The recipes in her new cookbook minimize time at the cutting board so you can spend more time eating well and enjoying your life.
Carla Lalli Music Is Here to Convince You That Fall Is the Best Time for Grilling
Carla Lalli Music is a professional chef, a former Bon Appétit food editor, Instagram food-fluencer, and the writer of two cookbooks. And even she doesn’t want to spend all her time in the kitchen.
In her glowy, hospitable new cookbook, That Sounds So Good, out October 19, few recipes call for more than 45 minutes of active cooking time. The book separates dishes into two categories: Monday through Thursday (simple prep and strong flavors) and Friday and the weekend (more luxurious, but not tons more work). “Your time is precious,” she writes. “I treasure my time off, and I don’t want to spend every minute of it standing in one spot, staring at a cutting board.” Is this not blasphemy, from a professional food person, no less?
“There have been phases in my life when I really cooked constantly,” Music tells Glamour. “When I cooked for my family on the weekend, I would choose project cooking. Instead of just using that free time to be together, I was kind of cooking to have something to leave with them when I was gone.” Eventually she realized: “If I spent less time cooking, I would spend more time being around them.” In That Sounds So Good, she demonstrates that great food doesn’t always mean great amounts of labor.
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Music writes movingly about the profound emotions associated with the work of feeding people, from watching her mom cook big meals only to clean the kitchen while the family ate, to her own experience breastfeeding and becoming a food source for her newborns. Her recipes are written to guide the home chef through the most efficient way to prepare the meal, tips Music picked up in a pro kitchen. Each dish is like a when-will-two-trains-meet algebra problem, except Music has done all the calculations and you can just relax and follow the steps to a gorgeous meal.
For Glamour’s latest installment of How I Eat at Home, she shares the meals that have been her greatest hits during the pandemic, her favorite $8 incredibly versatile cooking tool, and her extremely hot take on grilling.
Glamour: What four staples are always in your pantry or fridge?
Carla Lalli Music: We always have kimchee—if we don’t have kimchee, it’s a problem. Buttermilk, which is so useful for pancakes, dressings, and dips. It can also be used as a brine. Rice—long grain, short grain, brown rice, red rice. We just always have rice. My two go-tos are short grain white rice and something like a jasmine or a basmati rice. And canned fish—whether it’s canned tuna, smoked trout, sardines, smoked salmon. It's just so useful when you need a quick meal.
What’s something you’ve been dying to cook but haven’t gotten around to yet?
I love eating Korean and Japanese food so much, so over the years that’s been something that I went to restaurants to seek out. Now it's something that I would love to learn how to make at home and kind of acquiring the confidence and good teachers for that. And anything I can grill is really my favorite way of cooking. I have a grill, but I also have a wood-burning oven in my backyard. The colder months is actually the best time to be grilling, so I’m very much looking forward to some cozy fall Sunday-night grilling outside.
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Why is it better to grill in the fall?
It’s just too hot in the summer! As a cook, grilling when it’s hot outside is a nightmare. You’re cooking over an open fire! When it cools off a little bit, there’s also really great stuff at the farmers market because it’s harvest season. It’s a really nice time to actually be warmed up by hanging out by a fire. I learned this the hard way, shooting a series for my Patreon show dedicated to grilling. It was five or six episodes, and every time we shot, it happened to be the hottest day in two weeks. Every episode [the temperature] was like, “Real feel: 102!”
What’s a holiday dish you love cooking?
Still on the grilling tip, my favorite way to prepare turkey is to grill it. The smokiness with that dark delicious rich turkey meat is just such a good combo.
You have $20 to spend at the farmers market. What do you buy?
Whenever I go to the farmers market, I definitely walk end to end before I make a purchase, and that way you can see what’s abundant, what everybody has, what’s coming in or out of season. And then I really buy the thing that looks the best to me. I know that’s vague, but I like shopping without a list and buying something that makes me hungry or inspires me to cook. It could be anything—it could be a big cluster of mushrooms; it could be a little, tiny watermelon; it could be multicolored eggplant.
What do you listen to while cooking?
We pretty much have WNYC on all day, and then we switch over to a music playlist when we sit down. I have a 12-year-old and a 17-year-old, so it’s a wide range. We like a lot of ’80s/’90s R&B and hip-hop, we like some soul, we might listen to a good jazz mix, Frank Ocean might sneak in there, and my younger son really loves Queen and The Who. It’s eclectic!
What’s an edible impulse buy you can never resist?
I probably gravitate over to the cheese counter, charcuterie. I love sheep’s milk cheeses, and I love finding a cheese I haven’t had before. I like to snack around and talk to the cheesemonger.
What does comfort food mean to you?
Night cereal, which is cereal you eat at night! Bread and butter—that’s what my mom would bring to me when I was sick in bed. Rice is a big comfort food, for sure. Steamed rice that you can put broth into, grate Parmesan cheese into. I always have furikake in the house, which is a rice seasoning. They’re all very starchy.
What’s your kids’ favorite meal that you cook?
Definitely pasta. They’re good eaters when it comes to what kind of a sauce is on the pasta, but if there was one thing that everyone would get really excited about, it would be a ragù or meat sauce.
What thing gets the most use in your kitchen?
There’s a section in That Sounds So Good called 10 Tools You May Not Have but Could Definitely Use. That’s where I think about specialty items that are so multipurpose. Wire spiders or metal skimmers—I have a six-inch one and an eight-inch one—and I use them every day. I use them to get pasta out of the boiling water and into the sauce, yesterday I blanched some corn kernels and I used that to strain them. They’re great for edamame, they’re great for any noodle, even lowering or lifting out eggs from hard boiling or making jammy eggs. I use them more than I use my colander. There are fancy ones that have stainless steel handles, but the ones that I like and find indestructible have the bamboo handle and the kind of woven—it looks like a metal mesh. I think they cost like $8 and they’re gonna last you 10 or 15 years.
What are your favorite Instagram accounts to follow?
There’s a few creators who just inspire me so much. One of them is this woman named Tuệ, her handle is @twaydabae. She makes reels where she talks straight to camera and makes incredible Vietnamese food. There’s another woman; her handle is @dobydobap. Her signature thing she says when she starts every video is “Don’t yuck my yum.” She makes traditional Korean dishes, and it’s always really beautiful and delicious-looking.
What’s your go-to hostess gift?
I like to ask if there’s anything specific I can bring. But if not, I’ll bring a bottle of wine or some chocolate bars. Or if it’s a big party, like a holiday party, one of the best things you can bring is a bag of ice. It’s the thing you don’t think about and you always run out of.
Jenny Singer is a staff writer for Glamour. You can follow her on Twitter.
This story originally appeared on: Glamour - Author:Condé Nast
