#192: Max LaManna - You CAN Cook This! How This Social Media Sensation Turns Wasted Food into Mouth Watering Meals
APPLE PODCASTS | GOOGLE PLAY | STITCHER | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE
Every so often, a new BrocStar bursts onto the scene and just blows our PLANTSTRONG socks off with their passion, personality, and unique approach to plant-based eating. Today’s guest, Max LaManna, is one of those people.
He has over a million followers on social media and, for one year, Max asked his audience which foods they threw away the most.
Using the tens of thousands of responses, he narrowed down a list of thirty of the most commonly wasted ingredients and those were the inspiration for his new book, You Can Cook This!
We’re talking about peppers, potatoes, onions, beets, grains, carrots, leafy greens, bananas - all of the things we love most here at PLANTSTRONG.
Max and Rip dig into some of these fun recipes today and talk about how to prepare and store your food to maximize its freshness and extend its shelf life. No more throwing away those perfectly good banana peels or potatoes, let’s put them to use!
Max inspired all of us at PLANTSTRONG and we know he will inspire and transform the way you cook, eat, and save your food.
Episode Highlights
8:20 Growing up in the food industry and thinking his parents were “foodies”
10:35 How he went from zero followers to over a million talking about zero-waste
16:10 Wait. We waste HOW much food each year here in the US?
17:00 How his audience inspired his latest book, You Can Cook This!
19:00 Max shares his story of going vegan twice
26:15 Tips for food storage and avoiding waste for all types of food
Don’t fill up the fridge too full!
You can put tomatoes in the fridge to extend their shelf life
Why you never want to store potatoes and onions together
The trick for using and cleaning bell peppers
Freezing asparagus, leafy greens, and other veggies are a-ok.
Take a look at what other veggies are in the freezer section at the grocery
44:45 A Deep Dive into the Recipes of You Can Cook This!
1:25:00 Rapid Fire Questions with Rip
Episode Resources
Max LaManna's Website with Recipes and Links to all of his Social Channels and Resources
Follow Max on Instagram @maxlamanna
Join our PLANTSTRONG Sedona Retreat - October 9-14, 2023
To stock up on the best-tasting, most convenient, 100% PLANTSTRONG foods, including our cereals, granolas, pizza kits, broths and soups, check out all of our PLANTSTRONG products HERE.
Give us a like on the PLANTSTRONG Facebook Page and check out what being PLANSTRONG is all about. We always keep it stocked full of new content and updates, tips for healthy living, delicious recipes, and you can even catch me LIVE on there!
We’ve also got an Instagram! Check us out and share your favorite PLANTSTRONG products and why you love it! Don’t forget to tag us using #goplantstrong 🌱💪
Want to live your best PLANTSTRONG life? Join our exclusive PLANTSTRONG Community of friendly, plant-loving peeps! This is a goldmine of resources, recipes, and incredible support to feed your PLANTSTRONG life.
Full YouTube Transcript
Rip Esselstyn:
My wife said that she found a really good recipe for chili. She told me that it only calls for 239 beans. I asked her, "Why such a precise number of beans." And she said, "Because if it had just one more, it would be too farty." Today I am excited to introduce our ever expanding line of ready-to-eat chilies and stews. As someone who is passionate about the power of whole food plant-based nutrition, I understand how important it is to have convenient and nutritious meal options that align with our values. That's why I've worked super hard with my team to develop a line of hardy and delicious chilies and stews that are made from whole plant-based ingredients, and are ready-to-eat in just minutes. Our chilies and stews are packed with wholesome ingredients like beans, but not 239. Vegetables and grains, and are free from added oils, refined sugars, excessive sodium and processed ingredients.
They're absolutely perfect for those super busy days when you need a quick and satisfying meal, or for those times when you're craving something warm and comforting. Whether you're a student looking for a quick and easy lunch or a busy parent in need of a healthy and convenient dinner option. Or anything in between, our ready-to-eat chilies and stews are the perfect solution. So join us on the PLANTSTRONG journey and experience the strong benefits of a whole food plant-based lifestyle. Order a sample pack of our five ready-to-eat chilies and stews today, and let me know how much you love them. Learn more at plantstrongfoods.com.
Max LaManna:
There's a beginning section in my cookbook that says, "Everyone's welcome to the table." There's no discrimination, no judgment. I've been there before where I've had people say, "Hey man, why aren't you eating plants? Why can't you be vegan?" Those sort of things. I've been there and I've said those things too, and it doesn't make me feel good. And I think if you're somebody who's eating plants and striving on that plant-based diet and loving it and living life like you are and like myself. I think we need to be examples by just showing that and up in every single day of our lives. We don't need to force-feed it down people's throats. We just need to live our most authentic selves. And people will see that and they'll come around to it eventually.
Rip Esselstyn:
I'm Rip Esselstyn and welcome to the PLANTSTRONG Podcast. The mission at PLANTSTRONG is to further the advancement of all things within the plant-based movement. We advocate for the scientifically proven benefits of plant-based living. And envision a world that universally understands, promotes and prescribes plants as a solution to empowering your health, enhancing your performance, restoring the environment, and becoming better guardians to the animals we share this planet with. We welcome you wherever you are on your PLANTSTRONG journey, and I hope that you enjoy the show.
Every so often a new plant-based rockstar bursts onto the scene and just blows my socks off with their passion, their personality, their creativity, and that je ne sais quoi, that is just hard to put your finger on. The last guest that I had about a year and a half ago that really had it in spades was Carly Bodrug of Plant U. And my guest today, Max Lamanna, is most definitely one of those people, and you will see why. His "it factor" or "wow factor" has amassed the social media following of over 1 million. And that's just on Instagram. And these are just people that are following along, because they want to learn more about the power of plants from this young superstar chef. And the cool thing here, his followers actually provide the inspiration for his new book. For over a year, Max asked his social media audience, "Which foods do you throw away the most?"
And then using the thousands of responses, he then narrowed it down to a list of 30 of the most commonly wasted ingredients. Which are what serve as the inspiration for his new cookbook called You Can Cook This, with a big exclamation mark on the end. We're talking about bell peppers, potatoes, onions, beets, grains, carrots, leafy greens, bananas. All the things that we love, love, love, love here at PLANTSTRONG. So let's take a deep dive with Max and figure out which of these foods we can stop wasting and start using in creative and delicious dishes. Today, Max and I, we're going to dig into these fun recipes and we're going to talk about how to prepare and store your food to maximize its freshness and also extend its shelf life. For example, no more throwing away those perfectly good potato peels, my friends. Max really, really inspired me, as I knew he would. And I know he's going to inspire and transform the way you cook, eat, and save your food. Let's welcome Max Lamanna. All right, Max Lamanna, welcome to the PLANTSTRONG Podcast.
Max LaManna:
I'm happy to be here. Thanks, Rip.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah, we have never met before, so this is the first time. And I want you to know, Max, that I am fascinated with what you are doing. You're such an advocate for so many wonderful things, whether it's zero waste, whether it's cutting down on plastic. Stopping the plastic. Whether it's challenging all these traditional norms of what it means to be masculine in this culture that we live in. And I just want you to know that I'm fascinated with your advocacy, with your courage and your vulnerability and all that stuff. So I want to talk to you today. I want to unpack some of this stuff. You've got a new book that is dropping, I think any day. Here it is right here. For everybody, You Can Cook This! Max Lamanna. And I know, having written several books myself, that this was one heck of a labor of love.
Max LaManna:
Absolutely. A lot of love went into that book. A lot of blood, sweat, and tears, as I say. I've cut my finger a few times, sweat from just heat waves and tears from the onions that I was cutting.
Rip Esselstyn:
Exactly. Now, you are in the UK, is that correct?
Max LaManna:
I am. I am in the UK. I moved here I think three or four years ago. Yeah. So now I live here. This is home for me.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. And what used to be home for you? Did you grow up in the States?
Max LaManna:
I did. I did grow up in the States. I grew up in Connecticut. Waterbury, Connecticut. Smallish town. And then when I was 20, I moved to New York City. And then I lived between New York City and Los Angeles for the next 10 years. And then, yeah, so now the last three or four years have been in the UK.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. And tell me, your father had some restaurants, right? And so is that how you developed your love for food and cooking?
Max LaManna:
Yeah, my father had a few restaurants he managed and started. He franchised a few restaurants. Having grown up in the food industry, I always thought I grew up in a really foodie household. My parents cooked the same dishes on repeat. I think when you have children, parents are just trying to juggle. They're juggling so many things. I'm child-free, so I don't understand the juggling of putting food on a table and having children. And making sure that they're ready for their sport practice or they have homework and all these things. But yeah, I thought I grew up in a really foodie household. And no, we just had the same thing over and over and over again. But I think my passion for food, I think maybe somewhere deep in my subconscious there's, "Oh, food is lovely. Food could be great." And I thought the food that my parents cooked was delicious. Until I came back home in my twenties after spending time working in restaurants and trying my parents' food.
Sorry, mom and dad, it's not that good. They're not really good. And so now they're getting better because, they're cooking some of my recipes. So full circle.
Rip Esselstyn:
What kind of restaurants did your father have?
Max LaManna:
My dad was in the fast food, quick service industry. So my dad had a couple Subway franchises. So I grew up in Subway. I liked it because it was always... I was there as a kid in the back scenes. My dad would, keeping me out of trouble, he's like, "Go in the back and count the boxes of potato chips." Or, "Can you tell me how many boxes of cookie dough I have left?" And so I'd stay out of trouble, but I was always around food, and it was always fun because you see new people every day.
Rip Esselstyn:
Does he still have some of these Subways?
Max LaManna:
No. No, he doesn't. He was in the industry for about 13 years. So when I was about 14 or 15, he ended up selling them.
Rip Esselstyn:
So you have got a pretty incredible social media following. Close to a million on Instagram. TikTok is blowing up. So you're quite the sensation like that. And I'd love to touch upon how this all started. Did you just decide in what, 2017 that you were going to start an Instagram channel and share your philosophy on zero waste? Is that how it all began?
Max LaManna:
Yeah, I was off social media for a bit. And when I came back to it, or just before I came back onto social media, I was hosting supper clubs out of my apartment in Brooklyn. And I was utilizing the ingredients, like the whole ingredient. So I was hosting these supper clubs and showing my friends, "Okay, this dish has the tops of the carrots. The carrot top, and it's made into a pesto." And people are just like, "Wait a second, you can do this?" This is back in 2016. And one friend, my good friend Leo, said to me, "Dude, you need to put this on social media." And I always thought back then, 2015, 2016, all I saw on social media at the time was people traveling the world talking about products. And it was just very kind of product-heavy. Everyone's showing off products, products, products.
And I just thought, if I'm going to use social media, I'm going to use it. I'm not going to let it use me. And I need to provide something that is going to inspire, that's going to educate, that's going to transform the way people cook and see food. And so I just kept that at the forefront of my mind and just went forward from there. And started just kind of capturing moments of my day. I was heading to the stores. I was using my reusable bags and jars, going to the refill stores. Trying to find products without any plastic. My focus from living a zero waste lifestyle back in 2016, 2017 has shifted quite drastically. I no longer live that sort of lifestyle because it's impossible to be completely zero waste. So now I focus, Rip, just the focus of what I do is more just food, and trying to limit the food waste that we put into our bin. So I still stay true to those messaging. What I tried to achieve back in 2016, trying to inspire, educate and transform way people see and cook food.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Well. So in reviewing and looking at a lot of your Instagram posts, I learned so much. For example, I had no idea how much food goes into landfills. And how that food that's in landfills then basically takes a long time to decompose. I think the example you used was, maybe a head of romaine lettuce takes 25 years, right?
Max LaManna:
Yeah. Yeah.
Rip Esselstyn:
Five years to decompose. I mean, as opposed to what happens if you throw it in compost? How long does it take?
Max LaManna:
Yeah. It could take weeks. It could take three weeks to a month or two, to decompose in natural kind of settings. And the reason for that is because that natural ingredient, that raw ingredient is exposed to a natural environment. It's exposed to soil, which is exposed to bugs and critters that can chomp away and eat that ingredient. It's exposed to wind, sun, rain, and all this beautiful kind of cocktail is mixed up. And the food can break down naturally. And as it's doing that, it's providing nutrients to the soil and it's making the soil healthy. So we can use that rich, dense nutrient and soil to spread across our soils on our farms. Which I always say, "Healthy soil equals healthy plants. Healthy plants, healthy people."
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. And when it goes into the landfill, it turns into methane, which is what, 25 times more potent than CO2?
Max LaManna:
Yeah. 25 to 30 times more potent than CO2. And that head of lettuce, for example, or any kind of food is embalmed for decades at a time. And it's slowly releasing that methane into the atmosphere which is causing climate change and heating up our planet very slowly but gradually. And the example I like to use here is that if you place... I know this is a vegan, plant-based podcast. But if you were to place a frog in a pot of water, just room temperature water. And you turn on the stove and it slowly heats up, that frog is not going to jump out of the hot water. It's going to acclimate to that water. But if you place that frog in boiling hot water, right away it's going to jump out. So that's what's happening to our planet. We're slowly heating up the planet little by little.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah, we sure are. And you also, on one of your Instagram posts, talk about how we waste almost 1.3 billion tons of food every year. And that if Wasted Food was a country, it would be the third-largest producer of CO2 next to the United States and China.
Max LaManna:
Correct.
Rip Esselstyn:
All this to me, pointing to this, right? And how important your evolution has been and getting you right to here. And tell me, with this book here, how much help did you get from your audience? Like, helping you figure out what to write about?
Max LaManna:
Yeah, the idea came to me at the end of 2020. We all went through similar experiences. And I was just sitting around thinking of new ideas, new ways to help people reduce food waste at home. And I thought, "Oh, here's an idea. I'm going to ask my audience which foods they're throwing away the most." And I collected tens of thousands of responses. And the top 20, top 30 ingredients that were just coming up over and over again. So some of those ingredients are bread, potatoes, bagged leafy greens, like spinach and lettuce and arugula. Here in the UK we say, rocket. Which I like. I like saying rocket, it sounds cooler. Bananas, fresh fruit, milk, yogurt, those sort of things. And after collecting all this information, I thought, "Okay, I don't see a cookbook out there that is helping people use the food they already have."
If you're going to spend money on food, use that food. Because if you're not using that food, you're wasting it. And then you're wasting money. You're wasting your time, your energy, the transportation, the packaging, the labor. The labor on the farm, the person who placed the seeds in the soil. Who took time and love and put care into growing those ingredients, is wasted. So I thought, Okay, each ingredient, these hero ingredients..." I call them hero ingredients, trying to lift them up a little bit. So we can get excited about them. I'm going to show how we can use each and every single ingredient to the max, no pun intended there. And how we can use it all the way, utilize it so nothing goes to waste. And to inspire people, you can use that food, you can cook this. So that's where the title also came from too.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. I want to come back to some specifics on that. But before, tell me about your journey. What was it that inspired you to go, I don't know how you refer to it, plant-based vegan? What was the catalyst for you?
Max LaManna:
Great question. I always say I went vegan twice. And I think it's really important to kind of highlight the failures. I think we're so often on social media only see the successes of people, of individuals. And for me, my failures have led me to having big successes and big wins. And it's a part of my journey. So I went vegan back in 2012 for the first time. I was in the kitchen at a party and I ended up cooking some food. I was hungry, and I didn't like the food that was being served. So I started pulling some ingredients together and a friend said to me, "Hey, are you making anything vegan?" And it was the first time I ever heard the word vegan. And I thought, "You mean vegetarian?" And I knew what that was. And they said, "No, vegan." And I was like, "Wait a second. What is this?"
And in that moment, I was like, "I'm on board with this. I like the idea." They talked about the planet, they talked about their health, they talked about animals. And I just thought, "I can get behind this. Yeah, I want to take care of my health." And I come from a history, like my connection to plant-based and veganism is the health reasons. My dad's side of the family have a long line of heart conditions and heart problems and high cholesterol and all these things. So I've always been conscious of, "Okay, I don't want to be another statistic. I'm going to try to take care of myself, and I'm going to do that through food." So I did that for a little bit. I was vegan for about six months. And living in New York City, didn't have that much money. It was very hard to figure out, "Okay, what am I going to eat today?" I was eating the same thing on repeat, on rotation. And this is 2012. So I didn't find that many restaurants. And when you're 22...
Rip Esselstyn:
Can you remember what were some of the things that you were eating on repeat?
Max LaManna:
I was eating a lot of pasta dishes. I was eating a lot of stews. I was just stewing and just slow cooking a lot of vegetables. Quinoa bowls, like rice bowls, grain bowls, those sort of things. I was trying to get into tofu at the time, and I just thought, "I don't even know how to cook this." It was so difficult. It sounds silly to me now, but I couldn't figure out how to get inspiration from plant-based or vegan cooking. So I fell off the wagon and I went back to eating how I was normally. But I always had this idea in my mind, "Okay, but I'm going to watch out what I eat and where it comes from." And tried to put more plants on my plate. And then six years ago, I went back to eating plant-based and figured out, "Oh, I can make tofu tastes really, really good. And I can make seitan and I can cook..."
There's this thing called tempeh, and "Oh my God, I can make cauliflower taste like buffalo wings." I could do some really cool things with plants now. And so I started experimenting and trying new things with plants.
Rip Esselstyn:
And what was the impetus six years ago to come back to plants?
Max LaManna:
Great question. I'm taking you on a journey to Australia where I ended up moving to. And I was working in a chocolate factory with my...
Rip Esselstyn:
Are you serious?
Max LaManna:
Yeah. I was working in a chocolate factory in Australia. Rip, if there's one thing you need to know about me, I say yes to basically anything.
Rip Esselstyn:
Wow.
Max LaManna:
If the idea sounds good, I just say, "Yeah, sure, let's go." I'm now married, but before then I wasn't. And I met this girl in Los Angeles, and she was Australian. And she said, "I'm going back to Australia. It was really nice meeting you." And it was a love at first sight kind of thing. And I said to her, "Okay, I'll come back to Australia with you." So I went to Australia where she had a chocolate business. And we made chocolate. And it was vegan, gluten-free, paleo. Every kind of thing you can think of that can make this the best possible chocolate ever. And organic, all that. Gluten-free.
And I was swimming in the ocean one day in Sydney on Bondi Beach. And I'm swimming and I come across some plastic. And I'm just thinking I'm in the most beautiful place in the world, the most beautiful place I've ever been. And just thinking, "Why is there plastic in the ocean? This is the most beautiful beach I've ever been to. I can't believe there's plastic waste floating in this ocean." I went back. I didn't leave the plastic bottle in the ocean. I took it with me and went out and went into the recycling bin and dumped it off.
Rip Esselstyn:
So you're doing some plogging.
Max LaManna:
I think later that... Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I did some plogging. I got to figure out the word for plogging plus swimming.
Rip Esselstyn:
Swimming. Yeah.
Max LaManna:
So yeah, we'll figure that out afterwards. I went to the farmer's market later that day and noticed that people were bringing their food scraps to the farmer's market and dumping them off in a bin, and they were composting. And I was like, "Wait a second. What's composting?" So I'm in this small kind of community where there's waste happening. But then there's also the correct, proper way of reducing and finding a way to get rid of waste in the most kind of ethical manner by composting. And my head just kind of started going around in circles, thinking about where food is going and what happens to the food that we bring into our homes. And what happens when we waste it and where it goes.
PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:25:04]
Max LaManna:
It's the food that we bring into our homes and what happens when we waste it and where it goes. And then I started seeing vegan restaurants pop up again, and I'm thinking, all right, let me try this. So it just started kind of hitting me from all different corners for like, okay, this time why I entered veganism. Now I had the health aspect to it kind of already kind of hooked and latched onto me. The environmental side of things started coming into play. So I just started thinking, okay, this makes sense. Let me look at this once more.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. And Australia's actually, they got a pretty strong kind of vegan culture. If I'm not mistaken.
Max LaManna:
Yeah. There was tons of restaurants and cafes that just offered vegan food. So you go into, it doesn't need to be a vegan restaurant or cafe. They had vegan options. And that was, I think the first time really, where I saw this intersection of non-vegan and vegan eaters coming together, where before I was in Los Angeles, and I didn't really feel there was that combination of the two. Like, this is a vegan restaurant and this is a non-vegan restaurant. There was never like one.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. So what I'd love to do now, I want to ask you some questions about storage and avoiding waste, and then I'd love to dive into this book and actually ask you about a couple recipes.
Max LaManna:
Great.
Rip Esselstyn:
Sound good?
Max LaManna:
Yeah, sounds good to me.
Rip Esselstyn:
Excellent. So I think that in my family, especially after reading your book, we do a really awful job at storing our food and avoiding waste. And I think that everybody that's out there listening, you have so many incredible tips, hacks, suggestions for how to avoid waste. So let me just start with, you talk about how actually you don't want to fill up your fridge too full and that less food in the fridge is actually better. Can you tell me about that at all?
Max LaManna:
Absolutely. The fridge itself is a cold, dry, dark environment. It's literally kind of sucking the life out of your food. If there's moisture in there, the fridge is going to pull that out. And if you have vegetables like we do in the fridge, it's going to pull the water from those vegetables out. And so that's why we're seeing food decay really rapidly and quickly. But when the fridge is also filled to the brim when it's full and it's packed full of food, the air doesn't circulate. So that doesn't keep, it's this weird balance of keeping food fresh, but also kind of pulling the life out of it too.
So if it's packed full, the air's not flowing properly, and that can speed up the decay of food in your fridge. So not overfilling it is probably the best. And it also keeps food waste at bay. Having less in your fridge is a good place to start if you have the, for me, I have a below the counter fridge. I don't have a full large fridge at the moment. Here in the UK, a lot of homes have just small, kind of below the counter fridges with a very, very tiny freezer, which drives me mad.
Rip Esselstyn:
Drives you bonkers.
Max LaManna:
Oh my goodness. Because I use the freezer so often, and the freezer's a great place of storing food. So I have to be very, very smart with how I shop and how I store food because I'm heading to the store maybe two to three times a week because I go through food so quickly because of the recipes I'm making or who I'm feeding and trying to get the most out of my ingredients.
Rip Esselstyn:
Does your wife also cook, or are you the cook of the household?
Max LaManna:
I let her cook, I let her cook sometimes when she really, really wants to. But no, I'm definitely the cook of the house. She's more of a sous chef and a food critic. So I think she's better at doing the sous chef operations and critiquing my food because it just makes me a better chef, makes me a better cook and helps people try my food as well. And so she's a recipient. She receives well by giving me good criticism.
Rip Esselstyn:
Where did you meet your wife?
Max LaManna:
Where did I meet my wife? We always say we met each other at the Whole Foods dry bulk section, but we didn't. I came to the UK back in 2018 because I noticed a large portion of my audience on social media were based in the UK. And so I thought, I'm going to head to the UK, I'm going to host a couple supper clubs and I'll just go there. So I ended up doing that and noticed, oh, this girl's vegan and she has a podcast that's all about food. And I slid into her DMs and I said, Hey, love to go on your podcast. I'm here from New York visiting, would love to come on your show. And she didn't respond to my DM right away. She let it wait. And then we met up and it was love at first sight. I was purely business Rip. It was purely business at first. And then I met her in real life and I was blown away.
Rip Esselstyn:
What is her name?
Max LaManna:
Her name is Venetia.
Rip Esselstyn:
Venetia.
Max LaManna:
Yeah.
Rip Esselstyn:
Wow.
Max LaManna:
Venetia.
Rip Esselstyn:
Is she British?
Max LaManna:
Yeah, she is. And it sounds like a real Italian name. Venetia La Manna but yeah, she is British. She's, yeah, she's British.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Good for you. All right. I'm going to get back to the fridge.
Max LaManna:
Yes.
Rip Esselstyn:
So my wife always buys tomatoes on a vine, and they're like, they're beautiful. And they sit there on the counter usually for a good week, and occasionally we'll take one off and use it on a sandwich, and then they start to go bad. And I'm always like, ah. And I read, I've always been on the impression that you should not put tomatoes in the refrigerator, but you, I think, say it's okay after a certain period of time. Is that correct?
Max LaManna:
Yeah. So the fridge can help extend the shelf life of certain foods. With tomatoes too, I think I say in the book, I believe I should know this, flipping the tomatoes over,
Rip Esselstyn:
You do say that.
Max LaManna:
On their stems is another great way of extending the shelf life and the life expectancy of these tomatoes. But yeah, when they start getting kind of ripe and the skin starts to wither a little bit, you can pop them in the fridge and you just extend the shelf life a little bit further and longer because it keeps them cool. So yeah, you could try that, but I'd like to get to them right away and try to get them in a sauce Rip.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yes.
Max LaManna:
Come on, man.
Rip Esselstyn:
Get them in a sauce. I know. I know, I know, I know. Well, one of your earlier posts, you actually talk about making your own tomato sauce and not buying them in a store.
Max LaManna:
You did your research. I'm really impressed. You've dug somewhere really deep and saw this information. Yeah. At my local farmer's market, my wife and I moved to the country almost two years ago so we go to a local farmer's market. And on the weekend, it was the end of the tomato season, it was just the end of September, I believe and I remember going to the guy who has the tomatoes and saying, sorry, they say to tomatoes, and they said to the tomato farmer, so do you have any spare tomatoes? And he's like, yeah, this is the actual last batch. And it was the end of the day. And I said, how much do you have there? And I think it was around 25 kilos or 20 kilos of tomatoes. And they're all cherry tomatoes too. It wasn't big tomatoes. They were all small little. So I brought home this big crate of cherry tomatoes.
Rip Esselstyn:
Pounds, everybody that's over 50 pounds. Okay.
Max LaManna:
Yeah. So I ended up making, it was a great idea at the time, and I still think it is. So this is what happened with the cherry tomatoes. I brought them home, gave them a wash and rinse, and then I started making tomato sauce. And I had went to my in-laws and got one of those big large pots to make tomato sauce. I felt like a real Italian grandmother. I was tapping into my Italian roots going in there. I was playing Italian music. I got Frank Sinatra playing in the background. I was going for it.
And I ended up drawing all this tomato sauce and gave them away as Christmas gifts to everyone. And everyone thought Rip, everyone was so confused. I mean, the Brits were like, well, why are we getting tomato sauce for Christmas? And then I told them the story about it, and they thought, okay, that's cool, I guess, but I don't know if tomato sauce is going to be repeating itself for another Christmas gift, but I was giving away two kilos of tomato sauce to everyone, and everyone said it was delicious, and it was lovely, but they were just kind of like, what are we going to do with two kilos of tomato sauce now?
Rip Esselstyn:
Have a lot of pasta.
Max LaManna:
A lot of pasta.
Rip Esselstyn:
All right. So I got home two days ago after reading your book, and my eyes were riveted on this corner where we keep our potatoes and our onions and we stored them together. And I was like, Max would say, that's blasphemy. So why do I not want to store my potatoes with my onions?
Max LaManna:
I don't know the scientific reason. Gases are releasing all the time from our ingredients. There's a chemical reactions are happening. When we store certain ingredients with other ingredients, things happen. It ripens quicker. By putting your onions and potatoes together, it is just going to speed up the process. Things are going to sprout really quickly. So potatoes are meant to be, potatoes should be kept in a cool, dry, well-ventilated cupboard. I like to keep them below the countertop away from any kind of electrical source. So like the oven or refrigerator where heat can be giving off heat, and I cover them, so keep them dark. You almost want to simulate the same experience of where potatoes came from. Potatoes come from the ground where it's cold, covered and darkness. Same thing. That's what you want to do. If your potatoes begin to sprout, that's called the eye of the potato.
And basically what the potatoes trying to do is grow a whole new potato, which is really cool and fascinating, but that sprout can be removed. If the potato starts to turn green, I advise you to probably cut the green part off the potato or just compost the potato. Put it in the ground, just dig a hole 12 inches deep, throw the potato in there, and maybe you'll start to grow some potatoes very shortly. And onions, onions need to be stored separately too, and so they shouldn't be with other ingredients as well.
Rip Esselstyn:
Do you like onions to be in a dark place as well, or is that okay,
Max LaManna:
Yeah, the onion should be, I go through onions quite fast, quite rapidly because it's a great base to a lot of dishes. So you can keep them stored in a cool, dry, well-ventilated cupboard or space. But I keep them out right above next to my stove, and go through them really quickly.
Rip Esselstyn:
Last night I was making a salad and I had an orange bell pepper, and I cut off the top and I immediately heard your voice in my head.
Max LaManna:
Oh, great.
Rip Esselstyn:
And I was thinking, wow, I am wasting way too much of that bell pepper. Is there a trick or a best way to work,
Max LaManna:
You're doing it.
Rip Esselstyn:
Work into that bell pepper? Yeah.
Max LaManna:
Oh, yeah. Just with your thumbs like this, your two thumbs together, just push down the green stem into the pepper, and it should pop. And then at that point, you can pull out the stem itself and the seeds will be attached, and you can pull that out. And then I just rip open the bell pepper from there, and then I can clean out. And you can regrow a whole new pepper from those seeds. Or you can just put them in the compost. Funny story about this is actually when I went home to visit my parents back in Connecticut, where they live doesn't have a food waste collection program. So the council wasn't coming to pick up food waste. So I was digging holes in my parents' garden and just composting food waste in their garden.
And a few weeks later, maybe a month later, I got a call from my sister who said, you have peppers and squash that are regrowing in mom and dad's garden right now. I thought that was pretty cool. So yeah, all you need to do is press the lid of the pepper down and then you get the whole pepper. So you have that whole top bit that most people are cutting off and all you need to, don't eat the green top, I believe it's poisonous.
Rip Esselstyn:
Okay.
Max LaManna:
So yeah, so make sure you're just eating everything, but the green stem.
Rip Esselstyn:
Green stem will make it into the compost. What about asparagus? Do you have any tricks for asparagus? I didn't see it in your book. And my wife always buys asparagus, and it always seems to go bad in a couple days, and we put it in the fridge. We just put it sideways. Any tricks there, anything at all?
Max LaManna:
Yeah. Two things, well, I don't know if it's two things. What I like to do with my asparagus as soon as I bring it home is I know I'm going to use some of it right away. Cooking a whole bunch of asparagus all at once, seems not the best use of using that ingredient unless I'm making a whole big dinner and I have friends and family over, and then we can go through it. But I like to divide my ingredient. So first I'll store the first asparagus in the fridge just as it is, or I can keep them placed in water as well, so I can keep the life, keep them, kind of use them as a flower or some, like a plant that's just sitting in water. The other asparagus I like to do is just chop it up right away and then stored in the freezer, and then I can whip that into a stir-fry or a stew or a curry or a pasta dish later on.
So it's frozen, popped away. It's saved. But the woody stem bit down at the bottom, the trick I was taught was if you bend the asparagus, I don't know if you do this, but if you bend the asparagus, I get as close as I can to the base of the asparagus, and I try to bend very gently, and as I bend, there should be a snap. And that's where the space between the woody hard bit and the softer more, yeah, just the softer bit of the asparagus. But sometimes I try to go back and see, actually, is that other bit that I just pulled off the woody bit, is it, let's see how far I can go down. So I try to use as much as I can.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah, yeah, being the waste conscientious person you are. No, I love asparagus on a grill. I just love putting it on a grill and throwing it in a salad, cutting it up.
Max LaManna:
So good.
Rip Esselstyn:
Let's move to leafy greens, because we're a big leafy green house, whether it's kale, Swiss charred, collard greens. And I hate it when I go into that bin and I see a whole head of whatever, and it's gone bad. It started to wilt or turn a different color. What do you think with leafy greens?
Max LaManna:
You're going to change, everything I'm going to say you're going to change, and this is what you're going to do from now on. So I'll live in your head rent-free,
Rip Esselstyn:
Okay.
Max LaManna:
Moving forward. Rip, what you do is when you bring home a bag of leafy greens or loose greens from the store, wash them right away, store half of them in a container with a paper towel so it can absorb and take some of the moisture from the leafs. You want to give them a pat dry, you want to dry them first, but then place them in a container with a paper towel, you taking notes, and then close the lid, seal it tightly, put it away. You're going to use those leafy greens in the next few days. I would be shocked if you didn't use them within the next one to two days.
The other half, you're going to steam, you're going to blanche them, you're going to cook them in, you're going to steam them, you're going to cook them. And then you're going to remove, squeeze out the moisture from them, wrap them up tightly in a reusable plastic bag, and place them in the freezer. And you could do those in bunches. So if you place them in the plastic bag, the reusable bag, separate them in the plastic bag like so and then wrap them up, and then you can use them in a surf fry, in a stew, in a curry, and even in a smoothie. So I use that because I can come back to it. Oh, you know what? On a hot day, weather is changing, it's going to get hotter and hotter. I want something, I want greens in my smoothie this morning. Or I remember I had some leafy greens in the freezer. I'm going to whip that up into a stir-fry right now. So finding a way to extend the shelf life of certain ingredients and using that freezer is the best place.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. And that blanching and freezing method you just described works well for broccoli and cauliflower as well?
Max LaManna:
Oh yeah. A whole bunch of ingredients. Onions, you can store ginger in the freezer, bread in the freezer. I think you said potatoes, broccoli, everything. A lot of things can go in the freezer. This is what I've done before in the past, and this is how I figured it out, that, oh, I can use my freezer for a lot more ingredients. I've gone through the frozen section at supermarkets, and just looked at and see what frozen vegetables that they're freezing and going, oh, if they're doing that, I can do that.
Rip Esselstyn:
Sure. Yeah, yeah, there you go. We're going to talk about this one because you have it in a recipe, but you talk about using the banana peel.
Max LaManna:
Yes, yes, I do.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yes. And I guess let's save that for just a sec. Okay. All right. If you're cool with it, we're going to dive into your book here because it is remarkable. I want you to know that besides the recipes, your photographer was like, wow. Wow.
Max LaManna:
Thank you.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah.
Max LaManna:
Thank you.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Incredible.
Max LaManna:
This book took me two years start the finish. Every step of the process, this is my second book, I learned from the first one. It was the moment where I go, okay, cool, now I know what not to do in the first one. The first one's still great. It's my firstborn. And you love them, but you make room for the second one and you figure out, okay, how can I do this better the next time? And so I just really was on it with my publishing team and my agents and making sure that this one's going to be 10 times better. The recipes are going to be foolproof, everything's going to be well tested. I'm going to try every recipe five times before it gets tested from the recipe team to test. Everything in this book is I, thank you for that comment. That means a lot to me because I made sure that everything was going to be beautiful.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Yeah. All right. So we're going to start here on page 16 with Carrot Lox and Bagel, I'm going to show you what we got here. With every recipe, I'm going to show you. And one of the reasons, and I want you to talk about each one, but first I want to make a statement. And this one is, I had an old Jewish friend of mine that taught me this trick with bagels because so many bagels, they tend to go hard after a week, like hard as rocks. And he said, you take them, you run them underwater for 10 seconds, put them in the toaster oven for two or three minutes. They're like, brand new.
Max LaManna:
Brand new.
Rip Esselstyn:
How you like that one?
Max LaManna:
Yeah, that's a great tip. That's a great tip that you could do that with all sorts of bread.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah.
Max LaManna:
So yeah, make sure you do that.
Rip Esselstyn:
So talk to me about this recipe, because it looks spectacular.
Max LaManna:
Aw, thank you. It was the first recipe, and it's the first recipe in the book. It's the first recipe I started testing for, you can cook this, this is back in early 20 or mid to late 2020. I just thought, I'm really craving smoked salmon and cream cheese and bagels. And I was missing this like, I lived in New York City. You see a lot of people walking down the street with a bagel in their hand with cream cheese, and they're just munching on it as they walk to the subway station. And I just thought, and there's just a moment, maybe I watched something, maybe I watched a show, and I just thought, Ugh, I miss that. And I thought, how can I recreate that moment? And I like to do this with a lot of my recipes. I like to mimic and play with the ingredients, plant-based ingredients, vegetables that mimic textures and tastes of something that is not plant-based.
So the carrots, and my audience were telling me that they're throwing away carrots, they're throwing away the peels of carrots, which makes me just kind of go, why are we peeling vegetables? And so you can do this where you just marinate those peelings of a carrot. I utilize the whole entire carrot, so I'm peeling the whole thing until it's these long ribbons, marinating in spices and liquid smoke and liquids and oil. And then it's just in the oven, it bakes for a little bit, it softens up, it absorbs that moisture, and it gets soft and chewy, just like,
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah.
Max LaManna:
If you close your eyes, you can kind of imagine, okay yeah, it kind of tastes like lox.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and there's nothing like one of those New York City bagels that's made with that I guess it's that New York City water. They're just,
Max LaManna:
Yeah.
Rip Esselstyn:
Oh, man. Okay. Hang on, because I got 12 of these I want to go through with you and I,
Max LaManna:
Let's do it.
Rip Esselstyn:
Pick these out. So this one's your beet, and how do you pronounce the second word on that?
Max LaManna:
Bucatini.
Rip Esselstyn:
Okay. Beet Bucatini. I have that because I love the fact that you made this brilliant beet sauce using obviously beets and beets we make them, and then we usually put the rest in the refrigerator and they tend to go bad, and they hide in that Tupperware container until they die. So what can you tell me about this recipe?
Max LaManna:
Again, I should just go back a little bit. Every chapter throughout the book highlights an ingredient that people are often throwing away. And so you just told me you're throwing,
Rip Esselstyn:
Right now we're in roots.
Max LaManna:
We're in the root section.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah.
Max LaManna:
So root vegetables, carrots, potatoes, parsnips, and beets, I think. Yes.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Yeah.
Max LaManna:
So people are telling me they're throwing away beets. And similar to your story, you cook them, then you put them in the fridge, and then they go off and you forget about them and they go to waste. So here's one simple, easy recipe that is using the whole entire...
PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:50:04]
Max LaManna:
One simple, easy recipe that is using the whole entire beetroot. Even the leaves itself too, if you have the leaves, chop them up. Use them in the onion and the garlic mixture that's going to be blended with the beet root later on to make this creamy, velvety sauce. So it almost has like a sweetness, because beetroots, when they're cooked, they have a little bit of a sweetness, like the natural sugars from the beet root come out. But then you have this sauteed onion, garlic, and then you have this golden breadcrumb topping as well. So you have the creaminess from the sauce, the crunchy, golden, zesty breadcrumbs as well. And so I just think it's one of my favorite dishes in the book. The book that's in the UK right now and other parts of Europe, because the book has been translated in six other languages uses.. Here, I'll show you the cover for that book. That's actually the image on the front cover of the book.
Rip Esselstyn:
Lovely.
Max LaManna:
Thank you.
Rip Esselstyn:
Before I show this photo, I want to say that I too have learned how to make the best roasted potatoes. And it's the same special method that you use.
Max LaManna:
Oh, great.
Rip Esselstyn:
Now, can you share with the audience what that is?
Max LaManna:
Yes. Well, before I go there, there is a wrong way. There is a wrong way of roasting potatoes, and I feel ashamed to say this, but like I said earlier, I think it's important to highlight failures because then you can champion those successes. So these are the best roasted potatoes ever. I think that's the title of the recipe.
Rip Esselstyn:
It is.
Max LaManna:
So you want to parboil your potatoes after they've been chopped up. You want to parboil them in the salted water and the best roasted potatoes, they are. And here in the UK they know how to roast potatoes. They are fanatics about potatoes and making a good potato. You want to parboil your potatoes in salted boiling water. Once they're parboiled and they're just like fork tender, just before fork tender, take them out of the water, drain them, let them dry out for just a moment.
And then you're going to coat them in olive oil to go into a preheated oven. Now you want the oil to be hot as well. So the oil's in the container in a safe dish, baking dish that's in the oven that's hot. You can add other spices and herbs in there. You can add some rosemary or thyme, salt, pepper, garlic cloves can go in there as well, because that will just absorb lovely flavors as well. And that's where you add your parboiled potatoes that have a little bit of flowery consistency on the outside after they've been dried out in a calendar, in a sieve. And then you could toss them in with the hot oil and the herbs and the spices and the aromatics, and then you could just let it roast and go in there occasionally and toss them around until they're golden crispy brown. When you scrape a fork or a knife next to those crispy potatoes, it's just music to my ears, and then it's soft in the middle.
Rip Esselstyn:
Let me ask you this, Max, because we're not huge fans of using added oil. Can you make this without the oil?
Max LaManna:
Yeah, you could probably air fry them. You could probably air fry them, and you could probably, I wouldn't be surprised if you just placed them in a baking dish and just roasted them in the oven by themselves. And you could toss them with some spices as well. I would actually toss them with a little bit of corn starch, if you're a fan or you don't like corn starch. I like adding corn starch because it just adds another consistency. It adds a bit of that crispiness that you sometimes can't get. So adding a little bit of that corn starch and some spices as well. So you still have, the outer coat still has a bit of flavor as well. So yeah, I think you can do that without oil
Rip Esselstyn:
To dovetail on-
Max LaManna:
Maybe that's why you look so good and young and healthy because you're not consuming so much oil.
Rip Esselstyn:
Well, I've been staying away from-
Max LaManna:
What's your secrets?
Rip Esselstyn:
From added oils. You know what? I'm doing it, man. I'm living PLANTSTRONG, I'm exercising. I've got a young family, it's all those things. But thank you, Max. So to dovetail on the best roasted potatoes with your smashed potatoes, because you also start those the same way and then just mash them.
Max LaManna:
Yeah, exactly. Really great. I love this recipe. It's one of my fan favorites. So there's recipes throughout the book and later in the back of the book, there's an index of occasional kind of recipes that I feel are like, if you want to start cooking from this book, here are some recipes to start cooking from the book. And this is a fan favorite because I was getting messages from people on social media saying, where's this recipe? And because I've posted over 400 recipes on social media in the last few years, people just don't have time to keep scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, where's that recipe? There's no really easy index to find that on social media. So roasted potatoes, crispy smash potatoes were one of my fan favorites. People love this recipe. It had over a few million views. And so I thought, I'm going to add this to the book.
And great way of using it, parboil, then once they're parboiled and they're soft, you can just smash them down with a potato smasher or an empty glass jar, smash them. I make this little concoction of oil, sorry, tomato paste, some lemon zest, some lemon juice, salt, pepper. And that becomes this lovely paste. And I just spread them on top of the potatoes that goes into the oven, gets nice and crispy. The savoriness from the tomato puree and the lemon zest kind of just gives it this really dense and intense flavor. It's lovely. And then the pickled onions, which you're waiting, you can make pickled onions in less than 20 minutes as the potatoes are roasting. And then a spicy lemon mayo dressing on top with some herbs. Really great crowd pleasing dish, on the table in a few minutes and your family, your loved ones, and your friends will love this.
Rip Esselstyn:
And for people that are fortunate enough to be watching on YouTube, you get to see these photos. All right, let's go into the grain section. You have a one pot pantry pasta. What really caught my eye on this one is you say there's no draining required. You just throw everything together and it's kind of like lickety split. So I've never heard of a one pot pasta with no draining required.
Max LaManna:
Yeah, testing a lot on this recipe because we had to make sure that there wasn't too much liquid sitting in the pan. So then you're just ending up with basically a soup, and we weren't working with that. And this is really kind of just all in one pan. It's kind of store covered ingredients that you have lying around. A lot of the audience was telling me that they were short on time. They want less cleaning up. They're college students, so they want something that is budget friendly and just speedy on the table in a few minutes. And so this is one of those kind of recipes and hopefully it inspires people to think, oh, I can do more here. I can play around with one pot dishes. And especially this one pot pantry pasta.
Rip Esselstyn:
And what's also really neat is at the very, very bottom, you have all the cooking times and how long it'll stay in the fridge and tips to keep it up to three months. And it's really, really neat.
Max LaManna:
I noticed that most cookbooks don't share these types of icons or tell you, okay, this is how long you can keep food in the fridge for. If you want to freeze it, this is how long it'll stay in the freezer for. This is how long it takes to prep and this is how long it takes to cook. Is it freezer friendly? Those sort of things. So yeah, it's been a helpful guide. It helps a lot of people and people have responded really well to this.
Rip Esselstyn:
You're doing a lot of things right. So here, this... And let me tell you what else I really love because I did this in all my cookbooks, but you have great introductory stories about each recipe.
Max LaManna:
Thank you.
Rip Esselstyn:
To me, that's so important. And you talk about this nut roast cake with all the trimmings. And is that carrots on top of that?
Max LaManna:
Those are carrots.
Rip Esselstyn:
Come on, Max. I saw that and I'm like, oh my gosh, I need to try-
Max LaManna:
It's beautiful.
Rip Esselstyn:
It's gorgeous.
Max LaManna:
Thank you. If you flip to the other page, you'll see, I think that's even a more spectacular-
Rip Esselstyn:
This one?
Max LaManna:
Image as well. Yeah, look at that. I mean, that's my Christmas dish right there. Here in the UK we have roasts. This thing, I almost want to call it a phenomenon where every Sunday people will march to the pub and have a roast and they'll have a few pints and they'll watch some sort of football, not American football. I'm talking soccer to us. And they'll have a roast, they'll drink a few pints of beers, they'll watch their football. But for me, I like a roast. This is a savory dish. It's a spectacular dish. It has that lovely kind of tarte Tartin, kind of caramelized carrots on top.
What you do, you place the carrots on the bottom and then you add your filling on top of that. And then when it's baked, then you flip it over and then you have this beautiful presentation. But the story behind that is that every Christmas, every holiday that I spend here in the UK with my family, I have to end up making more dishes of whatever I make because everyone eats my food and my wife and I are the only plant-based eaters in the family, and everyone else is eating our food. So I want to have seconds, I want to have leftovers. I want to enjoy them the next couple of days, next weeks. So I end up having to make more.
Rip Esselstyn:
You mean to tell me your father, your sister and your mother are not on board yet?
Max LaManna:
In the US, you're ready to almost strangle them. No, they have reduced their meat consumption. There was a part in my life where I was like, mom, dad, come on. But I think you catch more bees with honey. And so I've just learned to set back. But my dad's doing, he's completely, I think at this point, I think would say he's probably vegetarian. He's reduced his meat consumption to B basically zero, which is great. My mom's another one. It's hard for her to try to change the way that she thinks. But she watches my recipes, she gets inspiration. So hopefully she feels inspired to make these changes. But I've learned over the years to not push people. I think teaching people and showing them how easy it is, and people will come around to it.
Rip Esselstyn:
No, I think that that's right on the spot, Max. And I love the way you're not preachy, but you just say, "Hey, you know what? Let's all just eat more plants. Let's eat more plants." That's something.
Max LaManna:
Yeah, there's a beginning section of my cookbook that says, "Everyone's welcome to the table." There's no discrimination, no judgment. I've been there before where I've had people say, "Hey man, why aren't you eating plants? Why can't you be vegan?" Those sort of things. I've been there and I've said those things too, and it doesn't make me feel good. And I think if you're somebody who's eating plants and striving on that plant-based diet and loving it and living life like you are and like myself, I think we need to be examples by just showing that in every single day of our lives. We don't need to force feed it down people's throats. We just need to live our most authentic selves. And people will see that, and they'll come around to it eventually. Fingers crossed, maybe they see it, maybe they don't. But little by little we'll start to see changes in the world.
Rip Esselstyn:
Bravo. Sourdough French toast with glazed peaches. And what caught me about this one is, as long as I can remember, I have loved toasting bread and then putting sliced strawberries or blueberries or slicing a banana up and putting it, I love fruit on bread, not jam, but I love just the whole fruit. And I saw this and you put a little bit of maple syrup on top of it and everything. And I just know how much my kids will adore this recipe and myself.
Max LaManna:
It's just a simple dish. It's really just that easy. Grilling some stone fruit, some peaches, making a french toast, frying that on the griddle, on the pan, and then adding a little bit of extra maple syrup or some icing sugar on top. There's nothing more simple than that. And I think the inspiration I got from that was people and most of my audience, there's a bit of college students who are looking for budget friendly meals. And I just thought here's a really simple dish. You don't need that many ingredients. And it's on the plate ready to sit down and devour and eat in just a few minutes.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah, we're going into nightshades now, which is kind of funky territory for me. But this first recipe that I want to ask you about, it's kind of in the same vein as the, let me look for a second here. As the one pot pantry pasta. This is your one pan lasagna. And I'm like, you got to be kidding me. lasagna in one pan, like in one pot? Give me a break.
Max LaManna:
I know. Hey, I'm Italian, so if people are Italian, they can come after me. I'll send my family after them. No, I think I make an introduction about how Italians almost like turn away. If you're too Italian, turn away now. Again, this is another kind of exploration through creativity, through trying to find ways, try to cut corners, trying to make things taste better, or just have fun with the ingredients. Now you could break up pasta sheets, like lasagna sheets, whack them in a pan with some veg stock or some water. I use, I think oat milk in this recipe. So it gets very creamy.
And then the lentils for added protein. And yeah, it's another fan favorite dish in one pan. And I actually cooked this on my Instagram live just a few days ago. So I enjoy that very much. And I always end up having leftovers because there's just two of us in the household where I live. So we end up having leftovers and put that in a pan, added some more vegetables, some mushrooms, some more lentils, some other various bits and bobs, and ended up putting that in the oven and baking it. So we had a pasta bake.
Rip Esselstyn:
Bits and bobs, I've never heard that.
Max LaManna:
I know I'm becoming more British in my ways, Rip.
Rip Esselstyn:
But I mean, you can do that in 25 to 35 minutes. A little bit of prep, but I mean, I'm going to make that very, very soon.
Max LaManna:
Amazing.
Rip Esselstyn:
There's one vegetable that I really cannot stand, and it's actually made it to the front of your cookbook, and that is the eggplant. And so that's why I have this one because, will I like this eggplant dish?
Max LaManna:
Yes. Do you peanut butter or almond butter?
Rip Esselstyn:
I could drown in peanut butter.
Max LaManna:
Yeah, you could drown me in peanut butter too. Yeah, I'll live in peanut butter even after it. I'll just float to peanut butter heaven. This is a dish that has been inspiration from a friend of mine who does a West African stew. And in her recipe, she uses sweet potatoes. And I thought, I'm going to just switch this out and use some aubergine, sorry, eggplant.
Rip Esselstyn:
Okay.
Max LaManna:
I'm going to use some eggplant. And it is such a simple, lovely dish, and it's one of those warming. So I would probably recommend this in the fall or winter if you want something that's warm and grounding and it's just delicious. But yeah, is it for you the texture of-
Rip Esselstyn:
Totally.
Max LaManna:
Eggplant, yeah.
Rip Esselstyn:
Sponge that has just-
Max LaManna:
So there's ways of cooking aubergine, sorry, eggplant. That is, you could do it wrong. And there's wrong and right ways of cooking eggplant. I see a lot of people salting their eggplant. They cut it up and they salt it. You don't need to do that because one, you're wasting the salt. You don't need to do that. What you can do to skip all of that is soak your aubergine, sorry, eggplant. I keep saying aubergine.
Rip Esselstyn:
That's okay. Stay with it, I like it.
Max LaManna:
Soak your aubergine in water. If you soak it in water, and this is what I've learned and have asked Asian chefs, Japanese chefs, what they're doing. And they said that they're soaking the eggplant and aubergine in water. You've soaking in the water for a few minutes. This softens up the fibers of the eggplant itself and then drain it, and then you could squeeze the excess water that's left in there. So now it becomes very meaty. So now you've gotten rid of the water that's inside the vegetable itself, and all you're left with is just this flesh and it's becomes very meaty and textured.
Rip Esselstyn:
That I could handle.
Max LaManna:
So try that. And it's going to change the way you see and taste and cook eggplants from now on.
Rip Esselstyn:
I like it. All right. I'm moving on to gourds and legumes right now. And we always make lentils at my household, always. We do red lentil sloppy Joes. And I saw this and I immediately was like, okay, I love lentils and I love bread, so why don't I do what Max does and just tear up some bread, throw it in my lentils and what do you call it?
Max LaManna:
Pappa Pomodoro.
Rip Esselstyn:
There you go.
Max LaManna:
Yeah. It's a classic Italian dish. I think the history of the dishes when, it's almost like a poor man's pasta dish. And Italians would just use up leftover bread that they have. There's always bread in the house and they whack it in with some tomato sauce, and that becomes like this pasta. But this dish is just another added level of flavor and textures with the added lentils that make, give more protein to this dish. But it's a great way of using up bread as well, because bread is one of the most wasted foods around the world.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. That's again, another dish that I am going to dive into. All right. I'm moving on now into the leafy greens and cruciferous, and just so everybody knows, I mean, Max, you probably have, I don't know, 20 to 25 recipes within each section. I mean, this is robust, but this is a cauliflower ragu. And the reason I picked this one is because I am fascinated with cauliflower and how versatile it is. But I've never ever thought of a cauliflower ragu. So what exactly is this?
Max LaManna:
So the cauliflower, again, another harrowing ingredient in this book that is often thrown away, and one of the most wasted parts of the cauliflower itself are the leaves and the core. Most people are throwing away the leaves and the core, and those are totally edible. You can eat them, you can roast them, you can fry them, you can bake them, you can have them as a chip, they're edible. And so I thought, I'm going to put everything all in one. I haven't seen one kind of cauliflower dish that uses the whole thing in one dish. Most dishes that are using up a cauliflower, kind of separating them and using them as two different things. So I thought, I'm going to use the cauliflower leaf. This is all going to go together, cut them up, chop it up, or grate it or put it in the food processor so it kind of gets the same kind of texture. Like this mince meat and cook this in, I believe it says 10 tablespoons of tomato puree or tomato paste. And it's this very luxurious, flavorful-
Rip Esselstyn:
Almost meaty?
Max LaManna:
Yeah, meaty. It's very meaty. It's very luxurious because it's intense with flavors and having that cauliflower just cooking down slowly over time. Very robust, very lovely. One of my favorite dishes too.
Rip Esselstyn:
Cool. One of our favorite dishes, Sundays, I always make pancakes for the family every Sunday.
Max LaManna:
Same.
Rip Esselstyn:
I would love to do your super green pancakes utilizing some of our leftover cruciferous greens.
Max LaManna:
Do it. This is great. Earth Day is around the corner. So the green, green for the pancakes make the earth, and then the blue for the ocean with the blueberries. So yeah, it's again, another one of the first dishes I started playing around with. Leafy greens can be added to anything. If you could just blend them down, you can blend up the spinach or leafy green, you can add that paste afterwards. Don't add any water, just that paste. And add that to, if you make fresh pasta from scratch, you can add that paste to the pasta dough to make it from scratch. You can add them to any type of baking dish, muffins, cakes, pancakes, breads. I mean, using leafy greens in a various ways. And so this is just one simple way of using up leafy greens.
Rip Esselstyn:
And we all could use more leafy greens thriving in our bodies.
Max LaManna:
Oh, absolutely.
Rip Esselstyn:
Hey, I want you to know you are doing phenomenal. Phenomenal. And we're almost there. So just hang in there with me.
Max LaManna:
I'm here. I'm not going anywhere.
Rip Esselstyn:
Good, I love it. I love it. So one of my favorite dishes when I go out to a Thai restaurant is Pad Thai. And especially a vegan Thai restaurant. And you have a mushroom Pad Thai that just caught my eye because I think we all are starting to understand the benefits of mushrooms and how just incredible they are. So a mushroom Pad Thai, I never even would've thought of it.
Max LaManna:
Yeah, I just think mushrooms are just a versatile ingredient. They're so versatile. They can be used in a plethora of ways. I mean, it depends on which mushrooms you're talking about, which ones you want to use, if you're using king oyster mushrooms. In this one, you can use any kind of a mushroom you want. If you were to do the king oyster mushroom, I would absolutely shred the mushroom with the fork, break it apart, add some spices to it, fried in the pan so it gets all nice and meaty and textured, almost like shredded pork. So yeah, mushrooms are another ingredient that people are often throwing away.
And I've been there before where I have mushrooms just sitting in the fridge and they just collect water and moisture, and then they go soft and soggy, and then they start to smell. And I just think, damn it, why did I just spend all that money on these mushrooms? So Pad Thai is one of my favorite dishes. If I see a Pad Thai on a menu and I really like it... Pad Thai. And I think it's drunken noodles is another one of my favorite dishes.
Rip Esselstyn:
I'm right there with you. But don't let Derek Sarno know that you're going to be throwing out any mushrooms.
Max LaManna:
Hey, I let him do all the mushroom work.
PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [01:15:04]
Max LaManna:
Hey, I let him do all the mushroom work. He's phenomenal with what he can do with mushrooms.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Did you get a chance to meet Derek at all?
Max LaManna:
I did. I did meet Derek. I did meet him once or twice. I don't see him that often anymore, but I did meet him once at a vegan party in London, in an abandoned warehouse hanging out with him. I was like, are you cooking? He's like, no, I'm just here enjoying the music, the vibes and the food. I was like, okay.
Rip Esselstyn:
Derek and I worked together at Whole Foods on the healthy eating team for about four years. O
Max LaManna:
Okay, great. Nice.
Rip Esselstyn:
And his brother Chad. All right, let's talk. So my kids, they love onion rings. You've got this recipe for extra crunchy onion rings, and I would love to make this for those guys and have them just do back flips. And this is a fan favorite with over 2 million views.
Max LaManna:
I know. Geez, it performed really well and I thought a lot of people, and you know what? A lot of people were making these onion rings as soon as I posted it. After I posted it, within 45 minutes, people were already tagging me saying, "I've made your onion rings." And I just thought, okay, this is just a clear sign to maybe put this in the book so more people can make this. We all have onions that are probably just sitting in a cupboard somewhere, or in a bowl or in our fridge that are just sitting not doing anything.
And sometimes you head to the supermarket, you might not see loose ingredients, and then you end up buying a bag of onions, four or five onions, and you're just thinking, what am I going to do with, I just need one. So here's a really fun way of using up onions. And I love making on rings because it's just fun and it could be great for a party. I know the Super Bowl was a couple months ago. Any kind of festivity or party that's around having an onion ring on the table, it's fun.
Rip Esselstyn:
Oh yeah. All right. I'm going into your non-dairy section right now, and I'm wondering if you can read my mind. So I'm going someplace decadent. Super, super decadent. My kids are going to just go crazy with this, and this may possibly be one of the most crazy photos in the book.
Max LaManna:
Ah, okay. Okay, okay. Okay. You're talking about the salted chocolate brownies.
Rip Esselstyn:
You know it. So there it is. Or there's the page. And then if I turn the page, look at that. Look at that.
Max LaManna:
Yeah. Very, very, oh...
Rip Esselstyn:
Go ahead. Go ahead.
Max LaManna:
No, I love brownies and there's, I've tried some brownie recipes in the past and some of them don't really work, and I really worked hard on making this recipe the best it could possibly be and that anyone can do it.
And as I was going through the different level of stages of making brownies, I thought, how do I make this one stand out? Literally, the thought process. How do I make this stand out?
And there you see the evidence, the proof of that image, and I thought peanut butter with chocolate go really well. What else can I add to this? Maybe some tahini. So I just added, you drizzle on this chocolate peanut butter and tahini and then you just drag a fork or a spoon or a skewer through it, and then you get this wonderful, beautiful image. Kind of psychedelic without the psychedelics in the mush- in the brownies.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Yeah. Wow. How hard is it to make that?
Max LaManna:
Follow the recipe.
Rip Esselstyn:
Okay.
Max LaManna:
Follow the recipe and you will, listen. I'm the same. The same. I'm like brownies, they can be totally cooked through all the way, and then you just end up having a cake. And that's not really a brownie. Brownie is something that's like where it's soft, it's chewy, the middle's still wobbly, and then it's decadent and it just kind of melts in your mouth. All of that. Follow the recipe. Because I've tested this recipe, or I would say around 10 or 12 times. There was a lot of brownies in my life at one point.
Rip Esselstyn:
All right, Max. If there's one thing that I don't like, and we're going into the fruit section now, if there's one thing I don't like, it's wasting apples. And seeing these apples, we get, I don't know, 12 at a time and they start to go bad. They get brown spots, and I immediately was like, okay, we need to start making this. This is your sticky apple toffee pudding.
Max LaManna:
Have you ever had a sticky toffee pudding?
Rip Esselstyn:
I'm sure that I have.
Max LaManna:
Yeah. It's a big thing here in the UK. A lot of people are into sticky toffee pudding. It's a lovely baked, I think it could be also steamed, cake pudding. Pudding is a thing they say here in the UK. It's just a dessert really I think. You just call it dessert and they say, no, it's a pudding.
And I just thought, apples, can I add some apples to this? I can. Let's make this, I'm going to break... I mean, I'm sure people in the UK are probably thinking, gosh, why is this guy just coming over here from the States think he can just play around with our sticky toffee pudding and adding apples to it?
So I just thought this is a great way of just adding, it's like a baked cake with apples and a lovely caramel sauce.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah, it looks really good. I'm going into leftovers now, Max, so hang in with me. We got two left. So we're coming back to the bananas that we talked about an hour ago. So this is your BLT using banana peels. Talk to me. Talk to me.
Max LaManna:
I know. I'm sure people are thinking, why banana peels? Bananas are one of the most wasted foods around the world. Where I am in the UK, bananas will take anywhere from 30 to 40 days to be shipped, which is a low carbon footprint, but still it takes 30 days for bananas to be shipped here.
And then we bring them home, we place them on our countertops, we turn our backs, they go spotty, they go brown, we let them go to waste. But maybe we are smart enough where we use the banana itself. Maybe we freeze them, maybe we make a banana cake. We've all been there before, or put it into a smoothie.
But the peel itself is one of the ingredients that often is thrown away. And I'm not here to say, hey, every time you get bananas, eat your peel. This is just one way of showing people that you can use the food you have, being creative, just looking at the ingredients you have in your fridge, in your cupboard, and just going, can I do something with this? And that's all I'm trying to get people excited about, is using the food that they already have.
So banana peel is one of those ingredients. And most southeast Asian countries, they use banana peels in their cuisine. Why aren't we using banana peels in our cuisine? What's the problem? So it's just another way of thinking outside the box, and it's a great way of using up banana peels.
The one thing I do, I think I mentioned this in the recipe, is that I do implore people to use organic banana peels when possible, because bananas are often heavily pesticide and filled with all sorts of different sprays.
Rip Esselstyn:
I had a woman on the podcast and she told me that her father grew up in India, very, very poor, and would sneak onto other people's properties and steal bananas, and he would eat the banana, all of it, like the peel and all.
And so I had her on again, and to kind of show off to her, I had the banana, an American banana, and I just tore into it and ate it. And she's like, oh, it's a different type of banana, you don't want to do, you want to be careful doing that. But it was an intense experience trying to chew a normal American banana peel raw.
Max LaManna:
Yeah. I'm sure it was.
Rip Esselstyn:
One of the things, Max, I've never been a coffee drinker, but I love the smell of coffee. And when I used to do it, coffee ice cream. And so I saw your coffee grind pancakes, and I was like, that really is intriguing to me to use the coffee grinds somehow into a pancake. What can you tell me about that?
Max LaManna:
Yeah. Just another, at the beginning stages of testing and developing recipes for this book, just thinking how I need to think outside the box. I need to find a way of tapping into people's subconscious minds. Hopefully that's happened with you now.
And just say, if we're making a cup of coffee, we probably end up throwing away some of the coffee that's been made for us, but also the grounds as well. We can still consume that. We don't want to consume a large amount of it, but some of that can be consumed and can be eaten.
So I sprinkled a little bit of that into my pancake batter, and it intensifies the flavor. It just lifts the flavor of the pancake batter, of the pancakes themselves, and tasted like a little bit of coffee. It had a coffee essence. And at the time, I wasn't drinking coffee as much as I do now, and I drink about a cup of coffee a day. Black, just black coffee.
Rip Esselstyn:
You know what, you made it through. You made it through. Those are all, that's all I had for you there. Now I got about three or four rapid fire questions for you.
Max LaManna:
Right. Fire away.
Rip Esselstyn:
And then we close it out. So do you have a hero in your life?
Max LaManna:
Do I have a hero in my life? You know what? I don't. I'm going to be, I'm completely honest. At this point and stage in my life, I don't think I have a hero. But I feel, I'm going to be honest with you, I feel, I'm going to go, we're going to deep.
I think I'm in a period of my life where I'm in this in between stage and I'm trying to figure out, okay, what's my life looking years from now? Whilst also trying to stay present in the moment and just be like, this is the only moment I have.
But I don't have a hero. I don't look up to anyone. I'm just trying to be my better self every single day.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Yeah. Good.
Max LaManna:
Maybe it's you. Maybe I'm looking up to you next. I'm going to look, I'm do a deep dive into you, Rip, afterwards.
Rip Esselstyn:
All right, let's do it. So I hear, you said you're child free. I assume you have no pets, but you have 33 plants. I don't see any of your plants. Are they being well taken care of?
Max LaManna:
This is the spare bedroom. This is nothing, nothing happens in here. Actually, I exercise in here. But yeah, we do take care of them. And we just started last week because the weather's changing and it's becoming, it's spring now. We've added more healthy soil and compost to our potted plants because they were get looking a bit weak and tired.
So we've added, we've replaced, I'm a big green thumb kind of guy, and so we've taken the potted plants out, removed some of the soil underneath, added some new soil, and yeah, they're thriving now. They're all happy. They're singing right now. You can't hear them, but they're singing.
Rip Esselstyn:
So I don't have to call Plant Protection Agency.
Max LaManna:
Yeah.
Rip Esselstyn:
Good, good, good. Can you tell me about your tattoos? I'm very intrigued by them, obviously. So what is it exactly?
Max LaManna:
I'm really sorry. I'm sorry. I think when you get, for me, I got one and I was like, wow, that, that's an intense feeling. I often put myself through, whether it's sports or I don't know, I don't what it is. I try, I've done some intense things in my life. Like I said earlier in this show, I just say yes to a lot of things.
And so when I was 18, my parents said to me, what do you want for your birthday? And jokingly, I said, "I'm going to get a tattoo." And my parents said, "Okay." And I think my parents probably were just like, he'll learn, he'll learn the hard way, let him have it. So I end up getting a tattoo at 18 on my birthday, and then slowly from there, I just added more and more tattoos.
Rip Esselstyn:
Where was that? Where was your first one?
Max LaManna:
I'm not going to show you. It's on my shoulder. And it's one of those pieces of art where you go, what was I thinking? So yeah, it's on my shoulder. It's actually your face. And I don't know what I was thinking when I did that.
No, I, well, they don't have, there's not a story to them, but it's very, I try to keep a theme where it's all kind of like lines and mandalas or some sort of pattern that kind of flows into the next one, into the next one. So I like them. And now I almost feel quite lopsided.
Rip Esselstyn:
Well, does that mean, do you feel like you need-
Max LaManna:
I feel like I got to fill up the other side, but maybe I think someone says, no, it looks cool with just the one that you have here on your wrist.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Well, it does. For people that are always trying to figure out what is the best pots, pans to get, do you have a certain brand that you recommend?
Max LaManna:
Actually, I think this brand that I'm going to tell you is actually based in Austin, Texas, where you are. And it's called Made In, Made In, and they're based in Austin, Texas, I believe. And those are the pot, it's every kind of-
Rip Esselstyn:
Are they the one with the blue steel? They have the blue-
Max LaManna:
They do have a blue, they have a blue carbon steel pan. This is not a sponsored, I don't think this is a sponsored podcast or conversation we're having. I'm not no longer sponsored by them, so I could still talk it freely.
It's one of the pots and pans that I often use, and you see them in all my recipe videos. I just enjoy the pans. Sometimes I use a pan and it scrapes, it sticks, the food sticks to it. These are really great pans. They've been tested with chefs all around the world.
So yeah, I would look in, I think investing money into great pots and pans is where it's at, because it just serves you better in the long run.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. This is my last question for you, and that is, what do you see as the new male, the new masculinity? What do you think that is? Because you had a write up in one of your Instagram posts and I was like, man, he is spot on. And if you can't remember it, I'm happy to read it. But I loved-
Max LaManna:
Please do.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Yeah. The new male masculinity, and this isn't all of it, it's kind of abbreviated. But stepping into fear and not, and to not hold back tears. Powered by plants, and then you went on and on and on. And I didn't write it all down, but those were just some of them. But I just love the way, you write some really wonderful, beautiful stuff on your posts.
Max LaManna:
Oh, thank you.
Rip Esselstyn:
Again. Yeah.
Max LaManna:
Our world is in turmoil. There's a lot of hate going around in the world. I think there's a lot of people who are afraid, who are feeling the pressure from external sources.
I've always been somebody to kind of march to the only beat to my drum. I march to the beat of my drum. I listen to what's going on in my heart and in my mind. And that takes time. That takes patience, that takes willingness to listen, to hear what's happening on the inside.
And I think I've been bullied, I've been teased, I've been picked on since I was as a child, as a kid, called names. Always, I wasn't the one who kind of stood out in the cool crowd. And so I've kind of just taken what was given to me, I'm going to take this with me. I'm going to learn new things. I'm going to move forward, and I'm going to apply those things in my life.
And maybe everyone is in those cliches. Everyone's special. Everyone has something to share with the world. And I'm going to share mine, and I'm going to do it unapologetically, and I'm just going to be my true, authentic self.
And I think being a male in this world is we need to... It's a challenge. There's, like I said, external resource, external things going on in the world that tell us to live a certain way, this is how to be a man. And no, I think being a man is showing those tears, saying you're wrong when you're wrong.
And you need to be honest with yourself. I think this allows other people around you to also be honest and free and allows that true, authentic self to come through.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Beautifully said, Max. I love where you say to be kind whenever and wherever to all beings. Love yourself first. Live passionately. Be you.
Max, this has been an absolute thrill, like I said in the very, very beginning. I'm fascinated by you. Everything that you're bringing to this space, to the planet, and to get people to stop wasting their food. You can do this, people, you can do it. Let Max be your guide.
Max, I really, really cannot wait to meet you one day, and I applaud you and all the fantastic work you're doing. Thank you.
Max LaManna:
Thank you, Rip. Really appreciate it. Thank you so much.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah, all the best. Give me a little PLANTSTRONG fist bump. Boom.
Max LaManna:
Boop. Awesome.
Rip Esselstyn:
Max's new book, You Can Cook this, is now available, and we'll be sure to put a link in the show notes to it. Of course, you can also follow Max on social media, like the millions of others who do so, for more recipes and inspiration. Remember, you can cook this and you can keep it PLANTSTRONG. See you next week.
Thank you for listening to the PLANTSTRONG podcast. You can support the show by taking a quick minute to follow us wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Leaving us a positive review and sharing the show with your network is another great way to help us reach as many people as possible with the exciting news about plants. Thank you in advance for your support. It means everything.
The PLANTSTRONG podcast team includes Carrie Barrett, Laurie Kortowich, Ami Mackey, Patrick Gavin, and Wade Clark. This season is dedicated to all of those courageous truth seekers who weren't afraid to look through the lens with clear vision and hold firm to a higher truth. Most notably, my parents, Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Junior and Ann Crile Esselstyn. Thanks for listening.
