Deez Interviews: Meet WaPo’s Tanya Sichynsky who’s out here helping single people be chef-y and making cookbook clubs a thing
Happy Friday, Deezers! The last Deez Interview of 2018 is with the meal prep master behind The Washington Post’s Meal Plan of Action newsletter (which we’ve covered here!). Longtime WaPo-er Tanya Sichynsky talked to us about taking her newsletter from concept to reality, and also ~dishes~ (sry) on her fave holiday recipes. Enjoy!
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The interviewee: Tanya Sichynsky (follow her @tanyasic!)
The gig: Audience editor
The story behind the newsletter:
Like pretty much everything I’ve worked on at The Post, the process was incredibly collaborative. After launching the first Voraciously newsletter series, Zero to Dinner Party, the team huddled up to brainstorm what our next newsletter endeavor would be. We kept coming back to meal planning and meal prepping as concepts. There’s a lot out there in the space, and I was adamant about determining how the existing mountain of content failed to serve our audience (Voraciously is a brand for young, novice cooks).
I was part of the team working on the concept and planning for the newsletter, but we hadn’t originally planned on having me write it. While all this was going on, I was working on a side project cooking newsletter, Quarter Cup Crisis, outside of work. My colleagues were familiar with it, and in one meeting the newsletters editor was just like, “Why doesn’t Tanya write it?”
From there, I was tasked with creating the program from the top down, which included developing the newsletter’s format, establishing the menus, finding or creating the recipes and testing them all. It was a crunch. We launched on September 6, and I had a little more than one month to test 36+ recipes. It was like nothing I’d ever done before … Timing, taking notes, making adjustments, establishing substitutions all while you cook is one hell of a challenge, and there were several recipes I got three to four tests into that I ended up scrapping entirely.
You delightfully described Meal Plan of Action as:
"If meal planning is a spectrum, Blue Apron sits cross-ankled on one end and big-batch Pinterest porn (Chicken! Breast! Roasted! Veggies! Rice! For! Five! Days! Straight!) stands menacingly on the other. You and me? We’re hanging out squarely in the middle."
What appealed to you most about situating the newsletter in that middle space?
It’s like so many food publications and blogs forget that single people exist. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to eat the same dish five days a week, and if I’m cooking a dish that serves 4 (which is pretty standard), that’s what’ll end up happening. The only real alternative for young, unmarried folks appeared to be meal kits, because, ya know, we’re just a bunch of lazy, coddled millennials who don’t own can openers and don’t know what a butter knife is.
I wanted to call B.S. on that quite plainly. It’s not that young people don’t know how to cook or don’t want to learn; it’s that of the available options, it was hard to find something that truly suits their lifestyles. We want to try new cuisines! We want to try new cooking techniques, but are sometimes embarrassed to ask anyone but Google about them! We just don’t cook five nights a week, and that’s OK! We don’t mind leftovers, but appreciate creativity when that’s an option!
What was the writing/research/testing process like for each newsletter?
So each MPOA week would focus on a specific ingredient. That was a parameter we latched onto early in the planning process for a couple reasons: 1) A unifying theme/item helps pare down the printable shopping list we include and makes a trip to the grocery store feel less daunting (and makes it less expensive); 2) It’s a solid entry point into teaching a skill; 3) It helps the reader really understand the versatility of common grocery store ingredients they’re likely already picking up.
From there, I literally just started listing foods that I love and that get me excited to cook, keeping in mind that I wanted to be able to teach a useful kitchen skill that can easily become a part of a cook’s repertoire. Chicken thighs! Kale! Onions! Once I had a list, I’d roughly outline dish ideas that could fit into each category.
On a couple occasions, I’d work backwards — I knew I wanted to include certain dishes, so I’d try to establish a unifying ingredient to justify them. I also had a mental checklist of skills I wanted to teach ~through~ my recipes, and worked to pair skills with specific weeks early on in the planning stages.
The testing process was a sprint — I had a little more than a month. Once I had my dish concepts, I’d either start from a base recipe I’ve cooked for years, be it my own or a family recipe, or I’d research cookbooks and websites for a starting point to test from. The process varied dramatically from recipe to recipe.
There’s a chickpea recipe of mine (Crispy Chickpeas With Fried Shallots and Cilantro-Mint Chutney) that I’ve made so many times, I only had to test it twice. But I must’ve tested the falafel fritters from that same week maybe 10 times.
Word on the street is that you also lead a really killer cookbook club! What're the rules?
The first rule of cookbook club is you don’t talk about cookbook club. Totally kidding. I started mine back in February; it’s crazy to think we’re almost a year old. There are no hard and fast rules, but here are my general ~guidelines~ if you’re interested in starting one:
Start small, and stay small. We have six women including myself. It’s so much easier to coordinate a nice meal in which all the dishes make sense together when you have a smaller group of people. This ain’t a potluck — this is a very coordinated operation that takes a decent amount of logistical planning on my part. It’s already tough to get six busy, career-driven, social women all in the same place at the same time. I could not imagine trying to corral even 10 of us.
Pick a book everyone is excited about. In our case, that’s meant Alison Roman’s “Dining In” on one occasion, Chrissy Teigen’s “Cravings” on another. There’s no such thing as a “high-brow” or “low-brow” cookbook for our club.
Not everyone needs to own the book! Incredibly common misconception. As long as one member has the book, you’re good. We try our best to schedule a happy hour at least a week ahead of our cookbook club date, and the owner of the book will bring our month’s pick to the bar. We’ll pass it around and make our dish selections then. Worse case scenario, I’ve put together a Google doc in the past that lists out every single recipe from our book, and let people make their picks that way.
My favorite cookbook club meeting *so far* was our last one: our Friendsgiving. We cooked from Ina Garten’s “Make It Ahead” book, which actually has an entire Thanksgiving menu in it, which is kinda wild but Ina gonna Ina. We picked a bunch of recipes that still made sense in that context: I roasted a chicken, there were I N S A N E goat cheese mashed potatoes, a leek and artichoke bread pudding that, tbh, is better than stuffing, a fall AF butternut squash farro bake and a pie (that may not have been from the book, but again, we have few rules).
Finally, can you link us to your favorite holiday recipe??
How dare you make me choose! I reluctantly accept this challenge, under the condition that I select a FEW: Big fan of this Slow-Roasted Spiced Pork, also from Ina, that I made two Christmases ago. Also endorse these Cardamom-Brown Sugar Snickerdoodles from Washington Post Food editor Joe Yonan, and I’m obsessed with these Sour Candied Citrus Peels from Healthyish, which I made in bulk last year and gave to friends and family as gifts.
And as for my own recipes, you should definitely make my Mojo Pork Tenderloin if you’re having a small Christmas dinner.
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Get cookin/feastin’ peeps, follow Tanya on Twitter @tanyasic, and have a delicious holiday!
Deez Links is pretty much off until after the new year. See ya later punks!!