I’m in love with her pepper - it has so much flavor. She says it can take her anywhere from two months to two years to find the right person for the right spice. and Sana is how devoted she is to finding exactly the right farmer. This does not taste like home.” And so her spices are definitely fresher than mine.ĬWB: You also have someone doing single-origin spices - Sana Javeri Kadri. She has a great story about how when she first got in the business, she was buying her spices from a big wholesaler, and her mother tasted the spices and was like, “this is awful. I like the fact that all things in Fauzia’s are fresh. I love a condiment that can do that to you.ĬWB: That’s amazing that you can get all that in a condiment.ĭC: The thing about jerk is that it’s not hard to do, but it involves all these things that I don’t know if I have in pantry, and if I do, they are aging. Having this really great jerk seasoning brought me right back to the beaches of Jamaica, which I love - the idea of smoke and the outdoors and the music and the heat and just that whole vibe. To me part of the idea behind Giving Broadly and my own quest for change in the kitchen was to bring back memories of travel, or bring back memories of restaurants. She partnered with Hot Bread Kitchens and bottled her jerk seasoning. Fauzia Abdur-Rahman is a street vendor in NYC who has Fauzia’s Heavenly Delights she has been on the street making her food for 25 years, which is quite extraordinary. I sort of rationed my Omsom, and I wanted to try different things, so I ordered Fauzia’s Jerk Seasoning. I would be craving larb, and there would be the packets, and I would follow the instructions, use the little flavor packets, and put it on the table and be like oh, my goodness - I actually feel like I’m at a restaurant! I, Dana Cowin, made a restaurant-tasting meal, which has often been somewhat beyond my reach. Omsom was started by two sisters - Kim and Vanessa Pham - who have put the flavors of Southeast Asia essentially into packets. So this first great discovery during Covid was Omsom. But I also like shortcuts because as someone who’s not an amazing cook, I really need the shortcuts to flavor. There are cookbooks, yes, and actually I love cookbooks. I found that in order to make it great and interesting to me and to everyone around me, I really needed some help. When we spoke, Cowin was back in New York City.Ĭooks Without Borders: Tell me about Giving Broadly - where did it come from? How did you get the idea?ĭana Cowin: For the first time in my entire life, I found myself at the stove mostly every night. She, her husband and their two children (one home from boarding school, the other home from college) had spent most of the pandemic at their home in Upstate, New York. We caught up with Cowin on the phone for a Q & A to hear more about the project. Some of those entrepreneurs have been helped by Hot Bread Kitchen, an organization that helps immigrant women incubate food businesses Cowin sits on Hot Bread Kitchen’s board. The Giving Broadly website functions as a shop for those ingredients and other edibles as well as a place where the remarkable women behind them share their stories. It’s a guide that curates and spotlights amazing products from women-owned artisan brands. That’s part of the idea behind the project Cowin has just launched: Giving Broadly. So how does someone who has long been devoted to eating well manage to put excellent food on the table every night for her family during a pandemic? She collaborates with interesting chefs and food makers to put the flavors she craves in bottles and boxes - cooking shortcuts, if you will. “I’ll be honest,” she famously wrote in the introduction to her 2014 cookbook Mastering My Mistakes in the Kitchen, “I am not a great cook.” Strange as it may seem, Dana Cowin - who led Food & Wine magazine for 21 years as editor in chief, and who has been one of the most influential people in food in America this century - does not count her skills in the kitchen among her strengths.
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