Episode Details

This week on Five Rules for the Good Life, I’m joined by photographer, content creator, and newly minted cookbook author, Lindsey Baruch. Her debut book Something Delicious is a love letter to everyday cooking, filled with flavor-forward recipes and the kind of real-life strategies that make dinner actually doable. We dive into her Five Rules for Grocery Shopping that Make Dinners Easy: From Post-it notes on the fridge to forgiving your fishmonger, her approach is equal parts practical, personal, and built on a deep love of food, farmers’ markets, & feeding yourself well.

I still remember my mom walking me through the grocery store the day before I left for college, showing me how to pick a ripe melon and avoid the sad lettuce in the back of the case. It wasn’t formal, but it stuck with me, and it’s probably why I still love the ritual of shopping for food. These days, it’s the LA farmers’ market that lights me up. There’s nothing better than being surrounded by peak-season produce and letting the ingredients tell you what to cook. Whether it’s radicchio or fresh figs or some unique squash I’ve never seen before, that moment of inspiration, that little spark at the stand is where the meal starts.

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to Five Rules for the Good Life. I’m your host, Darin Bresnitz. Today, I sit down with content creator and photographer, Lindsey Baruch, whose new book Something Delicious: 100 Recipes for Everyday Cooking is out now. She shares her five rules for grocery shopping that makes dinner easy. We chat about how to organize your fridge through personal notes to yourself, how having a plan is important, but how being open to pivoting can make a meal magic, and that shopping for yourself doesn’t start in the grocery store—it actually starts at home. It is a great way to set yourself up for success, whether it’s for dinner or any meal that you cook at home. So let’s get into the rules.

Lindsey, it’s so nice to meet you. Congratulations on your beautiful first cookbook, Something Delicious. It is an incredible tribute to learning how to cook. Thank you. From your family, starting with your grandmother, what is a fundamental that she shared with you that still guides you today?

A fundamental that she taught me is to just stay present and to have a good time. She taught me how to enjoy our time together in the kitchen, cooking together. We would always bake cakes together when I was sick from school. She lived next door to me, by the way—amazing—so I would just hop right next door. We would make tea and pound cakes. She had those indented molds, you know what I’m talking about? We would cook those together. So I feel like that’s something that she really just taught me—to be present and enjoy cooking by myself and enjoy cooking with other people.

It’s such an incredible way to learn how to cook and have it be such a natural part of your life from childhood. As you get older and cooking goes from a fun activity with Grandma to something that you have to do every day, it can get a little stressful. Oh yes. You kick your cookbook off with that question, “What are we going to eat?”—which has got to be one of the most vexing questions of anyone who’s got to feed themselves or their family. I know.

What is your advice for flipping that to something that you look forward to? Or are there just days when it’s going to be a struggle? I have a list of recipes where it’s: I don’t know what I want to eat, but here’s my list of things that I can w