The Keys To The Kitchen book tour is headed to Georgia this week, so I wanted to check in with Atlanta-based blogger and food stylist, Tami Hardeman of Running with Tweezers. As a fashion stylist gone rogue (and turned into a food stylist), Tami has an eye for beauty and some serious kitchen skills. I checked in with her to see what she’d reveal about her keys to the kitchen.
Q: Tami, please share, what is your key to the kitchen?
A: My “key to the kitchen” is a well-stocked pantry. My work schedule fluctuates so much – there are no “regular business hours” here – that sometimes, it’s hard to keep fresh ingredients on hand or have a fridge full of groceries. The crazy hours and spending my days around food means that, many times, I want to come home and have something easy for dinner like soup. Having great quality basics in the pantry – my favorite brand of chopped tomatoes, vegetable stock (if I don’t have some made in the freezer), cannellini beans or garbanzo beans, orzo or ditalini pasta – means I can throw soup together for dinner and use whatever produce happens to be around. I can’t tell you how many 5 or 6 ingredient soups I’ve made using the pantry staples I mentioned plus a chopped up zucchini or a handful of kale or spinach – whatever is around and needing to get eaten. It’s really the ultimate in fast food and certainly better for you than stopping off for a quick bite on the way home.
While I don’t have a lot of kitchen stuff, I can’t say enough about my favorite piece of kitchen equipment: my Vitamix. It’s such a versatile item and has replaced 2 or 3 gadgets in one. I can’t imagine pureed soups without it – not to mention the salsa, smoothies, etc. I’ll never have a kitchen without one.
Check out Tami’s work on her site, Running with Tweezers, and follow her on Twitter, on Facebook, and on Pinterest.
Though my new cookbook is called Keys To The Kitchen, the reality is that there are too many to publish in one single book. So, I’ll be asking some of my favorite food people from each city I’ll be visiting on my book tour to share his or her very own key to the kitchen in this interview series — read other interviews here.
