The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Tastes Better From Scratch Cookbook: Easy Recipes for Everyday Life by Lauren Allen

Episode Date: February 2, 2024

Tastes Better From Scratch Cookbook: Easy Recipes for Everyday Life by Lauren Allen https://amzn.to/3Sj2R7o Tastesbetterfromscratch.com Amazon Best Seller in Breakfast Cooking, Whole Foods Diets, and Comfort Food Cooking Lauren Allen, owner and creator of the Tastes Better From Scratch website is best known for recipes you can count on. Her much anticipated first cookbook includes recipes she terms, “The Best of the Best,” including her personal favorite recipes and fan favorites from her website, and several new recipes. Inside you’ll find recipes for every meal of the day, and more, as well as a variety of different cuisines. What’s inside: ⁃ 116 recipes ⁃ Images with every recipe ⁃ QR codes linking to a video of how to make the recipe ⁃ Make ahead and freezer tips for recipes. About the author Lauren Allen is the recipe creator behind the popular food blog Tastes Better from Scratch, where millions of readers come each month to find easy and approachable, family-friendly recipes. The book contains a collection of her favorite classic recipes, plus many fan favorites from her website, and some enticing new creations. Lauren has four adorable children with her husband, Jeff, and when she's not creating recipes, she enjoys time spent outdoors in the warm Arizona weather with her family.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. 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. I'm Oaks Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. There you go, ladies and gentlemen. The Iron Lady sings it. That's when you know it's official. Welcome to the big show.

My family and friends, we certainly appreciate you guys being here. As always, we have the smartest people on the show. The CEOs, the billionaires, the White House presidential advisors, the Pulitzer Prize winners, the great authors who share their knowledge and their stories of life and all the things that they've learned and they bring them to the Chris Voss Show and depart them? Impart them. I don't know. I'm just making up words at this point, people.

It's poetic license. On to you and improve the quality of your life. For 15 years, we've been doing this. And as always, we will continue on. This is going to be one of the harder shows I've done because I'm intermittent fasting right now to lose weight. And we have two amazing cooks on the show. They have a whole business of just inspiring people to eat better and everything else i'm just drooling in my in the back of my head so uh if if you're drawing

or slurping on the show it's just me so there you go we have the authors of the latest book on the show that came out september 27 2022 taste better from scratch cookbook easy recipes Taste Better From Scratch Cookbook, Easy Recipes for Everyday Life. We have Lauren Allen and Liz Haslam on the show. They're the team behind the multimedia company and food website, Taste Better From Scratch. Their passion for creating and sharing approachable from scratch meals has led to millions of social media followers, a best-selling cookbook, and a website that attracts more than 15 million monthly visitors. And I think I'm the newest one to be added to that. They hope to inspire people to eat healthier, save money, and create better habits for their

families. Welcome to the show, Lauren and Liz. How are you? Thank you so much for having us. We're just stoked to be here, making you drool. Yes. Yeah. It's, it's, I can't, I just keep flipping back before the Instagram and I'm, I'm just like, I just, I'm just lost.

So give us the.com one more time before so people can find you guys on the internet, please. Yeah. You can find our website at tastebetterfromscratch.com. We're also on all the social media platforms at taste better from scratch. There you go. The tickety tockety is thes, and all that good stuff.

You got it. So give us a 30,000 overview. What's inside this book? This book is really kind of like the beginner's guide to Taste Better From Scratch. It's our most popular recipes, the ones we love, the ones that made us what we are from our reader fan base, all compiled into a great book of 116 recipes. So it's just really great for, especially like beginner cooks,

people who are just wanting to feed their family better, don't know where to start and want recipes that are going to be winners. If you just pull up our website, there's thousands of recipes. And if someone's like, well, what do I start? What's your favorite?

It's like, check out the book. The book's got the best of the best. There you go. Now I've been doing that too. For the last 15 minutes or 20 minutes before you guys came on, as I was pulling up the show, I've been going through all your stuff. Now, you guys are twins. Is that correct? We are.

We are identical twins. So tell us how you got in this business together. How do you guys started your brand? How you guys were raised? Maybe what influenced you guys to be in the cooking business? Yeah. We were born in a little ski town in Park City, Utah, surrounded by amazing cooks, generations of good cooks.

So we both loved cooking from a very young age. And then like college hit and it was this whole new world of, you know, cafeteria food. And I literally had no idea that people don't like cooking and don't know how to cook and don't even know what good food is. And it was just, that's kind of where this idea started of just me wanting to help my roommate, you know, my neighbors, my friends, just like, no, cooking's really easy. You don't have to

eat this garbage. It's much better for you. It's less expensive. And it's just a more enjoyable experience when you cook for yourself. So that's where the webinar was born. It started with just, Hey, we need a place to share. You make a really simple recipe and people are like, how did you do that? We need a place to send a link and share a simple recipe. There you go. So when did you guys team up and say, let's kind of turn this into a business? Yeah, Liz started it with me initially.

Then she was, you know, she had a real job. I got busy teaching and all these things and Lauren wanted to take it seriously and really built a really sizable, awesome business. And then she needed help, and so I just jumped back on. I brought her on in 2017. Yeah, now she's kind of everybody's boss. She runs our team, and I just get to cook and do the good food, and Liz gets to be the boss of everybody. So it's great. That's a good team.

I had a business partner like that for about 13 years, and we had two strengths, two different strengths. So it works out really well that way. So now is this your first cookbook? It's our first cookbook. Yep. It's our baby. There you go. And you guys are killing it online. Millions of followers. I mean, the food is just, like I said, I kind of just got lost in my going through your guys' Instagram. Totally not us. It's good content. You know, it's totally not us. It's good content. Put out good content and people come back. Yeah.

It's enthralling. This might be, I normally get caught up in TikTok. So I'll have to check your TikTok channel and subscribe over there. Because I normally follow a lot of cooks on TikTok. And I just sit there as a single just going, oh my God. And I don't know what it is is but it seems like most cooks most women their chefs are always married and so no one asked me how i noticed that because i'm always looking for rings when i see people cook on tiktok and i'm like i my man brain just goes i'll marry her in a

second i have no idea who she is but she cooks really well i That food looks amazing. She's a nurturer. I love TikTok because I feel like it's brought a new kind of love for cooking that is kind of reinvented, especially with younger generations. More interest and food can be really fun and exciting. So TikTok's been great for the food world. There you go. I put on a lot of weight eating bad, owning companies all my life from 18. I started my own companies and I started eating on the road. And, you know, I had that attitude.

You know, I'll get healthy later. I'll get the weight off later. And I eat bad for a lot of years. And then, of course, when you're single, you end up going out to dinner a lot, dates and stuff. You're always eating at restaurants and crap. And I think it was 2016, I finally had gotten sick of how fat I was. And so I started eating healthy and I started making my food at home and kind of learning to cook for myself. And it was so empowering. It almost seems

like it's cooking for yourself now, making things from scratch. It's kind of like a lost art. Do you think that's true? Absolutely. You know, I was actually kind of like a lost art. Do you think that's true? Absolutely. I was actually kind of in a deep dive of reading about this topic and Forbes came out with a really interesting article a couple of years ago, basically about how millennials are missing the basic life skills, like life skills 101. And it is an interesting trend because you start to see this shift where all the grocery stores have these like ready made meals. And that's really the next thing is like, no, I am cooking, but I'm not really cooking. I'm just buying this meal and I'm heating it up at home, but I feel like I'm cooking. And it's an interesting trend because it's just it's a nice convenience food, but it's sort of still missing the boat on feeding yourself good, nutritious food.

And then you're also at the end of the day, it's expensive. It's not nutrient dense and people are eating more when they eat that way. feeding yourself good nutritious food. And then you're also spending a lot. At the end of the day, it's expensive. It's not nutrient dense. And people are eating more when they eat that way. So it leads to higher rates of obesity. Yeah. And these processed foods, you know, I learned about eating live foods and non-processed foods and, you know, the taste is like so much better in making things from scratch and in eating live foods instead of dead foods and, you know, spending time going through the produce department. And if you just learn to prep a little bit or season a little bit, it's not that hard. Absolutely.

You can make things taste way better than McDonald's. Yeah, anybody can. I feel like that's our MO is like it is just cheaper and tastes so much better. But then people are always coming back with, well, sure, I know all of that, but I don't have the time. Like I don't have the time to do it. And that's where I think maybe when people find our website

or similar websites, they're like, oh, there's this aha of like, it doesn't have to take long and I can have all of it. I can have cheaper, healthier, and it can be easy and simple to put together if I just have a plan. Yeah. We were talking before the show in the green room about how I'm always in search for the best sourdough bread I can find. And you guys have a no-knead bread where you don't have to knead it with your hands.

And I didn't mean to imply that it was a no-knead bread like you don't need bread. Do keep it light in your diet. But you guys have a thing on there, and it can be done in just a few minutes. That's a really fun one for people to start, especially people who are like, I love sourdough bread. I want to make it. Sourdough bread is a ton of babysitting and a ton of work and a huge learning curve. This no-knead artisan bread is a loaf of artisan bread. It's like four ingredients, flour, water, yeast, salt. You mix it in a bowl and you set it aside for a couple hours and then you bake it. Like it's the easiest.

Yeah. It makes the best bread. It's foolproof. And if you served me a loaf of this sourdough bread that you babysat and took care of and you took care of the starter for months and you compare, I'm like, I'm not sure a hot piece of bread I'm going to be able to tell the difference. Just the time cost, opportunity cost, and the ingredient cost, the loaf of bread is probably 20 cents.

Oh, wow. Seriously. That's pretty good deal. Yeah, I have this fantasy that I want to become like a sourdough dude. I actually have some friends that do it, and it's a whole job pretty much to what they're doing and monitoring. A lot of respect for people to do it. Yeah.

And I'm just like, yeah, I don't think that's really, and not to discourage anyone's passions, but I think sometimes, especially in sort of this Tik Toky world, we see these accounts and we're inspired by one dish and we're like, that's going to be my new thing.

And then turns out it's actually kind of expensive or complicated or difficult. And then we're like, yeah, I suck at cooking. It's not for me when maybe you just sort of chose the wrong entry point. And you guys bring up a good point. When I switched to veganese, there's a million variations of vegan. So I didn't learn you could offend so many people by saying the wrong term of vegan. So it's just veganese people. It's just whatever. But I started eating

more salads, more healthy, more alive foods, spending most of my purchasing time in the produce department as opposed to the frozen food TV dinner department. And it was amazing how much cheaper my grocery bills were. I was like, holy crap, it's really expensive to eat fatty foods that destroy your health, not on top of the hospitalization costs that you're going to encourage you to get older. How much of the recipes that you have in the book or maybe also the recipes on your website, do you guys try and find recipes that are, when it comes to consumption of time, are the faster ones? Yeah. At the end of the day, I'm a mom of four. She's a mom of three. We run a full-time business. I have as much time as anybody else who's a working mom.

We definitely gear all of our meals for the most part towards just quick, easy, delicious. There's definitely a subsection for people who want to cook fancier things for sure but yeah yeah there you go you know hacking that dopamine a lot of people don't realize with fast food and some of these other highly chemical highly processed foods is they're really designed chemically to give you a dopamine hit like a drug and people don't realize how much they're geared and what i found when i made that switch and started cooking for myself and making my own meals and and just learning to season stuff so that it tastes good and it can give you those same sort of flavors that you're you're looking for when you're you know most people aren't like hey i'm gonna go to mcdonald's i don't want to

eat this greasy nasty thing that has some sort of frankenmeat that god knows what's in it and 50 chemicals you know from i don't know lovers canal island if anybody remembers that joke in the from the 70s you know you're just like i don't know what's in this i think it came from a super fun site it's glowing and mostly you're just you're just after kind of that taste like my mom's kind of funny she loves chocolates and different sweets and stuff so she So she realizes that she's there for the taste. So she'll take a bite and then spit it out. Oh, gosh, that's awesome. So she realizes, though, that she wants the taste of it.

And I started realizing that with the fast food and everything. And so being able to prepare for food is so much better. So you've got 116 recipes in there. There's images with every recipe. And I thought this was pretty cool. You guys have QR codes that link to a video of how to make the recipe. Definitely. I feel like there's a couple of reasons people probably don't cook.

One being, you know, they don't have the time. One being that they don't know how or they don't like it. So I feel like we're doing the best we can to just hold your hand through the process. So there's a QR code, you can go straight to a video of myself making it or just kind of hands in pans, as we call them showing you exactly how to make the recipe. So it's, it's pretty cool this day and age, I feel like there's just no good excuse for not learning this basic life skill. It's like, we care about our sleep. We care about our exercise and we care about our health and eating well. This is a very necessary skill that once you practice it and learn it, it's going to make your life a whole lot less stressful.

And especially I feel that way with my kids. I feel like I have an obligation to teach them because they're going to have to feed themselves for the rest of their life three times a day. You know? Yeah. It's an important life skill. You don't want to be going to McDonald's and stuff. The other thing is too is, what are some of the benefits? You mentioned one, teaching the kids, you know, life skills. Those are really important because that's, I didn't learn to cook for myself when I was

young and then I ended up at McDonald's all the time and Taco Bell and all that sort of good stuff. And now it shows. I'm wearing half of it. But being able to cook for yourself is definitely a life skill. I know some couples that what they'll do is they use cooking as a way to kind of get together as a couple. And, you know, they cook together and make stuff together. And, you know, it becomes like a project.

Me and my friends used to do that when we used to throw parties. We would get together. My friend was a really good cook. And so I just kind of be the assistant in the thing and he'd tell me what to do that. We used to throw parties. We would get together. My friend was a really good cook. And so I just kind of be the assistant in the, in the, in the thing. And he'd tell me what to do, but we put together these great meals and there was a community to it.

Basically, you know, there used to be that whole community of breaking bread together with people. And it was a way that we got together. You know, you Anthony Bourdain kind of perfected that sort of thing of meeting strangers or breaking bread.

Any thoughts you want to expand on that? Absolutely. We're on board with all of that. I mean, if you can, I mean, what you're talking about, getting together with your spouse or good friends is a great relationship builder. And then even at its most basic, cooking by yourself and feeding whoever's in your family, that act of sitting down at a table, there's a ton of research around, you know,

especially for kids, if you've got kids, and you're trying to provide them with some protective factors to battle life, improved mental health, relationships, stronger academic performance, it's a protective factor against high risk behaviors, in general, for adolescents, just the idea that you sit down regularly as a family and eat something. Yeah, I agree, too. Like I know Europeans Europeans feel this way too, but just eating in a social environment is a healthier way to eat. Food should be enjoyed together. It's this community, it's this healthy social factor going on. And you're also just not going to eat as much. You're going to eat slower. There's going to be conversation going on. It's just a healthier way to eat. I've got some friends from Italy that I remember they came over to the States

and I remember them being just sort of abhorred at, they're like, you guys, you eat in the car and you eat in front of the TV and you eat while you're standing that like eating isn't this respected. Like you should sit down and enjoy the food and the people you're with rather than just treating it like it's this thing you're doing all throughout the day. Definitely. It's more communal. And community is good for us. I mean, I grew up in the world.

I think you guys probably did, too, where our parents or at least my mom made us all sit down and eat together. But we didn't have cell phones back then. And, you know, now I see I'll go to a restaurant and I'll see like a whole family of maybe four people, five people, whatever. And every one of them, including the parents of children have got a cell phone. They're just sitting there like zombies just going. And you're right. If I'm eating alone, I'll just hork down whatever food I have probably in a million miles an hour, choke on it half the time.

And it's like, I should have chewed that better. And you're right. If you're with somebody, you're talking, you you know it takes longer to go through the meal probably longer for you to ram it in your system and your system has a better chance to process it it's just better overall i think for people i think the qr code thing is great too with the videos because most people really you know i'm one of those people i watch videos to fix everything i mean if something breaks in the house i go watch a video something breaks in the car you know, I'm one of those people. I watch videos to fix everything. I mean, if something breaks in the house, I go watch a video, something breaks in the car, you know, whatever the hell it is. I'm like, Hey, go, just go see video. That's why we put a video is just

teach people stuff. And so it's much more easier. I've been on so many cooking recipes where you're like, is there a video on this? Cause these instructions, I don't get what's going on. Yeah. Yeah. No, the videos are awesome. I like, I feel like on our website, we also have just step-by-step process photos. I think people learn and interpret the information differently. So yeah. Yeah. I think one of the biggest things that keeps people coming back, cause there's, there's so many places to find information is that I think we might be, there's a few people copying us now, but we were one of the first people to ever start offering free meal plans. There's no catch. There's a meal plan. There's a shopping list, like everything you need to make

it for free on the internet. Luckily, we have an ad supported business model. So we're able to just give stuff out for free and we make money because people are seeing ads while they're on our content. But the meal plans have definitely, I think, helped with that issue. You have the video to help you and now you've also got a plan for the week. Yep. There you go. Now, I noticed on your guys' websites, you guys have air fryer recipes. It seems like air fryers are what everyone's using these days.

Is that kind of out of control, or is that a valid way to cook? I haven't tried it yet. The air fryer is great because I feel like it's not like a trend like the Instant Pot. It's here to stay because it's really just another type of oven. So you can cook more things in it and you can have more success with it. It's easier to use. You can cook vegetables in it, fish, chicken, you know, or you can reheat anything in it. I'm a big skeptic of all the new light gadgets and tools that come out.

And I've found I'm a big fan of the air fryer. I think it's here to stay as well. It's a really convenient tool that I think you can cook healthier in it. You don't need to add as much oil and you kind of still get that crispy flavor. That's the trick. I bought one for my mom and she loves it. I never got around to buying one for me. So you've got all sorts of recipes on your website.

People can go through them and target different things, even vegetarian. Tell us about some of the other offerings you guys have on your website. You've got meal plans, recipes, cookbooks, all that sort of good stuff. Yeah, our meal plans. I mean, I think what people keeps people coming back and back are just great recipes, new recipes coming out every single week, new videos coming out every week. But our meal plans are what we're really passionate about as far as just an amazing free resource. People all the time go to these different companies that are offering them meal plans. They'll ship you the food, but they're essentially shipping you the ingredients you need, the's like we give you a shopping list and the recipes you need that week. You punch it all in. Your groceries are delivered or you pick them up and it's all free, which is like I think we're passionate. That's probably the best thing that we offer.

Yeah. So how does the meal plans work? Are they frozen and sent to you by mail or do you have to pick them up locally? No. So that's probably what, so you've got sort of these like meal delivery services out there, the HelloFreshes of the, you know, we're sort of an intermediary where we are giving you the idea, the meal, the recipe, the shopping list. The work you have to do is to enter it in your grocery delivery service and order the

grocery yourself, but you're printing out the recipes you're printing and you've got all the ingredients and it's free versus paying a monthly fee for these. And the other thing I love about it is we offer like an estimated budget for every meal. So I would say the average week worth of dinner recipes is no more than 60 to $70 for a family. Most of them feed at least four to six people. And then there's prep ahead instructions where you can, you know, do something really simple ahead of time. If you prep on Sunday or you prep before you go to work so that just the cooking in general seems like less of a drag because you've already got yourself started. I love this too, because if you're a busy

family and even for me as a busy single guy, you're like, what should I make? And if I don't find it in the fridge, we have Walmart deliver stuff. But if I don't find it in the fridge, sometimes I end up at a restaurant, but I can afford it. But it's not always the best food. Well, I eat at nice places, damn it. But I love this meal plan thing. I just subscribed to it. A lot of people

you know we i don't know if it's still a thing but back when those well somewhere midpoint when hello fresh and a lot of those different services start they all send us stuff because we review products and stuff and what we found was a lot of time they were sending us like really like almost throw away vegetables and stuff that were kind of at the end of their life and i'm like did you get this out of the back of the dumpster of the grocery store that threw the fresh stuff out like it was it was just like like you had to cook it fast it had a day or two left on most of the produce that was sent to us and i was really discouraged by a lot of it and then we got the frozen stuff too and that was really. Like I would post it on social media and people like, that looks like crap.

And I'm like, well, it tastes good. And they're like, Chris, you're single. What do you know? Anything tastes good to you. And I'm like, you know, you kind of have a point. So I like this meal plan idea because it can make it so that you can plan a whole different meal and they look beautiful. You guys have 161 here on the website. So, you know, people can map out the week. They can, you know, you always get those kids that are like, I want this, I want that.

Yeah. And if you create a free account, you can edit them too. You can swap out your favorites. Yeah. If there's a meal, you're like, oh, my family's not going to eat that. You can plug in a different option, and it will generate an updated shopping list for you. Can I just make it so it's all tacos and sourdough bread?

Definitely. You can build your own from the beginning. Tacos are my love language. That pizza. What have we talked about that we should plug out for you guys on what you guys are doing and how you're doing it and all that good stuff? Yeah, if you're really into, you know, people are into healthy eating right now. We just launched a macro ebook. So it's an electronic cookbook, but if you don't know what macros are, basically it's just a healthy cookbook that gives you a sort of a calorie count of where your calories are coming and what percentage are

from fat, carbs, protein. If there's a lot of people into sort of dialing in more about what percentage of their calories are coming from each of those macronutrients. Or just eating higher fat, carbs, protein. If there's a lot of people into sort of dialing in more about what percentage of their calories are coming from each of those macronutrients. Or just eating higher protein, lower carb, all of the recipes are really geared toward that. And it's awesome because if you use apps like MyFitnessPal or the Macro First app, there's QR codes in there that directly take you like, so you can track it easily. And all of the recipes are already inputted in those programs. So you can just log them super, super quickly. And if you don't count macros, it's just an awesome, healthy cookbook.

There you go. I love it because anytime those apps are like, tell us how many calories or what you're eating. And you're just like, I don't know. It's a broccoli. Right. I'm not going to weigh it. I got things to do, man.

So it's been wonderful to have you guys on the show. Give us any plugs you want, any place you want people to follow you on the interwebs. No, I think we're just all about bringing the joy back to cooking. So if you're feeling in a rut as far as you're eating or wanting to cook better or more fun food, hope you'll check us out. Tastebetterfromscratch.com. There you go. And follow him on instagram and tiktok you can see all the pictures i've got this running in the background i'm just gonna

probably spend the next hour drooling on i kind of learned i've kind of learned a trick where if i look at food even when i'm intermittent fasting i'm kind of still okay and but it like i don't know it like takes it away from me where i don't really want to go eat. It's kind of like, I don't know, I can look, not touch sort of thing. I think that's a special skill that you have. It is. I've developed it. I think I converted it to men's ability to, you know, look at women, but whatever. But look, don't touch.

So sort of thing. I think it's a married guy, maybe response. But jokes aside, I'm looking at this. Oh, is this beef on here this is a beef tenderloin oh my god but i i can second the motion that eating healthy and being able to prepare your own food is so empowering too i mean you really feel proud of yourself you're like hey man i made some food it tasted really damn good and you just you just feel like you've learned a new skill in life and you've expanded your life vision and stuff.

So there you go. Thank you, ladies, for being on the show. We really appreciate it. Thanks so much for having us. There you go. And thanks to Ron for tuning in. Order up the book wherever fine books are sold. Taste Better From Scratch Cookbook.

Easy recipes for everyday life. Came out September 27, 2022. Be good to each other. Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time.