Hi, Bombs Squad. Welcome to Food for Thought, a radio Cherry Bomb miniseries. I'm Carrie Diamond, founder of Cherry Bomb.

We wanted to know what's on the mind of food folk across the country, so we went on tour to eat, drink, and talk with hundreds of you

and recorded the whole thing live. Today's stop brings us to Baltimore, Maryland, where we recorded

this episode at the beautiful Bar Vasquez. Thank you to Carigold for supporting our Food for Thought

tour. Carrigold is the Irish brand known for its award-winning butter and cheese made with milk from grass-fed cows from family farms all over Ireland.

We'll be hearing more about their amazing products later, so stay tuned.

Also, thank you to visit Baltimore for making this event possible.

First up, we'll hear from dietician and recipe developer Jessica Grossman about how her love for recipes led to her meeting with someone very special.

Good evening. I'm Jessica Grossman, a registered dietitian, recipe developer, and culinary instructor.

I'm also a wife, my husband's sitting right there, a mother, a home cook, and a paper lover. It's this love of

paper, what it represents in the kitchen that brings me here tonight. How many of you grew up

with a box of recipe cards on your kitchen counter? Handwritten and often grease stained,

I used to shuffle through my mom's box when I was barely tall enough to see over

the kitchen counter. As an ambitious eight-year-old, too impatient and too lazy to look for a recipe,

I nearly burned my house down trying to cook pancakes. Recipe cards were my first entrance point

into the food world, but they lack the visuals that are key for any

great recipe. While my friends were reading Sweet Valley High books, I was reading my mom's

good housekeeping magazines, always on the search for a visually appealing recipe that I could

make with my ever-increasing skills and confidence in the kitchen. I used to watch Julia Child on PBS, and I often

imitated her voice as I cooked. My sister preferred the sweetest chef on the Muppet Show, but I knew

that Julia Child was the real deal. By my early adolescent years, I became obsessed with food and

cooking. Besides my mom's recipe box and magazine clippings, there wasn't a collection of cookbooks in our house.

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