It's like cooking in technicolor." It's like a vocative of a place and a feeling that is a little hard to put your finger on. I liked that the title is mundane,” Cooking in Real Life,” and yet it feels like something more at the same time.
Kerry Diamond:
And how many recipes are in here?
Lidey Heuck:
There are about a hundred recipes.
Kerry Diamond:
Which recipe would you say is the best gateway recipe to your kind of cooking?
Lidey Heuck:
That's a really good question. I think a great gateway recipe would be one of the soups, especially because it's March and it's still chilly in much of the country, particularly the ratatouille lentil soup. I think it's a good gateway recipe because it's an example of how you can take something that's really classic and basic, like a good lentil soup, and zhuzh up a few of the ingredients and make it feel like something you've never had before. So in this case, I use all the veggies that go into a traditional French ratatouille. A ratatouille is like stewed summer vegetables, like eggplant, zucchini, onions, tomatoes, and in this recipe I use a lot of oregano and fresh basil. It feels like this fragrant fresh spin on a soup that's usually kind of hearty. And I just love it.
Kerry Diamond:
You can eat it while you watch the best food movie ever, “Ratatouille.”
Lidey Heuck:
That's so true. I think I actually wrote something about Ratatouille in the headnote. And I thought that “Ratatouille” was the name of the rat. And I was like, "’Ratatouille’, also known as a famous cartoon rodent," and then I was rereading-
Kerry Diamond:
That's Remy.
Lidey Heuck:
I know. Can you imagine if that had made it in? Sheesh.
Kerry Diamond:
Well, thankfully, you've got your editors looking out for you. Tell me which recipe is the most personal to you?
Lidey Heuck:
There are a couple family-inspired recipes, but one that's particularly special to me has come from my Aunt Candy, who is aptly named because she's a pastry chef. She's married to my uncle Mike, so I grew up with them in Pittsburgh and she made our wedding cake.
Kerry Diamond:
She's a pastry chef named Candy.
Lidey Heuck:
I know it's meant to be.
Kerry Diamond:
Is that her given name? Or is that her nickname?
Lidey Heuck:
Candace, yeah, her given name.
Kerry Diamond:
Oh, gosh.
Lidey Heuck:
And she very generously shared with me her recipe for her flourless chocolate cake, which is one of the most decadent rich fudgy chocolate cakes. It has all these great little cracks on top and you dust it with cocoa powder and it's just a little heavenly slice of fudge. And it was really important to me and meant a lot to me to have a family recipe in this book, especially because my grandfather has not been with us for a number of years, so to be able to include my family in this book was really important to me.
Kerry Diamond:
That's very sweet. Which recipe do you think will be the most popular?
Lidey Heuck:
I can't wait to see. Honestly, it's just fun to see the people who have gotten early copies to kind of see which ones they gravitate towards, because it's not always what I expect. But I think that the short ribs are going to be a big hit. They're a great holiday recipe. They have cranberries and port and rosemary and shallots, so just a great classic wintry recipe with a little twist with the whole cranberries. And then another one that I... Well, let's say I hope it's popular because I'm really excited about it, is the ice cream sandwiches with blueberry muffin cookies and strawberry ice cream. These are, I would say, a family-ish recipe because I've been making them every summer for my in-laws who I spend July 4th with for their 4th of July party. It's kind of a secret recipe for a long time, and I'm finally sharing it. So I hope that everyone else feels the way that I do about them and loves them.
Kerry Diamond:
Can you use frozen blueberries?
Lidey Heuck:
You can. I would probably drain them, so I would defrost them and drain them so there's not too much extra juice, but absolutely. You could probably use wild Maine blueberries too, it'd be really good.
Kerry Diamond:
I've always got my frozen Maine blueberries in my freezer. I love those.
Lidey Heuck:
I love them too.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay. This is very exciting. You're doing a huge cookbook tour. Tell us where you're going.
Lidey Heuck:
I'm going to Pittsburgh, which I'm really excited about. I love being from Pittsburgh and I feel like it doesn't get enough attention and credit for what a great city it is.
Kerry Diamond:
I told you this, we stopped there on the “Cherry Bombe” cookbook tour. I do love Pittsburgh.
Lidey Heuck:
I love to hear that. And I'm going to go to Maine, going to go to Portland, Maine, Boston, DC, Chicago, I'll be in New York for a couple different events, Seattle...
Kerry Diamond:
How do folks find out about all these stops and the tickets?
Lidey Heuck:
I have all the info on my website. It's all spelled out. And they're all different kinds of events, which I'm excited about. Some are signing, some are like little parties, some are shop and signs where you can shop at whatever home goods store we're doing the event at.
Kerry Diamond:
What's shop and sign?
Lidey Heuck:
I know. Isn't that fun?
Kerry Diamond:
I don't think I've heard that term before. That's fun.
Lidey Heuck:
Yeah.
Kerry Diamond:
Let's jump to the speed round. What beverage do you start the day with?
Lidey Heuck:
I start the day with lukewarm water because I read years ago that it's good for you. And then I have my coffee.
Kerry Diamond:
How do you take your coffee?
Lidey Heuck:
I like my coffee pretty weak with some whole milk.
Kerry Diamond:
Weak?
Lidey Heuck:
Just medium to medium weak. Yeah.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay. What is a treasured cookbook?
Lidey Heuck:
One of the first books I remember flipping through when I was a kid was called “Mom's Big Book of Baking,” and it's by Lauren Chapman, who I've since gotten to know, which was a real exciting moment for me, but it's just a simple book of very basic baking recipes. But it was the first book that I paged through and kind of put little post-its on and made the brownies and the banana bread, and to this day, there's something so classic and simple about it that I still flip through it, because she just has this way of making you want to make everything. And there's nothing flashy about it, but it just has a special place in my heart.
Kerry Diamond:
Favorite food movie.
Lidey Heuck:
This isn't a food movie per se, but I love “Moonstruck” and how food plays a big part in that movie, just sort of like the Italian American... The food they're eating at home and how Nicolas Cage's character works in a pizza shop, I just love that movie.
Kerry Diamond:
I think you're the first one to say “Moonstruck.” Love it. What's always in your fridge?
Lidey Heuck:
I always have a package of salted butter in the fridge. I guess sometimes it's at room temperature, but that's just one of my favorite little treats on an English muffin.
Kerry Diamond:
What is your favorite snack food?
Lidey Heuck:
Granola. I have a pretty major sweet tooth, and so I've been experimenting with ways to make my granola be more of a meal, so I add tons of different nuts and seeds. I could just eat granola all day.
Kerry Diamond:
What was your favorite food as a child?
Lidey Heuck:
I loved oatmeal as a child, and I still love oatmeal. I often say oatmeal-
Kerry Diamond:
You were a wild and crazy child.
Lidey Heuck:
Can you imagine? I just loved it. I love how mushy it is. I love all mushy foods. My next book is just going to be foods that don't require chewing. It's going to be a major hit.
Kerry Diamond:
No one has come out with Mushy Foods yet as their title.
Lidey Heuck:
It's catchy.
Kerry Diamond:
Claim it now. Mushy IRL.
Lidey Heuck:
Yeah, that's a corner of the market.
Kerry Diamond:
You could own that niche. When you were working in restaurants and working with Ina, what was your footwear of choice?
Lidey Heuck:
That's a great question.
Kerry Diamond:
What did you wear to protect those toes?
Lidey Heuck:
Well, I mentioned earlier that when I did my interview with Ina, I wore a blazer and pants. And in the beginning of that job, which was really my first job after school, I know it's really embarrassing, but I had pencil skirts and I had little button up shirts and ballet flats, so that was like era one, was the young professional. And Ina would wear running shoes and comfortable clothing because we were on our feet all day. So very quickly that morphed to wearing either sneakers or boots. I think because I am not a restaurant chef, I've never really gotten so into the Danskos. Also, I'm too tall for Danskos. They add two inches and I'm already 5'11". But jeans and comfortable shoes, it was a casual workplace for sure.
Kerry Diamond:
Favorite kitchen implement?
Lidey Heuck:
This might be a silly one, but I have this little metal citrus reamer that fits perfectly on the two cup liquid measuring cup top, at the top of the measuring cup, and I put it on and then I squeeze the lemon right into the measuring cup, and it's so simple, but it's so satisfying to me that it fits perfectly on all the measuring cups.
Kerry Diamond:
It never even crossed my mind that those are designed to fit on that, but I bet they are.
Lidey Heuck:
And I don't even know where it came from. It's one of those things that I've just had forever. I'm sure you can get one online.
Kerry Diamond:
And I squeeze a lot of citrus juice.
Lidey Heuck:
And it's kind of sharp. It's kind of sharp on the top, so it's really good for getting all the juice out.
Kerry Diamond:
Huh, that is a good tip. I love that. Okay, last question. If you had to be trapped on a desert island with one food celebrity, who would it be and why?
Lidey Heuck:
Okay. This one actually isn't that hard for me. It's going to seem like, I don't know, a little bit of a cheesy answer, but I would say Erin French because she's, first of all, so good at foraging, so she would find all kinds of amazing mushrooms and things we could eat. She's just a Mainer. Together, we could build a house. We could start a whole new life, the two of us. She knows how to do so many things and she's such a tough cookie, and I would feel so much safer on a desert island with her.
Kerry Diamond:
Oh my God. I'm dying laughing. Just when you said we could start a whole new life, most people assume they're going to get rescued.
Lidey Heuck:
No. Oh, I'm sorry. The question wasn't who do you want to spend the rest of your life with?
Kerry Diamond:
Oh, Lidey. That's so funny.
Lidey Heuck:
I guess, yeah, we're living there forever. We don't need to be rescued.
Kerry Diamond:
Well, I hope you and Erin are really happy-.
Lidey Heuck:
Thank you so much
Kerry Diamond:
... on your island.
Lidey Heuck:
Thank you.
Kerry Diamond:
And the house that you build and all the food that you make.
Lidey Heuck:
It's going to be really warm and cozy. It'll be great.
Kerry Diamond:
Lidey, you are the best.
Lidey Heuck:
Thank you, Kerry.
Kerry Diamond:
It was so nice to get to know you a little better. Thank you.
Lidey Heuck:
Yeah, this was so much fun.
Kerry Diamond:
Thank you for sharing your improbable story with all of our listeners, and I really hope that people just take away to go for it.
Lidey Heuck:
Go for it. You only live once. YOLO. Just go for it. What's the worst that can happen?
Kerry Diamond:
Absolutely. Well, congrats on the book.
Lidey Heuck:
Thank you for having me.
Kerry Diamond:
That's it for today's show. Our theme song is by the band Tralala, Joseph Hazan is the studio engineer for Newsstand Studios, our producers are Catherine Baker and Elizabeth Vogt, our associate producer is Jenna Sadhu, and our editorial assistant is Londyn Crenshaw. Thanks for listening, everybody. You are the Bombe.