The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Dennis Littley of “Ask Chef Dennis”

Episode Date: April 14, 2022

Dennis Littley of "Ask Chef Dennis" Askchefdennis.com

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Boss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks chris voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss com hey we're coming here in a great podcast we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in thanks for being here be sure to refer the show to your friends,

neighbors, relatives. Go on iTunes and give us a great review. We certainly appreciate that as well. If you would, also go to all of our groups, Facebook, LinkedIn,

Twitter, Instagram, all those crazy places, the LinkedIn group, the LinkedIn newsletter, all those fun places where all the people are coagulating. Is that even the right word for that? It's not,

but it sounded funny. I don't know. Coagulating? I don't know. Is that a chef right word for that? It's not, but it sounded funny. I don't know. Coagulating? I don't know. Is that a chef word, Chef Dennis? Coagulating is probably a medical term more than a chef term, but yeah, it's one of the two. It seemed like a butter term since we were talking about butter in the pre-show. There's going to be a lot of butter on today's show.

I don't know if there is or not, but we were talking about it in the pre-show. Anyway, guys, we have an amazing gentleman on the show. His name is Dennis Litley. He is the founder and CEO of Ask Chef Dennis Productions, where he runs one of the most successful food blogs in the world. And we were talking about a pre-show, and I'm hungrier than ever now. and almost 10 million page views annually, he has built a loyal following that uses his recipes and cooking tips to feed their family and friends. Screw sharing the food. I do it all myself. Helping them bring the joy of cooking to their home kitchens.

Welcome to the show, Chef Dennis. How are you? I'm doing great, Chris. Thank you so much for having me today. It's a pleasure to be on with you. Thanks for coming. We certainly appreciate you coming on. Give us your dot com so people can find you on those interwebs. It's really simple. I'm AskChefDennis.com. There you go. There you go. And I'm looking across your gorgeous website of fine foods. And as I mentioned before the show,

if the audience hears my stomach growling, you'll know why. If you go to his website, your stomach will growl as well. So tell us, give us a little bit of history. What got you into this business? Where did you grow up and some of your background and stuff? Well, I grew up in, I started in Texas early on in my career growing up and I had a Mexican grandmother who used to love to feed me. Oh, wow. And yeah, she would spoil me. And I mean, she knew I loved to eat and she loved to cook and it was a marriage made in heaven. And then we moved to New Jersey and sadly, my mother was not a very good cook. She found no joy in cooking.

Oh, wow. Yeah. My father liked very simple foods. He was from Philadelphia and he liked more of an English style food, plain. His idea of heat was Coleman's dry mustard, a little water in it. That would go on the beef. That's how I knew about it. But although he loved my grandmother's manudo and she could not make it hot enough for him. And I think that came from liking pepper pot in Philadelphia because it's close to being the same soup, except Pepper Pot wasn't as hot.

But yeah, that started it, and my mother was a nurse, so she worked a lot of strange hours, so she'd be home with us during the day, and she would be sleeping if I wanted to eat, and evidently, I like to eat. You and me. So I kind of started dabbling. Yeah. So you started at a young age just basically trying to fend for yourself, get some food and some good food. You know, I went through a similar journey when I was a child. My parents, we grew up in SoCal, and so we would go to the different, like, barrios there. You know, you had the Italian deli that you'd go to,

and you had the authentic Italian food. You know, there's these little neighborhoods in, in California. And then in my late teens, my parents moved to Utah, which is, especially back then it was about as white as white could get and everything. It still is pretty awful. And I remember going to a Mexican place and asking for hot sauce. You know, I grew up in SoCal where, you know, Mexican, everything. And they brought me ketchup.

And I was scarred. And I'm like, wait, we need hot sauce. And they're like, yeah, yeah, ketchup, ketchup. And so, yeah, that scarred me to where I have an appreciation for food that probably is a little too much considering my weight. So over the years, when did you start getting serious? Did you go to school at an early age? I did not. I ended up journeying through part of the country and went back to where I was born

in Louisiana and met up with someone I did not know was a family friend. And she kind of took me in for a while and taught me a lot of the basics and gave me an understanding of food. She used to tell me, you know, if you listen to food, it'll tell you what it needs. I know. I know. And she wasn't smoking anything either. It was just. I listen to food.

It tells me what it needs. It says, I need to get in your belly. You need to eat me. Right. I know. Yeah. But, yeah, so that was kind of my intuitive grasp on cooking, and it's really served me well. Whether she brought it out or taught it to me, I don't know.

But it's how I ended up cooking. But I got back home and went back into different jobs. I was a musician. I wrote jingles. I was a carpenter. I sold real estate. I was trying to find myself, and I kept going back to food, going back to food. And I did not go to school.

I did it the old-fashioned way. I was an apprentice. So I apprenticed to two chefs, and they taught me, abused you, paid you little, and you learned your skill. That was how things used to do. There you go. There you go. So you went through that journey. How long before you ventured out on your own sort of thing?

Well, it's funny. I mean, I had some basic grass of skills. And when I was working as the apprentice for these guys, I would always dive into the corner and cook when no one was around. And the one chef who was a CIA graduated hated cooking he loved every other aspect of the restaurant industry but he did not like to cook so yeah he would order he would cut meat he would do all the production he would he was run a tight ship but it just wasn't his thing you know and luckily for me because he saw I was kind of paying attention and doing what I was supposed to do, and he let me cook. So by the end of the year, the boss, the owner of the place, had got stung by 18 bees, wasps.

And looking at a new property he was going to open, and he got pumped up full of Benadryl and couldn't work. So I walk in, Labor Day weekend, the busiest day of the year, and they go, guess who's cooking? And I looked at him and said, who? He goes, you are. So sort of a graduation. They didn't let me out on my own right away after that, but I was then put into rotation and I kept learning more skills and developing techniques. And in another year after that, I was running one of the restaurants for them. Do you think there's something that draws you back to it? Is there a certain aspect?

Or have you been able to solve the mystery of what keeps pulling you back in, as Godfather would say? I do it well. Not to be bragging or anything, but it's a skill set that just seems to come naturally to me. It's something that I find joy in. Even in my worst day or part of my career where I was having a lot of problems, it was an escape for me. It was a place for me to go and be whole again. I think the biggest thing was I was able to make people happy with the food I was eating. I found the escapism and to feel whole again is to eat the food.

So I'm on the other end of the spectrum for you. Well, that was good. Yeah. I wouldn't be alive without people like you. So when did you venture out and start making your own website and doing your own recipes? Well, I'd always created recipes in the restaurants I worked at, and unfortunately I didn't write a lot of them down.

The ones that I was taught early on, I didn't write them down. They were in my head and how my brain cells have been as a chef. All the things chefs do, it's true. We abuse our bodies and i went to work i finally i was beating my body up and i i met my wife and she was a teacher and she had off summers and she had all these times and i'm like i'm just i went through my second carpal tunnel surgery on my hand oh wow i had one on the other hand and they're saying you shouldn't keep doing this you should stop so let me go into management and a friend said you know there's an opening at this school in flower town and i went oh flower town i'm not going to flower town and i'm thinking

flowers like the road sounds like a song yeah i know please take me to flower town well it was bread flour like that flower town yeah i went and uh it was a runown. It was clean, but it was old. And I'm looking at it going, oh, this is a mistake. I shouldn't be here. And the principal goes, and you work 165 days a year. And I went, when would you like me to start? Oh, yeah, that's a lot less than the whole big thing. So there you go.

All the holidays off the summer. And when I was there, I meant the food was so bad. I went back into the kitchen and I told the cook that I'm sorry. They're making me cut budgets. I have to go back and cook because she was just not good. You had a lot of other skills in the kitchen, but that was not her forte. Yeah. So I started cooking and it slowly became like a made-for-TV movie. They painted a mural

of me on the walls. Because I was feeding them. I didn't know what to feed kids, so I was feeding them what I fed adults all my life. Restaurant, executives. It worked out well. I have murals on the wall of all the cooks at my house, too.

It's still up at the school, so it was a good thing. That's a really good thing. But about four years into it, I decided to start teaching a culinary program at the school. It was the high school girls. There were all 600 high school girls. And I thought I would train my own staff because staff was always so hard to come by. So, you know, anybody that knew what they were doing. So I started training them. And at the end of the first year, I had 11 freshmen.

Everybody else had gone out because they just couldn't fit into their schedules. They tried, but the freshmen didn't have a lot on their plate so they could fit it into the schedule. And I ended up keeping three of them for a full four years that stayed with me and built a really successful culinary team at the school. And that's when I started my blog. So I'm thinking, I need some place for these kids to go to get recipes and to talk to me. So I went to the IT department and said, you know, blogs were new in 2009. Well, they had been on different formats, but they were just coming into the forefront with Blogger on Google and WordPress. And they set me up on Blogger, and I started writing these awful stories and terrible pictures.

And I was a blogger, and the kids never wanted to go to it. They wanted to come in the office and talk to me. But students at the school and teachers started going to it. Yeah, and it started to build. I found an organization called Food Buzz and straightened up my blog a little, made it a little more presentable, started working on my pictures and recipes, and became friends with people from all over the world that were in this organization. Yeah, it was really cool. Reawakening for me at that point. So you go through all that, and how many years have you been doing the AskChefDavis.com site now?

AskChefDavis has been around for a little over 12, 13 years now. Did I say Davis again? You did. My apologies. Davis again? You did. My apologies. Ask Chef Dennis. I'm having a Monday today. I was having our early episode that we did. I can't pick up stuff for some time.

It must be either I'm too much caffeine or I haven't gotten up to sleep, one of the two. So you said you've been doing it for how many years now? I started in 2009, so that's 13 years. 13 years. Awesome, man. It's kind of a journey to look back on all that history and all those posts, isn't it? It is. And I've either rewritten them, taken new pictures for them,

or just gotten rid of them altogether. The early part of the year, the first year, 2010, had some really good recipes and still has my number one post of all time. Oh, yeah? Tiramisu. Tiramisu. Oh, wow. The best tiramisu.

My recipe has been copied many times over the years. Note to self, don't do a show about chefs before you had something to eat. My stomach is really going now. Tiramisu, I mean, what a beautiful thing that is. You know, we started the Chris Foss show almost going on 13 years ago. And I still remember the first two years and I was just like oh my god this is so much and like one you're putting one post in front of the other and you're just like oh my god how much what do i gotta do here when do we when does you know become something and now you look back on it and

you know it's closing on 5 000 posts and the youtube channel's got 5 000 posts people are still looking at stuff from like 10 years ago 12 years ago yeah i had a bunch of questions come in last week where i'm just like they're asking questions about stuff that i'm like that still exists and and you just look back on the whole grandness of it and you're just like oh my god and then you look at it you're like well i guess i gotta do five thousand more, every morning I wake up and I check my traffic to see how it's been, my revenue to see how it's been, and I go on for the day because I've got a good start to my day.

That's always good. That's always good. For the first two years, I didn't know anybody was listening to the podcast or looking at the show. I'm just like, I don't know. No one says anything. For the first one or two years, no one said just like i don't know no one says anything for like first one or two years no one said much they didn't comment much i don't think there was comments on the show because back then a lot of people comment on blogs and the google analytics was

the only reason the way i knew anything was going on like i was like okay well somebody's here doing something and clearly there's there's something going on you know nowadays there's you know you can really tell there's stuff going on but yeah the first the first little while you're like is any area is anybody is this on hello i know yeah so what do you what do you find people love about the website and your recipes and your your cooking style that you take and use in fact what would you call your cooking style do you have one Do you have a genre that you do? I call them restaurant style recipes for the most part, since most were developed in a restaurant. And that's kind of how I still cook. And my wife jokes that, you know, I'm either going to cook for two or for 40. There's no real in between

because I'm making masses of stuff. But it's, yeah, it's easy food. It's not complicated food. I know people don't have time after work to sit down and go through all the motions of creating something that's going to take hours. I don't. At the end of my day, I want to make something that's going to be fast, easy, and delicious. So that's how we cook in the restaurant. We might prep some things ahead of time, but for the most part, we're creating, I would create one dinner in a pan every time someone came in, you know, one, one at a time or two at a time, maybe if it was the same thing, but that's the style of cooking I do. So you should be able to make 70% or 80% of my recipes in a half an hour. Oh my God, I'm looking at the website here.

Pepperoni pizza grilled cheese sandwich recipe? That's too good. Kill me now. The ultimate pulled pork cheeseburger. I can't pronounce anything. Best restaurant style chicken salad. That sounds good. I eat a lot of chicken because I lift weights.

I've been doing that for like six months or seven months now. The ultimate grilled chicken sandwich. Wow, look at that, baby. Blackened salmon sliders. I love sliders with Asian slaw. Wow. Okay.

Easy stuff. I mean. It looks awesome, though. I mean, it looks like, you know like restaurant quality preparedness stuff that you do. What is this? Garlic or ginger garlic pan roasted swordfish. Oh, man. Wow.

Okay. That's a winner. That's been one of my better posts, too. It's just not a lot of people have confidence with seafood. Yeah. And seafood's really expensive. Yeah. So they don't know. They don't want to try it.

It's not hard. The biggest sin with any protein is overcooking it, with seafood even more so. So that's what a lot of my recipes are for. It's about, I always tell people, it's about sourcing good ingredients and then learning a few simple techniques, whether it's searing or braising or roasting, you know, doing it in the oven. And, you know, the protein should taste good on its own with maybe olive oil, salt and pepper. If it doesn't, you know, then you need to resource your protein, find some better products. But, you know,

if it tastes good that way, then you can start having fun with it and trying some different seasonings, put a sauce on it. But again, nothing over the top that's going to take you hours to make. And people can say the recipes, share them, print them, all that sort of good stuff. Absolutely. Yeah. It looks like you're connected on Yumly, I guess. There's a share button for it. There's a share button. I am on Yumly. I actually just joined a new site called Wisk.

Oh, Wisk. Yeah, it's a place where people save recipes. Oh, wow. It's kind of like Pinterest in the way that they have, they call them rich pins where all the ingredients come up. So you can make a shopping list, and that way you can shop for it. And then you come to my website for the instructions, unless you want to wing it. But, I mean, it's not always a good idea. But you come for the instructions or for the tips. Because I put a lot of other information in my posts.

Like, at first, you know, when I was a chef and I was arrogant, and it would be like, no, you eat it this way or you don't eat it. You know, like no soup for you kind of a chef. When I became a blogger, my wife says, you became the kinder, gentler chef, Dennis. There you go. You know, you don't like broccoli. Leave the broccoli out. Put something else in instead.

You know, it's not rocket science. It's food. Yeah, that's true. You know, I live most of my life exactly why i'm so large is i live most of my life being single and just just eating the worst fast food and quick easy easy quick bad food that i possibly could and somewhere i think around 2016, 2017, I got sick of how fat I was. And I started eating better and vegan and started cooking for myself. You know, I ain't never done it because I'm like, oh, my God, it's so much work.

And I think a lot of people think it's a lot of work. But once you get the basics down or you have good recipes to work, that makes all the difference. And one of my saviors was Yumly when it was just barely starting out back then. But I could go on and search for vegan recipes. I went vegan for a while and lost like 75 pounds in three months. And Yumly was so good because I could go on Yumly and just put in like easy. I guess it was always the keyword easy. Easy.

And then, you know, vegan. And then the beautiful part was too is I could just put in the ingredients I had. then like you're like i don't know i got this and that what what the hell do you do with the broccoli and onion i don't know it's in the fridge and so yeah a lot of these things really help it and sometimes just sitting down and having something but i love the restaurant quality stuff i pulled up this uh pepperoni pizza grilled cheese sandwich recipe to save. Oh my God, this thing looks scrumptious. It was too good. That and I have a buffalo chicken grilled cheese.

Those were two. Buffalo chicken grilled cheese? That's evil, man. Why would you do that? Because I could. Actually, I made both of those when my wife was away because I always make two and I eat them both. You know, that's how good they are.

It comes almost like, where's that stuff? You're like, I had to test it. She yells at me if I make too much fat food and eat it. But she's away. Then I pull out all stops. I made fried shrimp one day. I said, you want shrimp? And she says, no, no.

So I said, all right, I guess I have to eat them all. Then she came back later and went, where's the i'm probably ate them that's what women do they they go i'm looking at your youtube channel too so you've got videos up on youtube and teaching people how to prepare this stuff yeah there's a short the short videos that everyone loves i forget the name of them now. Quick and easy. Tasty videos. They're in a minute, but it gives you an idea because I think a lot of times people want to just see if it's doable. Yeah. And the video kind of gives you an idea. It's not going to walk you through the whole process,

but it's going to give you some points to look at to see what goes where or how it comes together. And it's a good way to give people some confidence. Yeah, I can make that. And you just have to get in and try and look at cooking as like a therapy for you too to relax and unwind and have a glass of wine or a glass of soda or whatever you drink and talk to your significant other or talk to yourself. I do that a lot too.

And just enjoy the time alone, play some music. You know, where I got an appreciation for cooking, and this is kind of something people should think about. I had a friend like 20 years ago or something, and he was having, he'd broken out of a relationship and he was a real mess. And so, you know, we started hanging out on weekends and he was a photographer and did some photographer for my company. So we started hanging out on weekends. He was a photographer and did some photography for my company. So we started hanging out after his breakup with his girlfriend that he'd been with for several years. And someone had given him a book, and I forget the name of the book, but it was something along the genre.

If you want to impress women or get women, one of the best ways to do is to learn to cook. And especially nowadays where a lot of younger women, you know, they're not taught some of the culinary skills that they used to be taught in the older days. And it's true. People just kind of, you know, like I did, they lose an appreciation for it. You're like, well, I can go down to McDonald's, which you shouldn't do, please. And so he started learning to be cooked and he was really good at it and he started getting all the all the stuff and so we would on weekends have he would come over here i would go over to his house and he would be like we're gonna make you know this

and that and this and so we had a great friendship and i learned the appreciation of you know being a team on that and i think a lot of like couples could really use that. I always, I always thought, you know, if I ever get a wife, I, I, it would be great if I, if we could, you know, go in the, you know, go in the kitchen and start making stuff. And that's kind of what I started doing years ago with Yumly and, and, and making vegan dishes. And, and so I would start, you know, I was a sort of great chef. I was cheating with Yumly, and you're in recipe sites like yours. But, you know, I would make stuff, and I'd post it, and I'd be like, hey, this tastes great.

And they're like, yeah, you did that with, you know, tofu and, I don't know, you know, some sort of sauce, and it looks like ribs. People are like, oh, my God. And I'm like, yeah, this actually tastes like ribs. People are like, oh my God. And I'm like, yeah, this, this actually tastes like ribs. And, and we, you know, we'd have a whole mess of gals that we kind of had that we knew from our, our clubbing days. We, we basically have a whole thing where all of our friends come over, we throw a little party every Sunday and, and yeah, it was a great way to impress girls too.

But, you know, people that are couples and stuff, you know, people don't really do anything. And I think in the old days, like husband and wife teams would maybe, you know people that are couples and stuff you know people don't really do anything and i think in the old days like husband and wife teams would maybe you know work together and stuff and there's kind of an experience of i guess that's what i'm trying to say there's an experience of doing it and making it and i had another friend who taught me about the concept of breaking bread and how in the old days you know you, you would, you would use yeast and you would make bread. And when you invite strangers over or, or people over your home, you would do, it was called breaking bread with them.

And that was, that was a way of building rapport and getting to know people and feasting, if you will, I guess. Well, food is the common denominator. It's the bond that brings us all together. I did a lot of traveling before COVID, and we would be all over the world, and I speak a little different languages. My wife, not so much any, and I'd be off taking pictures, and I'd turn around, and she'd be sitting at a table. One day we're in Munich, and she's sitting with a table of Germans.

We're at a beer festival, and she can't speak German. They can't speak English. But they were eating and drinking beer and having a good time. Yeah. And then you try to communicate. Then you find a common bond. So people with different languages can do it. You know, we've got it all.

We've got so much more going for us with people that speak the same language. And we don't do it enough. We don't reach out to friends. Instead of saying, hey, let's have dinner together, we just say, no, I don't feel like it tonight. But, you know, you need to do that. It's a good way to reconnect and unwind and enjoy good food. Yeah, the whole concept of breaking bread, that's together. That's what my friend explained it to me because he was like hey i've

got i've got this yeast that i built up and i'm making bread now and i'm like are you gone off the deep end are you okay over there man yeah i guess he'd become employed for a while his wife was working and he was trying to find a new job and this is one of the things he found to i don't know just give him more meaning in life and he goes he goes i'm gonna come over and bring you some of my bread and if you want to bring me my yeast and i'm like i really don't i really don't know, just give him more meaning in life. And he goes, I'm going to come over and bring you some of my bread. And if you want to bring me my yeast. And I'm like, I really don't want your yeast, man. Like, I don't know what's going on here. But he explained the whole concept of breaking bread and how that, you know, was a commonplace among early tribes and men and families and stuff.

And I remember, you know, when I grew up as a kid, too, we would have the Thanksgiving dinners or family get-togethers would be these huge affairs. Oh, yeah. And we'd set up tables across the whole basement. And, you know, all the wives, you know, this is back in the 60s and 70s, all the wives would bring these different dinners and we'd come together. And it was just an amazing setting. And I've always missed it ever since. But people don't do that anymore. I think what I'm trying to say, too, is people look at it as like a job,

like a work, like, oh, God, I've got to make this. And if you make an experience of it where you sit down or you stand, but you work together and you enjoy and you, you build something and make it, and then you've got the fruit of your, of your work there for you. I think it's just a whole lot more rewarding. Absolutely. Yeah. It gives you, again, more common ground and you've spent quality time.

Yeah. Rather than just sitting in front of a TV, watching news that you've heard all day long. Out of a TV dinner. Oh, you know, it is. And sadly, I grew up in that kind of a household because my mother didn't have that joy of cooking. My father would work all day, and he just wanted to relax with a beer at the end of the day. And he wasn't into that at all. But, you know, for people nowadays, you nowadays, there's so many two-income families

that's normal that at the end of the day, if you could just relax and take 15 minutes to prep something to eat and then cook it for 15 minutes. I always tell people, lots of times the dinners you make won't take longer than you cooking pasta for it to go with it or rice to go with it or potatoes to go with it you know you cook your starch take your entree shouldn't take much longer than that if you do it right yeah looks like we've got some people chiming in hi chris and dennis and uh js my good friend coagulating clotted cream what is that about because i'm not that's not up on that one that's a british term clotted cream is something they serve with scones. It kind of plumps up a little bit.

There you go. It's delicious. There you go. Well, people are plugging the website. My friend, J.S. Gilbert, he's on one of those diets, the keto diet. So he's always posting his keto food and stuff. And I think he makes it at home. But, yeah, it looks like you'd

be checking out your website what are some things that people are going to find on your website i noticed that it's indexed so people can find asian beef beverages you you cover drinks too that's good for this alcoholics not a lot of drinks i i've heard a lot of you know people eat a lot of chicken a lot of chicken dishes a lot of chicken dishes, a lot of seafood dishes. I probably have more seafood than anything. There you go. Again, being from a restaurant, I was able to cook with clams and mussels and shrimp and scallops. I know a hundred different ways to make them and have them taste a little different and be delicious. And just good fish, good seafood fish, swordfish, mahi, grouper, tuna.

You've even got some good stuff here for people that have specialty diets, gluten-free. I have a few. There's a dessert section, even lamb. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. I was not a big lamb eater for a long time, and I went to Ireland. And when I was in ireland they're just

pushing this food towards me because as a chef everybody wants to feed you and i'm eating i guess oh my god this is so good what is it he goes it's lamb i go no freaking way it was just delicious so i gained an appreciation for lamb and learned how simple it was to cook it right and and how to source the right lamb you know and my wife still doesn't like it but oh my god this good lamb is a thing of beauty oh yeah uh soups stews and chili vegetarian the pizza even for those of you who are those uh pizza people the poultry thing i've got a, I've got to go through, it looks like here, because I've been drinking. I'm on a Monday, man.

I've got Monday brain. I get those two days off and out the window. But working out, I eat a lot of chicken. And it gets a little old. You're just like, oh, chicken again. Again, it's a matter of how you dress it up. You know, I've got about five pounds of chicken breast out there I'm going to make some cutlets with. I'll make them up.

I'll bread them, give them a quick fry, and then I freeze them. And then, you know, I make chicken parma, of course, because chicken parma is magical. But there's so much else you can do with the cutlet besides that. Dress it up with different toppings, with vegetables. Put broccoli rabe and some melted cheese on it or tomatoes and bacon. I always love that and some cheese for like a BLT chicken. But different sauces can go on. It's very simple to do and then i freeze my whole

thing is you know make more if you have those few extra minutes to do it freeze them and those days that you come dragging in something out of the freezer and you're good to go what i love about your website is like it all looks like restaurant food like it's this isn't this isn't simple food this is really interesting baked chicken marsala meatballs recipe. I never even thought about making meatballs out of chicken. That's pretty amazing. I love it. Chicken is so much better than turkey.

It doesn't dry out as much. If you get the whole chicken ground up. Yeah, plus it tastes like chicken. Yeah, which is always a good thing for chicken to taste like chicken better if it doesn't you might want to check your expiration date that's why i started eating free range chicken because chicken wasn't tasting like chicken anymore is is can you really notice a difference with the free range chicken i do up when i was in jersey i would go i would buy chicken at this one store and and I'm looking at it.

I don't know what this tastes like, but it's not chicken. So it wasn't because I wanted to eat better or feel better. It was because it tasted better. And I could, yeah, it tasted more like chicken used to. Like I remember. I mean, I remember what chicken used to taste like in the 60s. And milk, organic milk. I buy organic milk because it's like milk was it's thick

it's rich it's milk it's not just this drink anymore you know yeah certain things yeah i do that i get i buy raw milk and i love raw milk and then like i buy the original mexican cokes and and they literally taste like what i remember in the 70s, the original Cokes before they went to the high fructose stuff. And most of them would come in those glass bottles or small bottles too. So it's like a flash from the past. Yeah. And the taste of a glass bottle is different than the taste of a can. So much better.

I remember my mom would take us to the park or something and we'd have those, the original Dr. Pepper's. It used to have the 2-4, was it 2-4-6 on it or something like that? 10-2-4. 10-2-4. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Yeah, yeah. It was almost like the 4-20 of pop. But yeah, the best slow cooker, Guinness beef ribs, chicken parm,

restaurant style. I love what's on here. What are some of your favorite recipes that are on here? You know, I love my beef stew. That's one of my favorites. When I make something and it amazes me, that's when I go, wow, that is really good. That was one of them. My hunter's chicken was another.

I made that expecting it to be good and just blew me away. And my wife loves chicken marsala that's one of our standard dishes she loves clams and linguine and that takes 12 minutes to make it takes you longer to wash the clams than it does to cook them wow you know to get all the grit and sand off of them but just easy food it's again it's nothing too strange or too you know it's gonna take you too long or our odd ingredients it's gotta be what you have on hand and learn how to use that that's that's my there you go there you go let's see what else did I want to ask you about the site ask chef Dennis calm just a lot of wonderful

things on here oh yeah I was gonna get in the dessert and mess some people's diet absence of mine easy cream brulee that's always a favorite lemon cheesecake with a chocolate ganache white chocolate yeah white chocolate ganache oh yeah white chocolate ganache uh chocolate cake with strawberry mousse filling. You're killing me. Cranberry eggnog bread pudding with bourbon cream and cheese rum frosting. Is that fat-free and calorie-free? Yeah, we wave a little wand over it, and it just takes all the calories. That's amazing.

So what is the future for you? Do you see you traveling again with kind of coming out of COVID and stuff? I certainly hope so. I have been missing travel. We would cruise. We went to Europe a lot. It's a terrible thing to get used to doing something like that. We're in our retirement, or me, I can work anywhere so it doesn't matter. We had really gotten into traveling

big time and seeing a lot of the different parts of the world. People were sending me places to write about the food. What gets better than that? I'm hoping to get back to Spain. I loved Madrid. Madrid was wonderful. Paris is one of our

favorites. It's just nice to see something else, even in the States, just to get out in the national parks or something and try some different food too. One of my favorite shows now is Guy Fieri's Diner's Dives. I sit there and I almost have to change my shirt after watching it because I'm drooling so much. You're just drooling over stuff. Anthony Bredin was so wonderful that I've got another friend, Mike Elgin, and he's a foodie, but he's a tech review writer for tech blogs and stuff like that.

He's done for a long time. But a long time ago, like, I don't know, 10, 20 years ago, he's written a book about it. He literally gave up the house and car and stuff. And he literally travels the world. Airbnb stays with people networks. He has all these friends all around the world that he'll him and his wife will stay with. And I guess he started this after the kids left. And for the amount of money it takes for him to have a house, he worked this all in a book, for him to have a house and have a car and all the crap that goes with having a house,

you can literally almost live cheaper or the same on the road. And so he goes to all these different places and he has all these beautiful photographs. And they break bread together. He does what Anthony Bourdain does. He goes and you'll all these beautiful photographs and they break bread together he does what anthony bourdain does he goes and you'll see these big dinners in fact now he started this cool thing where he he hosts like getaway dinners like i could fly out you know for whatever it costs and you should do something like that like go to france and you're like everybody comes buys a ticket and you know you go learn and it's a whole experience that would be cool yeah we had started there was going to be a chef dennis cruise and this was getting started when

covet hit so we put that on the back burner that along with my i was going to start having bus stop signs that was my new form of advertising oh yeah i was going to be the new better call saul you know it's going to be what's's your dinner? Ask Jeff Dennis. You know, I remember older Vegas, when I used to go to Vegas up until I think about, I think they pulled a lot of their stuff down. Well, they sold the Venetian. The Venetian took over their location.

But there used to be, when you would go to Vegas, like 20 or 30 years ago, there would be this restaurant, and this guy would be holding like a 10 pound lobster did you ever go and see that i did not and it would be on every bus stop when you go down the strip and up the strip it would be every freaking bus stop sign the back of every bus and it'd be this guy just holding this you know body half body torso size uh giant lobster and you go there and it was like it looked like someplace the mob planned most of their stuff or the rat pack sinatra would hang out you know everything's uh i know you call it pinned red cushioned leather dining chairs that you just

you're just like somebody somebody got whacked in here i'm sure and just the greatest food ever and then i think they you know they got taken over when they built the Venetian and stuff. And I think they moved someplace, but you never saw the ads again. It was funny. They were just like the place to go. So it was pretty cool. Anything more we should know about you and what you have going on and what's upcoming? No, I just keep cranking out recipes and redoing old ones

to make them easier and better. I'm on Instagram. I'm on Facebook. I'm on Twitter, LinkedIn, and it's Ask Chef Dennis, Pinterest. It's easy, easy to do. An old friend of mine kind of named me that one day. Yeah. She said, you know, you should be Ask Chef Dennis. And I'm like, really? Yeah, so that was the best move I ever made was just making myself my brand. And I spent a lot of time, I think I ran

into you on Google Plus back in the old days too. That's highly likely. We were pretty huge back on that thing back in the day and I was sad to see it go. I was one of the only predictors that it was going to die. And people hated me for a year or two. And then, of course, I was right. But, yeah, that was a great thing.

I mean, I'm still angry at Gupta or whatever his name was that ran into the ground. He actually ruined my YouTube channel for a lot of years. We used to have a lot of engagement. I mean, you, you too had a lot of engagement and then he forced, he forced people to get a Google plus account to, to force them to use this service.

And it was just dumb. And then finally they had enough of him, but I still, I'm still angry with him to this day. It cost me a lot of money on my YouTube channel that we were making, but it still makes money, but not like it used to. But, you know, yeah, Google+, what a great place that was. I see you got an Instagram, so Instagram is a great place for foodies.

Oh, God, yeah. Oh, my God, yeah. I follow a lot of foodies over there. I'll follow you over there. I know she got some 30-minute meals. That's good for families. You know, I mean, one of the best things I can recommend, like, you know, I talked about earlier about families and relationships, the best thing

people can do, you know, mothers and fathers, teach your kids how to cook and really enjoy life because it really is the spice of life. So, you know, I know mothers try and bear a lot of burden and care for their children and stuff. Don't do all the work, you know, I know mothers try and bear a lot of burden and care for their children and stuff. Don't do all the work. You know, get the kids involved. Get the kids grading cheese and learning all this stuff. I mean, so much of this stuff is life skills. Yeah.

And, you know, I just reached a point with my life, being single all my life, where I just like, I got sick of it. I got sick of eating out. You'd think no one would get sick of it. I got sick of eating out. You think no one gets sick of that, but I'm just like, I'm so freaking tired of Wendy's and McDonald's and, you know, even some of the low grade restaurants. I'm just like, Oh my God, this again and learning to cook for myself and then being able to flavor the

food just, just provided a richness to my life. And I didn't have to be a chef just, but just being able to go, Hey, let me, I want to eat something I haven't eaten before. I want to taste something that I haven't tasted before. You know, that's why I used to go to

spa goes all the time in Vegas. You know, I love going to restaurants and being able to taste something that I haven't tasted before that that's new to the, the ancient palette, if you will. And so I think, you know, more parents should do that. Teach your kids culinary stuff, get them interested in it. You'll get them helping out in the kitchen. That way it's not such a work job, you know. And you'll find that they're more open to trying new things if you let them help prepare it. If they've got a hand in it and they've got something invested in it, you know, it's a good one.

You'd always tell them, you know, try it three times. After three times, you still don't like it always tell them. I try it three times. After three times, you still don't like it. Fine. You know what it tastes like, but I've cooked a lot of things that I personally didn't want to eat, and then over the course of time, I went, hey, this is pretty good. Sometimes it just takes a while to build up that adventurous palate

and to like things, but man, getting them in the kitchen, it's good for them. It helps clear their minds. Like I said, it's therapeutic. It really is. You shouldn't think of it as a chore. You think of it as some just happy time.

And then I always tell people, if you go into a restaurant and the staff is not happy, that means the chef is not happy. And if the chef is not happy, if the chef is not happy your food is not going to be as good as it could be that's true here in here in utah we had a one of the top most expensive restaurants back in the day they were doing a lot of blow-up evidently in the back of a cookie thing the food was it started out good and then it became really awful and you're just like how much coke are they doing back there but yeah it makes you you know make sure we're more resourceful it gives you more tools in life you know i mean at the house i'm kind of i try different

things and like you mentioned that adventurous palette i think i have like eight or ten different salts here yeah i have a bunch of gourmet salts there's some icelandic salts that i have i can't remember the name of the the company but they have a few different lava salt versions i have all sorts of different variations that i've really gotten to peppers too much but i love pepper just all sorts of seasoning that's the one thing i learned when i did the vegan thing yeah it's like learning to season stuff and having like say an adventure palette of different seasonings and trying to go on journey like hey well you know what's what's that you know even when i make my eggs in the morning i'll like okay himalayan salt today

i've got this uh parmesan salt i've got a what's it thyme and rosemary salt i got some really good stuff that's crazy and just being able to spice stuff up, pop, if you will. And you can even make some of your own, you know, with just a plain coarse grind salt. You add some of your own seasonings to it and just flavor them up. You know, if you think, oh, I don't want to invest in a jar that's $8 or $9, just make a little, see if you like it. It's easy. Just like we were talking about butter before a big thing used to be compound butters and a compound butter is just mixing

seasonings into the butter or different flavors into the butter reforming it into a roll chilling it and then slicing it down and you put that on top of meat or fish like a slice of that seasoned butter on something and it just adds a whole new flavor to it yeah the nice thing about making stuff at home too is it doesn't have all those that processed crap in it you know yellow seasoning number two or whatever the hell it is you know and all the extra you know sugar and it's it's amazing that's when i learned when i went vegan and i and i really started dieting hard on fasting i never realized how much bloody sugar and that high fructose corn syrup sugar is in so much food yeah like it's it's it's insidious yeah how much of it i you know you start

reading the labels you're like you're like why do you eat corn syrup, sugar, and bread? You're just like, what the hell is going on here? And so eating healthier, living healthier and stuff, especially for children, I highly recommend it. I really learned some good things with some friends about the breaking bread and, like you say, making experience. And then sitting down and dining together. That's what we would do, actually. You know, my family did that when I grew up as a kid. It's kind of a lost art with family, like you say, sitting in front of the TV.

But with my friend, I wanted to go over to his house and help him prepare for food. We'd put so much work into the food and preparation, we'd sit down, you know, because we put the work into it, you know. We'd sit down at the dinner table and drink and wine and, you know, just relish in the whole production of it. Yeah, Europeans take two hours to eat dinner. Yeah. And we'll be done in 15, 20 minutes.

It takes longer to prepare the food, usually, than we spend eating it. And we got it a little backwards. Things need to relax, unwind, and we probably wouldn't have half the problems we did if we did that. Definitely. Definitely. Well, it's been wonderful to have you on the show, Dennis. We certainly appreciate you coming on.

Give us your plug so we can find you on the internet, whoops. Well, if you'd like to come find some incredible recipes, go to AskChefDennis.com. Leave a comment for me and ask a question. I'll answer more than likely. It might take a day or two, but I will answer. And if you're on social media, look for me on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter as AskChefDennis. There you go. Thanks for coming on, Dennis.

We really appreciate it, man. Thanks, Chris. My pleasure. There you go. Thanks, Monica go thanks for tuning in be sure to go check it out you definitely want to check out the recipes he's got over there askchefdennis.com and also go to our groups on goodreads.com Fortress Chris Voss YouTube channel Fortress Chris Voss and all our groups Facebook LinkedIn Twitter Instagram thanks for tuning in be sure to be good to each other.

Stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.