Cooking with Grandma, Laura Soloman and Alex Chambers

The Best Advice Show

Alex Chambers is an educator and artist in Bloomington, Indiana and Laura Soloman is a lawyer in Philadelphia. To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: It's Food Friday on The Best Advice Show and today I've got a twofer. If you've been listening to this show you know I've been excitedly collecting your grandparents advice. If you have some grandparent advice for me. I would love to hear it. Give me a call on the hotline at 844-935-BEST. So today I've got two pieces of food-related advice both from these contributors' grandparents. First, Laura Soloman. LAURA: I think a lot of people just use only one of their senses when they cook. That is, their eye sight. They look at the recipe and maybe they really follow it to a T. But they don't use any of their other senses and I think that really misses an important opportunity. When I was growing up I learned to cook with my grandmother, my Oma, who was blind and as a result we had to use all of our senses. She taught me how to feel the dough, how to measure the ingredients in the palm of my hands, not a measuring cup. How to listen. You know, when the pan was ready for the food. How to even smell when a baked cook was ready to come out of the oven. So, that's my advice for Food Friday. Don't just read a recipe and then wonder why it doesn't turn out right. Use all of your senses because I think if you do that means you're fully present and you're gonna really enjoy cooking just like you enjoy anything else in life when you're really fully there for the experience. Enjoy. ZAK: I love this. Thank you, Laura Soloman. And thank you, Oma! Next up Alex Chambers is gonna talk about something his grandma taught him. ALEX: So, my grandmother died just about a year ago. It was in the midst of COVID but it wasn't due to COVID. She was very well protected from that. She was 99 and a half. Died peacefully. She had said 99 and a half was about when she expected to go. And that was plenty. Her advice for having a good, long life was eat plenty of butter and chocolate. I'm pretty happy to try to follow that advice. At her funeral, one of her 8 daughters remembered that another thing that my grandma always used to say was no bad days. And I think what she meant by that was just that you find a way to get something good out of your day. Find a way to appreciate something that happened during your day. That seems like it was probably good advice. Agreed. That's great advice and one way to do that, it sounds like Alex, is to eat butter and chocolate. How can you have a wholly bad day if you get a little butter and chocolate in there. You can't! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices