Try These Tasty Recipes from Celebrity Chefs Who Are Also Queer Parents

I love to cook, but sometimes the thought of making dinner after I get home from work feels daunting. I’m taking inspiration, though, from these professional chefs who are also queer parents. Check out a few of their recipes, and learn more about their lives and families!

Cat Cora is best known as the first-ever female Iron Chef on Food Network’s Iron Chef America. and has hosted several other food shows. She has opened more than 18 restaurants in the U.S. and around the world, and authored three cookbooks, Cat Cora’s Kitchen: Favorite Meals for Family and Friends, Cooking From The Hip: Fast, Easy, Phenomenal Meals, and Cat Cora’s Classics with a Twist: Fresh Takes on Favorite Dishes. She’s also written a memoir, Cooking as Fast as I Can: A Chef’s Story of Food, Family and Forgiveness, about growing up in Jackson, Mississippi, surviving sexual assault, and launching her culinary career. In 2011, she wrote the children’s book A Suitcase Surprise for Mommy, about a child whose mother is going on a business trip. Inspired by her own life, the book only shows one mom, but doesn’t exclude the possibility of another parent of any gender. She is president and founder of Chefs for Humanity, a non-profit dedicated to reducing hunger worldwide by supporting humanitarian relief and promoting nutrition education. President Barack Obama awarded her The President’s Volunteer Service Award and The President’s Lifetime Achievement Award. She lives in California with her wife Nicole and their six boys.

• Her website is chock-full of recipes for things both savory and sweet—but here’s both a recipe and a video for a Greek Cinnamon Chicken Stew. It’s a favorite family recipe of hers, which both her mother and grandmother made, and an easy weeknight dish.
• If you’re watching the NFL playoffs or any other sports right now, you might also check out her “Guilt-Free Game Day Snacks.”

Yotam Ottolenghi was born in Israel but trained as a chef in the U.K., where he now runs six restaurants. He is the author of numerous cookbooks, including Ottolenghi: The Cookbook (2008), Plenty (2010), Jerusalem: A Cookbook (2012), NOPI: The Cookbook, and Ottolenghi Simple (2018). Jerusalem and NOPI have won James Beard Awards, the highest culinary recognition in the United States. In 2013, he wrote in the Guardian about coming out as a gay parent and his and his partner Karl’s path to parenthood through surrogacy.

• This week, he offered three recipes in the Guardian: Chickpea Pancakes with Mango Pickle Yogurt, Quick-cured Cod and Celeriac Fritters with Scotch Bonnet Sauce, and Spicy Berbere Ratatouille with Coconut Salsa, all gluten free. For the new decade, he says, we should take up “new ingredients, flavours, techniques and recipes.”
• And here’s his recipe for Shakshuka, a classic Mediterranean/Middle Eastern comfort food of eggs cooked in tomato sauce.

Deborah Van Trece runs the Twisted Soul Kitchen and Bar in Decatur, Georgia, after becoming widely known for her gourmet catering soul food company, Edible Art Cafe. In 2015, she appeared on NBC’s Food Fighters. Her website notes, “As much as I enjoy cooking I enjoy spending time with my wife, Lorraine and my daughter Kursten.”

• Here’s her Country Chicken Saltimbocca, a sort of chicken roll-up, with a basil cream sauce on top. It’s on the website of Big Green Egg, the grill company, but I see no reason it couldn’t also be made in a conventional oven.
• Her Smothered Chicken Meatballs over Herb Truffle Spaetzle may sound daunting, but there’s a video, too, to help you out.
• I also enjoyed a story (though not a full recipe) in Entrepreneur about her mother’s chocolate chip cookies and why Van Trece keeps a copy of this recipe at her bedside table. She writes:

As a child, I spent a lot of time with my mom in the kitchen. It was the place in our home where family gathered. I grew up in the Midwest during a time of civil unrest, in an era of segregation and racial tension. My mom taught me how to navigate this time, and how to free myself from boundaries set by others. When I eventually moved to Atlanta to pursue my restaurant career, I experienced some culture shock: I was a black, gay woman suddenly living in the South, working in an industry dominated by white men. A lot has been thrown at me, and there have been struggles. As a business owner, I’ve learned the importance of tenacity and the value of networking with others. In this diverse environment, I’ve found many systems of support and understanding.

But I also still rely often upon the lessons my mother taught me. She made me realize that anything is achievable.

Jack Monroe is a British food writer and activist known for extremely low-budget recipes. Their blog, Cooking on a Bootstrap, began under the name A Girl Called Jack as a way to share the austere recipes they created as a single parent with a young child, living below the poverty line. Now, their cookbooks include A Girl Called Jack: 100 Delicious Budget Recipes, Cooking on a Bootstrap: Over 100 Simple, Budget Recipes, and Tin Can Cook: 75 Simple Store-cupboard Recipes. The Guardian ran a long profile of Monroe in 2016 about their rise to fame and their identity as transgender and non-binary. Last year, they announced their engagement to news editor and producer Louisa Compton. (Note that while the Guardian refers to Monroe by female pronouns, Monroe has said that they use either she or they. I’ve used “they” since it’s acceptable to Monroe and I want to work on normalizing “they” in the media.)

• There are tons of recipes at their blog; ones that caught my eye were the Roasted Carrot, Chickpea & Garlic Soup, which looks full of golden deliciousness, and these Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies—because chocolate chip cookies.

I’m sure there are other queer parent chefs out there, too—and of course we can find cooking inspiration from chefs who are one or the other or neither. Sometimes, though, sharing some identities with a person can help us relate to their stories as well as their recipes, giving us inspiration for both food and life. Whatever you may glean from the chefs above, bon appetit!

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