'all food is unhealthy' and other dumb shit I believe about cooking

Some strange realizations I had while making some truly delicious fuckin yum yum food from Hungry as Hell, the new cookbook by Michelle Albanes-Davis that I highly recommend !

In the kitchen, people often compare me to Emeril Legasse.

This is because I yell ‘BAM’ a lot and ask them to compare me to Emeril Legasse.

So when I asked my Substack pal and NYTimes best selling cookbook author

Michelle Albanes-Davis

, who also writes the amazing The Broiler Room Substack, if she’d want to collab sometime, and she responded by asking if I’d want to cook something from her JUST RELEASED cookbook Bad Manners: Hungry as Hell: Meals to Live by, Flavor to Die For, I pulled a classic romcom movie move and I SAID YES.

But when it came time to pick what to actually cook, I was flummoxed,f labbergasted and frankly, if I can be perfectly honest for a second, befuddled.

Here’s me looking through the menu:

• “Morning Cornbread” damn that looks good! Oh it requires brown sugar and flour and cornmeal those aren’t healthy. Next.

• Savory Breakfast Hand Pies? no they are made with homemade puff pastry and both ‘puff’ and ‘pastry’ are very unhealthy so no pass next.

• Fall Sheet Pan Hash Browns? Russet potatoes no those are bad only sweet potatoes are ok next.

• Ok cool salads nice…Onion Croutons made of…bread? Nope no bread bread is bad next.

• Hippie Hummus Wraps those look great but ugh no they need flatbreads those are bad too.

• Grilled Plantains hmm no eating fruit is too sweet too much sugar nope next

• Coconut rice, Cumin rice, Cilantro rice…all rice, no go next

• Chicken finger Shrooms — no they require flour and fried next

• White Bean Soup with Rolled Herb Dumplings nope dumplings are bad next

• Green Enchiladas and Queso Blanco – no way cheese bad I’m sure vegan queso is bad too its all bad next.

• And no fuckin way to anything in the desert section sorry no to

  • Banana Fritters,

  • Lemon Almond Blondies with Basil Sugar, and definitely no to

  • Midnight Chocolate Cake no no no no no next oh wait that’s the end of the book fuck I can’t make a single thing on here because I’m Afraid of eating literally all foods???

Midnight Chocolate Cake yummmmmmy so def a no go for me and my really healthy brain

Well, this is not good. First off, all those foods look SO GOOD and also, more importantly, Hungry As Hell makes a persuasive argument about how, get this, real food is…good. Nourishing, even. A source of joy and nutrition and time to chill AND YET my dumb ass refuses it all.

My brain said no Alex you can’t eat anything that’s good because you need to lose weight, which it’s been telling me since I was…16?

My hope with this experiment was to push through and cook some yummy stuff and be healed forever of my disordered eating bullshit. Here, dear friends is my journey.

quick cool note:

Michelle Albanes-Davis

has agreed to hang out in the comments section today to answer your questions about cooking and her cookbook and why i’m such a moron, so hop on into the comments the water is warm but not boiling that’d be too hot we’d die.

Also: I went into serious debt to learn how to cook like Emeril Lagasse so plz, if you want to support my work and my family, consider becoming a paid subscriber today thanks:

So what do I eat?

Genuinely, I eat the same thing for about 80% of my meals. It’s disgusting and I am ashamed of it but it’s also the truth so what can I do but share it in front of 7 million readers? Michelle asked me a couple questions for an interview she’s posting next week and in one of them I divulge my secret recipe:

• cottage cheese (regular fat)

• cottage cheese (fat free)

• berry of choice (straw-, blue-, rasp-, black-)

• protein powder (horchata flavor)

• grape nuts (pop rocks for old people)

I measure it all out and it comes out to about 300 calories. It’s the first thing I eat in the morning and also usually the 2nd and third. After three I’ll either eat something else or just have another. I just had one and would eat another one after finishing this but I am out of cottage cheese so I am gonna run to the store to get more.

Look, I know this isn’t…great! In fact here’s a photo taken of me at a recent movie premiere (I wasn’t in the movie, I was just the only scab who showed up even though SAG said no one is supposed to show up.

besides the cottage cheese tub I look p good tbh

Also, while looking for images of alex dobrenko premiere, I found this:

Lots to unpack here but most importantly this mf wore shorts to a premiere!!

First meal: Eggplant Polpetti

Finally and after much hemming and, get this, hawing, we decided on a few things to make. I led the creation of the Eggplant Polpetti (“When you’re cooking for this yourself, they’re meatballs. When you’re cooking to impress, they’re polpetti,” Michelle quips in the book)

And lemme tell you something – they were fuckin amazing. Here are some photos from my making them. Don’t be fooled these are not stills from the tv show The Bear:

Also for some reason I decided to film the entire 1hr long process of making them so if you would like to see that, which was mostly an excuse for me to try some standup material and embarrass Lauren, please enjoy that here?

But even while eating SO many of them, I couldn’t help but think ‘ah these are bad you are bad this is bad.’

Yuck!

White Bean Soup with Rolled Herb Dumplings  & Monkeybread

The next night, Lauren decided to make the White Bean Soup with Rolled Herb Dumplings and Monkeybread. It was all so good, especially the Monkeybread. I couldn’t stop eating it and neither could Wilder. He just kept demanding more and more and more. It was beautiful.

Look at that Monkeybread monster. He is not yet too affected by my weird eating habits and rules but soon, he will be. I don’t want that for him nor for me.

Everything we cooked was really really delicious. I hope to one day soon get to a place where I can enjoy food without feeling like I am destroying my body by eating it which, when I write it out, makes so little fucking sense — food is what my body NEEDS but I guess the Dr. Dobrenko in me decided he was smarter than…the universe and that protein powder and cottage cheese would be a better lifelong diet than…all other food. Good stuff Alex!

I asked Michelle if she had any tips on how to better enjoy food. Here’s her response:

I think the first step to enjoying food is thinking about how whatever you eat becomes a part of you, it fuels your ideas and powers your body. If you’re only eating things that you have to endure, like bland chicken breasts, or mindlessly shoveling calories in your mouth because you think that giving yourself what you need is a waste of time then you are already doomed. You have to eat multiple times a day, why not make that a time for some ease and enjoyment? Shit is hard enough as it is, dinner shouldn’t be a chore. It’s a break from the bullshit.

A break from the bullshit, I love that. The rest of our conversation is chock full o’ bangers like this and I strongly urge you to read it below, but first, I implore you to go and buy her cookbook!

In fact, I even asked Michelle what meals she thinks BATheads specifically would love! Here’s what she said:

BAT readers are busy, slightly insane people just like me. The red pepper rice, chickpea and tahini soup with orzo, and any of the fritters are perfect for those of us who want to cook more, eat better, but also want to shut down when they aren’t immediately the best at their new goal. These recipes are easy but taste way more complicated than they actually are. I wouldn’t set you guys up for failure, I swear. 

Well what are ya waiting for go buy the book ya dolts!

The rest of our interview:

Does the whole ‘not enough’ thing plague you within the world of cookbook authors?

Absolutely. I never went to culinary school so I’m always deeply insecure about my abilities despite writing 5 cookbooks and being a lifelong cook. That’s super common though, right? I am a brutal critic of my own work even when I know I did my best. I wonder all the time if this is what keeps me motivated or whether it’s actually holding me back. The jury is out. I’m always very jealous of people who seemingly never struggle with self promotion or selling out to brands for big paychecks. It can feel like I’m doing everything wrong even though I’m just doing shit my own way. Comparison is the fucking worst. 10/10 don’t recommend.

From the outside, that world feels super competitive – is that how it feels from the inside?

It’s really competitive which is weird since so many of us work in isolation. For the past 10 years I’ve been writing recipes alone in a kitchen and my business partner Matt has been photographing them. That’s the whole team. We were really lucky to go viral years ago (2012) when that could get you a book deal but now things are so much harder. Not only do you have to write killer recipes, you have to produce an endless stream of content, including countless videos, just so people can find you. And then you might be able to make some money. Maybe. It’s completely insane.

I used to wonder how so many people pulled this off and had these big beautiful houses and kitchens doing the same work I do. Then I realized that the food entertainment industry, just like the rest of the arts, is full of lots of people born into money who get to work for the love of it, not because they need to pay rent. It shifts the whole dynamic right? I’m competing with them but they aren’t competing with me at all. They don’t need to. But I’ve found that people who’ve worked their asses off to get where they are, like Rachael Ray, have been the first ones to reach out and offer help. They get it. The first time I ever got to be on TV was on her show and she was so fucking funny and kind behind the scenes that she has my loyalty for life. I was a nobody. She’s a class act and the total blueprint on how people in the same industry should treat each other. Considering how many of her peers loved to publicly shit on her for decades, that’s no small feat either.

Has your relationship to feeling like enough changed over time?

Honestly, I realized that if I can make myself proud and feel like I did my best, that’s all that can matter. If you get too caught up in the praise and the criticism, you’ll never get anything done. All my creativity vanishes when I do that so I’ve got to just keep moving forward. If I didn’t feel like enough when my book was #1 on the NY Times bestseller list then no amount of outside praise will fix this problem. I’ve been working on improving my internal dialog for years now but until it’s fixed sometimes the best move is to ignore it all together.

One last reminder to buy Hungry as Hell and subscribe to

The Broiler Room

for more cool yummy recipes!!!

Comments

1. Michelle Albanes-Davis
   is gonna join us in the comments! What questions do you have for her about…anything?!

2. What’s your fav meal to cook at home?

3. What’s your go to healthy snack?

5. Do you think wearing shorts to a premiere is a cool and awesome idea actually?