WEBVTT

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- I'm Courtney Roker Laga.

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- I'm Al Roker and this
is that's so random.

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- Thanks so much for joining us.

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I'm really excited to talk

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to you guys about your new cookbook,

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Al Roker's Recipes to Live By.

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So I gotta start by asking as
a, as a mom, as a Black woman,

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as a person who needs a
little help in the kitchen,

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this book really spoke to me.

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But so whose idea was it
to put this book together?

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- I guess it was my idea.

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He was doing some social media
videos with my little brother

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during the pandemic and
everyone was just obsessed

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with them cooking, saying,
when's a cookbook coming out,

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a show, anything?

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And I was just like, this is
the perfect opportunity for us

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to do a cookbook, a family cookbook.

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And I've been recipe developing for about

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five years.

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So it, it's just, I think it would be easy

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for both of us to do that.

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And he wasn't really interested in,

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- I had done a cookbook
I think like 30 years

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ago, and it's a lot of work.

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Okay. I mean, it's a
heck of a lot of work.

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And she was very relentless
and finally said, oh.

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And I said, okay, fine,
we're gonna do this,

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but you're gonna have to do the work.

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I mean, I'll write the
head notes for the recipes,

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but you're gonna have to
come up with the recipes.

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'cause my mother didn't
write anything down.

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We wanna do kind of a family, a cookbook.

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Her mom didn't write anything
down. My grandmother, nobody.

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Nobody. So you're gonna have
to be a recipe detective.

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And she was more than up to the challenge.

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- How difficult was it for
you to figure out, okay,

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you actually need a
quarter teaspoon of this?

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- There was a lot of
repetitiveness testing

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recipes over and over again.

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'cause again, there was
nothing written down.

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If I'm talking to him or my mother

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or Deborah, you know, they're
growing off of memory, right.

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They're saying, this is what I tasted,

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or I'm going off of memory
of my grandmother's recipes.

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This is what I tasted. So
it was a little bit harder

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with the desserts

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because you have to have
certain amounts, right?

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When it comes to like
savory items like chicken

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or vegetables, you can kind of, you know,

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a little bit of this,
a little bit of that.

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But with the desserts
is a little bit harder.

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- Spices. Are there any certain spices

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that you think everyone must
have on their spice wrap?

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- I love curry powder.

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I, I feel like curry powder
has everything in it already.

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I'm very into like Indian spices,

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Mexican cumin coriander.

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- I like, I like smoked paprika.

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Big fan of, big fan of, and I like zaatar.

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- I like za tarique.
- Yeah. That's, that's a, that's a,

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that's a fun spice.

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Okay. And it's fun to say zita.

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It's almost, it's almost like a magic

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- Zazaar.

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Alright, so in five words,

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tell folks why they should
check out your cookbook

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Al Broker's Recipes to Live By

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- You will be cooking.

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You will be cooking better, better.