Sharri Harmel: Hello everyone and welcome to the Extraordinary Women Podcast, and this is episode 107. Well, today I am chatting with Kelly Djalali. Kelly has her own food blog called Djalali Cooks, but she is also the fashion and food contributor to the very successful Style at a Certain Age created and run by Kelly’s mother-in-law, Beth Djalali.

I did a podcast with Beth a while ago, so check that out too. Well, Kelly and I talked about food. It was so fun to chat with a woman whose cooking expertise grew out of working in restaurants and, and really taught herself how to stretch out leftovers in wonderfully tasty ways. Perfect. Whether you’re cooking for one or a family, Kelly is incredibly talented.

How do I know? I have tried many of her yummy, yummy recipes. Everything is using the fresh, freshest, cleanest of ingredients, which fits perfectly for my lifestyle and yours. Try out the baked feta with tomatoes and herbs, which I finished right before our conversation. And now, before you run out and start planning your dinner, let’s get started.

Sharri Harmel: Hi, Kelly. Good to see you. 

Kelly Djalali: Hi, Sharri. It’s good to see you too. Thank you so much for having me. Oh gosh. 

Sharri Harmel: It’s just a pleasure and actually I have cooked some of your recipes. The, I think it was the feta. The feta with tomatoes and herbs was absolutely fantastic. And yeah, we chose to put it on crackers and things like that. It was just, it was yummy and other things too. And everyone looks on Kelly’s Website because she’s got something about pastas, that six pastas or something. And so the next time I’m going off to Paris, and the next one that’s on my list is the, uh, what is it? Broccoli and Panta?

Kelly Djalali: Lord. We, we do a lot of pasta. 

Sharri Harmel: Well, tell us, you know, you’re this food blogger, but you’ve had a very interesting career path. It’s been all over the place. I mean, your degrees, as I understand it in graphic design, you’ve been in advertising in the tech space. Tell us a little bit, you know, where you’ve been and how food stuck around.

Kelly Djalali: Yeah, you’re right. My career has been definitely all over the place and I’ve kind of taken life sort of as it comes, you know, opportunities I suppose, which has led me down a lot of different paths. But, you know, interestingly, all of those skill sets that I learned along the way, all form to you, help me form who I am and how I operate and, and how I do my work. So when I graduated high school, restaurant work was what I did for many years, and I guess I was probably around 23 or so years old, and I was married at the time. and my ex-husband and I decided to drop everything in San Francisco and move to Alaska. Yeah, so we did this kind of homestead adventure for a few years, and it wasn’t until I came back to San Francisco in around 2003 that I actually got a job that kind of led me down the path towards advertising. I was working as a project manager at a large format printing company in the city, and it was one of those opportunities that came about in a really strange way because I was a nanny for a family who owned this company, and after working for them for about a year, they offered me a job as a project manager and I was adventurous. And so I took it and that was a really interesting learning experience. It was really cool because it was in large format printing. There’s a lot of art based, you know, design aspects to it, so there was a lot of creativity. There was the nuts and bolts of actually project managing and actually learning what large formatting printing is all about. But sure, getting to work with clients and stuff was really fun for me and I really enjoyed collaborating with them on projects and making their stuff, you know, giant and on display. It was a lot of fun and that led me to advertising. I moved back to Alaska in 2006. And when I moved back to Alaska, I was seeking out advertising agency work with my project management background. I thought working with clients would be a really, you know, interesting endeavor. And so that led me down that path. And Alaska was a really great place to embark on a career in advertising when I didn’t have any experience in advertising. Yeah, the market is really small there, you know, so it’s, I don’t know. I suppose it’s a newcomer, it’s a lot less intimidating, the ability to kind of bootstrap and work your way up the ladder in an agency was, a lot easier to approach in that area. So after I was at the agency for a while as an account manager, I wanted to be on the design side of things and that’s finally when I went back to college. 

Sharri Harmel: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And got your degree.

Kelly Djalali: Yeah, I did. Yeah. And I, I moved to St. Louis, Missouri for that. And when I came out of school, I was doing freelance design work for a while. 

Sharri Harmel: Okay. Were you cooking through all this? How, where was food in your life during this, this time period?

Kelly Djalali: So, prior to my first move to Alaska in 2000, I was all restaurant all the time, you know, various cooking jobs and things. When I lived in Alaska, I did a little bit of cooking here and there. I worked at a bakery for a while. I worked at a pizzeria for a while, and then I didn’t do much cooking at all when I was, you know, kind of finding my feet and advertising and everything. And it wasn’t until I moved back or when I went to St. Louis for school that I got a kind of a summertime job working at a Woodfired oven Pizzeria that happened to be in an Airstream trailer. It was like a food trough. And yeah, that was really fun and exciting. 

Kelly Djalali: Although I can’t say that that working in front of an open fire in St. Louis Summer was, you know, always great. But it was a lot of fun, and we really made a go of it and had a great time. It was a good summer job for me, and it kind of brought me back to cooking. So then, you know, when I went on to doing freelance work and stuff, cooking, just, you know, I would just cook for myself but wasn’t really doing anything special with it. And it took me a long time to find my way back to cooking actually. You know, I was always cooking for myself at home or whatever, but the jobs that I was doing never had, I never had a schedule that allowed me to really focus on cooking. So it took me a while to get back to it, but I did eventually move back to San Francisco in 2013. And started working in tech marketing and that’s when I really started to do a lot more experimental cooking and just kind of fun cooking cause I was living by myself and I would pack my lunch for work every day, you know, so I would do like meal prep on Sundays and have my little bento boxes that I would create for the week and it kind of sparked my energy again for cooking and making time for it really.

Sharri Harmel: And that is all you bring up. What I think, because I live alone, it is all totally in many ways untouched market, which is how to cook for a solo. You know, because so many things are, you know, recipes for six and even four, and it’s like, maybe you can eat it two days in the week, but you’re not going to eat it for three or four days you know, So it’s really, it’s, it’s a whole different kind of cooking. 

Kelly Djalali: I mean, it is tough and it’s also, I think the toughest part about it actually is having the inspiration to make the effort to do it right. Like, it’s really interesting if I’m, if I’m on my own, you know, now I’m, I’m married and so I cook for, for two, but you know, when I was on my own and, and I would meal prep my lunches for the week, that was really the only meal that I you know, really putting a lot of energy and effort into when I would get home from work, you know, it was cheese and crackers, things like that.  So I do think that there is a lack of motivation that comes from lack of inspiration for cooking for one. And I think that’s where people tend to kind of just, I’m just not gonna bother you know, just do this other thing.

Sharri Harmel: Okay, so you were freelancing, you made your lunches, but food still on the horizon, a food career, right? Yeah. 

Kelly Djalali: Yeah. I gotta say that tech marketing really took it out of me. Working in the corporate environment was, it was tough work. I was back in the large format printing world, and I was working as a contractor at Apple, and it was not only hard work, but it was long, long hours, you know, and it just over years took it out me completely. And after my husband and I got married, we had these ideas of moving out of the Bay Area and all of these kind of like future sort of, you know, fantasies and planning kind of made me think a little bit more, well, if I did leave tech in the Bay Area, you know, what would I do? And that’s when the cooking thing kind of reared its head and came back in a big way. And even when we finally did leave the Bay and we moved to Athens, Georgia, it did take me still even then a little while to kind of figure out how and what I wanted to do with the cooking. You know, we had these grand ideas of maybe opening a restaurant or, you know, doing something like that, like a really long term, like trying to think I in those terms. And then, fortunately for me, Alex’s mom, Beth Djalali has Style at a Certain Age, and I had been doing a little bit of work here and there long distance for her, and she invited me to start a Saturday column called Kelly’s Kitchen, and that’s really what sparked the blogging for cooking.

Sharri Harmel: Yeah, but that’s wonderful because it was a win-win. I followed your mother-in-law for a long time, Beth, and I think her actual style at a certain age is fantastic, but the food entry is really a wonderful addition to what she’s offering, as well as it gave you the opportunity to get started, which it was a win-win for both of you, so absolutely. You mentioned something in our pre-call notes about that having that connection. You know, here’s your mother-in-law who runs a very, very successful blog you know, now she’s moved into YouTube. What did you, what did you learn from her that you maybe wouldn’t have learned if, or would’ve taken you a while to learn it if you had not had that mother-in-law?

Kelly Djalali: Yeah, that’s a good question. Cause honestly the answer is basically everything. Like I mentioned, I had been doing some you know, helping Beth out because she was growing very quickly in a very short period of time and we were still living in California and we would come to visit and she asked me at one point if I would help her, you know, with her, I think it was, we started with the email newsletter. And so from a distance I could kind of poke around and see what the ins and outs were with some of that kind of. Secondary stuff, like not so much with the reaching out and collaborating with brands and things like that, but just kind of the more day to day types of things that I could kind of pick up and run with. And so it started slow, which was good. It was baby steps. It kind of gave me a really nice entry into figuring out what this was all about and she’s just been, you know, I think in, in your podcast whether her, she mentioned that when she started, like she didn’t know anything either, and she’s still, you know, working to figure it all out you know, every day there’s something new and you’re learning how to use the tools available and creating new ones where there aren’t any. And so basically like really being able to kind of do what she does and see what she does and get in there and do it myself has been the best learning opportunity to get to do it. And honestly, without that, I wouldn’t even have known as she, when she first started, I wouldn’t even have known how to start. Honestly, I wasn’t on social media and frankly aside from buying a new phone every year, I’m, I’m a very late adopter to digital, you know, even, even being a graphic designer, like, you know. I’m still, you know, figuring a lot of it out but having Beth there, not only to inspire and guide, but also kind of prod me into doing things that I might have felt nervous or, you know, scared to do or, you know, things like that. She’s, seeing her do it in real time has been a, a really valuable lesson too.

Sharri Harmel: Wonderful gift. So if you were going to, if you were having a conversation with a group of women that are thinking of starting a blog now let’s back up, because some people have said that blogs are dead and you know, you hear that every once in a while, and usually it’s somebody that doesn’t have a blog that says that. But do you feel blogs are a great way to connect and grow? Basically an audience or follow, I hate the word followers, but something, you know, people who like what it is that you’re doing and if so, what are the things that a woman should think about before she actually, you know, starts blogging? What’s the process that she needs to have in place so it’s successful? 

Kelly Djalali: Sure. Well, I would say, maybe people feel like blogs are dying or dead because they don’t want to take the time to read them. I find that unfortunate because as we’ve all heard of and seen on social media, you can get canceled off of Instagram, you can get hacked, you can get, you know, your account can get taken over by robots. I think big risk to put all of your handmade homemade content on a platform singularly for one, but then also a platform that could get taken away from you. So what I, you know, a big thing I learned from Beth that I truly believe in is a blog is a really great way to own all of your creative property. No one can take that away from me. You know, if something were to get hacked and my account were to get shut down on Instagram and that was my only avenue for, for my business, I would be really up a creek because there’s no, you know, cuz you can’t get ahold of anybody at social media companies to try to restore something that was done incorrectly and that’s a big fear of mine. Like if, if at least now, if something like that were to go away, I would have my intellectual property spared on my blog. And that’s, that’s I think a very important first step is to me, the social media is ancillary to something like a blog where you have a digital platform that you can engage with people, you know, over distance and time and space, but all of that is contained within an area that you can own exclusively. That’s very important. And I would say to anybody who wants to start an online presence, I would always say Start, please start a blog first. And then branch out from there and Beth would say the same thing to anybody and everybody because she has had the unfortunate situation of having her Facebook hacked. And, you know, there was, I can’t remember how long it was, maybe a few weeks where she, you know, her hands were tied cuz we couldn’t resolve the problem with Facebook. So when your entire livelihood is based on something that can be taken away from you for no good reason and you. Restore it or resolve it, you know?

Sharri Harmel: Yeah, yeah. There you are. Yeah. That’s rough. So then, then flip to the that’s actually fabulous advice because I think in this day and age it is so easy. Especially for younger people, honestly, who are maybe much more engaged on social media, to think that that is where I become well known and eventually become quote unquote an influencer or whatever. But yet, it’s really interesting to me that you, you have said, but you don’t own those platforms. And there, and you don’t have any emails, right? So you have no, absolutely no way to contact who you view as your followers, you know? Yeah. It’s really interesting. 

Kelly Djalali: Yeah, it is. It is. And you know, it’s, And I don’t. The social media platforms exist and they’re very useful and helpful as tools to widen your audience and help create a community. But I’ve noticed from my blog, I’m not sure if Beth notices this with hers, but as much as I’ve tried to kind of get that community of Instagram people or Facebook people to come over to the blog, they do and they don’t, it’s a little, It’s a little bit hard to get those, those separate social media communities to engage in a way that I would prefer, which is a more like, uh, wholesome in terms of everybody is here, we’re all, you know, doing the same thing together and, and able to communicate on this one platform being the blog. So you do kind of have all your fingers in these different areas trying to, you know, maintain relationships and, and content and things like that. However, I will say, I do get a fair bit of crossover from social media to the blog, and it certainly is helpful. And those, those tools are, are wonderful ways to engage with people. So I do appreciate that they exist, but I don’t think as a smart business person, you can put all your eggs in one basket.

Sharri Harmel: Yeah. Well said. Really excellent advice. Kelly, I’m impressed. Okay. I’m pretending I’m a cook and I love food, and I have all these great recipes. People have told me I; I do a great job and I’m thinking, you know, I want to start a blog. Where do I start? How did you start? Like what? Well tell, just share your experience. 

Kelly Djalali: I have, I had a little bit of a benefit in that I have a graphic design background, so I did have some awareness of, you know, finding a blog template online and, you know, purchasing it and downloading it and being able to navigate, you know, the very sort of, Pick and play aspects of it without getting into like designing, you know, like heavy design or anything like that. So that’s, I think your first step is that if you want to start a blog, go online and find a WordPress template that you like that will work for your content and that has functionality that seems easy to use, which you can test out all of these things online, download it, and then get a WordPress account and get a hosting company and then just get it going. You can tinker around with, with a blog layout and style and even the writing. For as long as you want before making it live. So it really is super user friendly in the sense that, you know, you’re not pushing a button and all of a sudden, your whole life is out there for the world to see.

Sharri Harmel: Right, right, exactly, yeah, it’s a bit of a sandbox so you can play around. So when you started, did you, did you say, I’m going to stay in the. You know, I don’t know. I’m, I’m just making this up, like the appetizer space. I’m gonna start with that, or I’m gonna start with the main meal and then I’m going to expand because food just, and we haven’t even talked about your pizza entre, if we wanna call it that, you know, into the, and the pizza oven, which is. That was the most incredible video I’ve seen in a while. I just wanted to sit down with you and have some of that peach and mozzarella pizza. Yes, it just, oh my God, it looks so good. But where did you start? Yeah. Cause I don’t know the beginning of you, I only know where you are today. 

Kelly Djalali: Yeah. So I think, I think the, the entree into writing a, a blog column as it were on a style at a certain age. So Kelly’s Kitchen, the once a week on Saturday’s Post really gave me an opportunity to kind of figure that out. Okay. But I really did cuz she has Fridays with Oscar, which at the time was focusing more on like appetizers and cocktails and so Kelly’s kitchen was meant to be something a little bit more than cocktails and appetizers. So I kind of led with that. And, and just in terms of, of how I am in my normal day to day life, I’m not much of an entertainer, so I don’t, I don’t really have all that much requirements in my life to be making appetizers and things like that so it’s, it is really a, a like full meal based or a one dish based kind of approach that I took, and that’s really a function of who I am as a person in my day to day. I suppose if I had like pastry chef experience, I might, you know, focus on that or something. Right. But and you mentioned pizza and so since I have years of experience working in pizzerias, I decided to focus on, on pizza as like a, a regular thing that I would do every week just to have. Something that people could return to so that even if they don’t care about anything else, there’s one thing a week that maybe they are interested in, that they would return to, and, and that that is how pizza and a movie got started on Fridays. So, okay, let’s say the hypothetical cook wanted to, you know, they enjoy cooking so much and wanna share it with the world, I would say just think about the type of cooking that you love to do the best, and go with that and let it branch. And let it cover every aspect of cooking as you see fit that fits with who you are as a person, what you love about cooking and how you live your day-to-day life. Cause it’s really hard to maintain a six day a week blog. It’s hard to maintain a five day a week blog for that matter. 

Sharri Harmel: You are you five days a week? I am five to six days a week. Oh my Lord. Okay. I didn’t realize that cuz I pick and choose. So, yeah, 

Kelly Djalali: yeah, yeah. I have regular posting Sundays, Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays and sometime Saturday, so yeah, it is a, it’s a lot of work and I, I do think that if you want to have. The type of online presence that is engaging for people, you have to post regularly. And in order to do that, you do have to come up with some sort of, whether it’s, and this probably goes for fashion too, no matter what the subject is, you have to come up with an umbrella of content ideas or sort of subject matter that makes sense for your life on a day to day basis. Because in a way, this really does have to fit. With your day-to-day life like it, I can’t imagine how difficult it would be to have a persona that was so completely different from myself and then have to maintain that, you know, six days a week in an online way. I find it much easier to be authentic, to live my, live my life. We eat all the food for dinner that I make, you know, every day for the blog. Like it’s not, I’m not doing anything for show. It’s all real life that’s happening.

Sharri Harmel: But that’s a good point because sometimes we get caught up and you haven’t. But some, some of us get caught up in what is trending and therefore I’m going to kind of squeeze myself into whatever is trending. And I love that you said, it has to fit in your life and who you are and therefore, you know, and if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, but you’re still who you are. You haven’t taken on a role or as you called it, a persona that that is uncomfortable because it’s unsustainable. So yeah, exactly. Really long term it’s unsustainable. But who takes the photographs of the. Because your photographs are good. Really good. 

Kelly Djalali: Thank you. I take all the photographs myself with my iPhone.

Sharri Harmel: Oh my gosh. But what’s so great about, for all of you, you need to go on to, now you can find Kelly in two different places. You let’s tell them where they can find you cuz it’s your own website and then over at style at a certain age.

Kelly Djalali: That’s right. Yes. So Joel cooks.com is my blog, and then I appear over on style at a certain age on Saturdays which, and that, that’s really a, a roundup of recipes kind of by topic. I rarely will have like a brand-new exclusive recipe on Saturdays over there. It’s, it’s really a kind of a topic, and we then just choose several recipes from the archive to feature to showcase.

Sharri Harmel: But you, what’s so wonderful about the recipes as connected to the photographs is that you photograph, uh, the process of cooking something, which is extremely helpful. I know my daughter has used some of your recipes and she’s a very visual person, and therefore, you know, you see the many cookbooks, you see the end result, but you don’t see what do things look like along the way and am I on the right track? Or where did I go wrong? If the end result doesn’t look anything close to, what it was look like in the cookbook or whatever. And so that, that’s extremely valuable for, so for those of you that are visual people, I think that can be quiet, quite helpful. I was going to ask you something though, and it just came in and it went out. This is a, a sign of my age. 

Kelly Djalali: Well, maybe, maybe it’ll come back to you and in the, in the meantime, I can maybe just describe a little bit about, about that photographic process and what my impetus behind that is. As I, I have experienced cooking from working in restaurants. You know, I have a love for cooking. You know, it’s just been there. But, you know, one thing that has always frustrated me as a home cook is what you just mentioned, and that is seeing the end result and not having a good description of the process. Mm-hmm., uh, and whether that’s a written description or a photographic description, I would constantly be in the kitchen and be trying to follow a recipe and get partway through it. And the texture or the look of whatever I’m making doesn’t seem to be getting me to the right place. Mm-hmm., but perhaps had I known that if I just kept going at. I would get there eventually. And so I’ve scrapped tons of recipes, um, in my life. You know, just like thinking this cannot be right and then tossing it and actually perhaps it was right, but I would never have known because the recipe didn’t tell me, beware of this or look out for this, or I didn’t have a photo to show me. And so it did become, when I set out to how I was gonna format, uh, blog postings, I really wanted to. Be thorough in that aspect. I wanted to be in plain language. Have you known, the pitfalls and the things that you might encounter as you’re creating something. What I ran into when I did it, and yet I persevered and I managed to get the finished product, to have the courage to keep going when it seems like it’s all going wrong, you know, thing, things like that. I mean, sometimes things are irredeemable, like a totally burnt, you know, pizza or something like that. But, but I, I do think. One of the, the most important things that I strive for in my writing and in the photography of the, the process of, of making any dish is, is. Not only the authenticity of like what’s actually happening in the kitchen as it’s happening, but also like the, the evidence of when something looks wrong but is actually right, that that’s something that I run into a lot, especially like with pastas. In fact, just before we got on our podcast, I did a, a pasta dish that it seems all wrong until you just keep going and, and, you know, after a few more minutes of constant stirring, you know, the, the sauce turns into cream and it all becomes wonderful, and it’s just exactly what you wanted. But had you not kept going, you would’ve never known that. So stopped it. Yeah. Yeah. So those kinds of, those details are important to me, and I feel like they’re left out of a lot of. Not only, um, cookbooks, but you know, recipes as they’re written often, it’s confusing. So, so those, those things are important to me, and I try to go for that.

Sharri Harmel: Well, and what’s so interesting is the, the, the value of photographs and yet when we look, uh, I was listening to a podcast this morning actually with David Lebowitz, and he was talking with a. Cookbook editor, uh, who’s now retired, but they mentioned the incredible cost of photographs in cookbooks, and yet that’s something that you can get away with using your iPhone in a blog because it doesn’t have to be, you know, this world, but it doesn’t have to be incredibly high definition photographs or whatever. But right. They’re valuable. The value is there. So sometimes it makes more sense to go the blog route than to think I’m going to write a cookbook as an example.

Kelly Djalali: Oh, certainly. I mean, the blog, there’s like zero barrier to entry, you know? Um, putting it. If you wanna write a cookbook, you, you know, you have to not only practice and test all your recipes and shoot the, but I also mean sell your book, get, try to get it pub, try to find somebody to publish it. And even if you go to self-publishing route, you, you do need, you know, high-res photography and you probably need a food stylist. Cause not all the people that cook those dishes are styling them for photographs. So it does become kind of a large endeavor. When you really think about everything that goes into publishing hard copy things Digital photos on the iPhone is great. I mean, they come out with a better camera every year. 

Sharri Harmel: they do. Absolutely. So go to that pizza oven though because the video, You’re in the backyard. What an amazing backyard and this absolute gorgeous pizza oven that you’re, you, I mean, you’ve got everything set up. I’m telling you I was ready to invite myself over for dinner, but you said something I think in the video. That the temperature in that oven was like 750 degrees or something like that, and they’re only in there for 18 seconds or eight. I don’t know what it was. Yeah, clarify that and then share how can a woman or man for that matter, who wants to make pizzas, because those looked beautiful. This is not dominoes. This is not Whole Foods Pizzas out of the frozen foods section. These are absolutely beautiful. And also something fun to do with kids or grandkids, if, you know, you wanna just put ingredients together. You said it’s a great way of using up leftovers, which I had never, ever thought about, but how do you replicate that? So talk about that oven. I think you represent the oven company. Do you?

Kelly Djalali: I worked with them in a partnership for that video. Yeah. Moon Muni is the name the company. They, they, um, are out of Healdsburg, California. So going back to my pizza job experience, I first started working in pizza at a New York style pizzeria, and then over the years managed to work in woodfired oven pizzerias. So the oven itself, it, you know, you’re cooking at super high temperatures, so Yes, you’re right. It’s like 750 degrees or so, and the pizza’s cooked for like, you know, 60 to 90 seconds. Wow. So, So it’s fast. Yeah. Yeah. It’s very fast. You know, it took me a long time to learn how to build the fire correctly, how to attend the fire. The dough is a little bit different for, for the woodfired oven, uh, versus a home oven. So, uh, it, it takes practice and everything. But the great thing about that company, Muni, that I purchase this oven from, they have a really great cooking school at their location. They, and they offer a bunch of different types of cooking schools. They have, like, I think they have a winery also. Heal or Napa, which is just right next door, and you can, you know, go higher or low, depending on how much money you wanna spend for this cooking school. But it was a really great opportunity and my husband and I, before we were married, we went there on a date and we didn’t, we didn’t take the cooking class, but we went to a demonstration and um, and it was really cool. Like we got to see all, you know, their warehouse with the different. The different ovens that they offer. And then the rest of the afternoon they kind of teach you how to do like an appetizer, a main dish, and a dessert all in the wood oven using different tools and temperatures and, and stuff like that. It was so much fun and, and it really kind of inspired us to like, someday, you know, we’ll, we’ll buy a wood fired oven and, and, uh, and do that and, and we did. So, yeah, that’s how that came about. 

Sharri Harmel: So do you think, other than the dough, you mentioned the dough, you could replicate some of that in your own oven at home, just an average oven?

Kelly Djalali: Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s a little bit challenging because cooking a very high temperature, cooking a pizza at a very high temperature for a very quick period of time creates a different kind of reaction in the dough than happens. at a lower temperature for a longer period of time as okay. Would be the conditions in your home oven. So like with, uh, wood fired pizza or a pizza that can go in an oven that is 750 or so degrees, you’re gonna get this rapid rise of the dough. It’s gonna be a lot airier. Um, it’s gonna get a lot of like, kind of, they call it leopard spotting. So like the little dark, kind of, almost like burned looking spots on the cross. That all comes. It’s really, I, I don’t think you can achieve that in a home oven because you’re just not having the temperature as high. And I’ve found that dough wise, wetter doughs seem to work better in the woodfired oven dough that have some more moisture in them and then that helps with the puffiness of the, the dough and everything. So, it’s a, I mean, pieces that come out of a wood oven have a very different texture. Mostly it’s the textural difference and flavor from the charring that they get from the fire. But texturally, they’re very different than pizzas that come out of a home oven. Not that I, not that I dislike, I mean we eat a lot of pizza here and so I’m making pizza every week and this summer it’s mostly been in my home oven because it’s, the weather has been too terrible to, to cook outside. Lots of thunderstorms this summer here. Okay. So that’s been kind of a drag, but, but it doesn’t discourage me from making pizza at all. I feel like you can make wonderful, beautiful pizzas in your home oven with just a few tools that are maybe a little pricey on the front end. Cuz, I use a pizza steel, which is a little bit more costly than a stone, but it’s gonna last you forever. It’s like a. One time purchase, like it’s such a good piece of equipment and it replicates the kind of brick oven that you would find in a restaurant peach area, like whether it’s a woodfired oven with the bricks or even a, you know, like a regular gas fired pizza oven so that it’s, it’s fun to make pizza at home. And you’re right, it is a family activity and it’s, it’s fun to have a party and have a bunch of people over and have everybody make pizza. It is a lot of fun. It’s, it’s one of those foods that I think really kind of everybody loves it for the most part. I’ve never met a person that doesn’t like pizza, but, uh, it, of all the foods, I think it’s just one of the ones that really brings people together. And honestly, that was like, agreed. My big wish for Jolly Cooks would be able to inspire and bring people together in a way over food that is a lot more, um, approachable maybe than some other food writers and food blogs and things like that. 

Sharri Harmel: Yeah. Yeah. Do you, would you ever, and maybe you already have started this, but would you ever do live classes. You know where, where you actually teach people, some of you know hands on. You teach in your blog, you teach truly, Yeah, by the photographs and the sequence of, now it looks like this, and then I’m here and here. That’s a wonderful teaching experience. But what about you live? 

Kelly Djalali: I think that would be a lot of fun. And honestly, like this is, this is one area that I have been dragging my feet. I have to say in that I, I’ve been very, um, not good at making videos. And so I feel like if I can kind of manage to, to figure out the whole video thing, I think the idea of having live classes is the next step after that or maybe, maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s one of those steps that comes in between. But yeah, the video, the video horizon, I haven’t quiet, quite gotten there yet. 

Sharri Harmel: Yeah. Well, your mother-in-law is Beth is so,

Kelly Djalali: And she’s actually very, that’s one of those things that she prods me about is that I’ve got to get going on video.

And she’s right. I really do. But you know, it’s, it’s like I mentioned, I’m a late adopter Yeah, yeah. To certain things. And so yeah, dipping my toes into the video waters has, has been a little. I’ve just kind of kept, kept away from it a little bit, but I do recognize that in terms of growth and strategy and, and moving forward, I definitely need to, to get there and, and I will, 

Sharri Harmel: Well, I’m sure people would love it when you’re ready and you, you know, there are many kinds of entrepreneurs and there are some entrepreneurs that are like, you know, have an idea. I run with it, oh gosh, that didn’t work. I pivot. I go a different direction. I run that direction. And then there are entrepreneurs that are much more. You know, it’s like, and you may be that more, that kind. I’m going to, to expand and know everything about the blog world and then I’m going to add the video side.

Kelly Djalali: And there’s both, both are highly successful. It’s just different way of, of, of approaching, approaching Yeah. Your business to a great extent. So don’t ever apologize. Just be, be you, you know? Yeah. No, it’s. It’s definitely out there. And, and you mentioned that the, the video with Mooni that I did that experience was so much fun. My husband and I just shot that on the iPhone again. Oh, wow. And I edited, edited it in iMovie. Yeah. So it was very lo-fi, and I know how to use all of those things, those tools. And so it, it is, you know, it is a lot of fun. To do that kind of thing, but you know, yeah. I can find 101 other reasons during the day to keep me from sitting down and doing it.

Sharri Harmel: yeah, well maybe just do some out in that with that pizza. Cuz when you were throwing that pizza up in the air and twirling, you know, the pizza crust and twirling it around, I’m like, wow, that girl, she knows how to do that. Because I would never attempt that I would have to buy my pizza dough actually. But everything else I could, I could do. So yeah, as I’m sure everyone who’s on this call would say, I can do that. We talked a little bit about cookbook, but one of the things that I think is, and you can tell, you know, here I am with recipes. and these, I didn’t print ’em off just for our call today. I have a whole drawer and notebooks with the recipes? Cause I think I’m going to get organized and, but one of the things, so I was thinking about you and I’m like, I like these recipes, but would you ever do like eBooks where they’re in particular? I see you nodding your head, but particular other themes, even like the pasta, like a pasta eBook. It doesn’t have to be hard cover, but to be able to print that off or have it for those of us to travel at our fingertips. What do you think of that?

Kelly Djalali: Yes. Yeah, that’s, that’s definitely in the book. Like I say in the books, but it, it is part of our plan. That would be, that, that’s one of the next steps, next step things that, that we’ve got coming. Um, I wanted to have, and we’ve talked about, I say we, I, I mean, my husband and I have talked about, have talked about doing this since the inception of GE Cooks and I. Wanted to push it off until I had at least a year under my belt with the blog in terms of content until I had, you know, an archive that was big enough that I could pull from and actually create like you’re saying, themes like the Pasta Cookbook and the, you know, the pizza cookbook and the Dessert cookbook, you know, things like that. Mm-hmm., so it’s always been on the table for us to, to go that route. So now that the blog will be two years old in November, I do feel like I’ve got quite a bit of a of an archive that I can draw from to, to create an eBook. It would be an eBook.

Sharri Harmel: How, well, how do you get inspired because you’re fighting, you just said five, six days a week. That’s a lot of cooking. So how do you, yeah. How do you get inspired? Where do you get inspired? 

Kelly Djalali: I, well, this is one of those things that social media is actually good for. Cause I do, I do find a lot of ideas on social media. I do subscribe to a lot of magazines, so oh, I do, I do tend to peruse magazines and, and look for new ideas that way. And, and that, that’s pretty much it. Those are pretty much the two avenues looking online, perusing social media, which I consider an online resource, and then print media, so magazines, I have, you know, cookbook collections and things like that that I’ll, I’ll turn to. And I mostly, you know, I do have a lot of recipes that I have almost verbatim. Attempted a written recipe by someone else. And those in those are always interesting to me because I often find. Not problems or faults with their recipes, but I really enjoy being able to take their recipe and say, look, I’m making your thing, and then here’s a more detailed way to show people to do it. And of course I always credit whenever I, you know, recreate someone’s recipe. And I just think it’s a nice, a nice sidebar maybe to their, their recipe. And then I also have recipes that I come up with, you know, just outta my own head on my own. But yeah, it is, it is. Sometimes it does get really challenging to come up with new things to cook, uh, day after day, week after week so one of, one of the things kinds of going back to the cooking for one, or cooking for two, is leftovers. And you mentioned this just a minute ago with the pizzas, like one of my most favorite challenges ever is to reimagine leftovers. Cause I think as a single person, I did that for years and I think a lot of people in my audience are single now and they are living alone, or it’s just them and their partner. So there is, you know, not a big family to cook for. So reimagining leftovers is like, just one of my most favorite things to do.

Yeah. Cuz there’s so, there’s so many, um, there’s so many exciting kinds of things that I think people can do with leftovers that don’t even occur to them. And you can just turn leftovers into a whole new meal and it just, it, it, you know, I don’t know. I, I just think it’s wonderful cuz it feels like it’s a, a powerful, if that’s maybe too big of a word, it’s a confidence building way around the kitchen, honestly. If you’re not a very confident cook and you follow recipes to the letter and you make a dish and you’re happy with it and you’ve got these leftovers and you can just eat the same thing, of course, but if you could turn that into something else that’s equally as amazing, like you’ve just created something and that’s, that’s a really kind of confidence boosting thing in the kitchen. I always feel like, um, and I want, that’s, you know, part of the blog is, is that’s so important to me. Boosting people’s confidence in the kitchen and giving them the wherewithal and the tools to, to be able to become that confident cook to where at some point, hopefully you don’t, you almost don’t even need a recipe for certain things. Not that you’ve memorized how to do it, but that your intuition is telling you how to go about something. 

Sharri Harmel: And that’s what you mean by, because in the very beginning I think of your blog or somewhere you describe yourself as an intuitive cook. Is that right? 

Kelly Djalali: Yeah. Teaching people how to cook intuitively, I think there’s always going to be certain things out there that we’re going to absolutely need recipes for, cuz they’re complicated or there’s, you know, whatever. But I think that there’s an amount of cooking, or I’m sorry, there’s, there’s a, a, a style that you can approach cooking with, that doesn’t necessarily have to come from just years of experience cooking whether it’s at home or as a job or whatever. I think that there are just, there are a few fundamentals, like understanding how salt is working in your dish or understanding, you know, how different things can be used in combination to create other flavors, other textures, other, you know, other things about your food that, that really sort of, um, Embolden you to get creative and to experiment and try new things and I don’t think it’s easy for people, especially in today’s economy, to like willy nilly just start experimenting and being frivolous in the kitchen. I’ve never been like that, and I don’t think I ever could be like that, which is why the leftovers is like so awesome to me. But yeah. Um, but I think that there’s, there’s a way to approach cooking. From an intuitive standpoint, I think that I would really like. Help people build the confidence to, to step into, if that makes sense. No, 

Sharri Harmel: it makes beautiful sense actually. And, and then when we think of, so, so, so there’s so many prongs to it, you know, it’s the inner how to feel more confident so that it’s like, okay, I’m having that meal. That day and the next day I have the confidence I’m gonna turn it into something else. That might be just as good, if not even better. Yeah. So I feel stronger, and I’m also more connected with my food and what I’m eating, but also the amount of food that we waste in this country and throw away is whether it’s restaurants or even homes. And I’ve been guilty of this throughout my life when I had children and husband at home. You, you just couldn’t eat it anymore and so you’d throw it out. But this is, that cookbook would actually go off, fly off the shelfs, because that’s something we absolutely. Need to figure out, you know, even as a, as a country, uh, you know, a race, you know, human race, let’s figure out how to extend things and morph them into something else that’s just as delicious, but that we don’t throw it out, you know?

Kelly Djalali: It’s true, It’s true. You know, even I am really in support of like the, the local farmer’s market and mm-hmm., and we used to get CSA boxes of veggies. And as much as I wanted to support them and loved it, even the smallest box that they had was too much for us. Like, I, I couldn’t get through it, you know, and so that’s a, you know, you can always compost the veggies and stuff, and at least it’s not just going in the trash, but, but that is something that is really. Hard to stomach the, the food waste, uh, just even in a household of two people. And I realize I probably cook a lot more than most people, but being able to, to be resourceful for one thing and to use up what I’ve got in the fridge, substituting ingredients for ingredients, you know, and that’s part of the intuitive cooking that I, I hope people learn and understand from my cooking process on the blog is like just being able to kind of be nimble and to swap things when you need to use them and, and not letting food go to waste just because it’s leftover and because, yeah. I mean, after the third night of Chicken Noodle Soup, I might not, you know, wanna eat that anymore. So maybe you phrase it or maybe you give it to your neighbor. There’s, there’s a lot of ways around the food waste issue, but I do think. Inspiring Leftovers is a really easy way to just go kind of dealing with that issue. 

Sharri Harmel: Well, and it’s fun. It’s like, you know, a recipe calls for onions and yet I don’t have any onions, but I have leaks or, you know, what, how could, or I have something frozen, can, you know, frozen onions of some kind, you know? How can I, as you say, be intuitive enough to know I can swap this. because that, and that also requires confidence, you know? And but we get there. If we try it, we do get there. So It’s true. It’s true. I love that. That’s really interesting explanation for intuitive cooking, cuz I, that, that intrigued me when I read that. I thought, what does that mean? Thank you. I think that’s something we could all say. I, I want that, I wanna be considered an intuitive cook, you know? 

Kelly Djalali: Yeah. In my home. It’s a great, it’s a great feeling. I think it’s empowering. 

Sharri Harmel: Absolutely. Well, Kelly, thank you. Thank you so much for this call today. You’ve just shared. Valuable information for the, if a woman wants to start a business, you know, maybe a blog of some kind, whether it’s cooking or not. Or if someone is just loving cooking, you’re the person they need to follow. Appreciate your time, Kelly. 

Kelly Djalali: It’s really been my pleasure.

Sharri Harmel: Wow. Wasn’t that fun? Are you hungry yet? If you’re like me, you’re going to leave this podcast, find some of Kelly’s recipes and head to the grocery store. Cooking small is sometimes really difficult, but as I have said, Kelly is a genius with creating new meals with leftovers. Something that the solo cookers or small cookers, if you wanna call it that struggle with so, I took her advice. Remember I said I had started that feta and tomato and herb bake over, you know, in the oven before we had our conversation? Well, after the conversation and the next day actually I served the feta, tomato herb bakes over pasta, which was Kelly’s recommendation and had a lovely dinner. Brilliant. Brilliant. So if you want to follow Kelly, all of her information is in the show notes below. Thank you for joining us today. Until next week’s podcast, à bientôt.

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