Alaska Airlines has teamed up with Hawaiian Airlines to create new nonstop international flights.

Go to Alaskaair.com or Hawaiian Airlines.com and I'll tell you more details later in the show.

I'm Rachel Bell and this is your last meal, a show about famous people and the stories behind the foods they love most.

Today on the program, award-winning food blogger and author of a New York Times best-selling cookbook, Deb Perlman.

Deb is the woman behind the Smitten Kitchen blog and two cookbooks. The Smitten Kitchen cookbook and her newest book, Smitten Kitchen

Every Day, Triumphant and Unfussy New Favorites. The tagline of the blog is Fearless Cooking

from a Tiny Kitchen in New York City. And Deb shares the recipe she cooks for her family,

a husband and two kids. I think the

reason that people are really attracted to Deb's blog is because she has this very warm riding

style. She's very relatable. She's very unfussy. And her recipes work. But since her full-time job

revolves around cooking and all her readers see are these lovely posed photographs. Some people

make assumptions about what her life is like. So nice people build a picture where you're just like

this domestic goddess. Yes. I'm not a domestic goddess. Just the cooking. That's the only thing

I like to do. I just like to cook. And I also don't cook three meals a day, you know, seven days a week at all.

Like, we live in New York City. There's no reason to cook every night. So Deb is the human star

of this episode. But our culinary star is the artichoke. And a particular type of Roman artichoke

was the center of scandal and controversy a few months back. The story was splashed across the pages of international news outlets, and no, I'm not joking.

Oh my gosh, it was a shock sent around Rome and the rest of Italy.

That's Italian travel writer Susan Van Allen.

She's going to fill us in on this scandal.

But first, my interview with

Deb Pearlman. I'm just going to start with a small gush. I really love you. And I've, yeah,

...