ARLINGTON, VA – Few household names have had a career in cooking and television longer than Sara Moulton. Beginning as a sous chef for Julia Child, she ran the executive dining room at Gourmet magazine, helped launch the Food Network, put her stamp on cooking on Good Morning America, and is also the queen of her own media empire. With four cookbooks, and a bustling social media presence, Moulton stopped by
The Rice Stuff podcast to talk about the just launched 11th season of her PBS television show,
Sara’s Weeknight Meals.
Rice regulars will remember Moulton from her three on-location episodes in rice country where she learned about farming, conservation, and delicious rice-based meals.
Moulton went crawfishing with Louisiana rice farmer Randy Thibodeaux and hosted an outdoor dinner party for 30 at his farm where they served up etouffee the two made on the air. She traveled to Stuttgart, Arkansas, to learn about the relationship between ducks and rice from rice farmer Eric Vaught, and cook rice hush puppies and catfish with Eric, his wife, and children. And finally, Moulton visited Matthew Sligar in Gridley, California, where they cooked rice buns for hamburgers and made sushi with the incomparable chef and restauranteur Billy Ngo.
“Sara is such an amazing person – so accomplished, so knowledgeable, she manages to make cooking accessible to all,” said show co-host Michael Klein who had joined Moulton on her rice country trips. “There can be a certain level of snobbery in cooking at times with recipes that call for exotic ingredients and fancy techniques. The great thing about Sara is that as a classically trained French chef, she understands all of it but brings cooking back down to earth for the rest of us.”
The far-ranging conversation with Moulton started with how she got into cooking, and went through her favorite kitchen utensils, cooking competition shows, the one thing almost all home chefs get wrong, home meal kits, and what she sees as opportunities for rice in the coming year.
“You would expect to learn new things about cooking when watching a cooking show, but every time I just have a regular conversation with Sara, I learn something new,” said Klein. “And she does it in such a casual and non-judgmental way – like here when she told me about parking my food!”
Sara’s Weeknight Meals airs on PBS and you can catch up with episodes on her YouTube Channel (we personally recommend Episodes 516, 705, 808). Her new cookbook,
Sara Moulton’s Home Cooking 101: How to Make Everything Taste Better is available now.
New episodes of
The Rice Stuff are published on the second and fourth Tuesday of every month and can be found on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Amazon Music, and online at
www.thericestuffpodcast.com.