Michelle Obamamay have eaten at the White House, formal state dinners, and restaurants around the world — but her palate hasn’t always been so adventurous.
She added later in the podcast that “everybody else in the whole household, on the whole planet, loved breakfast food except for [me] … I despised breakfast.”
As the name suggests,Your Mama’s Kitchenhost Norris asks all of her guests about their childhood kitchens growing up, and how their “earliest culinary experiences helped shape their personal and professional lives.” Future episodes, which drop weekly, will feature stars likeKerry Washington,Gayle KingandMatthew Broderick.
Michelle Obama and Michele Norris recording ‘Your Mama’s Kitchen’ podcast.Merone Hailemeskel
Merone Hailemeskel
Michelle’s food memories include desperate attempts from her mother, Marian Robinson, trying to “force” her daughter to eat breakfast. Michelle said she was “really stubborn” and instead opted for an unconventional morning meal: peanut butter and jelly.
“[I ate] peanut butter and jelly every morning until I went to college. That was all I really liked,” she said. “It was sort of a compromise that I made with my mother because it’s got peanuts, that’s protein, a little bit of oil. Nothing’s wrong with bread if we’re having toast, why can’t I have it in a sandwich form and jelly? Everybody was having jelly on their toast.”
Michelle Obama Ate the Same Breakfast ‘Every Morning for Most of My Life’.Weiss Eubanks/NBCUniversal via Getty
Weiss Eubanks/NBCUniversal via Getty
While she said she would “literally” eat the peanut butter and jelly sandwich “every morning for most of my life,” Michelle admitted that she finally got around to liking eggs in college. “I’m big into all of it now. Give me eggs benedict. Any eggs, any way,” she added.
When Norris asked if she ever indulges in her childhood sandwich go-to, she said, “I think I kind of OD’ed on it. I don’t do it as much anymore.” Another big reason? Her daughter, Malia, was allergic to peanut butter as a child.
But she does cherish plenty of other formative recipes that are meaningful to her family and her upbringing in the South Side of Chicago.
“There are a couple of things that taste like home. [My mom’s] homemade cakes because she used to bake us our birthday cakes each year,” she said. “She tried to [make them] in the White House, but she felt that the ovens weren’t right. And there’s something different about a homemade cake…”
Another dish that “feels very much like home” is her family’s “hand-me-down recipe from our South Carolina elders.”
“My father’s mother learned how to cook this dish and my father loved it so much, my grandmother taught my mother. And it’s something called red rice. Red rice is a rice that is steeped in tomato sauce – not runny — where the tomato mixture soaks it up, so that the white rice becomes red,” she said. “Then in that you add bacon, a spicy kind of sausage and shrimp. But it’s not Creole…it’s not a jambalaya. And it’s dryer, but it’s so flavorful.”
“All of that, it was imparted around that little table with that yellow checkerboard plastic tablecloth as my mom did dishes on that formica sink and talked to us little girls as we played jacks on that linoleum floor,” she said. “The conversations around my household about fairness and honesty and how to be a person in this world. How to treat others, the compassion — that all happened around the table.”
Each episode ofYour Mama’s Kitchenwill be exclusively onAudiblefor two weeks, then available widely wherever podcasts are found.
source: people.com
