The One Where We Love To Cook Again
Words By Jeanne Cooper
Photos by Kelsey Wisdom
Video by Grant Kinsey
Caroline “Caro” Chambers, Carmel Valley cookbook author and creator of the most popular food and drink newsletter on Substack, sometimes feeds her three young boys frozen dinners. And if you’re among the 150,000 subscribers to her breezily confessional, nonjudgmental What to Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking newsletter, you already know that’s more than OK.
“I did all the right things, exposed my kids to fruit and vegetables at a young age, but my big boys are still picky eaters. People assume that I’m a chef and they just love eating my food, but that’s not the case,” explains Chambers, who shares sons Mattis, 5, Calum, 3, and Cashel, 1, with husband George Hodgin, founder and CEO of Biopharmaceutical Research Company in Castroville. “I love to take the time to cook a meal that my husband and I love to eat, and the boys will get frozen broccoli and frozen meatballs. I’m going to eat something that I love and I don’t feel bad about that.”
One of her current, grownups-only favorites is the lentil bruschetta in her new cookbook, also called What to Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking, in stores Aug. 13. “You can boil your own lentils, or use canned lentils, or any beans would work. Spread them over olive oil toasted sourdough and put parm on top,” Chambers says, deftly demonstrating her gift for offering ingredient substitutions as well her fondness for Parmesan, which she buys by the block. “You put some ricotta on the bread and it’s so delicious. My boys wouldn’t go near it with a 10-foot pole, but it’s a fresh, plant-based meal and everything that I want to eat.”
And it’s the type of recipe that many want to read: Chambers’ Substack subscribers include nearly 20,000 who pay up to $50 a year for additional content. Yet it took a rejection from her previous cookbook publisher, the pandemic slowdown of her work as a recipe developer, and fatigue as a new mom to find inspiration for the newsletter, according to Chambers.
In 2017, the same year she and Hodgin had moved to Carmel-by-the-Sea from the San Francisco Bay Area, Chronicle Books published her first cookbook, Just Married, designed for newly engaged and newly married couples, Chambers says. “The recipes are not difficult—that’s never been my style—but after my first son in 2019, I realized that a lot of techniques in there are the correct chef-y things that take too long—like, they use two bowls instead of one, or two skillets instead of one.” Describing herself as “exhausted,” Chambers quickly came up with the “What to Cook…” concept, but says Chronicle Books and other publishers passed on it due to her lack of social media presence. “You had to have your own community to have your own cookbook deal,” she notes. “The publishers don’t want to spend money on marketing and they want you to have your own built-in audience.”
With her freelance recipe work dwindling in 2020, “I started cranking out recipes on Instagram and putting them on my website and created a dedicated following,” Chambers says. “My signature thing is I provide a substitute for every single ingredient. Can I use chicken here? Can I use gluten-free flour here? It was Covid time and nobody had the proper ingredients. That’s still on every recipe, a full list of substitutions. It’s like teach a man to fish instead of hand a man to fish. The second you can improvise or swap in ingredients, that’s when you become a really core-competent cook.”
Chambers put the book proposal away for a year, and after gaining “some followers on Instagram” (currently 216,000-plus), she launched the Substack newsletter. “Overnight I had 500 paid subscribers,” Chambers recalls. While her initial following was “mostly young moms,” she says, it quickly grew to “an amazing community and really dedicated following of people who want to cook easy and delicious food.” The secret sauce: her laidback and encouraging tone to nevertheless precisely written recipes.
“I write them as if I’m standing in the kitchen and drinking a glass of wine, and you’re not a super competent cook, but I’m talking you through it,” Chambers says. “I tell you if the tops are burning before 45 minutes are up, just place foil over them and don’t worry about it, it means your oven is running hot. That’s the type of things that home cooks need. They think, ‘Oh, I did something wrong,’ and no, you didn’t, you just hit one of the potential hiccups. … Cooking feels like a chore when you’re so exhausted, but when you can make it a creative fun thing, that’s when you feel like cooking.”
Chambers credits her “basic skills” to having to cook for her mom, who worked full-time while Chambers was growing up in North Carolina, and she attributes their mutual passion for food to being Southern. “Cooking is a core part of our personality and what we do,” Chambers says. “My mom jokes we spend all of our breakfast talking about what we’re going to have for lunch and at lunch we talk about what we’re going to have for dinner.”
Union Square and Co. approached Chambers to publish her latest cookbook, organized by how much time each recipe takes—"15 minutes, 30, 45, and hour and ‘set it and forget it,’” according to Chambers. “When I don’t feel like cooking, it’s that I am usually strapped for time or I have only 45 minutes between my two oldest boys’ sport practices.” The cookbook will include 90 all-new recipes as well as the 10 most popular from the Substack newsletter. Among the latter: 15-minute “peanut noods,” a recipe that coincidentally her youngest critics will eat, with gusto. “You throw in whatever vegetables you have while noodles are cooking to cook them all at the same time, and then toss them in the peanut sauce,” itself a simple mix of peanut butter and soy sauce, Chambers explains. “It’s endlessly customizable—you can throw in edamame, or rotisserie chicken, or cook it with spaghetti or ramen noodles. We make that a ton and our boys will eat it.”
After Chambers finished months of working on the cookbook, she admits even she was “burnt out” on writing recipes. So last fall she added something else to her busy plate: a podcast and newsletter called So Into That. “I needed a complete mental shift,” Chambers notes. “It’s about fashion, motherhood, lifestyle. We all have a lot going on outside of our strict career—what are our babies eating, what’s an attainable skin care routine for a mom of three. It’s a place where I can chat about things that are not about food and talk about all the other things that make up who I am and how I live.”
To be fair, there can be some talk about food—Health Nut cookbook author Jess Damuck and Grilling All the Things cookbook author Gaby Dalkin are among recent guests sharing their wisdom—yet like the best chicken, discussions are free-ranging and organic. Some themes are lighthearted, while others explore physical and mental health issues. “I would chat on Instagram Stories about maternal health, postpartum care, depression and anxiety, but those would disappear after 24 hours, so this gives me a longer form to discuss things that I really care about,” Chambers says. “As moms, we are so caught up in just making our day-to-day lives run, we don’t have time to chit chat with girlfriends and sit on the couch hanging out like we used to, but that’s the vibe I’m trying to create on the podcast and the newsletter.” <img src="https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6457f19f1c1e1601e2c9c3f6/6487a9355b63a6818c705cea_CC-Icon--20.svg"alt="CC"height="20" width="20">
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Jeanne Cooper worked as a news and features editor and writer for the Washington Post, Boston Globe and San Francisco Chronicle before going freelance in 2008. Her family ties to the Monterey Peninsula date to the early 1950s, when her grandfather helped establish the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey.
