Hey There, It's Amanda
Founder Files: Brooklyn's Best Snacking Station
Plus chocolate-orange zucchini bread, career advice, and why everyone needs a steamer.
Welcome to the latest edition of Food52 Founder Amanda Hesser’s weekly newsletter, Hey there, it’s Amanda, packed with food, travel, and shopping tips, Food52 doings, and other matters that catch her eye. Get inspired—sign up here for her emails.
We have a Slack channel called come-and-get-it. When our Test Kitchen cooks finish cooking a new recipe, they post a photo of it on the channel and within moments our quiet office explodes into action with chairs shoving back and people scrambling down the hall to get a bite before it’s gone!
Here are a few come-and-get-it treats that are now official recipes on site:
- Zucchini bread lovers, you have to try Nea’s moist and citrusy chocolate-orange version.
- César’s pan bagnat, just in time for the Paris Olympics, is an easier-to-eat version of the classic.
- Emerald Chan–who you’ll soon be seeing more of on Food52!—put her nuanced spin on tiramisu, using milk tea instead of espresso.
Jojo, the GM of Food52, asked me to test out the new Steamery Cirrus X Handheld Steamer. If you don’t already know Steamery, they make high-quality laundering products. Their odor-control detergent for workout clothes has become so essential in our house that my husband goes into panic mode when the container dips below half full.
I grew up in the age of irons and ironing boards, and had a mother who ironed not only sheets but even jeans. She also vacuumed in straight lines, but that’s for another newsletter. Her influence on me lingers: I no longer iron my clothing or sheets, but I still often yearn for a shirt that doesn’t look like it’s been rolled into a ball. Also, I’ve now been around photography sets enough to be tuned into the value of a steamer to take wrinkles out of table linens and aprons. So I was primed for the travel steamer challenge and dutifully got to work on some challenging items in my closet.
The steamer has a water receptacle that’s held into place with a magnet, which makes it easy to remove for refills. There’s also a hook to hang it up. Smart details, noted. In less than a minute you can get the steamer filled, heated, and be on your way! You hold the steamer up to your clothing, press the button and glide it across the fabric. Had I known how easy and (yes!) fun steaming could be, I would have purchased one years ago.
The steamer’s portability is subjective—it's the size of an immersion blender. But I don’t pack a hairdryer when I travel, either. Bulky items just have to make way for more shoes. For those who care more about pressed clothing than an eighth pair of shoes, fine, have it your way! What I will say is that the travel steamer is a perfect size for apartment living. I’m going to order one and get rid of both my iron and my ironing board.
Erika, our CEO, put Lindsay Shookus, a longtime SNL producer and founder of Women Work F#cking Hard, and me on the hot seat for our inaugural Nobody Cares event, a speaker series for Erika’s new book, Nobody Cares About Your Career (And Other Needed Work Truths—that’s my subtitle for it, not hers). She asked us how we knew it was time to make a career change, what work-life balance means to us, and how to build trust in the workplace.
Read more about the event here. Then sign up for the next one on August 27 here! Erika will be interviewing Kim Fasting-Berg, former head of marketing at Vogue and now EVP of Marketing at WME Fashion.
Yours in beautifully steamed shirts,
Amanda
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