I had a real fun time chatting with Beth La Manach, whose new cookbook, “Entertaining 101” just released. Beth’s YouTube channel is wildy entertaining and she is also on Substack so you can follow her Entertaining with Beth

Now since Beth makes it so easy lets all get to Entertianing!

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Stephanie Hansen:

Hello, everybody. Welcome to Dishing with Stephanie's Dish. I'm Stephanie Hansen and I like to talk to people obsessed with food. In particular, I enjoy cookbook authors and today I'm with Beth Lamonic and she is the author of a cookbook that just the title alone, I feel like holy cats. That's so intimidating. It is called entertaining one zero one. Beth, that just makes you, like, right on the level of Martha Stewart in my brain. Were you nervous about calling it one zero one?

Beth Le Manach:

No. Because the way that I'm thinking about the title is it's really targeted towards beginners or veterans who just need it to be easier and quicker. And I think everybody loves a one zero one entry point because they know it's not gonna be intimidating. It's gonna be accessible.

Stephanie Hansen:

Well, you are not a one zero one in your chops. You have over 662,000 followers on YouTube. They were like, oh, she has a a YouTube channel. And I went to look. I was like, holy cats. Tell me the name of your YouTube channel because I forgot to write it down. Recipes for entertaining. Was that what it was called?

Beth Le Manach:

No. It's called Entertaining with Beth.

Stephanie Hansen:

Got it. Okay. So you also are very fascinating, but I'm gonna get to that part in just a second. Take me through, like, your journey of, like, the how you started the YouTube and how we are that you're just is this your first book?

Beth Le Manach:

Yes. It isn't my first book. I know. I've been in a long time. I know exactly. Yeah. So it's kind of a long story, but I'll give you the highlights. I started my YouTube channel because I was by trade a producer for television, lifestyle television, and I got my start with the Scripps network.

Beth Le Manach:

So Food Network, HGTV, Fine Living, I was producing a bunch of content for them. I saw everything going online, digital. So I was like, I wanna produce digital content for the web. I got a job at a company that had a huge order for YouTube. So this was right around 2011 when YouTube started getting grants to media companies to produce quality content so they could get the advertisers to actually advertise against it. Because up into that point, it was a lot of, you know, skate board tricks and cat videos and stuff like that. Yeah. And so since I had come up with all of this kind of lifestyle content, my boss was like, okay. Create a YouTube channel that women will love. And I was a new mom. I had two small kids, and I was into all this lifestyle content, but I knew nothing about YouTube. So I had to really learn what it was, and little by little, we started to just create content. That was food content, fashion, beauty, all the things that I thought, like, women would be interested in.

And then one day, my boss came to me and said, you know what? We are, like, really behind on the hours here that we have to deliver. We gotta pep this up a bit. What do you got? And I was like, I think we should do, like, entertaining shows, like, thirty minute shows, like what we used to do for TV. Like, let's do the perfect dinner party. He's like he was like, well, who are we gonna get to do that? And I was like, me. I love to cook, and I have a lot of recipes. And at the time, I just bought a house, and I was like, you know, come to my house. You don't have to pay me.

You're already paying me, and let's knock off a few of these episodes. So we did about 16 of them, and then my boss was like, you know, this is really resonating with people. Like and and it really hit me at that point that I thought, how is this new information for people? Because I had grown up with Martha Stewart and Ina Garten, and I just thought that everybody was watching this. But people at the time on YouTube were just getting into, like, all the beauty gurus, and those girls were now aging up and sort of, like, having their first apartment and getting married. And they weren't suddenly gonna go offline and go look at magazines and books. They were staying online.

Stephanie Hansen:

Yeah.

Beth Le Manach:

And I think that's where it really resonated. And so long story short, I did that until I started to do it full time, and now the channel is mine, and I just do it full time.

Stephanie Hansen:

It explains lots of things. One, how prescient of you to see this digital age coming. So very smart.

Beth Le Manach:

Yeah.

Stephanie Hansen:

Two, I always talk about first mover advantage. And whenever there's a new platform or something, I always make sure that I log on. I save my handle. Even if I don't know if I'm gonna use it or do anything with it, I I believe that being the first in a space or in in a being a handful of first in a space is part of what gets you that first mover advantage. So note to self people because there's gonna be a lot of social enterprises that are coming in our future. And then also, like, sometimes the keeping it simple is the best. Like, you just assume that everybody knows how to, you know, make a delicious apparel spritz, but necessarily they don't. So that what you can offer in your most authentic way is, valuable.

And that's, I guess, why you did this as your first book because you seem like you really are taking and packaging a lot of this in a way that feels authentic to you, and that's what people want.

Beth Le Manach:

I think they do. I mean and I think that's what YouTube has really taught me is that there are thousands of chicken Parmesan recipes on YouTube, but people will still ask me, but we want your recipe. Not because my recipe is gonna be better than anybody else's recipe because there's only a couple of ways around making a chicken parm, but because they want my point of view. And I think that that's what makes YouTube so human, and that's why they called it YouTube because it is about you and how you how I prepare chicken parmesan recipe could be different than how you prepare it. And the things that we're gonna highlight could be different based on our own lived experience, and I think that's what makes it really human and really fun.

Stephanie Hansen:

Yeah. Your show is also very beautiful. I just started doing a TV show, with Fox here locally, and lighting is so important. And my own YouTube is horribly lit and embarrassing. Yours is incredible.

Like, do you have my normal lights set up?

Beth Le Manach:

No. My gosh. You know what my light setup is now? No lights. The light setup is no lights because I went round and round, and I have, you know, a lot of different experience. Like, I started with the big crew of seven people people that would come, and then I would go back, like, after COVID, and there was no people. And then I had to learn it all myself, and then I moved to France, and I was like, I can't carry all this stuff with me. I have gone back and forth on the lighting, and I always go back to the fact that, like, natural lighting for food is just the best lighting, and then just adjust the camera settings. Like, you're much better off doing that and know which angles of the kitchen give you the best softest light because that you can always reproduce the camera, but you can't always reproduce the exact temperature and light. And, like, that just was making me crazy. So I just decided to finish the lights.

Stephanie Hansen:

Yeah. That is really the tip. Yes. I like it. You mentioned this move to France, and I I you have through the course of your channel and through the course career here. Also, you had a like, it sounded like a rental in France that you made into a full time home.

Beth Le Manach:

Yes. Exactly. So my husband is French, and we had been coming to France every year or so when we were married. And then we took a break when we had kids, and then we started to bring the kids when they were, like, five and two.

Stephanie Hansen:

So you and your husband moved to France, and he's French. Yes. So he's like your Jeffrey.

Beth Le Manach:

Yeah. You could say that. Yeah. He, he he definitely, has inspired me a lot, I think, with the French lifestyle and French cooking. And we would come to France every summer just to vacation, and then we thought, okay. Let's stop renting all these houses. Let's buy a house and then become the renter like, become the person renting. That was a better investment for us.

Beth Le Manach:

And then, I don't know, we just he got to a point in his life where he was like, I see all my friends retiring in France. That's where I wanna be. And I think that's the blessing and the curse of marrying a foreigner. At one point, they're gonna wanna go back, and you just have to be ready for that. So I was always ready for it because I've always loved France, and I just thought, like, that's a fun experience. Yeah. Let's go do that.

Stephanie Hansen:

Do you re