You're listening to From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy, a food and culture podcast. I'm Alicia Kennedy, a food writer based in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Every week on Wednesdays, I'll be talking to different people in food and culture about their lives, careers, and how it all fits together and where food comes in. 

Today, I'm talking to Daniela Galarza, the writer behind The Washington Post's Eat Voraciously newsletter, which goes out Monday through Thursdays offering suggestions for what to cook for dinner. We discussed how she went from pastry kitchens to food media, writing recipes for a broad audience with plenty of substitutions, and walking around Walmarts to see what kind of ingredients are available everywhere.

Alicia: Hi, Daniela. Thank you so much for being here. 

Daniela: Hi, Alicia. Thanks for having me.

Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

Daniela: I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, a few different suburbs. And my mom immigrated to the U.S. in her early adulthood, and my dad from Iran. And my dad moved from Puerto Rico to the mainland in—when he was 9 or 10 years old. And they met in Chicago and realized they had—I guess, they both loved to cook. Or they both loved food. And so growing up, I ate a lot of both of those cuisines, and also a lot of things that they kind of made up together. 

And then, when I started going to school, I started—my brother and I, who’s younger than me, started complaining that we weren't eating enough American food. I loved the Puerto Rican food and the Iranian food that I was eating. It's interesting that I, as a kid, just wanted macaroni and cheese and, from a box. And, I don't know, hot dogs, and—What else? Oh, and baked pastas. I wanted all of this Italian American food, which was so foreign to my parents. And they did their best to try to figure out what we would eat. That manifested in really interesting mas- ups. My dad's take on spaghetti and meatballs was spaghetti, really, really overdone spaghetti in, I think, a canned tomato sauce, and then a fried pork chop on top. And it would get cut up for me. Yeah, there were a lot of translations into American food that I ate.

Alicia: Wow. 

Well, and you've had such a long and varied career in food. So I wanted to start at the beginning. Why food? And how did you start your professional career?

Daniela: I don't know how I always knew I wanted to work in the food, in food, somehow doing something with food. I think I always gravitated towards the kitchen. It wasn't always a happy place in my home. I just loved eating.

Something I get from my mom that I'm more aware of now is a pretty sensitive sense of taste. And I think that that contributed to my enjoyment of eating different foods and different cuisines, whether I was cooking them myself or eating somebody else's at a restaurant or at their home. And that enjoyment—

I remember my parents. My dad was a bus driver for the Chicago Transit Authority. And my mom did many, many different jobs when I was growing up. And it was very clear that both of them worked to work, to pay the bills. And I came away from that experience never wanting to work a 9 to 5 and never wanting to work to just pay my bills. I wanted to figure out how I could work, how I could do something I loved and make a living out of it. 

And initially that was me wanting to go to culinary school. And I had a lot of notions of like, ‘Oh, I'll open a restaurant.’ Or ‘Oh, I'll be like a TV chef like Julia Child,’ whoever I watched on PBS growing up. And my mom had these very strong feelings about like, ‘Oh, you want to be, want to cook for people?’ And in some cultures that—there's a stigma. There's a class attached to that kind of service industry work. And I remember being so puzzled by that when I would hear that from family members just not understanding it at all.

Until I went into working in restaurants and saw how restaurant people are treated, saw how you were treated if you worked in the back of house at a restaurant in general and the assumptions that are made about you. And then, I understood her words a lot more. But I still had a lot of fun doing it.

Alicia: [Laughs.] Well, so you started out in kitchens, right?

Daniela: Yeah. Oh, I didn't answer the second part of your question. Yeah. 

I started out working in restaurant kitchens. My first job was working at a local bakery, selling the bread. And then my second job was at Williams-Sonoma as a food demonstrator in the local mall. And when I went to college, I worked in local restaurants to help pay for books and lodging. And that's when I started getting into pastry. I found some local pastry chefs that took me under their wing, and I got really excited about it and was a pastry assistant for a really long time. 

And then, after I finished college, I studied food history in college and found a number of really great professor-mentors while I was there who encouraged me to stay on the scholarly food path. They thought I would become like them, and I would teach food history or food anthropology. And then, I would write books about my research. Just that whole time, I was just like, ‘No, I'm gonna go become a pastry chef. I'm going to get this degree; I'm going to cross off my list. And then somehow, I'm gonna figure out how I'm going to pay these student loans back by working in restaurant kitchens.’

And so after I graduated, I went to the French Culinary Institute in New York City. And I had to work full-time while I was doing that. A way I found a job in New York was I just read. I started reading all of William Grimes’ restaurant reviews and looking for the ones that mentioned pastry chefs. And I cold-called all of those restaurants and just said, ‘I'm moving to your city. I need a job in a restaurant kitchen. This is my experience. Are you hiring?’ And most of these places hung up on me until one of them didn't. And I mean, I don't know if they still do trails, but I did a two-day trail where I worked for free for two days. And they observed my work and hired me. God, I had a job. I could move to New York, and I could go to culinary school. And I finally thought I had found my place—It's like, ‘I graduated college. And I found what I was, what I've always wanted to do. And I did it.’

I worked in pastry kitchens in New York, and went to France and studied a little bit more in France. And then got offered a job doing product development in Los Angeles. And I never wanted to leave New York. This was a really good opportunity. And it was also an opportunity for me to finally have health care benefits, which I hadn't had before. As you know, they're very rare in the restaurant. 

I went into that, and then the recession hit and this company basically went under. And a friend of mine at the time said, ‘Have you thought about writing about food?’ And I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, it had been years since I thought about writing about food.’ I hadn’t thought about writing about food since I was in college. Yeah, they told me about an internship at Eater LA that was open, and I went and applied for it. And that's how I started writing about restaurants and food. 

That was really long.

Alicia: No, I love it. Because it gives me a better sense of—I knew you did all these things. But I didn't know how you know the chronology of everything you've done. And so now, it all comes together.

You've stayed really invested and interested in pastry. What keeps you so excited about dessert?

Daniela: When I was in pastry school, I didn't have a clear sense of what the North American public thinks of as pastry and how it fits into their daily lives and how essential it is. And then when I went to work in restaurant kitchens, they—that's where my first sense of pastry as a business came out. At the time, I was told by a number of restaurant people that the average restaurant sales for rest—in restaurants in New York City was about 30 percent, which was considered high nationally. So 30 percent of people that walk in the door of a restaurant were ordering dessert. And I just thought, ‘Oh, my God, that's horrible! It's so low.’

And it's about, if I'm devoting my whole life to this—but I also knew it from a practical standpoint, where it just so happened that the first restaurant I worked at the dessert sales were 90 percent. And that was because it was mostly a tasting menu. And the restaurant was known for its desserts as this sort of spectacle, and it was something that the chef really promoted. And so, I had this really early skewed introduction to how many desserts people would order at a restaurant. And then progressively in my career I realized, ‘Well, people are, just don't order dessert. They're always on a diet. They’re always making excuses. They’re too full.’

And I was the person at the end of the night. All the line cooks are cleaning up. It's 10, 11 p.m. The kitchen closes, but pastry stays open because people are having their after-dinner drinks. And then, they're gonna order dessert, or you hope they're gonna order dessert. And so, you have all your mise en place. You have all of your beautiful little cakes and the souffle ingredients and all of the things you have ready to go. And then they don