The Storied Recipe

Introduction For so many of you who listen to this podcast, recipes are among your family’s greatest treasures. You cherish these recipes because they connect you to your ancestors and the sacrifices they made, to your homeland and its beauty that cannot quite be matched, and your family’s resilience through change, struggle, often even tragedy. Sri Bodanapu loves her grandmother’s recipes for all...

I'm very grateful to welcome Natasha Levai to the podcast today. I'm not going to say much by way of introduction for Natasha for the simple reason that she expresses herself so poignantly and more eloquently than I could. Natasha, who is half Ukrainian and half Russian, speaks to us today from her new home in Hungary, where she and her husband are raising their baby girl and investing their free...

When Shauna turned 30, a relative challenged her to start writing again. After setting aside the initial (quite reasonable) excuses - that she had two young children and was working full time! - she and her husband carved out just one hour every other day for her to write.  Six years later, walking out of the library, my eye fell on a book in the New Releases section: The Children of Gods and...

Hello and welcome to the February episode of The Storied Recipe. I’m here today with an episode that was well worth waiting for. Kaveri Ponnapa wrote The Vanishing Kodavas - a deep cultural study of her people group who were devoted, above all else, to the rolling hills and deep, dense forests of their land, Kodagu.  The origins of this remote & warlike people are unknown and their histor...

Three important things for you to know about the podcast in 2023... PLUS, my interview with Christine Pittman on her Recipe of the Day Podcast. We talk a lot about our mutual passion for podcasting and why I hope to be doing this for a long time! Important Links Read all the details about why I'm making these changes (and what I hope to accomplish) here: Changes to The Storied Recipe in 2023 . Sub...

Welcome back to the Christmas Around the World Series on The Storied Recipe Podcast! This series began as a crowd-sourced post titled Christmas Desserts Around the World. As the Storied Recipe community shared their cherished Christmas recipes and the memories surrounding them, I really wanted to hear MORE. So I decided to expand on a few of these with a little mini series about Christmas traditio...

Welcome back to the Christmas Around the World Series on The Storied Recipe Podcast! This series began as a crowd-sourced post titled Christmas Desserts Around the World. As the Storied Recipe community shared their cherished Christmas recipes and the memories surrounding them, I really wanted to hear MORE. So I decided to expand on a few of these with a little mini series about Christmas traditio...

Welcome back to the Christmas Around the World Series on The Storied Recipe Podcast! This series began as a crowd-sourced post titled Christmas Desserts Around the World. As the Storied Recipe community shared their cherished Christmas recipes and the memories surrounding them, I really wanted to hear MORE. So I decided to expand on a few of these with a little mini series about Christmas traditio...

Welcome back to the Christmas Around the World Series on The Storied Recipe Podcast! This series began as a crowd-sourced post titled Christmas Desserts Around the World. As the Storied Recipe community shared their cherished Christmas recipes and the memories surrounding them, I really wanted to hear MORE. So I decided to expand on a few of these with a little mini series about Christmas traditio...

Welcome back to the Christmas Around the World Series on The Storied Recipe Podcast! This series began as a crowd-sourced post titled Christmas Desserts Around the World. As the Storied Recipe community shared their cherished Christmas recipes and the memories surrounding them, I really wanted to hear MORE. So I decided to expand on a few of these with a little mini series about Christmas traditio...

Welcome to The Storied Recipe, a podcast about food, culture and love. I'm thrilled to share this special crowdsourced episode, 36 Testimonies to Cultivate the Spirit of Thanksgiving Spirit , with you today! Welcome & Introduction Thanksgiving is genuinely my favorite holiday. I love preparing for a home full of hungry guests! But in years past, I've often felt a bit of a disconnect when prepa...

Most of us have heard that the current revolution in Iran began with the death of Mahsa Amini, who was beaten to death for not wearing the hijab in accordance with the regime’s morality laws. But did you know her name was Jina? When Jina was born, her parents were required to seek permission to name her Jina. The name was not allowed. So, they chose Mahsa as her official name and called her Jina a...

Hi listeners! So glad to have you join me today to learn all about Sfouf, the recipe contributed by today’s guest, Amale Chamseddine of Habibi What’s Cooking! Now, sfouf is a gorgeous golden Lebanese cake that’s very easy and quick to make. In Lebanon, Amale and her family would just buy Sfouf from the famous Lebanese bakeries, where it is made daily. When Amale was still a child, however, the pri...

Over 6 million Venezuelan refugees are currently seeking asylum around the world. In September, between 1400 and 1600 fled PER DAY. Today we’ll hear the story of an anonymous guest, who gained asylum in the US 4 years ago. She is speaking anonymously because the government there is so repressive - so controlling (you’ll hear how she was threatened to lose all access to food if she didn’t vote for...

I’ve never celebrated Diwali in my life but when I think of Diwali, I smile. Why? - because for years now, I’ve seen friends in the food world celebrate Diwali and their celebrations just exude excitement. When I planned out episodes way back in the beginning of 2022, I was adamant that in October, I would learn more about the origins and traditions of Diwali.  Today, thanks to Lopa, I finall...

Alison of Ancestral Kitchen speaks to us today from a tiny little flat outside Florence, Italy, that overlooks the land that grows and sustains her food. From there, she cooks for her family and develops resources for the rest of us on how to eat ancestrally. For Alison, food has been the catalyst for just about everything in her life. As a child, she turned to food when she felt, deep in her soul...

Today's guest, Elizabeth is mother to 4 very young children. Her oldest, Louie, was born with a genetic condition so rare that he was only the 12th person in the world diagnosed with it. Not only that, but the mutation was "De Novo" - Latin for "in the beginning", meaning that this genetic disorder did not come from Elizabeth and her husband’s genes; it was a mutation that sprang up in L...

Today, I'm welcoming Mai of Almond & Fig to the podcast so that, together, we can all honor Mai's grandmother, her beloved Teta. Mai’s grandmother was born in Palestine long before 1948, when the international community took it upon themselves to declare parts of her Palestine as the new nation of Israel. She was a young woman when she saw the suffering of 1967, and already a grandmother many...

Have you ever thought about the stories right there in your own neighborhood, on your own street, in the homes up and down the block where you live? Where Marina was raised, there were Koreans, Germans, Russians, Ukrainians, Persians, and the indigenous people as well - not Native Americans, because Marina wasn’t raised in America. Instead, she was raised in Kazakhstan, a huge Asian country where...

Welcoming Sophie to the podcast today. She’s speaking with us from Uganda, where she writes the blog A Kitchen in Uganda and hosts a podcast titled Our Food Stories.  Sophie takes us with her to the communal gatherings she enjoyed by sunset and moonlight at the communal pestle, where women took turns pounding cassava and preparing dinner, while large extended families ate together in the moon...

So happy to welcome the utterly delightful Lauren of Must Love Herbs to the podcast today. Lauren is going to speak to an idea that I don’t broach quite enough in this podcast, which is the fact that the US itself has many distinct subcultures: Appalachia (or - properly said, Appa - LATCH- a) is one of those subcultures with its own geography, heritage, music, accents, and foodways. Lauren is quic...

Excited to introduce you today (although she needs no introduction in the food photography circles) to Dyutima Jha, the energetic, positive, and professional woman behind the My Food Lens podcast. Dyutima was born and raised by a schoolteacher mother (who also happened to be a radically experimental and wonderful cook) and a neurologist father. Because her father was in the military, Dyutima and h...

I reached out to Saima for an interview because I have noticed Saima often achieves the difficult balance of being unfailingly kind, gracious, and encouraging to others while unflinchingly frank in her opinions on many topics of great importance.  It’s so difficult to do both at the same time, but when someone does so successfully, that is exactly the type of person I’m most curious to speak...

Olia spent summers in Mariupol, dashing through the massive food markets, eating dried fish with her grandparents, and picnicking on the beaches alongside tourists from around the world, including Russians. However, in 2014 those neighbors mounted siege after siege upon Mariupol. The rounds of assault and resistance became so commonplace that Olia’s grandmother, who worked at the now infamous Azov...

Why does the US have 90,000 miles of shoreline yet import the majority of its most of seafood? My guest today is Craig Fear. He’s an author of 3 soup cookbooks, a blogger at Fearless Eating, and a board member of the New England-based seafood non-profit, Eating with the Ecosystem, which promotes a place-based approach to consuming seafood. Craig fell in love with soups during his travels to East A...