How a Picky Eater Became a Cooking Expert
An interview with Food52 founding editor Kristen Miglore of Sunnyvale
Happy January! For the first issue of the year, I have an interview with Kristen Miglore, founding editor of Food52, current editor of their Genius Recipe column, and author of the brand’s many Genius Recipe books. I’ve known Kristen for a long time (we met almost 15 years ago, when I was on staff at Saveur and she did a stint as an editorial intern), so I used the publication of her most recent book, Simply Genius, as an excuse to get on the phone for a chat last fall.
This book is ideal resource for anyone who made a New Year’s resolution to cook more in 2023; it’s full of excellent tips, charts, and illustrations to help make cooking less confusing, and, most importantly, it has tons of absolutely wonderful recipes. (I’ve written more about the book’s contents in my fall cookbook roundup.) Kristen and I spoke about the book, and we also talked about her food influences, her history as a former picky eater, and how working with Genius Recipes for so many years has impacted her approach to cooking. She also shared the cocoa almond oatmeal recipe—one of her favorites from the book. Here is what she told me, edited and condensed for clarity:
Kristen Miglore
Where did you grow up, and what was food like when you were a kid?
My earliest childhood days were in near LA, in a town called Downey. It’s actually where, the oldest standing McDonald's is; I think it was the third-built McDonald's. That's like Downey's claim to fame. It has the huge golden arches. So that was something that we were quite proud of when I was little. I lived there until I was right or nine and then moved up to Northern California, east of Sacramento, into the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas.
My earliest food memories from around that time, living down in LA, are really influenced by my grandmother, who lived four blocks away. And she was from Oklahoma by way of Colorado, so she had a lot of Southern influences in her cooking. We had biscuits and gravy at her house pretty much every weekend. Her biscuits and gravy recipe is a little unusual—I have the recipe for it on Food52—and I've been kind of spending most of my food career trying to replicate it but never quite getting there, even though I tried documenting it many times when she was alive. There's just something about it that isn't quite perfect without her.
My parents really just exposed my brother and I to lots of foods. They loved going out to eat at local restaurants, and so some of my earliest food memories are just at local restaurants in town, where I was growing up—and not just the local McDonald's. They would just take us to whatever restaurants they liked, and they just brought along a bag of markers and little books or games we could play. And we, my brother and I, from the time we were babies, just kind of sat there and played or read books until the food came.
What kinds of stuff did your parents cook at home?
Certainly, there were the quick get-it-on-the-table nights: lots of just basic like pork chops and rice and lima beans, or something. You know, just kind of here's your vegetable, your starch, and your meat, and that's it. But they were very curious about food, so there was a lot of experimentation too. I remember my dad got into blackening things when he got into Paul Prudhomme in the eighties.
Those things, though, would always come with sort of a tale. Sometimes there would be experiments that would fail, and those would become like, “Oh, remember when we invited that family who owns a restaurant over to dinner? We made the pastry in the food processor that turned all gummy, and we served them this chicken wrapped in pastry that was terrible.” Those kinds of flops would become family lore. But that happily that never stopped my dad from trying new things. And I think that influenced me a lot.
The main cookbook that I remember from my childhood was the Frog Commissary Cookbook. I don't personally remember specific recipes from it, but I remember it had a vibe like the Silver Palate. I believe the Frog Commissary was another gourmet shop that put out a cookbook. So, we didn't have the Silver Palate as a big presence in our house, but that one had a similar feeling. I remember there's like watercress salads and things like that. That felt like a new, exciting thing to be eating in the eighties.
I was a really painfully picky eater. But my parents handled it really well. I have done a lot of research since, getting into food and going to grad school for food studies at NYU. I was sort of so fascinated that picky eating—mine and seeing it in children and even in some of my adult friends—I really wanted to understand what influences that biologically, socially, psychologically, all the different things. So, I did a lot of research on that when I was in grad school. In retrospect, looking back, I see that my parents basically did all the things that people recommend doing without having a background in it: They always continued to offer me a variety of foods, always left something that they knew I would eat on the table, but they also introduced other foods and didn't pressure me a lot and didn't force me to eat anything that I was really panicking about—like some other places that did kind of force those three “brownie bites,” or three “no-thank-you bites,” or all that kind of stuff that I felt sort of deepened my resistance over the years.
I started coming out of it when I was a teenager. I was about 12 or 13, and I went to a new camp one summer with a friend. I basically subsisted off of pretty plain-cooked vegetables—a lot of lima beans, green beans, broccoli, zucchini, steamed vegetables—throughout my childhood. I refused to eat salad after being forced to eat the three brownie bites earlier on. And then I got to this camp, and they didn't have anything but salad as a vegetable. And I think I just thought, Okay, I probably can't get through this week just eating the corn dogs and the chicken and whatever; I need to have vegetables. So, I just started dipping a toe in, like, Italian dressing, and realizing, Oh, this is actually delicious.
I was thinking of salads as always being just covered in blue cheese or ranch, because those were the ones that I'd been forced to eat as a kid. But I realized that Italian dressing could be really bright and tangy sweet and add life to iceberg lettuce. So, I think, from then on, I started realizing food didn't have to be scary and overwhelming, even if I didn't know what it was going to taste like. And, frankly, it just kind of exploded from there. Now I eat everything.
So, I guess I've had this lifelong fascination with picky eating from both sides of it. And now that I have a daughter, I'm doing my best to kind of do what my parents did: just continue exposing her to as many foods as I possibly can think of, to cook for and with her, and always try to come up with new angles of how we can decide what we're going make. But also having compassion for her and remembering what it was like to be on the other side of it and not making a big deal of anything because she doesn't want to try something.
It is so not my personality to let go of something like this. It’s taken all these years of research and observing other kids, and really reflecting on what I want to have our relationship be like at the table, to really let go of what she eats at any given time—and also really take the wins too, like noticing when I'm like, “Okay, if you don't want to try that, that's fine,” and then seeing her coming back around to it, and reminding myself that if I had bugged her and pressured her, it probably wouldn't have happened.
In that sense, it's more successful than I ever thought it would be. Not in the sense that she has this amazing talent and she tries everything and she's fine with me just like mixing all the foods together. None of that is true. I still have to be sensitive to what she'll be excited to eat. But in terms of her still being open. She's three and a half, and I've heard that three is kind of peak pickiness—I'm sure it varies by kid. But seeing that she comes back around, seeing that she's curious, seeing that she's excited to be in the kitchen, that she comes from a place of “Yes.” And I just want to emulate that.
When did you start cooking for yourself?
I dabbled when I was still living at home, making the Toll House chocolate chip cookies. I think of that as the way that I learned how to respect baking and respect recipes. They weren’t from the back of the back the bag of chocolate chips, weirdly enough. My mom had a pretty massive cookbook collection—and still does—and we had a spiral-bound Toll House cookbook that we always pulled out to make the cookies. And I don't know that we ever made anything else from that book, but for some reason that was the ritual.
And that was just one of the things that I did with friends. Well, we didn't know what to do after school, if they came over. It was like, “let's just bake chocolate chip cookies.” And I messed them up pretty much every time. It was just about the, the activity, the journey, the sneaking bites of cookie dough, all that kind of stuff. But I feel like that's how I started to respect like, Oh, why did these, you know, spread all into one cookie? I put in too much brown sugar. Or, They looked great in the oven, but then, after they cooled, they were rock hard. What? So, I was picking up those kinds of tips along the way and I guess also processing how it felt to try something, have it not work out, and then want to try again.
I really started cooking was when I was in college, after I wasn't in the dorms anymore, in my own apartment with friends at UC Santa Barbara. I remember when we got our first kitchen and our first apartment going bringing Julia Child’s The Way to Cook with me and laying out in the sun and reading this massive cookbook while we were doing our ill-advised tanning. As I was waiting for the school year to start, I was like, Okay, this is when I'm going to learn to do things.
I feel like a lot of the influences on my early cooking were nineties food trends. Some of that was California Cuisine, but some of it was also things like bruschetta, which seemed like it was at every restaurant. It was always a thing that we wanted to order. That wasn't necessarily California, because obviously that's Italian, but it seemed like it showed up at a lot of California restaurants at the time. That was one of the first things that I realized I could make at home and have it taste relatively similar to something you could get at a restaurant—and it felt very fancy. And by bruschetta, I mean specifically the chopped tomatoes, the garlic, the basil, maybe a little balsamic, olive oil, salt, and just piling that on toasted bread. That was sort of the only way that I knew it to exist in the nineties and early aughts, maybe, when I was in college.
When did you end up moving out of California?
After I graduated college. I had major in business economics and a minor in professional writing and editing. And I had some aspirations of trying to get into writing and editing at a food magazine, but obviously those jobs are incredibly hard to come by.. I spent the first few years out of college at a couple different econ jobs. The first one, in Santa Barbara, was analyzing car lease portfolios, exclusively. So, I spent two years running analyses on portfolios full of car leases. And then I did another econ job, a little bit different, in LA.
In retrospect, the things I really enjoyed about those jobs was having coworkers and having a lunch break. The most exciting part of the day was picking where we were going to go to lunch. The rest of the time in my cubicle, I just kind of daydreamed about what I wanted to cook or where I wanted to go out to eat on the weekend.
I was applying to Bon Appetit—this was when they were based in LA—as often as I could, and I never heard back. And I just kind of grew increasingly desperate to get out of working in economics, because I just was thinking about food more and more and more. One day, in frustration with feeling really disconnected from the work I was doing, and what my brain actually wanted to be doing, I Googled “food studies.” Because I couldn't figure out how to get a job working in food, and I thought There's gotta be some way, there's gotta be some graduate school program that isn't culinary school. Because I didn't think that I had the stamina for working in a restaurant. I had worked in restaurants before, on my summers after high school and college. So, I knew how grueling working in a restaurant is. And I appreciated the experience of doing it, but I it was something that was challenging to think about doing full time. And that wasn't really necessarily the part of food that I was most interested in. I wanted to cook, but I wanted to be able to analyze and write and not spend all of my time cooking.
So, I Googled food studies, and I found the program at NYU, the master's program there, and it was exactly what I was hoping existed but didn't know it was out there. So, I moved to New York for that in 2007.
How has working on the Genius Books and the Genius Column for so many years affected how you cook at home?
In some ways, working on all the genius recipes—the cookbooks and the column—has kind of taken up all the space in my life for following recipes. I continue to have a huge appreciation for recipes, obviously, because all I do is talk about how special certain recipes are. But because I'm always testing recipes for the cookbooks or for the column, any in-between time that isn't testing a recipe, I rarely am looking for other recipes to make for fun. Those in between times are my chance is to be creative myself.
But I do use those ideas. What I love about the best genius recipes is that the point is that they give us some trick or technique that will change the way that we cook. So, I will follow, verbatim, a recipe if I know that that's really critical to the outcome. But more often I just sort of take these little tricks that I picked up along the way and use them to assemble whatever's in my fridge at the time. And I hope that that's how other people use them too.
I guess you can use them both ways. My parents are kind of two opposite sides of the spectrum of cooking. My mom follows recipes every time. My dad pretty much never does. And I think that both types of cooks can benefit from using the recipes that I'm seeking out, because they work well exactly as the original authors wrote them, if you want something that is just really dependable to always be able to go back to, but, also, there are these kind of defining tricks.
The recipe that I make the most often from the book is Samantha Seneviratne’s cocoa almond oatmeal (which is in Simply Genius). She’s this incredible cookbook author and food stylist, and we were working together years ago on a video shoot at Food52, and she mentioned to me that she makes all of her oatmeal in a non-stick skillet, because you didn't have a sticky pot left to clean afterwards. And it also, because it's a wider surface area, it cooks down a little faster, and it comes out quite creamy.
In her recipe, she uses a little bit more milk than like the back of the package would. And I make that with my daughter all the time. Usually we use exactly Sam's recipe, because it's just so good. It's got a lot of cocoa powder in it, so it's got this really like deep bittersweet chocolate flavor, but there's no sweetness in the oatmeal itself. You can sweeten it to taste with maple syrup afterwards. And she swirls in almond butter, too. So that combination of the bittersweet chocolate, the almond butter, and the maple syrup is just like—I never knew that I wanted chocolate oatmeal in my life, and it's one of my favorite breakfasts now. And it's so easy to make that we do make it all the time. So, we do follow that recipe pretty specifically, although sometimes we swirl it in peanut butter instead, or throw on some chopped nuts or fruit or whatever we feel like. But also in the book, Sam includes three other riffs that she does, and you can just take that template and use it to make any oatmeal. She gives you a few different ideas for flavor combinations, or she will also stir in leftover cooked grains (like farro or spelt or something like that) to make it extra nutty and chewy.
What does your home cooking look like now that you're back in California? Has it changed?
I guess it's always changing and in ways that I don't really see at the time. In the beginning of the pandemic, we were making a lot of hashes, just because it was something that we could make fast. We were caring for our daughter who was one at the time and both had full-time jobs still and no childcare. So, it was like, What is the quickest meal that we can make? And, you know, there was always some way we could put leftovers together and fry an egg and put it on top. So, I've recently returned to that, just because I'm still working from home and I like taking that break during the day to give my brain a new thing to work on and put something together from the fridge. And that tends to always be something that, you know, you can pull in whatever seasonal produce and whatever leftovers you have.
It does seem to like go in phases that you don't recognize, and then all of a sudden one day you're realize, Oh, I haven't made that in a while. But coming back to California, I appreciate the produce more than I ever would have if I didn't move to New York. I had no idea what we had access to until I moved to New York. I didn't really understand seasons until moving there. So the fact that, we're in the middle of October and I can still make beautiful toast with deep red tomatoes on top is just something that would've been unheard of in New York. And when I was working at Food52 in the early days, I don’t think we would have thought to feature a tomato recipe at this time of year. But in California it's just sort of a given that we will continue to have access for longer than other places. It's good to have both perspectives. I think it's good to know that that's not true everywhere else.
I have been making a lot of giant salads for myself. I sort of relish in my lunches, making things my daughter won’t eat: huge salads and lots of things piled on toast. I don't have a toaster. I haven't for a very, very long time. So, our broiler is something that we use for just about everything. We have one of those ovens that has a full-size oven below and then a tiny kind of broiler compartment. And we cook just about everything it either in a skillet or in the broiler.
Fora long time, I obsessed with olive oil-fried toast, after writing about a recipe from Roman’s in Fort Green, Brooklyn many years ago. My easy modification of that recipe is to just throw the bread under the broiler, toast one side, flip it over and drizzle a good amount of olive oil on top, and then broil it so the top gets really crispy. And then that is just a good bed for anything and everything that I might want to pile on top. It's the fastest way that I can get the kind of toast I want since I don't keep butter soft on the counter and I don't necessarily want to like fill a pan with olive oil to fry toast. Also, at this point it's an everyday kind of food, so it feels a little bit heavy to have it that saturated. This is all the good things about fried toast without using more olive oil than you maybe want to; also, olive oil is so expensive.
Last night we made Canal House's crispy chicken thighs. That technique is one that I always go back to because it's really hands-off, and I just haven't figured out how to make chicken thighs any better. You start it in a fairly cool pan, like medium heat at most on the skin side and let it render for kind of as long as you can and let it crisp. It's kind of the way that I think a lot of people make duck. You really want to crisp and render out as much of the fat as you can. And it just gets so salty and crispy, like a potato chip. And then you flip it for a little bit less time on the second side, just to finish cooking it through.
And then you end up with this pan full of schmaltz. So last night I quickly microwaved some baby potatoes and like spooned schmaltz over it with some salt, instead of buttering the potatoes. Also, I had some corn still. (Can you believe in October we still have fresh corn?) So, I sliced that off the cobs and threw the corn in there in the pan with the little bits of brown goodness, so it could pick up a little bit of that. And we had some steamed green beans on the side.
I love being able to kind of put piece of these things together. I feel so fortunate in my career to have been doing this for so long. I've been doing the Genius Recipes column for over 11 years now, which I can't believe, and I feel really lucky that my day job turned into this thing where I get to collect these little tricks from all of these brilliant cookbook authors and chefs and food writers, and then just kind of pull them up when I have 30 minutes to throw together dinner, either with my daughter, if she's down to cook with me, or while she's playing with her dad. And it's kind of like this archive that I can pull up. But also, if there's something that I can add to it, then I feel even better.
Recipe: Cocoa Almond Oatmeal
Making a quick batch of oatmeal each day can be a happy, steadying ritual. Finding the sticky pot still soaking in the sink at 6 p.m. is not. So food stylist and The Joys of Baking author Samantha Seneviratne switched to a nonstick skillet—a trick she picked up in a test kitchen at some point in her career, but really put to use when feeding her toddler, Arthur. Not only is the skillet much easier to clean, but the oats also cook down swifter and creamier, as they bubble down over a wider surface area.
The following basic ratio works with any milk, mix-ins, and toppings, but you’ll want this chocolate-almond combo for mornings in need of glee. It will smell like hot cocoa as you stir it and remind you of the chocolatey cereals little-kid-you weren’t supposed to have—with a nutty, bittersweet depth to hug your grown-up heart.
Serves 1*
1⁄2 cup (50g) old-fashioned rolled oats
1 1⁄4 cups (300ml) unsweetened almond milk, plus more for serving
Salt
4 teaspoons cocoa powder
2 tablespoons creamy or chunky almond butter
Maple syrup (optional)
Simmer the oats: To a medium nonstick skillet, add the oats, almond milk, a pinch of salt, and the cocoa. Bring to a simmer over medium heat, stirring frequently and scraping the bottom and sides with a silicone spatula, until the oats are tender and creamy, about 5 minutes. Reduce the heat if it starts boiling too wildly, and don’t wander away or it might boil over on you. Stop cooking when the oatmeal is a little looser than you want, as it will thicken as it cools.
Top and eat: Swirl in the almond butter and maple syrup. Add more milk if you’d like. Serve hot and clean up fast.
*More Oatmeal!
This recipe scales up well, but it might take a few extra minutes to cook. At any scale, make sure your pan isn’t more than two-thirds full since it will bubble up as it simmers. An 8-inch (20cm) skillet is great for one serving; go with 10-inch (25cm) or larger for a double batch.
More California Stories to Read, Watch, and Listen To
The New Year always brings all kinds of roundups and food-related predictions, like this one, from Eater LA, about restaurants’ biggest hopes for 2023 and SFGate’s look at chefs’ predictions about upcoming restaurant trends. This year, the LA Times also gave its food section a makeover; check it out here. Other outlets have some slightly more depressing news, including a look at restaurants that have major damage after the recent storms, like the SF Chronicle’s piece on how Bay Area restaurants are trying to weather the weather. In other news, Eater has a piece about Giada De Laurentiis’ new online store, Giadzy. And KQED has my favorite food piece of the week: a memory-filled essay about the importance of Dungeness crab to the Bay Area’s Filipino community.
Photos and Spreads reprinted with permission from Food52 Simply Genius: Recipes for Beginners, Busy Cooks & Curious People by Kristen Miglore, published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Copyright © 2022 by Food52 Inc.
Photographs copyright © 2022 by James Ransom
Illustrations copyright © 2022 by Eliana Rodgers