The Well-Seasoned Librarian: Mixing Cookbooks and Conversation

Bio Victoria Slind-Flor has been a journalist since the early 1970s. In the course of her career she has worked for the Bellevue American (now the Eastside Journal), the West Bank Guide, New Orleans Business, the Los Angeles Daily Journal, The Recorder,  National Law Journal, American Lawyer, Intellectual Property Law and Business, the American Bar Association Journal, Intellectual Asset Mana...

Bio: BRIAN THEIS is a resident of New Orleans and New York. He is a recipe developer, teacher, and home cooking maestro, passionate about twentieth-century culinary history. His New Orleans side of the family encouraged his immersion in Creole cooking, and his worldly travels inspired his affinity for international cooks and their fare. Theis is now a regular guest cooking up his recipes on a numb...

Bio: Douglas Weissman is a graduate of the Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing at the University of San Francisco. He is an award-winning travel writer and has published 8 novels spanning Young Adult, New Adult, and Adult genres.  He lives in Los Angeles with his gorgeous wife, fun-loving daughter, anxious dog, and indifferent cat. By the time you read this, he will probably have...

Jeremy James Lee is a British chef and chef proprietor at Quo Vadis, London. He had previously been head chef at the Blueprint Café for eighteen years. " With the voice of a thespian and the culinary skills of a French master chef, Jeremy Lee is by far one of the most well liked chefs in London. His incredible dedication to British produce is apparent in his simple, delicious food, coming out of t...

About the Sour Dough Library The future of Bread lies in its past, a tour in the only sourdough library Bread! It feeds, it crackles, it breathes. When you bite into it, you dive into a wealth of heritage and a whirlwind of a story written with only a few basic ingredients. Flour, water, fermentation, and time. Over 250 generations of bakers like you have kneaded their hearts and th...

Bio: Maggie Zhu started her website, Omnivore’s Cookbook, in 2013. Born and raised in Beijing, she moved to Austin, Texas, in 2015. Now she’s a full-time New York–based blogger, writer, recipe developer, and photographer. Having grown up with a mother who always did the cooking, Maggie’s culinary adventure started in 2007, when she moved to Japan and needed to cook to survive. Learning and sharing...

Bio Yumi Komatsudaira  is the president of K-Seaweed, a leading ocean greens provider since 1960’s and an author, recipe developer, food stylist and food photographer for her latest cookbook, “Japanese Superfoods: Learn the Secrets of Healthy Eating and Longevity - the Japanese Way!" by Tuttle Publishing. (This book will be released on January 3, 2023) She is also a Japanese culinary instruct...

Bio Vasudha Viswanath is the founder of We Ate Well, a community for foodies that brings you the inside scoop on everything vegetarian. Her mission is to help you eat mindfully, joyfully and sustainably on a vegetarian diet. She grew up in Bangalore, India and now lives in New York City with her husband and daughter. Her web site is www.v8well.com __________________________________________________...

Bio: Leah Su Quiroga cooked for over a decade at Alice Waters’s renowned California restaurant, Chez Panisse, where she started out as an intern and quickly worked her way up to head chef. She currently lives in Sebastopol, California, where she’s raising a family.  Cammie Kim Lin , Leah’s sister, is a serious home cook who got her start in commercial kitchens before becoming a professor and...

Bio Jenay Marontate began learning the secrets of kitchen witchery at an early age from her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. Now, she applies her knowledge of herbs, oil, magic, and kitchen witchery to her loose-leaf tea and spice business, Kitchen Witch Gourmet. Here, she infuses tea with magic, wellness, happiness, and love to brew the perfect cup. She also teaches tea leaf reading an...

Jenna Helwig Bio: When I first started preparing my own meals as a young adult, my idea of cooking was boiling pasta and heating up a jar of store-bought tomato sauce. My salads were topped with bottled dressing, and I didn’t think twice about using a box of brownie mix. But, while it’s true my cooking skills were practically non-existent, I always loved to eat delicious food. That interest in goo...

Sarah Gailey is a Hugo Award Winning and Bestselling author of speculative fiction, short stories, and essays. They have been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards for multiple years running. Their bestselling adult novel debut, Magic For Liars , was published by Tor Books in 2019. Their most recent novel, Just Like Home , and first original comic book series with BOOM! Studios, Eat th...

Atava Garcia Swiecicki is guided by her dreams and her Mexican, Polish, Hungarian, and Diné ancestors. She received a BA in feminist studies from Stanford University and a master’s degree from the Indigenous Mind Program at Naropa University in Oakalnd. Atava has studied healing arts extensively for over thirty years and has bee...

Matt Cockerill A sourdough-fermenting, backyard-wasabi-growing culinary adventurer, Matt began his career as a science publisher. As co-founder of open-access publishing pioneer BioMed Central, he helped to bring the 350-year-old science publishing industry into the digital age. Next up, cookbooks! He is based in London, and when he is not working, cooking, or drinking coffee, he likes to bur...

Bio: Hi, I'm Emily.  Growing up in suburban NJ, there were plenty of good bagels around.  But when my father had business take him to the Upper West Side, he would stop by Zabar's for lox, sable, whitefish, and chive cream cheese, and H&H for bagels, which we would have as a special treat.  These bagels were on a whole different level of unique deliciousness.  After moving...

Bio: Culinary educator Kim Kushner is the best-selling author of 'The Modern Table', 'I Heart Kosher', 'The New Kosher', and ‘The Modern Menu’. Raised in Montreal, Canada, Kim learned to cook at an early age from her Moroccan-born mother and spent summers with family in Israel. A graduate of the Institute of Culinary Education in Manhattan, she has developed recipes for Food & Wine and Chile P...

Bio: Faith Kramer is a food writer and recipe developer concentrating on the food ways, history, and customs of the Jewish diaspora. She develops recipes and writes about Jewish customs and food as well as travel, and global ingredients. As a columnist for j., the Jewish News of Northern California, she writes articles on food and cooking along with original recipes. Faith has taught cooking class...

This is a Hanukkah Week Rebroadcast of a previously aired episode. Bio: BETH A. LEE who grew up on the East Coast before moving with her family to Northern California, thousands of miles away from the traditional Jewish food she was raised on. She attended the University of California, Berkeley, where she received a degree in business and later pursued a marketing career in Silicon Valley. In 2010...

Bio: BETH A. LEE who grew up on the East Coast before moving with her family to Northern California, thousands of miles away from the traditional Jewish food she was raised on. She attended the University of California, Berkeley, where she received a degree in business and later pursued a marketing career in Silicon Valley. In 2010, Beth realized she preferred pita chips over computer chips and la...

Priya Mani is a Copenhagen-based designer and food writer. Mani grew up in India and studied at the National Institute of Design. Her bylines have appeared in the Art of eating, Whetstone Journal, and Gastro Obscura, among others. Her work has found mentioned in Elle Decor, Wired UK, and MOLD Magazine, and she won an Honourable mention at the Sophie Coe prize for Food Writing 2021. She is working...

Alison Walsh first began cooking as a way to stretch her post-college paycheck. From there, her love of cooking grew. In 2014, she combined her love of food and books into Alison’s Wonderland Recipes (WonderlandRecipes.com), a food blog dedicated to book-inspired recipes. Her recipes have been featured on the Good Morning America website and MuggleNet, the number one Harry Potter fan website. She...

Bio: Travel/lifestyle journalist and historian James T. Bartlett has written for the Los Angeles Times, BBC, Los Angeles Magazine, ALTA California, Hemispheres, Westways, American Way, Atlas Obscura, The Guardian, Real Crime, Ripperologist Magazine, Crime Reads, History Ireland and Variety, among others. His new true crime book, The Alaskan Blonde: Sex, Secrets, and the Hollywood Story that Shocke...

Bio :The American Crisis Playlist (2020-2021) is Terry Barr's fourth essay collection published by Redhawk Publications. Terry's essay "Greyhound Seats" won first prize in Tell Your Story's spring 2022 essay contest, and his work appears regularly in The Riff, Plethora of Pop, and A Cornered Gurl, on Medium.com.  He lives in Greenville, SC, with his family and will retire as Professor of Engl...

A quick bio : I grew up in South Carolina and Richmond, Virginia, a middle child in a big Catholic family. I majored in English at the University of South Carolina, and did an M.A. in Creative Writing at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Now I live in Richmond with my husband and son. As a freelance journalist, I've contributed to the Wall Street Journal , Slate, CNBC and NBC News, Lit Hub,...

Bio: Amisha Dodhia Gurbani is a computer engineer, recipe developer, photographer, and the creator of The Jam Lab. Born in Mumbai, she moved to the United States in 1999. Gurbani’s culinary creations are remarkable for their unique flavor pairings and modernization of her Indian culture. Through her blog and popular Instagram account, she teaches readers to play with sweet, spicy, sour and savory...