Five Things You Missed on Heritage Radio This Week

Heritage Radio is the food-focused, listener-supported internet radio station that broadcasts from a studio attached to Roberta's in Bushwick. Every week, many of the big players in the food world host and appear on shows, and oftentimes they reveal interesting tidbits about their work. Here's a guide to five notable pieces of recent programming:

1) Gabrielle Hamilton on the Prune Cookbook:
On this week's episode of The Morning After, Chef Gabrielle Hamilton talks about the followup to her self-made culinary memoir Blood, Bones and Butter,the recipe book to her restaurant, Prune. In the interview, she discusses why she wanted to keep recipes out of her first book, and traces the culinary roots of her cooking, one of which being simple frugality:We use a lot of nubs and tips and ends and cut around the bruised part and if it's a little wilted it's still perfectly good, and I run a business, a restaurant, which, maybe you don't know, you don't make money, you've just got to find money by not throwing shit away, so there's a lot of what we call ‘perfectly good material left in those onion tops or the zucchini tops or Parmesan rinds, egg whites.  Don't throw it away, I can at least make family meal out of it if not make something profitable out of it.

2) Greenmarket Bakery Empire Hot Bread Kitchen:
Following a career promoting human rights, Jessamyn Rodriguez entered the world of social enterprise with Hot Bread Kitchen, an NYC-based immigrant women's baking collective, teaching English and business management classes alongside baking skills, the edible result of which is available at the NYC Greenmarkets.  Check out her profile on HRN to hear about starting a business under the Metro North Railroad, starting a culinary incubator alongside her business, and facing the daily ups and downs of the industry:So there are days that I walk in and women are training women and we're making these wonderful ethnic breads and I'm like ‘this is it, it's working, this is the dream and this is what I'd thought it would be over a decade ago' and then there are days that I come in and I was like ‘what the hell was I thinking this is not what the dream is!
3) Tales of Roberta's Past:
Roberta's Co-owner Brandon Hoy got his employees to share some of their favorite Roberta's service and non-service memories on this week's episode of Roberta's Radio, the show that is the Roberta's equivalent of Thomas Keller's closed-circuit Per Se-to-French Laundry Kitchen television surveillance system.  Obviously there are loads of drug references, so this one ain't for the kids!  Here's one tale:It was new years...and I was drinking but in comparison to every other person here I was dead sober, I could have flown an airplane compared to everyone else, but it was the end of the night and literally the entire dining room, everyone was on top of their table, and I was like, ah shit, I haven't dropped a lot of these checks yet, so I had to kind of shake a couple ankles and some other things.

4) Rosie Schaap of NYTimes Magazine Column "Drink:"
On this week's episode of Sharp & Hot, Emily Peterson spoke with Rosie Schaap about her approach to writing about drinks in light of the recent holidays:When I was a teenage girl I was one of those kids always making crazy concoctions in the kitchen and ordering crazy herbs in the mail.  I was a wannabe witchy kid.  As I've grown older, in a way, making cocktails now does that for me.

5) Dana Cowin on Radio Cherry Bombe:
Food & Wine editor-in-chief Dana Cowin spoke to Julia Turshen of Radio Cherry Bombe about her first cookbook, Mastering My Mistakes in the Kitchen,and her process toward learning to cook for herself, drawing on the expertise of the talents she covered for the magazine:I grew up in a non-food family, nobody cooked...I'm exposed to chefs and great cooking every single day of my life, and that actually allowed me to never learn how to cook, but I do love having people over, I do love entertaining, and so I cook for them, I would cook for them all the time, and every time I would cook, I would do something wrong, like head-bangingly wrong, like, not a little bit wrong, but stupidly wrong...I decided I was a little bit sick of it.  And it had never really occurred to me that I could get better until I really got sick of making these mistakes...and so I reached out, over the initial embarrassment, and I went to Dave Chang and Thomas Keller and Tom Colicchio and Mario Batali, and say, ‘you're not going to believe this, but I really need your help, I don't know how to cook.