Around the Table with Maggie Hoffman

On the spark you feel when you see a recipe you can't wait to cook, her mom's cioppino, and her impressive cookbook collection

Welcome to this week’s Around the Table interview—grab a seat and join us. Our hope with this interview is to open up a tiny little window into someone else’s kitchen. We want to see the way food shapes who they are and how they move around the world. We want to learn about their favorite recipe, and why it means so much. We want to read about their favorite memory in the kitchen. If they’re parents, we want to hear how they feed their family and what sorts of memories they’re making present day with their little ones.

Most of all, we want to be reminded that no matter where we are in the world, what our beliefs are, or where we’re going, there’s something magical about the way food can bring us together. The way it can heal us. The way it says, “I love you.” The way a warm bowl of soup can sometimes say more than a hug.

If that sounds good to you, keep reading. We think you’ll like what you find. And remember to check back every other Wednesday for a new one.

About Maggie

If you’re not subscribed to Maggie’s Substack The Dinner Plan or haven’t given her podcast a listen, drop what you’re doing right now, and get on it! She’s a force to be reckoned with in the food world, and she knows her way around cookbooks, weeknight cooking, and how to build your very own repertoire of home run recipes. We loved hearing about how she went from working for some of the biggest brands in food media to starting her own podcast, the spark ignited by a recipe you know you want to make, and the dishes that will always remind her of her mom.

Let’s get to it!

What’s your story? Help our readers understand a little bit of what makes you you.
I grew up in Oregon, cutting recipe clippings from Gourmet and Sunset with my mother, who was a fabulous cook. I joined Serious Eats as an editor after a brief stint in book publishing. Since then, I’ve written two cocktail books published by Ten Speed Press—The One-Bottle Cocktail and Batch Cocktails, which focuses on drinks for gatherings—and worked as senior editor and then digital director of Epicurious. In my post-Condé-Nast life, I host a cooking podcast called The Dinner Plan—and listeners can get the recipes from the show in The Dinner Plan newsletter (it’s free!). I get to talk with a new cookbook author every week about what they really cook at home and what inspires them in the kitchen. It’s an extremely lucky and fun situation for someone who loves cookbooks as much as I do.

Bring us into your kitchen

Describe your kitchen for us. Tell us your favorite part about it.
Rental kitchens can be grim, but our current spot is by far the best I’ve ever had, and it’s full of happy memories of baking with my daughter and cooking with friends, music blasting, tasting bites as the meal comes together. I’ve even come to love the mottled maroon-and-gray counters. (Katie: I love this. I’ve spent my entire adult life in rental kitchens and couldn’t agree more that it’s less about the space and more about the memories you make there.)

What’s your favorite way to cook?
One of the biggest gifts of leaving my last job to go independent and launch the show is that I’m no longer in seven hours of meetings a day. I’m no longer out-of-breath scrambling to make dinner happen with a pounding headache. And that means that cooking has come back to me as a part of my life that I really enjoy. I need that hour—maybe not every day, but at least a few days a week—to chop and putter and stir and listen to podcasts and enjoy the process. Sometimes I even take a break between podcast edits or newsletter writing or recording sessions or ad sales efforts in the middle of the day to prep some part of dinner—today, for example, I’m making a chipotle-apricot salsa from Rick Martinez’s new book, Salsa Daddy, which is so fabulous. (Katie: Running—not walking—to add this to my cookbook wishlist!)

Can you talk a bit more about this career shift?
At the time that I left my job, my parents were still living on the west coast and dealing with some medical crises, and I just couldn’t juggle it all—taking video meetings early morning from there while trying to help them in the hours that they needed, plus all the things for my own kid back home. I couldn’t give my all to everyone.

Probably everyone knows this: The media industry is in a squeeze, and if you’re a cog in the wheel (excuse my mismatched metaphor) they’ll squeeze as much out of you as they can. I think so many people push themselves into burnout in these situations, trying to deliver as teams get smaller and smaller, trying to get the A grade.

I was extremely lucky to get to work with some brilliant people—not just editors but also product design teams and marketing and sales folks and audience development folks—and to learn so much from them over all these years building things for the companies I’ve worked for.

I’d always loved going on other people’s podcasts, and at first I thought I would either develop a show for my former employer or find another company to bankroll it and run the business side. They passed. I felt really small and adrift for a while. But then I began to ask: What if I don’t actually need them—or their higher overhead costs and expectations? What if I built something for myself, and started small? What if I took a risk for a limited time, say 6 months, to see if I can make something happen? What if I actually sort of know how to do some of this after all these years, even if this is a completely different version of it? And that’s really where the fun started. I love hosting the show. I love talking to my idols every week and meeting new cookbook authors who have amazing knowledge to share. But I really love the business side too, the conversations I get to have with founders of other companies especially.

How do you organize your favorite recipes?
Will I ever really have them organized? I have been playing around with the Recipe Keeper app, but I’m not diligent enough to always file my ideas there, and it’s a little fiddly. I use Pinterest for things that are published online, but I am often working from cookbook preview PDFs, which are a bit more unwieldy. Wherever I find something that makes me feel a spark—whether that’s a printed book, preview files, or on Substack—I try to add it to a note in my phone called “things I want to cook.” I look there, and on these lists (1, 2, 3) of ‘greatest hits recipes’ that I’ve published, when I put together my separate rolling list of meal plans, usually a few days at a time.

In the mornings I usually post that day’s dinner on Substack notes, and I do go back to those notes. Often the actual lowest-lift dinners, which I especially lean on during busy weeks, are more ideas than recipes. So just having a note of it can be enough: Frozen dumplings, greens, peanutty drizzle. That’s dinner. (Meredith: This is such a good idea).

We love recipes here. Will you share one that means something to you? (And if you’re up for it, can you tell us why it’s so important?)
My mom always made cioppino when I was a kid—the tradition originally was that we went to a movie on Christmas or Christmas Eve and had it all prepped and ready to go for a warm and special but easy dinner after. You make the base ahead, so it’s wonderful for dinner parties; you just add the seafood at the last minute. I’ve fiddled with the recipe over the years—I posted her version online, which is based on an NYT recipe, a very long time ago—and simplified it a little. My mom had a way of amalgamating multiple recipes and just tacking on more and more and more ingredients. But the flavors, at the core, are amazing: saffron and tomato and green pepper and orange zest, all made deeply savory with clams and cubes of fish (I like hake.) It’s a little funny because you can’t get a sense of the final flavor until that seafood goes in, because it contributes so much to the broth.

Since she died last fall, every recipe reminds me of her—or I want to tell her about it—but I really don’t think I’ll ever be able to taste this soup without missing her. (Meredith: Thank you for sharing that memory with us ❤️)

Cooking:

You clearly have a love of cookbooks! Same, same, same. Could you share some of your favorites?
I am a full-time cookbook lover and basically have designed my life around always having a stack of a dozen new ones by my desk. Across three groaning bookshelves, I think we’re nearing 500 cookbooks, plus a big collection of about 150 copies of Gourmet and Bon Appétit going back decades. So yeah, I have trouble choosing favorites!

I adore my old copy of The Vegetarian Epicure, which is this kind of luxurious hippie book of (sometimes rich) vegetarian food. Lately, I’ve been cooking a ton from Julia Turshen’s newest book, What Goes With What. I love digging into The Zuni Café Cookbook—just the attention to detail is exceptional. Every week on The Dinner Plan podcast I ask people to share their favorites, and I’m reminded of more books I love. My bookshelves are starting to bow in the middle…

What’s your go-to breakfast? And when you’re feeling fancy/have more time?
This is maybe weird, but I love to make a little omelet filled with Good Culture cottage cheese. I also love a soft-boiled egg with toast. Or that really rich White Moustache yogurt with Early Bird granola.

What’s your go-to meal when you don’t have time to cook?
I’m trying to get better at pulling things from the freezer instead of leaning on takeout; I was so inspired by a recent conversation with Gena Hamshaw on the show about how she does a batch-cook on Sundays and splits it up. She eats the first two or three portions that week, but freezes a few portions for later, too, so toward the end of the week she can switch it up with something from the freezer from previous weeks. (Meredith: I love this idea!)

One quick move I really like is to buy cooked sumac-rubbed chicken from Sahadi’s, an iconic Brooklyn shop, and just pile that in a bowl with hummus, greens like arugula or little mustard frills, cherry tomatoes, onion, cucumber, olives, and fresh lemon juice. So good with zero cooking.

You’re hosting dinner this weekend for a group of good friends. What’s on the menu?
I’m lucky to have a crowd of friends who are mostly wine professionals and serious cooks. This week a few of us are actually headed out of town together, and the vacation menus include lamb burgers topped with anchovies and onion, plus a day of grilled chicken. Lots of salads, which these days I’m piling with sugar snap peas.

Family:

What do you love to cook for your family?
I grew up eating a variation on Cincinnati chili, spiced with cinnamon and unsweetened chocolate. I don’t usually put pasta in it anymore, but I do pile on toppings: raw onion, cilantro, avocado, cheddar. I love to make cornbread on the side but it rarely happens.

I often do slow-roasted arctic char, which I find is more forgiving than salmon. Sometimes smeared with harissa, but often with a mix of mayo and a stellar barbecue sauce sold by this Manhattan fish market / sushi spot.

We eat a ton of big salads. I like to make a sort-of-chorizo using ground turkey, based on this recipe, which I use in a taco salad situation I’ve been making for decades. Lots of crunchy things and a cabbage base, no lettuce. (Katie: I’m feeling SO inspired by you, Maggie!)

To be clear: My kid eats none of these things. I decided long ago that I really didn’t want our family table to be one of cajoling, bribing, or fighting about food, and while I sometimes worry a little about her limited palate, I also know she’s highly attuned to bitter flavors and I get that things taste really strong to her. My husband—a voracious eater of the world’s cuisines today—was similarly selective as a kid and it all worked out fine. We do not add this to the list of things to be stressed out about. (Katie: Actually obsessed with this outlook! As if we needed one more thing to worry about as we parent!)

Do your kids like cooking? (And do you let them in the kitchen to help?)
My daughter (almost 10) can nearly make brownies by herself, and has perfected the recipe over the years. We do olive oil instead of butter, and tons of cocoa. Not too sweet. Most recently she put crumbled pretzels on top. She’ll help with banana bread, too. She should—she takes a slice every day to school for snack and goes through it quick.

Do you have any infamous dishes in your family? Ones that simply can’t be skipped each year or that somehow make it onto every holiday spread?
One funny one is that my mother used to make a green bean pâté, sort of a mock chopped liver actually, which was from Jane Brody’s Good Food Gourmet. It’s basically green beans, egg white, caramelized onion, and walnut, all chopped together in a food processor, but it’s shockingly good. This year in our first holiday without my mom, I knew I had to make it, and when we showed up, my father, unaware of the menu, mentioned that some day we should dig that recipe up. We both knew we needed it in her absence. (Katie: So beautiful.)

Are there any food traditions you’re establishing now with your own family?
My husband sometimes travels for work, and we do a pancakes-for-dinner night one of the nights he’s gone. It’s kind of messy and labor-intensive, but my kid loves it and loves getting to choose the fruit we add. She always wants to save some for his return, which is sweet.

What did your kid’s school serve for lunch today, or what did you pack them?
I will be completely honest here: Every day she gets exactly the same thing in her lunch box, on request: plain bagel with peanut butter, fruit, and four chocolate chips. She’s changing to a nut- and seed-free school next year, and I think I’m going to have to push her a bit.

Just for fun:

What are you loving reading/ listening to / watching right now?
I didn’t want Curtis Sittenfeld’s recent book of short stories, Show Don’t Tell, to ever end. I always have a million cookbooks on my bedside table as well—Noor Murad’s Lugma is a wonderfully written book, packed with vivid memories and evocative food descriptions.

Where else can we find you on the internet?
I’m on Instagram, and in addition to The Dinner Plan, I also send a fun little newsletter of vintage tableware finds a few times a month.