028. Meet the Chefs: Getting to know Cal & Christa

This week on the podcast join us for a special episode featuring Chef Cal and Christa—better known as Chef and Mrs. Chef—as they sit down with Linda Bott on Northstate Now to explore the transformative power of food.

Together, they explore how food brings people together, the importance of fresh ingredients, and insights on pairing wine with food. Chef Cal discusses his upcoming cookbook, while Christa shares about her newly released how-to fix veggies e-book along with how her own culinary journey began. 

You'll also find out about the first time they met. 

Fun Fact from the Episode: Did you know the term "table touching"? Neither did we! It's when chefs in restaurants come out to chat with diners, ensuring they're enjoying their meals. It's all about making a personal connection with food!

 🥕 Grab your FREE "Veggie Quick Fixes" guide! 🌱
Fast, flavorful ways to make veggies taste amazing—straight from How to Make Vegetables Taste Good!

Let's Connect!

I'm Christa DeMercurio. I started as a stay-at-home mom who relied on cookbooks, measuring everything and following recipes to the letter. But watching my chef husband move effortlessly in the kitchen, I knew there had to be a better way.

So, I learned—studying his techniques, practicing his methods, and mastering the strategies that keep professional kitchens running smoothly. Over time, I became confident, capable, and free from recipes controlling my cooking.

I’m here to help you do the same. On Cooking Like a Pro, together we share everything you need to cook with confidence, save time and money, and actually enjoy being in the kitchen—without the stress and frustration.
P.S. I still reference cookbooks and internet recipes too!

❤️Culinarily Yours, Christa DeMercurio (Mrs. Chef)

Email: christa@culinarilyyours.net

Website

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Chapters

• 0:04 Intro
• 0:39 Linda Bott welcome to the show
• 3:24 New Veggie Booklet release
• 5:30 Cultural impacts on food
• 10:50 Cal's roots
• 13:15 Christa's culinary journey
• 16:46 Starting a school lunch program
• 20:25 Cal's new cookbook
• 23:54 Communicating in the kitchen
• 26:11 Wine Pairing
• 28:33 Mrs. Chef getting stretched

Transcript

Christa DeMercurio [00:00:04]:
Hey, food fans. Welcome to Cooking Like a Pro with Chef Cal and me, Mrs. Chef his wife, Christa DeMercurio. We're dishing out culinary intuition, insights and imagination to spice up your meals and make cooking more fun. On today's episode, my Chef husband and I are guests on the North State now radio show. Join us and our host, Linda Bott and get to know a little bit more about Chef and Mrs. Chef. Let's dig.

Christa DeMercurio [00:00:34]:
Today's episode was broadcast and recorded live on AM FM radio.

Linda Bott [00:00:39]:
How are you? This is Linda bott here on KCNR 96.5 FM 1460am and your talk radio streaming always@kcnr1460.com well, you know, it's January. We start thinking about, oh, my gosh, what am I doing with my diet? We have gorged. We have overdone. We have. Well, I can speak for myself. So many. How many of you really, really, really have been, I don't want to say strict, but have been. Unless you're, unless you really deal, like maybe with a kind of a condition where you know that you can't eat thing where, you know, you have to be strict.

Linda Bott [00:01:19]:
Otherwise it's just kind of like there's stuff out on the table and there's drinks pouring. It's just like, sure. And then it becomes a big slippery slope for many of us. It just seems to be kind of a mindset that when the new year happens that we start thinking about taking back control of our health, our wellness, our, our good deeds that we're doing, et cetera, and so that it's a perfect, perfect time to have these two individuals on the show on my show. Now, they do have their own show here on this very station, but tonight I'm interviewing them. And that is Chef Cal DeMercurio and his beautiful bride, Christa. So welcome to the show.

Christa DeMercurio [00:02:06]:
Thank you.

Chef Cal [00:02:06]:
Well, yeah, thank you very much.

Linda Bott [00:02:08]:
All right, so we are, before you came on, we were talking about this book that. Let's just go right back to there because you. Which I think is fascinating. There's a book. Well, let's talk about your website, first of all, and that you are, you are going to be writing your own book. Is this correct?

Chef Cal [00:02:28]:
Yes, correct.

Linda Bott [00:02:29]:
Okay. And so you've got a book on there now about how to make vegetables taste so good. How would you want to share with our listeners what that means? And then we're going to go back in about your 45 years of professional experience. Plus, you know, I'm sure it's more than that. Because when does food become your passion? How does it start? Why did you become who you are.

Chef Cal [00:02:50]:
At a very young age? But yeah, the book I've been working on for a while, so we hope to have that out sometime towards summer. But every. Everything kind of comes from our website. Originally started culinarily yours, because that's the way I used to sign menus when I was competing. And then I'm not a techie person, so I hand this over to my wife because my wife Christa, she goes by Mrs. Chef, she can tell you everything you need to know about where you can find our podcast, which we do here, we do every Wednesday at 5.

Linda Bott [00:03:20]:
Fantastic. Yes, you do.

Chef Cal [00:03:22]:
Like a pro.

Christa DeMercurio [00:03:23]:
Yeah. And so I put together this vegetable booklet. So he's working on his cookbook. That's one project. And the website is my baby that I run everything through. And so digital downloads are my thing. So one of my questions that came popping up lately was what do I do with vegetables other than just put cheese on them? I'm like, well, you know what, let's try and take a look at this and come up with some ideas. And lo and behold, after a few months, I have a 28 page booklet download available online on our website, culinarily yours.

Linda Bott [00:03:53]:
So this is a fantastic thing. People can come onto your website and okay, so you've got like sections that are pickling and fermenting, salads, vinaigrettes, the whole enchilada, which you know, meal preparation, when to cook things in what order. So it's. It's pretty. And what's nice is that it's 18 to 20 pages.

Christa DeMercurio [00:04:19]:
It's 28 pages.

Linda Bott [00:04:20]:
20. How many?

Christa DeMercurio [00:04:21]:
28. 28.

Linda Bott [00:04:22]:
Oh, my gosh.

Christa DeMercurio [00:04:22]:
Okay.

Linda Bott [00:04:22]:
I wrote down two things. Spaghetti squash.

Christa DeMercurio [00:04:25]:
So there is a full walkthrough and how to think about a spaghetti squash, how to prepare it, different ways, different things you can do to it, different ways you can adapt it, make it a main meal, make it a side dish to making vegetables more front of mind. Instead of just I want to put some broccoli and carrots on the side.

Chef Cal [00:04:41]:
And I think, I think the entire show kind of Linda goes that direction is let's demystify cooking. Let's make it simpler, let's make it easier, let's make it fun, you know, instead of. And I guess we'll start off with this. Here is it that in Europe they have this, this quote. In America, it's a similar quote. In America, we eat to live, we eat for energy. We eat. So we can keep moving.

Chef Cal [00:05:07]:
All right. Well, in Europe it's the opposite. They live to eat, they go through their jobs, they go through the day. But they're. The highlight of their days are these beautiful meals and fellowship and family and all of that in the gathering. And I think that we've really gotten away from that in the country. And if we can help in any way be able to convince people, then that would be great.

Linda Bott [00:05:27]:
I think we talked about that. I was watching a documentary recently and I haven't finished it just on the first. It's like a series of. A documentary about twins and how they put them on different diets. They basically go through all of their. Everything that you could possibly test and to see. I've only watched the first series, like I said so far, but it is very interesting about. And they're all in America.

Linda Bott [00:05:57]:
So when we think about the fact that in Europe, we all know that if you've ever gone, you don't eat till 8 or 9 o'clock at night. And they have fiestas and they have. They start later in the day and that they, they in this documentary they talk about how so far that I've seen about how food changed with the war, with World War II happened. And then we started with faster food. TV dinners. TV dinners, hot dogs. That became a way of life.

Christa DeMercurio [00:06:31]:
Convenience, prepackaged items.

Linda Bott [00:06:33]:
Exactly. And. And not nutritious at all.

Christa DeMercurio [00:06:35]:
No.

Linda Bott [00:06:37]:
So I would think that learning, getting a cookbook on how to make vegetables fun would be great for your family.

Chef Cal [00:06:43]:
Well, there's so many different flavors. There's so many different flavors you can explore and things that are out there and you look at things that are seasonal. They just started doing the farmer's market here in town.

Linda Bott [00:06:53]:
Oh, they did.

Chef Cal [00:06:54]:
Year round?

Christa DeMercurio [00:06:54]:
Year round.

Chef Cal [00:06:56]:
Year round. So you can get things that are. That are being grown. So you're looking at things that don't have the pesticides and they're grown in better soil. And then they also don't, of course, have things like preservatives. And that's one. One of the things that people need to get away from processed foods. And it's the process that takes these foods and destroys their nutritional value.

Linda Bott [00:07:17]:
You know, I don't know. I have to work on that with my husband. And I wonder if, because he was in the military for so long, because I think about when we go buy cheese, he'll just buy that big old block of the cheapest cheese that you can get. And I think, why do you. Why do you do that? But I don't want to judge him because that's his thing. But I would, you know, it's. Instead of really thinking about the taste of great cheese.

Christa DeMercurio [00:07:47]:
Yeah.

Chef Cal [00:07:47]:
You know, a big part of that, Linda, is that it's. We're creatures of habit.

Linda Bott [00:07:51]:
Yes.

Chef Cal [00:07:51]:
In so many ways, we're creatures of habit. Whether it's, you know, it's Friday night, we go to a particular restaurant, or we always go here, wherever it is. You know, they say that, what, 90% of a person's life is lived within five, 10 miles of their house.

Linda Bott [00:08:04]:
Okay.

Chef Cal [00:08:04]:
So. So as creatures of habit, that's just how it started. But we want to break that habit because we want to see people get to a point where they're enjoying and this, you know, I. I will put it this way, that I think the country started falling apart when families quit eating together.

Linda Bott [00:08:20]:
Yes, I agree.

Chef Cal [00:08:20]:
Because they lost that communication.

Linda Bott [00:08:22]:
Table time.

Chef Cal [00:08:23]:
Exactly. And I think we need to get back to that. And that's really what we're trying to do on the show is.

Linda Bott [00:08:28]:
Okay. I like that. I like that, because I think that I'll never forget. It could have been rfk somebody talking about that. The most memorable time of his growing up was what. No matter how busy his father was, there always was the table at nighttime, he was home for dinner with eight or 10 or 15 people at the table. And that that was their time to commune. And I think it's important spiritually to connect us that way.

Linda Bott [00:08:57]:
I mean, it could be having a crummy day rather than hiding in your room and eating fast food and being on a device is to take that time, that sacred time of that hour, hour and a half. And that way you can kind of. Even if somebody doesn't even talk, you're still in a. Being around that person, almost like you're blanketing that person with food, with communion.

Christa DeMercurio [00:09:20]:
Well, stop and think about it. Whenever you go to somebody's house, where does everybody end up?

Linda Bott [00:09:25]:
Kitchen.

Christa DeMercurio [00:09:25]:
In the kitchen. That's where everybody goes and hangs out. You know, maybe a couple of people go sit and watch tv, but everybody goes and hits up. It sits at the kitchen counter.

Linda Bott [00:09:34]:
That's.

Christa DeMercurio [00:09:34]:
I think that's what draws us together. It's a common, Common denominator.

Linda Bott [00:09:39]:
Is it a comfort? Do you think that's just American?

Chef Cal [00:09:42]:
Yeah, well, there's. There's nothing that you're going to do more than eat in your life. You might. Other than perhaps sleep. Sleep, yeah. And maybe work.

Linda Bott [00:09:52]:
But.

Chef Cal [00:09:52]:
But food is such a, you know, monumental thing that we have to go through. Why not enjoy it. And if you're going to enjoy it, it's not just enjoying the food and the flavors and getting more in depth with things that we discuss in this vegetable booklet with things like what kind of seasonings you want to try. You can take the same ingredient, like cauliflower, and turn it into a steak. You can turn it into a puree. You can bake it, you can steam it. So just trying different things and different flavors, and I think that that goes a long way to us enjoying that. And then you add the fellowship again.

Chef Cal [00:10:26]:
I know I've mention that a few times, but that's. That's really what it is, is people need to communicate. They need to get together in the family. You know, you. You didn't eat if you weren't at the table.

Christa DeMercurio [00:10:35]:
There's two main common languages throughout the entire world. Food and music.

Linda Bott [00:10:39]:
Oh, true, true.

Christa DeMercurio [00:10:41]:
So it's a gathering thing that we can all speak. We all speak food.

Linda Bott [00:10:44]:
We all speak food. And you don't have to speak. Yeah, but.

Christa DeMercurio [00:10:47]:
Yeah, it's a way of communication.

Linda Bott [00:10:49]:
Let's talk a little bit about your Italian heritage. Talk to us.

Chef Cal [00:10:53]:
Well, when you're Italian, there's a variety of things. First off, you eat a lot of food, but it's a family, all right. And it came from. My dad's father was from Sicily.

Linda Bott [00:11:02]:
Okay.

Chef Cal [00:11:03]:
And so from Sicily came to San Francisco, and then my family came out of San Francisco. And one of our favorite family dishes is cioppino. And my family were fishermen, and they would go out and my dad's favorite. Oh, and whatever. They would catch the fishermen when they got back to the dock. Most people don't know this is. They would trade, like, this guy got crab, and this person got. Got a snapper or rockfish, and this person got, you know, clams, and.

Chef Cal [00:11:29]:
And then they would trade bit, and they would make this fish stew. So that's where cioppino came from in my family. And it's just been, you know, part of the heritage. And then again, just growing up from there, you know, we always had our fresh milk delivered in little glass bottles here. Here in Reading. Hopkins Dairy.

Linda Bott [00:11:47]:
Okay.

Chef Cal [00:11:48]:
I don't know if anyone out there remembers Hopkins Dairy, but It was before McCall's. And they would deliver the milk at the front door so that it's completely unprocessed. Beautiful food. We're going out, we're hunting a lot of things. And life was just a lot different, but seemed to be a little slower, maybe.

Linda Bott [00:12:03]:
Yeah, of course. I mean, we just Had a little bit different. Our pulse was different and probably way, when I think about it, you know, healthier. We played outside and we didn't. Again, processed foods were not really that much in the vocabulary. But what brought you to running?

Chef Cal [00:12:20]:
I've been in my whole life. If I was born in San Jose, I was 3lbs 1/2 ounce. It wasn't even a good size tri tip, you know. And then soon they got me on the house. They moved up here. Most of my family worked at the Calvary cement plant.

Linda Bott [00:12:35]:
Okay.

Chef Cal [00:12:36]:
My uncles, my brothers, my dad, grandpa and. And again, hunting was just a big thing. But we're in Reading. We're in Northern California. So it was going to the coast to fish.

Linda Bott [00:12:45]:
Right.

Chef Cal [00:12:45]:
And more importantly, abalone.

Linda Bott [00:12:47]:
Yes.

Chef Cal [00:12:49]:
It was always a part of it. And catching crab and then, you know, going in the streams. Trinity river. And now remember, Linda, this was back when the, the limit on fish that you could catch depended on the size of your ice chest.

Linda Bott [00:13:02]:
Okay.

Chef Cal [00:13:02]:
Yeah. So you could catch as many as you could. Mom would clean the guts out, cook them, and we'd eat them head and tail and all. So it was just, it was a lot different. But there's so many resources up here.

Linda Bott [00:13:12]:
And we still have those as well.

Chef Cal [00:13:14]:
Exactly.

Linda Bott [00:13:14]:
So now, Christa, you enter in the picture. How did you. The two of you meet?

Christa DeMercurio [00:13:19]:
I'm born and raised also from here down the Dersh and Deschutes area between Pal Cedar and Anderson. And I was going to church that I've grown up in, little country church. And one day I walked past him and I introduced myself because I was working with his sister.

Linda Bott [00:13:35]:
Okay.

Christa DeMercurio [00:13:35]:
Sister in law. And I said, hey, I've been talking to your sister in law and I'd like to introduce myself. And he was like, wow, Really?

Chef Cal [00:13:45]:
I was.

Christa DeMercurio [00:13:46]:
He didn't know what to say because I, you know, I am. I was in business. So I just walked upstairs, stuck up my hands to shake his hand. He's like, wait, what?

Linda Bott [00:13:52]:
What was your business? Or what is your business?

Christa DeMercurio [00:13:55]:
Mostly marketing.

Linda Bott [00:13:56]:
So that's a perfect, like marriage, you know, where you're doing the art in the creating and then you have this beautiful person that you can pair with and have a relationship with and a passion that shares your passion. It can market for you.

Chef Cal [00:14:13]:
Yeah, it's really bloomed out of that too. It's bloomed out to the point where, you know, I do what's in the kitchen and Christa does everything else at the marketing. And I mean, we're on Spotify and Apple and YouTube and LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram, and I'm not on any of those. Okay, but she's on all of those. And it's a big part of what we got going together. It's kind of like we, I guess we fill each other's spaces.

Christa DeMercurio [00:14:38]:
Well, this whole thing came about because, you know, even though I was more front of the house service type stuff and the marketing and the office operations, I got to take over the school lunch program for my son's school. And I turned him with help. What do I do? So he came in and helped me get the program started. And I started watching him going, he moves different, he talks different, he thinks different about food. I'm like, I want to know more about this because I'm a home cook. I mean, I'm a solid cook. I can follow any recipe you give me. I grew up in the kitchen.

Christa DeMercurio [00:15:11]:
My mom, my grandma, me, my dad, we all cooked together. So for us, it wasn't coming together at the table. It was an entire evening in the kitchen together. All the way from prep to cleanup. Everything was done together as a family. So I had an understanding of food, but not commercially, not to the extent that he does. So I came up to Hume. I think it was like 2018.

Christa DeMercurio [00:15:34]:
I don't do the New Year's resolutions, but I came up to, on January 1, said, should you choose to accept, I want to learn how to cook professionally, commercially, like you, I will lay aside my ego and I will not let my feelings get hurt.

Linda Bott [00:15:49]:
That's a big thing.

Christa DeMercurio [00:15:50]:
That was a big thing. Like, I will just. I will just listen and I will just do what I'm told and learn.

Linda Bott [00:15:55]:
Right?

Christa DeMercurio [00:15:55]:
And we did that. And even today, we're still doing that. And that's how culinary yours was born. And, you know, even though I had to kind of pull back a little bit on the website, we started out doing back when there was like, Julie and Julia out the movie where she was following through Julia Child's cookbook.

Linda Bott [00:16:12]:
Great movie. Watched it recently again.

Christa DeMercurio [00:16:14]:
So based upon that movie, it's like, well, so are you going to start a blog? And I went, oh, okay. So I started blogging and then. But the blogging kind of fell on the wayside when I was working more full time at the school. But now we're picking back up and I'm trying to do a more concerted effort to get the information out there.

Linda Bott [00:16:31]:
Love that. I mean, we can all really relate to Julie Julia. Yeah, it was as a Julia Julia Julian Julia. Yeah, it was just a fantastic movie. And. Yeah. To see what she went through. And so let me ask you, two things came to mind while you were talking, Christa, is about the student program for lunches.

Linda Bott [00:16:55]:
Tell us a little bit about what inspired you to do that.

Christa DeMercurio [00:16:58]:
We were. He was in a private school and they had the position opened up. The principal knew that I was into food and, you know, being married to gals. So he's like, hey, you want to take over the lunch program? I said, sure.

Linda Bott [00:17:08]:
So what. What did you implement? I know that we used to. In my day, if you did the lunch program, you could take your tray and you always had something hot. It seemed like to be balanced where I grew up, but I don't know. What did you implement in that?

Christa DeMercurio [00:17:23]:
Well, because we're a smaller school, we didn't have, you know, the traditional lunch program like that with, you know, running down the line and, you know, get your little thing of milk at the end. What we would do is. Well, we started developing a menu, and it was. Every month there was a full menu, and so we had about 16 to 20 rotating items. And there was certain things. There was always Taco Tuesday because that's what the kids wanted.

Linda Bott [00:17:44]:
Oh, that's cool.

Christa DeMercurio [00:17:44]:
There was always pizza on Friday. There was always hamburgers.

Linda Bott [00:17:47]:
Once a month you had something to look forward to. Like, you knew you could circle your calendar.

Christa DeMercurio [00:17:51]:
So I wrote a menu for every single month, and then I scheduled parent volunteers to help me every single month. And I did the shopping every single month and the cooking and the cleaning and the washing and the bagging. So it was. Do you miss it? No.

Chef Cal [00:18:06]:
Well, you know, I don't know. I. I missed it quite a bit. I mean, these little kids when they're like in kindergarten. Yeah. It's like, got to be the best time.

Linda Bott [00:18:13]:
Yeah, yeah. Right.

Chef Cal [00:18:14]:
They come running up innocent, and they're so excited and they're lining up and they're just, you know. Yeah, so that was. Yeah, that was enough to sell.

Christa DeMercurio [00:18:23]:
I missed what I did. And the program we built, it was so popular and they loved it so much. But it's a lot of work to understand, you know, going to Costco and going to Cash and Carry and Winco every single day and then doing like, you know, thousand dollar orders at the beginning of the month and having. And it wasn't Cisco driving up and dropping off the back door, and it was me getting in the car, going to Costco, got it, loading up a big old orange cart and taking it back. So it was a lot of physical work. And that's what a lot of people don't understand, too, about cooking and commercial cooking. It is very physical. It is like construction.

Christa DeMercurio [00:18:55]:
And you have days that, you know, for him, sometimes he would start three in the morning and be gone till 10 at night. Yeah, I have a very physical.

Linda Bott [00:19:02]:
Who owns a restaurant that's, I think, celebrating 30 years now after all this time. She goes to Costco, she goes to Cash and Carry, whatever it's called now. And I think about that sometimes, about the physicality of what that is, and then having to go through your list and then balance at the end of the day from the restaurant. You know, just the intense work. Of course, you're only as good as your team, right?

Christa DeMercurio [00:19:28]:
Yes. Right.

Chef Cal [00:19:29]:
And I think that you need that. What you need to have is you need to have a servant's heart. You need to have a. Be a person of hospitality, because if not, it's just too hard of a job because you need to be able to have, first off, really thick skin, which we had a family restaurant, so I recommend that for anyone that wants to thicken their skin. But that was decades ago. But again, it is something that you need to enjoy doing. Because I teach a lot. I've taught for 40 years as well.

Chef Cal [00:19:58]:
And I always tell kids the same thing. Find something you love to do and you'll never have to work another day in your life. So come up with something if you like to. We connect with people, great. If you like it outside, be a park ranger. If you like little kids, be a school teacher. But those you know, and for food, because it's so demanding, as my wife Christa said, you really need to have a reason and a passion, and that's what. That's what excites me.

Linda Bott [00:20:24]:
And you're going to be writing. You are in the midst of about ready to release a book.

Chef Cal [00:20:30]:
Yeah, we're looking to get it out by summer.

Linda Bott [00:20:33]:
Okay. And in that book, is it basically about you and your life and recipes or. Tell us, tell us what that. What makes your book different.

Chef Cal [00:20:44]:
And thank you for asking that, but it. Because it is very, very different in its thought. It's four different components. It's a cookbook, but it's also just as much a storybook. And it's a passion, which is also very much the same, a legacy. So those are the four directions that it came from. From how I was raised, how I feel the way that I do, and then to the professional side of, you know, competing. 15 years in Europe, I worked with the best, literally in the world.

Chef Cal [00:21:13]:
And you gleam so much information off these people and you're able to bring it back to, back to Reading, California, and to be able to use it. But. And you know, the legacy part, I know I've been to restaurants before and I've heard people say this, that they'll say, hey, ask the Chef if I could have that recipe, you know, and then it'll come back. And the Chef says, no, you can't have it. And I'm like, well, you know, I could live, Tom 100 years old. I will not know a tenth of what there is to know about cooking. It's just too vast. So for someone to say, I'm not going to share that.

Chef Cal [00:21:46]:
It stops the legacy, you know, and all of a sudden there's that. To me, it's a sadness. And I have a quick story on that where my grandpa showed me how to make this barbecue sauce and. But he never wrote it down. And he passed away real tragically in a boating accident. And one of the things really sad me was I was never able to see this barbecue sauce slash marinade. He did. And probably 15 years later, my mom had given me a book from her grandmother that was a home.

Chef Cal [00:22:17]:
What do they call those, those home.

Christa DeMercurio [00:22:19]:
Books back like a sunset barbecue type, you know, all encompassing how to do.

Chef Cal [00:22:23]:
Everything books, Good Housekeeping or something. But what it did was, you know, it would show you how to fix your lawnmower, you know, how to, you know, do, you know, make a pot roast and then also how to. How to paint. So they were all encompassing books.

Christa DeMercurio [00:22:38]:
Life skills.

Chef Cal [00:22:38]:
Yep. Yeah, life skills. Kind of like the Boy Scouts.

Linda Bott [00:22:40]:
We need those now.

Chef Cal [00:22:41]:
Yeah. So I was flipping through this book and all of a sudden I turned to this page. This is almost.

Linda Bott [00:22:47]:
And it's a God thing.

Chef Cal [00:22:48]:
It's. It's a picture of. It's a barbecue sauce recipe and grandpa's fingerprints all over both pages in barbecue sauce.

Linda Bott [00:22:58]:
Oh, man.

Chef Cal [00:22:59]:
You know, so that's the, the legacy part of it. And there's tons of stories. I just. A real shoot, short, quick one. I remember some folks coming up from Cottonwood and Dean McCarrol's restaurant. Kind of an upper scale restaurant at the time. This is back in the 90s. And.

Chef Cal [00:23:16]:
And I walk up and I do what called table touching. You go out and you talk to everybody.

Linda Bott [00:23:20]:
Table touching. Oh, I haven't heard that expression, you.

Chef Cal [00:23:22]:
Need to talk to everybody because it's important, you know, you need to be able to connect, make sure they avoid everything. So I walk up to this couple and they were A couple. And I'm taking me a new night. They were no shabbily dressed for an upscale restaurant. But I mean, it was fine. Anyway, I walk up to them and they had had a yard sale. They lived in Cottonwood. It had a yard sale to raise money to come to my restaurant for their first wedding anniversary.

Linda Bott [00:23:46]:
I love that.

Chef Cal [00:23:48]:
So it's those, that's honor. It's those kind of things that we get to be involved in. And there's just, it's just littered with those throughout the book.

Linda Bott [00:23:54]:
Well, now, is there, you know, we, we see this in there's the television show called the Bear.

Christa DeMercurio [00:24:02]:
Yes, I watch it.

Linda Bott [00:24:02]:
Okay, so. And you do this, do you. Did you do this? Left, right, corner.

Chef Cal [00:24:07]:
Oh, yes. Yeah. Behind you. Sharp corner.

Linda Bott [00:24:11]:
Right.

Chef Cal [00:24:11]:
We always do timeout and that's one of the times out. And like how long before the food is ready?

Linda Bott [00:24:17]:
Okay.

Chef Cal [00:24:17]:
We use a term like where the server grabs the food from and the cook puts the food up to. It's called the window.

Linda Bott [00:24:24]:
Okay.

Chef Cal [00:24:25]:
So as I was training my wife, as she had mentioned earlier, I had asked her one, this is a little, quite a while back, I said, when's Isaac going to be ready for school? And she goes, 15 minutes to the window.

Linda Bott [00:24:36]:
Okay.

Chef Cal [00:24:37]:
So it's like 15 minutes he'll be ready to take out.

Linda Bott [00:24:40]:
So, so in other words. So in other words, when you think about that, that window where the food is now on being ready to be served, like the server has to get it to the table in that period of time. If you, if you stay too long at the window now, you're, now your food is cold.

Chef Cal [00:24:57]:
That's when it's maximum. It's. It's at its best when it's in the window.

Christa DeMercurio [00:25:01]:
Yes.

Chef Cal [00:25:02]:
And that's why you have a position, I always did, called expediter, which makes sure that people are ready for the food.

Linda Bott [00:25:08]:
Yes.

Chef Cal [00:25:08]:
So it comes out and goes out immediately.

Linda Bott [00:25:10]:
Yeah.

Chef Cal [00:25:10]:
So that's one of the things. And hot food and a hot plate and.

Linda Bott [00:25:13]:
Yes.

Chef Cal [00:25:14]:
And cold food and cold plate. I can't tell you. I went to a local restaurant and had Mac and cheese dish a while back.

Linda Bott [00:25:21]:
Right.

Chef Cal [00:25:21]:
But the bowl was cold.

Linda Bott [00:25:23]:
Yes.

Chef Cal [00:25:23]:
So that dish is only going to stay. The food's only going to stay hot so long. And that's a pretty simple thing. That's actually the first thing I was ever taught. Hot food on hot plates. Cold food.

Linda Bott [00:25:31]:
Right, right.

Christa DeMercurio [00:25:32]:
And when you're at home, do the same thing. Don't take a cold plate out of the cabinet, set it down, put Hot food on it. Boom, it's cold.

Linda Bott [00:25:39]:
I always put mine in the microwave.

Christa DeMercurio [00:25:40]:
Microwave makes difference.

Chef Cal [00:25:43]:
Yeah.

Linda Bott [00:25:44]:
So, okay, so farmer's market. Now, do you guys go every. Every week?

Christa DeMercurio [00:25:47]:
No, it's early in the morning, and it's usually Saturdays. We've always got something scheduled Saturday, and it's like, ah, I got to get back.

Linda Bott [00:25:54]:
I'm so happy that you brought that up, because just like you about getting the freshest ingredients, we try and make it a point.

Christa DeMercurio [00:26:01]:
We schedule. We literally put it on the calendar to go. If there is a weekend we don't have something going on, have to go somewhere, then yes, it is on the calendar to go.

Linda Bott [00:26:09]:
So on your website, you're talking about the intricacies, also about wine pairing.

Chef Cal [00:26:15]:
Oh, yes.

Linda Bott [00:26:16]:
Is that something that you're still involved in?

Chef Cal [00:26:19]:
Yeah, yeah. We actually have been doing classes. We've done some online, especially when Covid was here. We did some things with that, and we've also participated in some with other people that put them on. I ran a winery for two years in Napa Valley, and I learned everything from vintage vineyard management to bottling to everything in between and refractometers, and it was amazing. So I've always loved the dynamic between food and wine, because if you do like wine, the right wine will always dramatically enhance the right food. But how do you choose?

Linda Bott [00:26:52]:
Yeah, how do you choose?

Chef Cal [00:26:54]:
Well, there's two different ways. It's either similar or it's complex. So it's similar flavor. Like, I'm having a nice scallop dish and a cream sauce. So I'm going to have a nice creamy, buttery Chardonnay that goes with that. Right. So that's a similar. A contrast would be spicy Asian food and plum wine.

Chef Cal [00:27:13]:
Plum wine, of course, is very sweet. Or maybe you'd have a Riesling or a Gewurchtraminer. So it's either the opposite to help it meet in the middle, or the same to just help it keep going down the same trail.

Linda Bott [00:27:24]:
Well, I think that's a whole other show, actually. I've always been confused about wine because I kind of like either a Chardonnay or, like a real bold Cabernet. And I know several friends that they. They love to go, and they belong to wine clubs, and they meet with the people who make the wines, and they know about wine releases, and we just aren't those. That's not our thing. But it's wonderful to be around people who can tell you and pair. Like, when you do a wine pairing dinner, that's Fabulous.

Chef Cal [00:27:59]:
It's always got to be Linda, to put it this way. The simplest way is, and I have a chapter on this in the book Dinner to Movie. You always have dinner. What's the movie? It used to be in the old days, it was actually a movie. Some matter of fact, they used to have this thing called drive ins. Right, Right.

Christa DeMercurio [00:28:15]:
Okay.

Chef Cal [00:28:15]:
So it used to be a movie, dinner and a movie. Now what's that movie? Is the movie a beautiful list of wines that are paired with each course? Is it an actual movie? Is it going out and do something else? Is it the conversation at the table? But what is the kind of the movie app, the entertainment side of that? And that's what people are looking for.

Christa DeMercurio [00:28:33]:
For and not necessarily going to the store on purpose going, okay, I'm going to start opening the refrigerator in the cabinets. And there's a lot of people that can't do that. They go without a recipe in front of me, which that's where I was originally. I could not function without a recipe. If it said half a teaspoon, I only had a quarter teaspoon, I could not adapt. If it said I needed two cups and I only had three quarts of a cup, I could not adapt.

Linda Bott [00:28:53]:
Or girl, you had to stretch.

Christa DeMercurio [00:28:55]:
I did. I did. But I could follow any recipe. But that's now getting out of my cup comfort zone going, you know what? Hey, I didn't have that ingredient. Let me try this. And now even our son who's becoming top ramen king, he loves ramen, but he doesn't want to use the packet. He wants to make his own flavoring, his own sauce. So he's pulling ginger out of the cabinet.

Christa DeMercurio [00:29:13]:
He's pulling chicken base and curry powder and making all these different flavors. It's like, oh, that didn't work. I'll try that again.

Chef Cal [00:29:21]:
He's like a little mad scientist.

Linda Bott [00:29:22]:
You have a place that you would recommend for our listeners that where you buy your spices?

Christa DeMercurio [00:29:28]:
As far as where we shop, we shop at Costco for some things, right? Some specific things that you can only get at Costco. Like, you know, there's really nice cheese that they have there, certain frozen items that we can separate out and use individually. Pull a piece out here and there. But mostly, you know, I'll shop at Walmart, Winco. As far as spices, we go to the Winco bulk section because we can pull out just a couple ounces and refill it. We don't buy a whole big old thing of it unless it's something we really truly go through a ton of it of we don't buy a big giant thing.

Linda Bott [00:29:59]:
And you've got interesting spices. Is old world market. Yeah, they've got some like they pull.

Chef Cal [00:30:05]:
Some stuff from all around the world.

Linda Bott [00:30:06]:
It's kind of interesting as well. So also I want to encourage you because we're wrapping it up right now. And again, thank you for joining us today. Chef Cal D. Mercurio and Christa Mrs. Chef. And I love the fact that you've got this book. You can read up on this and you can go to their website, how to make Vegetables Taste Good.

Linda Bott [00:30:26]:
It's a 20 page, 28 page download. And I really appreciate you guys joining us today.

Christa DeMercurio [00:30:34]:
Thanks for having us on. Thank you so much for spending time with us. Until next time, we hope you'll be cooking up a storm in the kitchen. So we'll be with you again next time week with food, flavor and fun right here on Cooking Like a Pro podcast.