Love, Honor, and Fillet: A Guest Post From Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Julie Tanous, Authors of Food Between Friends: A Cookbook
The hilarious star of Modern Family is also a big foodie. That’s clear if you follow him on social media where Jesse often invites family and friends over and cooks for them. In this book, Jesse teams up with his writer/foodie friend, Julie Tanous to create recipes that feel very Californian, but with a twist. An unexpected combo for a celebrity cookbook that’s great fun from cover to cover! Here, Jesse and Julie share a bit of the inspiration that went into this labor of love and offer us a sneak peek at a few of the amazing recipes featured in Food Between Friends.
Food Between Friends
Hardcover $32.00
Food Between Friends
By Jesse Tyler Ferguson , Julie Tanous
Hardcover $32.00
The biggest thing we’ve discovered in our years of cooking together: anyone can learn how to cook, but cooking with someone else is an intimate thing. It requires mutual respect, trust, and most important, chemistry. (Um, sort of like being lovers!?) It also requires a sense of humor, especially when you’ve reached the end of a day in the kitchen together and all you have to show for it is a wildly burnt chicken. But, hey, that’s what the wine is for.
Our relationship is marked in time with the collection of recipes we have created together that are now memorialized in our book. They reflect not only the food we grew up eating but also the loving hands that made that food for us. Even our spouses served as inspiration: Will’s Lebanese roots and Justin’s fair-weather friendship with grains-guided dishes we made in honor of them. (Love, honor, and fillet!)
Chicken is far and away the most popular and most requested protein in our households. There is an entire chapter for chicken. We include our favorite go-to recipes for those days we are looking for a lean and healthy meal, but it also has a vast array of decadent delights for those times we want to be a little naughty! Don’t forget who created these recipes: A New Mexican food enthusiast and a buttermilk junkie from Alabama. Julie’s Fried Chicken with Crystal Hot Honey is perfect for just those types of days.
You are going to have to excuse me for a moment while I lose my mind over Crystal Hot Sauce (which is pronounced creeeeee-stuhl where I’m from). This Louisiana hot sauce is rooted deep in my childhood nostalgia. With its smooth texture, medium heat level, and salty-vinegary tang, Crystal Hot Sauce also happens to make one helluva brine for chicken.
We know you have all had the pleasure of meeting a flaky Southern-style buttermilk biscuit (and we introduce you to ours), but we are sure some of you have yet to discover the simple beauty of a New Mexican sopaipilla. We even share a few of our favorite ways to enjoy both of these regional delicacies in our book. Some people might call that micromanaging. We prefer to call it being helpful.
If you haven’t traveled through New Mexico, the sopaipilla may be completely foreign to you. And if it is, I am so excited to introduce you to this delicious pillow of fried bread. Sopaipillas are believed to have been born almost 200 years ago in Albuquerque’s Hispanic community. The great pride that the community has for this delicious pastry is proven by the fact that almost every New Mexican restaurant in Albuquerque serves sopaipillas as complimentary table bread. They are meant to be enjoyed as a way to mop up the extra sauce on your plate and to cut the heat of the spices that New Mexican food packs.
I spent a good portion of my high school years working as a host at one of Albuquerque’s most popular restaurants, Sadie’s Cocina. (If you are passing through, definitely pop in and tell Betty Jo I sent you.) After seating a table of guests, I would often take a detour by the line cooks, snag a sopaipilla, and devour it before returning to the host stand. (Let’s take a moment here to honor the memory of my seventeen-year-old metabolism. It was a force of nature, and a day does not go by that I don’t miss it.) I loved a “sopa”— that’s what I called them. To this day I get excited when I see sopa on menus and am immediately disappointed when I am reminded that sopa means “soup” in Spanish.
The beauty of the sopaipilla is that it is so easy to transform from a side of bread into the foundation for a full-on meal. Like these sopaipillas stuffed with pulled chicken in red chile sauce.
As you read and cook through our book, we hope you feel like you’ve made two new friends named Julie and Jesse. What better way to get to know us than through the food we love to share with each other and the stories we have built our friendship upon? Okay, no, we can’t promise we will literally be your friends, but we hope the spirit of our friendship entertains and maybe even inspires you to get cooking with someone you care about.
The biggest thing we’ve discovered in our years of cooking together: anyone can learn how to cook, but cooking with someone else is an intimate thing. It requires mutual respect, trust, and most important, chemistry. (Um, sort of like being lovers!?) It also requires a sense of humor, especially when you’ve reached the end of a day in the kitchen together and all you have to show for it is a wildly burnt chicken. But, hey, that’s what the wine is for.
Our relationship is marked in time with the collection of recipes we have created together that are now memorialized in our book. They reflect not only the food we grew up eating but also the loving hands that made that food for us. Even our spouses served as inspiration: Will’s Lebanese roots and Justin’s fair-weather friendship with grains-guided dishes we made in honor of them. (Love, honor, and fillet!)
Chicken is far and away the most popular and most requested protein in our households. There is an entire chapter for chicken. We include our favorite go-to recipes for those days we are looking for a lean and healthy meal, but it also has a vast array of decadent delights for those times we want to be a little naughty! Don’t forget who created these recipes: A New Mexican food enthusiast and a buttermilk junkie from Alabama. Julie’s Fried Chicken with Crystal Hot Honey is perfect for just those types of days.
You are going to have to excuse me for a moment while I lose my mind over Crystal Hot Sauce (which is pronounced creeeeee-stuhl where I’m from). This Louisiana hot sauce is rooted deep in my childhood nostalgia. With its smooth texture, medium heat level, and salty-vinegary tang, Crystal Hot Sauce also happens to make one helluva brine for chicken.
We know you have all had the pleasure of meeting a flaky Southern-style buttermilk biscuit (and we introduce you to ours), but we are sure some of you have yet to discover the simple beauty of a New Mexican sopaipilla. We even share a few of our favorite ways to enjoy both of these regional delicacies in our book. Some people might call that micromanaging. We prefer to call it being helpful.
If you haven’t traveled through New Mexico, the sopaipilla may be completely foreign to you. And if it is, I am so excited to introduce you to this delicious pillow of fried bread. Sopaipillas are believed to have been born almost 200 years ago in Albuquerque’s Hispanic community. The great pride that the community has for this delicious pastry is proven by the fact that almost every New Mexican restaurant in Albuquerque serves sopaipillas as complimentary table bread. They are meant to be enjoyed as a way to mop up the extra sauce on your plate and to cut the heat of the spices that New Mexican food packs.
I spent a good portion of my high school years working as a host at one of Albuquerque’s most popular restaurants, Sadie’s Cocina. (If you are passing through, definitely pop in and tell Betty Jo I sent you.) After seating a table of guests, I would often take a detour by the line cooks, snag a sopaipilla, and devour it before returning to the host stand. (Let’s take a moment here to honor the memory of my seventeen-year-old metabolism. It was a force of nature, and a day does not go by that I don’t miss it.) I loved a “sopa”— that’s what I called them. To this day I get excited when I see sopa on menus and am immediately disappointed when I am reminded that sopa means “soup” in Spanish.
The beauty of the sopaipilla is that it is so easy to transform from a side of bread into the foundation for a full-on meal. Like these sopaipillas stuffed with pulled chicken in red chile sauce.
As you read and cook through our book, we hope you feel like you’ve made two new friends named Julie and Jesse. What better way to get to know us than through the food we love to share with each other and the stories we have built our friendship upon? Okay, no, we can’t promise we will literally be your friends, but we hope the spirit of our friendship entertains and maybe even inspires you to get cooking with someone you care about.