Found Treasure: “Caro Can Cook” Chambers

March 3, 2023 – Author and professional recipe developer Caroline Chambers has a lot on her plate.

And I’m not talking about the skillet pizza, asparagus risotto, or the cheesy figgy everything bagel ham rolls. (Though we’ll get to those.)

I’m talking about Mattis, Calum and Cashel. Three boys, all under 5, each with their own superpowers, personalities and dietary dispositions. 

Mattis would be the oldest, the introspective, kind, thoughtful type who fasts in monk-like fashion. 

“He eats 17 gulps of air and two Cheerios most days,” says Chambers, who lives in Carmel Valley. “Every third day he eats everything I cook.”

Two-year-old Calum, meanwhile, takes a different tack. “All he does is laugh, and eats everything all day long,” Chambers says. “He’s never not hungry.”

The baby just hit 5 months, so his tastes are TBD, but the affections of his siblings, not so much. 

“His older brothers are obsessed with him,” mom says. “They call him ‘Babe’—capital-B Babe, like the pig. They are absolutely addicted to him.”

When the kids started arriving, Chambers’ life in kitchens shifted tectonically. Previously, she owned a catering company and also spent time as professional cook, freelance recipe tester, menu strategist and food stylist. 

Now that represents a luxury: If pre-motherhood she was a slow-poached egg, now she is scrambled. 

“The recipes I enjoyed took too much time and labor,” she says. “Ingredients were going bad in the fridge.”

But she turned the chaos into clarity: Despite her increasing constraints, she wasn’t ready to surrender what she calls the “rich flavor of longer processed meals.” So she set out to create them with less time and effort, adapting recipes and sharing the tasty results on Instagram. 

Her willingness to reveal the happy madness of her process, meanwhile, made her a hit: Today she has well beyond 110,000 followers; her recent “Pregnant or Stoned?” post about waffle grilled cheese drew 87,000+ likes.

“I’m wide open,” she says. “I share a lot of hard things about being a mom, fun things about being a mom, and that has opened up meaningful, back-and-forth relationships.”

She planned to compile many of those in a cookbook, her second. (Her first was Just Married, A Cookbook for Newlyweds.) When publishers passed, she pivoted to an e-newsletter called “What to Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking,” which proves as habit-forming for many as Babe is for the older boys. 

Here’s how she described it when it debuted December 2020: “A living, breathing, weekly non-cookbook email blast. I encourage you to make each recipe that week, don’t put it off. Cook it even when you don’t feel like cooking. I promise it’ll be quick and painless. It might even be fun.”

“You don’t have to worry about searching through your inbox to find previous recipes,” she adds. “It all lives on the What to Cook When You Don’t Want to Cook website.

I can testify it’s outright fun—and functional—thanks to her gymnastic word play and cooking intuition. 

For the latest Super Bowl she shared a tale wherein she made Bojangles biscuits for the Carolina Panthers before the 2016 big game—then coached by the Monterey Peninsula’s own Ron Rivera—and showered readers with manageable “snacky things that one might eat while watching football.” 

Think chicken satay wings and sheet-pan sliders, sausage balls and chicken flautas, jalapeño feta dip and salt and vinegar onion dip, smash burgers and (yes) those cheesy figgy everything bagel ham rolls.

Nearly each one is quick, simple and delicious. If you can’t pull some inspiration from that lineup, you belong on the bench.

Amid rising inflation, she compared prices and dished out links to super affordable dishes like The Dankest Taco Salad, 15-Minute Veggie Peanut Noods, Sunshine Pasta and Crash’s Egg Salad. 

Amid the recent cold snap, she brought the heat with a comfort soup loaded with veggies, lentils, grains and sausage, with a broth balancing harissa, lemon and Parmesan cheese. 

It comes with a riff about her former Navy SEAL husband, who swears he doesn’t like soup, let alone healthy soup. 

“When I started telling him how nutritious it was, he was like, ‘I don’t need to know all of that, it’s just good soup,’” she writes. “‘If you’re gonna feed me soup, don’t tell me how healthy it is, too.’ So there you have it. That’s all your family needs to know. It’s just good soup.”

Oftentimes inspiration involves the youngsters, as with “Calum’s birth story + 3 meal ideas to bring to new parents.”

I love the little hacks that come along for the ride, like the benefits of Better Than Bouillon and “flavor bomb” abilities of harissa paste, both in the soup post. Instant and applicable ammunition.

The aforementioned asparagus risotto qualifies. Instead of endless slow stirring, you bake it in the oven, turn the lid upside down and roast the asparagus on top so it doesn’t get squooshy in the dish. So does her “foil dam” technique that allows for roasting two things on one oven pan, so when one gets juicy they stay separate (like chicken and bread).

“The ideas aren’t not fancy, they may look bizarre, but they help you out,” she says. “I’m always asking, ‘How can I do this with fewer dishes and less time?’” 

When asked about helpful kitchen tools not everyone stocks, her reply was quick: 1) a “fish spatula,” long, skinny and slotted, great for flipping pancakes and freeing roasting vegetables cooked directly on a baking sheet; and 2) a milk frother to make beautifully emulsified salad dressings (“Buzz it up!” she says). 

Chambers cultivates dialogue with readers by way of polls and prompts (“Are you repeating certain meals to cut down on leftovers waste? Which ones? Share links!”), something that wouldn’t be possible with the cookbook iteration of What to Cook. 

“A cookbook collecting dust on a shelf doesn’t allow for any of that,” she says.

Perhaps moved by Chamber’s candor, I feel compelled to close with confessions.

Confession #1: I track an irresponsible amount of recipe- and food-focused e-newsletters. But none of them get ear-marked as much as What to Cook.

Confession #2: Though we’ve never met, she’s technically my colleague at Edible. After a Carmel restaurant owner suggested publisher Deborah Luhrman and her meet, Chambers now helps the mothership develop seasonal recipes like a pumpkin-maple cheesecake, a trio of wintry soups and the skillet pizzas. “Caroline’s recipes are not only delicious, they are always so creative,” Luhrman says. “She often adds an unusual twist or technique that makes the dish special without a lot of extra effort, like her Cajun butter shrimp and fresh corn grits recipe from last summer, which has become a favorite at my house.”

Confession #3:  While I eagerly devour her newsletters, I don’t access the paid section (where the complete recipes live), because 1) I’m a thrifty free-lance soul-ger; 2) I get too many ideas than I can apply from the more conceptual flavor riffs already and 3) I like to create my own version—I seek the spark, but want to build my own fire.

Confession #4: With more inspiration than I can handle, for free, I feel like I’ve got it pretty good. But I don’t have it as good as the Chambers boys, who double as her taste test team—and deserve appreciation for transforming a kitchen pro into something superior.

“I got a lot better at my job after having kids,” she says, laughing. “They forced me to do it!” 

More at the What to Cook Substack.