Open Kitchen | Susan Spungen

Open Kitchen
Inspired Food For Casual Gatherings

By Susan Spungen

Intro:                  Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City sitting at her dining room table talking to cookbook authors.

Susan Spungen:                  Hi, I'm Susan Spungen and I'm here to talk about my latest cookbook, Open Kitchen.

Suzy Chase:                  So here in New York City we just ended week two of the coronavirus quarantine. In Open Kitchen you have some recipes scattered throughout the cookbook that you call projects. Since many of us have lots of time on our hands right now, I thought you could walk us through your French beef stew recipe on page 101, and I bet we have these ingredients on hand.

Susan Spungen:                  So, yeah, personally I've been definitely stocking up on the basic mirepoix vegetables, which is onion, carrot, celery, because I want to be ready to make soups and stews at a moment's notice. And I've been actually buying mushrooms too. So even if you can't get fancy hen of the woods mushrooms from your farmer's market right now or anywhere else, any kind of mushrooms are great in this stew. And you just need to get your hands on a nice big chuck roast and you're ready to go to make this really comforting stew that even if you're not going to be serving it to guests, you can share it with your family and you could also divvy it up and freeze some for later, which is what I've been doing a lot of batch cooking lately.

Suzy Chase:                  So I started making this, this morning and I don't have pearl onions. White onions are okay?

Susan Spungen:                  Look, you can always make substitutions, especially in … Like this. It has to have that onion flavor in it, but if you don't have pearl onions or can't even get a bag of frozen pearl onions, then just chop up a white onion and put that in in the beginning.

Suzy Chase:                  Could I use stew meat too?

Susan Spungen:                  Yeah, you could. I wrote the recipe to cook the meat in larger pieces, like if you got one big chuck roast. But if you buy stew meat, that's the same cut of meat just cut in smaller pieces. Either one is fine, a big roast or cut into, I think, four pieces I have it in the recipe. Or you can just use stew meat.

Susan Spungen:                  The reason I did it with a big chuck roast and bigger pieces is because I just found the final product to be moister and juicier while you still got the flavor into the sauce from searing three or four bigger pieces of meat and then you pull them apart at the end and the sauce sort of bathes all of those wonderful craggy surface areas with delicious sauce. If you can just get stew meat that works perfectly well. Because when you cook it for two-and-a-half, three hours, it will get tender no matter what.

Suzy Chase:                  So talk a little bit about the demi-glace concentrate.

Susan Spungen:                  Yeah, that's something I always have in my kitchen and I think it came from working at one point in my career with a couple of classically trained chefs. I learned how to actually make demi-glace from scratch in giant kettles full. And it's just a really invaluable ingredient, I think, for making flavorful sauces. There are so many things you can do without that, making a quick pan sauce, whatever, but demi-glace is when you've cooked down veal and beef bones for many, many hours, strained it, reduce it again. It's rather labor intensive although it could be a once a year project for anybody that likes doing those kind of things.

Susan Spungen:                  You can get some really good high quality demi-glace concentrates and it's a very hard jelly, because that is from all the collagen from the bones, and it really adds … A big spoonful of that in something like the French beef stew, it just adds so much richness and flavor that would be hard to get otherwise because a canned beef stock or a box beef stock, you might as well not even … In my opinion, it's just salt water. It doesn't really have a lot of flavor and it's mostly salt. So I tend to avoid beef stock in a box.

Suzy Chase:                  So just quickly going down the ingredients, I think everyone has these in their kitchen. It's beef, butter, olive oil, garlic, red wine, beef stock, bay leaves. So easy. So you've had a lot of practice making this dish both in your real life and professional life. Can you tell us the story behind the recipe?

Susan Spungen:                  Well, I have had a lot of practice with boeuf bourguignon, which this is loosely based on the classic French recipe. I worked on a little move called Julie & Julia, and this was the recipe that we cooked the most throughout the three months that I worked on Julie & Julia. It just came up again and again and again in different scenes and it was just to me the quintessential Julia Child dish. And it's so delicious and so good that I didn't mind making it over and over again.

Susan Spungen:                  I've tweaked it and perfected it and made it my own by making the … It's a little more vegetable heavy than the classic. I roast the vegetables on the side and throw them into the sauce at the end rather than stewing them along with the meat the whole time because I really like … It makes it a little more vegetable forward. I found when I eat this dish, I like the sauce and I like the vegetables. I don't really need to eat a lot of the meat and I'm not a huge meat eater, so I like it but I don't want to eat a big, big portion of it. That's why I've tried to balance out the meat with a little more vegetable.

Suzy Chase:                  Did you ever meet Julia Child?

Susan Spungen:                  I did. I did. Back in my Martha Stewart Living days, when she was working on a book and companion TV series called Baking with Julia, Martha Stewart was one of the people that she had come up to Cambridge, along with lots of other different pastry chefs from all over the country on different days. Our day came and, of course being the food editor, I was the one down in the basement making the wedding cake and Martha was on TV talking about it. But it was a great experience.

Susan Spungen:                  Of course now to say that I've been in that kitchen that's now preserved in amber in the Smithsonian is cool. I had a real experience there with Julia and our shoot went over two days, so she actually cooked us dinner in her kitchen. We ate out on her patio, it was summertime. The night that we stayed over in Cambridge and then we went back and filmed the second day. That was pretty cool.

Susan Spungen:                  I had met her at a couple of different events. I actually went to her 80th birthday celebration, which was a big deal at the Rainbow Room. That was when I had first started working at Martha Stewart Living. And then about 10 years later we did this book project with her. And then I met her a couple other times too, at the IACP Awards I remember seeing her. I got an award for the Martha Stewart's Hors d'Oeuvres Handbook, which I was the co-author of, and on my way up to the stage to accept the award, she said … Should I do my imitation? She said, "It's a wonderful book. I got it at Costco."

Suzy Chase:                  Were those awards the year that they had them in San Antonio?

Susan Spungen:                  No. I don't remember but I've never been to San Antonio so it wasn't there. I can't remember which city it was, it might have been Portland. I'd have to look. I think it was 1999 that we won that award. I'd have to go back and do research to know which city it was in, but it was not San Antonio.

Suzy Chase:                  Because I think the year before I went to the IACP Awards in San Antonio, and she was there. The room just stopped. When she walked in everyone was like, "My God, Julia's here."

Susan Spungen:                  Yeah, I think she was one of the founders of IACP. She used to go every year. And then I saw her out here once in the Hamptons for the James Beard Awards. So I think those are all the times that I had met her.

Suzy Chase:                  I love it. So on your Instagram you wrote, "Some good things. I'm achieving my goal of eating dinner earlier and it's getting lighter later by the day. It's hard not to find one's self happy to feel spring coming despite this world we're living in right now. Cooking is truly getting me through all of this."

Susan Spungen:                  The truth is I've been having … I've barely been enjoying cooking. I always enjoy cooking, that's why I've made it my career, but I have been … I think a lot of people who cook already especially have been finding a lot of solace in cooking right now. And it's just the act of cooking, it's not about cooking for others, although it probably is about cooking for whoever's in your household. But I know there are people who are quarantining alone who are enjoying cooking too.

Susan Spungen:                  But I just find that I've had a few strategies that have been getting me through. Which is really just about cooking more than you need for any one particular meal. I've been cooking a big pot of beans and then I'll make a soup with some of the brothy beans that are there and maybe a chili or maybe just rice and beans or incorporate the beans into a salad, or I might freeze some of them. I'll cook more grain than I need, like freekeh, and then I'm really trying hard not to let anything go bad.

Susan Spungen:                  So we've had some planned dinners and then we find ourselves with a surplus of already prepared ingredients so we do what we call scrounging, where we just put together meals based on what's in the fridge. My husband and I sometimes just eat different things. It's like, "Let's scrounge," and we each make our own thing. We're not going hungry that's for sure. Definitely eating less meat than I normally do even though we have meat.

Susan Spungen:                  Tonight we're having fish. We're here in Long Island and the fish market was full of wonderful fresh fish, so that seems like a treat right now. They had gorgeous, gorgeous halibut from Nova Scotia today, so that's what we're having for dinner.

Suzy Chase:                  I thank you for your cooking inspiration and take good care.

Susan Spungen:                  Thank you. You too.

Suzy Chase:                  Cooking makes you happy and it's a way you can make other people happy, but you didn't start out cooking. You first started out as an art student, then you moved on to become the dessert chef at Coco Pazzo on the Upper East Side, then founding food editor of Martha Stewart Living and I can't leave out culinary consultant on numerous movies, including Julie & Julia and Eat Pray Love. You've been called the queen of food. This cookbook is called Open Kitchen. What does Open Kitchen mean to you?

Susan Spungen:                  Well, when I was coming up with what's the hook for this book, after going through a few different ideas, I settled on this concept of an open kitchen. I loved the double meaning of that phrase. I had just finished renovating … I should say building a new kitchen in a newly renovated home and of course we wanted a big beautiful open kitchen.

Susan Spungen:                  I never really even had a very good kitchen before, so I really started entertaining in earnest when I had this home. Entertaining more in a more grownup way. And I realized that when you have this open kitchen space and your friends are literally walking right into it and most likely hanging out there while you're getting ready to eat dinner or lunch, whatever it may be, they can see everything you've been doing and working on. It made me want to get ahead even more than I already naturally did. And when I say get ahead I mean it's really about prepping and being ready. If there's something I can do a day ahead, I'm going to do it. If I can do it two days ahead I'm going to do it. So it just streamlines the cooking of the meal and also lessens the mess in the kitchen that everyone's going to walk into.

Susan Spungen:                  And then the other side of that meaning is just having it be a place to welcome friends and family and guests into your home and wrap them up in nurturing food. It's an open kitchen in that sense as well.

Suzy Chase:                  And this whole cookbook is all about your get ahead cooking philosophy.

Susan Spungen:                  It is.

Suzy Chase:                  So in the introduction you wrote, "A few years ago I came across the word sprezzatura."

Susan Spungen:                  Yup, that's perfect.

Suzy Chase:                  Really? My God. You wrote, "Not only did I love the way it sounded, I was intrigued by its translation which, simply put, means studied nonchalance." What is it about that word that caught your attention?

Susan Spungen:                  Well, like I said, I just love the way it sounded, but when I heard what it meant I thought, that's exactly what I strive for when I cook. I don't want things that seem fussy but, at the same time, I am willing to put some work in and I think you have to be willing to put a little bit of work in when you make good food. Let's face it, you have to shop, you have to plan your menu, you have to cook the food and pay some attention to how you're doing that. But the more you do it, the better you get at it.

Susan Spungen:                  And I want it to feel nonchalant even if I make something super delicious. Maybe it's an amazing dessert that I spent a little bit of time making, it's just sitting there on the counter during dinner and people can't … Their mouths are watering waiting for it. But they didn't see me executing that. So it just feels very nonchalant. What can I say? I really want it to always feel nonchalant and I also don't want my guests to feel put upon. That's why I want to be done in the kitchen. You'll never find people saying to me, "Can I help? Are you sure you don't need help?" I think people only say that when they see you struggling.

Suzy Chase:                  Yeah, I love that. Because I'm always like, "She needs help."

Susan Spungen:                  Yeah, exactly.

Suzy Chase:                  So you hear about chefs and you hear about home cooks, but this is a new one for me, professional home cook. What sets the professional home cook apart from the ordinary cook, which is what I am?

Susan Spungen:                  Right, well I'm glad you picked up on that because for years I worked in restaurants, I worked in catering, I still work as a food stylist and a recipe developer, but as a recipe developer I actually do work at home. So I have the skills of a professional but I have the mindset of a home cook. So it's just maybe kicking it up a notch. I create recipes for home cooks, but I'm doing it from a professional's point of view. So I really have to get inside the head of a home cook and realize what their limitations are, but also I want people to have something to aspire to. And, like I said right on the cover, I want people to be inspired.

Susan Spungen:                  And that's what I keep hearing from people over and over again about this book, how they feel inspired. Of course that is so gratifying. I'm so happy to hear it. Because that's what I want to do. I'm not about solving your every day problems. I'm about making you want to really spread your wings and fly.

Suzy Chase:                  Can you talk a little bit about how the book is organized?

Susan Spungen:                  So I start with simple starters and they are, as I say, simple. Really, really easy low effort things that you can put out for people to nibble on while … We call them nibbles in our house. Some of them are make ahead, like the dukkah crostini. I actually have this dukkah, which is a spice and nut and seed blend on hand from another recipe, and I thought, wow, that would be so good in crostini, which are those skinny breadsticks. That's a wonderful recipe.

Susan Spungen:                  That requires making ahead but there are other things that are super spontaneous, like grilled peas in the pod, edamame-style. You could buy a quart of English peas, the season is coming up really soon. I'm too lazy to shell peas myself so I just throw them on the grill in one of those grill baskets and char them and the peas inside don't need much cooking. And then people can just nibble on them, they just have a little olive oil and lemon zest and flaky salt on top.

Susan Spungen:                  Or there's a beautiful avocado tahini dip which I put out with all kinds of raw or slightly pickled vegetables. I think you get the idea. That's simple starters.

Susan Spungen:                  And then I break the centerpieces, which I think is something you should actually start with when you're planning a menu. What's the main event of the meal? I have centerpieces that are meat, poultry, fish and shellfish and then vegetarian or nearly. Because I don't like to leave out my vegetarian friends and my vegetarian readers because I know there are a lot of them. And I myself eat vegetarian part of the time because I enjoy it. The whole book is very vegetable forward. So the nearly vegetarian chapter might have a little thing you can remove, like a little bit of pancetta for flavor, still going to be great without it.

Susan Spungen:                  And then I have salads, which I think as side dishes because I like to have a lot of room temperature things when I do a menu because it doesn't really matter if things are hot. So I love a salad as a side dish. And then I have a vegetable chapter, a starchy side chapter and then a really big and robust dessert chapter.

Suzy Chase:                  So some Saturdays I wake up and think, all I want to do is spend the day in the kitchen cooking and listening to NPR. Tell us about your project recipes that are sprinkled throughout the cookbook.

Susan Spungen:                  I like to warn people. I don't want people to think, wow, that is really a lot of work, I wasn't expecting that. So I wanted to label them as projects and also as people, like you said, they sometimes want to embrace a project. I would say that all in all the projects are things that are really great things that can be made almost completely ahead. It just breaks down that way. A lot of things that are easy are more last minute things, but a lot of the things that are projects are things that you can make a couple days ahead of time and then serve the last minute, like the French beef stew, which I just saw someone making the other day and they loved it.

Susan Spungen:                  Osso buco sugo with orange gremolata, this is one of my absolute favorite things to make ahead. It's a braise so it takes a good couple hours and it has a veal osso buco, you could use beef shanks if you didn't want to use veal. It makes the most delightful pasta sauce. You can make this completely ahead of time. All you have to do is boil the pasta and make the gremolata at the last minute. The vegetable lasagna that I mentioned before is another project, but I think there's about five or six throughout the book and they're all centerpieces.

Suzy Chase:                  You approach cooking with an artist's sensibility, layering flavors, textures and colors. And one section of this cookbook that might be the definition of that is your toast section. Like your cassoulet toast recipe, can you describe this?

Susan Spungen:                  I really, from the very beginning, wanted to have this specific toast section and I wanted it laid out the way that you see it on a double page spread, so that you could see the … Be inspired by the array of things that you could do. Depending on how good a cook you are you might not need a recipe for some of these and they also might inspire recipes of your own.

Susan Spungen:                  The cassoulet toast I'd say is one of the more complex of the toasts, because you actually have to cook something. And when I first approached the book I wanted to do a cassoulet recipe because I thought that's such a great make ahead wonderful winter dish. And then I realized there is just no way to really streamline a cassoulet without really compromising on what it is. I just thought, what if I took the flavors of cassoulet and made them into a delicious hearty toast? You just have to caramelize onions, that's the most complex part of it, and then you take can of big butter beans and then you buy a duck confit leg at the supermarket, which if you look for it it's usually there with the bacon. D'Artagnan makes a great one and a couple other ones. It's almost a real shortcut to the very delicious flavors of cassoulet. And you could serve this actually as a lunch with a green salad, it would be fantastic.

Suzy Chase:                  In your go to pantry list on page 14, you included preserved lemons. I bought my first jar of preserved lemons a few weeks ago. So what is your favorite way to use preserved lemons in a dish?

Susan Spungen:                  Yeah. I think also mentioned that I also love preserved lemon paste, which I think is even easier. Now what you have to remember is that preserved lemons are preserved with salt. So what you're getting is … You actually only use the rind. If you're getting a jar of whole preserved lemons, you don't actually use the pulp. Just scrape out the pulp, which is very almost nonexistent by the time they're preserved. The pip part has been salted and it takes three months to make them, that's why I don't make them myself, I buy them.

Susan Spungen:                  They have a very strong flavor, a little bit like Indian lime pickle if you've ever had that as a condiment, similar. It's quite strong, you don't need a lot and you should always hold back on salting other parts of the dish until you've put them in because they contribute a lot of salt. So I like putting them into dressings and vinaigrettes. I love just a little bit of that preserved lemon paste in maybe a vinaigrette that you might put over fish. Because I love fish with something really zingy. Super zingy, salty, absolutely delicious.

Suzy Chase:                  Over the weekend I made your recipe for clams with chorizo and smoked paprika on page 155. Can you describe this recipe?

Susan Spungen:                  Sure, and thank you for giving me page numbers. Very helpful. I think I might have seen that on Instagram.

Suzy Chase:                  Yes.

Susan Spungen:                  Clams are something that people might walk past in the supermarket or the fish store, and don't underestimate them. Because when you cook clams they release this incredibly powerful flavorful broth that is a little bit of garlic, a little bit of white wine and some clams and you have a flavor bomb. Yeah, I cook this on the stove but I have also done the same thing on a gas grill or a live fire grill. If you have a big cast iron pan you could cook these outside on your grill.

Susan Spungen:                  These are Portuguese flavors really, mixing the idea of a spicy sausage like chorizo with clams. That's a very Spanish and Portuguese flavor combo. And how many ingredients do we have here? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Eight ingredients, quite a short list. Some cherry tomatoes, they help break down into a delicious sauce, and then just grill or toast some yummy bread and you have a great meal that you can stick in the middle of the table and have a messy feast with a couple of friends.

Suzy Chase:                  And you can dip your bread in that broth.

Susan Spungen:                  So good. Or let me give you another idea, another way to serve this, put a big piece of bread in four bowls and then spoon this over and let people eat the clams and then eat that soaked bread. Delicious.

Suzy Chase:                  My gosh, okay, I'm going to write that down. Now for my segment called My Favorite Cookbook. Aside from this cookbook, what is your all time favorite cookbook and why?

Susan Spungen:                  Well, lately I've been thinking about some of the books that I've kept over the years and I don't know if it's definitely my only all-time favorite, but a book that had a big influence on me early in my career was a book called Cucina Fresca written by Evan Kleiman, who's now on the radio, and Viana La Place.

Suzy Chase:                  I love her.

Susan Spungen:                  Yeah, and they had a series of books but Cucina Fresca was the first. And it was a revelation to me at the time because the recipes were so straightforward and simple and they were really based on mostly Tuscan ideas, and that's a sensibility that really appeals to me where less is more and true farm to table cooking. It just always inspired me. It taught me how to be simple.

Suzy Chase:                  Where can we find you on the web and social media?

Susan Spungen:                  Well, my website is my name, so just type in susanspungen.com or just Susan Spungen, it should come right up, and that's S-P-U-N-G-E-N, I'm used to always spelling my name because it's a little hard to figure out. And on social media, same thing, @susanspungen on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, everything.

Suzy Chase:                  Thanks so much for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.

Susan Spungen:                  Thanks for having me.

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