ON THIS WEEK’S episode of Dinner SOS, test kitchen director and host Chris Morocco is joined by senior test kitchen editor Shilpa Uskokovic to think up foolproof vegetarian recipes for Nelson to cook for his partner, Cate.
Nelson loves Cate’s cooking, but she’s chronically ill, and on days where she has a migraine or isn’t feeling her best, Nelson wants to be able to take care of her through cooking a really good meal. Chris brings in Shilpa, who’s both an incredible recipe developer and knows a thing or two about cooking for a partner with great taste in food. They brainstorm easy weeknight recipes (that are also vegetarian) for Nelson to try.
Shilpa suggests these Vegan Tacos, where rehydrated, sautéed soy curls are the star, and these Herby Cauliflower Fritters, which amp up frozen packaged cauliflower rice with herbs, Parmesan, and a yogurt sauce. Shilpa also throws in her own recipe for Samosa-dillas With Cucumber Salad, where between making the filling ahead of time and adding in lots of cheese, Nelson will be set up for success. Chris adds in these Cold Soy Milk Noodles With Chili Crisp, Cold Noodles With Tomato and Peanut Sauce, and Tofu Meatballs in Burst Tomato Sauce—three very tasty and shockingly easy-to-make options.
Listen now to hear which weeknight vegetarian recipes Nelson makes for his partner, Cate, with help from Chris and Shilpa.
Chris Morocco: Hey, Dinner SOS listeners. It's hard to believe it, but we're already thinking about Thanksgiving and we want to hear from you. If you have a Turkey Day SOS you'd like our help with, or if you just want to share with us why you’re excited for this year’s celebration, send us an email to dinnersos@bonappetit.com or leave us a voicemail at (212) 286-7030.
Hey there, listeners, future callers, and cooking enthusiasts. Welcome to Dinner SOS, the show where we help you save dinner or whatever you’re cooking. I’m Chris Morocco, food director of Bon Appétit and Epicurious.
Our caller today is Nelson. When he first called us, he was sharing his small Washington, DC, apartment with many, many other living creatures.
Nelson: I love animals. I have a lot of aquariums. I have, with my partner, Cate, two dogs and a cat.
CM: Okay. I cannot proceed without interrogating what you said about aquariums, just for a sec.
N: Oh yes. Let me give you that origin story. So like many people during the pandemic, I was sitting around on my couch and the YouTube algorithm started throwing everything at the wall toward me. And one of those things was this thing called aquascaping, the premise of which is just to create a beautiful underwater garden with a ton of aquatic plants in an aquarium and just lightly stock it with some fish. I’ve got all kinds of snails. I’ve got a saltwater aquarium with two clownfish and several corals and anemone, and it’s just a great way to bring nature into your living room and keep animals, while at the same time having a really beautiful and natural-looking piece of decor. And I just jumped into the deep end and now I have seven aquariums in my 500-square-foot apartment. It's kind of insane.
CM: How big are these aquariums?
N: Most of them about the size of a regular TV. It's like 30 gallons of water. It sounds like a lot, but-
CM: Yeah, you wouldn't want to spring a leak.
N: Exactly, yeah. So I'm very careful with that.
CM: I regrettably have to move on from this line of inquiry, but it is with a heavy heart that I announce we have to transition to talking about food.
N: Oh, what a shame.
CM: But I really would love to dig in further on this aquarium thing...
Nelson is mostly a self-taught cook. He’s learned through subscription meal kits and watching YouTube, a little trial and also a fair amount of error, it must be said.
N: And then I met my girlfriend, Cate, and she just opened my eyes and blew my mind. And for one thing, she's vegetarian and has been her whole life, and so I was immediately skeptical that I would enjoy her food, but everything she cooks is the best thing I’ve ever eaten. She can take potatoes and leeks and make the brightest, airiest, lightest, most delicious soup you’ve ever had in your life, which, to me, is a complete oxymoron. And she does it all at home and it’s incredible.
CM: Okay. So what prompted you to want to call?
N: Well, so like I said, Cate’s an incredible cook, and that’s just one of her many hobbies. She loves to read, she loves spending time with our animals, she’s very creative in interior design, and one of the things that she struggles with is that she's chronically ill. She gets migraines pretty much daily. Some days are better than others. And what really breaks my heart is those days where she just has a terrible migraine and she can’t do any of the things she loves. She doesn’t have the energy or the stamina and can’t withstand the pain of being up and functional.
CM: Sure.
N: So, what I would love to do is level up and be able to create really good dishes so that even when she’s in pain, when she has a good plate of food, it can distract her from the pain she's feeling, and it’s how I want to pay back that love.
CM: Wow. I mean, it’s coming from a very, very deep place. Completely understand wanting to take care of other people and food being a cornerstone of that emotion. Yeah, and so now you have this pressure on you, which is like she's the one who's got the skills. Maybe you’ve got the aquascaping thing down, but in the kitchen, you’re really looking to level up here.
N: Exactly.
CM: So yeah, describe to me what are some of the meals that you might make at home?
N: So, when I cook, earlier on in our relationship, I tried to cook some macaroni and cheese, and I thought it was brilliant to throw a bunch of raw red onions onto the mac and cheese.
CM: Onto the mac and cheese, the finished mac and cheese?
N: Yes. That was not well received. Well, on top of that, I’ve done even worse mac and cheese. I had the brilliant idea of buying a mango habanero cheese at the grocery store and trying to use that, and then just a pile of mustard powder.
CM: I mean, a touch of mustard powder as a seasoning, kind of flavor-amplifier, sure. Mango habanero cheese?
N: Exactly.
CM: So have things gotten better? Where are you at now?
N: So, where I am now, is that I really don’t feel comfortable in executing anything that I don’t already know how to do. I’m really bad when I try to follow recipes or try to do something on my own. I just don’t have that instinct or that ability to execute.
CM: Interesting.
N: I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been trying to follow a recipe and then it says, “Okay, now add the tomatoes,” and I add the tomatoes, but I miss the part in the section where the ingredients are listed and it said, “Tomatoes, diced.”
CM: Diced, sure.
N: And then I’m just throwing whole tomatoes on there. But when I can see what things are supposed to look like as opposed to a recipe saying, “Cook for five to eight minutes,” then I’m better at executing because if you tell me to cook something five to eight minutes, I will cook it just five to eight minutes, even if it’s not fully cooked.
CM: That’s something that we see a lot in recipe writing that obviously we want to give people a time range to clue them into when they might achieve the sort of intended outcome, but ultimately, we want people to cook to the end points, not according to the time necessarily. Right?
N: Right.
CM: Cool. All right, well, let me ask you one final question. Your dream outcome from this experiment and calling in today, what is your vision? If you're closing your eyes and you're thinking into the future, what does it look like for you to have succeeded?
N: I think what that looks like is I would be over the moon if I put something together for her and she’s just like, “Oh, it has this. Oh, that goes really well with this.” Kind of like that reaction that she has when she has a really great plate of food that she hasn’t cooked herself, I would love to provide that for her.
CM: To help Nelson step up his cooking game, I knew I had to call on Bon Appétit senior test kitchen editor Shilpa Uskokovic, an incredible recipe developer who has more in common with Nelson than you’d expect. I got Shilpa in the studio to give her the lowdown on Nelson, from his aquarium collection to how well he’s eating when Cate is on dinner duty.
Shilpa Uskokovic: I’m wondering what the problem is.
CM: Yeah, exactly.
SU: I mean, everything sounds great.
CM: Everything sounds great, right?
SU: Yeah.
CM: So the thing is Nelson’s partner, Cate, is chronically ill and she’s not always up to the job of cooking. He really wants to be able to...
I also filled Shilpa in on some of Nelson’s more off-script moves in the kitchen.
SU: Oh, Nelson. I think this is a very common.… This isn’t a problem just that Nelson is facing. I think that every cook faces that problem. I would say even an advanced cook, even restaurant chefs, it’s not something that you’re born with, and it’s only through failure that you get there, which sounds really cliched, but it’s only when you mess up 10 times making mac and cheese that you’re like, Oh, wait a second. Now I know actually what to do.
So I think embracing that is part of learning to become a better cook, but what we can do is give Nelson or point Nelson in the direction of a few recipes that are “foolproof” or that are a little bit more forgiving or they don’t require a lot of finesse.
CM: I’m also thinking ways that we can use recipes as instructional tools to just teach Nelson some of the basics that he can apply beyond this experiment.
SU: Yeah, I love that idea.
CM: We’re going to take a quick break, and when we get back, we’ll see if we can help Nelson feel more empowered at dinnertime. Welcome back, Nelson. How’s everything been?
N: Everything’s been so good. I’m so excited to be back here and go from zero to hero.
CM: Whoa! Okay, great. Love that energy. Now, Nelson, if I understand correctly, you moved recently, right?
N: I did. I just moved to Baltimore.
CM: So how do you move these massive aquarium tanks?
N: Ideally you don’t is what I’ve learned.
CM: Yeah, that’'s fair. So how did that go?
N: Oh my gosh. It was the most stressful thing in my life. I had to drain all the water, all the sand, and somehow reassemble everything back together and have fish in buckets with air pumps and air stones, and it was a disaster, but everyone made it through it okay.
CM: And none of the tanks broke or anything?
N: Well, I can’t speak for all the little shrimp, but all the fish definitely made it.
CM: Okay. I’m joined here by Shilpa. How are you doing, Shilpa?
SU: Hi. I am doing very good.
CM: Well, Nelson, listen, Shilpa is an ace recipe developer. I’m so glad that she’s going to be part of this conversation.
N: Me too. I love all your recipes, Shilpa, or at least I know my girlfriend makes a bunch of them from the podcast episodes. Sorry to interrupt.
CM: No, no!
SU: Wow.
N: I’m very excited you’re here.
CM: Love that.
SU: Thank you. I’m so flattered.
CM: Yeah, well, I wasn’t sure if you knew her, and I’m so glad that you do because obviously she’s so great at teaching people the whys behind what she’s doing in her recipes, but she’s also somebody whose partner is as well a professional chef, and she’s used to cooking at home for someone with high standards who knows what they like.
N: This sounds perfect.
CM: Shilpa, do you mind starting just with some of the recipes you were thinking about?
SU: Yeah, no, I actually felt almost overexcited about the options that we had. There were so many, so I think I might have failed my mission a little bit because I have multiple options. I know we usually…
CM: I have so many options too.
SU: Okay, great. Nelson, you’re in a great place.
N: I love it. Yeah, that sounds perfect.
SU: Okay. To start things off, we noticed some of your comments about sometimes getting led astray when you work through a recipe. So my first recipe has a video component attached to it, so you can follow along. It’s Emma Laperruque’s recipe for vegan tacos, which was actually part of our newly revived Feel Good Food Plan, where every month, an editor picks whatever recipes are making them feel good for that month.
And Emma developed these really amazing vegan tacos, which introduced most of us, I think, in the kitchen to this product called soy curls. None of us had really encountered this before. They were these dried soy strips, and Emma really had a very simple and transformative way of making them where you have to hydrate them, then you coat them in spices, sauté until they pick up a little bit of color, and then you can build tacos with it.
You can top it with whatever your heart desires. If you’re not vegan, you can also put regular sour cream on it, or cheese, anything that you would put on a taco: lime, red onion, cilantro, salsa, avocado.
N: That sounds so good. I’m so excited.
CM: Do you have another one, Shilpa?
SU: Okay. Option two was something that I thought was a little bit restaurant-y and special because I know Nelson is here trying to impress Cate, so I picked Jesse’s recipe for cauliflower fritters.
CM: Oh, that’s a great one too.
SU: Those are very good. Those are vegetarian, and they’re made with frozen riced cauliflower that Jesse then shapes into patties with lots of herbs, Parmesan, binds it with some egg, and then you pan-fry them, and they’re served on this bed of seasoned yogurt with lots of herbs and red onions. And, to me, I think the success of this recipe was that it felt very different, and you start off with this ingredient that most of us sometimes write off, like riced cauliflower.
CM: Yeah, like commercially available, store-bought…
SU: Frozen.
CM: …frozen, packaged.
N: That is music to my ears.
CM: Yeah, riced cauliflower.
SU: Yeah, it really works. And I think what is quite remarkable is how Jesse transformed something that can be very austere into something very indulgent, and it feels easy to accomplish because most of the prep work has been done for you in terms of having that riced cauliflower. And then it’s interesting to see how it progresses from something that could be boring into something very special.
N: That’s definitely a contender because Cate loves a bed of seasoned herbs.
SU: Oh, fun! I think this has everything. I love it personally. My last option was something that I felt is really simple, something that is kind of hard to mess up. And I picked a recipe that I recently developed, which was samosa-dillas with cucumber salad. And what these are are essentially quesadillas, but with a samosa flavor, like a samosa-flavored potato filling.
And I like this one because you can make the filling ahead of time and you can hold it so there’s no pressure when you’re actually cooking dinner, and you can feel a little bit calmer and less stressed out, and it’s just easy to do. You’re mashing potatoes, adding a bunch of spices, folding this cheese. So if there’s a mistake, cheese will forgive your errors. And it has a bunch of fun textures. It’s crispy on the outside.
CM: Cheese conquers all.
SU: Cheese does conquer all.
N: Yeah.
SU: And I just thought this was a good recipe for Nelson to sink his teeth into.
CM: These are good, Shilpa.
SU: These are good options.
CM: These are so good.
SU: These are good options.
CM: I had so many too, Shilpa.
SU: Yeah, I’m curious to hear what you have.
CM: Well, okay, so there’s a continuum here, Nelson, and you got to follow me.
N: Okay.
CM: All right. First up, Kendra Vaculin’s soy milk noodles, using soy milk almost as a ramen-type broth. The chilling, cool quality of a cold noodle dish cannot be overstated.
SU: Overestimated. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
N: Yeah.
CM: And it’s easy. Okay? That's one. But then we move forward into another noodle dish. This one is by Shilpa, which it was noodles with tomato and peanut sauce.
SU: Oh. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
CM: Do you want to talk about that one just briefly?
SU: Oh, sure. It’s noodles in tomato and peanut sauce, as you said. And the sauce, I think what I found was brilliant is I grated some of the tomatoes.
CM: It’s raw tomato, correct?
SU: Raw tomato. I grate them on a box grater, and then that liquid becomes part of the sauce. So then you’re getting tomato and the sauce is built with peanut butter and soy sauce, a few other ingredients, pantry ingredients, and I think that ties in the tomato flavor all the way from bottom to top because then I finish it off with chopped tomatoes, peanuts, cilantro.
N: I’m noticing a trend here. I love it.
CM: Yes. This is the progression at work. Okay, you have a cold noodle dish. Now you have a noodle dish that uses a no-cook tomato sauce fortified, sort of bolstered by peanuts.
Okay. Now we jump to a tomatoey preparation, but this is for Kendra Vaculin’s tofu meatballs.
SU: That was on my list too! That’s a good one.
CM: Which it's tofu that is crumbled and then also given egg, a breadcrumb treatment, so they are moldable. And then you have really luscious tender tofu meatballs.
SU: They’re very light.
CM: They’re very light, they’re really good on their own, but then Kendra finishes them in this case with a burst tomato sauce.
N: That sounds lovely.
CM: So it’s like light, fresh, easy. Okay? Now we pull it back to noodles.
SU: Oh, Christopher. You have many, many options today.
CM: And I want to offer you a framework, which is Lara Lee’s Everyone’s Favorite Gado-Gado. So now we've completed the full circle of noodle dishes and tomatoey things, and that is a great framework for taking raw vegetables, whatever you have, with a really luscious peanut-y, savory sauce, rice noodles. It can really be adapted to whatever ingredients you have on hand, et cetera. I don’t know, that one’s…
SU: It’s very fun to eat.
CM: Yeah, it’s really nice. It kind of starts out as this... . It can be every little component separated off on its own on top of the bed of noodles.
SU: Yeah, yeah. Which looks colorful and inviting.
CM: Which is colorful and fun and a real wow factor.
N: Perfect. We love good aesthetics in this house.
SU: Yes.
CM: Yeah. But once you toss everything together, it becomes like a glorious mishmash, just bathed and cloaked in this really rich sauce. So anyway, this is too many options I'm giving you, but this just speaks to the excitement that we felt around easy vegetarian weeknight cooking.
N: Oh, that makes me so happy that you guys are excited for it. I feel so spoiled for choice.
CM: I’m trusting you, Nelson, to just follow the rules just enough to get some of the basics right here and then set you free to riff and to supplement and to amend things as necessary down the road.
So the other thing that I do want to call out here, getting annoyed about...
Another thing, I wanted to make sure that Nelson knew, all of the recipes that Shilpa and I offered him use Bon Appétit's new recipe style, which includes the amounts of each ingredient in the recipe process itself. So instead of a step saying, “Add the tomatoes,” it’ll say, “add a quarter cup of diced tomatoes,” which hopefully will help Nelson keep everything organized as he’s cooking, so he doesn’t have to scroll back and forth between the ingredient list and the process itself.
N: I’m ready. I will not let you guys down. I got this.
SU: We believe in you.
CM: We never thought you would.
So armed with some weeknight vegetarian recipes that are straightforward without sacrificing deliciousness, Nelson went off to cook a meal for Cate. After another short break, we’ll hear how his adventures in the kitchen went.
Hey, Nelson. How are you?
N: I’m good. How are you doing?
CM: We’re okay here, and welcome back to my cohost, Shilpa. How are you?
SU: I’m doing great today.
N: Hi, Shilpa.
SU: Hi, Nelson. We’re so happy that we’re here with you.
CM: And I understand we are joined here by a new voice in the room, Cate. Hi, Cate.
Cate: Hey, good morning, y’all. How is everybody?
CM: We’re all right. Cate, I have to know, are you an aquascaping fan as well, or is that really Nelson’s bailiwick?
C: You know, that is Nelson’s baby. I do my best work in the kitchen.
CM: Ah, okay. Fair. Well, I have to say, Nelson, we’re dying to know, what did you end up cooking for Cate?
N: Okay, so I cooked two recipes, one from each of you. The first one was the cold soy milk noodles with chili crisp, which was fantastic. And then the second one was the herby cauliflower fritters recipe.
SU: Oh.
CM: Oh, okay. All right. Let’s take them one at a time. Soy milk noodles, talk to me about the process. And before you even picked up a knife or an ingredient, how were you feeling? Was the pressure on or did we kind of set you up?
N: No, so I felt good about it. I was a little disappointed because I ruined the surprise for Cate because as I'm going through the recipe list of what to get, I was like, “Do we have this? Do we have that? Do we have whatever?” And then eventually a light bulb went off and Cate was just like, “Are you making the cold soy milk noodles with chili crisp?” And I was like, “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m making.”
CM: Wait, how did she know? Cate, how did you know?
C: We spend a lot of time on Bon Appétit.
CM: Are you serious?
SU: Wow, that’s crazy.
CM: Wait. So Nelson name-checked the ingredients, and that was enough for you to, by process of elimination, figure out what specific recipe he was attempting to cook?
C: It’s so funny because I’ve thought about making this recipe a thousand times, and I didn’t know if he would like cold noodles. So it was primed right in my frontal lobe, and yeah, I knew immediately.
CM: I just…
N: And I gave her like three ingredients. It was like tahini and miso and Persian cucumbers, and that was it.
SU: Wow. Free subscription for Cate for life.
CM: I know! Cate, you’re now a member of what we like to call the Golden Circle, and you’ll be getting a special card in the mail. Wow.
So any hurdles once you were getting going with cooking?
N: The one hurdle I had was actually with making the noodles and my boiling pot of water. At some point, it just started overflowing and I had very little ice for cooling the noodles, and so I was just throwing ice into the pot very sparingly, one ice cube at a time, hoping that it would not overflow and it would keep coming back up.
CM: Wait, hold on. I’m trying to relive the moment with you here, Nelson. So the noodles are boiling away, and they were boiling so rapidly and intensely that your solve was to throw ice sparingly into the cooking environment.
And I guess, Shilpa, what’s my next statement going to be, slash question?
SU: Why didn’t you turn the heat down?
N: That was Cate’s first question as well.
CM: I mean, it comes to mind. You know what I mean? It feels intuitive. We weren’t there, though.
SU: Yeah. And in Nelson’s defense, I do know that sometimes when you cook dumplings, you do add, maybe not ice cubes, but when the water comes up to boil, you can add cold water to bring it back down. So Nelson, it’s creative.
N: Thank you. Everyone deserves a defense.
C: That is so nice, Shilpa. There’s no way he knew that about them.
SU: That’s okay. Let's just pretend he did. You could either turn down the heat or add ice cubes to a boiling pot of water. He got there.
CM: So Cate, take me to the moment where you’re sitting down at the table, maybe there was some foreshadowing around what recipe this would be, but nonetheless, you sit down together, Nelson’s about to serve you the noodles. What are you thinking and what are you feeling in that moment?
C: I was excited. I have to say Nelson is a better cook than he thinks he is. He just gets stressed. He did neglect to tell you guys that I hate eggs. So I had mine eggless, but his egg looked beautiful. He plated it really beautifully. I mean, I know it’s a big bowl of noodles, but the arrangement of the cucumbers and his knife work, it was all gorgeous. I was very proud.
SU: Wow. Were you ever tempted at any point to go in and help?
N: Yes.
C: Yes.
SU: And did? Did you give into your temptation?
C: No. In fact, he kept asking me questions, I think just out of habit, and I kept saying, “I can’t answer you. I can't answer you.” I think there was one point where he was like, “What does it mean to trim a cucumber?” And I was like, “You have a computer in your pocket, sir. Google it!”
CM: What would the possible interpretations of that phrase have been for you, Nelson?
N: I didn’t know if it was just the ends or the sides, and Google just gave me gardening tips, but eventually I figured it out.
CM: So Nelson, were you making small adjustments to seasoning and flavors in terms of the sauce and the liquid, or did you just follow the recipe and not think twice?
N: I was not making adjustments. I just followed the recipe. And I think because I did that, and then realized once I was eating it, I was like, You know what? Maybe I do want a little more soy sauce in here and a little more chili crisp, and then I carried that on to the next one. And in the next one, I actually went off-script a little bit and was really tasting as I was going.
CM: Okay, so let’s talk about that then. So the cauliflower fritters, how did you choose that recipe?
N: Oh, so I chose that one just because it checked so many boxes. Cate loves a pile of herbs and a nice yogurt-y sauce and fried stuff. I think we all do. And the other thing was it felt like an opportunity to slice up some raw red onion and make up for my past foibles with red onions. So that’s why I was drawn to it, and also they just looked so good in the picture.
CM: Okay. So Nelson, you mentioned you went a little bit off-piste, as the French might say, with this one. What were you tweaking?
N: No, so the only thing I tweaked... . Well, first of all, I really appreciated the recipe, like in the instructions, it said, “Put the one and three quarters cup of yogurt,” and saying the exact amount so I don't have to scroll all the way up to the ingredients list to know everything.
But as I was doing it, I was like, Oh, I'm just making a lemony yogurt sauce. I’ve done this before. I’ve seen people do this before. And so I was just, Okay, I’m just throwing as much in in the proportions I think are right, and tasting and adjusting as I go. And I think it came out really nice.
CM: Oh, that’s awesome.
SU: That’s great.
CM: I mean, I think that’s entirely appropriate, just establishing a baseline for yourself and having a nice little feedback loop of, Oh, this is how much zest I put in, and this is what the flavor result was, establishing that for yourself will give you all of the information you need to know in terms of how you use zest in the future.
N: Yeah, and I think it really... . The dish benefited from it.
CM: I understand we have some tape of you trying the fritters. I’d love to hear that.
C: Oh my god! They’re beautiful. Oh, it’s so green. I love it so much.
N: They’ve got lots of herbies.
C: Oh, they’re so bright and lemony. I love them! With the creamy yogurt and the nice bite from the onion. Babe, these are amazing.
N: Oh, yeah. That’s solid.
SU: Wow.
CM: Nelson, did you just say, “Oh, yeah. That’s solid”?
N: Yeah, I’m always surprised how good it comes out.
CM: I mean, there’s some genuine joy and delight there. What’s that doing for you, Shilpa?
SU: I mean, Cate, you set my standards really high. I am going to go home to my husband, play this tape when the podcast comes out, and say, “This is the reaction I need from you every single time I make you something.”
That was amazing. I love that you…I mean, it seems that you both are very supportive of each other, and Cate, I think it seemed like really nice. You seemed to be really surprised and thrilled that Nelson made these things for you, and I find that so endearing.
C: Yeah. I mean, he’s just the best person in the world, and that he even wrote into you guys and thought about me being chronically ill and wanting to make me something I would really like, that alone, even if the food had been terrible, would’ve been enough for me. It was an added bonus that everything was absolutely delicious.
CM: Well, it sounds like Nelson did pretty well with this, and Cate, I mean, is this maybe going to be a pattern going forward where Nelson picks up cooking duties a couple nights a week? Where are we going from here?
C: I think Nelson is probably going to be a weekend cook. Each recipe took him, I want to say, north of two hours to do.
CM: Oh, wow. What took so long?
N: I’m just slow and methodical and easily distracted.
SU: You know what? That’s fine. That’s fine! Nelson might have been listening to music and drinking some wine, putting ice cubes in his pot of boiling water.
N: Exactly.
SU: Give the guy a break. I think you did great.
N: Thank you, Shilpa.
CM: Nelson, how’s your confidence level now?
N: Through the roof. I felt really good about this. Yeah, the fact that the Cate tried it, and Cate’s…she’s very forthcoming with feedback on how to make it better, and truly both dishes, she was just really impressed by, and that made me feel good, and it made me feel confident that next time when she’s not up for it, assuming she doesn’t mind me starving her for two hours, I can make her a really lovely meal.
CM: I love that. Well, listen, Nelson, I mean, well done. Cate, I mean, you’ve obviously been the beneficiary of this, and this sounds pretty awesome just in terms of the place you’ve ended up in. But Nelson, let us know how the next couple cooking projects go, and thanks so much for joining today as well, Cate.
C: Thank you. This was amazing.
CM: If you have a dinner emergency on your hands, write to us at dinnersos@bonappetit.com or leave us a voice message at (212) 286-SOS1. That’s (212) 286-7071. We’d love to feature your question on the show.
If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a rating and review on your podcast app of choice and hit that Follow button so you never miss an episode. You can find the recipes mentioned today on the Epicurious app brought to you by Condé Nast. Just search Epicurious in the App Store and download today.
Thanks for listening to Dinner SOS. I’m your host, Chris Morocco. My cohost this week is Shilpa Uskokovic. Our senior producer is Michele O’Brien. Peyton Hayes is our associate producer. Cameron Foos is our assistant producer. Jake Lummus is our studio engineer. This episode was mixed by Amar Lal at Macro Sound. Chloe Prasinos is our consulting editor. Jordan Bell is our executive producer. Chris Bannon is Condé Nast’s Head of Global Audio.
Next week, we’re sharing an episode from the Financial Times’ Life and Art podcast, but we’ll be back next month with all new solutions to your dinner emergencies.