033: How to Make Potato Salad Mrs. Chef’s Way – Plus Tips on Scaling, Prep, & Anti-Inflammatory Cooking

Welcome to Cooking Like a Pro with Chef Cal and Mrs. Chef, Christa DeMercurio! In this episode, we’re breaking down the secrets of scaling recipes, prepping like a pro, and making potato salad the Mrs. Chef way—with bold flavors from infused oils and tangy vinegars, using less mayo, and way more love. Plus, we explore anti-inflammatory ingredients and salads that bring health and flavor to the same plate. 

🔪 What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• The real reason you need a kitchen scale (and what "tare" means)
• How to scale any recipe for 2, 20, or 200—starting with just one serving
• A game-changing trick for lighter, more flavorful potato salad
• Tips for building anti-inflammatory salads using everyday ingredients
• Why celery might be your new unsung hero in the kitchen
• Explore global food traditions with African one-pot dishes like Jollof rice

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

• 0:00 Intro
• 0:46 Scaling Recipes, what is it?
• 4:24 Measuring and scaling recipes by using a food scale
• 6:54 Prep for future meals by portioning
• 8:53 Mrs. Chef's way to make potato salad
• 14:29 Other bound salads beside potato salad
• 16:43 What types of lettuce did you have growing up?
• 18:51 Anti-inflammatory ingredients
• 20:48 Exploring peppers
• 24:40 Blueberries...from the store, to the fridge, to the freezer, to the smoothie
• 28:44 Have you ever tried African cuisine?
• 32:19 Travel the world by changing your sauces and spices

Transcript

Christa DeMercurio:
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 discuss the lesser known strategy of scaling and portioning, changing up the way we make potato salad and exploring anti inflammatory foods. Let's dig in. Today's episode was broadcast and recorded live on AM FM radio.

Chef Cal:
Welcome, welcome, welcome to Cooking Like a Pro. This is Chef Cal and Mrs. Chef Christa.

Christa DeMercurio:
Hello.

Chef Cal:
There's, there's a lot of different things that come in into cooking and notice the cooking show, but we do try to talk about, you know, things related to cooking besides just strictly food. And here, this is one of those things that needs to be taught along with knife skills kind of at the beginning of learning and interpreting recipes and such for yourself. And that's reading a recipe and being able to measure things, being able to scaling up and down. A lot of people don't even understand the term scaling, but it's quite important. I remember Christa, when you were doing the cooking for the school and it was, you know, cooking for four versus cooking for, you know, 60 or 70 kids all having tacos. You better not scale.

Christa DeMercurio:
That's something I kind of want to. So my heart start teaching people is, everybody's so focused on, this is a recipe for four, this is a recipe for six. You're stuck on that. Where we just go back to, it's a recipe for one and then we multiply it out. So I was talking to somebody a couple of days ago that, you know, we prep these big items and have all this stuff on hand, but each plate that goes out, we are cooking for one person. But overall we were prepared to cook for 100 maybe, but we focus on that one person. So if you can get that down to one, then you can multiply it out, then you can extend it to four, you can extend it to eight people, then you can extend it to 20 people, things like that. Yeah.

Chef Cal:
And normally what we'll do is we'll always try even numbers because definitely in the restaurant business, more often than not it was an even number of two people as far as two guests at a table or four guests or six. Just because generally speaking, the majority of people coming in were couples, you know, or they came in pairs. So, but, but so the recipes, for example, that we're putting together for the cookbook, or they're really going to be for Two or for four or for six, because that way you don't have to move them around too much. But scaling is that trick. And let's say you go to a website or you go online. Again, we didn't have online back when I started, but now you can go online, find a recipe, but check to make sure that it's the recipe. When you get the list of ingredients that it's allowing you to scale. There should be a button there that says scale.

Chef Cal:
I don't know if that's something that's common because I don't go online looking for recipes.

Christa DeMercurio:
Well, ours says serving. So if we have our soup recipe on there, I was just looking at today, it's for eight people because it's a pot of soup. But if you wanted to make it for larger gatherings, say Thanksgiving for 16 people, then you can get to 16 servings.

Chef Cal:
Yeah, and it's just. Yeah, because then you're just doubling everything. But, you know, you might be cooking for two, you might be cooking for 50. But I think that understanding that you're really. What you're doing when you're scaling is you are adjusting the quantities of the ingredients. It's as simple as that, either increasing or decreasing, but you're doing that to every single ingredient. And to be honest, not all things scale equally, and it'd be nice if they did. But there are times where, especially in baking, that the things don't scale, but generally scaling, you know, doubling something.

Chef Cal:
If it's one cup, then you put in two cups. If it's one ounce, you put in two ounces. If it's, you know, you know, two teaspoons, you put in a tablespoon and a. In a third or, you know, whatever those measurements are.

Christa DeMercurio:
For the most part, it does. If you get into commercial cooking, we move into weights. We don't use cups and teaspoons and tablespoons. It's more accurate to use weight. The other day we were to have pasta and look at the bottling. It says that 2 ounces is a serving. So I took out the scale. Okay, two ounces of pasta.

Christa DeMercurio:
There's going to be four of us eating. So I multiplied it, so that's eight ounces. And eight ounces of pasta was perfectly enough for all of us to eat. It was by weight. It was not half a box. It wasn't a cup. Because, you know, especially when you work with flour, too. You know, a cup of flour, if you tamp it down, it's different than a cup of flour that's been Fluffy and sifted.

Christa DeMercurio:
Yeah. So there's.

Chef Cal:
Whey is more consistent either weight or. But in a lot of things. Actually in most things, weight and butter are almost identical. For example, six, you know, eight ounces of butter equals a cup, and there's eight ounces in a cup, whether liquid or in weight. So those things you know, are. But learn ounces, learn weight. Also volume for measurements or something you need to know. But you mentioned, Christa, one word that is really kind of at the heart of all this, and that's scale.

Chef Cal:
As in, do you have a scale? Do you have a weight scale at home? If you don't, you need one. I would recommend one that first off has a tear. You need a tare setting. Because what a tear will do is when you. If you set a bowl on top of the scale, then you. And let's say the bowl weighs 13 ounces, you hit the tare and the tare takes away the weight of the bowl.

Christa DeMercurio:
It zeros it out.

Chef Cal:
Yeah, so it zeros it out. So if you're using, you know, like sized pans and pots and bowls, it can save you an awful lot of time by just by using the tare. But you really want a scale that will alternate and give you the option of either in ounces, which ounces go to pounds. 16 ounces in a pound or grams. But yes, you know, a scale. Be sure that you have one. They're very inexpensive. Again, make sure you get one that has ounces, grams.

Chef Cal:
And then also you can. Where you can tear things because it's. It's a T a R E. So it's not like tearing a piece of paper. It's tearing, meaning replacing that weight. So. So yep, get yourself scale again. You want to, to know how to portion.

Chef Cal:
Another example of this would be our dog Remy gets his food, which is sweet potatoes, which are mashed. And then he also gets either rice or oats and then chicken. And we do a mixture of this stuff. So last night we, you know, got all of his ingredients together and my wife just mixed, portioned out equal parts of the rice and the sweet potatoes, mixed those together. Then I just took the chicken and processed it, you know, cooked it fine, diced it, and then just bagged it up in 3 ounce portions. So in the morning, you know, getting. When you prep something, you allow yourself a lot of leeway, a lot of extra time. So it's three times as fast, four times as fast in the morning with everything going on to just say, you.

Christa DeMercurio:
Know, boom, grab a bag.

Chef Cal:
Yeah, yeah. Warm up his stuff, throw it in the bag, throw it in his bowl. And it's one more thing you can click off the table.

Christa DeMercurio:
I think that's where we do a lot of sauces, a lot of sauces. We try and do a bulk batch and then portion it out so that we have it ready to go. We had our tacos all portioned out, so we make tacos really quick last night because it was all ready to go.

Chef Cal:
Yeah, our freezer is pretty well full of portioned out things. So basically what it is, is, you know, when you're, when you're cooking something, even if you're cooking for two people, it doesn't mean you can't make enough sauce and you make an extra quart or so because it's easier to make then. And then portion it out in two ounce portions, put it in something you can freeze and off to the freezer. And the next time need a demi glace or something, you don't have to go through the whole process. You just pull a couple ounces out of the freezer and you're ready to go. So we're going to take a quick break. We appreciate you listening here at Cooking Like a pro. Chef.

Chef Cal:
Kyle, Mrs. Chef, back in just a moment. Welcome back to Cooking Like a Pro. And so we were working together a few days ago, me and my wife at home and had some potatoes. So I went ahead and cooked off some potatoes. And we want to talk a little bit about bound salad. We're going to start talking about potato salad here. But it was interesting because my wife did a little bit different.

Chef Cal:
I always, you know, I cook my potatoes, I dice them up. Then generally mayonnaise is like the first thing I put in. And then I season them from there. Onion, celery, you know, the basic stuff that you put in. You know, bacon, green onions, whatever you want to put in your potato salad. But I wanted my wife, Mrs. Chef, to explain her history on that because I actually followed her instructions when I made this a few days ago, and it really came out nice.

Christa DeMercurio:
This is the way I grew up with potato salad. I grew up with a baked potato salad first off. Now you did boil the potatoes, so it was similar process after that. But traditionally it was a baked potato that we would peel first. You would bake it whole, then you would take the skin off, which you did. You actually boiled yours whole. And then we took the skin off.

Chef Cal:
But, you know, but we also, when we took the skin off, we used a different technique. And that was something that my grandma showed Me. And that was the back of a butter knife. The back side of the butter knife, not the blade side that you would cut with, but the back. Because you don't want to cut in the potato, but you want to scrape off it.

Christa DeMercurio:
Yeah, you hold it kind of like you would a paring knife, so you almost kind of pare it, but using the back of the butter knife. So. And actually this was kind of interesting. And he brought this up earlier today that we went back and forth in creating this potato salad. He bought the potatoes, then I came in and peeled them, then he diced them. And then together we started coming up with a combination of oil and vinegar. And it's a one to one ratio. And we had gone down to Napa a few months ago and we got these really nice infused olive oil and infused white balsamic vinegars.

Chef Cal:
Yeah, we used. The vinegar we used was a Sicilian lemon. So it was infused with that and it was a really nice, again, white balsam on it. And then the. The oil was actually infused with Madagascar black peppercorns and it was really deep. So it's kind of unique that we just kind of came up with some fairly obscure oil and vinegar ingredients to start with.

Christa DeMercurio:
Yeah. So what you do is you take a one to one ratio of oil and vinegar and you simply toss the potatoes in that and then let them set for a while. Let them. You can let them marinate overnight. Even if you do that prep beforehand. If you're going to make a salad the next day, then after it's set up, then start adding your seasoning, your celery, if you're going to do any boiled egg, et cetera, and then add lastly the mayonnaise to kind of pull it all together.

Chef Cal:
Yeah. And you don't. And what I realized and noticed is you really didn't need that much mayonnaise. Not nearly maybe a third of the mayonnaise that I would normally put in, which of course is going to make it a lot healthier. But I think, remember potatoes are going to be very, very porous. They're going to really soak up a lot and really soaked up that lemon and that black peppercorn flavor. That's why I thought made it just a really nice potato salad. And again, also the going light on on the mayonnaise.

Christa DeMercurio:
And even the next day it was even better.

Chef Cal:
Yeah. So again, just some minced celery, you know, 1/8 inch squared. You know, we would call it a, like a boonoise, but just kind of like a fine chop, not a Mince, but a fine chop of some celery. And we have some onion and then and of course, always a little bit of secret salt. We've talked about that before. It's just a mixture of salt, granulated garlic and white pepper. And it's something that we use in just about anything and everything that we make.

Christa DeMercurio:
And also the potato salad typically add a little bit of celery salt too, just to enhance that celery a little bit.

Chef Cal:
Well, you know, celery is just one of those. It may not be a flavor that you always recognize, but it's certainly a flavor that you almost always start with when it comes to French cooking. Because the foundation of all French cooking is stock, period. That's just where it starts. French cooking starts with stocks. And a stock starts with a mirepoix. And a mirepoix is always celery, onion and carrot. So those celery and onion, carrot give, they provide this background flavor that all stocks are going to want.

Chef Cal:
Whether it's seafood, you know, poultry, lamb, beef, salmon, it doesn't matter. The only thing you might change is carrots do have, you know, the orange pigmentation in them. So if you want a light colored sauce, maybe like a seafood, like a fish balute or maybe a crab or clam stock, they just take out the carrots and replace them with leeks and you pretty much get, but you still get that same flavor. And celery is something that you don't really see. It's kind of like the, the uncommon or unsung hero, which is interesting is.

Christa DeMercurio:
I grew up with a lot of celery. My dad put celery in everything. We had it in our eggs in the morning, we had it in our potato salad. It was a very common ingredient for me cooking growing up.

Chef Cal:
And also remember, this is a side note, but you know, when you think about the, the vegetable that you're going to be eating, think about how it sits in the, and where, and where we're actually, you know, where it's coming from. But when we get heavy rains during particular parts of the season where celery or romaine lettuce, where things grow facing up, then that rain causes a lot of mud. So you want to make sure that you always, you know, clean your, your, your celery and your romaine. Just any place where that dirt might.

Christa DeMercurio:
Have, might have gotten shy, pulled out because lettuce was so expensive. Last week I just bought a single head of romaine, brought it home, and literally every single leaf had a pile of Dirt in the bottom of it. It was very covered.

Chef Cal:
Yeah, there was enough. You could have just grown some more.

Christa DeMercurio:
Yeah.

Chef Cal:
Anyway, so a bound salad, again, is anything that's going to be bound. Bound together in this case, a lot. Quite often it's mayonnaise. Could be anything. Could be a little bit of oil, vinegar. I think of a lot of these really healthy salads that are made with things like lentil and different grains. Wild grains, wild rice. There's just so many things are out there.

Chef Cal:
You know, the other things that fall into that category, things like coleslaw, bean salads. I know. I look back, and when we first started out in the old days, we'd have a brunch and we seemed like. We'd always say everything was bound salads. It was coleslaw, it was macaroni salad, it was potato salad, it was three or four bean salad. You know, those were the type of salads, that.

Christa DeMercurio:
Carrot salad.

Chef Cal:
Yeah, carrot salad salad. Yeah, beet salad. We used to do a salad that I used to really enjoy. It was bacon, cheddar and peas. We put, like, some red onion in there, Just a little bit of light mayonnaise. And. But. But again, just salads that are bound together.

Chef Cal:
And there's then. So when you break salads apart, basically you have bound salads and you have lettuce salads. Okay. And then you can have it also add the. The addition of a fruit salad as another category. But, you know, lettuce salads, things with romaine or head lettuce, wedge salads, that kind of stuff.

Christa DeMercurio:
Well, you don't have to default to mayonnaise, thinking that process like we did.

Chef Cal:
We used oil and vinegar.

Christa DeMercurio:
You get the oil and vinegar first. Try different vinegars, try different oils. Last week, when I made the potato salad, I used an avocado oil, and then I used a straight white balsamic. In the past, I've used a red wine vinegar. So you can do different flavors. You can use a red wine vinegar and an olive oil. You can use avocado oil. And I actually.

Christa DeMercurio:
I forgot when I made it before, I added a touch of walnut oil. Just a little bit. Just to give it a little bit of dimension in that vinegar and oil base.

Chef Cal:
Yeah, they say walnuts are good. I was reading something today that says walnuts attack the parasites in our body. Yeah. Yeah, I thought so, too. You know, it's weird, if nothing else. But anyway, so there's a lot of different salads that are out there, and I think you can have fun with those. You know, we used to just be that head lettuce salad back in the day. But now you can get creative.

Chef Cal:
You can get creative. There's all kinds of different dressings that you can do.

Christa DeMercurio:
Curious. When you had salad growing up as a kid, all we had was iceberg lettuce. That's all we knew.

Chef Cal:
Yeah, that's pretty much us, too, you know, and I. Well, that's kind of all there was.

Christa DeMercurio:
Yeah.

Chef Cal:
You know, you really didn't see a lot of the leafy greens until later on. One thing that we always had was chard, too. But most of our leafy greens were always cooked. You know, they would stew them, you know, or, you know, maybe take, you know, chard and make a rhubarb pie out of something like that with rhubarb. But there were a lot of different heavy, very fibrous lettuces that we would have. But most of those. Those were cooked, but doesn't mean you can't throw them in a. In a salad.

Christa DeMercurio:
Well, that's. I kind of found it interesting, kind of about the 90s, the field greens, the mixed greens came out. It was like, don't use the iceberg anymore. Let's use this. That's got all these different textures and colors.

Chef Cal:
Yeah. But, you know, the thing about that is that generally when you come up with a dish, the, you know, the liquid component needs to match. And so often you see a really heavy laden, maybe in density and thickness, but also maybe just heavily flavored, you know, component that you're going to make a dressing out of and then put it on a lettuce that's really light. And you mentioned field greens. We used to call it mescaline mix back in the 90s, and that's what we used a lot in our. When we were competing. And the thing about mescaline mix is you almost don't need hardly anything on it because you got the rocket and you got the frise and you got the chicory, and you got, you know, those. They're like baby lettuces and red and green lettuce and all that.

Chef Cal:
And you can literally, you got this abundance of flavor that have bitters and spices and pepper notes and all kinds of cool things. But anyway, so here's a quick trick.

Christa DeMercurio:
Just add some vinegar to a really thick dressing, like a ranch or a thousand, and make it into a lighter dressing.

Chef Cal:
There you go. There's the tip. Write that one down. Cooking like a pro. Chef Cal. Chef Christa, we will be back in just a minute. Welcome back to cooking Like a pro Chef, Cal and Mrs. Chef here.

Chef Cal:
And you know, I want to talk about this. We didn't get to it last week, but I wanted to talk about inflammatory, with the inflammatory concerns that we have with our bodies. I wanted to talk about anti inflammatory foods. So, so things that would, would help you when you have, you know, whether it's, it's pain, sometimes redness, swelling, even heat, sometimes it can get warm. When you have these almost kind of like allergy reactions, you need to know, you know, is my diet causing any of those things? So you can start looking at anti inflammatory foods. And one of the things that I noticed when you put these together, you have like a list of fruits and vegetables and nuts and seeds. Seeds and, and then different oils, fats and herbs and spices is you can literally take this and, and make as we were just talking about, you know, bound salads or maybe like a bound dish. You could take and make it out of that because if you take a vegetable that would be anti inflammatory, things like, you know, all of your berries fall into that category.

Chef Cal:
And then, you know, your tomatoes and your broccoli and tomato seasons. Oops, excited about that. And even avocados and peppers. So if you take these things, for example, let's just take avocados and then you go down to, okay, what kind of nut or seed which is anti inflammatory that I could add to that. So maybe we're going to go ahead and we just mentioned walnuts. Let's add some walnut stats. We have diced avocados, walnuts. We're also going to add maybe some diced tomato in there.

Chef Cal:
Then we're going to come down to our oil and fats. And just as Christa mentioned about using avocado oil, we use a lot of avocado oil. Now we're going to use the avocado oil to bind that together and then you get down to an herb and spice so you can go that, those other different directions as far as your taste buds go. And you got fresh garlic, you got ginger, turmeric. These are all great things for anti inflammatory. Again, garlic, ginger, turmeric, black pepper, cayenne pepper, almost any pepper. Matter of fact, thinking of pepper, you just bought some pepper. I know we're going to talk about African foods in the next segment, but what was that? And you brought some pepper home.

Chef Cal:
And I did smell it. We haven't used it yet. It is very, very unique.

Christa DeMercurio:
It's very unique.

Chef Cal:
It's pungent.

Christa DeMercurio:
No. And I actually took a little bit and put on my Tongue, it is extremely stingy. So I'm gonna have to work with it and see how. With my lack of heat tolerance, how.

Chef Cal:
I know you're evolving. You are evolving. I can tell you as your husband and as a Chef, that you're evolving when it comes to your. Your heat level, because it used to be a lower than it is now.

Christa DeMercurio:
It is. But actually I discovered this. There's different areas of types of heat that hit different areas. Your mouth, this particular one was very forward on the tip of my tongue. Like jalapenos, I can't stand because they go straight to the back of my throat and make me want to cough. This one was very forward and very. It was just a different type of sting. So I'm curious to work with it, maybe do a little spoke with it.

Christa DeMercurio:
What could come up with.

Chef Cal:
Yeah, well, and I think that that's one of the keys is getting used to. If you look at it around the world, it cultures where pepper is. Well, first off, if you go way back in pepper in history, pepper was actually a currency as valuable. You know, it was used as money. So it spread out a lot. And because it spread out through, you know, the different travels back in, in those days of, you know, Crispr Columbus and Marco Polo and all that stuff, it was able to spread and create this variety of peppers from all over the world, where if you go to an Asian culture, you're getting into the serrano and the smaller chilies, and then you're going down south in the southern hemisphere, south of us, down in the Hispanic areas, and you know, you're getting jalapenos and some that are fire roasted. If you, if you roast and smoke a jalapeno, you get what's called a chipotle. So if you've ever wondered where chipotle comes from, and then you can go into the Latin countries and you start getting the different chilies that they mix into their foods.

Chef Cal:
And if you go to these countries where the chilies are one of the more dominant flavoring elements, you have less cardiovascular concerns and you have, you know, age limits where the age expectancies are higher and. And just a lot. Just much more healthy for you. Because sweating is the way your body, you know, air conditions itself regulates. Yeah, nothing wrong with sweating at the table, but I mean, not too sweaty too much. But anyway, so I had opened up a can. Speaking of sweaty, I'd open up a can of. Of jalapenos.

Chef Cal:
They're the pickled jalapenos, not the tamed ones. But Fairly strong. But they had carrots in there. And if you've ever wondered why those carrots are in there, they actually, it forms what they call an escobichi, which is the carrots. They pick up that heat from the jalapenos. And escoviche is like a real spicy. I'd probably use a term like relish that you'll see in a lot of Hispanic or Mexican culture. Cultures.

Chef Cal:
It's just something that, you know, I think they're, I think they're great. But you know, they, you know, carrot is a porous vegetable. Even though it's a dense vegetable, it's still porous and it's just going to soak in a lot of those, those heat, that heat element.

Christa DeMercurio:
Yeah, it didn't pass my test.

Chef Cal:
Yeah, I said, here, try here, Here, sweetheart, try this carrot. No, anyway, it, it didn't go well. It wasn't in the mouth long, let's put it that way. But anyway, so if you're having it and, and I guess this, it comes down to the whole adage that you are what you eat. Think about that. If your body is reacting in a certain way, the first thing you should look at is your diet.

Christa DeMercurio:
I love to have blueberries. They are very anti inflammatory.

Chef Cal:
Blueberries are very. All berries fall into that category. And they're good for you. It's nice when the season is good. Well, I noticed something that you and Isaac do at home, which is you've been taking the blueberries and because you know the shelf life on blueberries is even if you treat them well, dry them off, rinse them, dry them, store them on a paper towel, make sure that they can breathe. Even if you go through all the processes of how to properly store them, you're still. They are a fruit that's going to mold quickly. And you guys have been tossing them in the freezer.

Christa DeMercurio:
Yeah, just taking the little plastic box straight off the shelf because we try and get a few days out of the fridge, use them fresh and they just pop them in the freezer and they just hang out there.

Chef Cal:
Yeah, you guys, you guys do the shake thing. See, I'm unfortunately, I'm the only real breakfast person it seems in the family. Although, you know, sometimes you just need a stack of pancakes, you know, you need some French toast because that's how I was raised.

Christa DeMercurio:
But first, that is inflammatory food.

Chef Cal:
Of course it is. But I know that, that you and, and our son are having fun with these. I got. What are those little ninja things?

Christa DeMercurio:
They're little mini ninja Blender.

Chef Cal:
Yeah, I got them those for Christmas and they, they've been thoroughly enjoying them the last few months and I'm real impressed with, with our, our sick, now 16 year old that he just, he, he's kind of a little bit of a mad scientist and we've talked about him before. Like he gets back to, with his ramen.

Christa DeMercurio:
So that's what we're doing with our shakes in the morning is what fruit are we going to put in there? Are we to put Greek yogurt? Are we going to do one of our fresh eggs that we've poached? And you know, this morning I, because I do put some milk in mine just for a little bit of creaminess. But I've got the blueberries, I've got bananas, I've got a poached egg from our chickens right out back. I've got Greek yogurt, I've got my AG1 powder in there and literally in 30 seconds I've had breakfast. How long would it take you to eat an egg and a thing of yogurt and half a banana?

Chef Cal:
Yeah, but I think that with me there's some satisfaction in digging a fork into something. I don't know, I just, I like to have utensils in my hand. I've never been much for a smoothie person. I know it's a, I know it's a big thing, a lot of people out there doing it and you guys do it and I think it's great. And I guess if somebody made it for me, you know, I certainly wouldn't have a problem, you know, with it. But, but I like to bite into things. I mean, I, I'd rather have my eggs in an omelet. You know, those chickens are working so hard out there and we get about, we get a, basically we get a dozen eggs every two days.

Chef Cal:
You know, we get about six or seven eggs a day. And they're just beautiful, they're just beautiful eggs. And it just. I had some corned beef and cabbage the other day and I'm not corned beef. It was after the corned beef and cabbage. I just had corned beef and hash as we had some diced potatoes left over and the corned beef diced it up and had these little, our little littlest chicken. What is he? I call him Fluffy. Fluffy Fluffer gutter.

Christa DeMercurio:
She's. She's a silky.

Chef Cal:
Silky, yeah. So she makes these little small eggs. She's a small chicken. She's like half or a third the size of the other ones, but she's so cute. She's got this little hair thing going. I don't know what you call that, but it looks like. Yeah, it looks, yeah, it looks like a, I don't know, crew cut. A.

Chef Cal:
Not a crew cup, but a.

Christa DeMercurio:
Kind of like Rod Stewart.

Chef Cal:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We ought to call him. We ought to call him Rod. But anyway, it's. It's a cute chicken. And we get his little or her little eggs and, and I usually, I think I, you know, lightly poached like four of those and put them on top and they were, they were delicious. Remember when you're poaching your eggs, a little bit of vinegar in there. Hold the egg together.

Chef Cal:
You don't want it boiling. You want it simmering in exactly three minutes. But anyway, we're going to be back in just a moment. We're going to take our last quick break here. We're going to be coming back at Cooking Like a Pro with some talk about some food from the. The continent of Africa. So hang around for that. And we'll be back in just a moment.

Chef Cal:
Welcome back to Cooking Like a pro Chef. Mr. Chef and Mrs. Chef. And I wanted to talk a little bit about African food. And I've done a lot of. Of African food. I've done a lot of every kind of food.

Chef Cal:
I mean, we used to do four special events a month. This is just my first restaurant. Okay. This is for. Ventured off into all the rest of them. But, but four events. And one would be a winemaker dinner. One might be a special event.

Chef Cal:
Maybe there's a holiday that month. One would be a Chef Cal Chef show. And, and so we'd always have, you know, maybe one was like all crab. Maybe, you know, five, six courses of all crab. Probably like 35 bucks. Yeah, that times have changed. But we did that every month. We have four events, and we did that for 18 years.

Chef Cal:
So that's a lot of events. I mean, we're talking a ton, ton, tons, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of different ones.

Christa DeMercurio:
So we were, we had to have explored a lot of different continents and countries and cultures.

Chef Cal:
And we were always. Yeah, and we were always looking. I was always looking for. I would be asking people. I remember I had a radio show back then as well, and I was like, okay, what do you people want to see? Okay, I'll do whatever you want because we can always figure it out. And anyway, I know we did two dinners with all food from. For Kenya. We also did it for the Congo.

Chef Cal:
To the Congo. We did. I did a lot of Stuff that was up in the northern area, like, you know, Morocco and Ethiopia. You know, foods from that area where you're kind of coming up with grains and things, but, you know, mostly rice. Rice is a big one. But you see a lot of yams and plantains, a lot of the things that they make in potatoes and pumpkin still also. But, you know, things that are a little easier to grow. And a lot of times they just kind of do a one pot thing.

Chef Cal:
And you know, one pot they call a jolif, but it's basically a rice dish. And I think we would call it a stew kind of. They cook in something that's called a tangine, and it comes up to like a smokestack. And what that allows to happen is for all the steam and condensation that would normally come up. And, you know, if you smell your, your stew cooking, then, you know, there's, you know, aroma slash flavor that's, that's flowing out. And a tangine just kind of locks it in. It's kind of an interesting cooking cooking tool.

Christa DeMercurio:
Which time I'd ever seen one was at Williams Sonoma years ago. What is that? That is such an interesting contraption.

Chef Cal:
And that's, you know, those are the fun things to get too. I know that we have a friend coming over, a dear friend coming over to my tomorrow. And the last time we were. She lives at the coast, and the last time we were over there, we made a great big paella. And I mean, I was excited. I seen our, my, our paella pan the other day, and it just got me thinking, oh, when she comes over, we need to do another paella. Just something fun. They see a big rice dish, but it's got shrimp and fish and chicken and usually shellfish, if not clams, mussels, or maybe both.

Chef Cal:
But just that, that comes down to like the tangine or the jollof. It's just a one pot cooking, you know, like, it's like we would make stew and we would serve stew, and that's all you would get because stew had your vegetables that had your meat. Well, you'd probably have some dipping bread to go with it. But. But everything was in there. Your starch was in there with your potatoes, your meat or the gravy, and then your carrots, your onions, your celery, your, you know, corn, peas. Peas are always a good one throw in there. But.

Chef Cal:
But, you know, it's just something. It's one other culture that's out there, and I think that that's always a fun thing. To do. Remember, we have to eat. Why not make it fun? But anyway, a lot of opportunities that are out there. I think when you bring in a culture and a culture doesn't mean you need to leave the United States. You know, you can have Boston style clam chowder in California or Manhattan style red clam chowder from the East Coast. You can go down to the south and have Cajun food, which is very much French influenced because that's kind of where the French, you know, settled from the cuisine wise.

Chef Cal:
But, but again, just think about different places and different things you can do and, and ways to be able to make food something more than just filling, filling your stomach.

Christa DeMercurio:
It's just exploring sauces and seasonings. You could take one piece of chicken, cook at the same every single night and do a different sauce and seasoning every night and travel the entire world all year.

Krista Dimaciero:
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 week with food, flavor and fun right here on Cooking Like a Pro podcast.