Welcome! We're veteran cookbook authors Bruce Weinstein & Mark Scarbrough. We've written three dozen cookbooks--now thirty-seven!--and sold 1.2 million copies over the years. But we may be most excited about our brand-new cookbook: THE LOOK & COOK AIR FRYER BIBLE. You can find it here.

We often interview cookbook authors on our podcast. In this episode, we're being totally self-indulgent and telling you about our own.

We'll also offer you a one-minute cooking tip. And we'll tell you what's making us happy in food this week.

Here are the segments for this episode of COOKING WITH BRUCE & MARK:

[01:09] Our one-minute cooking tip: Save some of the water used to cook dried pasta to thin out or loosen up pasta sauces.

[03:34] Let's talk about our newest book: The Look & Cook Air Fryer Bible!

[12:20] What’s making us happy in food this week? Garlic chili noodles and mango chutney with egg salad!

Hey, I'm Bruce Weinstein.

And this is the podcast cooking with Bruce and Mark

and I'm Mark Scarborough.

And together with Bruce, we published a lot of books.

We're going to be talking about that a little bit today, but before we get started, let me just say that this podcast is unsponsored and unsupported, and it could always use your sponsorship.

And the way you can do that is that.

If you are a regular listener to this podcast, you can subscribe to it.

Hit that subscribe button wherever in you're listening to this, whatever player, Apple, Spotify, whatever.

Subscribe to the podcast.

That's terrific.

That really helps us.

And also write a review or give it a rating, either one.

Uh, can I ask for five stars, please?

Um, give us a rating at, uh, we would most appreciate that.

That very much helps us.

out.

And it very much keeps us away from sponsors because then we appear better in the algorithms and the podcast gets a little notice.

So we would appreciate your doing that.

Thank you for helping us out on this episode of the podcast today.

We're going to have our one minute cooking tip as we always do.

And then we want to tell you about our brand new book, which is published this week.

And we're going to tell you what's making us happy in food this week.

So let's get started.

When you're making pasta, you got the pot of water boiling.

boiling, the pasta is just about done.

Before you drain it, here's a tip.

Use a measuring cup to scoop out one or two cups of that pasta water.

Because when you add sauce to your pasta or you dump that pasta into a skillet with the sauce makings, sometimes you need a little extra liquid.

You gonna, you gonna water down auntie grandma's, auntie grandma's, I like that, auntie grandma's sauce.

Sugo.

Sometimes you do.

Sometimes you add a little bit of water to thin it out and also for the pasta to keep cooking in that because you should be taking your pasta out when it's still a little al dente.

And then you want to let it cook a bit in the sauce so the sauce might get too thick.

So you have a little pasta water to thin things out.

I have to say, and I don't mean to be like some of these TikTok Italian snobs, but I have to say that, um, I've had to recently, as you probably know, go back and forth and see my mom.

And, uh, yeah.

St.

Louis, my family doesn't eat the way I eat.

I've been forced to eat at Olive Garden.

And I just want to say, man, that is gummy pasta.

That is super, super gummy pasta.

It's so sticky and gummy.

I it's not, it's not my favorite.

Um, I mean, I do it because listen.

There's medical stuff that's going on, and it just all has to happen fast.

But, um, it's better to have pasta with a little chew to it.

Just a little bite.

It is.

So you take your pasta out a little early, you save a little water.

Now, you may not need that water, but it's good to have it.

There's starch in that water, so it helps thicken the sauce up.

I see you pour that water into Auntie Grandma's sugo.

I really do.

I want to see you do that.

Okay, so that's our one minute cooking tip.

But Prusi is right.

You use that water for carbonara.

Yeah.

You use that water for all kinds of reasons.

Cacio cacio e pepe.

You can use it to actually help build and bulk up a sauce because pastas do eat water.

And let me also say that you can save that water back for when you reheat leftovers, because it can help rehydrate the pasta.

And it's already got some of the pasta water flavor.

Yeah.

It's got some starch in it.

A little pasta.

Yeah, sure.

I didn't even thought of that.

That's a great idea.

Um, and, you know, if you need to refresh your pasta before you heat it back up.

For leftovers in, God forbid, the microwave.

Oh.

Oh, pasta in a microwave.

Pasta and microwave are not two things that you really gotta get in.

Well, back to the olive garden with pasta in a microwave.

Okay, anyway.

Up next in our podcast, we want to tell you about our brand new book, which is published this week, the look and cook air fryer Bible.

I am so proud of this book.

It's got 704 photographs.

Every step of every recipe is photographed.

So you'll know what you're doing and what it should look like

as you go already appearing in some, uh, food bloggers and food type.

In their Instagram.

Mm-Hmm.

reels and stories and they're all commenting about the number of photos, , they're all flipping through it in reels or on Instagram in their posts, and they're just showing the sheer number of photos and it is really crazy.

I have to, I to, I have to tell you this and um, you may have heard me say this before, but.

I opened the box, we opened the box, and we were both dumbfounded, and I'm going to tell you that we've published a lot of books, and I'm not always dumbfounded when I look at a book, but I was dumbfounded.

I thought, who, who did all this work?

Who is it that actually created all these photographs?

We did.

The photographer, Eric Metzger, and Eric has been our photographer for, I don't even know, 13, 14 books.

And Eric is just a dream to work with, and he has a great eye, and we can fly through production shots like you cannot believe.

And we just really got into a seamless groove with him.

It took us 12 days of shooting to make this book.

Eric's been a guest on this podcast, talking about food photography.

You can actually go back to the archives and search for Eric Metzger and listen to the episode where I interviewed him.

He is a...

big time food photographer.

He's, you know, been involved with Blake Lively.

He's involved with all kinds of big brands like absolute, and he's involved with a lot of restaurants and Tony bars like Devon Co.

And he's now quite the food personality photographer or food photographer with a big personality.

But he really made this book beautiful.

So let me tell you about this book.

This book really does have basic recipes.

So there are recipes for Grilled cheese, air fried pimento cheese sandwiches.

There are recipes for, uh, fish in chips.

So you grind up potato chips and to a powder, not a powder and have a crumb crust and then you get into crumbs, right?

And then you roll the fish or the chicken in these potato chips.

And so you create a.

Potato chip coating.

You do this because you are air frying it, you're not deep frying it.

The chicken nuggets, and I know this is insane, but the chicken nuggets recipe is, is killer to me.

Bruce shot a video of the chicken nuggets for this book a while back, and we literally ate that.

batch of chicken nuggets for dinner.

I mean, that's how good they were with a Caesar salad.

Well, okay, but that's how good that

video of that Caesar salad is up on the TikTok channel with the chicken nuggets.

Okay, we said they're dipping those chicken nuggets.

I think I was dipping mine in cherry chutney, but whatever.

I was probably using duck sauce.

Yeah, whatever.

We were dipping them in stuff.

I might have even used sriracha.

They were delicious.

Unbelievable.

And it's when you make your own chicken nuggets, it's not Anything like the fast food stuff.

It's like you're using good, fresh ground chicken and you're choosing the spices.

It's not overly salted.

We even used whole wheat breadcrumbs and I made it for us because I wanted a little healthier.

And the book is full of things that are both simple and delicious and approachable and there's nothing crazy.

Well, there are a couple of crazy, let me just say, I want to say that most of the recipes are super simple, like they're stripped steaks with herb butter and that kind of thing with lots of pictures to show you how to get it done right.

But there are also a few crazy ones and I just want to highlight a couple of crazy ones.

One of the crazy ones that is my favorite is air fried deviled eggs because they were so delicious.

This was actually my idea.

And so what happens if you hard cook eggs in the air fryer?

in okay, in the air.

Don't even have to boil them.

You cook them in the air.

And then you, uh, you know, peel them and have them.

And then you take the yolks and put them aside because that's gonna be your filling.

And then you take the whites and you dip them and bread them in bread crumbs,

egg and bread crumbs.

You do the standard dipping.

Yep.

And then you put it back those in the air fryer and you make them crunchy.

So the egg white shells, shells, cups, whatever they are, they get crunchy.

And then you just make a fairly standard deviled egg filling with the yolks and fill it into those crunchy eggs.

Those are, that's crazy.

And it's kind of crazy.

That's not normal.

That will, that inspired, that got inspired from mozzarella sticks.

We were looking at mozzarella sticks and they're white on the inside and crunchy on the outside.

And Mark's like, Oh, it's kind of like bacon and egg whites.

And he was like, Wait a second.

What if you did this with egg whites and then stuffed it with deviled egg filling?

Yeah, let's do that.

Another one is the same technique, except you have in pit an avocado.

And then after you've done that, yeah, you take the avocado shell, its peel, you pit it.

And then again, you egg and bread crumb it and then air fry it.

And you get this really crunchy avocado shell.

I think we fill it with.

Salsa, you know,

you want to fill that with salsa.

You could fill it with queso too.

That would be a good thing,

even fill it with chicken salad.

I think what surprised me in this book was, I mean, I wanted to push myself with desserts, but I wanted to keep things again, somewhat simple to do, but there's a way that you could make lemon meringue pies in the airfryer and actually do them.

And it's really easy.

I'm going to tell you that it's not, you buy the little graham cracker pie shells, the individual small ones.

And then from there, the recipe is super.

simple and you make these little individual lemon meringue pies.

They're really beautiful.

It's true.

You can only, if you have a bigger fryer, you can only make four at a time, but they're so fast that you could line these things up and get through 16 of them in no time.

They take about two minutes to brown the meringue.

So they go really, really fast.

And there's, there's recipes like that.

There are recipes for some baked goods, some breakfast fare.

Mostly it's really heavy on the protein.

And then one of the My favorite things about the book.

Sorry, just to talk about it for forever.

But in the middle of the book, two thirds of the way through, there are, I think it's eight pages.

It's a huge chart of how to air fry every single vegetable.

And this is not to bread it and coat it.

This is just to take the Brussels sprouts, the asparagus, the green beans, the corn, whatever it is.

And, you know, basically, what fat do you need?

How long?

At what temperature?

It's just this huge chart about every vegetable we can imagine.

We did this because we didn't want to have, you know, a bunch of vegetable recipes that are super repetitive.

Well, here's the broccoli florets, here's the cauliflower florets, blah, blah, blah.

We wanted to have something easier and that was referential or reference, like a reference, right?

It's not referential, but it's like a reference work.

Wow, there my grammar went.

Um, okay.

That's It's like a reference work and we wanted to do this in the middle of the book and I love that chart because I just think it's so user friendly and so handy.

I, I own that book.

I would probably rip that chart out of it and staple it together and put it on my refrigerator without me.

So I desecrate books, but I publish them so I don't find them super sacred.

So I would probably tear it out and put it on my refrigerator.

So, to complete this whole talk about our book, let me just say that we have three copies of this book that we would like to give away.

And if you want to get a free copy of the Look and Cook Air Fryer Bible, here's what you need to do.

You either need to go to our website and send us a note and just say, Hey, I subscribed to your podcast.

And it's the honor system, listen, I don't know if you subscribe or not, but just send us a note that says, Hey, I subscribed to your podcast.

And, uh, if you send us that note through our website, I'm going to be real upfront and tell you that the website will capture your email for the email list.

So that will happen, but you can unsubscribe from that at any moment.

So either do that or go to our Facebook group, Cooking with Bruce and Mark, and just drop us a note and say, Hey, I subscribed to your podcast, or I love your podcast.

We will.

instantly interview.

Two rules to getting one of the copies.

It has to be in the lower 48.

We really can't afford international shipping.

So the lower 48 United States.

So sorry, no Alaska, no Hawaii.

Sorry about that.

But you can buy our book in the UK and you can buy it in Canada.

We just aren't going to ship it there.

Sorry, just being cheap.

That's the first rule.

And the second rule is we will write you back and ask you how you would like the book signed.

So expect some kind of correspondence back from us.

And you have to let us know you were a subscriber to our podcast by December 1st of this year, 2023.

And then we will put all those names in a random generator picker program.

We will get the top three picks and we will contact you and send you Book's been Time for Christmas

Hazah, and you can have a copy of this with your brand new Christmas Air Fryer.

Alright, that's enough about our own book.

Let's tell you what's making us happy in food this week.

What's making me happy in food this week are those 10 minute.

chili garlic noodles we made in a previous episode because I'm addicted to them and I'm making them for lunch every single day.

You are.

So go back and listen to that.

You are making him a little much every day.

You can kind of hold back on that for a bit on my account, but okay.

So I want to tell you about what's making me have him for this week and it's a new fine.

So let's talk about that.

Cool.

I love mango chutney and I, let me explain this for a minute.

I actually don't love major greys chutney.

Too intense for you.

Yeah, it's a, it's a little bit too like Branston pickle for me.

It's too much.

But I like fresh mango chutney and I like it to be really hot.

And so let's say you get a fresh fruit chutney.

Let's say cherry chutney.

I use mango.

Cherry chutney will work.

Blueberry chutney will work.

A fresh fruit, uh, chutney of some sort, right?

Okay.

Put that on a piece of toast.

Don't nod.

Stick with me here.

Put that on a piece of toast and top it with egg salad.

Just stick with me here and I want to tell you chutney and egg salad.

Why not?

It

is so delicious.

I eat it on whole grain toast.

It is so delicious.

Major grazes too far.

It doesn't work.

So it needs to be a fresher, brighter fruit chutney.

It is so delicious.

And yes, my egg salad is made with a little mustard and it's made with pickle relish.

So yes, it's a little different than most people make it.

But what can I tell you?

It's how it gets made.

And I find that.

Absolutely an irresistible combination on a slice of whole wheat bread.

So there you go.

That's making me happy in food this week.

That's the podcast.

Thanks for sticking with us.

Thanks for being here.

Thanks for listening to us.

Talk about our brand new book.

Look and cook air for our Bible.

Sorry.

It's just like a kid.

You have to endure our talking about it because we're very proud of it.

And I think we're prouder of this book than we have been of some others.

Not that we haven't done a great job.

It's just that this is just so overwhelming when you open it.

It feels giant.

All those pictures.

Yeah.

It's a crazy, crazy amount of work and we're very proud of the results.

And we hope you will subscribe to this podcast.

You will let us know and you will be in the running for a free copy of the book.

And every week we tell you what's making us happy in food this week.

Tell us what's making you happy in food this week on our Facebook group Cooking with Bruce and Mark.

And come back for another episode of Cooking with Bruce and Mark.