Apr 4

Apr 4 Podcasts & Pizza: The Year of No Travel

Vaccines are rolling out with higher frequency and it does feel like this pandemic will turn a corner in the near future. I’m getting my first dose tomorrow and I’m pumped.

After a year plus of staying in the same place, I’ve been thinking about how different my life pre-pandemic and pre-baby were from life now. I used to travel once a month or once every other month. I didn’t always go far necessarily far, but living in a smaller college town always had me craving city getaways. From Louisville to Austin, I was just going and going all the time. Until I wasn’t; none of us were.

With a new baby, I knew I wasn’t going to be traveling as much as before but after Fern and my trip to Maui, I had hoped to travel quite a bit with her before she started becoming mobile and take advantage of not paying for a separate plane ticket for her. Obviously, that didn’t happen. I’m so fortunate that I was already working from home so that wasn’t much of an adjustment. Keeping a toddler alive and entertained while trying to work is an entirely different situation.

I get it now. People want their kids to stay small because they’re adorable but they also can’t run into the kitchen to go splashing in the dog’s water bowl.

Anyway like everyone, I found ways to cope with isolation and newish hobbies in the year of no travel. I know people are looking to the future and excited to get back to normal but I think it’s likely going to be a long road to normalcy. If you’re looking for some new entertainment or some new hobby ideas to get you through to the other side, I hope these ideas are helpful and maybe inspire you to try something new.

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Podcasts are my new Happy Hour

Working in the beer and travel industry for years, I’m all about a happy hour. With lockdown, I needed something to fill that void. I have listened to podcasts on occasion during an airport layover or on a road trip but I really started digging into weekly shows starting in February of 2020. My first obsession was Be There in Five, a hilarious and thoughtful pop culture podcast with a millennial perspective by Kate Kennedy. I cannot thank my friend Kristin Luna enough for sharing this show on her IG stories. The first episode I listened to was a deep dive on TikTok and the Hype House in particular. I knew about the app but didn’t quite understand the TikTok celebs or the fashion choices. I was even more intrigued by this group of characters when I realized I had been in Maui at the same time as the Hype House kids and we’d stayed at the same resort. WILD.

We stayed at the Wailea Beach Villas on the south end of the island and it shares a beach with the Grand Wailea Resort and Four Seasons. Thanks to color-coded umbrellas you can easily recognize people staying at the same resort and I absolutely remember seeing these scantily clad kids taking photos and videos in front of a rock wall at the beach. I remember thinking, “who are these gorgeous teenagers, and how are they in Maui alone?” My sister and I figured they were some celebrity’s kids and didn’t think any more about it. It’s funny now realizing that they were wildly famous then, and we had no clue who they were.

Kate also has some incredibly entertaining takes on pop culture phenomenon, blogger culture, informative deep dives on Taylor Swift, and nostalgic looks back at the millennial existence. Here are a few of my all-time favorite episodes: All of the Mormon Mommy Blogger series (3 parts), Bar Cart Blanche (deep dive into early 2010s Pinterest culture), Bath & Body Jerks (90s & 2000s culture deep dive), and Wow Danny P. WOW (pop culture nostalgia chat with Danny Pelligrino). These are long episodes but they are so entertaining. I love her tangential think-out-loud intros and all of her deep dives are well researched.

Thanks to the Wow Danny P. WOW I was introduced to Danny Pelligrino of the Everything Iconic podcast. I have always been a Bravo TV fan but I blame/thank Danny P for rekindling my housewives obsession. He is so freaking hilarious and does weekly recaps of most Real Housewives cities, celebrity interviews, and a few other Bravo shows. I need his takes on Below Deck immediately. The episodes are easy to sneak in a full episode when you have just 30ish minutes.

Working remotely and being a new mom in a new place without family around is already isolating. Throwing a pandemic in the mix makes it even more so. Sure, I talked on the phone to friends and family constantly but listening to these shows gave me that feeling of being with friends at a happy hour just talking about everything and nothing all at once. It was really cathartic. Anyone else get into podcasts this year?

Other podcasts on my must-listen list:

1619 - Much heavier but so important and well done by The New York Times
Code Switch - NPR’s race and culture podcast
Bitch Sesh - Real Housewives Breakdown with Casey Wilson & Danielle Schneider
Even the Rich - Stories of famous families. The current season deep dives JFK & Jackie O
Reality Life with Kate Casey - Interviews with reality stars and other celebs
Up First - NPR’s quick daily news

Mastering the Perfect Pizza

I baked my fair share of banana bread and biscuits at the beginning of the quarantine but I quickly turned to pizza as a new quarantine project. For the past few years, we’ve lived in college towns so we love going to restaurants and bars. Pre-Fern and pre-pandemic we would go out multiple times a week and since moving from Bloomington, Indiana we found we missed our favorite wood-fired pizza place King Dough most of all. So much so that I reached out to the owners to find out about making pizza. They suggested Joe Beddia's book Pizza Camp. Ever the teacher’s pet, I bought it immediately and read it cover to cover.

If you’re intimidated by making pizza but you love pizza, he posted the dough recipe on his Instagram so give it a shot. If you like it, get the book. He breaks down pizza piece by piece, starting with the dough, then sauces, then toppings. Making the dough itself is really simple; I mean it’s just flour, water, salt, and a tiny bit of sugar. But the process is fascinating. I loved reading about how he pairs ingredients together too. We forage for a lot of mushrooms and other plants and he had some really great tips on how to incorporate those types of ingredients in a pizza. All of the recipes are from his restaurant Pizzeria Beddia in Philadelphia and I cannot wait to go there!

By Memorial Day Weekend, I’d made a ton of good pizza but our oven just doesn’t compare to a wood-fired oven. We’d been thinking about getting a smoker for a while so we decided on a Kamada Joe grill so we could make wood-fired pizza too. By far the best quarantine purchase, we use the grill at least once a week. I wish I would’ve kept a tally of how many pizzas we’ve made since purchasing the book but it’s gotta be in the hundreds.

Beddia’s writing style is really relaxed and funny. He doesn’t seem to take himself too seriously even though he’s one of the most famous pizza chefs in the country. I will say his dough recipe does require a little planning because it’s a really slow fermentation and requires a 24-hour nap in the fridge before you can use the dough. I’ve rushed it before and it’s not as good. It has been fun to try and use up stuff in our fridge as pizza toppings. We started out following his recipes completely with our favorites being the Roasted Mushroom Pizza and the Roasted Corn with Heirloom Cherry Tomato and Basil. The Mushroom Pizza is the most decadent pie you can imagine. The sauce is a creamy, woodsy, mushroom garlic sauce, topped with cheese, and more mushrooms and a little swirl of good olive oil when it comes off the grill. I mean wow. We forage for mushrooms in the warmer months and have a freezer stocked full so the mushroom one is easy for us to do on the fly. The roasted corn pizza dominated the summer of 2020 and I loved every bite. The sauce is actually a roasted corn cream sauce and then you top it with mozzarella, tomatoes, basil, and a basil-infused olive oil. Oh my gahhhhhh - out of control good.

My baking didn’t stop with pizza of course. I make sandwich bread all the time now, too many cookies, dabbled in sourdough (need to try it again), and made my first batch of croissants (I’d rather buy these I think).

Here are a few other cookbooks in my heavy rotation:

Everyone Can Bake - Baking building blocks by the creator of the famous cronut, Dominique Ansel
Sweet & Vicious: Baking with Attitude - Libbie Summers is one of my all-time favorite food people and her baking book is so fun. The Satorialist Cookies (bourbon & pecan) are insanely good.
Joy the Baker Cookbook - I’ve been following her on IG for years and just love her vibe. Oh and she’s the baker behind @drakeoncake
The Joy of Cooking - This is the cooking bible to me and they have some chapters dedicated to baking as well.
Callie’s Biscuits & Southern Traditions - I love Callie’s Biscuits and whenever I want to take a trip back home I pull out this book. If you’re ever in Charleston or Atlanta you must visit her Hot Little Biscuit shop. If you’re feeling lazy, you can buy her biscuits online :)
For the Love of the South - Speaking of home, this is my other favorite Southern cookbook. Amber is an incredible storyteller and her photography is so dreamy. Her dessert chapter is absolutely delicious.

Here’s to the new normal, whatever that looks like.

Now that I’m typing this out, my year of no travel reads much like my college experience - filled with too many carbs and too much tv drama. It wasn’t all great but considering what others have endured, I’m incredibly lucky. I’m so ready to get fully vaccinated and hit the road! We live like 20 hours from most of our Southern friends and family but hoping to make some road trips to meet them in the middle.

How have you spent the past year and some months? Are you ready to travel?