Store Bought Is Fine | Trent Pheifer
Store Bought Is Fine
by Trent Pheifer
Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.
Trent Pheifer: Hi I'm Trent Pheifer and for the last five years, I've been cooking my way through all of Ina Garten's recipes.
Suzy Chase: If you enjoy this podcast please be sure to tell a friend I'm always looking for new people to enjoy Cookery by the Book, now on with the show. I feel like Ina's cookbooks are a must for any home cook. I have so many questions for you, Trent, but first tell us how you got this spectacular idea to cook through all of Ina Garten's cookbooks and the TV show.
Trent Pheifer: It happened about five years ago. At the time I had just read, Julia Child’s, My Life in France, and it kind of coincided with a time that my roommate and I were constantly watching the Barefoot Contessa on Food Network, but not totally making a lot of her food. So those two things kind of combined at the same time I was in a relationship. I was cooking a little bit more. So I started to try to branch out and develop my knowledge of cooking. After a summer spent with hundreds of failed recipes I decided that I should probably stick to one cookbook author that throughout the course of the several recipes that I had made, had always come through for me. And that was the Barefoot Contessa Ina Garten. Her recipes have been foolproof, I'd made three or four over the course of the summer. And I jokingly mentioned to my friend that, you know what, maybe I should just teach myself how to cook by working my way through all Ina Garten's recipes, ala, Julie and Julia one of my favorite movies. Who doesn't love Meryl Streep? So I started the Instagram account kind of on a whim with a photoshopped image of me and Ina called Trent & Ina saying that if I cooked three recipes a week, I would finish all of her recipes in five years and that I hoped Meryl Streep was available to play us in the movie. Yeah. And it's been five years since then. And, it's been a really crazy journey.
Suzy Chase: So you just finished Barefoot Contessa Parties. And you mentioned on Instagram that you cook from all the books simultaneously, how do you organize everything?
Trent Pheifer: So when I first started, I realized I was going to need some sort of system at the time there were like I said 800 recipes, and now they are about 1300 and my memory is failing me so I knew that if I didn't have some sort of system I was going to be repeating recipes, forget recipes. So I created a massive Excel spreadsheet. I downloaded all of the lists of recipes from all of her books and then split it into spreadsheets that are divided into tabs of appetizer, soups, alcoholic drinks, lunches, sandwiches, dinners, breakfast and then those are broken down into, by meat or vegetarian, just so that I can easily with a quick glance pick out the recipes that I want to make for the week. And each of those have the recipe name, the title of the book, the page number, my rating, any notes I did, and then any hard to find ingredients or expensive ingredients. And it just saves me so much time on meal planning because I can go into that document in five minutes and say, I have time to run to one grocery store, which recipe can I get that won't have hard to find ingredients and then kind of match it up to other recipes on the spreadsheet.
Suzy Chase: All that stuff on your spreadsheet, you put on your blog, like the page number or the TV episode, all of that, right?
Trent Pheifer: Yea and my original plan was to build those out a little bit more. So I include the book and page number, the episode category of how easy is that, is it easy, intermediate, hard to make ingredients that you could use store-bought is find ingredients hard to find ingredients, pricey ingredients. There used to be more categories. I used to do kind of a two-fer idea where, what would you turn the leftovers into, what you could serve it with, but time kind of gets away from you and so I've kind of kept it simple on the website. It's kind of all the basics for, if you're looking to make this recipe, here's what you need to know.
Suzy Chase: So yesterday I was interviewed by BBC radio and they asked me who I would love to have on the old cookbook podcast. And I blurted out Ina and they were like, who's that? And so I kinda, I just, I just, how do you, how do you, and so all I could say was she's iconic. She's our iconic American chef cookbook author. So what is Ina to you?
Trent Pheifer: I think that Ina has always been somebody that, and like I said, with my, with my roommates, we used to watch the show and never really cook anything. She just has a magnetism to her that she has this fabulous lifestyle that I think all of us would aspire to be having an amazing time with her friends, but she's also super approachable. So she welcomes you into her house. She makes you feel like you belong there, that you can cook. And then once you start cooking your recipes, you realize that she tests these over and over and over again. She watches people cook her recipes and then incorporates things that they made mistakes with into the actual recipe. So I just think that she's been in the game for how many years she has nailed how you make a recipe and how you describe a recipe to somebody. But on top of that, she's a fun, loving, everyone wants to be friends with her, everyone wants to be invited to one of her parties and when you watched a lot of those early shows, you kind of felt like you were the in in-crowd with her at one of these fabulous parties. So I think she's just an expert that is welcoming and is not intimidating. And everyone feels welcomed with her.
Suzy Chase: The first recipe you made was the Lentil Sausage Soup from Barefoot in Paris. How did you choose this as your first recipe to kick this project off?
Trent Pheifer: I wish I could tell you that I spent so many hours to pick the perfect recipe, but to be, to be real honest, it was probably what I made the week before. I started this project in early October weather's getting a little cooler. Who doesn't love the combination of sausage and, lentils? And give me a soup any day, every day. So to be honest, it was probably just what I had cooked the week before and had taken a photo of.
Suzy Chase: I love it. Would you rate these books from your favorite on down? Are you doing that on your Instagram?
Trent Pheifer: So at the end I will, I feel like do a rating of each of the books. Right now I tell everyone that my favorites are Barefoot Contessa At Home and Barefoot Contessa Back To Basics. I just really think there are so many go-to recipes from those two books that like, especially if you are a new cook, there's just a lot that I repeat all the time. I mean, the Back To Basics Shrimp Scampi was one of the first recipes I made, and it's one of the recipes that I am constantly making. It's just so simple and such an impressive meal. So I'm doing ratings of each of the recipes as I go. I'll be very curious once I aggregate all the recipes from every book to see what ratings, the books end up coming out to. 'Cause I rate each recipe one to five, so we'll see how all that adds up in the end.
Suzy Chase: Oh my God, I can't wait. So when I was piling up my collection. I realized that she, somewhere along the line, dropped Barefoot Contessa in the title.
Trent Pheifer: Yes and I'm not exactly sure, like after I said Back To Basics, I was like, I actually don't know if it's actually called Barefoot Contessa Back To Basics.
Suzy Chase: It is. I'm looking at my pile right here. It's called Barefoot Contessa. But that's the last cookbook that had Barefoot Contessa on it, like forward facing.
Trent Pheifer: And I think that for so long, she was known as Barefoot Contessa, but I have found sometimes when I mentioned Barefoot Contessa to people, if they're not into cooking, they might not know exactly who she is, but a lot more of them have heard of Ina Garten. So I wonder if that was a conscious move after Back To Basics, to skew more towards name recognition of her own name.
Suzy Chase: Yeah. I'd love to know that story. Okay. Trent, you need to find that out.
Trent Pheifer: Hey, when maybe we'll all have a dinner together or lunch together and we can find it out together.
Suzy Chase: That would be amazing. So I know you have a tiny New York City kitchen like I do, and your kitchen seems fully stocked. Where do you store everything?
Trent Pheifer: So when I first started project, I was living in Harlem and the kitchen I had was absolutely tiny and I probably had just your basics, your plates, nonstick pan, silverware, and some odds and ends. And over time when people realize you have a passion, they start buying new things, or you start partnering. I partnered with Cassandra's kitchen, which is like a one-stop shop for all of Ina Garten's favorite tools and ingredients. So I partnered with them and so over time I've built up so much stuff that at one point in my old apartment, I was storing things under my bed, under the couch. I had a bookcase that was full of, things. I've started to pair down a little bit of what I have, but right now I have a little bit of a bigger kitchen in my current apartment in Washington Heights. So I have a little pantry that stores a lot of things, and there's just a lot of storage for the small kitchen that I do have. I think when I first started dating my boyfriend, he was like, are there pans and baking sheets under your couch? And I was like, just ignore it. You'll thank me later when I'm cooking you dinner, breakfast, or any of that. So I do have more space here, but it's always a challenge, I feel like in a small kitchen organization has become my friend as soon as I'm not cleaning the dishes as soon as I'm not prepping everything ahead of the recipe is when I start to lose my mind, I have three pans of roasted vegetables I have no clue where I'm going to set them as when I have a little bit of a meltdown in the small kitchen.
Suzy Chase: Same. I like how honest you are in the descriptions, like on recipe, number 469 Artichokes with Lemon, Terragon,Aioli, you confess that you don't love artichokes. How do you cope with foods you just don't like.
Trent Pheifer: I think one of the blessings of this project has been having to make recipes that I don't want to make. I usually, if I really, really think I'm not going to like it, I try to cut it in half or quarter it, I try to cut it down to the smallest portion that I can but that's not always an option. I think with that recipe, it might have mentioned that like I love a cheesy artichoke, give me a artichoke spinach dip or artichoke pizza, but there've been some surprising things. I think that, uh, one of the dishes that I thought I was going to hate, and I'm happy that I didn't cut in half was her Roasted Sausage and Grapes. It was just a phenomenal dish and I never thought of roasting grapes, but it really concentrates their flavor and the sweetness from them paired with the salty sausage was just absolute perfection. On the flip side, there have been ones, such as her Pear and Parsnip Gratin that I made a whole casserole dish of and I just don't love mashed up pears and parsnips. I'm not a fan of parsnips and had to eat a casserole dish of that for a week. Not my favorite thing, but in the end, I truly believe that for any dish or any ingredient, you need to try it at least three times, you could have purchased a bad ingredient. You could have gone to a restaurant and they just aren't good at making that certain dish. So I try to live by the idea that I need to try things multiple times. One of those things that I'm still working on is finding the perfect anchovy. So if anyone has any recommendations for a delicious anchovy, let me know, because I can't find one I love.
Suzy Chase: When do you break down an order from Seamless or do you?
Trent Pheifer: All the time. All the time.
Suzy Chase: Really?
Trent Pheifer: There's just certain recipes, I love cooking and I probably cook four days a week or five days a week, but there's just certain things that I'm not going to spend at home, especially work's been busy and I want something quick and delicious and tasty. If I haven't gone grocery shopping, I'm going to Seamless just because grocery shopping for me has become a little bit of a bane of my existence in the city. The grocery stores just don't have this big of footprint as they do in many other places. And so I find myself going to three or four stores just looking for chives. So at that point, I know I can order from Seamless my favorite Thai place down the street, or my favorite ramen place down the street. And I'll be there in an hour. It's just, you're exhausted after a day. Sometimes you just need Seamless.
Suzy Chase: So talk to me about food photography. It's the hardest thing for me. I make something and then I'll take a photo and I really want to make it look delicious. And oftentimes it's dark and my photos don't come out great for Instagram. What do you do?
Trent Pheifer: I mean, if you really scroll back to my early Instagram, you'll know that I struggled with that a lot early on. The premise originally was to put my horrible photos next to Ina's beautiful photos but over time, I guess, five years of taking pictures of everything you've eaten, you start to figure out what works. And I know that everyone says that natural light is your best friend. So a couple of years ago, I got a very large day light bulb from Amazon. I think it was like $15. And then I got a little clamp thing to plug it into and it has changed my life. I'm no longer chasing the light to get the perfect picture at 8:00 PM at night. And I think for probably $30, I have something that just saves me a lot of stress. And to be honest, I think natural light is your best friend. That's the one thing. I shoot all of my photos on iPhone 11 people are always like, what special equipment do you use? And all of my photos are shot on iPhones and it's finding natural light. And I mean, sometimes I wish that I weren't taking pictures of the food and I could just glop it onto a plate, but it ends up being a lot of fun. And I do think that what I would recommend is getting one of those daylight light bulbs, because it makes a world of difference.
Suzy Chase: I'm going to get that because it's so hard for me cause I make dinner for my family and it's usually out of a cookbook and I need to take a picture and it's like right now and it looks muddy. So I'm going to get one of those light bulbs. Thank you.
Trent Pheifer: And we'll send you all the information and I'll send you some pictures of stuff I've taken at night that people are convinced during the day.
Suzy Chase: Yay! So do you have a favorite Ina recipe?
Trent Pheifer: This is such a hard one after a thousand recipes, this is one of the hardest ones, but what I really always keep coming back to is her Sausage and Fennel Rigatoni. It's from Cooking For Jeffrey, it just hits all the spots. I never thought I would love fennel as much as I do. I still don't love raw fennel, but cooked fennel is absolutely delicious sausage, cream sauce, pasta, you really can't go wrong with it. So that's one of them that I always recommend to people. And then I always hear back saying thank you so much I can't believe I had not made that one, but if I have to pick one that's the one I always go with.
Suzy Chase: Speaking of cooking for Jeffrey, I went to BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music). When was that? Like 2014?
Trent Pheifer: I think so. Yeah, it was right around then... Oh no, no, no. It had to have been 2015 or 2016 because I didn't start this until 2015
Suzy Chase: And yeah, 2016. And Ina was at BAM doing a cookbook talk for Cooking for Jeffrey. And they were taking questions at the end and someone, and I swear to God, I thought it was you, stood up and mentioned your Instagram Store Bought Is Fine.
Trent Pheifer: I was so upset because I was actually on a trip with a friend to hike Machu Picchu. And I was on a plane on my way back. My Instagram started blowing up and I was like, what's like, or maybe it was right after I landed on. My Instagram was blowing up. And my friend has Hasani was like, I just stood up in front of the audience and told them about your account. And I was like, you get free food for the rest of your life!
Suzy Chase: Yes!! And the whole row was like, what is that?
Trent Pheifer: I think that was only a year into this project, but I truly think that was a little bit of a turning point in this project. I mean building a following on Instagram can be a hard thing there's, there's so much competition and I think that was one thing that people started to hear about me and the community has just been so absolutely wonderful and so supportive it's been this nice little corner of the internet that just brings me so much joy and everyone's so supportive and we just all share a love of Ina.
Suzy Chase: Today on your Instagram, you wrote "it's been nearly a month since I posted an Ina recipe with any significant amount of green veggies. I was stressing y'all." You can say that again. So first I want to tell you what I made last week, stress cooking during this election. Creamed Spinach and Eggs page 234 Modern Comfort Food. That was the perfect morning after election breakfast.
Trent Pheifer: That sounds perfect. That's been high on my list too.
Suzy Chase: The next was Chicken with Goat Cheese, and Basil on page 114 Barefoot Contessa At Home. One of the very first recipes I ever made for my husband when I was first married. So easy.
Trent Pheifer: Do you still make it regularly?
Suzy Chase: Yeah, it's the easiest, most delicious chicken.Moist, which is key.
Trent Pheifer: And that's what I love too. And I do hear from a lot of people 'cause Ina often recommends getting boneless skin on, which is very hard to find, but I'm always telling people like, it's not that hard once you've, deboned a chicken a couple times you have all of that to use for stock and then you get these delicious chicken breasts and the skin just keeps everything moist and with this one, you really need it because it holds the basil leaf and the goat cheese and that's just one of those phenomenal recipes.
Suzy Chase: And the next one I made was the Croissant Bread Pudding on page 192 of the very first Barefoot Contessa cookbook. All I can say that is so much half and half!
Trent Pheifer: It is!! That is one of my favorite dishes ever. I'm not big on the raisins. I can skip the raisins, but that was just one that I could not stop eating. And then I couldn't stop thinking about how many calories were in it.
Suzy Chase: It was perfect last week though cause we didn't even care.
Trent Pheifer: No. Last week was a free week, free calories nothing sticks.
Suzy Chase: And now we're back to green veggies today.
Trent Pheifer: We got to have balance in life, I guess.
Suzy Chase: What would you make for Ina if you had her over to dinner?
Trent Pheifer: So I always joke that this would be wonderful and also would stress me out so bad that I would probably stress about it for a couple of weeks and then I would head over to Popeye's and I would pick up a Spicy Fried Chicken Sandwich. We'd enjoy that. I would make her favorite Whiskey Sours. And then for dessert, I would make my grandma's Red Velvet Cake with Heritage Frosting. I know that with red velvet cake, people are adamant that it needs to have cream cheese frosting, but my grandma's heritage frosty is out of this world, it's a cooked frosting where you mix flour and milk and create kind of like a bechamel and then you cool that, and then you whip in the butter and sugar. And it has been my favorite thing since I was a little kid. And I just want Ina to experience that as well.
Suzy Chase: Tell us the story about when you met her in Paris.
Trent Pheifer: It was truly kismet. I had seen a couple of weeks prior that she was in the city, but I had assumed that by the time we were there, she was not going to be there. And we had made reservations at a tasting menu, a restaurant called Verjus and we had made them originally Friday. Our friend was like not getting into until Paris until Saturday, can we change the reservation? So last minute we changed reservations to Monday and it was just truly meant to be. I walked in and the restaurant is no larger than a large living room. And directly in the corner are Ina and Jeffery enjoying a meal in Paris of all places. We both live in New York, but have never run into each other. And I run into her halfway around the world. I didn't want to bother them right then so we kind of bee-lined to our table. I had to face away from them because I wouldn't be able to concentrate the entire meal. And we did the wine pairings. So I, over the course of the next hour, hour and a half, I built up my liquid courage and my friend and I walked over after we had seen they've paid their bill and I was like, "hi Ina. I absolutely love you. I just couldn't pass up this opportunity to introduce myself. I'm sorry to interrupt. I'm cooking my way through all of your recipes. And then I go, I'm Store Bought Is Fine." And she looks at me and she goes, "I heard you were in town." I think I could have died. Happy. I think people that had followed me had commented on her Instagram saying Store Bought Is Fine is in Paris too, you have to find him. So we had this really lovely conversation, talked about the dinner, talked about our trips in France. Just talked about the night and both of them were so friendly, so gracious and at the end I was like, could I get a picture? And Ina goes, "we just called a cab I'll give you the heads up when we're heading out and we'll go out and get photos." And she took photos with us and just could not have been more sweet. You always worry about meeting somebody that you appreciate and you look up to so much that maybe they could never live up to what your expectations are. People are humans, but she lived up to them in every way, shape or form. And it's just one of those nights that I have to pinch myself every once in a while 'cause I still don't believe that it happened.
Suzy Chase: Does she follow you on Instagram?
Trent Pheifer: She doesn't, but she's super supportive. She comments on photos, likes photos but she keeps her following, like who she follows very low. I think she tries to keep it at a hundred people at all times. I mean, she's super wonderful. If I reach out to her, she responds super supportive.
Suzy Chase: So I'm curious to hear about your new found passion, developing your own recipes.
Trent Pheifer: So that is something that I have just not had time over the last four years, as you can imagine, doing this project, doing the grocery shopping, cooking, photographing, writing for the website and for posts, chatting with followers, all of that kind of stuff takes up a lot of my time. So over the last two years, I've started a document every time I come across an idea of a recipe that I want to try to perfect, a recipe from my childhood, that I want to update, a recipe from a restaurant that I went out to. So I have this master list. So once the project is over and I should wrap it up in about, I think 15 months if I stay on schedule, I really want to start developing and diving into developing my own recipes and putting my own spins on a lot of dishes that I have ideas about.
Suzy Chase: Have you gotten to be a better cook through all of this?
Trent Pheifer: I always tell people, this was where I got my cooking education. Prior to this, my cooking was whatever I heated up from the Trader Joe's frozen food aisle. And in five years, I've moved from there to being able to make my own carnitas at home and making Baked Alaska at home. And it's just one of those things that I think so many people get intimidated saying they don't know how to cook and I think they think that you should walk into the kitchen and it's intuitive and you should know everything, but you just have to build those skills up over time. I always think back to something Ina says, and it's like, once you know how to do one technique or way of doing something, you know how to do a hundred techniques once you know how to make a broth, chicken broth, you know how to make vegetable broth. You know, how to make pork broth. Yes, there are variations to each of those, but once you can learn the basics, everything else becomes a little bit easier. So I look back five years ago when I was screwing up almost everything that I was making and just think of how far in just five years that I've been able to come. It helps that it's one of my passions and it's my happy place, I think the kitchen used to be a source of frustration as I think it is for a lot of people. And now during quarantine was my savior. It was that place where I could go have a little bit of control in my life, create a satisfying meal and just space out for an hour or two hours. So yeah, this has really taught me how to cook. And I think, Ina always says that she cooked her way through Julia Child's Mastering The Art Of French Cooking and that's how she learned to cook as well.
Suzy Chase: You just mentioned the Baked Alaska, how hard was that to make?
Trent Pheifer: So I would say overall easier than I was expecting. I think one of the issues is I was very paranoid about timing and then, cause I was worried that ice cream was going to melt at every step of the way. But when you really look at the basic elements of it's relatively easy. It has a raspberry sauce that you can make ahead of time. And it's Ina's classic raspberry sauce that she uses in tons and tons of her dessert recipes. It's store-bought cake that you cut into circles, it's store-bought ice cream that you mold into balls. So it's raspberry sorbet and vanilla ice cream that you mold into a ball and then put on the cake and then you freeze those until it's rock hard. I think the hard part might be the meringue if you're not used to making meringue that could be the difficult part, but I think, and I think a lot of people think that, it would be a near impossible dish to make at home. How are you putting ice cream in a 500 degree oven and it coming out perfect? But it did. The meringue really insulates the ice cream and you have this perfectly sugary delicious meringue with crisp brown edges and freezing cold ice cream and a sponge on the bottom. And it was much easier than I thought it would be.
Suzy Chase: Now to my segment called Last Night's Dinner where I asked you what you had last night for dinner.
Trent Pheifer: I had a goulash recipe. So I think maybe a month ago I had a follower reach out and she had said she had created a cookbook of her children's favorite recipes from growing up and that she had an extra copy of it and she reached out to me and said, I want somebody to have this that is as passionate about cooking as I am and so she sent it to me and I was sobbing. I was sobbing when she told me about it. I was sobbing while I was reading. It is a book filled with so much love and I think that so many of us have those recipes from growing up in our childhood that will never be the same as the ones our moms made, but it's always nice to have the recipes so that you can go back to them and I made her Beef Goulash last night and it was such a great comfort food served over egg noodles. It had paprika and red pepper and the sour cream and it just was spicy. It had the perfect amount of spice. The meat was falling apart. It was an absolute delight last night, so long story, but that was what I had last night. And I just thought that was a great story.
Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?
Trent Pheifer: You can find me at Store Bought Is Fine on Instagram. My website is www.storeboughtisfine.com also Store Bought Is Fine on Facebook.
Suzy Chase: Thank you for bringing Store Bought Is Fine into our lives and thank you for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.
Trent Pheifer: Thank you so much for having me. This has been so much fun.
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