Jodi Moreno (@jodimmoreno) grew up in a household where it wasn’t uncommon to see pasta drying on the washing machine. Her maternal grandparents immigrated to New York from Italy, carrying rich culinary traditions with them – traditions that shaped Jodi’s entire world view of food and the experience of sharing it with others. They also inspired her path to becoming a chef, James Beard-nominated author, and food stylist, each step fueled by a childhood spent surrounded by simmering pots of Sunday Sauce and nightly family dinners.
After completing a foundational tenure at The Natural Gourmet Institute in New York (now, The Institute of Culinary Education), Jodi dove into private cheffing. She simultaneously began developing recipes that she meticulously catalogued on her food blog, What’s Cooking Good Looking. Accolades from Saveur and peers in the space parlayed into her first cookbook, and, subsequently, the opportunity to join legendary Argentine chef Francis Mallmann's traveling team. When the pandemic derailed those plans, Jodi took a leap and decided to settle down in Mexico City.
The spontaneous decision was the catalyst for a new chapter for Jodi, one that allowed her to slow down and rediscover the simple pleasure of cooking and her roots of finding joy in the kitchen.
From the first page of Jodi’s new cookbook, Simple Pleasures, we can intuit the depth of her love for the magic of cooking. There’s an ease and honesty to her writing that speaks to her enthusiasm for inspiring others to also celebrate the simple pleasures of food – whether it’s relishing the vibrant crunch of a celery caesar salad with bacon breadcrumbs or twirling a fork into a tangle of crab + sungold tomato pasta.
We knew we had to have Jodi to do a "Pasta People" Q&A the second we arrived at the dedicated “Pasta Party” section of her book where the latter recipe lives. In her words, “Pasta is my heart, my true love, my greatest of all comfort food…. Whenever asked what I would want as my last meal, it is, without hesitation, a perfect bowl of pasta.”
While there are many reasons to immediately order Simple Pleasures (officially out on May 27!), her affinity for our favorite carb definitely tops our list.
You speak so evocatively of the family meals you experienced growing up with your Italian immigrant grandparents. What lesson(s) impacted you the most from your time in the kitchen/or at the table with them?
Funny enough, while my grandmother’s cooking has been one of my biggest influences on my love of cooking, I was not often encouraged to be in the kitchen or to help. In fact, on some occasions, I was not even allowed since kids hovering in a tiny kitchen with lots of pots firing on the burners seemed more like a hazard to my grandmother.
However, my grandmother loved nothing more than to feed us, and I loved nothing more than to observe how she cooked all day long almost every single day. I have such fond memories of the way that the fresh tomatoes from the garden smelled cooking down to make my grandmother's Sunday sauce. The sounds and smells of breakfast being made in the morning, from the pancakes and bacon on the griddle and the Folger’s coffee brewing in a pot.
Growing up around all of that amazing home cooking, witnessing things like my grandmother picking vegetables out of her garden every morning, and making fresh pasta by hand from scratch that would later be laid out to dry all over the basement, really instilled in me a love and appreciation for home cooking. I would later realize it was becoming a bit of a dying lifestyle replaced by something that is now, so often, offered out of convenience in our modern day.
Your culinary career has brought you all over the world. What’s the dish you always turn to when returning home after being on the road?
Almost always, the first meal I will make when I return home is some kind of pantry pasta meal. Sometimes as simple as butter, olive oil, garlic, and parmesan pasta, or a midnight pasta that includes anchovies and copious red pepper flakes. However, the pasta that I crave the most when I have been away for a while is always spaghetti with a classic pomodoro sauce. If I want to make something that takes a little more time and attention when I have been away from the kitchen for a while, that is the pasta I will make.
We always invite our Pasta People to share their Shift Notes or typical day-in-the-life. We’d love to hear what a day of your favorite “Simple Pleasures” would look like for you.
Recently, I moved to a quiet town on a lake outside of Mexico City where I get to live out many of my “Simple Pleasure” days as more of a routine.
Here, my days always start just around sunrise, which I am lucky enough to watch peaking through the trees in the forest that is the backdrop to my bedroom.
The first thing I like to do to start my day is to go outside, so I take my two dogs for a long walk. If it is a weekend, we will usually do a much longer walk or hike, often to a nearby waterfall or lookout trail. Then when we get home, I’ll make some coffee and my boyfriend will make me a French-style omelet. I am not a big breakfast person, but his French omelets are so perfect that I can never resist.
On weekends, I like to do something active or sporty during the day, and one of my favorite things to do is to take a boat out on the lake. I will pack up a cooler with some sandwiches, snacks, and drinks. We will have a picnic, swim, and enjoy lake activities like water skiing or wakeboarding. On the way back to the dock, we always stop for a local smoked trout tostada at the floating restaurant on the lake.
Then, on the way home from the boat, we will pick up ingredients to make dinner to cook at home in the outdoor kitchen. I love to have friends over on the weekends to BBQ, and we always tell them to arrive before “golden hour” because the sunset from our deck is spectacular. Once the sun goes down, we light the fire pit and enjoy dinner under the stars. I like to end the day just as it began, being outside in nature, feeling super grateful to live in a place surrounded by such incredible natural beauty.
What album is playing when you’re in the kitchen developing a new recipe?
I love music as much as I love food, and I love to make playlists, so I have dozens of playlists that I love to listen to, for every time of day and every mood when I am cooking and developing recipes. You can find them on my Spotify account but these are my 3 favorites:
Your dishes always showcase the elegance of simplicity. What’s your go-to, low-effort, high-reward pasta recipe?
My go-to, low-effort, high reward pasta is, without a doubt, the sungold tomato and crab pasta that is on pg. 120 of my new cookbook, Simple Pleasures. I love this recipe because there are very few ingredients, and hardly any prep, you only need to slice a shallot and a couple of garlic cloves. The tomatoes cook down quickly, and you add the crab at the very end which elevates the whole dish, but also gives an unexpectedly creamy consistency since the crab melts into the sauce. It all get finished with a squeeze of lemon to brighten up all the rich flavors. It is the perfect simple pleasure pasta dish that showcases the ultimate elegance of simplicity.
Photo Credit: David Alvarado
