Hey fam, Hello sunshine.
Today on the bright side, we're celebrating the fourth of July weekend with a salute to revolutionary women in the food and wine industry.
It's Friday, July fifth. I'm Danielle Robe.
And I'm Simone Boyce, and this is the bright side from Hello Sunshine.
I love when the fourth of July hits on a Thursday and we all get a nice long summer weekend.
Tgif woo cheers to that.
But before we get into the long weekend, we're gonna spotlight our favorite moment of the week, brought to you by our friends at BMW.
Yes, we are gearing up for the Olympics. I could hardly wait, and we got a shout out the USA's official women's gymnastics team. The trials wrapped up this past
weekend in Minneapolis and headed to Paris this month. Is thirty seven time Olympic and World medalist Simone Biles, Olympic all around champion, Sony Lee, Olympic floor exercise gold medalist, Jade Carey, Olympic team silver medalist, Jordan Chiles, and two time twenty twenty three Junior World silver medalist and twenty twenty four Winter Cup balance beam champion Hesley Rivera, who just turned sixteen and is the youngest member of not just the women's gymnastic team, but the entire Team USA
delegation headed to the twenty twenty four Games. Wow, that is so impressive. Congrats to Team USA. We can't wait to cheer you on.
Yes, it was so exciting. I love seeing these women in my timeline. This week, there was also this amazing video of a moment between Simone Biles and the musician Sizza. So apparently Sizza used to be a gymnast. I didn't know that. She met up with Simone Biles at the gym and they did a handstand competition and the splits and she was so good. It was such a cute video. I reposted it on my Instagram. It just like made me smile and everybody was commenting, this is so cute, this is so cute.
It is like just such a happy video.
I love seeing those two queens together. I mean, they both totally hold their own in their own respective fields, and then seeing them come together, it's just an explosion of icons.
It was incredible.
Sizzo was like, I'm a little bit nervous.
Yeah, No, that's so endearing that she said that it's hard to imagine sizz of being nervous about anything, right, But I guess that's the Simone Biles effect. Well, congrats to our women's gymnastics team. We're so excited for those heading to Paris and everyone who participated in the trials, and we can't wait to watch Team USA compete in just a few weeks. Danielle, I have a confession to make.
I always cry whenever the Olympics are on. Like, I always cry during the opening ceremony, I mean during the events themselves.
It's just I don't know what it is.
I guess it's people coming together, the unity of it all, the sportsmanship.
It just brings tears to my eyes to see it's so beautiful.
The America of it all.
I've never cried, but I do get good bumps sometimes.
I'm with you. I also love seeing their outfits. Is that so strange to say?
I love seeing what they're wearing and like which companies are sponsoring them, Like my friend Sammy Miro made the cool jackets for the women's Olympics team, and they all have like these cool breaksuits on.
Like I love the Olympic fashion. Ooh, that's gonna be so cool to see the new fashion. You're You're right, I'm so glad that you put that on my radar. So I can't wait to see all the styles that they're wearing too. Yes, Danielle, did you have a good Fourth of July?
Yes, we talked about.
Actually when we first met, one of the things we bonded over was our love for Fourth of July. It's just so spirited and comes at the right time of year and reminds me of so many of our favorite things, like music and food and family and obviously fireworks when and if they're legal.
I couldn't agree more.
I have a girlfriend in town visiting from Florida, so we all hopped into the pool yesterday. We had some red, white and blue berry cake grilled out Hamburger's hot dogs, just the true California Fourth of July experience.
It was beautiful.
I love that, and I can taste that hot dog from here. So much about this holiday is about food and family, isn't it.
It's so true. Food and gathering are at the heart of this long weekend. So today, instead of popping off about pop culture, we thought we would give our bright Side besties a taste of some of our fondest foody interviews.
M I'm trying to keep your mouths watering all episode long because we've had the opportunity to talk with some of the most interesting, the most cutting edge, and pioneering women in the food and wine industry. We've had women like joe Anne Lee Molinaro, aka the Korean Vegan. She's a New York Times best selling author and James Beard Award winning chef. She's also part of the Hello Sunshine collective with Me and Simon, and during the pandemic, her cooking videos popped off on TikTok.
Her videos are mesmerizing. She's such a natural born storyteller, and Joanne told us that her Korean culture inspires her recipes and that veganism is also a major part of the lens through which she sees the world. So we asked her how she gained that perspective. Okay, wanting to ask you about just veganism overall and what that term means in our society today. I mean, you've been outspoken about the implicit bias and exclusionary politics that can often
be present in vegan and plant based spaces. Why is it important for you to take that on and challenge that.
Let me answer that question by sharing sort of this interesting story. When I was like nine years old, my dad he walked into my room with his like busted up, nasty typewriter and he was like, Okay, your job now is to type up all these letters for my boss, or for the bank, or for this. And I was like nine barely. I did not know how to type. I didn't even know how to turn the typewriter on.
But he already knew then that I had a better command of the English language than he did, and that I was better at making things sound more official and professional than my father, you know, And that was that was true, And for a long time I hated it, and I grew to resent it. I said, you're the adult. Why do I have to do the adult things here?
Right?
And fast forward, you know, three decades from that point, AAPI hate is running rampant in the streets, and the first thing I can think about is, oh, I have to protect my mom and my dad. They don't even know what racism looks like. They don't even know what microaggression is. They don't know what that word is, and if it happened to them to their faces, I think they would be very hard pressed to even describe this
as racism. And so then it became my job as somebody who spoke Korean and English, who literally spent her entire life defending her parents against the banks and the insurance companies and customer service because they couldn't speak the language as well as they needed to. Oh, well, this is what I've.
Been modeled to do.
This is what I'm specifically trained to do. I can do this better than most people. And it's the same thing with veganism. Whether it's a job that I wanted or a job that I decided to take on intentionally, well, it's one that I'm uniquely equipped to do. I am vegan, I believe in the ethics underlying veganism. I am a recipe developer of vegan recipes. So I have this kind of arsenal at my disposal. But then I'm also a Korean American. I grew up as the child of immigrants.
I have experienced racism in many shapes and forms my entire life, and it is the one thing in the world that I hate more than anything. So with these two kind of things happening inside of me, it was sort of natural for me to take that up.
As just part of who I am, as part of the Korean Vegan.
The Korean vegan. Yeah, it's about veganism, but.
More importantly, it's about compassion, it's about empowerment, it's about empathy. It's about making sure that people every single day feel safe to tell their stories beautifully said.
Thank you.
Okay, Joanne, We're about to let you go, but I want to go back to that quote from your website where you said I veganized Korean food, I koreanize everything else.
What should we be koreanizing? There's so many things, you know.
I think for me it's more just like, oh, there's so many wonderful things about Korean culture that you can incorporate in many aspects of your life. Whether it's in your cooking, whether it's in your literature, whether it's in your music certainly like come on btas you know or you know, whether it's in movies or Korean dramas, even language like my favorite tiktoks now are like people who are not native Korean speakers learning how to speak Korean because they're so enthralled with the Korean.
Dramas and they want to really like.
Lean into that language. I think that's beautiful. But I don't think it's limited to Korean culture, right. I think that there are so many wonderful cultures out there, like my husband's. You know, his father is Italian, and so I've been learning Italian every night. I'm trying to watch more Italian films and more Italian dramas. And you know, obviously no one has to twist my arm to make
Italian food. But speaking of koreanizing it, I think that's a wonderful place to start, is you know, I think that tomatoes and qujujang.
They just work really really well.
Together, and they're also the same color, so I think it's kind of perfect. And you know, so that's a really quick and easy way to experiment with in incorporating different cultural ingredients, stories, and narratives into your daily life.
I'm here drooling over the idea of Koreanized Italian food.
Can we get a restaurant that does that? Any kind of food fusion, that's the way to my heart. And I also love when Joanne talks about compassion. I mean, I think we could all use a little bit of that right.
Now, right, let's raise a glass to that, Simon. I love that, and keep those glasses in the air because our Fourth of July celebration continues. Up next, we're talking about our favorite patriotic colors red, white and rose.
Oo. Okay, see what you did there.
We're gonna take a quick break, y'all, and we'll be right back. Welcome back, y'all. Up next, we're throwing it back to one of the most fun times I think I've ever had drinking at work. Not that I do that often, but anyways, that's all thanks to Alison Morris Roslin. She's a Level three Somme Lia, a good friend of mine, and the founder of Francy Not Fancy, a luxury wine consulting company.
Okay, so mom, that was such a fun day. We were in the iHeart Studios in New York. We were all dressed up and Alison brought in three bottles of wine and we started drinking.
And in addition to getting the party started, she taught us all about how to pick out the right bottle for every occasion, plus what to do if you leave an open bottle of wine out on the counter overnight.
Don't act like you haven't done it before.
She schooled me. I learned so much from this interview.
But what really stood out from our conversation with Alison was when she told us how much we should actually be spending on a bottle of wine. Let's talk price, because this is a huge conversation around wine. A lot of times the idea is that it's really expensive to get a great bottle. I know from researching that's not the case. No, But how do you determine what's what's good?
Like if you walk in to a liquor store and you're This happens to me all the time, Like I'm going to somebody's house, I want to bring a bottle. I want it to be reasonable, right, how do you go about that?
So one thing I would say is there have been some studies done where they say that once you get to like the thirty dollars level, that it doesn't necessarily get better from there. Like a thirty dollars bottle of wine made the same way as one hundred dollars bottle of wine are comparable.
So that's good.
My suggestion for people is outside of champagne, bubbly, which can be a little bit more expensive.
If you're buying a bottle of wine.
If you can just get to that fifteen ninety nine nineteen ninety nine category, you're talking about better stuff. So if you can just step it up a little bit into there, it doesn't have to be expensive. These bottles here the most expensive bottles that I brought to you, the most expensive twenty seven dollars. So and I just tried a Montepolgiano the other day. It's an Italian red that I eleven ninety nine. So you don't have to
spend a lot. And that's not to say that you know, a fifty dollars champagne isn't good, but you can get them for twenty.
Five dollars thirty dollars.
I have a ton of examples on my website where I'm like, hey, if you need to bring a decent champagne to a party, I happen to love Nicola Foyatt is a champagne that you can get in like the thirty dollars range.
It's always something I bring.
It's half the price of some of the other fancier labels that you all know that I won't mention and it's excellent, so you can find things and you don't have to break the bank, and then you know you spend fifty seventy five hundred when it's really a special occasion.
Danielle Allison is just this endless well of knowledge when it comes to wine. I recommend everyone follow her on social media at Francy not Fancy. She has so many great tips when it comes to traveling through the wine regions of France, how to pick out great every day bottles of wine. And when I tell you, I have been living by that thirty dollars bottle rule ever since. Every time I go to the store, I'm like looking for a bottle that's under thirty dollars and it works every time.
She also helped us with how to pick a wine for those of us who aren't totally confident picking one aka me. So in the last five years, I would say I've done a lot of work on myself as I'm in the dating world and I have to tell you when I go on dates, the one thing I still don't feel totally confident about is picking a glass or a bottle of wine.
Oh, we can help you with that.
I leave it to the guy.
No because here's the thing. No, No, because here's the thing.
The guy is sitting there being like, I don't know what the hell to order, but she thinks I do, right.
I actually get that vibe from people.
So if like in a very simplistic world, because I know you could give me a ton of great advice if I don't know what to do and I see a large.
Menu, Yes, what's my goat?
Okay, So here are a couple of things that I would just say.
One thing and this is totally a restaurant trick that's just helpful to now, and this is so applicable to you because it's a dating thing. Do not order the second cheapest wine on the menu. Restaurants know that usually it's the guy who's ordering, and he doesn't want to look cheap, and so he won't order the cheapest.
He will order the second cheapest.
And so what they do is they actually take the worst wine on the list in many cases and jack it up so that they make a great margin on the wine that you buy the most. Whoa hot tip, right, Like, if you walk into a restaurant and the second cheapest wine happens to be saying you know and love by all means, go for it.
But a lot of restaurants are like, he doesn't want to order that nine dollars.
He thinks he's looking good if he orders that eleven dollars by the glass.
So we're gonna make.
The you know one that's really eight dollars eleven dollars, and we're gonna make all this money on it.
So avoid the second cheapest one on the menu.
That is such a hot tip. Don't be afraid to ask your server for advice. Tell them a couple of things. For example, like I usually put ice in my red wine. That will tell them that you don't like something that's like really intense. Tell them how you drink your wine and ask them to help you. Or when in doubt, ask the bartender. No one knows wine better than the bartender, and especially if you're ordering by the glass, he's gonna kick you a little taste and just like, try this,
you like it, order it great? He ask him for help, ask questions. Yeah, sorry, shouldn't say him, but ask your bartender for help. They are happy to. I go into our local restaurants and they know that I know, and I'll just be like hey, and he's like, people are ordering this one a lot.
Just taste it for a second, see what you think. They love to help.
But another cool thing, just keep in mind that ordering wines from where your food is from makes a lot of sense. Those wines and those foods were made to work together. Like Italian food and Italian wines that come from the same region. They're designed to pair well together. They're designed to go with the foods of the regions. So like, I'm always a big fan of like I prefer French wines, but I'm not ordering French wine and an Italian restaurant ever, you know, so pick from the place.
Honestly, I felt just a little bit more sophisticated after that conversation, Simone.
I felt great in a lot of ways, let me tell you. And since we're feeling so good, let's keep this Fourth of July celebration going.
Yes, Bestie, I think we should highlight a chef who's really earned her stars and stripes.
Okay, let's take a quick break, and when we come back, it's Top Chef winner turned host Kristin Kish. She told us about the one thing she never leaves home without and a few tips on how to elevate those TikTok recipes. We're back, y'all and rounding out our tour de force of women who are taking over the food and wine space. It's Top Chef host and world renowned chef Kristin kish.
Simone and I don't usually fangirl, but we were kind of fangirling over Kristin.
She was so much fun. We laughed a lot in this interview.
Kristen's a Korean American chef, and she won Top Chef and then recently took over as host of the show.
Yes, and she gave us a little easter egg about the finale of Top Chef too.
During the Top Chef finale, while we're sitting there dining all together, my pants are undone. So take a little peek and see if you can find it.
Oh my god, here are my people. I thought I was the only person who did that at a restaurant.
That's if somebody does peep your pants undone and sends you a DM on Instagram, can they win a meal cooked by Kristen?
I will, I will do this.
I will, I can.
I will officially put this out there now if someone can find it and the producers air it and someone can screenshot it in the moment that I'm sure half a second. You are welcome to come to Arlo Gray and you and a guest can have dinner on me.
I wonder if anyone caught it. If so, you must come forth then claim your prize.
Well.
Kristin also talked about the secret culinary weapon that she won't leave home without. Okay, so, Kristen, I have interviewed a few chefs, and most of the time they tell me, and it's always different, but they tell me that they have something that they keep in their bag at all times. I've heard sea salt, I've heard hot sauce. What is your essential? What do you think we need in our bag? Is at all times?
Gummy candy?
Yes?
What kind?
Any fruity chewy but not too chewy, slightly sour, but an assorted peck So there's you know, candy that comes in one flavor, one bag with one.
Flavor, like a high chew.
I get flavor fatigue.
I need a variety pack of something, things like a skittle or Star Wars that has different flavors. Having snacks can like curb offs a little bit angry and impatience so you can get to the next thing of like actually making food for yourself. So you know, sure, salt sounds great, hot sauce is wonderful, but if you're angry, how far is that gonna get you?
Candy at all times?
It's a pro tip candy.
Have you tried the harrowbo All Star mix bag?
I love that one, amone.
Is that the one with the cherries?
Yes, it has the cherries, it has those sour worms, it has the coke bottles, it has the gummy bears.
It's like chef's kiss.
And sometimes they're misshapen. Yeah, in the best way. No, you get like the reject bag.
It's so fun.
Yeah real Quickly have to circle back to this gummy take of yours because I just realized that you have a tattoo of a gummy bear, and I'm wondering if these two things are connected.
So I'll give you the story about the gummy bear. I like to get tattoos that mark moments in time. I clearly have a lot of tattoos, or a lot of moments in time, some that you know are worthy of talking about and some that just aren't. The gummy bear is one of those things that brings me a
lot of joy. And so the gummy bear is because on set during all of our cuts and takes at the beginning of the season, like my onset and would come on and like he'd always carry candy and his fanny pack, my water bottle and my candy, my chopstick. So you'd come, I open up a bag and between takes, I take a couple pieces and we carry on. And then second day, third day, Tom and Gil are like, what is this guy like pulling out candy, and so
they're like, let's let me have some. And over the season it grew into we'd have candy breaks in between every take, and they started bringing out boards of gummy candy of different kinds. And so Tom and Gale sit to my left at Judge's table. So I got a gummy bear on my left side to represent the season.
That's really cute, Kristin.
I feel like you need to come out with your own line of high end gummies.
But do we want high end gummies?
Do we want just like down and dirty kind of crappy gummies.
It's like a little.
Bit you know what, you're the chef.
You decide, I'll do an all star mix of crappy and high end, so we you know, we cater to the bougie and then the basic perfect.
I feel like in this scenario, I'm the basic, but it's.
Fine, I'll take it.
When we were talking with Kristin, we also ended up playing a game called Chef's Kish, Say that five times fast Chef's Kish. But we talked to Kristin about viral TikTok food trends and it got hilarious. So the first one is the Green Goddess dressing that took TikTok by storm. It's made with mayonnaise, yogurt or sour cream, parsley, lemon juice.
And that's the basic way.
What's your top chef take on a salad dressing that everybody should or could make it home.
Listen, here's the thing with salad dressings. I prefer an a mulcified dressing, which means you have to have an emulsifying agent. So, because the kids on TikTok don't necessarily talk about food in this way, we're at least the ones that I haven't I've seen. And so what that does is it takes oil and vinegar, two things that don't want to mix inherently, allows them to come together in a really creamy emmalsified dressing. You can do that
with egg yolk or mustard. So how about my hot take on salad dressing is that before we start dumping a lot of things in some blenders and calling it a dressing, as we learn the basic scientific ways to properly emmalsify a dressing so you don't use globs of mayonnaise and sour cream.
I love this. It's bougie, it's amulsifying. Imn.
She hit us with the emulsification all straight out the gate, straight out the MF gate. Well that's our show for today. This was so much fun reliving these culinary moments with you, Danielle. But I gotta be honest. It's Friday. The vitamin D is calling. I am going to grab a glass of red white and rose and go soak up the sun.
M me to simone, I'm going to see if I can find some Korean infuse Italian food here in Chicago.
Well, if anyone could do it, Danielle, it's you. I'm wishing you the best, and I'm also wishing you and all of our besties a bright and fun Fourth of July weekend.
Yes, Maam, I hope everybody saw some fireworks, and thank you so much for hanging out with us today and every day. We'll see you on Monday for an all new conversation with author Glynnis McNicol. She's here to talk about the pursuit of pleasure in Paris. Listen and follow The bright Side on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The bright Side is a production of Hello Sunshine and iHeart Podcasts and is executive produced by Reese Witherspoon.
Production by Arcana Audio. Courtney Gilbert is our associate producer. Jessica Wank is our producer. Our senior producers are Janice Yamoka, It'si Kintania and Amy Padula.
Our engineer is PJ. Shahamat Our.
Conna's executive producers are Francis Harlowe and Abby Ruska.
Arcana's head of production is Matt Schultz.
Tull Up and Maureen Polo are the executive producers for Hello Sunshine.
Julia Weaver is the supervising producer and Ali Perry is the executive producer for iHeart podcasts. Tim Palazzola is our showrunner. This week's episodes were recorded by Graham Gibson, Carl Catl, Jessica Crinchitch Bahied Fraser.
Our theme song is by Anna Stump and Hamilton lighthauser.
Special thanks to Connell Byrne and Will Pearson.
I'm Simone Boyce. You can find me at Simone Boyce on Instagram and TikTok.
And I'm Danielle Robe on Instagram and TikTok. That's ro b A.
Y see you Monday. Keep looking on the bright side, y'all.