Super Easy Recipes with Preppy Kitchen's John Kanell - Part 1

In this episode of Chefs Without Restaurants, Chris Spear sits down with John Kanell of Preppy Kitchen for part 1 of their discussion. John's a former middle school teacher turned cooking personality. They discuss John's new cookbook Preppy Kitchen Super Easy, which is filled with quick, family-friendly recipes. The conversation covers the challenges and joys of cooking with kids, how to make time-saving meals at home, and the transition from teaching in a classroom to teaching in the kitchen.

Part 2 of our conversation, which focuses exclusively on the business of food content creation, can be found here.

Topics Discussed:

• Transition from teaching to becoming a cooking personality
• Cooking with kids and making family meals enjoyable
• Time-saving kitchen hacks and tips
• Special diets and adaptable recipes
• John’s favorite go-to family meal for busy nights
• Behind the scenes of creating food content

JOHN KANELL and PREPPY KITCHEN
Preppy Kitchen YouTube
Preppy Kitchen Instagram
Preppy Kitchen Website
Preppy Kitchen Facebook
Buy the book Preppy Kitchen Super Easy
John's Fudge Recipe

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Chris Spear: You're listening to Chefs Without Restaurants, and I'm your host, Chris Spear. On the show, I speak with culinary entrepreneurs and people working in the food and beverage industry outside of a traditional restaurant setting. I have 32 years of working in kitchens, but not restaurants, and operate a personal chef service throwing dinner parties in the Washington, D.

[00:00:20] Chris Spear: C. area. Today, I have part one of my conversation with John Kanell. He's the founder of Preppy Kitchen, a digital food brand that he started in 2015. After more than a decade of teaching math and science to middle schoolers, John made the pivot to full time food content creation. His style's more deliberate and educational than many of the other food content creators out there these days.

[00:00:42] Chris Spear: If you're someone who actually enjoys learning from cooking videos, and gets a little overwhelmed by all the quick camera cuts and slamming of things on the counter that seem to be a hallmark in many of today's cooking videos, I think you'll find John's videos a refreshing change. You can find new videos being posted to his YouTube twice a week, and of [00:01:00] course, he's consistently posting short form videos and photos all across social media.

[00:01:04] Chris Spear: John's second cookbook, Preppy Kitchen Super Easy, will be released on Tuesday, August 20th. It's full of quick and easy recipes, which, let's be honest, we could all use more of. And like me, John's also a twin dad. Quite often, I have a million different things going on, and I'm always looking for ways to get dinner on the table quickly.

[00:01:23] Chris Spear: And while I have hundreds of, uh, really fancy cookbooks, sometimes I just want something that's gonna get dinner on the table in, like, under an hour. And I think that's where this book comes in. Talking with him, he said he hopes that this is a book that people keep in their kitchens and keep coming back to.

[00:01:41] Chris Spear: And I chose to split this conversation into two parts because we had two distinct conversations going on here. This first part focuses on John's cooking style, his new book, and some cooking tips. But John's also someone who's grown a social media following to over 10 million people. That's huge. And I know a lot of [00:02:00] listeners out there want to learn how to build and grow a following.

[00:02:03] Chris Spear: So next week's episode is going to focus more on that. Finding your style, reaching an audience and connecting with them, and even more tactical things like lighting and videography. After that episode's released, I'll go back and put the link in these show notes. But the best way to find the episode is to subscribe to the show.

[00:02:21] Chris Spear: When it drops next week, it'll be in your podcast player. How easy is that? But seriously, if you want to do one thing for me, it would be to subscribe to the show and maybe leave a comment on your favorite podcast platform. As always, thanks so much for listening, and have a great week. Hey, John, welcome to the show.

[00:02:37] Chris Spear: Thanks so much for coming on. Thanks for having me, Chris. I'm, uh, I'm looking forward to catching up with you today. I've been watching lots of your videos and reading your recipes in preparation. I went down the fudge rabbit hole the past couple of days because that's something I've wanted to make and found your video there.

[00:02:52] Chris Spear: And I think I'm going to, by the end of the week, get a pan of that going. 

[00:02:56] John Kanell: So easy. That was like the cheat fudge. It's a couple of ingredients. [00:03:00] And it goes right in and it's ready. 

[00:03:02] Chris Spear: Well, and it's, it seems so easy. My mother in law goes to the store and buys fudge all the time and it's ridiculously expensive and every time she brings it home, it's delicious.

[00:03:10] Chris Spear: But I think We could probably just be making this at home in like half an hour or so. 

[00:03:14] John Kanell: Yeah. And add like, if you want toasted walnuts or macadamia nuts, go to town, make it your own. 

[00:03:18] Chris Spear: But I think that's like almost everything. I mean, a lot of your recipes are pretty straightforward recipes. I think people just have to make the decision to cook, you know, I don't know.

[00:03:28] Chris Spear: It seems like in some circles, it's like fallen out of favor. You know, we're all busy. We're trying to get a quick, delicious meal on the table. And quite often we opt to pick something up from somewhere rather than making it at home. 

[00:03:39] John Kanell: It's true. And. Aside from it being so expensive to do that, it's. I find it's never something that I really love.

[00:03:49] John Kanell: Like even if it is like a beautiful meal, what happens is I'm like, I'm so excited that I ordered again and again until I'm totally sick of it and I'm left with no option. So [00:04:00] making your own food can be a challenge because a lot of us are so stretched for time. I have twin seven year old boys and you know, life started busy and it's only this ramped up exponentially.

[00:04:12] John Kanell: But every day I still want to put something nice on the table and have that time together as a family, both in the kitchen where the kids like to help me and on the dining room table. And that was really the motivation for the kitchen. Super easy because I wanted to make. All these recipes and codify them in a book.

[00:04:32] John Kanell: So people could just pick it up, make something really quick. And, you know, this one, I try and include all the time saving hacks, like using air fryers, which I love. I have two air fryers in my kitchen because I'm doing double duty or instant pots. 

[00:04:47] Chris Spear: Oh, there's a couple of things I want to get into there.

[00:04:49] Chris Spear: So first of all, I have twins who will be almost 12. Well, there'll be 12 in two weeks. So. Similar boat as you. I know how that is. What do you think about cooking with kids? You know, you see all these [00:05:00] videos of people cooking with kids and they're having so much fun and they're laughing. Like, that's not how it usually goes down in my house.

[00:05:06] Chris Spear: There's a lot of chaos. There's a lot of mess. And quite often I want to just be like, move over. I got this. What is that like in your household? 

[00:05:13] John Kanell: Well, there is the move over. I got this from the parent. And then on the kid side, it could be frustrating too, because children are really great at conceptualizing what should happen.

[00:05:25] John Kanell: As an end product, but getting to there in the steps is really difficult. So there's a lot of grace that has to go around everywhere. And like, for example, I have a really nice rug below me in the kitchen. I'd be sad if eggs or milk spilled all over it. So if I'm having the kids and we're going to make something messy, just going to move the rug.

[00:05:44] John Kanell: Cause what I want to do is create an environment where it's okay to be a little bit messy. We're going to make mistakes. I mean, I'm an adult and I'm messy and make mistakes all the time. So I should have some empathy. Give your kids the grace to like, be a little bit messy. However, [00:06:00] your job as the parent is to step things out for them.

[00:06:04] John Kanell: So, you know, I have like a nice mise en place going. Everything is pre measured at the beginning. At the very beginning, they're working on just like, Whisking. What does that mean? Like crazy or like a careful whisk? And, you know, they build all these really rudimentary skills that we don't think about as adults.

[00:06:21] John Kanell: And then they get more and more adept in the kitchen. It's like, you know, when my kids were five, they were making pizza dough from scratch. All I would do is warm the water for them. But they would add the yeast, they would use the scale to measure the flour. There's like a lot of nice math moments in there too, and it's something that we all enjoyed.

[00:06:38] John Kanell: But you have to like temper your expectations because kids can be chaotic. 

[00:06:43] Chris Spear: Amusing Plus is a great tip. I'm actually working with my kids. We're going to be teaching some at risk youth how to cook. We're going to be doing cooking demos with them. And one of the things we're doing is we actually wanted to put together a bunch of videos that we could put online for them to watch at a later date.

[00:06:57] Chris Spear: So I've actually had. For kids, we had two [00:07:00] other kids come over in our kitchen this past week and we're filming like five recipes that we think would be easy for younger kids and teenagers to make at home. So I'm just the video guy, so I'm not even there like doing any of the cooking, but you know, they got through it and we did a lot of fun, easy things.

[00:07:15] Chris Spear: It'll be interesting to see how the final videos come together. It's impressive. Well, we kind of jumped right in here. I want to back up a little bit because, you know, you had another career, a little different lifestyle before you got into this cooking. You were a middle school teacher before, which something I imagine was like really rewarding and something you loved doing.

[00:07:35] Chris Spear: So how did the transition go from being a middle school teacher to now being an online cooking personality? 

[00:07:42] John Kanell: I would say it was a pivot. It might seem like a weird jump, but when people ask what I do like at a cocktail party or out and about, I always pause and have like a processing moment. But what I want to say is I teach people how to cook because I'm still a teacher.

[00:07:57] John Kanell: I just changed the subject for math and [00:08:00] science to cooking and baking food. The kitchen is such a laboratory, first of all. So there's all these lessons that you can incorporate. I wish I could go back in time so often whenever I'm filming a YouTube video or whatever and go to my geometry class or go to my algebra class or even go to my biology class and talk about like, Oh, proteins are denaturing.

[00:08:21] John Kanell: That's why these eggs are changing their texture. Like everything happens in the kitchen. It's one of the few practical places where you can use math and science and it really makes sense. It's not, not abstract. I switched careers mostly because my husband and I wanted to start a family and. His job was extremely demanding and my job had like weird punctuated times off, but you know, you cannot come into school late, so that's not a, that's not going to happen.

[00:08:47] John Kanell: I did it once, it was bad. My alarm didn't go off. So I wanted to have a career where I could really work from home and be more flexible, and my husband said, you know, you love food, it's really one of your main [00:09:00] passions, and you love, you love teaching, you could kind of pivot this into something totally different, but you're still doing what you love, and he really inspired me to make that leap.

[00:09:10] Chris Spear: So how did that start? Was it just like, okay, let me just start cooking at home and filming this and seeing where it goes? 

[00:09:19] John Kanell: Started with everything being really bad, to be honest, and that's one of my main bits of advice is kids have high expectations of what they can do and you have to temper them and let them know it's okay to fail.

[00:09:30] John Kanell: So to adults, we walk into something thinking this is the plan. This is how it's going to be. I know that I'll have this end result and the first thing you make totally flops. And what do you do with that failure? You can only learn from it and keep moving forward. So consistency of putting things out there and trying an effort and.

[00:09:51] John Kanell: Really sitting down with what you put out there and trying to understand how it could be better because, you know, I was a home [00:10:00] cook, so I would make something and think, Oh, my God, this is so delicious. Everyone's gonna love it. My husband said, No one can taste your food on Instagram. It has to look nice.

[00:10:10] John Kanell: And I wasn't actually I was actually an art major in college. So I took conceptual photography courses, but that is very different from practical food photography. They have nothing in common. So my photos were just Awful. And that was the impetus for me to teach myself kind of like how to light things, how to style things.

[00:10:31] John Kanell: And, you know, over the course of a few years, things eventually got a bit better. No one should do things and think it's going to be perfect the first time, because that is wrong. 

[00:10:43] Chris Spear: And if we're dealing with the internet, I mean, it's always the worst people that come out first, right? Like I remember the very first time I had a recipe in a major publication and they shared it on their Facebook.

[00:10:55] Chris Spear: And the first comment was like, why would anyone make this garbage and waste the raw product? [00:11:00] You're like, really? This is the, this is the first time something I have produced has been in a major publication. You know, the first time I made pizza, I thought it looked great. And I post on Instagram and just like.

[00:11:09] Chris Spear: Everyone comes out of the woodworks and they come at you and it's like, this was my first pizza. I just thought I'd share it. 

[00:11:14] John Kanell: I'm. I'm very, very lucky that the audience I have is really engaged and kind. And I find, generally speaking, that food is a safer place. It's where people kind of come together and you can cast some judgment aside.

[00:11:30] John Kanell: And when I go through my comments and I replied as many as I can, there's a lot of like constructive moments or people trying to teach you something. And a lot of times, They have good advice. I want to try out their hacks that they mentioned or the special way their grandmother did this pie crust to make it a little bit more, you know, crispy.

[00:11:47] John Kanell: So there are some bad moments, but there's also a lot of good people trying to share, like, kind of like what their folklore is for food 

[00:11:57] Chris Spear: and where do you even Mmm. Start with [00:12:00] the recipes, because even in 2015, is that when you started 2015? Yeah. There was already established, well known chefs, lots of cookbooks, there were even food bloggers, and you're not doing anything like crazy, new, completely off, out in left field.

[00:12:16] Chris Spear: You're doing brownies, chicken pot pie, things like that. So where do you even start and to some extent, like why, you know, there's probably a million brownie recipes, pot pie recipes out there and why give it your own go? 

[00:12:33] John Kanell: Well, I started off by sharing kind of family favorites, like my mother. Loves lemon and I had lemon roulades and lemon layer cakes and lemon tarts and that was like a lot of my first Recipes were just things that I loved from my childhood like German chocolate cakes in some ways I was very lucky because my mother loves Cooking and she is one of those people Who is intuitive and joyful in the kitchen.

[00:12:58] John Kanell: So she's just like [00:13:00] throwing things hither and thither, no measurements. And she's like always winging it. And it often like most of the time it works out really well. So I was inspired growing up being her sous chef to like kind of take in that joyfulness and that sense of like, it's okay to experiment.

[00:13:18] John Kanell: It's okay to meld flavors. It's okay to get things wrong. You know, what am I gonna do better next time? And her cookbooks were all like filled with annotations. And yeah, whenever she made a recipe, she would always write the date down, which I find so like such a nice index of like food and memories coming together.

[00:13:39] Chris Spear: And it almost gives you like a timestamp in history because food changes so much over the years. I know, 

[00:13:43] John Kanell: and my mother, like, hit her formative phase because she, just like, take a very long story and condense it. She ran away from home as a teenager because her dad wouldn't let her go to school and she loved learning.

[00:13:57] John Kanell: So eventually after [00:14:00] having my brother and I, she like put herself through night school to get her GED all the way to her doctoral degree in education and retired having taught for many decades. So I was very inspired to kind of continue and keep teaching and like education has always been so important to me, but her other passion was food, like I'm very similar to her.

[00:14:21] John Kanell: So she would explore the world in her kitchen. She had so many cookbooks of different cuisines and cultures and cookbooks of recipes that she had taken out of newspapers. And that was really the laboratory where I kind of learned about food. And that's what helped me start Preppy Kitchen because I was able to draw on this very broad bank of recipes that I'd grown up with and kind of refine them and make them my own.

[00:14:50] Chris Spear: Are there any dishes that stick out that you remember her making that was brand new, whether she had just like discovered like Chinese food or something. Do you have any [00:15:00] memories of certain dishes like that? 

[00:15:02] John Kanell: One dish I put in my first cookbook was this version of a Swedish apple cake, and it was apples cored and halved, poached in like a white wine sweet sauce, and then they're placed face down, and you make a meringue.

[00:15:22] John Kanell: And it's folded in with processed almonds, the ground and the whole thing is just slightly sweet. It's like perfectly sweet and you just eat the whole thing and very light and it has the airiness and the crunchiness and it's all in this dish. It's a very homely looking. It does not look fancy. So I could never put it on Instagram, but I had to include it in my cookbook because it was one of the special recipes for me.

[00:15:47] Chris Spear: You should totally put it on Instagram. I talk about all the time and that's one of the things I hate about it because I've always disliked the expression, like you eat with your eyes. Like it's true, but I think some of the most delicious food is like brown food and kind of ugly food and [00:16:00] it doesn't get the likes and the clicks, but it's like, that's the best stuff out there.

[00:16:03] Chris Spear: Isn't it? 

[00:16:04] John Kanell: It is. It's true. So like in the new book, one of my favorite recipes that was like a Sunday dinner staple, because my dad, my grandfather was from Greece, was a spicy tomato orzo. So, really, really juicy, slick orzo, perfectly spiced, lots of like minced onion and garlic and herbs in there. And it's the perfect side dish if you're having like a big piece of lamb or chicken or even a salad.

[00:16:32] John Kanell: But it's kind of a lot of work for a side dish, so I wanted to pare it down in the spirit of Preppy Kitchen Super Easy. My hack for this was to get the spicy tomato base to be Bloody Mary Mix. So that's your starting point. And then you go in from there and instead of like having it on the cooktop and like minding it, which is difficult with pasta dishes with very little liquid cause they kind of burn on the bottom, you just bake it and it works perfectly.

[00:16:59] John Kanell: So it's [00:17:00] two hacks in there and it tastes so good. But for posting it, I'm like, Hmm, a red mound. How does this look? 

[00:17:08] Chris Spear: I know that's, it's very difficult. I did a photo shoot for a, a local magazine not too long ago. And they kept wanting to throw a bunch of like random herbs and things that like, wouldn't go flavor wise.

[00:17:19] Chris Spear: And it was like the standoff during the photo shoot. And they'd suggest like, why don't we put some parsley on the room? Like, that's not my aesthetic. Like, what if we put a little dill here? And we, it took almost half an hour at the actual shoot for us to come to an agreement of what the dish was going to look like for the magazine.

[00:17:32] Chris Spear: Cause I'm like, I'm not just going to like willy nilly throw this nonsense on there for no reason. I mean, the reason is color in a magazine, but that's, that's not how I usually cook. 

[00:17:42] John Kanell: I totally get it. One of my favorite things to do if I'm looking through recipes on Google or in a magazine is to try and spot the food styling, you know, like if it's a strawberry cake or cupcakes or something.

[00:17:53] John Kanell: You know, the strawberries are going to turn, they're going to lose a lot of their color, right? But you look at some and they're like ruby red [00:18:00] pieces of strawberries. I guess, like, imagine a food stylist with some tweezers placing those in afterwards. 

[00:18:06] Chris Spear: And I'm also annoyed about, like, leaving the greens on strawberries.

[00:18:09] Chris Spear: Like, nobody eats them. They're not edible. Like, I went to culinary school. They would tell you, like, don't leave them on there if it's not meant to be eaten. Eaten, but people leave it on all the time to give you like the little duality of color. And I just absolutely hate that. My 

[00:18:21] John Kanell: solution to that for everybody listening is yes, you haul your strawberries.

[00:18:25] John Kanell: Nobody wants to eat that. You will grab some baby mint leaves and place them not on top of the strawberries, but around that gives you the same like, Oh, verdant, beautiful freshness. 

[00:18:36] Chris Spear: Let's talk about the new cookbook, easy recipes. I think that's something people are always looking for and asking for. So what's the new book like?

[00:18:44] John Kanell: It is all easy recipes. And basically I just wanted to acknowledge that a lot of the people out there are hanging by their fingernails at the end of the day when it's time to make dinner. So I wanted to make a book where it had [00:19:00] a nice breadth of recipes. So it goes from breakfast. Lunch, dinner, dessert, all the side dishes, but I wanted to save people the tedious time in the kitchen and give them really more time for those moments that matter.

[00:19:15] John Kanell: So the recipes are all delicious. I think they look beautiful, but they're very streamlined. So if there is a way to make the time involved or the ingredients involved reduced, like with the Bloody Mary mix that I mentioned earlier, for example, I'm going to give that to you. And. The other part of the book was I kind of wanted everyone to come back to it again.

[00:19:39] John Kanell: It makes me sad. Like someone tries a recipe once and then like, you know, it's on to the next one. I wanted the book to be a bit more inspiring to people basically as home cooks. So instead of just being didactic and saying, this is the recipe, every recipe has a lot of variations and things you can try out.

[00:19:58] John Kanell: So. Yes, [00:20:00] you could make a sheet cake as a layer cake. You could try different spices. You could swap out proteins. There's a pantry of convenience chapter at the beginning where it goes over one, how to organize your pantry in a way that will save you time and also have like sauces and salad dressings and things that let you make a bare basic dinner, but you can dress it up with some sauces or like have a salad ready in a moment with like beautiful dressing and kind of have those meal preppy moments that make.

[00:20:30] John Kanell: Getting food on the table doable. 

[00:20:33] Chris Spear: I talked to my customers about that, like having base recipes, but you can change out your proteins, you can change out all these different ingredients. You know, I did this shrimp and grits the other day, but that could be tempeh and grits if you're vegetarian, if you don't like seafood or you have chicken, like you can do it with chicken.

[00:20:49] Chris Spear: And it's still like the base thing. You can change the condiment on top, but having some, you know, basic idea of what you want to do and then what are the interchangeable parts, I guess. [00:21:00]

[00:21:00] John Kanell: So important. 

[00:21:02] Chris Spear: And how about people who really are timid in the kitchen, maybe, you know, they do okay, but they want to do more cooking.

[00:21:10] Chris Spear: What do you think some low hanging fruit, like tips for someone to be a better cook at home, whether it be some ingredients to stock, some basic equipment to get, like, where do you think people should start if they really want to up their game? Gosh, I 

[00:21:24] John Kanell: would say have your proteins on hand. Cause that's really for most dinners, unless you're a vegetarian, that's kind of the meal.

[00:21:34] John Kanell: So I like to have a lot of chicken parts. I have my ground turkey. I'll have like some salmon steaks and things that we enjoy, and then a selection of vegetables. And honestly, if you can cook a meat and if you can blanch a vegetable and make a starch, you're golden. Like you can do so much. If someone is just [00:22:00] starting out in the kitchen, I would teach them just how to salt their water first of all, because it's so important and people think it's like a little sprinkle there.

[00:22:08] John Kanell: No, you are pouring salt into a pot because nothing has any flavor without it. And if you're cooking potatoes like to boil them for a potato salad, if you're blanching some asparagus or snap peas, it has to be in a nicely salted water. And honestly, like if I'm really busy, which is always the case, I'm going to get my pot of water boiling, salt it, blanch whatever I'm going to have, set it aside, and then I'll just use that same boiling salted water to either boil some ricin or some pasta and, you know, dinner is like halfway done.

[00:22:42] Chris Spear: My tip is I brine everything. I brine all my seafood. It's a 5 percent salt solution, just 5 percent salt in water, salmon, scallops, any of it in there for 10 minutes, take them out, dry it off. It changes like completely. It ups your seafood cooking game. And then all [00:23:00] my meat, I dry brine in the fridge for at least 24 hours.

[00:23:03] Chris Spear: Like if I have a steak, salt it, put it on a rack uncovered in the fridge overnight, and then you cook it and you're going to get a nice browning. Like people drastically underestimate. Salt, I think in their cooking and it's not salty. I mean, it's still way less salty than restaurant food and processed food.

[00:23:18] John Kanell: Yeah, it's just that you need that for one, the texture and sometimes, but also just it, the taste, it has to be there. 

[00:23:28] Chris Spear: How much do you work with and consider special diets, you know, whether it's celiac or dairy or vegetarian, like how much do you deal with that in your recipes, both in your books and online?

[00:23:40] John Kanell: Some recipes, you know, are naturally going to lend themselves to that, right? So if that's the case, I'll call it out for people who need that. I'm not an expert on that, so I'm happy to leave that to other people who are experts and I don't want to, like, I can't be everything to everybody. So. If I'm making [00:24:00] flourless chocolate tort, I will point out, Hey, this is gluten free for all you people who are wondering just to make sure you know that, but I'm not going to try and like, you know, use almond flour bobs one to one and make that sort of dessert.

[00:24:16] Chris Spear: Yeah, that's fair. I mean, I just get Bombarded with that all the time is people asking all those questions. So every day I'm cooking in someone else's kitchen, it's all dinner parties. So I have tons of different clients, but so many people hire me because they have challenges going out. So it's something that I'm naturally dealing with to the point that almost all the recipes I create are easily adaptable for almost any of those specialty diets.

[00:24:41] John Kanell: That's. A lot of work and I applaud you for it because it's not easy and it's something that's very, very important and you can't mess it up. 

[00:24:52] Chris Spear: What's your favorite thing to make for the family on a busy weeknight when you just got to get something on the table? Is there like one that's your go to [00:25:00] dish?

[00:25:00] John Kanell: Gosh, one of the recipes that is a go to that's in this book is a, it's my version of an orange chicken. So I have my little cubes of chicken, a simple dredge, and they go into the air fryer usually. I love the air fryer because, yes, like, pan fried food is delicious. I'm not even thinking about the calories, but I just do not like the cleanup and I do not like the little micro splatters of oil on my wrists, which happens all the time.

[00:25:26] John Kanell: Like I've tried all the gadgets, like it's just, it gets messy, especially towards the end of the fry, you know, and the stove solves a lot of that. I have, that's why I have two of them so I can keep running the baskets back and forth. It's like a. Dickie gooey, really easy orange sauce that gets tossed in that with some chopped scallions on a bed of rice.

[00:25:47] John Kanell: And everyone's very happy, including myself. 

[00:25:51] Chris Spear: That's good eats. I mean, we love that kind of thing and you can even get a healthy or like already breaded chicken if you even want to cut some of those corners. We've [00:26:00] done that before and just, you know, I think Costco has a really good one and they in a small oven or an air fryer cook up and you know, like eight minutes almost, right?

[00:26:07] John Kanell: Yeah, I'm all for hacks because you know. Like you want to make, make a really easy chicken salad summer, just go buy a rotisserie chicken, you know, get those bits off. And that's delicious to me. A lot of times you do not want to be running your oven in the summer and you know, everyone needs to eat. It cannot be gazpacho.

[00:26:27] John Kanell: You got to do what you got to do. 

[00:26:29] Chris Spear: We don't have an air fryer, but I do have one of those little countertop ovens and it's great. I actually was at Goodwill last week and found it was 7, but it was a wearing professional. And I think we've used it every single day since we got it. And it's great now that we have the kids because you know, you can, they can easily, it's got the timer.

[00:26:46] Chris Spear: You set the timer when the timer goes off, the oven shuts off. You don't have to worry about someone leaving it on there in the morning, whether they're, you know, just heating up a bagel in there, you know, sometimes it's like, uh, Frozen mozzarella stick, which isn't the best lunch choice, but it won't be like 

[00:26:58] John Kanell: the toaster fire I had as a [00:27:00] child.

[00:27:02] Chris Spear: And what's the farm like for you? 

[00:27:05] John Kanell: It's really cyclical. So in the winter, it's. You know, there's not much to do and we are in a state like we're in the coldest part of Connecticut. So winter lasts like eight months. I swear. So it's crazy. It's a long winter. In the spring, we start planting like what are we gonna plant in our kitchen garden?

[00:27:26] John Kanell: Whatever else we have 20 beehives right now and we have an apiary guy who helps with that because it's a lot and I like visiting the bees, but I'm not going to do it all. I also want to take care of them. I want an expert who's there. Because it's so cold here in the winter, they have to like have little muffs put on top of their eyes to help insulate it.

[00:27:45] John Kanell: And there's a lot of extra stuff you have to do. Also, we have a lot of bears. So someone has to make sure that the hot wires are all working. 

[00:27:54] Chris Spear: So that really isn't just like a thing in cartoons. Bears really go to beehives. They will 

[00:27:59] John Kanell: decimate [00:28:00] beehives and like poor bees. Uh, and because the winters have gotten warmer, even though they feel cold to us, they don't actually hibernate very much anymore.

[00:28:07] John Kanell: So there's kind of out and about in the summer, things get really busy and that's where we will take on some help to help us out. And just mowing like some, there's a local farm that will hay a lot of the stuff for us. And. That's it. It's a community project. Right now, I'm reaping the benefits of the kitchen garden because our apple trees have all the apples.

[00:28:28] John Kanell: I'm pruning them and the kitchen garden has the first peppers are coming out. My favorite things in the garden are what comes back naturally. So like, you know, the oregano is going to come back and be stronger. The rhubarb is coming back. And, uh, The strawberries are so happy for some reason. I'm not asking questions, but we get like three harvests from them and they're really delicious.

[00:28:52] John Kanell: Like those summer sweet strawberries that just collapse on your palate. They have no structure. It's like, Hmm, it's like a little, a strawberry liquid balm. Love 

[00:28:59] Chris Spear: [00:29:00] them. What did we not talk about that you want to discuss? Is there anything you want to share with the listeners before we get out of here today?

[00:29:07] John Kanell: I really hope that they take a copy of the book. Enjoy it because. Honestly, these recipes are for the people who are busy at home and love food. They want to make food, but they might feel intimidated or they still don't have the time. And it's kind of all mapped out here. Like there's the one pot meals.

[00:29:25] John Kanell: There are every kind of side dish you can imagine. And it really is a good resource to help you make something for your family or just yourself. 

[00:29:35] Chris Spear: People always jokingly say to me like, Oh, dinner must be amazing at your house. Cause you're a chef. And my wife used to be a chef and I'm like, No, like I have my own business, my wife works full time, she gets home at like 5.

[00:29:46] Chris Spear: 30 every day and I have like young twins and other people to feed. I'm barely surviving. Like today, we said we were going to have quiche for dinner, but I don't have pie crust in the freezer and I haven't made any. I'm like, I don't know. It might just be omelets for [00:30:00] dinner tonight. Maybe a frittata. How about that?

[00:30:02] Chris Spear: Yeah. Yeah. Frittata. Frittata is amazing. I'm just going to go in the garden. I've got peppers already. I think I'm just going to break out the cast iron skillet and there we go. 

[00:30:09] John Kanell: That's easy. Call it a day. The frittata is dinner. 

[00:30:13] Chris Spear: Are you going out on a book tour for the new book when it comes out? 

[00:30:16] John Kanell: Yeah.

[00:30:16] John Kanell: August 20th, my book tour starts. There's details on preppykitchen. com and we'll be going to New York, Seattle, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Some more tour dates are going to be added on. 

[00:30:31] Chris Spear: Very cool. Well, I hope some of our listeners go out and find you on that tour and pick up the book. Well, thanks for coming on the show.

[00:30:37] Chris Spear: I enjoyed talking to you today. Thank you so much for having 

[00:30:40] John Kanell: me and I hope a wonderful, peaceful day ahead. 

[00:30:43] Chris Spear: Thank you. You too. And to all our listeners, this is Chris with Chefs Without Restaurants. Thanks for listening. Have a great day. You're still here. The podcast's over if you are indeed still here.

[00:30:55] Chris Spear: Thanks for taking the time to listen to the show. I'd love to direct you to one place and that's chefs without [00:31:00] restaurants.org. From there, you'll be able to join our email newsletter, get connected in our free Facebook group, and join our personal chef catering and food truck database so I can help get you more job leads.

[00:31:12] Chris Spear: And you'll also find a link to our sponsor page where you'll find products and services I love. You pay nothing additional to use these links, but I may get a small commission, which helps keep the Chefs Without Restaurants podcast and organization running. You might even get a discount for using some of these links.

[00:31:26] Chris Spear: As always, you can reach out to me on Instagram at chefswithoutrestaurants or send me an email at chefswithoutrestaurants at gmail. com. Thanks so much!