Each month, we get to know another Canadian food blogger and post our interview with them here. But this month we’ll be featuring more than one food blogger. In fact, here’s our second interview this month with Vancouver based Emily Wight of well fed, flat broke.
1. What made you decide to start blogging about food?
Well, I was two months out of school with a Creative Writing degree and a job that had few opportunities for creativity, and I had just roasted a really fabulous chicken and had had too much to drink. I have my best ideas over roasted meats and too much bourbon. I love cooking, and I no longer had the workshop setting for writing, so I decided to start a food blog. I've pretty much only written about food since then.
2. Who taught you how to cook?
Various relatives, television, and books. I love cookbooks. When I was in high school I worked at a little produce market and would bring home weird ingredients and look them up in cookbooks and try to make something of them. I was not good at following recipes, and as a result my parents endured many a disgusting meal until I figured out the basics. There was nothing I thought wouldn't benefit from the addition of curry powder. Like, nothing. It got a little weird there for awhile, but my parents' desire to not have to cook was strong so I was able to persevere. Every day after school I would watch the Urban Peasant, I think that was the start of it.
3. How does cooking influence your everyday life?
Apparently I am really annoying because everything relates to food. I'm like those obnoxious people who make everything about them, but instead of everything being about me it's food. My husband was recently diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes (at age, like, 30), and so my current really awesome obsession is how much fibre is in everything. We'll be eating dinner and I'll prattle on extensively about the carbohydrate content of what we're eating and how much of that is fibre. I wouldn't want to live with me. Fortunately, most of that stays out of the blog; the blog is a cleaned up version of our lives, where I hardly ever talk about how much or how little any given meal will make Spouse poop.
4. What’s the one ingredient you simply couldn’t live without?
Grainy Dijon. And fresh rosemary. And white wine. And butter. BUTTER. Do I have to pick just one thing? I suppose butter would be number one, but I need wine to cook. So maybe that's less an ingredient and more a culinary lubricant. Hee hee hee.
5. Do you have a favourite chicken recipe?
Yes. I do. Well, a couple. I can never pick just one thing. A good roast chicken will make me happier than almost any other meal - I adapted Ina Garten's roast chicken recipe and it pretty much changes peoples' lives, or, at the very least, their previously ambivalent feelings about roast chicken. When I found Spouse he wanted nothing to do with roast chicken; he said roast chicken was boring. Ina's recipe changed everything. The other is a recipe for something like butter chicken (I blogged it, here: emvandee.wordpress.com/2009/10/29/tomato-curry/) which I make with chicken thighs from the freezer and pantry staples when it's cold out and going to the market is so daunting I could cry, which happens a lot between November and March and which would be less embarrassing if I didn't live in Vancouver, which barely gets winter, and if the market wasn't literally two blocks away. Anyway. It tastes like butter chicken, but it's even easier than take-out. You can't really lose.
