Allergy-Free Cooking, Our One-Minute Cooking Tip, An Interview With Author Kayla Cappiello, Pizza Bagels, Breakfast & More!

Hey, I'm Bruce Weinstein and this is the Podcast Cooking with Bruce and Moore.

And I'm Mark Scarborough. And together with Bruce, we have written three dozen cookbooks, including one out this fall, the Look and Cook Air Fryer Bible. If you're at. All interested in air frying. This thing has got 704 photographs for 125 recipes. Every single step of every recipe is photographed. You can't make a mistake. But we're not talking about air frying in this episode of our podcast. In this episode, we're focusing on.

We wanna talk about how to cook for everyone these days when no one eats anything.

I take great offense at that, but I am a ridiculous omnivore. If basically I eat it, if it's put on the plate in front of me.

You were raised that way. I wasn't. I was raised. Spine. I was raised in a house where food was put on the table, and if I didn't want to eat it, I was welcome to go in the kitchen and make something else for myself. But my mother was not gonna make anything else.

No. But the other thing is I don't ever remember being punished for not eating. Hmm. So,

but you weren't allowed to go get yourself a bowl of cereal? No. If you didn't want to eat the liver and bananas. No I wasn't. And yes, his mother made liver and bananas. Yes she did.

Um, it's true. Uh, but no, I wasn't. And I don't know. Now, uh, this is so much longer a conversation. It may have to do, I was adopted as a kid and it may have to do with adoptive kids syndrome. Maybe that, you know, you just so badly. Wanna please these, your adoptive parents. Maybe.

I think I had Jewish kid syndrome. I'm just gonna eat what the hell I want to eat.

Excellent. So anyway, we wanna a little bit about this because it's not true that no one eats anything. No. But people are now more forward with what makes them their stomach upset. Yep. Which gives them dietary distress. I don't think it's actually hard to do this. I just think it requires a level of consciousness. And I think that that is a really important thing and we wanna give you some tips and tricks, right. For how to cook for

other people and don't just say, no, I'm not gonna do it because, Eating with friends, eating with family, sharing a meal, of course, is so important. Of course, it's important for your wellbeing. It's important for your happiness. It's wellbeing. It's important for your health just to share food. So as Mark said, here are a few tricks. One, keep notes.

Yeah, I think this is really important and we keep notes. I keep a little record of what we feed people so we don't have people back over for repeats. Not that there are all that many repeats in our house, but you know, I keep a little record of what's been eaten. There are apps that can do this for you. There are dinner party apps that allow you to track what you've fed other people.

We have one friend who will not eat eggs if they're visible, right? So I know that I can make, no, that's not an allergy, that's not an, that's just a personal, that's a personal taste. And. That's, you know, something, if someone has a personal taste, it has to be honored just as much as someone who has an allergy. Well, because I, I think we have to honor what our friends like and don't like. Okay.

But I can't feed someone with celiac gluten because they're gonna get really violently ill. Well, of course if I put an egg down at somebody who doesn't like eggs, I don't know that's of equivalent value. But I will say that it's important to honor it all. I can't say that the equivalency is there. Hmm. Because I think if it. Causes you to be sick, right? That's worse than, I don't like it.

Well, let's talk about gluten for a second. If there are people in your house or your friends that don't eat gluten, there are alternatives. And I wouldn't suggest going after gluten-free bread at a dinner party, but no, you could still serve great pasta dishes and Mark and I. Have decided to eat non wheat pastas for lots of reasons. One is most of them have so much fiber and I'm really pleased with that. And we've tried most of the non wheat Yeah. And the non wheat pastas.

Yeah. We decided that we were gonna kind of cut out a lot of refined carbs in our house to only eat whole wheat bread, to only eat whole grain pasta or wheat alternative pasta. This doesn't have anything to do with except wanting to live healthier. Yep. And make sure that, you know, now that we are. Of a certain age, we're eating better food. If you have friends who have dairy, this is our, my big tip for you who have dairy problems. They can have butter.

You will, you might even come up with great black and white cookies. Mm. Look, as Mark says, a. Thousand Kosha bakeries can't be wrong. I limit my dairy intake and I make French pastries that nobody believes have no dairy in them. Coconut milk works. Cashew milk works. You can add extra egg yolks to thicken these thinner things. Thinner like rice milk, and there are ways around this. Shortening works instead of butter, right? Of avocado oil works.

And let me also say in this allergy free problem, if you have someone with celiac or a known wheat gluten problem, be very careful of the meat and sausages that you buy. Mm-hmm. The sausages are often. Banded with wheat derivative fillers in the United States and Canada, in North America particularly, and in the United States and Canada. Uh, chicken particularly can be injected with a saline salt solution to plump up the meat, and sometimes there are wheat derivatives in that solution.

You have to read labels because we have a friend who's severely allergic to sunflowers, and if we serve him some packaged dinner rolls that I bought and they're made with sunflower oil, which they might easily be, he's gonna be sick, right? So I have to read labels carefully on all your frozen stuff, on your breads, on everything. Make sure that products aren't hidden in there. That your friends can't eat.

Right? And it also don't forget that just because you're allergic to one thing doesn't mean you're necessarily the, or The person you're serving is allergic to another. For example, I have a terrible allergy, an EpiPen worthy allergy for bumblebees and wasps and hornets. But that's not the same thing as honeybees. Those are actually different kinds of toxins. And so a honey bean, I have no effect on it, and I have no effect eating honey.

Are people who are allergic to honeybee stings or can they not eat honey often? Wow, that's interesting. So the toxin actually carries through the whole buns down the, so they're not gonna eat, eat the bees either, who eats bees? Right. Well, and here's a tip also that I think is just good social graces. If you have friends coming over and somebody doesn't like something or can't eat something and you decide, you know what?

We have an example about this, so Bruce made this really fantastic Nevo Mexican cuisine dinner party meal. For a group of friends, and one of the courses was tongue tacos and he beef tongue tacos, which I love Langu tacos more than I can say. Me too. And he made the tortillas and he made the whole bit. And we had these tacos, but one friend just couldn't in advance had said that she just couldn't stomach the idea of eating tongue. Mm-hmm. Stomach, tongue.

It did. And I didn't tell anyone else at the table. I told her that when we get to dinner, you can eat everything, don't worry about it. And she didn't have to feel embarrassed that everyone was being. You know, told she doesn't want to eat what we do.

Right. It's because it is also embarrassing, especially not, allergies aren't embarrassing that food likes and dislikes can be very embarrassing. They can, I mean, I remember I, I've gotten over this, but I remember when I just absolutely couldn't stand cilantro and it's kind of, that was when I first met you. Embarrassing to say, I don't like cilantro. Oh God. I went to, A dinner party once years ago and I was served cilantro pesto, and I honestly thought I was gonna die.

I learned my way out of a huge food, dislike. When I first met Mark. My identity as an eater was as a chef. Yeah. Well, was I don't eat anything that lived in water. Here I am the chef. I would cook it, I would serve it, but I wouldn't eat fish. I wouldn't eat shellfish.

Yeah. Bruce had gone back to work for an advertising company and he was a creative director at this ad company. Post chef school, post everything. We, we were together just a little bit of time and he went back to work for this ad agency as the creative director of a small boutique agency, and he would go to his Japanese restaurant every day for lunch. And so I met him one day.

I don't like anchovies. Yeah. I like fresh anchovies in the grill, but I don't like tin anchovies. Yeah. Which I love. And I don't like herring.

Which is really the saddest thing and may prove that you're really actually not a Jew. So there you go. Okay. So, um, before we get up next to our one minute, can you take, let me say that it would be great if you could rate or subscribe to this podcast. You can subscribe to it so that it's always drops in your feed every week. That would be brilliant on whatever platform you're listening to this podcast on, whether it be Spotify or Google.

This is a new one for me and I love it. Pile potato chips on top of your hamburger, especially salt and vinegar chips with a little pickle relish on a hamburger. Okay, so we smash it down

and are supported by doc. Smith, the cardiologist at we, we clearly just picked up a supporter who is underwriting our podcast. Really? Potato chip, potato

chips on a hamburger. I'll smash it down. Then you don't need to eat the french fries cuz you're potato.

You don't need to eat them. But you can,

of course you can. You can always, then you could crumble ground beef cooked on your french fries, and you can have it both ways. That's just called poutine. So you have poutine with a burger with potato chips on it. That's what's, that's your cooking tip for the week.

Oh, I, okay. You know what? This may be the lamest cooking tip I've ever heard, right?

Salt and vinegar chips with sweet pickle Resh on a burger is a great cooking tip.

I'm gonna just leave it there. We're gonna move on. Okay. Up next Bruce's interview with Kayla Cappiello. She's the author of Easy Allergy Free Cooking, a cookbook that will help you negotiate the world of food allergies while you still cook for your friends and

Today I'm speaking with Kayla Cappiello. She is the author of Easy Allergy Free Cooking, simple and Safe Everyday Recipes for Everyone. Hey, Kayla. Hi.

Thank you so much for having

me. My pleasure. You are an expert in cooking without the most common allergens. That would be milk, gluten, nuts, and it's all from your personal experience. So tell me about your journey.

Of course. So when I was younger, I guess I always knew I was allergic to nuts. I had tried pistachios at a friend's house when I was pretty young. I was in middle school and I immediately had a reaction. So I immediately went to the allergist and got tested and they told me all of the tree nuts I'm allergic to. It's actually not every single one, which is kind of weird. Um, but it's specifically. Almonds, um, pistachios, hazelnuts and walnuts.

When did you get into cooking and how did that become like a major part of your life?

So when I went to college, I obviously started cooking for myself for the first time, and they were very, Simple, like approachable things that anyone cooking for the first time is gonna make. But I think what really catapulted me into starting to make like harder and more difficult recipes was when I found out about these allergies. I mean, immediately after finding that out, it's like you think you can't go anywhere. So you can't go to the restaurants.

So, Kayla, when you're forced to cut certain foods out of your life, or if you're cooking for someone who has to follow a very strict diet, Do substitutions work for cheese, pasta and grains, or is it simply all or nothing?

That's a tough question. For somebody like me who physically cannot eat these things, it fills a hole or like a void in. Whatever kind of dish that I'm making. So yes, if I'm making a pizza, like I'm gonna want some sort of cheesy texture, so it does fill that void. But does it replicate exactly that cheesy texture I was getting from my favorite pizza place? No. Like of course not.

One of the most useful things about your book is that in the first chapter, you have a series of baking substitutions, and what surprised me the most was eggs. So many experts talk about using blacks or chia seeds, but you have a few more. Common and easy to use options. Can you talk about egg substitutions in baking?

I'm not obviously like allergic to eggs, but I felt like giving up the dairy. I was so close to these baked goods being like totally vegan that I was like, why not just go the extra step and cut out like the eggs or the cholesterol that it has or the fat. So I wanted to add something back to the recipe that had maybe a similar amount of moisture and was kind of a similar texture.

and I find that so many people don't have a clue as to how to bake if you tell them no butter. Yeah, after looking at your book, it's actually quite simple, isn't it?

Yeah, so I definitely experimented a lot. I did like a lot of research on just cutting out all kinds of butter and what could replace it, and I feel like I do have some things in the cookbook about it, but I've been using it more in my recent life as well. If you replace butter with avocado, then it's still like a healthy fat, but it's not coming from dairy, so I've been experimenting with that as well. But replacing it with, if you can have.

So when it comes to other recipes in your book, you start off with what you call. Life changing dressings and condiments. So you can't call it that without me asking how did they change your life?

So I am definitely one of those people who like, I don't crave chicken fingers. I want the honey mustard, so I'm going to make the chicken fingers. So I was like, I. I'm buying all these condiments and using them all, but sometimes it's a bit off-putting if I think about it, to look at the back ingredients and be like, I can't pronounce any of this. So some of these I tried to make. Either it was my own salad dressing or my own vinegarette, so I knew exactly where it was coming from.

You offer up a chapter in the book called Loaded Salads and their main core salads. Do you have a formula you follow when building a satisfying salad?

I'm very put off by salads that are 75% lettuce and just a little bit of toppings. I just feel that if all your toppings are pretty healthy, why can't I have a good ratio? So I really try to use the equal amount of toppings to equal amount of lettuce or greens, and I really focus on adding a crunch to each one. So whether it's a meat-based crunch like chicken, chicken, cutlets.

Let's talk about a salad. The Asian chicken salad in your book has a headnote that says, I love this. Who says you can't put fries on a salad? Tell me about this dish.

I used to get this dish at Applebee's, obviously before I knew about any of my allergies, and it was like this Asian chicken wrap and it was delicious. But I needed to find a way to like recreate those flavors. But do it in a healthier way. Mm-hmm. So I ended up making carrot fries cuz I remembered that that wrap had shredded carrots in it. So we had just gotten an air fryer and I was experimenting, making all these healthy versions of fries and I think the carrot ones came out the best.

Kayla, when you cut gluten and dairy out of your diet. You would expect, anyone would expect that pizza was gone from your life, but you offer up no less than nine pizzas in your book that are allergen free, including skinny buffalo chicken pizza, and butternut squash and roasted garlic pizza. Tell me about making pizza without gluten or dairy.

So pizza was always one of my favorite things to have. Even way back, like when I was a kid, like the best night of the week was Friday ordering in pizza. So it was just so off putting to be like, oh, I can't just stop by my favorite pizza place and pick something up on my way home from work or after a night out with my friends. It was just such a staple that I enjoyed in my diet. So I really set out on a quest to be able to make that again at home with whatever toppings I wanted.

in your dessert chapter, you empathize with everyone who can't eat most bakery baked treats, whether it's because of diabetes or high cholesterol, celiac or nut allergies like you have, but yet you have a dozen incredible desserts that can satisfy almost everyone. Was this the hardest chapter to create?

Absolutely. The baking world is so different than the cooking world. When I'm coming up with a cooking recipe, like for dinner or salads, it's like if someone adds in more garlic than I suggest, or less sauce than I suggest, it's still gonna come out in a pleasing way. But with baking, it's like all a science. Like if you add a little bit of this or not enough of this, it's not gonna come out the same way. And that was really challenging for me. I think I started with the intent of.

Is there any one particular dessert in that chapter that you're really proud of that you think it will just please everybody, no matter what they can or can't eat?

Oh yes. So I have in there, um, banana blondies with chocolate chips on top. Mm-hmm. And I just think, yes, everybody's making banana bread and I love banana bread, but the blondies are just on another level. They're kind of like brownies and have the same shape as brownies. But they're loaded with healthy ingredients, and I think that's the best way to go for dessert. If it's healthy, you don't have to feel bad about eating too much, and you can kind of just do it every night.

Kayla Capello, author of Easy Allergy Free Cooking, simple and Safe Every Day Recipes for everyone. Great. Good luck with the book and thanks for spending some time with me this morning.

Thank you.

Our cooking for, our friends and family. Our family is more, uh, difficult than our friends, our fleet.

Oh, we, our friends will eat just about anything. Friends. Most of our friends, we have one or two friends who have a list going, but most of our friends eat anything. Right. It's our family. Mo, your mother will eat anything. Right. My mother will eat absolutely anything. Right. It's your brother and sister-in-law have issues. Some are medical, some are likes and dislikes.

Yes. My brother has a medical issue. Yeah. My and my sister-in-law has very distinct. Dislikes. Your sister has

dis My sister has distinct dislikes and the things she doesn't like to eat. And

our niece by your sister is a vegan?

Yeah, she's a, she, well, she's a vegetarian. She eats cheese and she's 16 years old and she's a vegetarian. She has 19 animals. She's

a vegetarian who doesn't eat vegetables.

That's a Well, you go figure that one out. Thank goodness. Potatoes are a vegetable. Yeah.

So, um, uh, yeah. Anyways. So cooking for our families often is a little bit difficult. We always cook a lot of Christmas dinner for my family, and there are several issues we have to work around to make a taco bar or to buy deli.

We buy, oh, that's my favorite Christmas dinner. I go to a kosher deli in St. Louis when we visit Mark's family. I am not from St. Louis, I'm from Dallas, but the family's there now. So I go, we go to this kosher deli and for Christmas Day, We bring in platters of pastrami and corn beef and Kens and chopped liver. It's delicious.

Okay, before we get to the last episode of this podcast, let me say that we have a newsletter. It goes out every two to three weeks, somewhere in there. It's not every week by any stretch of the imagination. The content is not related to this podcast. It is sometimes lifestyle, sometimes about Bruce's knitting, sometimes recipes. It just depends really, it. Actually depends. I do the writing of it. It depends on what I want to write about that week. So there you go.

pizza bagels. I've been shooting a ton of TikTok videos with this look and cook format, which is the format of our new book coming out in November. You should check out our TikTok channels Cooking. It's cooking with Bruce and Mark Bruce and Mark and I I did a look and cook pizza bagel in the air fryer yesterday and oh, it was delicious and it's beautiful and it's fun and it was a bagel and marinara and mozzarella and Parmesan and pepperoni and olive oil garden.

My rear end off yesterday, I've got the last of the malts we had, I don't know. Five cubic, five cubic yards of mulch delivered and I have finally gotten the last of it down. It went down yesterday. I kind of killed myself to get the last of it in, so it is now all in. And I came in and scarfed down a pizza bagel some lunch. You earned it. So you earned it. I was. Starving. What's making me happy in food this week is my standard breakfast.

breakfast, right? I mean, oh yeah. Blueberries are a good carb. They've got fiber fruits. Good for you. You should eat, of course. More fruit.

course you should. Okay, so that's the podcast for this week. Thanks for joining us. We know there are lots of podcasts out there. We know there is a wide selection of food podcasts. Thank you for being a part of our journey and our podcast. We certainly appreciate that you're here with us and we would like to know more about you. Connect with us on social media. There's a cooking with Bruce and Mark. I'm just have you tip all these names, cooking with Bruce and Mark channel on TikTok.

on Facebook. Yeah. Go there and tell us what's making you happy in food this week, cuz we tell you it's making us happy. I wanna know what's making

you happy. Yeah. Go there and you can connect with us under our own names, Bruce a Weinstein on Instagram or Mark Scarborough on Instagram. We're there too. And we would be glad to share more of food with you.

And don't forget to subscribe to this podcast. You don't miss a single episode of cooking with Bruce and Mark.