Seeing Home Through New Eyes

An Interview of Author Erin Gleeson of Redwood City

The weather in Northern California is finally starting to feel like Spring. The plum trees in my backyard are blooming, the jasmine on my neighbor’s fence smells wonderful, and some pea shoots are poking their heads up in our garden. The nights are even colder than they were earlier in the year—we have lots of frost in the morning—but the days are warming up a bit.

For this week’s newsletter, I spoke with Erin Gleeson, the author of the Forest Feast cookbook series. Like me, Erin grew up in California but then spent a number of years in New York. When she moved back, about decade ago, she and her husband moved into a cabin in the hills of Redwood City, set among towering redwood trees. Erin started a blog, combining watercolor illustrations and photography with simple, eye-catching vegetarian recipes, and soon that blog had morphed into a book (and then another book, and then tablewares and journals and other fun things). A couple weeks ago, she told me about how she started cooking this way and how she researched her newest book, The Forest Feast Road Trip, which coming out at the end of March and is all about traveling through California. Here is our conversation, edited and condensed for clarity.

Erin Gleeson

I grew up in Sebastopol, California. We lived out on an apple orchard, and it was a very kind of bucolic setting. We spent a lot of time outdoors; my parents are great gardeners, and they had a great big vegetable garden.

And around the time I was six or seven, my mom became very interested in the vegan diet. She was following a local chef, Doctor MacDougal, who wrote a lot of books and lived in our town and was offering cooking classes. So, she overhauled our entire family’s eating, which had been pretty standard American up until that point. She grew up in the ‘50s and ‘60s in a sort of meat-and-potatoes kind of household and that transitioned to our home. She would make, lasagnas and beef stroganoff and probably chicken—I don’t even remember some of the early stuff.

It was around the time that we moved to the orchard that her cooking shifted. She started taking these cooking classes, I think because she wanted to be healthier. Suddenly she was making her own tofu burgers. You couldn’t buy veggie burgers then and you couldn’t buy all the meatless products you can buy now. She was using powdered egg replacer to try to bind stuff together. And they would fall apart. She became really engaged in learning to cook in a whole new way.

In my mind, we were sort of vegan-vegetarian for several years. I asked my mom about it recently, and she was like, “Well, we sort of came in and out of it.” So, we were never super strict. We ate that way at home, but I remember having turkey at my grandparents’ house on Thanksgiving, and we went to somebody’s house, we could have whatever we wanted. We would get a stomachache, but we would eat it. I specifically remember getting so many stomach aches having ice cream after being vegan for years.

That sort of transitioned into us being vegetarian, and I stayed vegetarian. My family sort of went in and out of it, individually. But I stayed vegetarian until I was in my late 20s. At that time, I was shooting a lot at the James Beard Foundation in New York as a volunteer, and I was in the kitchen with all these chefs, trying to build my food photography portfolio. I was being offered these amazing dishes and felt bad that I couldn’t try them. And I felt like one of my reasons for staying vegetarian was kind of more ethical and for sustainability reasons—and for heath too and for animals to—but I was thinking of it more in an environmental way at that time, and I thought Well, a lot of these chefs are really sourcing in a responsible way, and if I only have these things once in a while, I can feel ok about it.

So that was in 2008, or something like that. So since then, I will occasionally eat meat. I’d say I’m 99.9 % vegetarian. But if I’m at somebody’s house, or I’m traveling and there’s a unique product that I feel it would be important to try, or if it’s a special occasion or a party and something special is being served, I will usually try like a bite or two. Or if I’m working with a chef who’s making something, and I think it would be good to try it. I would never order a burger at a restaurant.  

I come to cooking as an artist; I went to art school not culinary school. What I make is very simple. I feel like I cook very much like what’s in my books. I’m very much a home cook and inspired by produce and always trying to make things as simple as I can and trying to highlight what’s in season, because I think that makes it taste good.

When I started cooking, I was making what sounded good to me, and I think I was just guided by my farm box, and I was often reaching for the most colorful item in the box. I was making classic dishes that I’d had or seen at restaurants that were pretty simple—salads and stuff—but trying to think about presentation and cutting vegetables and fruit in different ways to make it a little different. Like the watermelon salad in my first book: instead of cubing it, I had big round slabs as the base of the salad and then built it on top. I think that the idea of a little sculpture on a plate was informed by this one pastry chef I worked with in New York. He really approached each thing with so much attention to detail, in terms of color and how things were cut and presented and sort of built on the plate.

So, I was really into that bringing some simple artfulness to the way I would plate a dish, even though my ingredients were very simple. I was not trying to make anything elaborate. I think I’m just generally overwhelmed by recipes with lots of ingredients and lots of steps—I still am. My goal is not to teach people how to cook. If they want to learn to cook and make sauces and more complicated recipes, classic recipes, they can get that everywhere else. But my goal is just to give people ideas of how to use produce in a fun way and a very approachable way.

Before I started my blog, I was doing this mostly for dinner parties. When we lived in Brooklyn, I was always going to the bodega and buying whatever weird produce I could and trying to think about how I could serve that in a fun way. My roommates and I would host dinner parties all the time, and I would try to come up with fun and different presentations. I remember one time our bodega on the corner was selling these really long aloe leaves, like two feet long. It was pointy and sharp on the edges, and for some reason I saw that and I thought Oh, that would be really fun. And I remember we used it as a platter, and we put chocolate-dipped strawberries all the way down the center of it, and that was the dessert that we put on the middle of the table. It sounds so weird, but I feel like that’s a good example of just trying to think outside the box with produce in a fun, whimsical way.

My first couple books, they’re very much about cooking from a cabin in the woods, and I wanted to take that idea on the road. We were already doing a lot of road tripping. Having three kids, going by car becomes a little bit easier, so that was part of it. (This was mostly shot before the pandemic. We did continue the road trips during the pandemic, but the bulk of the shooting in the book was the summer of 2019.)

We highlighted ten different regions of California. And this is not like a researched book—this is very much a personal journey and finding inspiration along the way. I did try to show a range of what’s grown and produced in California, but it’s very much on my experience of travel in California, rather than really trying to accurately cover every single region.

We stayed in these ten different areas, all the way north to all the way south. I was taking the idea of cooking from a cabin on the road, we stayed in ten different unique, cabin-ish places. And tried to shop at markets near each and eat at restaurants near each. I kind of let thing unfold as they went. I had a general plan, but in terms of ingredients that would inspire recipes later, I just took notes all along the way that gave me ideas that I would come back home and sort of reimagine.

Both meals at restaurants and things we found a farmers markets inspired recipe ideas. Down south, we went to the night market in Palm Springs and all the date farmers were there. And we visited a date farm and saw more varieties of dates than I ever realized there were, and I ended up preparing dishes with dates that were inspired by that visit. A sandwich in Santa Barbara, at Natural Café, inspired a sandwich that I put in the book.

After the trip, I think more thoughtfully about the terrain in which everything grows. At my market, so much that’s considered local comes from just a few hours away. But I think now about how the land there looks so different than where I live, and it’s still considered local. California is so geographically diverse that we can access “local” food that is grown in a place that’s so different. Even that date farmer told us that she drives all the way up to Northern California with her dates for farmers’ markets.

It makes me think differently about what I’m buying. For instance, Humboldt is really known for its cheeses, and when I visited, I could really see that in its green, grassy fields. The cows eat it, and they create this amazing milk that gets turned into this luscious cheese, and that’s why that area is known for that. And it’s also so foggy and coastal, so you see the dark leafy greens being grown there and in the markets. And we drove through the Central Valley in the spring, when all the almond groves were blooming. I saw papayas in Southern California in a market and thought Papayas? I’ve never seen papayas at a farmers’ market. I think it gives context to the things I already had been buying and cooking with. It’s just so easy in California to buy local. Like, at my Safeway is a lot of local food.  

I also don’t want to ignore the troubling part of California produce: the migrant workers who end up supplying a lot of our produce, and even just some of California’s culinary history, especially just driving through the Eastern Sierras, we became constantly aware of and learned a lot about the Native American people who lived in that area. We went to the Paiute Cultural Center and they have a native garden where they’re preserving some of the native seeds and native gardening/farming practices. It’s a small museum and then an actual garden space dedicated to continuing the learning around that type of food production.

I think I was also surprised by California in general and—having grown up here and coming from a family that drove a lot and camped a lot—by how many places that I had never seen. I had never really been to the Eastern Sierras, up the 395, up the far eastern part of the state. And I don’t think I’d ever been to Lassen; we saw snow in July in Lassen. I felt like I knew California pretty well, and there was just so many times that I was like, Whoa, I’ve never been here before and it’s only like a day’s drive.

Walnut Enchiladas

Erin told me this recipe came about because she is always looking for vegetarian mains that she can serve to a group, and she wanted enchiladas with some solid protein instead of just cheese. Driving through the central valley and thinking about all the nut groves she saw there made her want to work with nuts in a different way. Those two impulses, combined, lead to this stunning and unique take on a Mexican classic. (She also told me she had a walnut tree outside of her childhood home.) You can see the recipe in its full glory above, but I’ve replicated it here for ease as well.

For the Filling:
1 cup (80 g) mushrooms, chopped
1 red onion, diced
3/4 cup (90 g) unsalted walnuts, chopped
1 (15 oz/430 g) can black beans, drained

Sautée the mushrooms and onions on med-low with olive oil and a pinch of salt for 8-10 mins. Then stir in the walnuts and beans until warm.

Next you’ll need:
8 corn tortillas or small flour tortillas, heated in a pan or over an open burner flame
1 (16 oz/480 ml) jar red enchilada sauce
1 approx. 7 x 12-in (17 x 30-cm) casserole dish

Start rolling!
Pour 1/2 c (120 ml) sauce into the bottom of the dish, then start rolling a few spoonfuls of filling into each tortilla and place them seam side down in a row. Fit as many tortillas as you can, then sprinkle any leftover filling on top. Pour the remaining sauce over the tortillas and sprinkle with 1 c (116 g) grated cheddar cheese.

Bake at 375°F (190°C) for 20-25 mins.

Serve with sour cream and avocado on the side.

More California Stories to Read, Watch, and Listen To

The San Francisco Chronicle has a piece about how San Francisco-based chefs are participating in a variety of fundraisers to support Ukraine. (Make sure to check out the work of Ukrainian food blogger Anna Voloshyna, who is coordinating these efforts.)

Last week, the AP reported that the drought is so bad that federal officials from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation won’t be able to give farmers any water from the Central Valley Project’s reservoirs.

On a lighter note, Eater LA updated their list of place to find LA’s best creole and cajun dishes this week, just in time for Mardi Gras.

Last but not least, Sunset Magazine just posted a great article about West Coast sake brewers (including Sequoia Sake, in San Francisco, and Nova Brewing, in Covina) that are modifying brewing to fit local ingredients, like the calrose rice grown in the Sacramento region and experimenting with new techniques.

Images by Erin Gleeson