From KCRW, I'm Evan Klyman, and this is Good Food.

It's Mother's Day weekend, and we dedicate this episode to all the moms.

So my mom had this blue line notebook with a picture of Madonna, Bleach Blonde, and Red Laundere singing on the cover, and she would write all of the recipes that she loved. Like all of her

favorite recipes were written in there. There are recipes that she got from her community,

that she got from her family. There were newspaper clippings from newspapers all over the world

that she collected on her travels. And it was used so much that the spine would kept deteriorating, and she kept

putting electrical tape on that spine to keep it together. So it's like, it's very tattered,

but it is very, very powerful. Hamill-Wailey was a fine dining chef through and through. But when

the pandemic hit, the highly choreographed restaurant food you love to make just wasn't hitting the spot.

Inspired by his mom's Madonna notebook, he started to rethink the cozy nostalgia of home-cooked meals.

In his new book, Hello, Home Cooking, Ham offers a fresh ideas on comfort classics.

Hi, Ham, Welcome to Good Food.

How's it going? Thanks for having me.

Oh, we're thrilled to have you. I really love the book. I love the look of it.

There's so much about the design of it that I find incredibly useful.

Thank you so much. We really put a lot of thought into how it was designed. I really

wanted it to evoke those old classic Betty Crocker cookbooks. They pack so much information

into such a little space. And I wanted to take advantage of that because I don't know if you know,

if you probably know this but you you don't

pick how long your book is you're told that this is the number of pages you have to work with

and I really wanted to find a way to pack as much as I possibly could into the number of pages

I had also I think it's the nature of learning how to cook that you often aren't given

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