JEN HATMAKER: "Feed These People"

myself little little pep talks when January rolls around. I resolved to be better about I don't know self care, vowing to strike a better balance when it comes to rest and exercise and nutrition. The dark winter months do provide time for me to work on indoor art projects, to read all the books I wanted to get to over the summer, and ample opportunity to think up fresh

new ideas I might try out in this spring. But in the meantime, I want you to embrace winter in all of its wonder My guest on our podcast today is someone known to embrace and celebrate life through every twist and turn. She's a New York Times best selling author of For the Love and Fierce, Free and Full of Fire, along with twelve other books you might listen to her award winning for the Love podcast. I'm talking,

of course, about the fabulous Jin Hatmaker. If you were to visit Jen's web page, you would be greeted with this statement. I'm going to try to read it just as she wrote it. I believe women living in freedom are the answer to all that ails society. When we are actually who we are, how we are, where we are, as we are always meant to be, women are the greatest gifts to this world. My whole life's work is to serve women as they genuinely show up to their

own lives. We need not fear the truth or hard questions, or spiritual curiosity, or challenging unjust systems. That is literally why we are here. Welcome to this community. You are beloved and necessary and good. Needless to say, I love her. I can't wait to have a heart to heart conversation with Jen hat Maker today. I know it's going to be inspiring. I'm going to share some love with one of my podcast sponsors first and then we'll get into it. Visitors to my home or my studio are sure to

notice one thing right away. My love for Tea, one of my favorites is bigelowt s constant comment. It's been my go to for years. The aromatic citrus and Spice Blend is an immediate pick me up first thing in the morning, during the afternoon slump, or when sitting down in front of the microphone to spend time with my listeners. Each evening, even before I take my first sip, I like to slowly inhale, letting the scent of oranges and sweet spices fill my lungs and tantalize my taste buds.

It's a little ritual that helps to put me in the best frame of mind for whatever task lies ahead. I wonder if Ruth Bigelow did something similar when she mixed up the first batch of Constant Comment in her kitchen over seventy five years ago. It wouldn't surprise me. Love tea, love citrus and spice and everything nice. Don't forget to add Bigelow's Constant Comment Tea Blend to your shopping list. It's been lended by the Bigelow family for three generations, and you'll taste the love they add in

every cup. Our guest on Today's Love Someone is Jen hat Maker. I was so happy to see you and I gotta tell you. When your name first popped up in social media a couple of years ago, I'm like, oh, she makes hats. I know. I thought it was like your moniker. And then I get a little research that she doesn't make hats. That's right, she makes she heals hearts, and she inspires people and uh, and so I kind of became a quiet fan. Um. I wouldn't say I

stopped you, but I did. And because I have a very large, interracial, intercultural, intergenerational family, you were one of the closest people I had seen to representing a little bit of my life. Yep. How many of your five are girls? Two girls, two girls? Three voice? I have eight? Yeah, yeah, and they don't pull punches. Oh godly, they do not even care, like no, absolutely, and they're not impressed. Nobody's impressed here. Nobody's like, um my, we we have a

group chat is unsure you do too. So it's me and my five kids, and it's always popping off with like nonsense and sarcasm and dark humor. And my son Caleb his twenty, sent a meme around that said it just had a picture of like some weird looking woman and it was like when somebody you never even heard of, um is a New York Times bestseller and you're like, I never even heard of that book. This is clearly directed at their mom. And I'm like, first of all, rude, Um.

Second of all, you're welcome. I'm sending you do going to college. Yeah, because mom's book. Thank you, thank you. But they're like so unimpressed, like whatever, mom, Um, Jim Garner um endorsed my cookbook and we've become friends anyway. My kids are impressed about that, but still rude. They're like, Mom, it's so weird that Jin Garner like endorsed cook They're like, she must feel sorry for you. I'm like, okay, thanks, thanks, even more cold blooded than mine. I got to say.

You know, they come by it. Honestly, I can't even be mad at my kids. Um. They are so cayenne spicy, but they got it for me. I mean, there is no way we actually thought. I actually thought, you know what, I'm going to end up with at least one nice, like sweet kid, like at least one of them will be precious because we're gonna adopt, right, so we've got to adopted kids. I'm like, they don't they're not spoiled by our d n A. That's right, they're gonna come

in sweet. Oh no, no, no, they're calliane hot. So I couldn't even adopt precious like we just are. We are just what we are. And I'm telling you so yours are almost grown though? How old your youngest sixteen? Yeah? What are you doing? You need two or three more? Go Delilah. Now I can call you up. I can hook you up. Do not manifest that into this universe. I've been parenting since I was twenty three. I Um, what's so weird for me right now? I mean absolutely

bizarre world? Is that my fourth kid, Ben as a freshman of college, so he moved out in August. And my fifth kid, Remy, who's a junior, is doing her junior year in Spain as a foreign exchange student. My point, nobody lives here right now, nobody. I'm child. I gotta hook you up. I gotta hook you I don't know how to be, like, I don't know what to do. I don't know. We don't even know how to cook,

Like how do you cook for one person? I don't you know what I do as I eat yogurt or I'm just like, I don't want to make a I don't know what to do with myself, so I go to hummus on on flower tortillas. I'm as right. I had hammas and cucumbers for lunch hummus on flower tortillas when I'm alone. But I'm never alone, so I don't get that very often. Well, frankly, all my kids live in Austin, all and my brother and his wife and their little sons who were preschoolers, they are five minutes away.

So that's what I do. They call them and say, I've made an entire dinner. Would you like him? I made a butterboard with Tricia year, would come and share it with me? That's just come and share it, like, I'm exactly right, that's not untrue. And so I'm actually gonna do a butterboard this year for the for the family. Yeah, I think for the years, I think we'll pay attention to that. Because people got like real wild about that trend.

I was thinking, who wouldn't want this? I want to dread their bread with butter and olive oil and garlic. Peopoth don't love well, they either love it or hate it. But the haters are like, that is so gross. I'm like, what is gross about butter? It's delicious. It's like, look at all this stuff we put on it. It's now it's even better. It's fancy butter um. But no, they're like, I don't like it. I'm like, well, yeah, well you're a portion more butter for me. People they probably wouldn't like.

I saw a recipe for you put caramels like were there's candy in a pan with butter, lots of butter that you throw a popcorn in it and you pop the popcorn with the were there's caramels melted with the butter. I'm like, oh yeah, oh yeah, try it. Not yet, I just saw it. I'm like, oh yeah, mama's doing that. But we can't do that. I can get behind. We can't do that for a movie night because that will make a huge mess all over everything. So true. And I have a real history of burning caramel. I just

can't quite get it right. And so the smell of scorched caramel is so like, I have such muscle memory for it because I just I can't do it. Like I want to make toffee eat what I have is burned, but I just cannot. This is outside of my skill set, and so I am willing to try your trend and I will like send my notes okay, but we'll try it. Try it. Yeah. So that's about the only candy I make is Christmas crack. Have you made that with the crackers and the toffee? And I could eat gallons of it?

I do eat gallons. I do. Yeah. Have you had it where you smash the peppermint candy on top? Absolutely? And it's so good there's no bad iteration of it, Like every version of the Christmas crack? I want to have it. And I'm not even really a distorted person. I'm not a sweet person. I don't make a lot of sweets. I don't bake, but that stuff with the salty crack. Yeah, and if you put a little sea salt on top of it as the chocolate melting, yeah the best. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I did many many batches

of Christmas crack for Christmas gifts. We go down to the thrift stores and I buy like plates, Christmas plates, you know, for a quarter apiece, and then wash them and load them up with a Christmas crack and wrap them up to the plastic and give them. That is such a cute idea. Look how cute you are as

you were being darling when you do that. I am the thrift store queen, Like, what do you what are you on the prowl for when you're thrift ng Because generally good thrifts have a few categories that they specialize in. Art supplies, always art supplies. Never enough art supplies in the world. There's never enough paint or paint brushes or because unlike you who stopped after five, I kept going and yeah, so I've you know, I've got a house

full of littles, and so pipe cleaners and beads. Pipe cleaners and beads will keep a six year old entertained for an hour. My nephews are two four, and I have six drawers of art supplies. And it's just it's endless fun. It doesn't matter what it is. Table cloth, no matter what it is. Yeah, just put it out, plastic, tablecloth down, put it out. No glitter though I stopped at the gloves. Oh so anti glitter. If you come to my house, I don't have nice furniture. I don't

have pitching dishes or plates. Um literally, they'll just break them they're gonna get broken. And they take the nice utensils when I have them, they take them in their lunch box, like to basketball practice, and if they don't come home with them. So why, okay, isn't that the weirdest thing? I like, really want I want to analytics on this. And in my house when all the kids lived here, You're so right about the utensils, And for me,

it was almost exclusively forks. So I would have three d knives literally anywhere, like we just these are the two we have. Who gets them? The rest of you, I don't know, eat with your hands like a bear. Like. It was just so weird. And now that they're all gone, I have no I have forks and you don't. Else, I'll have cups and they live in the kitchen where they belong. It's the weirdest phenomenon. I'm like, look at

all these cups I have. They're not under beds, they're not just propped up next to the upstairs bathroom sink. They just live on the shelf where they belong. It's a miracle. Look at this. Yeah, I'm not there yet. I will be a thousand years old when I'm there, I will be Enthuselah. Yeah, so you said you were twenty three when you started parenting. That's right. I had my first time when else twenty three. I was twenty one.

I married a man that had two children, and um, then we had a baby together and so it was just me and my son for several years, and I was like, hey, god, I really want more children. I really want more children. And the doctor said, that's not probably going to happen. So, um, you know, we've got options, there's medical intervention or whatever. That's right. I mean, not to that extent, but I came from a big family and then I created a big family, and so big

family energy is just all I know. I don't any time that we were ever out in the world and I would see a sweet little family with like their one or two little kids and they're at the restaurant and everybody's quietly, I would just be like, what is that even happening? What is that even? Like? What is

their world? Like? Why aren't they all yelling and like hollering it or like like I do with my sisters and brother talking over each other, and somehow we hear it all like no one's missing a word, but we can all talk at once and still can be communicating like on the nose, and everybody else observing is just like this is overwhelming. I'm like, I it's it is,

it is. You are right, it is, um, But Christmas your house, Holidays at your house, birthdays at your house look like yeah, wild, So what are you working on? You have a cookbook that's out Tell me about that, and that is comprising all my hours of all my days right now. It just came out. It just came out like three weeks ago, a feeding that and it's called Feed These People. And it was just so fun. I mean, that's what I do. That's my life as

I feed these people. And so it's funny and it's obnoxious. It's got a lot of swear words in it. Um. It was so fun to write. It's outside my normal genre, you know, I normally right, nonfiction books for women, you know, kind of in empowerment space and like emotional and spiritual development space and all that, um and this so this was a real departure from my normal thing. I've been writing about food online for years and years and years,

just but in an obnoxious way. And my community was like, gen, we want you to write us a cookbook, but don't get good do it just like this the way that you write about it, like on on social media, that's

how we want you to write your cookbook. And I'm like, first of all, I think that's a little rude, but I know what you mean, m because they're long, rambly, hilarious, nonsense, very sketchy quantities um And it's just so you measure like I do, where it's like like some yeah, some some taste or and then add some more yeah you like some more? Um so yeah, my editor everybody's like, Delilah, you cook all the time, like I cook for at least eight to ten people every day of my life.

They're like, why don't you why don't you have a cookbook at I'm like, no, no, because how would I like people have to be able to follow a recipe that's right through all my recipes that I just make. I'm like an intuitive cook and um, did you have somebody measure what it was for you? I had to keep a notebook right and I can't do that. I can do right down, Like I would just grab how much would you use jen just like if you were just doing it, I would grab it, and then I

would be like, how much is this? Yeah, that's exactly reverse engineer. I can't do a recipe. I can't do it. I can't. I can't do it. So I'll just tell people to go get Jen hat Makers book. And I'm sure, like, is there a recipe for your lasagna? Is there? There's a pasta bake. I call it a lazy lasagna. That's in the chapter. I have a chapter called food when You Have No More Damns to Give, and that one's in there. It's like a lazy lasagna. Um, this is

like a it's a cookbook for normals. You know. It's not a chef's cookbook. This is just for people like me and you who just stand in our kitchen and cook for the people that live here. Um so, and and nothing's hard, nothing's fancy. This is not I'm not credential, I'm unqualified. Like this is just really yummy food for normal families. And so it was really a blast. I loved it. So I'm I just I just came off tour. I just got home like two days ago, um from

the book tour, and it was wild. We slept on a bus. I have decided I'm too old for that, and so um that was a new bit of data that I procured. Yeah. I I have those realizations all the time where I'm like, when I go to Africa, stay in a refugee camp, you know, we we sleep on the floor on mats or whatever, and and and I am too old for that, Like my body is like, oh jin oh, come on, like you're forty eight. Let's think us went through let's think. Let's think clearly. So

bus on a couch on a bus? Yeah, no, because you have to look good on TV. Yeah, we were doing live events, like we were in a different city every night, so it was like packed theaters, like you know, thousand plus women in every location, plus the handful of rogueman who come to everything. And um, yeah because you're because you have it's because of their wives. Let's be honest. Their wives are like, look, these poor husbands are like, look,

my wife has been reading me against my will. You're writing for so many years, like while I'm drug drug me to this. Yeah, they're like, I'm coming. I deserve to get to see you because I have been like a reluctant reader all these years via my wife. And so I'm like coming in everybody'sing, isn't gin incredible? Will continue our conversation right after I sing the praises of today's podcast sponsor. This podcast is sponsored by a company

solving a family problem. They've got the greatest name, Forever Forever dot com. I love my family, and I love all my family memories, especially all the photos and all the videos of my children and my grandchildren. But I have the same problem as many people. My photos my videos are very where. Some are in old boxes and old photo albums, others are on social media sites and

cloud storage accounts, and thousands are on my phone. But with all these memories spread about everywhere, they're really nowhere. They're difficult to share, and they are all in danger of being lost, and many are being data mined by advertisers. But recently I discovered a solution to my photo mess. Forever is the name of a company that's been helping families save, organize, and share their memories for a decade, and I've opened my own account at Forever dot com.

My Forever account is my permanent digital home, which I'm now using to safely, save, organize, and share thousands of family photos and videos. Forever is safe, no data mining, no advertising, and you can design and print beautiful holiday cards, books and gifts. Start today by opening a free intro account at Forever dot com. It's easy, but if you need help, call one eight eight eight Forever or choose a Forever ambassador near you. Memories help families stay connected Forever.

Get started at forever dot com and use promo code love for percent off. So you want to know a funny fact about my sappy love song show. Yeah, I get more calls from men than I do from women. I cannot air them. I I don't put them on the air most of the time because people who listen listen for stories. So when a man calls me and he's ready to pour out his heart, he says, I want to play a song for Jen. She's my rock. That's it. That's their story. It's the beginning, middle, and

in the whole thing. In thirty seconds, she's my rock. And so I'll lead them down the path. You know, I'll say, well, what is it? What qualities does jin embody that makes her your your solid place, your touchstone. She's not my touchstone, She's a rock. She's my rock. Okay, Okay, thanks, thanks a lot, and then you know, like riveting listening exactly their hearts are in it. Their hearts are in it. But so then I'll have to do a double up.

I call them where you know. Then then Susan, I'll collin before I even say hi, welcome to the Delily Show. She's just told me her entire life story and why she wants a song for her boyfriend, and you know, and so then I'll weave in. I just talked to Billy who wanted a song for Jin because Jesus rock, you know, And I'll double it up. I love it. Listen, men, and I know this and so to you because we've

raised to them. And so I have those young adult boys and I think we're talking about my current husband nice one. Boys. Boys have all the same feelings as girls. They're goopy, they're squishy, they're soft, they cry when they get broken up with their wildly sentimental Now they may not wrap it with as much language and as many words as women do, but it is all in there. I'm telling you those boys right pages of like love notes, and they make they need to call me because I'm

getting is she's my rock. They need to be the ones to call me. They need to call me and read that love letter to me telling you. I'm telling you I've watched him like stay in their for four days after a particular hard break up. Their boys are boys, could be pretty tender to they They're very in fact, I think they are sometimes more tender, but because there's so much pressure on them to be tough that that

causes quite a conflict. You know, in the world's demanding that you be this when in reality you've got a sweet sweetheart. At that's hard. It is hard. I completely agree. Um So keeping them soft and able to be vulnerable at least in their own home and be able to talk about their feelings without getting shamed for it or

told to buck up or to stop crying. I think it's important hopefully that transfers to their relationships as they kind of launch or like, so that they'll call my show and give me more than cheese, my rock Y. That's exactly right, right, Let's let's give him some home training. Thank you around, Thank you, Jen, has been delightful to talk to you. I I get to go muck stalls

now and very glamorous. Yeah, and take care of a a four year old almost four year old that that has recently become a part of our family, not a permanent part. She's she's here for a medical services UM, but she is hearing impaired. So we're learning sign and then teaching her sign, which is very exciting. And my my thirteen year old daughter has led the charge. She's

like taking it on. She's like, Mom, we're gonna learn this, We're going to do this, and she's really been the teacher of all of us, which is kind of amazing to see her take a leadership role like that. I absolutely love this. My first three kids, when they were in high school, all shows a s L as their foreign language. That was an option for them, and so

they're all fluent in sign language. And so when when my youngers were younger and I needed a nanny in the summer because I still work full time, I hired a nanny who was hearing impaired and so they only spoken sign language and it was just so amazing, and even her introducing my kids to the deaf community, we have a pretty large one here in Austin because we've got a huge school here. UM was so great. They're still talking about it years and years and years and

years later. So it's a wonderful way to enricher family and also love her. Is that nanny still available? Could use your number of friends? Yeah? Well, thank you, thank you, God bless. I'm so glad we Matt I loved you for ever. Jen's new cookbook, Feed These People is jam packed with easy recipes, big flavors in southern wit. Do you ever find yourself cooking for a crew, even a crew of two. You'll love every recipe you find between

its pages. It's available on Amazon and everywhere books are sold. I'm so happy Jim pulled up a chair and joined us today. She's fresh, she's fun, she's vibrant and smart. She's also a fierce mama of five, a bright businesswoman, and a woman of faith. I admire her. Jin two is co founder of Legacy Collective, a giving organization that grants millions of dollars towards sustainable projects around the world,

such as the Florida Relief Fund and so many more. Today, it's raised over six million dollars for funding of more than one hundred and forty different grants to more than one hundred nonprofits across four continents, and more than fifteen cause areas Wow just Wow. To learn more about Jen, her books, her podcast, or to read some of her amazing blog post, visit jin hatmaker dot com. The time to burn the candles, sip the t crack open the books,

and get cozy is here. All through this long dark Winner, I'll be taking your calls and debtic Asians, playing your favorite tunes, and helping you smooth off the rough edges of your day via my radio program. I'll keep having great conversations with inspiring people and sharing them with you on Love Someone with Delilah, and I'll keep dropping my short daily podcast. Hey it's Delilah, where you can hear my best radio moments anytime you need a little pick me up. Winter is here, but so am I, and

we'll get through it together. My friend, do me a favor. Take some time out of your winter schedule to slow down and love someone