Raw Food Chef Ani Phyo Shares Tips on Gourmet Raw, What is in Her Pantry and the Best Blenders

In this article, Ani Phyo shares on gourmet raw, what is in her pantry and the best blenders for home and travel. Ani Phyo is a raw food chef extraordinaire and the author of Ani's Raw Food Kitchen and Ani's Raw Food Desserts.

Kevin: I am excited to have Ani Phyo with us today. Today's going to be really fun. Why not introduce yourself and tell how you got into this whole arena.

Ani: Sure, okay. Let's see. I was really lucky to have been raised on a lot of raw food. My father was a raw fooder. That was like the previous generation of raw. It was when raw food was really about the functionality. So my mom would make vegetable juices with everything that was ripe in the garden that day, without any consideration for visual color or look or flavor. It was more about "put everything in there because it's good for you and hold your breath and chug it down and get it into your body because it was good for you."

Then around the mid-90s when I was in San Francisco during the whole dot-com boom, explosion, the multi-media gulch, I came upon Juliano's restaurant in San Francisco. For the first time I was introduced to a gourmet raw, this new wave of gourmet raw food, without really realizing that is was the same philosophy of what I had been raised with. As I started learning about that and discovering how it affected my body and gave me mental clarity and focus and kept me from getting sick and made my productivity very high, I started delving into it and making more of that food for myself. As I would have somebody over to dinner or go to dinner I'd be making more of it and sharing it. Everyone that would taste the food would be interested in it because everyone that I talked with wants to look and feel their best and get the most out of life and stay healthy and not be sick, all of that great stuff, be their ideal weight.

So I guess by the late 90s I had started doing more catering and events and dinners. When I went down to Los Angeles I was doing weekly dinners for 50-100 people, before there were any raw restaurants down here, really just as a service to the raw community because there were not restaurants. But also for selfish reasons because I needed to feed myself. It was like extreme gourmet. I would be soaking, dehydrating, marinating, sprouting. Really complex recipes. I don't enjoy doing that when making the food for myself. It's all about sharing it with others. So by having these events I could have a reason for making this food and then I'd have food to eat up to those events and then leftovers after the events. That would carry me through the week. So that's really how I got started, for selfish reasons, to have food to feed myself.

Kevin: The book is on consulting. You'd done consulting for different companies, correct? The original book you wrote. The first book you wrote.

Ani: "Return on Design"?

Kevin: Yes.

Ani: It was an interaction, user-experience design book.

Kevin: How did you go into raw food chef? What made you flip the switch? Was it just, "Hey I need to do something different, I don't like this anymore"?

Ani: I think what it was...I started off as a 3D modeler, animator and then a special effects person. That was the early 90s. As the web started happening in the early 90s and mid-90s, I sort of moved onto the web and doing multimedia online. Towards the later 90s it really became about the large corporations and eCommerce online. That was when I was doing the dinners on the weekends so I could have food to have to take with me into these corporate offices during the weekdays. I think it really just hit this plateau when I got down to LA and I was working with some of the studios and it was really heartbreaking for me to be in these environments because it was during the rolling blackouts and things and there was a shortage of energy, yet these huge corporate towers were really over-cooling the buildings to a point where employees were wearing like fall jackets to the office in the middle of summer when it was 110 degrees. They were wearing blankets over their shoulders at their desks. Our fingers were so cold I couldn't type. So they were wasting that much energy and then also they weren't recycling in the break room or whatever. They were drinking water out of Styrofoam cups. People would go and drink like three ounces of water out of a Styrofoam cup and then throw it away.

So being in that kind of environment was really challenging for me. By that time I had been several years of doing the catering and events. They were really taking off. I realized doing dinners 50-100 people every week, I was like, "Wow, this is really a viable business actually." So I thought, "Why don't I take a break from the convergence media and focus 100 percent on the food business?" That was really where my heart was. I could see how it was helping people. It was helping the community. It was helping people gain better health and getting more out of their lives and helping them feel better. So I just really believed in that. So that was when I made the switch from making large corporations more and more money when they weren't really taking care of their communities or the environment, over to the raw food.

Kevin: Great. Well, we have a lot of questions here. They're all over the map. We have a lot of great people who are listening and a lot of great questions. I'm kind of struggling as to where to start. Why don't we start with this listener's question? What are the top five things in your pantry?

Ani: That are in my pantry...

Kevin: Or that are in your arsenal?

Ani: The top five things. Well, right now I go to the Farmer's Market all the time, when I'm at home. I love it. Peaches are just so amazing. So I always have the vegetables and the fruit in my kitchen, always. I really like the dark leafy greens like the kales and the chards and I like cabbages because they're so alkalinizing. In my pantry I always have almonds and cashews and different kinds of nuts and seeds. Actually, in my fridge I have hemp and hemp protein. I always have my superfoods, like acai and my chia seeds and my maca and lucuma, all that kind of stuff, my goji berries. Then I have my greens like spirulina, E3live, Vitamineral Green, that kind of stuff, which I really love. So I think those things I would have on hand.

Then when I'm traveling I always have my personal blender with me and I just take the powders in one of the containers to make a smoothie. I'll have my hemp protein or something. That way when I get somewhere I can just pick up a banana and blend it in. I have my hemp protein and usually I put in some of the powdered E3Live stuff and different superfoods and I make mix. That way in my hotel room every morning I can start with a smoothie.

Kevin: Great. What kind of blender are you using? Are you traveling with?

Ani: A personal blender from TriBest. It's my favorite. I just love it because it's so tiny. I used to travel with my food processor or my Vitamix, so now I have more room in my suitcase for my clothes and my books and things like that. It's really tiny. I take my two-cup size container and it has the little blender top but it also has a storage top and it has a little travel top for it. It's really versatile. I really love that blender.

Kevin Gianni the host of Renegade Health Show - a fun and informative daily health show that is changing the perception of health across the world. His is an internationally known health advocate, author, and film consultant. He has helped thousands and thousands of people in over 21 countries though online health teleseminars about abundance, optimum health and longevity. He is also the creator and co-author of "The Busy Person's Fitness Solution."

Raw Gourmet, Author and Educator Shares the Benefits of Transitioning to Raw Foods

Kevin: Why don't you just give us a little brief history of why you're here and then we'll move onto the real meat.

Nomi: Okay, back in the beginning I started my raw journey, so to speak, about 20 years ago. I had just moved to California and I found myself not feeling well for the gazillionth time in my life. I had sort of a litany of issues and I remember it was around Christmas time where a big table was set up in the back room with all kinds of cakes and Christmas stuff and I subsequently, many years later, found out I really can't eat wheat. I wasn't feeling well and not only vague but it was sort of like an intolerance that affected my entire digestive tract and really some of the words to go along with the description would be fibromyalgia, hypoglycemia, mood swings, really severe allergic sinusitis because I had moved from the East to the West Coast where there was pollen at all times, a lot of digestive problems, acid reflux, systemic candida, blah blah blah.

I went to a holistic doctor, Dr. Barney Meltzer. He was in Del Mar, California. One of the things he said to me is I want you to eat 50% of your food raw. And I said to him, the following sentence, which I've

since heard 5000 times: How will I get enough protein? That's the first question and he kind of rolled his eyes and it's all I can do to keep from rolling my eyes. Really, Kevin, it was just simple for me to go 50% raw. I've always been kind of a good cook. People eat raw food in their daily life. They eat coleslaw, they eat salad, even if it's just lettuce and a slice of tomato on their McDonald burger or something. It's not like an alien entity. I just upped it. My hypoglycemia at that time was so bad, I don't know if this has ever happened to you but I used to fall asleep while I was driving. I could get in the car all alert and literally wink off and it's like a miracle that I didn't kill someone or get killed. And what I did for that is this doctor said just carry around a pocket full of almonds. Raw almonds and when you start to get that feeling, that sort of sleepy feeling, or even before that if you know it happens every hour or whatever, just chew slowly on a couple of almonds. I mean this literally almost overnight cured that situation. I'm not talking about your driving tired. I'm talking about, you think you're fine, then you get in the car and you start nodding off. That had to do with my combination of food and eating too many carbs and stuff like that too.

So anyways, it was pretty dramatic, just the 50% change and after a year of doing 50% I went to one of the several places in the country where you can go for a three week retreat where it's wheatgrass juice and buckwheat and sunflower sprouts, and lots of raw food, only raw food and classes and that was very profound for me. I lost some weight and everything was completely cleared up from that. Just like serendipity, within 6 months I was working at the world-renowned Hippocrates Health Institute. I'm talking 20 years ago now. I'm going to tell you, I was 44 years old when I started this journey and I just want to share with you that I'm going to be 65 years old in 2008 and I really feel like I should throw a big party and show people what 65 can look like and frankly, if I had started younger it would look even better.

Kevin: So why don't you talk a little bit about the Hippocrates Institute and we'll get into the meat of what raw food can do for you therapeutically.

Nomi: I'm glad you asked this Kevin because there's a lot of buzz about raw food, a lot of books, a lot of restaurants and there's a big stress on the gourmet, culinary aspects and I sometimes wonder if there aren't some people out there, whether they're chefs or whether they're teachers

who really don't exactly understand or know that this came from a therapeutic point of view, a way to cleanse and heal yourself without necessarily having to get involved with the medical community.

And really I think my book is one of the very first books that introduced this whole kind of more gourmet and palatable subject. And there's nothing wrong at all with all the delicious things that are happening. It's just that I don't want to see people forget that it's grounded in something that's good for you, so really raw food is on a continuum or a spectrum, all the way from therapeutic up to gourmet.

What I mean by that is you can talk about water-fasting, for example, or juice fasting where, with water fasting you are resting and it's best to be supervised and you are literally only drinking water. What happens when you do that is, after a few days the energy that your body normally uses to digest, assimilate and eliminate is going into healing. It can be very profound. Then you can do carrot juice combinations and there's lots of people who have stories to tell about that like Reverend George Malcolm or Dr. Lorraine Day both of whom are pretty important people in the raw food movement because they both had a really serious cancer and they feel that they were able to become well by juice fasting. Then you can get into, and this is what a lot of the retreats do, they have some juices

but they also have good simple raw food. You again have that cleansing, de-toxifying factor. Then there's your everyday raw food, somewhere in the middle between this kind of severe and simple raw food, somewhere between that and the really gourmet, multi-nuts, all kinds of sauces, is your everyday, at home, how to eat raw food because a lot of people are really committed to being anywhere from 50% to 100% raw. They do see a health difference. Really depending on who you are and where you're coming from is where you're going to be on that continuum. If you for example, have a cancer you want to be on the more therapeutic end of it.

Kevin: Let me ask you this. What is kind of an ideal balance, say throughout a year, of therapeutic to gourmet? I mean, is there a percentage? 50% therapeutic? 10% gourmet? The rest in between? What do you think is ideal?

Nomi: If only I could answer it because each of us is so unique. If there were one exactly right way to eat, let's say in this case because I have a book, The Raw Gourmet and I'm considered to be an exact, if there was just one right way to eat raw food I'd be a gazilionaire. The reason there isn't is that because each of us is so unique. Some people can eat almost all fruit with a little bit of green. Many other people, they just can't. That's just all there is to it. People do get confused. They go, I don't know who to listen to, I read this book, this says that or this person they said that, and the reason for that confusion is, people kind of want to be told what to do.

I mean, we grew up in awe of the medical community and our parents before us did, and they go, well the doctor said to take this pill, the doctor said to do this, do that. And people have given away their power in terms of their health. I'm faced with people constantly asking me what should I eat and how shall I do it. Gee, I wish I could answer that for you but I'm going to have to toss that right back in your lap and you are going to have to experiment. It's all experiential. It's just not a religion or a philosophy. It's what you eat. You have to do it to know. If eating a certain way works for you I can almost guarantee it's not going to work for your wife, or your spouse or your kids or your brother. So it's an impossible question to answer. How much plain and simple and how much really gourmet can one person take in.

One big common mistake though, so that people learn, like from the Ann Wigmore books or from going to one of the therapeutic kind of places, Hippocrates is one of them, and they're pretty gourmet, but there's also a place in California and a place in Texas called Optimum Health Institute. A place in Michigan called Michigan Creative Health Institute and the food is very very simple. People think that's the way you eat forever but that's really what they're really presenting is the cleansing and the healing. You can't usually eat that way forever because it's not going to be enough calories in there for you or even enough variety. So it's a learning process. Fortunately or unfortunately each person really has to learn for themselves. certainly help people do it, in consultations, but it isn't an easy question.

Kevin: What do you think are some of the best ways or most efficient ways to experiment on yourself when when you're doing this?

Nomi: I think that whatever you decide, from reading or taking a class or whatever, is what you want to do, I think you need to try it out and as the days and weeks go by, see how you feel. If you're losing too much weight or not losing enough weight or if the initial uncomfortable feeling,

which can happen when you cleansing and de-toxifying, tummy aches, head aches, aren't going away, you need to revisit. One person can eat two avocados a day, another should only eat two a week, that kind of thing. I do think that a lot of people, my peers, who are writers and teachers in the community, have a tendency to if something works for them to then instruct that that's how you do. But I've learned from long experience there simply is no one right way. I'll give you an example. I had an employee come to my house several years ago. We each made smoothies for ourselves. Mine was -- I'll give you my favorite Green Smoothie. She used some sort of nut milk and some nuts and a few other things, some different fruits. I want to tell you I would have been sick for three days if I had made that for myself. It was just too rich, too filled with multiple nuts. This was a woman who was way thinner than I am. That's what she needed. She knew what she needed. I would have been nauseous initially and felt ill for, so it's really that is why people are confused. They read something, it won't work for them. That's the thing: there is no one guru.

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Kevin Gianni the host of "Renegade Health Show" - a fun and informative daily health show that is changing the perception of health across the world. His is an internationally known health advocate, author, and film consultant. He has helped thousands and thousands of people in over 21 countries though online health teleseminars on The Healthiest Year of Your Life. He is also the creator and co-author of "The Busy Person's Fitness Solution"

Raw Foodist Shares on Energy Soup, Green Juicing and Transitioning to Raw Foods

In this article, Nomi Shannon shares on energy soup, green juicing and surviving the transition to raw food. Nomi Shannon is raw foodist who has worked at the Hippocrates Health Institute and is the author some amazing books on raw food preparation including "The Raw Food Gourmet" and "Raw Food Celebrations."

Kevin: Can you explain, for some people who might not know, what's an energy soup?

Nomi: If you Google energy soup, you'll come up with 500 recipes, but the original energy soup was made by a woman named Anne Wigmore, who actually started all of this whole raw food movement. She's the lady who researched different grasses and had a scientist evaluate them and came up with growing wheat grass and juicing it. I mean to my knowledge no one has ever done this before. We are not going back to the first century where people made wheatgrass or even when they chewed it and swallowed it and spat out the pulp. It's actually a new creation and the reason for it is that even back when she did this, which is in the late 50s early 60s, the soils were very depleted. They're triply so now. Even the very food we were eating, the spinach we eat today, is nothing in its nutritional breakdown, the amount of iron in it; to the spinach that grandpa ate in the 1900. It's shocking the difference because of the depleted soils.

So she came up with the wheat grass concept as an ultra extreme nutritional concept and also the growing of the sprouts. She came up with the energy soup because juicing is very, very expensive, you are buying a huge amount of produce. So she came up with energy soup also for economical reasons, and that's to blend it. It was something like a whole bunch of sunflower sprouts, a whole bunch of buckwheat sprouts, maybe a quarter to half of an apple for sweetness, a little bit of lemon juice, I don't know, a couple of other things maybe and it would be blended up. I got to tell you it tasted like mud.

So now there are a gazillion energy soup recipes, some of them people start making with oranges, yams, carrots, that isn't really energy anymore, it's soup. An energy soup is very, very green. And it's still greater to use sprouts or mixed greens because you're getting a big hit of green. And then, very recently, the green smoothie craze started and that's similar to an energy soup but has way more fruit in it and it's very palatable. For people who are OK with eating a bunch of fruit, it's great. My green smoothie has 12 cups of greens in it. It's a different kind of green. It could be sprouts, mescaline, mixed greens, a little bit of orange juice maybe and some frozen banana. There are some people who aren't able to eat fruit for a while, whether they have a candida or even cancer. People feel sugar feeds cancer. So they might be eating more of the energy soups than the green smoothies. And there's a lot of juicing, too. Juicing is the most sublime way to get a fast hit of nutrition into your body without the body having to work very fast and very hard.

Kevin: Can we talk about patience and how important it is in any sort of transition?

Nomi: You mean they give up too soon?

Kevin: Yeah. Have you seen that and what have you used to help people get through it?

Nomi: There are reasons people give up. I don't know whether they don't love themselves enough or believe that this will help them enough. Another transition is the transition from "Tell me what to do," asking a medical professional to tell them what to do, and taking the responsibility themselves. It can be very frightening. I'm not anti-doctor, but it is hard to find a medical person or physician who understands and agrees that a therapeutic, raw program will help someone. They know so little and have so little training with any kind of nutrition, they don't know that even if a person is undergoing chemo or radiation, this can really help them get through that. This is the choice of what to do. They don't get a lot of support in that. So it's very frightening. They feel very alone.

Also another issue is your palate changes so you're used to highly seasoned salted meat, things like that and when you first come into a very simple program like this, even the most gourmet food, you may not like the taste of it, but if you stick with it, a lot of things change for you. Your palate, your taste buds get used to it, and eventually the day will come when you go I have just got to have a green salad and then you know you're there. Because people don't normally go "Oh I have to have a green salad," you know out in the real world, it's sort of like a little dish that's additional to what they eat. When you've been doing this for maybe just a few weeks suddenly your body is getting used to getting the wonderful nourishment and is telling you what to eat.

Cravings, especially for someone who is coming off of the SAD diet, which is the Standard American Diet. "Oh I just got to have a pizza." Now that's a craving where your body isn't telling you the right thing to do, and that can continue for a long, long time. People say trust your body. Well it takes a long time and you have to go through a lot of cleansing. Getting rid of literally toxins that are stored in your tissues, before your body starts saying "Got to have a green smoothie, dying for an energy soup, really want a big green salad." It does happen. You can't listen to your body when it's saying, "Go and get a fudgesical."

There are lots of reasons people leave being raw. One of them is they get a sense of failure. If we're talking about a well person, there's a huge difference between someone, like a lot of people who went to Hippocrates who have a serious health issue and actually really needed to stay totally on a very strict program for quite some time in order to live.

Kevin: Right.

Nomi: And another person, say a young person who says, "I want to live a lifestyle so that I may have a long and healthy life." I don't personally believe that we have control essentially over how long we may live, but I do believe we have complete control over how well we will live within that time we're given. I think the feeling of failure is the biggest. In other words, you go along, you're doing great, you're eating lots of rough food, you're having a green smoothie, you're having a salad, you take it to work with you - that kind of thing -- and then x amount of time into it you go out and have a steak dinner. Whatever it is that is the big thing you think is terrible. A lot of people right there go, "Oh, I blew it."

This is the diet syndrome, any kind of diet...I think of raw food lifestyle as a lifestyle, but a lot of people especially in the beginning think, "This is my new diet." I say to people, "You know, it's only your food." I'm not talking about people who have a life-threatening thing. I'm talking about you and me. We just want to be healthy and make the most of our life, be so alert and feel so physically well that we can do what we want to do. Whether it's our job, serving God, being the best soldier, best politician, best medical doctor because we're clear and we feel great and our bodies are healthy and we're not bogged down.

What happens to so many, many people-it doesn't matter, it could be a Jenny Craig diet-they "fall off the wagon" so to speak and they eat a bad meal and they throw the whole program out. You know what? It's what you do most of the time that really, really counts. If you go have something you think of as bad, whatever it is, a fish meal or quick food, a fried meal, whatever it is, so what? The next day, the next meal, just eat your good food again. It's your food. It's not your religion. That, I think is the biggest cause of dropping out.

No one likes to feel like a failure. If you keep giving yourself the thought that you're a failure and you're less than, you'll eventually going to stop doing whatever gives you that feeling. If you're going to be more comfortable saying, "Look I'm not going to do that anymore. I used to do that," and start eating at McDonald's again. And you don't give yourself that feeling because you're not on the program anymore. It's an unfortunate psychological thing with any kind of regime, like working out. You've been an exercise physiologist for years. I'm sure you've seen that with people, right?

Kevin: Yeah.

Nomi: It's a human nature kind of thing. It's really important to go easy on yourself. With your food, it's what you do most of the time. Say you go on a one-week vacation and you just do all kinds of stuff that you don't think is optimal. Maybe it's just a question of forgiveness. I'm lucky in a funny, perverse way. If I eat a lot of cooked foods, after a couple days, it happens when I travel sometimes, I don't feel very well.

Kevin: Yeah.

Nomi: And I don't like this feeling. I'm spaced out; I can't think as well. My body's a little sluggish. So I just go right back to it.

Kevin: You can correct me if I'm wrong, but the good news about it is just that, isn't it?

Nomi: Yes.

Kevin: Is that once you get far enough into this, when you do go back, which I advocate doing sometimes, it's like trying to see if things still work with you, you'll be reminded that...

Nomi: I'm very lucky... that five days of traveling with lots of cooked food, even really good cooked food, I don't want to feel like that.

Kevin: It's a great way to be.

Kevin Gianni the host of Renegade Health Show - a fun and informative daily health show that is changing the perception of health across the world. His is an internationally known health advocate, author, and film consultant. He has helped thousands and thousands of people in over 21 countries though online health teleseminars about abundance, optimum health and longevity. He is also the creator and co-author of "The Busy Person's Fitness Solution."

Chef John Besh Shares Cooking Tips and His Best New Orleans Recipes

Food & Wine welcomed New Orleans chef John Besh to our Facebook page for a live chat with fans. Here, he answers questions about adding Creole flavor to everyday recipes.

How can I put a New Orleans twist on the ol’ steak & taters supper?
There’s nothing more New Orleans than pommes souffle and béarnaise sauce, but this will take some doing. I encourage you to try a really cool Creole-flavored compound butter by placing some butter, a shallot, a clove of garlic, dash of Worchestershire and Tabasco and a sprig of tarragon into a food processor, turn it on and let it all mix well. Grill your steak and just before serving, top it with a dollop of this Creole-flavored butter that has a lot in common with the Bearnaise sauce, just ten times easier! If not pommes souffle, make some home-made sweet potato chips.

Hi, Chef! My husband is allergic to shellfish and I cannot tolerate anything spicy. Do you have any ideas or recipes for "knock off" New Orleans staples that we could try?
Certainly. New Orleans and spicy really don’t go together. Trout Meuniere would be the perfect dish for you to try. All you need is fresh trout if you can find them, flour, butter, lemon and some parsley. If you want to be real New Orleans, throw some almonds into the pan and you’ve got the perfect trout almondine.

What’s a signature dish that defines your style of cooking?
The other day I slow-cooked one of our Mangalitsa pork bellies from the farm at La Provence and lacquered it with a cane sugar glaze, serving it sliced with a warm crawfish tarragon and blood orange vinaigrette over the top. That about sums it up!

I am cursed with a shellfish allergy, but can eat crawfish. What is your favorite unusual way to prepare them?
First of all, I’ll pray for you. My favorite and most unusual way of preparing crawfish is what I lovingly refer to as the French crawfish boil. With a hot pan and some olive oil, I saute live crawfish and toast these shells until the room is perfumed with the beautiful nutty aroma. Then to the pan, I add a shallot and some garlic, armagnac and then flambe. Once the flames begin to subside, add a little heavy cream. Season with salt, pepper and tarragon. If you happen to have a beautiful truffle lying around, cover the entire pile of crawfish in truffles. Reduce the heat to medium and allow them to bathe in this glorious bath. Don’t waste an ounce of the sauce—make sure you have lots of bread for sopping.

When making gumbo, have you played with different roux, like using crawfish fat from the heads for the roux? Could you offer some examples of nontraditional roux?
I’ve a chapter in my book devoted to gumbo and an extensive excerpt on making a roux with whatever fat you have, but be aware what people think of as crawfish fat is not fat at all, but a gland that seems to look and taste like fat. The most exciting roux I’ve ever made was out of chicken or duck fat that I saved after roasting the bird.

What is your favorite cooking method and why?
Don’t know if I have just one favorite! I like the old-fashioned slow-cooking one-pot meals of my youth. Most people would say this is a braise—I call it dinner from a cast iron pot because it takes true devotion to pull off a truly spectacular braise.

How do you stay inspired with your busy schedule?
Good question. Ella Brennan told me years ago to spend at least 30 minutes of each day reading about food. I try to do that along with experimenting with my best friends who happen to be my partners and chefs at our restaurants. I’m inspired each time I walk through the market or our farm for that matter.

How would you incorporate new veggies into meals for kids?
Wraps are one way that I do it. It’s amazing what you can do with roasted cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, and sugar snap peas that have been blanched, when stuffed into a whole wheat tortilla rubbed with a little hoisin sauce. Kids love to eat with their hands so make it easy for them—buy some great dips for the veggies. Get away from the raw ones and blanche them slightly to make it a little more palatable.

We just enjoyed an amazing anniversary meal at Domenica. (We got engaged after dining at August!) Where do you procure the amazing proteins and ingredients used there? And how do they make that incredible satsumacello?
First of all, we raise much of the pork that finds itself on the menu. The goats come from a friend of ours, Stuart Gardener, as do the lamb, when they appear. We try to stay as local as possible. The satsumacello can best be mimicked with fresh satsumas, split, wrapped in cheese cloth, covered in pure grain alcohol, left to age refrigerated for a month.

Can you suggest dinner party recipes that will impress and won’t keep me in the kitchen all night so I can spend time with my guests?

Starters: In my neck of the woods I love starting with a chilled salad of fresh sweet peas, baby carrots, end-of-the season-baby turnips, and blood oranges drizzled with a little vinagarette. Blanch the vegetables ahead of time and dress at the last minute. Of course, I love to throw in some crawfish tails or jumbo lump crabmeat for a little extra somethin’.
Main courses: Stick to slow cooking like braised short ribs or daube of pork shoulder that can be done in a big old cast iron pot of even a crock pot if need be. Then it’s a matter of heating a serving just as your guests arrive. Over fresh pasta. What could be better?
Go-to desserts: Pot de creme or creme brulee will never go out of style. They can be made a day or two in advance and keep perfectly well while wrapped in the fridge. This menu will keep you in the kitchen cooking well before the guests arrive and out of the kitchen while you socialize with your friends.

Courtesy of Besh Restaurant Group

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