BEVERLY HILLS – Think of Molly Yeh as the millennial Pioneer Woman.
Like Oklahoman celebrity cook Ree Drummond, Yeh (pronounced “yay”) had big-city aspirations but settled on a farm, where her love of food and cooking yielded recipes and Food Network stardom.
At 30, she’s a cookbook author, a food blogger, an Instagram favorite and a TV star (“Girl Meets Farm,” Sundays, 11 a.m. EDT/PDT), all from her kitchen on the Minnesota/North Dakota border.
And with the fourth season of “Farm” in gear, she adds a bundle of joy: daughter Bernie, who was born March 30 and should be just ready to eat her solid foods.
What will she try first? “Sweet potato,” Yeh responds without missing a beat.
“I wanted it to be a vegetable; I wanted it to be something sweet,” she says, dismissing avocado as “too trendy” and vowing she’ll “wait till spring for the peas.” But “I’m not above jarred baby food, if it’s good ingredients, for convenience sake. I’ll make a lot of her food, but I will not be neurotic.”
Host Molly Yeh with husband Nick and daughter Bernie, as seen on Season 4 of "Girl Meets Farm." (Photo: FOOD NETWORK)
If she ever was, she left it behind when the effervescent suburban Chicago native and Juilliard graduate – she met her husband, Nick Hagen, there while studying percussion – moved from Brooklyn to Nick’s family farm seven years ago, before they were even engaged.
There, a clash of cultures opened horizons. Yeh’s dad is Chinese and from Los Angeles, and her mom is a Jewish New Yorker, so her cooking veers toward hybrids like scallion-pancake challah, with nods to the hearty Midwest palate. The current 13-episode season includes a Jewish New Year-themed episode on Sept. 22 and culminates in a Chrismukkah special.
Molly Yeh frosts a rainbow layer cake on Food Network's "Girl Meets Farm." (Photo: FOOD NETWORK)
The Midwest move “introduced me to a lot of things I didn’t grow up with,” she says, and taught her that not everyone puts Sriracha sauce on everything or loves tahini. (But they might be as obsessed as she is with rainbow sprinkles.) The biggest surprise: How Midwestern salads “don’t have that many vegetables in them – candy-bar salad and cookie salad and salads that are just covered in mayo. That was shocking, but I’ve since warmed up to them. It’s just the fact that they’re called salads that’s weird.”
“I like that I still feel like I can be myself and cook the food I’m really passionate about and want to be cooking,” she says. “There’s never been a moment where I’ve tried to be somebody that I’m not. The guests that come on the show, they’re my real friends (and family). It’s my actual house, it’s actual things I would do in real life, just, like, beautified.”
Molly Yeh puts the finishing touches on mini marzipan candy bars in "Girl Meets Farm." (Photo: FOOD NETWORK)
But motherhood has changed her cooking and eating.
“Everything moves a little slower now,” Yeh says. “I’ll wear her in my sling while I’m in the kitchen, but I don’t want to make anything where I have to use a knife. I don’t want to make anything where I have to stand too close to the stove. I’m doing a lot more no-bake things, or things that require no chopping.”
Also: less cooking. Before, “anytime I wanted a crouton for a salad I would make the bread from scratch, I would wait for it to rise and make the homemade crouton and always make homemade dressing. Now I’m warming up to the semi-homemade thing, and salad kits are my new favorite thing. So it’s just kind of finding a middle ground: What can I make that tastes good and that is good for me but also allows me to spend time with Bernie? It used to be that I’d only want to frost cakes if I had a free day. Now it’s singing ‘Old MacDonald Had a Farm’ to Bernie.”
Molly Yeh in her color-coordinated "Girl Meets Farm" kitchen. (Photo: FOOD NETWORK)
And Yeh’s own taste buds changed. It was all bread and cheese during pregnancy, but “the day that I gave birth to Bernie, I started craving salads and sweets. I didn’t know if my body was compensating because I was nursing or what, but I have an aggressive sweet tooth. I always enjoyed baking, but as far as eating, I always picked cheese fries over sweets. But now I can’t get enough sugar; it’s so good.”
About those Pioneer Woman comparisons: Her favorite Food Network star is Ina Garten, but “I love Ree; I want her Barbie doll,” Yeh says. “It’s such a flattering comparison, but at the same time we cook differently. I love her food, but I gravitate toward my Chinese and Jewish and Middle Eastern flavors I’m most comfortable with, and the Upper Midwest, flavor-wise, is just different from Oklahoma. And we don’t have a bunch of cows to make beef dishes from. We’re more vegetarian.”
Source: Read Full Article
