Day 316: Carla Snyder
“You know, you’ve got a certain way that the recipe works, but there are flavors in there that you can swap out and change, and that’s kind of a revelation to people that they can do that. They tend to look at recipes as a basic thing you’ve got to adhere to. And when they’re educated that they can change it and make it theirs, I think it becomes more their thing, and so they own it. And then I think it encourages them to own more and to do more and to be … who doesn’t want to be creative?”
.
.
.
Toni Reece: Thank you so much, Carla, for agreeing to be part of this Project, and before we begin, can you please introduce yourself?
Carla Snyder: Toni, I’m Carla Snyder, and I’m a cookbook author and freelance food writer and a cooking school teacher.
Toni: Well thank you for being here. Carla, when you think of the word inspiration, who do you inspire, and how does that happen?
Carla: I think … you know, I guess we can never be really completely sure who we inspire, but I like to think I inspire people who want to learn how to cook. I’ve been a cooking school teacher for over 20 years, and it’s just been a wonderful place to be, because you get to help people to learn how to make their lives better every day, whether it means that they get to cook faster or whether they get to cook with more creativity. I like to think that it helps people to move along in their lives and to live a better, more beautiful life.
Toni: When you do this type of work, Carla, how do you think teaching people how to cook or … I know that you’ve also mentioned that you have a cookbook. What is the name of your cookbook?
Carla: I actually have six cookbooks.
Toni: Wow!
Carla: Yeah, quite a few. We’ve been very busy the last few years writing cookbooks, and I’ve discovered that I really love writing. But one is The Big Book of Appetizers and another one is The Mixer Bible and another one is 300 Sensational Soups.
Toni: Well that’s really awesome. And when you write these books and you have, I guess, the end user, the reader in mind, how do you think by being in this industry and teaching people different ways to cook helps them to explore their own potential?
Carla: Well, I think that feeding yourself is one of the most basic jobs that needs to be done every day. I know when I left home and was faced with the prospect of feeding myself every day, it’s a daunting task. And I think it’s important that we start to focus a little bit more on the quality of how we feed ourselves. And for most people that means a little bit of education is in order so that people aren’t relying on fast food and a lot of take out and processed foods.
If you know a few cooking techniques, you can make better food and feed yourself more healthfully., And if you’re healthier, then I think you’re going to live a better life, and I think you’re going to be able … if you’re not worrying about feeding yourself, you’re going to be able to do the other things that might interest you more.
Toni: I think it’s also the creativity that comes into it not only in time that I can put something healthy on the table in the time I need it to be done by, but also learning, almost, you know, the recipe part of it, that A goes with C goes with E goes with F. I would imagine that that would be almost … I don’t know, the thought process changes too, doesn’t it?
Carla: It does, and I think almost everybody that feeds themselves with any interest whatsoever, you learn and you grow. Whether it’s learning that “Oh, I like a little bit of fresh basil in my eggs in the morning” or whether it’s “Oh, that little touch of cardamom in that rice pudding made that taste really interesting and different.” I think it’s just a lot of fun. I can’t imagine not having a world of taste to live your life through.
Toni: I love that – “a world of taste.” So Carla, what inspires you?
Carla: Gee, so many things inspire me. I come at cooking, I guess, kind of from an art background, and an awful lot of people do. It’s amazing how many chefs I know that are artists and how many artists I know that are chefs. It’s very, very … it crosses a lot of lines. But I think anymore the thing that inspires me most is really beautiful local produce. I love looking at fresh vegetables and fruit and thinking about what I’m going to do with them, and I love how they look. I like the color, and I love the texture of them, and I love the smell of them.
I was just recently really influenced by a produce stand in South Carolina where my husband and I were on vacation. This produce stand, I mean, it was just amazing. It was manned by this little old man and a little old woman, and she was sitting in there shelling beans, and the little man was so shy, but his food – it just intrigued me so much. I mean, I grabbed one of those peaches and smelled it, and I realized that I hadn’t smelled a peach in a really long time – like a really good-smelling peach.
So much of the food that we come in contact with in the grocery store is a bit on the sterile side, even if it’s not wrapped in cellophane. If you can’t touch it and smell it, a lot of the smell and a lot of the things that made it wonderful have been bred out of it so that it can last longer, so that it ripens sooner, so that it sits on a shelf longer. We’ve lost an awful lot of the way that foods smell. And oh, it was just so wonderful. I was just so moved by that. I took pictures.
I’m like “Do you mind? I’m taking pictures of the food. I’m smelling it.” My husband’s telling me “Settle down, settle down – you’re freaking them out. You’re getting way too excited about their food!” Because they eat it every day, and they were just really kind of nonplused by how excited I was about how wonderful their everyday food was to them.
Toni: What else inspires you? You said that you come from a design background.
Carla: Yeah, I started out as an artist, I think, in my first life and evolved into cooking because I needed a creative outlet as a young mother at home with little kids. So I started cooking out of Gourmet magazine, because I needed to make dinner anyway, and I might as well make it interesting, right? That was my thought process, anyway. So I just got really hooked on cooking and magazines.
I love magazines. I love the color, the pictures, you know, whether they’re designer food magazines. I’m very influenced and inspired by books. I’m a big reader. I read cookbooks, and I’ve recently been doing a lot of judging, cookbook judging for organizations, and I’m finding that really wonderful because I’m reading more cookbooks than I ever would have come in contact with. So it’s a kind of a vision into other people’s cooking lives, and that fascinates me — what inspires them, you know — and you pick things up and you learn things.
I think young people inspire me. I love talking to young people about what they like to do and what they like to eat and how they want to live their life. I think that’s really inspiring as well.
Toni: Carla, a lot of the interviews … many of the interviews of the Get Inspired! Project … unintentionally there’s been a theme that has flowed from these interviews which is wrapped around passion and purpose, and I’m wondering if you feel as though you’ve come into your purpose with your cookbooks and your cooking and teaching, and if you just … if it was an evolution for you or you just were always drawn to that, you know? Do you feel as though that you’re in your passion and purpose work now?
Carla: I really hope so. I’m 55 years old, so I think that I am. I mean, I started out with a passion for horses and dogs and art and went to college and realized that I wasn’t as talented as I’d hoped I would be, and went into journalism and didn’t really love journalism, but I liked the advertising and the marketing angles of things that I studied there. Then I got married and had kids and was home with them for 20 years, so the cooking kind of came into things.
And as the cooking evolved and catering evolved, and then working at a cooking school, and then being asked to start to teach – and I really wasn’t sure about teaching because I never saw myself as a teacher – and then I realized I really loved teaching and watching as light bulbs go off on top of people’s heads as you’re talking to them and teaching them in a class and illuminating, you know, things that they’d thought about … but never quite put A and B together to get to C.
And then I though “Well I should start writing because that’s going to get me more teaching jobs.” So the journalism background kind of came into play there unwittingly. I never knew that that would be a useful thing for me, ever. So then I started writing, and I realized I loved the writing, and the writing is a lot of fun, and it’s a way to reach more people than just teaching and it really does go hand in hand.
Now I’m working on a TV show with my kids on a local cable channel and, you know, teaching kids how to cook more efficiently and creatively and to light a fire under 20-somethings so that they can start to feed themselves in a better way. I think that might be really the crux of it. It’s kind of hazy, all of these things coming together in your life, and I don’t think it was planned. It seems like it just kind of really happened that way.
Toni: It’s interesting, because what I’m thinking as you’re speaking, you’re describing how a recipe gets put together. It’s all part of a recipe for, you know, the ever-changing dish.
Carla: Yeah, it’s an evolution, and I try to teach that with my students as well, that it is an evolution. I mean, you’ve got a basic idea, but you can play with it and you can make it better. You can change it. You can make it more yours.
You can do anything that you want with it with flavor. You know, you’ve got a certain way that the recipe works, but there are flavors in there that you can swap out and change, and that’s kind of a revelation to people that they can do that. They tend to look at recipes as a basic thing you’ve got to adhere to.
And when they’re educated that they can change it and make it theirs, I think it becomes more their thing, and so they own it. And then I think it encourages them to own more and to do more and to be … who doesn’t want to be creative? I mean, it just seems like a basic human need to me and a basic human urge.
Toni: So what do you do now to explore your own potential?
Carla: Exploring my own potential … well, I’m always looking for that next fun, great trend. The publishing world is really in a bit of an uproar right now, and there’s an awful lot of talk about e-publishing and e-books and things that like, and I think that stepping into that venue is going to be the next interesting thing.
I don’t know how different it’s going to be, but I’m working with someone on writing a series of e-books. And so it will be different in that it won’t be something that you’re holding in your hand, but they’re going to be downloadable on iPads and iPhones and things like that. I love how it will make it so much more accessible to this new generation. They’ll be able to download a recipe as they’re standing in the grocery store and have the recipe ingredient list right there in front of them.
Toni: That’s amazing.
Carla: Yeah. They’ll be able to use it in ways that … we have had to saddle ourselves with sitting at the table, opening a book, writing a list, going to the store – that whole tedious process is going to be completely eliminated, and you can be on your way home from work and say “I feel like eating peanut noodles tonight” and walk into the store, download the recipe, there’s the ingredient list, grab what you need, go home and make it in a much more simplified way. And I think that’s going to be really an interesting thing to do.
Toni: And how exciting for you to be part of it, as you said, the next evolution for you.
Carla: Yeah, yeah. I mean, there’s a lot of – I’m not going to say pessimism – but there’s a lot of … there’s fearfulness in my industry about this and what it’s going to do to publishing as it exists right now, but I don’t really think it’s going to cannibalize books. I think there are so many people out there who love books.
I think we’ll always have books, and I think there will always be people who want to go to bed at night with a book, who want to sit, you know, curl up in a chair and listen to music and read a book and turn a page, so I don’t think it’s going to cannibalize it. I think it’s just going to enhance it.
Toni: And wouldn’t it be wonderful if it allowed the boutiques and old time book stores to come back?
Carla: Wouldn’t it be ever so wonderful? Yes, it really would. The service that you get from those stores and the conversations and the community is irreplaceable. We’re all looking for community, and I think even more so now.
Toni: Absolutely. We have found that in the Get Inspired! Project with all of these interviews and the connections that have been made. It is such a wonderful community, and we’re absolutely thrilled that you’re part of it, and you are our first chef that’s on the Get Inspired! Project, so congratulations.
Carla: I’m so honored! I really am – how exicting for me!
Toni: Well Carla, thank you so much for being part of the Project, and we look forward to your next book, and also take a look at the books you’ve already done. Thank you for being here, and good luck to you.
Carla: Thank you, Toni. Good luck to you as well.
Toni: All right, take care.
Carla: You too.
___________________________________________________________
For more information about Carla Snyder: www.meredithandcarla.com
.
Post Comment