The Pittsburgh Dish
Do you really know the food scene of Pittsburgh?! The Pittsburgh Dish introduces you to the people, places, and recipes that make our regional cuisine so special. By sharing personal stories, weekly recommendations, and community recipes, we aim to inspire you to connect with local taste makers and experience the unique flavors that shape our city.
The Pittsburgh Dish
036 Chris Fennimore: Cultivating Community Through Cooking
(00:50) What do you do when you have an abundance of zucchini? If you're Chris Fennimore, you create a beloved cooking show that’s been a Pittsburgh favorite for over 31 years! Join us as Chris shares how his garden's bounty led to a unique television journey, one that focuses not on celebrity chefs, but on real people and their cherished family recipes. These stories capture the heart of cooking as a way to preserve heritage and build community on screen, transforming simple home-cooked meals into a celebration of family history.
(15:08) Chris reflects on the challenges and joys of adapting marathon cooking sessions into engaging TV segments, with tales of themed episodes like "Grandma's Kitchen Wisdom," which continue to resonate with audiences for their timeless appeal. Alongside these cooking memories, Chris shares delightful encounters with culinary legends, highlighting the camaraderie and shared passion that define the world of cooking shows.
(28:37) Beyond the kitchen, Chris lets us into his life of harmonious pursuits—gardening, music, and family. Listen in as he recounts how a shared garden plot blossomed into love and inspired both personal happiness and professional creativity. Chris’s stories of performing with the Pittsburgh Banjo Club, nurturing a family, and savoring Italian food during family trips reveal his life’s passions.
As we wrap up, Chris envisions making his vast archive of community-focused television segments accessible for future generations, ensuring these stories of food and heritage continue to inspire. And of course he left us a great idea for mushroom risotto!
Welcome to the Pittsburgh Dish. I'm your host, Doug Heilman. How did a bountiful summer garden lead to over 30 years of local food television that other public broadcast stations just can't replicate? We talk tales of cooking, family romance and banjos From Brooklyn to Pittsburgh to Rome and back again, all with this week's guest. Stay tuned. Thanks for listening to the Pittsburgh Dish. Check out our website at wwwpittsburghdishcom for past episodes, our recipe blog or if you'd like to support the show, that's wwwpittsburghdishcom. Now on to the show. Thank you so much for coming over and for being on the show. I'm glad to be here. Would you introduce yourself to our listeners?
Chris:Well, I'm Chris Fennimore. A lot of people think of me as that cooking guy. That's right, because for the last 31 years we have been doing cooking shows on WQED here in Pittsburgh, and the thing about the shows is that they are not like Julia Child or Jacques Pepin, where you have somebody who is a culinary genius and a wizard in the kitchen. All of the guests on our show are people in our broadcast area. The first one I did was Z is for zucchini, and it was so strange because I had a garden filled with zucchini right up here at the Homewood Cemetery.
Doug:Oh yeah.
Chris:And the zucchini were so plentiful that summer that you could stand at the edge of the garden and zucchinis would jump into a basket. I didn't know what to do with all of these. So I went back to the office I was also the director of programming there and I said to my director of continuity, Nancy Polinsky. I said, nancy, would you please make a promo on a little thing, asking people to send their recipes for zucchini? She said is that legal? You're crazy. I said, well, I need a lot of recipes for zucchini. She said is that legal? You're crazy. I said, well, I need a lot of recipes for zucchini. Yes, and she goes. But but are we allowed to do that, can you know? And I said, yeah, sure, I mean you know it's in our budget.
Chris:We can make little promos. Yes and uh, so she did. And she said if you have recipes for zucchinis, send them to this address. And all of a sudden it was like pandemonium at the station because the letters came pouring in. The response was overwhelming, to say the least. Now I'm reading through these, trying to figure out what would be good recipes for me to make. And they're not just recipes, they're family stories and I'm sure I've told you that you, this story, yes, uh, that they, they would be like this. Um, this is my aunt margaret's recipe for stuffed zucchini boats. My aunt margaret never so we're already on a tangent here and she used to come to our house every Thanksgiving because she didn't have any other place to go and she always brought these zucchini boats because she wanted to feel like she was participating in the meal. Um, we never liked the zucchini boats you're getting a lot of story.
Chris:I know, so I'm here's this maiden aunt, you know, uh, but they love her, so they don't say anything about how terrible these zucchini boats are oh and, by the way, here they are for your cookbook or your show or whatever.
Doug:Right exactly.
Chris:But then the story goes on and it says now that my Aunt Margaret is gone, we still make these every year. And what I realized was that recipes, our kinds of recipes not the fancy-dancy ones, but our kinds of recipes are all about family history. But our kinds of recipes are all about family history, the promulgation of family ethics and traditions, and it's all conveying stories. And you relive those stories every time you make whatever that dish is. And so many of the recipes in all of our cookbooks are Aunt So-and-So's, this, uncle Ronnie's, that, my grandma's, this. We did a whole cookbook on grandma's kitchen wisdom Only recipes from grandmas. If you weren't a grandma, don't bother sending it in. And that one is still one of my favorite cookbooks because the stories in there were unbelievable. And in our old cookbooks we used to actually put a lot of these stories Right, not just the recipe but as much of the stories as I could fit in there. And so I got all these recipes and I thought you know, this is something unique, I'm also a program producer, right? You?
Doug:really had something here.
Chris:I am. And so I said to the person who was the station manager. I said could I have a little time during the next pledge period Because I would love to do a demonstration of a couple of recipes and I'll type up these recipes and offer them as a thank you gift, like the tote bag or the coffee mug or whatever people use. And so he said sure, knock yourself out. Well, we didn't have a kitchen.
Doug:What year is this, Chris?
Chris:93. Yes, 93. It was the summer of 93. So Nancy and I set up two tables and I cooked the five or six recipes that I picked out of the book Ahead of time, ahead of time. And then I had all the ingredients, and so the ingredients were on the front table and the finished dishes were on the table behind me, and so I would say so. Then you chop this up, and then you put the onion in there, and then you slice that and blah, blah, blah and put it in the oven for 45 minutes, and it comes out like this, and then we would taste it.
Chris:Well, the phones rang off the hook, people wanted these and we were reading, while I'm cooking, while I'm making believe I'm cooking, nancy is reading the letters from everybody who sent in their recipes. So it was very heartwarming and it was, I thought, particularly appropriate for public broadcasting, right, because this was our way of sharing, for them to share with us and for us to share back with them. And to me that's what public broadcasting is all about, and to me that's what public broadcasting is all about, Aside from keeping all these loved ones' stories alive through the cooking you're bringing the community into the station.
Chris:Well, on the next show, because what happened was immediately the people in the pledge department said when's the next one? And I said I have no idea. I didn't know this was going to happen we picked cookies as the topic. Then we decided that I wasn't going to make all the cookies. We were going to have people come in and make their cookies. And that was the beginning of the format that we have now followed for the last 31 years, and that is that people send in their recipes. We get usually a couple of hundred recipes. We select four or five people to come on the show. I usually make one recipe, nancy usually makes one recipe, and that is not so much a matter of our egos involved in you know, we've got to be part of this but it's a timing matter in terms of production. So I usually do the first or the last and Nancy does the first or the last, and that way if I need to do it all in five minutes instead of 12,.
Doug:I can do it, yes, smart.
Chris:And also, if we're stuck for time, I can just stand there and talk. It works out. It works out that way. So that's why I've been doing some of my recipes on that show. Anyway, that's how the cooking thing got started. But because I'm not a people always say oh, chef Fennimore, you know, chef Chris? And I said no, no, no, I'm not a chef, I'm just a cook.
Chris:The only cooking that I learned was from my mother and my grandmother, who we lived with my grandmother, and this is in Brooklyn. This is in Brooklyn, new York. I was born there in the 19th century and it's not a secret, I'm 77 years old, so you know, you do the math. But, and we lived in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, which was an interesting combination of ethnic influences, because right in my few blocks around our local church, it was all Italian. Then the next group was the Irish, and then there were the Greeks and we had a Jewish community. So it was really you could walk a few blocks and get a. Well, the Norwegians I forgot about the Norwegians. Oh, my goodness they were. It was wonderful to go over there.
Doug:So you could get all these food influences as a young person Exactly, and I did you know.
Chris:So that's where I grew up and my grandmother being the oldest of eight sisters, she was the one who had the Sunday dinner and everybody who could come came, so we were somewhere between 15 and 25 people every Sunday around our table.
Doug:Amazing, and didn't she make like dozens of dishes?
Chris:Oh yeah, you know appetizers, then there was the pasta course, then there was the main course, then there was the dessert, then there was the wine and the fruit was the main course, then there was the dessert, then there was the wine and the fruit. You know, it just went on all day. Could you?
Doug:imagine cooking for 30 people every weekend.
Chris:No, but she just did it. She just did it and she was a seamstress. So she was at work every day because she had to take the subway to Manhattan. She worked on 34th Street in the Garment District, so she would leave the house at 6.30 in the morning, get home at 7.30 at night and she would miss dinner because my dad insisted on having his nightly dinner at five o'clock. So she would always have her little soup and greens, beans and greens or just escaroles. She would just do escarole and whatnot. Anyway, back to the Sunday dinner.
Chris:As soon as you were old enough, they would start giving you jobs that they thought you would be capable of, like okay, here's how you shell peas. And they would give you a bushel basket full of peas and you'd go there and that's what you did after you went to church in the morning. So we would come home and we would just start working on this dinner. And I remember the time that I graduated she says, all right, here's the meatball mixture. She didn't trust me to mix it. Oh, no, no, no. But she thought I could shape them. So I thought, okay, I could shape a ball. And you know I'm just, I took a little bit. It's like Play-Doh, you know. You just roll it around in my hand and I put it on the tray. And another one and I put it on the tray. Now there were like a hundred meatballs, so it took me a little.
Chris:While she comes over and she looks at it. Some of them were a little bigger, a little smaller, and everything. She points to one that's small. She says who's that for? I said, well, I don't know Whoever gets it, you know. She said, well, what if it's one of our guests? Oh, and they think that we're holding back on them and that everybody else has got a big meatball and they got a small meatball. How are they going to feel? Oh, what are they going to think of me?
Doug:She gave you her inner monologue there.
Chris:So she dumped all of the meatballs back in the bowl and I had to reshape them. Oh my goodness. Uniformly.
Doug:Do you know how old you are at this point About?
Chris:eight, nine. Oh, nine oh yeah, and it was a lesson learned you know about. That's one of the aspects of cooking and serving and feeding people.
Doug:Always thinking about the other people.
Chris:Yes, so that training I did have, but you know there was none of those other culinary things out of. You know, flip the saute pan or whatever they do.
Doug:You and I both I mean I always say I'm a home cook. Yeah exactly, I've learned from watching people like you. I've learned from a lot of PBS shows how to cook beyond what my mom and my family members taught. But I've also never gone to culinary training of any sort.
Chris:I used to go down to culinary training of any sort. I used to go down to the culinary school downtown and sometimes they would ask me would you like do a demo? And I said I don't have anything to demo for them. I'll be glad to talk to them and I can show them some home recipe.
Doug:That they can convert to fancier.
Chris:I said but you know I'm not a chef and they just, they just couldn't get over it. You know, they say you're, you're on TV for Pete's sake. Of course you're a chef. No, I'm not.
Doug:But it's part of your accessibility. Actually, I think all of those other community members that are writing in and sending you recipes they don't feel intimidated to not do that because you are just cooking with them in the same way that they would be cooking.
Chris:And the thing about the recipes that they send in is they never send in their worst recipe other than Aunt Margaret's zucchini boats, which they still make. What they're sending you are the recipes that they are famous for. You know that always comes out and people go. How do you make that? Yes, you know, when you go to a potluck and you're bugging the person for the recipe, and so they learn and they just start making recipe cards that they put down next to their casserole. You know, those are the recipes that they're sending us, that we put into our books and, as I say, it's now been hundreds and hundreds of guests, maybe eight 900 guests over these years. That's a lot of people.
Doug:It's incredible and I just want to point out, most affiliates in the PBS world don't always have kitchens or anything like we've had, so it's such a treasure for our community. On the programs you guys have brought over the years, yeah, you have me thinking, and actually I'm thinking back to the first time you told me this story. Is it true? The zucchini program?
Chris:it wasn't even taped, no, we just did it live Right, it was an hour and a half that we filled and then that's it.
Doug:And from then on, do you have any ballpark idea how many shows you've done? You've done two new ones this year Gadgets and Gizmos Sweets.
Chris:And Sweets, yeah, and then, just before that, we had done the when in Rome show, when in Rome and that's when I got to thank you so much. I got to make meatballs with you from Dan Mancini that's right?
Doug:Yes, because he puts the mortadella in the meatballs he grinds it in.
Chris:It's such a wonderful trick. Yes, yeah, I'm limiting the number of shows that I do, which is fine with me, and they're all national now we don't just do them for local, because the stations around the country were not able to replicate what we did, right, so they run all these shows. But other than that, I would say we've done about 160 shows Incredible, yeah.
Doug:And do they all then have like a community cookbook?
Chris:Oh, absolutely. And then we started to take segments from those cooking shows, the marathons, because it would be like in the old days, we made four hour shows. I don't know what I was thinking. We went from one and a half hours to four hours and in four hours you'd have 10 or 11 demonstrations. So with that many recipes to do on air, we were take out, and now I stir it for 12 minutes, you know, and then you just cut that down in time until they were all about 12 minutes, and then we would make half hour programs with two of these recipes in each program. And we've done seven seasons of those. So that's 26 shows times seven.
Chris:Oh my, I can't do that kind of thing, it's a lot of shows, it's a lot of shows, and that's what they're running. Now is season seven of the QED Cooks morning show every Saturday at 10 o'clock.
Doug:For our listeners that maybe haven't been so in tuned with you. The national shows we now call America.
Chris:America's Home Cooking.
Doug:That's right, and when they were more local or regional did we call it QED Cooks.
Chris:No, we had a title for each show. Oh okay, Sometimes it was just whatever the recipe was or the ingredient, main ingredient, like we did cookies.
Doug:Yeah, you did the alphabet almost like A to Z.
Chris:Berries, appetizers, soups and stews, seafood. And then we started to do things like Grandma's Kitchen, Wisdom, Church Lady Cooking, Church Lady Cooking.
Doug:That's a good one. It was a wonderful show. Oh yes.
Chris:Oh, my goodness, we actually did two of those, because we did one set of them and then all these other church ladies came and they were banging on my door, going what?
Doug:about us, as they should.
Chris:So we did. We had a whole new cookbook because we had all these new recipes from new churches and so on Holiday Sides, Holiday Sides I keep that on my counter because there were so many great recipes in there that my family now demands on Thanksgiving and Christmas and so on and I've noticed they still play it almost every I don't know November or October It'll play again, it's classic.
Doug:It gives you great ideas too, but along the way it still connects you with all those community members. And still the stories. When the people come on, we should say they're still telling the story. Oh, absolutely, You're asking them about the story behind the recipe. When the people come on, we should say they're still telling the story. Oh, absolutely, you're asking them about the story behind the recipe.
Chris:That's what we do while we chop onions.
Doug:It's so much better than a lot of the other food TV that's out there truly.
Chris:I mean I have to say that I liked the old style where you actually learned something. They gave enough time to the process and the procedure and the ingredients for you to say, okay, I would try that, I would try to make that. And if it was Julia Child or Marianne Esposito or Lydia Bastianich or so many Sarah Moulton great cooks to learn from, and I thought you know, even in the best cooking schools you're not necessarily getting somebody with that kind of expertise and background. Did you know that Sarah Moulton was Julia Child's kitchen assistant when she did her series?
Doug:I just recently saw this picture of them and Sarah Moulton looks like a little girl.
Chris:She's not very tall to begin with, but she's very young, oh yeah no, she looks like she's 16, but I don't know what what age she actually was. But she's a delightful lady. I got a chance to meet her. That, I have to say, has been another nice part of all of this, because once they, you get identified as a TV cook or celebrity.
Doug:You are a little bit of a celebrity, Chris.
Chris:You get to meet other celebrities and to me it was a thrill. I'm good friends now with Marianne Esposito. Imagine that. She's so great, she's terrific and just a down-to-earth kind of lady.
Chris:And Jacques Pepin came to town and he said I don't want to give a lecture, it was a lecture series. And they said, well, what would you do? And he said, well, if you could get somebody like Chris Fennimore, who's a local guy, he knew about my show and if he just asked me questions. So I got to spend all this time on stage with Jacques asking him questions, mostly about his book the Apprentice, which I, if you haven't read that, by the way, the Apprentice by Jacques Pepin Okay, he's a brilliant writer. You know his language as he talks makes it seem like maybe he's not that good at English. He's brilliant when he writes it and he has his master's or his doctorate from Columbia. So this is no slouch here and it shows in the book the Apprentice and it really comes through. And then we I went out to lunch with him and his daughter, claudine, who did a couple of seasons with him on his cooking show.
Doug:Oh, yes, yeah. Where did you take them? In Pittsburgh.
Chris:Oh, no, no, I didn't.
Doug:Oh, okay, okay.
Chris:They had it at this affair. Okay, okay, that the whole deal was you got the whatever this was lecture, and then they had a luncheon, and so I was with him at his table.
Doug:Wonderful, because I would be stressed when am I taking Sean oh?
Chris:yeah, I know, see, and I gotta tell you, my safest bet would be to take him home. Yes, yeah, because he would dig that he'd get it, of course.
Doug:Every chef I've met is so grateful to be cooked for and they're not gonna be judging. Judging you? No, not at all.
Chris:Um if you go to a chef's house and look in their refrigerator, first of all it's pretty empty. That's right. There might be a bottle of wine in there, but they don't have anything to cook at home, and they love home cooking it's not what you do in the restaurant.
Doug:It's very different, it's very production, and I think that's why I've never gravitated to wanting to work in a restaurant, because there's such a rigor and a monotony to getting it right, and again and again, and again Exactly.
Chris:That's the chef's talent or specialty, and that is that they make a dish on Tuesday. And that is that they make a dish on Tuesday. They make 40 of them on Tuesday, and they make 40 more on Wednesday, and they're exactly the same, all 80. How do you do that? I couldn't.
Doug:And that's what people want.
Chris:It is because when they go back and tell their friends, oh, I had the chicken, limon, you got to have it, and all of a sudden it's not the same, you know, then it would be very disappointing.
Doug:No, I mean, they count the number of capers they put on the darn dish, you know before we get too far away from talking about the show in these memorable moments, you've done all of the cookbooks for the pledge drives, but there are two books that you've written yourself Right, simple Pleasures, right and you had a co-author, yeah.
Chris:Daniel Aguera.
Doug:And he's local as well. Oh yeah, how did that come about? It's a little different than the other books.
Chris:It's very different. I had him. It was for a short documentary that I did. Well, it was the Fat Club, and the Fat Club is a group of chefs, local, who come together every once in a while. They used to do it at least twice a year, but now it's sort of dropped off and they try to kill each other with food. What they're doing is they're trying out new recipes and they want sophisticated palates and whatnot. To see what they're doing is they're trying out new recipes and they want sophisticated palates and whatnot. To see what they're doing and to critique it, tell them how they might change it and so on. And they invited me to one of these. So I brought a film crew and we filmed this thing. I could watch that darn thing over and over again.
Chris:Anyway, Daniel was there. He's never done restaurants. He's done more institutional cooking, okay, but he made this soup that was so delicious and maybe it was soups and stews that we were doing and I said, would you come on and do that? And that's how we met. He came onto the show and he did this soup. That was from his family origins. He's from Spain.
Doug:What I really like about that cookbook is it's almost every other page is a recipe from you and a recipe from him. They are simple. I mean they're very approachable.
Chris:Yes.
Doug:And yet you both give your family spin on, as it would be a soup or some kind of casserole or something.
Chris:It's a great book? Oh, it is, and the recipes are simple. You don't have to go to a specialty store to get the ingredients or these are things we all have and that we're all capable of the directions for. You don't have to souffle any eggs. Do you souffle an egg? Is that what you do?
Doug:No, I don't I have it, and this was around 2017. And then you did another, a follow-up, and I think this is yours solely. It's Stuffed.
Chris:Yes, stuffed. Well, because the publisher said when's the next one, of course. And so I thought what would be interesting? What's a thing, first of all, that I haven't done with WQED Right? And then I thought through all the dishes that my mother and my grandmother made, and you know like 60% of them were stuffed, meaning something inside something else, whether it was a cream puff or a manigatta or a brajol. Grandmother made brajol with beef. She made it with pork, different fillings, you know, but everything was wrapped up in something else. So I said, okay, stuffed.
Doug:I love it. I actually thought you drew a lot of inspiration even from Pittsburgh, because we love pierogi and you know stuffed cabbage rolls and all of the things. They're all in the book. They're in the book too. So I think you drew from a little bit of both family.
Chris:Oh yeah, but that's. I started thinking about that. And then you know, I, my mother, also made stuffed cabbage and she made pierogies and and when it? Because my dad grew up in a Polish neighborhood. He was in an Italian family but all of his friends, he would go and he enjoyed having their food and that's what he wanted to have. So my mother said, I'll learn how to make it. Heck, my mom used to make chow mein. This little Sicilian girl and she's there in Brooklyn making chow mein and egg rolls.
Doug:She's very similar to my grandmother, who was sort of English and German descent but had 10 kids learned how to make tacos, what we called Italian spaghetti through the seventies. I don't know why we didn't just call it spaghetti. She just she incorporated all of these. You know, these kuchina palvada the food of the poor.
Chris:Yeah, but that was soul food. Soul food, that's right.
Doug:And so she made all that. But that was her Soul food. Soul food, that's right, and so she made all that, and I think that's any wise woman with a big family in that era would do the same thing, oh yeah.
Chris:Yeah, and also we kids were influenced by what we saw on television, and in a way that prior generations might not have been. So I'm looking at the Chungking Chow Mein commercials and going can we get that? Can we get TV dinners? Can we get pot?
Doug:pies.
Chris:My mother made the most delicious chicken pot pie you could ever imagine putting in your mouth, and we were bugging her, can we have the ones in the little tin? And so finally she bought them. They weren't that expensive but there wasn't a lot of space in my mother's budget. But she relented and uh, and we taste and we go, that's supposed to be pot pie awful it was awful. There was no chicken in it. No, there was no pot, it was just a pie, that's all well, you learned your lesson I did food.
Chris:And I'm glad you did.
Doug:Hi, this is Chris Fennimore, the host of QED Cooks, and I'm here with you on The Pittsburgh Dish if you don't mind, I would love to talk about family a little bit more, but I'd love to go back and talk about the zucchini story and your wife.
Chris:Oh yeah. Well, my wife played a big part in that whole zucchini thing, because the reason why I was in the garden was that I was in a church choir and going through a tough period in my life. My first marriage hadn't worked out as they can happen.
Chris:So I was feeling depressed a little bit and I went to it. Actually I went to a psychiatrist. He says he said, mr Fenimore, you're not depressed, you're sad With. That was in some ways very enlightening. So I joined this choir and we would practice every Thursday and we sang at church every Sunday. And one of the members of the High Sopranos, when we were getting ready to wrap up the season because we didn't sing through the summer, she said you know, I've got a little garden right off of Forbes Avenue and it's part of the Homewood Cemetery and I've got a plot, but I'll never use it all. And she said I travel and I won't be able to tend to it all the time that it might need. So would you be interested?
Chris:So I said, well, yeah okay, I was living in an apartment.
Doug:And how long had you been in Pittsburgh at this point? Just a couple of years.
Chris:No, no, no, no, no. I came here in 85.
Chris:Oh, okay, I was here like eight years, okay. And so I put in what you would think of some tomatoes, I put basil and I put zucchini. I put the zucchini in his bushes because I didn't want those long, stringy vine zucchini. I thought it'd be easier to find them and harvest them and all that jazz. Well, I was going to the garden and it started to be like every single night and I came home. I remember I was living in an apartment with my daughter, Marianne, and I said, boy, I said there's something wonderful about this gardening. It's making me feel so much better about myself and life and everything. And of course, she's 13 years old, so she goes. Was Laura there? In her teenage voice? And I said, yeah, she goes, uh-huh. In her teenage voice. And I said, yeah, she goes, uh-huh. So my daughter was onto the whole thing before I was, because the fact of the matter is that I was starting to feel good about myself in every way.
Chris:Yeah, and being with Laura was a big part of that. So what happened with all of this attention given to the garden? As I said, the garden was booming, booming with zucchini, and I went in and did the whole thing about send the recipes in At QED, at QED, and it was very successful. So then they said now we've got to have another show. And I said cookies.
Chris:And the first show was in some date in August was when we did the zucchinis, and December, the 4th was the day that we did the cookie show. And I know the date because that's the day that I married the girl from the garden, Laura, and I got married. We did the show in the morning and I got married in the afternoon, just so you know where the priorities are. And I got married in the afternoon, just so you know where the priorities are. Oh, my goodness. But the advantage was that my mother was in town for the wedding and she got to come on the cookie show with me and she made her Vienna tarts, which are outstanding, especially with the apricot filling.
Doug:What a special day. Oh yeah, All around. All around, and so everybody my whole family was sitting in their motels and hotels or houses and watching my mom and I cook on TV, and that's amazing. And so you mentioned your first daughter.
Chris:You have two daughters from your first marriage, and then you ultimately had a son with Laura and he's grown up on the show. I think he came on the show first as a as almost as an infant and I'm holding him in my arms.
Chris:Uh, then he was a toddler and we put him up on a stack of uh crates and I was kept wondering if he's gonna fall over and whatnot. And then, before you know it, he's taller than I am and he's standing there and I just saw him on the show this past saturday and I forget what we were making. But he said yeah, I'm going to go to Case Western start next year. So this is him as a senior. Yeah, he's a Central Catholic.
Chris:He's documented on the cooking shows and I can't tell you how many people come up to me and they'll say, oh, I'd like to enjoy your show, how's your son me? And they'll say, oh, I'd like to enjoy your show. How's your son? Yeah, they want to know, and so I'm always happy to tell them. And Joe's back here in town. After he graduated he worked in a couple of different places, but he ended up back here. He works for Dick's Sporting Goods as a software engineer. I didn't know that sporting goods stores needed software engineers, but apparently they do apparently we all do.
Doug:You sparked my mind on a couple of other things, so I would love to go back and talk a little bit more about. You mentioned you joined the choir and that's where you met laura.
Chris:Music is actually kind of a big deal in your family life, oh yeah well, that was what I thought I was going to do when I was in early college and whatnot. I was a folk singer and I used to go down to the village and sing in the village square there in lower Manhattan. Oh okay, yes, and so I would go over there. Never panned out to be a famous folk singer, but I enjoyed it. I still enjoy it. I still have my same guitar that I've had since senior year in high school.
Doug:I've had the privilege of seeing you play that guitar in your house during Christmas. Carols, oh Christmas carols right.
Chris:Well then, what happened was I was at Fordham and I had two years down and I had completely run out of money. My tuition was covered, I had a scholarship, but I had no money to buy tokens, to get on the subway, to go home, nothing to eat. I couldn't afford the room that I was in, which was $7 a week. Oh boy, at Mrs Selbreed's up in the Bronx I have to go look for a job and I think if I can make save $200, I can make it through the next semester. So a bunch of the guys said come down with us. There's a club down in the close to the village, 10th Street, and they, we're waiters there and we make sometimes $30 a night. I went get out of here $30 in one night, yep.
Chris:So I go down and I go up to the manager and say I'd love to apply for a job as a waiter. And he looked at me and he says we are up to our armpits in waiters, we don't need another waiter. He says if you could play the banjo. I said I play the banjo. I lied, we don't need another waiter. He says if you could play the banjo. I said I play the banjo. I lied I didn't. But you played the guitar.
Chris:But I played guitar, I figured how hard could it be. So he says, all right, go up on the stand, play something. And I said I didn't bring my banjo and he goes. They have extras Now I'm doomed. So I went up on stage and I'm watching the guy next to me, the lead banjo player, a guy named Ron Beisel, and when he moved his hand up the strings, I moved my hands up, but I wasn't hitting the strings with the pick, I wasn't making any noise at all. And I'm singing these songs because I knew all these songs my dad used to. We would always sing these in the car Five Foot Two, Heart of My Heart, Darktown Strutters Ball. And it came in handy because when we finished the manager said to him how does the kid do? And Ron wasn't paying any attention to me at all and he said, yeah, he knows the songs.
Doug:And that was it.
Chris:They hired me. Now I have to run home, get a Mel Bay chord book and a banjo, and, and that's how I started my banjo career, which then lasted, you know for Well, I was going to say you're.
Doug:You're sort of leading us to say your banjo career is over, non-existent, but but People can go to the Elks on the North side and find you with the Pittsburgh Banjo Club. That's where you guys do all of the rehearsing and a lot of singing.
Chris:Oh yeah. Oh no we do like two shows, if folks are interested, every Wednesday yeah.
Doug:You should come by the Elks. It's a good place, it is a really good place. Another local treasure, yeah, and we should say too your daughter is a pretty successful singer, but she doesn't live here.
Chris:No, Marianne lives in Rome.
Doug:And you leave Pittsburgh a little bit every year.
Chris:Well, she's got two boys I got. My grandsons are over there, you know, so I'm not going to leave them just sitting around over there.
Doug:It doesn't make it hard. Do I get this right? You escape the winter essentially. You go over right after Christmas. Well, here's the thing.
Chris:Yeah, I go right after Christmas and stay for a couple of months. The winter temperature in Rome average, you know, 55. So you can just wear like a windbreaker or a light jacket and you're good for the winter. Now don't look at the Italian people. They are scarfed covered, leggings down, vests and coats, and you would think it was the Arctic. That's the way they dress when it's 50. I don't know what. What is? It's something about?
Doug:maybe their blood is very thin, maybe or maybe they're trying to just get the italian fashions out, and I'm sure the food isn't bad over there. Does it re-energize you in any way?
Chris:it does absolutely. Um. The access to daily fresh fruits and vegetables, hand hand-cut meats to order to your preference in every way, and everything fresh, fresh, fresh that's all they think of, and the assortment of cheeses which they think is normal. Where can you go on a daily basis and get fresh regatta? I mean, you can make it yourself. I often make my own ricotta, yes, but when they make it, they're making it with sheep's milk or they're making it with cow's milk, and they also make it with buffalo, like buffalo mozzarella.
Chris:They make the buffalo ricotta and they all have different textures and curd structure and so on. So yeah, it's fun. Nothing like it.
Doug:Bringing us back to Pittsburgh. Number one. I just want to thank you for sharing so much today and wandering. I know you're not doing as many shows on QED as you used to, but what is on the horizon? Do you have any shows or even demos or anything coming up in the near term?
Chris:One of the things that I've been talking with folks about is making the inventory more accessible Because, as we have talked about, there's hundreds of segments with people from the community. Occasionally I'll have somebody come up to me and go you know my grandmother. She was on that show when you did tomatoes and she made her favorite tomato casserole and my grandmother just passed away. Is there any way I could get a copy of that? If I can, I go back in, I go into the archives and find the tape and transfer it and make a CD for them. But that's old fashioned Now.
Chris:There should be some way to digitize the entire thing, yes, and then have it accessible by the person, by the show, by the recipe, by the ingredient. That would be amazing. So this is a little bit of. If I could hire my son, he could probably do this and make a spreadsheet that gets you in and out of all of those variables. But I'm sure that they have people at WQED who can do this too. So that's one of the things I'd like to do, and the other thing is to make them accessible for the younger people, who are accustomed to getting video material directly.
Doug:At different platforms too, whether that's short form, other social media platforms or whatever. How do you get to it where it's not just a rerun or maybe somewhere on the website where you have to dig for it?
Chris:Yeah, yeah. So that's what I'm exploring now. I'm trying to be modern.
Doug:I love it. We never stop learning in food anyway, and this is part of it for you. We never stop learning in food anyway, and this is part of it for you.
Chris:I'm not sure if and when we might do another giant show, because they take a lot of time, a lot of planning. I've noticed Because you've been part of those A little bit. But you've got to collect the recipes and then get the cooks that you're going to have on and book time to shoot them. It's easier now because we don't do them live.
Doug:Man, I can't imagine Chris.
Chris:Live was so crazy.
Doug:It's part of the element, though, that it's fun Even when they are not live. They're still pretty true to form.
Chris:Oh, they're live to tape. They are live to tape. Yeah, we may edit something later on and we can stop.
Doug:When I put the food processor on backwards for you Exactly, and we couldn't stop.
Chris:No, in those days we just said, oh well, we'll clean this up later. Keep going. Poor Mary Irwin Scott and Joe Certo and folks like you who would come in and help us on that side of the camera cleaning up in the kitchen and setting things out. People don't realize everything that goes on. They see what goes on on the countertop? Yeah, but to the left stage, left of the countertop, there's all kinds of stuff going on A lot happening All the time.
Doug:Yeah, there's a lot to it. Yeah, so it takes a small army. Um, they're fun to do, but there's a lot of work. Oh yeah, we're wrapping to the end of our time and I always have a a sign-off question for our guests okay the name of the best dishes you've eaten this past week Ooh, hmm.
Chris:Well, I cooked myself all this week and I have to say the thing that I made and once I make it I know why I don't make this every week I made some arborio rice risotto with a ton of mushrooms in them. Now I used to make it with dried mushrooms and I would rehydrate the mushrooms. They have a lot of flavor and whatnot, and that's not a bad idea. But this time I just bought baby bella mushrooms but I mean a lot, yes, maybe a quart size basket and chopped them up and fried them with a little bit of onion and not much, just a dash of salt, a little bit of parsley. And then I made the rice.
Chris:Oh, I made it in my Instapot, which I found makes arborio rice, makes risotto better than I can with all that stirring. So I put the rice in the Instapot one cup of rice with one and a half cups of water and a half cup of white wine and some butter, about a quarter of a stick, it's nothing. And then I put all the mushrooms that I had served for something else that were left, I put them in there and put the thing on. It's 10 minutes on low pressure and Laura and I were sitting there going. Where did this come from? You know? No strange ingredients, no, nothing. But it was so flavorful and the mouthfeel was great and if I had gotten this in a restaurant I would be raving about it.
Doug:That's the best sounding mushroom risotto I've heard in a long while.
Chris:Easy peasy, as they say. Now next time? Would it be the same? Probably not, because I'm not a chef and I'm always tempted to tweak it one way or another, but I remember it well enough that I could go back and try to make it the same. You have to jot it down.
Doug:I'm the same way. I'm a tinkerer. I'm always fiddling. I need to write my stuff down, Chris Fennimore.
Chris:Thank you so much, Doug I didn't let you get a word in edgewise.
Doug:here it was amazing, and I'm looking at all of my questions. You just kept answering them, so it couldn't be better.
Chris:Chris Fennimore. Thank you so much for being on The Pittsburgh Dish. Well. Thank you, Doug, for all of your support of what I do and for giving me this chance. Of course, Thank you.
Doug:Be sure to catch Chris Saturday mornings on our local PBS station,WQED, for QED Cooks, as well as their other great programming. You can also follow Chris on the Facebook page QED Cooks. And finally, we thought that mushroom risotto recipe sounded so delicious. We're leaving a version up on the blog as our recipe of the week. We have instructions for Chris's Instapot method as well as a traditional stovetop version. Hope you enjoy it. That's our show for this week. We'd like to thank all of our guests and contributors, and to Kevin Solecki of Carnegie Accordion Company for providing the music to our show. We'll be back again next week with another fresh episode. Stay tuned.
