Transcription of Love Maine Radio #325: Barrett Takesian + Vanessa Seder
Speaker 1: You are listening to Love Maine Radio, hosted by doctor Lisa Belisle and recorded at the studios of Maine Magazine in Portland. Dr. Lisa Belisle is a writer and physician who practices family medicine and acupuncture in tops … Show summaries are available at lovemaineradio.com.
Lisa Belisle: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you’re listening to Love Maine Radio, show number 325, airing for the first time on Sunday, December 10th, 2017.
Today’s guests are Barrett Takesian, president and executive director of Portland Community Squash, and Vanessa Seder, chef, food stylist and founding member of Relish and Co, who recently published a cookbook called Secret Sauces. Thank you for joining us.
Speaker 1: Portland Art Gallery is proud to sponsor Love Maine Radio. Portland Art Gallery is the city’s largest and is located in the heart of the Old Port at 154 Middle Street. The gallery focuses on exhibiting the work of contemporary Maine artists and hosts a series of monthly solo shows in its newly expanded space, including Ingunn Joergensen, Brenda Cirioni, Daniel Corey, Jill Hoy, and Dave Allen. For complete show details, please visit our website at artcollectormaine.com.
Lisa Belisle: Barrett Takesian opened the community center at Portland Community Squash in January of 2017 and he currently serves as president and executive director. Thanks for coming in today.
Barrett T.: Thanks for having me.
Lisa Belisle: You and I both went to Bowdoin College, I notice.
Barrett T.: That’s news to me. That’s great. Go U bears.
Lisa Belisle: Go U Bears, indeed, but before that you grew up in Southwest Harbor.
Barrett T.: Yeah, for the first 10 years of my life I grew up on the Hinckley Boat Yard, right at the bottom of the harbor in Southwest Harbor, Maine.
Lisa Belisle: What was that like growing up at the Hinckley Boat Yard?
Barrett T.: Despite having sailing all around me, I was a high energy kid so my preferred activity in that small town was throwing a ball against the barn, and when the winter came I moved up to the attic and thought I was an Omar Garcia Parra throwing the ball across at the window at the other side of the attic. I was an active kid. It was me and my little sister and we actually had a pond in the backyard, too, so my grandfather used to stock it with trout and I did a little fly fishing as a kid, too.
Found a way to stay active in a little bit of a sleepy town, but now I really appreciate the true beauty up there, every chance I get to go back.
Lisa Belisle: It’s an impressive boat yard. I’ve actually been there so I think about how much has been put into that town, just by virtue of having that business there.
Barrett T.: Yeah. That business has really shaped a lot of the values in my life. My grandfather ran the Hinckley company when I was a kid and I ended up moving away when my mother remarried, for my middle school and high school years down in Boston, but I just remember the Hinckley company grew really fast after my grandfather had sold the company, and once that small brand got leveraged to be a big company, it went through some tough times and the company’s in great shape now because I think they’ve gotten back to their smaller roots, but what a beautiful thing when all the boats were built there in Southwest Harbor and everyone in that community was contributing to that one brand.
When it outgrew that small town feel, I think, the company had a little bit of a different identity, but now that I run my own business, I think about the beauty of simplicity and not necessarily overgrowing too fast but enjoying the community that you’ve built and the people that it’s sustaining.
Lisa Belisle: You were an economics major at Bowdoin.
Barrett T.: Yeah, I hung on. I studied … I went into Bowdoin. I thought I had a game plan. I transferred in halfway through my sophomore year and I studied economics and environmental science and I loved the idea of the futuristic nature of green energy and thinking about how cool it would be to have these electric cars on the streets and these farms that were off the gird, powered by solar, so I had a vision that drove me in college and then when it was time to look for a job, I realized that it might have sounded great in my head but it wasn’t necessarily where my passion was.
I ended up taking a job for an insurance company here, Unum, in Portland, which was a great training program. It taught me how to be a professional, and then from there I got to explore a few more of my interests and it turned out that building community was what was most important to me, and that’s what I really took from Bowdoin, was the fact that no matter where I was on the campus, I was with people that supported me and I wanted to bring that type of a community wherever I went.
In the case of my early 20s, that was Portland, Maine.
Lisa Belisle: When you talk about throwing a ball against a wall, that’s basically my child. He was growing up, and I think he thought he was an Omar, also. He’s a little younger than you but it really was important to him. He was, like, a constant motion kind of kid.
Barrett T.: Sure.
Lisa Belisle: At the same time, he also, I think, really relished being a part of a team. He played baseball. Do those things all kind of come together in the job that you’re doing now?
Barrett T.: Yeah, absolutely. When I think about what I and the rest of the team of Portland Community Squash can offer our kids, things we talk about our helping kids find a passion and a community that supports them. When I was a kid in a small, somewhat isolating setting in Southwest Harbor, the Red Sox were that community for me. I had a little AM radio in my bedroom and I used to swing at every pitch and I still have great memories all the way into my teenage my years, listening to the Red Sox on that radio, whether I was cooking dinner with my dad or whatnot.
I still have that radio today, so that was my little community as a kid, and the community that I offer students now is one that revolves around a sport I found in Boston, Squash.
Lisa Belisle: Talk to me about Squash. I grew up, in the 80s, it was racquetball, which I think is somewhat different, but why Squash?
Barrett T.: Yeah, well, racquetball was really an American phenomenon. We have 30,000 racquetball courts in the United States and 3,000 squash courts, but if you look internationally, squash is played in 185 countries, goes back to the early 1800s. It came out of the UK, and racquetball is a great game for the recreationalist because you can just get out there. The ball’s bouncing everywhere. It’s pure athleticism, not as much as technique.
The nature of squash, it’s actually a dead ball, or we call it a dead ball, meaning it doesn’t have that same lively bounce. If you were to drop a squash ball on the floor it would barely come off the ground. How that translate onto a court is that you have total control of where you hit the ball.
If you decide to hit a short shot in the front of the court, you move your opponent to the front, that opens up the back, then you can send it to the back of the court, so there’s a lot more technique to learn how to control the ball, but it’s a game that you can never stop learning about because you’re constantly battling to get your opponent out of position and then applying pressure, so there’s a lot of strategy and a lot of cardio, too, because you’re lunging into every corner of the court for 45 minutes.
It has a lot more traction at the collegiate level. At the professional level, there’s a really robust tour with players from all over the world, and now it’s the two fastest growing countries in the world are China and the United States for Squash right now. It’s a good sport to be part of.
Lisa Belisle: You learned about this in Boston.
Barrett T.: Yeah. When my father moved to Boston, someone recommended he try Squash out as a way to meet people in the city, and I used to hop on a court in the basement and just hit around until my dad was done with his matches, but I remember the club pro telling me to hold a pencil out and see if I could get the pencil to go in the strings of the racquet to see if I had the hand-eye coordination, and my dad turned to the pro and said, “I don’t think you know my son,” so he just gave me a ball and I’d go down in there and solo for an hour straight when I was six, seven years old, and ended up playing tournaments and getting recruited to high schools to play, believe it or not, and eventually it was my path to Bowdoin, as well.
Lisa Belisle: You went from being an Omarr to being, like, the squash guy.
Barrett T.: Yeah, sure, Peter Nicol, he was my squash idol.
Lisa Belisle: Peter Nicol. Why do you think that in the United States and in China, squash is growing in popularity?
Barrett T.: Unfortunately, I think a lot of it is fueled by this desire to be recruited to colleges. In the New York Times, about 10 years ago, I wrote an article about how squash was the secret pathway into the ivy league universities, and to be honest, it was. Squash in the United States was only played in prep schools and elite universities. We, in this country, still, we actually have more collegiate squash positions than we do high school squash positions.
Think about a sport like basketball where you have 100 high school players for every one collegiate player. Squash is upside down on its head, so you might have one high school squash player for every two college squash players, so a lot of the collegiate teams are actually filled by recruiting international students to come in and play for these programs.
Now, we have 70 collegiate programs and just a great college sport to be part of. Any time that there’s a clear next step after high school participation, kids are going to get put into the sport, but the problem with the sport has always been accessibility. The program that we created here in Portland is known as the most accessible squash facility in the country.
We have an extremely affordable membership for anyone in the community to come enjoy the sport. Squash is a sport at every Portland public school now, elementary, middle and high school, and we even have programs that work with students year round for 10 years to make sure that, if squash is a passion of yours, it’s something that can take you all around the world and to a great college one day.
We don’t shy away form the fact that it’s a good tool, but for us, it’s a lot more than throwing a lot of money towards a kid so that they can get into a school. For us, it’s the 17 feet between the courts we feel is a really powerful community at Portland Community Squash, and so we use it as a hook and a common ground to bring together every demographic in Portland.
It didn’t have to be squash. It could have been theater. It could have been ice skating. It could have been anything, but squash just happens to be a really powerful too for doing the work that we’re doing. A lot of cities across the country have taken notice and are trying to replicate what we’ve created here in Portland.
Lisa Belisle: How long has squash been part of the Portland community?
Barrett T.: It really started taking off when a volunteer, Greg [Borne 00:12:06] just decided to bring some structure to a small league at the YMCA. When I moved to Portland, I found a pretty robust group of adult players that were playing on converted racquetball courts at the Y, and it was everything great about squash. Although, there was the opportunity to grow that community and to make it more diverse and to use it as a tool to uplift youth in our city, as well.
I got involved to bring that youth element, that diversity element, and the energy to Greg’s organizational skills and from 2013, when I first became involved, until now, we’ve become a multi-million dollar non-profit with a building and serving hundreds of kids in the Portland school system and hundreds of families that are enjoying the community, as well.
Lisa Belisle: Is this something that requires one to have a specific level of knowledge before going in? Do you have to have any skills at all?
Barrett T.: Right. Absolutely not. One of the first things we did was to put some beginner clinics in place just to make anyone feel welcome so that if we ran into anyone on the street we could say, “Hey, we have a Tuesday night women’s clinic. It’s 6:30 PM. It’s totally free. We have all of the equipment. We have a great coach, Mary Lou [Forzen 00:13:26] that’s there to instruct, and then on Thursdays we have the men’s clinic so we encourage anybody to come by at 6:30 on a Thursday night.
We have all the equipment there. We run a great clinic, get you introduced to it, and then we have a bunch of leagues and whatnot for every level, so that if you want to become involved, with facilitate all those introductions for you.
Any time someone comes in our facility, our membership’s really attractive but we’re quick to tell them, this is our real mission, about uplifting first generation college seekers and any student in Portland that wants to be part of this program, so we encourage all of our members to volunteer and our members volunteer a couple hundred hours a week, not each but collectively, as mentors, tutors, coaches, cleaning the facility, you name it.
It’s that community vibe that we’re trying to make clear every time we have someone new into our space.
Lisa Belisle: How many people do you have currently involved in this?
Barrett T.: Our committee’s alone are probably 75 to 80 people, spanning from development to real estate to junior program committees to events. We have great parties and outreach, as well. We have a huge network of dedicated volunteers running the organization.
Then, from a membership perspective, we have 200 memberships but a hundred of those are families, so probably are serving about 400 individuals that are using the space as their own, and then we serve about 120 students a week in our facility across our elementary school, middle school, high school programs, and as we start sending students to college as well, we’re supporting our students that are in college, as well.
On any given year, we’re working with about 200 youth, as well.
Lisa Belisle: How many students have you successfully gotten into a college at this point?
Barrett T.: One of our first students was Devon [Case 00:15:35] who just graduated from Caska Bay high school, and he was with us at the YMCA, so he’s the oldest student in our program. He is a freshman at SMCC right now. He works almost full time on our staff as well, coaching the younger students and running the facility, and then he’s interested in doing a wildlife biology major at either Western Ontario University or U Maine [inaudible 00:16:02], and he’ll get into either one, I’m sure. He’s an extremely hard working kid.
He’s the first one to have gone all the way through, but the real goal I’m working towards is, in five years, we want to be the number one youth development program in the state of Maine. It’s really going to take that long to start working students through our full curriculum which is an hour of squash, an hour of fitness and an hour of academic support every day after school.
Back then, when Devon was with us, I used to all the kids, “Listen, we used to be an entirely volunteer run organization run out of those [inaudible 00:16:42] courts at the YMCA.” I told the kids the level of programming is a two out of 10 right now, but you’re part of this because we’re trying to build a 10 out of 10 program.
I would say, we’re about six months away from a 10 out of 10. We’re probably eight out of a 10 right now, working out the choreography of how students flow through practice, why they think they’re there, the ownership they feel over the program, all these intangibles that need to be in place to build this culture of excellence, and then once we’re at a 10 out of 10 it’s five years of being in a 10 out of 10 program that you start thinking, “Okay, Harvard or one of these elite universities is a place that I could excel.”
When you walk into our facility we have college banners hanging over every inch of the space, and from fourth grade all the way through, you’re thinking big. You’re thinking about goals, and you’re trying to find those two things: passion and community, because we think those are the two things that will carry you all the way through.
Lisa Belisle: In your mind, what does a 10 out of 10 program look like?
Barrett T.: First of all, a 10 out of 10 program, a staff is just there to help and guide. The students really run it, so I have organizations that I look up to. One in particular is Squash Busters in Boston. When a new student goes into that program, they’re greeted with a handshake by an older student the second they walk in the door. They look to the older students to see what’s going on, and the students are what’s driving the culture. It’s not the staff. For us, we’re putting these programs in place and these expectations. We talk about respect, effort and positivity, and we track those things in every stage of practice.
Kids are flowing through an hour of hard work on court. They’re doing an hour of fitness or yoga, and then they’re flowing into our classrooms for academic support after practice, as well. Right now, it’s the coaches that are reminding students why we’re doing this, what our values are, why hard work is so important, but you only have to be that broken record for a couple years until your students are the ones that start telling that message.
That’s when you know you really made it, because the students have a much stronger voice than their coaching staff when it comes to influencing peer behavior.
Lisa Belisle: You said that you’re a multi-million dollar non-profit. Why are people so interested in supporting a non-profit that centers around squash?
Barrett T.: When I say a multi-million dollar non-profit, I’m not talking about our annual fund, because … Portland doesn’t need a lot of multi-million dollar annual funds. We’re all doing our best to meet our annual fund goals. I’m talking about our balance sheet and the initial rounds capital we were able to raise to put a sustainable program in place for what we hope will be the next hundred years.
When I was in the community meeting with people about why you want to support Portland Community Squash, I talked a little bit about that culture. We’re going to create a culture that’s going to perpetuate excellence and results from students that might not otherwise have after school activities. The return on investment in terms of shaping youth in the city was there, and we had proven models, and we had a proven track record of working with youth here in Portland at the Y.
We promised that, but we also promised a really sustainably operated non-profit, and one of the talking points I used when meeting with our first supporters was, this is crazy but we just met, and I’m already talking about a capital gift because we were crazy. We started with a capital campaign. Not many organizations would do that, but we were really confident in our plan. I said, “I’m asking for a capital gift but what you’re building is a really sustainable community, because our membership creates a lot of recurring revenue, so half of our annual budget is through earned revenue, and that just takes a huge load off of the organization and the time of our staff.”
As an executive director, most of my peers that are other executive directors are spending their whole day out in the community fundraising, but I really don’t have to do that anymore. I’m in my sweats right now because I’m on court every day with our students. I’m helping run yoga, fitness, I’m in the class room, and to be an executive director and to be able to be part of that front line programming staff is really unique.
That’s just to show the point that, by thinking a little bit more creatively about how we can have mixed uses in our space, it’s really freed us up to be this really efficient organization that spends all of our time working on our youth and not so much having to worry about covering our administrative and facility expenses.
Lisa Belisle: It sounds like you’ve really been able to tap into a variety of different interests that you hold. You’re doing some coaching, some teaching, some fundraising, some business work, some directorial duties, many, I’m guessing. When you were going through high school and college, did you have a sense that you would have so many different interests that you’d be able to tap into?
Barrett T.: No. I’ve always been a really passionate person and gotten really excited about working on projects and working in teams. When I was working on those economic problem sets, I promise you I didn’t have most of the answers. In fact, I had very little, but I was the person in the team that knew where the different skills lied around me, and was able to smile and have a group take me in and work on a problem set and keep morale high, and learn as I was going, too.
When I translated that into working on a project, it was really about the strengths of the people around me. I said, “Hey, I’m going to bring the smile. I’m going to bring the work ethic, but I don’t know anything about real estate taxes or zoning or fiduciary responsibilities.” The community really rallied behind the project and we were able to put an amazing team in place. Yeah, I guess I was the conductor that was just saying thank you a lot and making the requests that had to be made and following up and keeping everybody on task together.
Lisa Belisle: You recently bought a condo here in Portland and you said that it’s important to not only have this place that you’re going to move into but also it’s important to have a place where you can practice your faith.
Barrett T.: Oh, yeah. That’s funny that you interpret it that way. It’s actually very true. The synagogue I was referring to is the Shaarey Tphiloh Synagogue, which is the new home of Portland Community Squash. Where I practice my faith is the back cathedral at St. Luke’s Church on state street, so my faith doesn’t exactly align with the history of the building, but it’s the same God. I suppose Jesus is a little bit of a different conversation when looking at Judaism and Christianity, but yeah, these … My faith, too, is also in community, as well.
That synagogue at 66th Noyes Street has been a place for celebration and mourning and faith for more than 50 years, since 1955, and the same is true for every church, synagogue and mosque and other communal faith space in Portland. It’s really sad. I saw on Instagram that another synagogue had a de-consecration ceremony coming up. Those places used to be where community collected, and we have fewer and fewer of those spaces now. We’re just really thankful that Portland Community Squash, we could preserve that space as a place that would be a place of celebration and support and community.
To me, that’s just as influential as making it to a Sunday service once in a while at St. Luke’s.
Lisa Belisle: You’re actively practicing what you believe in.
Barrett T.: Yeah, yeah. In every aspect of my life right now. I feel very fortunate.
Lisa Belisle: What would you like to see happen with Portland Community Squash in the next 10 years?
Barrett T.: I can see the potential energy in the space as we have these amazing stories of students that have taken themselves all the way through adolescence. My mentors, my high school squash coach, we just celebrated his 100th birthday party, so 72 years of working with youth, and you couldn’t imagine a better end of life. He had James Taylor sing a song for him because he used to teach James Taylor when he was a kid, and Deval Patrick was there, the governor of Massachusetts. It’s not that it’s the remarkable students, necessarily, that make it special, but just the outpour and the amount of people that you can support through your life time.
I’m just so excited to try to create this culture that’s so positive in student’s lives, to see them come through, and then the nice thing about having an adult membership, too, is that hopefully they’ll come back to Portland, make their own stamp on Portland, and be members of Portland Community Squash, and be able to see the next generations of kids come through, as well.
It’s really a life long offering that we’re offering to our community. I’m just excited to be in a position where I can watch generations of people come through that program.
Lisa Belisle: I’ve been speaking with Barrett Takesian who opened the community center at Portland Community Squash in January of 1017. He currently serves as the president and executive director. Thank you so much for the work that you’re doing and thanks for coming in.
Barrett T.: Thank you for having me.
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Lisa Belisle: Vanessa Seder is a chef, food stylist, recipe developer, teacher, author, and founding member of Relish and Co, a Portland-based culinary design collaborative. Her new cookbook, Secret Sauces, was published in the autumn of 2017. Thanks for coming in.
Vanessa Seder: Thanks for having me.
Lisa Belisle: I do love this book. It’s just such a beautiful product. It makes me feel inspired to start making some sauces.
Vanessa Seder: Oh, that’s wonderful. I’m so happy you like it. One of our goals in writing and creating this book was that it would be a book that you could give as a gift if you wanted to, and it’s coming out around the holiday, so it’s good timing for that. Also, the size of it, we didn’t want it to be too heavy and thick and big. You know how some cookbooks, you open, and they kind of pillow out and then they close on you. We wanted this book to be really, really tangible so that people actually cook from it.
Lisa Belisle: I can see that that would happen, even as I’m opening up the book itself I can tell that it would lay pretty flat which is … I know it’s a strange thing to worry about but, I can see this being on a counter and using it as a reference, and I guess, being inspired by it.
Vanessa Seder: Yeah, we thought about every little thing, component, for this book, and from the visuals to just how it felt in your hand.
Lisa Belisle: As someone who has been in the food world for quite a while, why was it that sauces were so interesting to you?
Vanessa Seder: Wow, I mean, cookbooks run the culinary gamut. There’s so many cookbooks out there. What happened is this book came to us. It came to our company Relish and Co. An editor we had worked with through Rissole on a different book had just started working at Kyle Books and he came to us with a blank slate. Just create a cookbook, so we really thought about it and one thing that I remembered from culinary school, one of the first things you learn is all about classic sauces, French sauces.
The culinary school I went to which was in New York City is the Institute of Culinary Education. It was classic French technique, and sauces can really transform any kind of a dish. They can be very simple. They can also be very complex and take a long time to make, but that’s kind of part of the secret. You can have your every day average meal, but if you have some incredible sauces and you make a few and you keep them around for a week, even, some of these will last for a week or two weeks, but they are very fresh. They’re not going to last forever, they really can transform even a chicken breast or some vegetables.
The way it came about was through thinking about that as a basis of what you can do with sauces, and traditionally how they’re used in classic techniques, and then trying to modernize the sauces and coming up with featured specific recipes to use the sauces with. I did a lot of research and I noticed that a lot of cookbooks … There are other sauce cookbooks out there, of course. This isn’t the only one, but what makes this one a little bit different is that you start with your sauce and then each recipe has a specific recipe that corresponds with the sauce.
If you’d like to, you can make the sauce and make the recipe, plus, we’re calling them extra credit ideas. They’re really specific ideas for how to use each sauce, so you’re not just left making a sauce, “What do I do with it?”
Lisa Belisle: Have you found that people maybe aren’t as used to spending time on sauces as they once were?
Vanessa Seder: Definitely, I think. There are so many sauces you can just simply buy in the supermarket, so why not just buy those? I guess, putting in a little bit of extra time, you know what you’re getting. A lot of the sauces in this book, I kind of specifically stay away from the rue-based classic sauces. These are modern and a lot of them are made with really fresh ingredients.
Like I said before, they’re not going to last that long but the difference is there’s no preservative. There are some interesting new sauces in here that I encourage people to try, and I tried to make everything incredibly tangible so that people would really cook from the book. I think there’s a lot of books out there that, they’re wonderful but they’re so complicated.
People don’t have the time. I want people to try making sauces and to expand their palettes. It’s important to me.
Lisa Belisle: What are some of your favorites?
Vanessa Seder: There’s so many. Let me go through the book here. I love sweets, so … Okay, this is going to sound a little weird, but one of the recipes is for this dish called, it’s Secret Ingredient Caramel, and it actually has a little bit of soy sauce and miso in it. I know, it sounds bizarre, but what those do … Salt, if you think of salt as not just salty but a flavor enhancer, it adds flavor to the caramel.
You know how people are into salted caramel? It does the same thing. The miso in it gives it a sense of umami. Have you heard of umami before?
Lisa Belisle: Yes.
Vanessa Seder: You really get that plus the flavor of caramel, so it’s a lot of flavor, but it’s also subtle at the same time, and it really works. Savory … I have a sauce that I really love and this is one of the first sauces that came to me for the book. It’s a purple basil and almond smash, and it’s just a very fresh … It’s not a pesto. It doesn’t have garlic or Parmesan like a pesto, but it just has the flavors of almond and lemon and basil, and it’s a really great way to use all that wonderful, fresh summer basil when you can get it.
That is paired with a blueberry Caprese sandwich, which is with prosciutto and Burrata cheese and more basil and blueberries, and micro greens, and then you just drizzle some of that sauce over the top. It’s like an opened face sandwich. It’s a very summery-flavored sandwich. There’s a lot that I love. I wrote the book, so … Avocado green goddess, a lot of these are based on my upbringing in Los Angeles.
I’m a third generation Los Angelino, and if you haven’t been, maybe you don’t think of it as a place where there’s a lot of culture. There actually is. It’s not European. It’s Hispanic and Asian, is the background there, so I grew up eating tons of incredible Mexican food and really interesting Asian dishes.
That cuisine has always been a part of who I am as a chef today. I like to incorporate those flavors into what I cook. This book has a very international based focus. There are sauces from all over the world in this book, and I really feel like food and cooking bring people together, and it’s a way to expand people’s palettes and what they … They can try new dishes and new sauces and they’re tangible in this book.
Lisa Belisle: Do you think that it is helpful that, for example, most people have had a curry sauce by now. Most people have had a pesto sauce by now, without even really thinking, “Oh, these came from other parts of the world.” Do you think that it’s helpful to have that common language of other cultures to start with?
Vanessa Seder: I think so, definitely. There’s a Thai green curry in the book, so not all the sauces are that outlandish or out there, but it’s my own take on them and it’s what I would recommend putting in it. I think, we live here in Portland … I’ve lived here since 2011, and it really is a foodie town, and more and more, a foodie town. We’re so lucky. It expands beyond lobster and blueberry pie and there’s just some fabulous restaurants here.
I just feel like food is becoming more and more important in our culture in this country anyway. I think, more and more people are willing to try dishes that maybe they wouldn’t have tried 10 years ago, so hopefully they’ll cook from this book. That’s my goal, is that they actually cook from it, it’s not just a table book.
Lisa Belisle: I noticed that one of the recipes you had in there was for mayonnaise.
Vanessa Seder: Yes.
Lisa Belisle: Which is kind of funny, because I know it’s something that we can make, I’ve made it before, but most of us just think of, I guess, Hellman’s.
Vanessa Seder: Hellman’s, that’s true. You can always use Hellman’s, it’s great. There’s nothing wrong with Hellman’s, but if you’ve made your own Mayonnaise, it just elevates it. The way this book works, too, is each chapter starts with a modernized version of the mother sauces. Have you heard of the mother sauces before?
Lisa Belisle: I have not.
Vanessa Seder: In classic French technique, you learn about the mother sauces which consist of Bechamel, Espanol, tomato, Hollandaise, Demi glace, Veloute. The concept of the mother sauces is you start with that sauce, you make the sauce, and then they kind of tangent out into other sauces.
For example, the Bechamel, which his a rue mixed with milk, you add cheese to that and that becomes a Mornay sauce. What is that the base of? Macaroni and cheese, right?
Lisa Belisle: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Vanessa Seder: What I did was I modernized the mother sauces. You have your mayo, and that’s in the creamy chapter, but then you can also transform that into [inaudible 00:39:19] and sesame mayo which is kind of like a Korean flavor, smoky tomato, miso and soy, or lemon and herb. Then, you could use those on sushi, a hamburger … I have drizzled the miso and soy mayo over blanched asparagus spears. Serve the lemon and herb with fried seafood or swipe artichoke leaves through it.
It’s really specific. Each chapter has its own new mother sauce, plus, you get 65 recipes plus 65 sauce recipes. That’s 130 recipes plus all the mother sauce recipes. You get a lot of sauces in here, basically.
Lisa Belisle: Why do you call it the Secret Sauce?
Vanessa Seder: Why is it a secret? Because, you can simply transform anything bland or typical into something extraordinary through the use of a sauce. People don’t think of it that way, but, simply by making a few sauces … You could have, let’s say, a chicken breast or a pork tenderloin and you put different sauces on it that go with it. Three different sauces, you have three different pork tenderloins. It’s as simple as that. Sauces can be very simple. They can also be complicated, but the secret is that you can quickly make a sauce and completely transform your dish.
Lisa Belisle: How did you decide to go to culinary school?
Vanessa Seder: I guess it’s a long story, but I never grew up with home economic classes. Growing up in Los Angeles, I went to a small, private school for the arts and sciences, and that was just never an option, but cooking was something I always did, and I’ve always been very visual and into crafts and cooking.
I moved to New York after college. I went to school in Boston, and I just found myself cooking all the time, just to deal with moving to New York, because it’s kind of an intense place. I guess the first thing I noticed is I couldn’t see the horizon, and I was so used to seeing the horizon, so it took me a while to deal with that, but I found my calm, my calm place, through cooking, and I also had just moved in with my boyfriend who’s now my husband.
It was a way of just communicating my love for him and for us and making friends, and I just always have loved food. I love trying to get people to try new things, and I just would talk about it all the time, to the point where people were sick of it, and my friends and family, they just said, “Why don’t you go to culinary school?”
It was at the coaxing of everybody that I finally did it, and it was the best decision I made. I went in 2003, which was an interesting time because it was a couple years after 9/11. We were there for 9/11, and so what came out of that horrible, horrible day was that people started to really question their lives and how they want to use their time, and what their passions are.
When I was in culinary school, there were a lot of people there that were kind of in that phase. They were reexamining their lives, and some had been in the financial industry, some had been writers, everybody. We all came together and we cooked and that’s how I ended up there. It was just such a fabulous experience. I was so sad when it ended, truly.
Lisa Belisle: It sounds like it was really a way to reground yourself in some ways.
Vanessa Seder: Completely, yeah. I think, because it was just a genuine interest and passion for me, I think it’s just kind of grown into this career. When I was in culinary school, I staged at restaurants, and staging means you cook for free. You just volunteer your services and they give you the bottom tasks, so chopping mushrooms for stock or carrying things up and down stairs, trying not to trip in your clogs. Doing that, I got a sense of the world of working in restaurants and I worked for some caterers, and I just realized, I don’t know if, long term, that’s for me.
I worked for a family for two and a half years as a personal chef. I catered their parties, I came up with meal planning for them. I didn’t serve them. I would just make the food and I would leave it, and then I started assisting this food stylist on this television show and I would get up at the crack of dawn and we would lug everything into the studio and set up, and it was a live studio audience.
I just loved the challenge of keeping the food looking fresh and beautiful for the set, and also working with different chefs and getting to meet different people. It was really exciting for me, so I kind of decided to go in that direction, and then I worked at the Food Network. That was more on the production side, on Iron Chef America and Emeril Live, and then I started testing recipes for Atkin’s, and then I just kind of fell into the editorial side of things.
I think it really suits me. I spent years, also, assisting food stylists. That’s really the only way to learn food styling. It sounds more glamorous than it is. It’s actually very hard work and you have a lot of pressure to produce. That’s kind of how I ended up doing all these crazy things.
Lisa Belisle: I noticed when I was paging through that this truly is a beautiful book.
Vanessa Seder: Thank you.
Lisa Belisle: There’s a sense of art around the dishes, and I know that you were very involved in all of it, really.
Vanessa Seder: Yes, yes. Like I said, all they gave us was, “Create a book,” so, what do you do with that? First, what we did was we met, the three of us, and we kind of talked about what we wanted and what the aesthetic would be, and the three of us always work very well together. We bring different elements to the table, and actually it was Stacey the photographer who … She first thought of … She made a couple salad dressings.
She and her husband are excellent cooks and they’re mostly vegetarians, and she was talking about having a few sauces and keeping them around and using them in different ways. It kind of grew out of that idea, and then I thought about my culinary school training and just how important sauces are.
Yeah, that’s kind of how it came about. It was such a pleasure to work on. I was talking to you before we started here, about the short time frame of doing everything, and we actually shot this in the winter, which was another challenge, because we had to gather out of season, summery looking vegetables in January, and we also mostly shoot with natural light.
In the winter, you have these very short days, so we were working with a lot of challenges to deliver this book, but we’re all very happy with how it turned out. Some of the pages do end up looking pretty summery, so there’s that.
Once I got started … It was a big project, but once I kind of got into it and got rhythm going, I got so much pleasure out of creating these recipes and just being with myself in the kitchen and just letting my creativity go. You don’t usually get that as a recipe developer. You’re developing for somebody else, dietary constraints, what they want to work with, so to just have that freedom was just wonderful.
Lisa Belisle: The book is dedicated to your miracle daughter, Conscious.
Vanessa Seder: Yes.
Lisa Belisle: How old is she?
Vanessa Seder: She’s five.
Lisa Belisle: How does she feel about all of your time in the kitchen? Does she join in?
Vanessa Seder: I’ve decided I’m going to teach her how to use a knife soon. There’s these kits for children that have safe knives. She loves to cook with me. In terms of eating, she’s the most picky eater … The irony. I was never a picky eater. I didn’t think it was going to be an issue, so how to deal with it, but she does love to cook with me, so it’s our daughter, of course. We love her so much.
Lisa Belisle: Does she cook with you but not eat what she cooks?
Vanessa Seder: Yeah, basically.
Lisa Belisle: She’s able to appreciate all of this on some level.
Vanessa Seder: On some level. I think, writing the book was a little hard though because I had to hire a lot of sitters, and sitter time, and it was time away from her. As her mom, of course she’s my priority, so I had to balance everything as a mom, and try to make it work. That was another level of challenge to these projects. It’s the age old question of work, family life balance, so definitely there were days when she wanted my love and attention and I gave her as much as I possibly could, but it’s just a balance.
Lisa Belisle: I think what you’re saying is that you got so much enjoyment out of it that it probably translated into just having a happier life in general even though it was busier.
Vanessa Seder: It was, it was, but it was also around the holidays and I was doing a lot of writing, too, so at least she had Christmas to fall back on. There were weeks when she had vacation from school and those were really challenging weeks because I needed that time to get through this project, so it was getting a lot of help from family and friends to help watch her and take care of her, but we can all relate to those days, right?
Lisa Belisle: Absolutely, yeah, anybody who has kids.
Vanessa Seder: Yes.
Lisa Belisle: How did you end up in Portland?
Vanessa Seder: That’s a great question. We lived in Carol Gardens, Brooklyn, for 11 years. It was just time. I think we missed having nature nearby. I am a city girl, but, growing up in Los Angeles there was always hiking and ocean available. Not so much in New York City, and we were just really burnt out. We had opposite schedules. We never ate dinner together. I missed those things.
Now we do. It’s great. We’re all together at night. We get to go hiking when we want to. We get to raise our daughter here in this beautiful place and I’d never lived in such a small city and I absolutely love it. I think it really suits me more than large cities.
We moved here and I really felt at home. We’ve been coming here a long time because my brother and sister in law live here, and luckily, they live down the street from us now, so it’s just nice to have some family closer, too.
We’ve met such wonderful friends. I think, what keeps us here is the beauty of Maine. I’ll be honest, I’m not a huge fan of winter. Did not grow up with winter and I don’t ski, and I don’t like being cold, but it’s temporary and the summers and the spring and the autumn make up for it, and the people. We’ve met such wonderful people here, and that’s important to me.
You can be digging through a trash can, but if you’re with the right person, that’s what matters, maybe on some level, but we absolutely love it. There’s not a day when … We just sit on our front porch and we look out at the stars, which you can’t see in New York City, which here you can, and we just feel so blessed that we have this life. We’re so happy.
Lisa Belisle: The work that you do with Relish and Co, how’s that going?
Vanessa Seder: That’s great. We work with national and local companies. We just finished doing some work with Pulp and Wire, which is another company here in town, for Barney Butter, so that was great. We found each other working on another cookbook. It was called Real Maine Food. I did the food styling and I actually ghost wrote some recipes for it, and we had talked for a while, the three of us, or more like joked about how do we come together and keep this going. Finally, we just said, “Hey, let’s do this. Let’s come together and form a little company,” so we worked very hard at having it come together and then we finally came out with it.
It took about nine months of secretly planning this. We actually have studio in Cape Elizabeth, now, and our prop collection is forever growing. We have a large prop collection and we shoot out of our studio. We mostly shoot daylight. We have a kitchen in our studio so I can develop and test recipes there if needed, so it’s a wonderful little space. Yeah, we’re doing great.
Lisa Belisle: I encourage people to buy your book and try the recipes in it. I think I’m inspired to do this. I’m loving the watermelon radish on the front cover here, and I’m really kind of amazed that, when I think about sauces, that must have been an interesting … You can’t just put pictures of bowls full of sauce. You got to find some way to actually visually represent, but I’m pretty amazed that you guys have done such a nice job with this, really.
Vanessa Seder: Yeah. We were very organized and we knew how many photos we would have to put in the book and how many pages the book was going to be ahead of time. We kind of broke down how many jars of sauce we actually wanted to show in the book, and then we wanted to show pictures of the recipes that go with each sauce. I think, just, sauce drizzled on something can be, just beautiful, absolutely beautiful, if it’s done the right way.
Also, in the book there’s ingredient shots too, where we just have some of the ingredients out so you can kind of see what you’ll be playing with, but I tried to keep, just in general in the book, I tried to keep the ingredients as accessible as possible.
If there’s any ingredients that are hard to find I give an alternative suggestion for something else you could use in its place, but I just wanted to keep this book incredibly tangible and easy to use. That was the goal. That’s the ultimate goal, and I teach every month and that’s kind of my motto when I teach, as well. I like to expand people’s palettes but also have it be tangible so people actually will cook the stuff at home for their families and friends.
Cooking is such an important skill. It actually makes me sad when I hear people have no interest in it, because you’re feeding yourself. You’re feeding your family. It’s super important. It’s not a talent, it’s like a life skill, and you’re never too early to start.
Lisa Belisle: I agree, I agree.
Vanessa Seder: Oh, good.
Lisa Belisle: I’ve been speaking with Vanessa Seeder who is a chef, food stylist, recipe developer, teacher, author, and founding member of Relish and Co, a Portland-based culinary design collaborative. Her new cookbook, Secret Sauces, was published in the fall of 2017. Congratulations on this beautiful book.
Vanessa Seder: Thank you so much.
Lisa Belisle: I hope people go out and buy one for themselves.
Vanessa Seder: I hope so, too. The holidays are around the corner.
Lisa Belisle: You’ve been listening to Love Maine Radio, show number 325. Our guests have included Barrett Takesian and Vanessa Seder. For more information on our guests and extended interviews, visit lovemaineradio.com. Love Maine Radio is downloadable for free on iTunes.
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Speaker 1: Love Maine Radio is brought to you by Maine Magazine, Aristelle, Portland Art Gallery, and Art Collector Maine. Audio production and original music are by Spencer Albee. Our editorial producers are Paul Koenig and Brittany Cost. Our assistant producer is Shelbi Wassick. Our community development manager is Casey Lovejoy, and our executive producers are Kevin Thomas, Rebecca Falzano, and Dr. Lisa Belisle.
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