Mehreen Karim, Srishti Jain, Chrissy Tracey Transcript
Kerry Diamond:
Hi, everyone. You are listening to Radio Cherry Bombe, and I'm your host, Kerry Diamond, coming to you from Newsstand Studios at Rockefeller Center in the heart of New York City.
We have a special guest host today because I was in Portland, Oregon, working on a project. It's Chrissy Tracey, the outdoors enthusiast, chef, and author of the cookbook “Forage & Feast.” Chrissy was recently named to the Prestigious Explorers Club 50, so congrats on that, Chrissy.
Today's guests are Mehreen Karim and Srishti Jain. Reenie, as everyone calls her, competed on the Gordon Ramsay show, “Next Level Chef.” She is a pop-up queen and was a contributor to Bon Appétit. She's now the executive editor of the “Make It Plant-Based” series of cookbooks dropping tomorrow, May 13th. She also authored one of the books, “Make It Plant-Based! Southern.” Joining her is Srishti, the author of “Make It Plant-Based! Indian.” Srishti is a food writer, recipe developer, and has her own supper club right here in New York City. If you love cookbooks, food media, and plant-based eating, you're going to love their chat. Chrissy, thank you for filling in for me, and stay tuned for their conversation.
A little housekeeping. We are about to reveal the covers for the new issue of Cherry Bombe's print magazine. It's our first ever power issue and we've got covers with… ready? The one and only Gloria Steinem, chefs and empire builders, Jody Williams and Rita Sodi, chef Mashama Bailey of The Grey in Savannah, and culinary creative Sophia Roe. Yes, four covers. All shot by the amazing photographer, Jen Livingston. We're so thrilled to celebrate all these incredible women. You can purchase a single issue or subscribe. If you're a subscriber, you can choose which issue you want to receive. We'll send you all the details. Visit cherrybombe.com for more. Now, let's check in with today's guests.
Chrissy Tracey:
Reenie Kareem and Srishti Jain, welcome to Radio Cherry Bombe. Reenie, how did you get your start in food media and cooking?
Mehreen Karim:
Ooh, honestly, I remember seeing you for the first time at the start of my food media and cooking journey. I started out at Bon Appétit, and I remember you were doing videos for them actually, so this is a fun serendipitous moment a few years later. Yeah, I started out on their editorial team. Before that, I hadn't worked formally in any sort of media actually. I was doing communications and whatnot for nonprofits, and I was just cooking and furiously filling out my food blog all the time by the time I applied to BA, and since then I've dabbled in a variety of things that have now gotten me to writing this cookbook.
Chrissy Tracey:
And it's been so fun to watch your journey, I might add. You are doing incredible things, and I hope to attend one of your pop-ups soon.
Mehreen Karim:
Likewise.
Chrissy Tracey:
And Srishti, how about you? How did you get your start in the food world?
Srishti Jain:
I really just started as a home chef and during the pandemic I made my personal Instagram public, and I was documenting all of the things that I was cooking. I had a little micro bakery in my apartment, and from there I moved to New York and got to work in a bunch of restaurants and ended up here today.
Chrissy Tracey:
Real quick aside, can you tell me a little bit about that micro bakery?
Srishti Jain:
Definitely, so I've always loved to cook since I was little, but baking was kind of a blind spot for me. As I got older, I wanted to dabble a little bit more in baking and got really obsessed with making cakes, and so during the pandemic, I started making these elaborate three to six-tier cakes and I would just post about them on my Instagram and people would buy them. Then I got to evolve into making more tarts and pies, but it was really just run out of my home.
Chrissy Tracey:
What inspired you both to focus on plant-based cooking, and how has that shaped your career path? I'll start with Reenie because I know that you're not technically plant-based, but I'm curious about that crossover and if that feels natural for you.
Mehreen Karim:
I know, feel like such a fraud talking to you about this, Chrissy, with your own true plant-based lifestyle. It's interesting because so much of the history of plant-based cooking and techniques comes from a lot of traditional South Asian or generally Asian cooking traditions, so I didn't realize until I started formally developing recipes at BA and then afterwards cooking at pop-ups and trying to abide by dietary restrictions or writing recipes around dietary restrictions forces you to think about creative ways to implement flavors without sacrificing the integrity of ingredients, textures for whoever your audience is, whether they're online or you're serving them dinner.
It was a natural inclination to understand ingredients, whether they're animal-based or plant-based, so by the time I started discussing this book series with Workman, the publisher, and our agent, it felt natural to be able to think even further outside of the box and consider my own culinary heritage through the lens of plant-based cooking, which is southern food. I was raised in Georgia, born in Alabama, and pretty much just nomadically went around the south as a child until I stayed most of my life in Georgia around Atlanta.
The fact is that Georgia itself, specifically metro Atlanta, has a huge vegan/plant-based food scene, probably more extensive than I've seen in most major cities. There's a lot of credit there to influencing my lack of stigma against plant-based cooking because I know that stigma exists, especially in food people. I think that opened my eyes at an earlier age and made eating vegan and plant-based food pretty normal, so now cooking with it also feels natural, whether it's a strict lifestyle or not.
Chrissy Tracey:
That's awesome. And good food is good food is always what I say. And how about you Srishti? How did you get your start with plant-based cooking? What does it mean to you?
Srishti Jain:
I'm a lifelong vegetarian, and so is my entire family. I have a really deep relationship with eating vegetable-forward and then also in college I was vegan, so I got to also kind of experiment in that plant-based lifestyle, but as Reenie was mentioning, a lot of South Asian cooking is rooted in plant-based techniques and plant-based food.
I'm also Californian, so a lot of that cuisine is heavily rooted in vegetable-forward eating and just celebrating produce and celebrating plant-based cooking. So when it came time to write this book, it was pretty natural for me to be able to think about all the things that I ate growing up and really the thesis of the book is plant-based cooking has existed in the east forever, for centuries and in my mind I didn't even have a label for it. It was just how I ate on a daily basis growing up, and so being able to celebrate that and kind of bring up a lot of dishes that I ate growing up as well as some modern riffs on them was pretty natural and also really exciting because I get to bring things that I've been eating forever to the world.
Chrissy Tracey:
It's clear that you've worn many hats, recipe developer, writer, editor. Which role feels most like home to you and why?
Srishti Jain:
I think being in the kitchen always feels like the most home for me. Cooking, baking, having people over to eat. I have had a supper club for the past three or four years, and so hosting people and just being able to cook for them is by far my favorite thing.
Chrissy Tracey:
I have a supper club as well, so this is really exciting. We'll talk more about that later. I'll pass it off to you now, Reenie, you've worn so many hats. You've done pop-ups, you continue to do them, and it's really fun to watch that on Instagram. You're a writer, recipe developer. Which role feels most at home to you?
Mehreen Karim:
It's a bittersweet answer because when I am under stress and in the kitchen at any of these pop-ups, that's where my brain feels at home, unfortunately. I can recognize my brain optimizing its capacity every single second. Honestly, it was after shooting “Next Level Chef,” which is a gamified cooking competition show, but you actually do have 30 minutes to cook from all these random ingredients, and it was there that I was like, why am I not dying while trying to accomplish that?
Once I started doing pop-ups, it made me realize that constantly feeling challenged and bound by parameters of whether it's your kitchen leading a staff of cooks, dealing with vendors and whatnot, that whole side of culinary expertise, the leadership side that comes with being a chef, I think is where I found my personality shine, not just my creativity. It's a great time to pitch and share recipes with the internet and food media and magazines and whatnot to exercise all parts of my personhood and who I've become today as someone who has an intuitive flair for cooking and thinking on the fly, but also for working with large groups of people and leading a team. Those things all came together and come together whenever I do pop-ups.
Kerry Diamond:
We'll be right back with today's guests. Today's official Bombesquad shout-out is Gustiamo. You know when you taste something and it just stops you in your tracks, like, “how is this even real” kind of good? That's exactly the feeling I had the first time I tried the Sicilian pistachio spread from Gustiamo. Gustiamo is a woman-founded independent importer of real deal Italian food. For over 25 years, they've been working with Italian farmers, olive oil producers, bakers, cheese makers, you name it, people who dedicate their lives to making Italy the dreamy, delicious, cultural haven we all fantasize about.
Right now, their spring hero is a pistachio spread made by flavor genius Marco Colzani. It was a smash hit at Cherry Bombe Jubilee where folks literally signed up for seconds and thirds. Why? Because it's got this perfect balance of richness and simplicity. Raw Italian beet sugar, real Sicilian pistachios peeled to show off that emerald glow, extra virgin olive oil and a tiny pinch of sea salt. That's it. I've been pairing it with strawberries, swirling it into yogurt, and okay, just eating it by the spoonful, no shame.
You can find the pistachio spread at gustiamo.com and follow them along on Instagram @gustiamo. Again, that's gustiamo.com.
The founders of Gustiamo are official Bombesquad members. If you'd like to be an official Bombesquad member, visit cherrybombe.com for all the details and perks, like discounts on event tickets and invites to our monthly member meetings. The next one is happening tomorrow, Tuesday the 13th, and it's featuring today's guest host, Chrissy Tracey, in conversation with the one and only Jacques Pépin in advance of his 90th birthday celebration. The Bombesquad is an amazing community, and we'd love for you to be part of it. Visit cherrybombe.com to learn more.
Chrissy Tracey:
Srishti, I just wanted to say, your voice in this book is so warm and assured. When I was reading through the pages, I felt that I was in the kitchen with you. I'd love to hear more about your journey there, and how did you specifically find your way into food writing?
Srishti Jain:
I have always wanted to do something like write a cookbook, but it's something that I saw for myself maybe 10 or 15 years from now, so it was an extremely surreal moment when Reenie reached out to me on Instagram DM to say, "Hey, do you have..." Well, actually first she had reached out over the summer of 2022 and asked to send some writing samples over, and I had been working kind of harder on recipe development because that's really kind of the direction that I wanted to go.
A couple of months later, I heard from her about hopping on a call and she asked if I wanted to write a cookbook in this series, “Make It Plant-Based.” At that time, it didn't have a name yet, specifically about Indian cooking. Actually, up until then, as an Indian woman, Indian cooking is a huge part of my life, but I also hadn't really dabbled that much in writing my own Indian food recipes, and so I was actually at first a little bit hesitant, but I felt like this would be a really great opportunity to explore all the things again that I've been eating growing up, my relationship with my family, especially the maternal figures in my family as they have always been the chefs in the kitchen and then kind of go from there.
My goal was really for that kind of energy to come through in the book, and so as I wrote the book, I did make it a very kind of social and communal activity for me and actually the chat chapter specifically, so as I mentioned, I have a supper club and I would host kind of these afternoon chai editions of the supper club where I would have people over and test recipes from the book and make chai and we would sit in my apartment for hours. I would get feedback on the recipes from them and try different things out, and so it really kind of was a big communal effort to get to this point, and I'm so lucky that I got to explore that part of my heritage as well.
Chrissy Tracey:
Your chai party write-up read like an invitation into your home. How important is hospitality to you in the way you cook and write?
Srishti Jain:
Oh, it is the biggest part for me. That is the reason that I feel like community building and just being able to share food with people is the most important part of food to me, and whether it's hosting people in my home or through any sort of popups I've done, just seeing people together and eating the food together and it's more about the conversation in that chapter, How to Host a Chai Party. I mentioned that one of the most important parts of it is the gossip and know just exchanging those stories, so yeah, that aspect is the whole reason that I feel like I cook to begin with.
Chrissy Tracey:
Your chilla recipe stood out to me, not just because it's delicious, but also because it uses tofu in such a creative way, a way I would've never thought of. Do you see tofu as a cultural bridge ingredient in plant-based Indian cooking?
Srishti Jain:
Yeah, I definitely do, so I use tofu in the book a lot in place of paneer, which is a traditional Indian firm cottage cheese. One of my goals with the book was, as I mentioned, I really wanted to celebrate the plant-based eating that has always existed in the east, so the book actually uses very, very few vegan substitutes or traditional plant-based substitutes. Tofu is kind of treated like a vegetable in places like China, and so I very much wanted to use it in the same way where it's something that we're familiar with in the West as a common vegan ingredient, but also is really familiar to folks in the east, and so by treating it similar to paneer and really kind of taking advantage of that, spicing it that way, et cetera, I feel like yes, it bridges that gap, but it also still represents eastern culture and eastern cooking.
Chrissy Tracey:
This is why whenever I travel, I know where I'm going to eat. It's always going to be an Indian restaurant where I can find some plant-based comfort foods for myself, so I love it. Going off of that, there's a real sense of honoring tradition in your book, but also a confidence to reinterpret. How do you navigate the balance between respect and reimagination? And the reason I ask is because this is something I'm really curious about having to have navigated that myself as a first-generation Jamaican American chef.
Srishti Jain:
I completely relate to that. It's funny because the people that I argue with this about the most are my parents. I make a lot of modifications to dishes that I ate growing up and my mom will immediately be like, "Oh, that's not the same dish." But then I kind of reminded her that you eat different variations of pasta and you eat different variations of a Thai curry at a modern Thai restaurant and you still consider that Thai food, you still consider that Italian food, why not have the same thought towards Indian food? I think that really helped kind of open up her mind to this and for me personally as being someone from California, I really wanted to highlight that aspect of my life and my style of cooking in the book and bring that into Indian cooking, especially because there are so many Indian people in California. And so I use a lot of produce like Brussels sprouts and asparagus and eggplant and just things that you don't always find in traditional Indian cooking because it is very present in Californian food.
And I think another part of it is I also just wanted to make the recipes as accessible as possible. When I think about having some sort of fusion or reimagining traditional Indian cooking, I want someone who's not Indian, who's not plant-based even to look at the book and see things that feel familiar to them and produce that they've cooked with before, ingredients that they've cooked with before, so that also really helped kind of dictate how I was going to build these recipes.
Chrissy Tracey:
And I really enjoyed that sentiment because my whole philosophy with plant-based cooking is to meet people where they are and not try to force anything on them, but to find those bridges of familiarity so that you can get people to open up and try new things, so that's very cool. One more thing I wanted to talk about was you wrote about prepping chai in advance and serving unsweetened with sugar on the side, which I haven't heard of before, so I found this to be such a generous touch. Do you think that we underestimate the role of choice in personalizing and plant-based food?
Srishti Jain:
Oh, that's a great question. I think so. One of the ways that I approach cooking and the way I approach food is again, coming back to that question of accessibility, I think everyone can cook. I think everyone has their own taste and has amazing taste. Even in the book, there are these sidebars like Remix It and Mealify It that really encourage someone to use the recipe in the way that serves them best, and my essays actually really focus on that as well. I have this recipe called the Subsy Formula that explains any vegetable you have in the fridge, here's how you can make a dry curry out of it. I have another one called Pakora Anything and Everything, where you can make a fried fritter, again out of anything. I really love that idea of choice in cooking and it just makes cooking a lot more accessible, I believe.
Chrissy Tracey:
Last but not least, if someone is trying to plan a plant-based Indian dinner party, what would be your go-to lineup from the book?
Srishti Jain:
Oh, okay, so I would definitely start off with the fruit chaat. It is a spiced fruit. You can use any fruit that you have, salad kind of thing. It's really refreshing and a great way to start off. Definitely have some chai on the side, I think with that. From there, I think I would definitely go to a pakora a little bit heavier. It's a fried fritter. And then for the mains, I love the wild mushroom biryani. It is served in a paella-style presentation and that's how it's cooked as well, so it's broad and covered with these crispy mushrooms.
I think the jalapeno butter tofu is just a classic. It's meant to remind people of a butter chicken or a butter paneer, but it's completely plant-based. And then I think it's probably pretty easy to add in something like the all-day chole or a dal on the side just to have a curry. I think for dessert, I am extremely partial to the black forest cake. I love to bake and I love cakes in general and that cake is really easy. It's plant-based, but I think it celebrates those flavors of plant-based like a coconut whip that's the perfect cherry on top, literally because it has cherries on top.
Chrissy Tracey:
I like that a lot, and also you had me at mushrooms. I wanted to ask you, I used to work in tech before I was in food and one of the things I had to do a lot was translate technical jargon was what they'd call it into something anyone could understand, and I feel like that skill shows up in the kitchen a lot too, and one thing I noticed is that you do that so beautifully across your Instagram, across your substack, across the book. One of the things that I'm thinking about is the way you broke down biscuit lamination. I clearly understand it because a chef, but someone that's new to cooking could look at that and say, "I think I can make a good biscuit right now." How do you think about that kind of accessibility when you're developing recipes in that lens?
Mehreen Karim:
I've always wanted to answer this question. It's so funny. Whenever we do game nights with friends, my husband and I argue over how to explain a game and I'm always, I'm going to zoom out first, teach a concept at almost a metaphorical level. I want you to feel immersed in what you're about to do and then we're going to go level by level deeper into the micros. When you mentioned the biscuit explanation and just how to build a better biscuit in general, that's kind of the approach I took. There's three sections. It just allows you to look at the three components of a biscuit that are going to make or break the quality of your final product, and one of them is the butter and how the butter acts and why are we dicing butter and grading butter? What does that do?
The way I describe anything that is tangible, I have to make it abstract, almost like a metaphor for people to feel some sort of relation to. I want them to connect a different part of their brain to a recipe rather than just think about the ingredients because usually people that are reading recipes for the first time or cracking open a cookbook for the first time are assuming that they're here to learn. They're assuming they're a beginner when reading what you have to say, just by this self-proclaimed teacher-student dynamic when you read something. And I almost want to just level with them first and be like, these are little blocks of butter that are going to release steam in a flat formation. I just want as much imagery there as possible because that's how I've always learned.
It's funny you mentioned being from a tech job because I also said earlier that I used to do media and digital communications for nonprofits and the nonprofits were actually for sexual and reproductive health and that's my entire education is in global health and so much of that job is being able to distill seemingly pedantic information into something that's both meaningful and memorable for a reader. That's where I got a lot of my practice in just persuading someone to understand a concept. You have to teach someone that they can do something before even teaching them how to do it.
Chrissy Tracey:
I like that because I do feel like in order to teach, you have to empower first, and that's something I'm working on, so you're someone I need to talk to.
Mehreen Karim:
That's a great way to put it.
Chrissy Tracey:
Another thing is that you have these really beautiful freestyle suggestions, like turning fried mushrooms into biscuit sliders with maple syrup. Where does that intuitive cooking voice come from?
Mehreen Karim:
It comes from the fact that I grew up such a brat who wanted to customize everything I ate, and that's why that's a part of the book, especially. Srishti was talking about how that's a natural part of Indian cooking. You asked about customizing that level of generosity and hospitality in providing your guests or whoever you're cooking for a customized experience. I think shouldn't be some high standard and it's very accurate for South Asian cooking for the “Make It Plant-Based! Indian” book. The reason that's in there, the reason that's so natural to serve sugar on the side of chai is because how dare you decide how much sugar someone wants? That's like unheard of in our household, so I'm so glad you touched on that.
I think that's what makes it so fun to see an Indian cookbook as a first part of this series and even a southern cookbook. There's a lot of hospitality when it comes to cooking for others and I just want people to feel like, like you said, empowered first. I want people to feel like their choice is the right choice and if they taste what they're doing, then they will figure out if it's right or wrong. I'm not going to tell them that the way they freestyle something is going to be wrong. I'll even show them some of the wacky ways they can do it.
Chrissy Tracey:
I know you mentioned growing up down south, so I wanted to talk about that a little bit. Southern comfort food is so tied to memory, identity, and tradition, it holds a lot of weight. What drew you to reinterpret it through a plant-based lens? Was there anything in particular besides the fact that you grew up down south kind of immersed in the culture?
Mehreen Karim:
We kind of touched on the conceptualization of the entire series, and I think that actually makes sense to maybe share a little bit here. We wanted to create a series that, first of all, made people who aren't strictly plant-based feel like their food memories and positive food experiences can come from just working with pantry ingredients that don't include dairy or meat and whatnot. Again, that's why I felt natural to do an Indian cookbook, especially isn't necessarily vegan now, but it was so natural for her to eat that way and that goes for a lot of the authors in the series.
And similar for me, I wasn't even strictly vegetarian growing up, but I was noticing how much the food I was eating growing up was plant-forward because of the produce in the south shore. Why was the most popular restaurant in my college town of University of Georgia, it's in Athens, Georgia. It's maybe a 10 street block of a downtown area, and there's a lot of great restaurants, but our favorite one to go to and almost everyone's favorite one to go to was a plant-based restaurant. It was a vegan restaurant. They don't know, I didn't even know it, but they influenced me completely because it immediately conflated the ideas of good food and the food you get on an occasion. The pastry case I wanted to visit was at this vegan restaurant, not at any other bakery in my college town.
When we were conceptualizing the series and we were figuring out, okay, we want an Indian cookbook for sure, we want some type of Southeast Asian cookbook, we ended up with Filipino. We definitely want something Latin American. We have Mexican in the series, and when the publisher and agent, they're like, could you do southern? At first, I was like, what? I hate presenting myself or my ideas of something that's not naturally occurring. I had to do a lot of memory digging to realize that actually a lot of my favorite food memories were indeed plant-forward or plant-based.
Chrissy Tracey:
There's something really intentional about the sauces in this book, like the mustard barbecue, coconut lime soup base. I get the sense you see sauces as more than just a condiment. Can you go into that a little bit more?
Mehreen Karim:
Yeah, sauces, sometimes I tell people that I just eat certain foods as a vehicle for a sauce. That's probably all of our favorite foods, like Caesar salad, who cares about the Romaine? We're here for how good the Caesar dressing is or the croutons. This hints towards my association with some of the fast food I had growing up in the south, and I don't mean to qualify it as just fast food, really what I mean are really good fried chicken restaurants and joints that do focus a lot on their sauces and sometimes you decide where you're going to eat based on the condiments that come with those meals.
I think there is a lot of intentionality behind choosing pungent flavors that can mend well with a variety of bases in the book, so there's a lot of main dishes that can be dressed up with different types of sauces, and one of the sauces is a magic mayo that the base is tofu.
Chrissy Tracey:
I saw that.
Mehreen Karim:
Okay, great. That's one of the bases of most of my sauces. When I make pasta, I think in the book both of the mac and cheese recipes call for a cashew cream instead. That's just for the longevity of it, but when I make pasta at home and I don't feel like using cream, I'm blending silken tofu, which is how we get the magic mayo in this book as well. A lot of foods I like to eat are just vehicles for sauces.
Chrissy Tracey:
Starting with Srishti, do you have a motto or a mantra?
Srishti Jain:
I think “Just keep swimming” is definitely my sort of inner mantra, not only because I am a swimmer and swam growing up, but also that is very much how I'm navigating everything in my life.
Chrissy Tracey:
How about you, Reenie?
Mehreen Karim:
I should have a mantra. I think that would be great for my mental health, but one of my cooking things I say to people is, you're not bad at cooking, you're bad at failing. That's some therapy for you. Because I think people just refuse to take risks in a lot of places and they're afraid to take risks when they're spending time and money on ingredients and cooking, and I think releasing the pressure of failure would be really helpful for people who want to cook more.
Chrissy Tracey:
We kind of touched on this question a little bit already, but I wanted to go into it more in-depth. I always say that once you know how to cook plants, you've mastered it all. I don't know if you agree with me or not, but if you do, where do you think plant-based cooking pushes chefs to be more creative in the kitchen?
Srishti Jain:
I think definitely some of those vegetables that people are a little bit afraid of, and it's exactly what you're saying. Once you start to learn to conquer those, I think you can feel pretty invincible in the kitchen. Some of the ones that I worked through are okra and eggplant and some of the squashes and just figuring out how to make them texturally delicious and flavorly delicious. I think once you figure that out, you can cook anything.
Mehreen Karim:
I usually hate okra, but I have one okra recipe in my book, too.
Srishti Jain:
That's the cover of my book. The cover is okra.
Mehreen Karim:
Yeah. Oh my gosh. No, I agree. Okra is very difficult. If I wasn't going to say vegetables that you don't like the texture of because that's a great answer and usually my first, my second answer is replacing fats and binders, so butter and eggs, which when you think about, are the backbone of many European cuisines. French food gets away with so much because they can use so much fat in eggs and binders and you don't have to rely as much on other layers of flavor because you can immediately taste your produce just with a really luxurious fat. That's often what you find in good European food. So learning your way around that and understanding how to use fats appropriately and bring out flavors and the Maillard reaction of heating something up and caramelizing something without the ingredients that you usually would.
Chrissy Tracey:
You both approach different cuisines, but there's a shared energy. This isn't diet food, this is food for joy. What conversations did you have as part of this series about how plant-based food is perceived?
Mehreen Karim:
I'm happy to start, actually, and even discuss my reflection of Srishti's book. I'm also South Asian, so I have a pretty strong opinion before meeting and working with Srishti on her book that there is unfortunately advantage taken of South Asian cuisines when it comes to modern western vegan food. When I started working in the series, it was my dream to make sure that the Indian cookbook in the series not only did justice to the region and the ingredients, but also was very honest to whoever the author was and provided a really fresh point of view because there's actually quite a lot of vegan lentil soups instead of dal and using chickpea flour actually as some sort of 100 calorie protein pancake. It's so disturbing and it's such a dream to see the recipes in the plant-based Indian cookbook because not only does it rectify the really bland narrative that's out there about the intersection of Indian food and health food, but because of the Californian produce in it is so innovative and vibrant.
So the pakoras she was mentioning, they use beets. I wrote an article about pakoras a few years ago, and beets were never part of the conversation. There's so many examples of that in the book that I hope people realize that the conversations didn't even have to be that hard because it was so natural for Srishti to understand what people wanted to eat and see because it actually aligned already with the way she cooked. I can already see those recipes being the new trendy Indian recipes. I hope to God they replace what's out there right now, and the reason I wanted to start talking about that perspective on Srishti's book is because the Southern book actually takes a different turn, where there is a misconception around southern food being strictly unhealthy and too indulgent and all of these other misconceptions. That was the conversation I had to have with myself and family members in the south, and just reflecting on my time whenever I visit Georgia and how I'm eating and what I'm thinking about when I look at good restaurants there, and I realized that a lot of my favorite restaurants are extremely plant-forward.
It's just a matter of the fact that people confuse a plate of vegetables with health food simply because they're not paying attention to how they're preparing side vegetables, and so there's a summer squash casserole that, sure, it's filled with zucchini, but it's also topped with crispy breadcrumbs and fresh tomatoes, and all of those things are sweet and crispy and speak to somebody's taste buds in a different way than a fried chicken sandwich, but there is also a fried mushroom sandwich in there to replicate that craving. So yeah, I see the two books as inherently correcting a lot of false narratives out there about their separate cuisines.
Srishti Jain:
Yeah. Oh, thank you so much for saying that about Indian cuisine and kind of its marriage with plant-based cuisine, because that was completely on my mind when writing this. As a lifelong vegetarian, I have never felt the absence of meat in my life. I love plant-based food, but I completely understand that perspective because I've also felt people thinking that there's something absent in plant-based cooking or it's not a full meal because it doesn't include meat. I really wanted to start to change that narrative or work around that a little bit, and I really love that you brought up that these books are not focused in any way on diet culture. They're not even focused on converting someone into a plant-based eater. It's really meant to have a full table of really hearty beautiful food that won't even make you start to question the absence of meat because that won't even be on your mind, and that's the perception that I feel like I've been working on forever and continue to kind of work on through this book and what I really hope people take away from it.
At the end of the day, if you're even just eating plant-based for one meal a week or one day a week, I think that's amazing. That's a great celebration of plant-forward cooking, and that's all I really hope for.
Chrissy Tracey:
So just a quick note here, these books are more than recipes. They're also a soft guidance on how to live and host with care, and I'm so proud of you both. I just wanted to say that.
Srishti Jain:
Thank you.
Chrissy Tracey:
If someone's just getting into plant-based cooking, which dish in your book would you want them to start with and why? I'll start with Reenie.
Mehreen Karim:
Okay. I have my book in front of me. I would say the pancakes. I have a cardamom-infused pancake. I think it's a blueberry pancake, but you can use whatever fruit, and they turn out really fluffy. The technique it's trying to teach you almost has very little to do with plant-based cooking in general, so you trick yourself into learning how to make fluffy tender pancakes without butter and eggs, and you actually learn an entirely new technique, which is how to infuse coconut oil, the fat you're going to use to cook your pancakes with cardamom first so it doesn't overpower the pancake, which is an accomplishment on my part because I think we just throw a lot of cardamom powder into desserts.
Right now, Srishti's nodding, because that's what a lot of South Asian fusion recipes will do, and they're delicious. They can be delicious, but there's some merit to layering flavors more gently, and that's what I actually wanted to teach the reader with these pancakes is you can first infuse cardamom into your coconut oil and then use that coconut oil to fry each of your pancakes off and it'll just smell of cardamom without overpowering it.
Chrissy Tracey:
Last question before the speed round. Any tips or tricks for our listeners today?
Srishti Jain:
I think for me, my biggest tip/trick is take your time. You watch cooking videos, you'll watch YouTube videos, you'll watch cooking shows, and everyone's moving so fast, and there is absolutely no need for that. If you are starting to cook or if you feel anxiety around cooking, just take as much time as you need, do your mise en place and really spend time with it, and that's where you're going to get your enjoyment from.
Mehreen Karim:
I think my tip is maybe a sub-tip of that, which is while you're taking your time, read the entire recipe first. Approach it like a storybook. See, I zoom out first. I just need you to go into it and pretend it's a fairytale about what you're about to make, visualize yourself making things while you're reading the recipe, and then start getting your ingredients and mise en place like Srishti said.
Chrissy Tracey:
So we're going to go into our speed round. I love this part. What song is stuck in your head these days?
Srishti Jain:
Pondeggi by Yaeji. It is so good. I just ran the half-marathon on Sunday, and it was like the first and last song I listened to. It is just a great running song and great dancing song.
Mehreen Karim:
The Gilmore Girls Theme by The Lalas, they sing in between the different scenes in “Gilmore Girls.” I love that entire soundtrack.
Chrissy Tracey:
Three words that describe your food philosophy.
Mehreen Karim:
Specific, personal, and memorable.
Srishti Jain:
Use more salt.
Chrissy Tracey:
How do you take your coffee or tea, if you drink it either?
Mehreen Karim:
iced oat cappuccino or flat white, aka an iced oat latte with less milk.
Srishti Jain:
Not a big caffeine drinker, but I do love an oat cappuccino.
Chrissy Tracey:
Guilty pleasure takeout order.
Srishti Jain:
Papa John's Pizza.
Mehreen Karim:
I was about to say nothing feels guilty, but yeah, I actually like Domino's Pizza. That would be it.
Chrissy Tracey:
Kitchen tool you can't live without?
Srishti Jain:
These days, it's a spatula. I'm obsessed with spatulas.
Mehreen Karim:
I just got the Gir, G-I-R, silicon spatula set, and I use all of them.
Chrissy Tracey:
Life changing.
Srishti Jain:
Wow. I need that.
Chrissy Tracey:
One dish from your book that you could eat every week forever.
Mehreen Karim:
The crispy golden tofu. That's one of the dishes that I actually had at the vegan restaurant. I ate that all the time going to college, and that's what I remake almost every week.
Srishti Jain:
The spiced potato sandwiches with the jalapeno chutney. I used to eat those. My mom used to make those basically every weekend growing up for brunch, and I should be making them more now.
Chrissy Tracey:
If you were stranded on a desert island, who would you want to be stranded with and why?
Srishti Jain:
My brother, he is so funny, so he would make me laugh the entire time. He's an Eagle Scout, or he was a Boy Scout, so I can also rely on him to help me with a bit of fire making and sheltering.
Mehreen Karim:
I would say my husband, just because I've trained him well, he's the best sous chef and assistant, but also a leader if I need him to be, so I can ask him to hunt and gather anything I need, and he'll find a way to bring it.
Chrissy Tracey:
Well, thank you so much, Reenie Karim and Srishti Jain, for joining us today on Radio Cherry Bombe. It has been my absolute pleasure to speak with you and good luck on your cookbook journeys. I'm very proud of you. They are incredible cookbooks. They're vibrant.
Srishti Jain:
Thank you so much.
Mehreen Karim:
Thanks, Chrissy.
Chrissy Tracey:
Thank you.
Kerry Diamond:
That's it for today's show. Thank you to Chrissy Tracey for filling in for me today. If you love Chrissy and you're an official Bombesquad member, be sure to check your inbox for details on tomorrow's member meeting. Chrissy in conversation with Jacques Pépin. You don't want to miss that. Also, the Athens, Georgia restaurant that Reenie mentioned, The Grit, is sadly closed, but they do have a cookbook if you want to check that out. Don't forget to listen to Cherry Bombe's baking podcast, She's My Cherry Pie, hosted by Jessie Sheehan. New episodes drop on Saturday mornings wherever you get your podcasts. Our theme song is by the band Tralala. Joseph Hazan is a studio engineer at Newsstand Studios. Our producers are Tarkor Zehn, Catherine Baker, and Jenna Sadhu, and our editorial coordinator is Sophie Kyes. Thanks for listening, everybody. You're the Bombe.