Knife Drop: Creative Recipes Anyone Can Cook

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DiGiovanni: Especially, I admired my dad's mom — my grandmother. She would put on these six-course meals for up to 25, 30, 40 people on these big holidays, which is insane. DiGiovanni: It is interesting. It's been interesting for me also — and I'm sure [for] many people — to watch how the whole space is evolving. What do you think about all of it, the fact that TV is not fizzling away, but it's different than it used to be?

Thiessen: I know you're a man, and it's hard to understand that. But every woman would understand if they've had a child. Tip:You should always bake your bacon. It makes for a far better final product. No more stovetop bacon please, unless absolutely necessary. Thiessen: My challenges are very different cooking now for a family than they were when I was in my twenties cooking for myself or for friends or whatever. It was very, very different. I felt like I was able to laser-focus into a recipe and do pretty well with that. There's always fails of turning the corner and not paying attention, but nowadays, it's all about multitasking in the kitchen. I'm cooking dinner, but I'm still having to help my child with their homework and my husband's needing something, so my biggest challenge is making sure I get it done in time for dinner. DiGiovanni: The dough melted off the dumpling. It was horrible. We tried to make this big contraption with a big box that was a steamer, and it was going to be a 50- to 75-pound dumpling, and then it melted. DiGiovanni: If I could cook for anybody, I'd probably cook for my grandmother. I'd probably cook for my dad's mom.Thiessen: It's called "Here We Go Again." This will be, actually, my second cookbook. I haven't even gone from all that. Since the show, Ramsay has become a mentor to DiGiovanni, sharing the screen with him for cooking videos on social media and even penned the foreword of his new book.

DiGiovanni: I know we have — it sounds like — many mutual friends, and we've wanted to meet forever. As for the recipes themselves, I’m quite pleased to report that the vast majority of them look like something I’d actually like to cook and/or eat. Obviously everyone’s tastes are different so no cookbook ever manages to be 100% for anyone (except perhaps its own author), but this one is closer aligned to my tastes than most. And I particularly like a book that combines some sophisticated classy recipes with some that are more comfort food. And I have to admit, what really caught my eye is that this book even includes a recipe to make your own home-made dino nuggies. I’m pretty sure that means this is an author who knows what his audience wants. Thiessen: I have a good question for you. If you could cook for anybody, who would it be that you haven't cooked for yet? I know you've cooked for a lot of celebrities and stuff. I appreciate the scope of this cookbook, and I look forward to sharing this book with my soon-to-graduate children to have references for successful cooking later in life.Thiessen: Yeah. Well, it's where it started for me too. It was all the women — they were always in the kitchen, and I wanted to be with all the cool women in my family cooking.

Using a pastry brush, lightly coat one side of each slice of bread with mayonnaise, about 1/2 tablespoon per slice. Thiessen: Was that your first love of getting into cooking — the chore that you had to actually cook? Thiessen: I like the stories that go along with the food. You can see I have rooms of cookbooks all throughout my house; it's not just in the kitchen. I love buying cookbooks, because they're almost like coffee table books to me, to a certain degree, but also, I like reading the stories of where the food or the recipe came from. I read them like a normal book. I do know there's a lot of people out there — I know they're not all like that — but that's what cookbooks do for me.DiGiovanni: They're very fun. We recently did our ninth one. It's not out yet or anything, but that was our best planned-out one so far. We felt really good with the whole thing. It looked perfect. We were very, very happy with it. We just did our ninth one. We're definitely getting better at getting all the planning in place. DiGiovanni: It's interesting, because in a way, it's different now, right? The most recent one was probably [when] we had set up this huge project. We tried to do the Guinness World Record for the biggest dumpling. I am the type of person that will get a cookbook from the library, find 2-3 recipes I like but will never make and then return it. I’m also a person that can’t cook unless I’m following a recipe. It was a teaching to my children and also my husband, because he always had this analogy of "leftovers are gross," and I wanted to show him that they're not. You can do really cool things with leftovers. That's the gist of the book, showing how many things you can do with buttermilk, how many things you can do with the bottom of the pretzel bag. [If] there's a little bit left, you can do something with it, and I can show you how to do it.