Sous Chef

What do you do on a daily basis?
A little bit of everything that our kitchen staff does (production work, recipe testing and developing, writing for the apps), plus day-to-day administrative (scheduling, mostly) and working with the purchasing team on kitchen maintenance.

Who is your favorite food TV personality, past or present?
The Galloping Gourmet

What’s your favorite cookbook?
Tough one? Mes Tartes and Mes Confitures are sitting on my book shelf, begging me to quit my day job so that I can bake and preserve my way through them; Paula Wolfert’s books, too; and the Ottolenghi books, which I don’t own, are about to join that lineup.

What dish or ingredient will we never catch you eating?
Never say never, but I suspect hearts and minds will remain on the unwinnable list

What’s your favorite condiment?
Sophie’s choice between mayo and ketchup

What’s the first dish you learned to make?
I did put together a stunning sandwich loaf for my 10th birthday party — little ladies who lunched.

Sweet tooth, salty tooth or both?
Saltier as I get older, though salted peanut caramel is a best-of-both-worlds thing I would love to have in my fridge at all times.

What kitchen tool can’t you live without?
Tongs

What music do you like to listen to in the kitchen?
Either my husband’s wonderful selection on his iPod — since we met in our 40s, I now have a world of music that I hadn’t realized existed. When he’s not around, I am obsessed with right-wing talk radio (know your enemy).

What’s your favorite food scene from a movie?
The Hercules cheering section scene from Eddie Murphy’s Nutty Professor

What’s your favorite alcoholic beverage?
Not a big drinker — wine. And while I appreciate the good stuff, my son and I have been working our way through a $3 bottle of Trader Joe’s merlot this week — a steal.

If you weren’t in food, what career would you have liked to have tried?
Food security, journalism

What’s your favorite “food city” to visit?
Not widely traveled enough to say, but New York makes me pretty happy. My regular trips to L.A. round things out — the best Vietnamese and Japanese I’ve ever eaten has been there.