Hey guys! Carole and myself, Scott, are starting off 2020 with a bang. We launched our new podcast and we are super excited to bring it to you – ENJOY!!!
Scott
Hi. My name is Scott, and this is
Carole
Hi I’m Carol.
Scott
And this is our very first episode one of our This Is Yu podcast. Super excited to bring it to you guys. We are recording it with a video camera, and we’re recording it to just make it as a podcast. But we will post it on YouTube if you want to see what we look like.
Carole
I don’t know about that. I know they want to see me, but I don’t know about you.
Scott
I’ve got a disguise. I look a lot like Brad Pitt online. Um, anyway, so, Caroline, I just want to tell you a little bit about ourselves so you can get some perspective on where we’re coming from. Carole would you like to start off telling us about yourself?
Carole
Okay. So I was born in New Zealand. I grew up in South Bend, Indiana, and I have a mechanical engineering degree. Always wanted to be in fashion. My conservative Chinese parents wouldn’t let me. And so I decided to go into engineering. After university, I went to Beijing, China, and I taught technical writing to engineering students. After that, I came back to the U S and got offered a job as a knee and hip designer. But that was in South Bend, Indiana, seven miles from my house. And so I really wanted to get away. Stay away from my family. So anyway, I don’t think they want to hear this. But, you know, it’s the truth. This could go on way too long, you know.
Scott
So do the readers digest version
Carole
Reader’s Digest? Okay, so I liked highlights.
Scott
How did you become so interested in food?
Carole
Okay, well, my mom taught Chinese cooking when I was growing up, she taught to Indiana University South Bend students at their continuing education program. So every Tuesday, I loved it because we would get to go to Burger Chef for dinner down the street. That was the only kind of fast food we had when I was growing up. And then my mom taught a lot of cooking, and she would also cater a lot of dinners be cause my father was the mathematics dean of several times when I was growing up and we would have dinner parties with maybe 20 people, my mom would be cooking and I would help her, you know, food just was kind of something that wasn’t that top of mind all through when I was in college and when I lived in Boston working for IBM and sales. And finally, after about 40 years, I realized I’m really into food. I really enjoy going to restaurants. I really enjoy looking at recipes, making new things, challenges, challenging myself. Also my daughter Dara. We have two daughters. Elena is older, she’s 25 and Dara, who is 18 now 18. What I know. I can’t believe that happened. I know that happens so fast. Anyway, she’s Ah, really into cooking. She was on the first season of Master Chef Jr. Should we tell them now, or should we wait till later?
Scott
Well we’ll just preface that for now and then we’ll, come back to that.
Carole
All right, So she was on Master Chef Jr. So my life has in the last six years really emerged into food. So now I am the culinary manager at the Williams and Sonoma flagship store in Beverly Hills. We are the largest store in the Los Angeles area. I have the fun, super fun job of finding chefs and instagrammers and bloggers to come into our cooktop and do a pop up or take over. We’ve got people that are showing cookies. We’ve got chefs that are doing elaborate Bouche de Noels. We’ve got wine tastings. We’ve got Master Chef Jr kids coming in and we’ve got lots of fun things happening all the time. So anyway, I finally found my passion with my job as culinary manager at Williams Sonoma. So that’s a little bit about me. So how about you, Scott? You gotta really varied background. Tell me about yourself.
Scott
I’m originally from Toronto, Canada, and I grew up in the comedy acting world of Toronto. I was in the original version of the Kids in the Hall comedy sketch group.
Carole
Really eh.
Scott
Yeah, good one, eh? Anyway, so I always wanted to live in Southern California. I went to acting school down here, so eventually made my way down here, worked a lot in restaurants, didn’t really have an affinity for food other than putting it down on the table and going enjoy. Would you like another glass of wine with that? Can I fill up your diet Coke? Just mainly that Then I came into the world of Yu with Carole and Dara and Elena, and they’ve really had a passion for cooking all through my whole experience with these guys. Carole and I start talking a year ago and we decided, Yeah, let’s do a food blog. I could just always see how Carole would light up when it came time to talk about food. So we just decided to put together a food blog, and you can find it at ThisIsYu.com Yu is spelled. Y U. It’s Carole’s last name. Yeah, so that’s basically how we came to the world of food, both of us. We’d like to tell you a little bit about our podcast. Like what the idea behind the podcast is. Is that not right? Carol.
Carole
It’s true. It’s exactly true. You know, I wanted to have a podcast because basically, we have this new business. ThisIsYu.com. We really want to spread the word about our amazing products also talk a lot about food with other chefs and people that I’ve met. We’d love to interview chefs from Top Chef from Master Chef. I think Scott has a lot of ideas, too.
Scott
Well, one of the key components for me in life in general is to inspire people, is to help them find their passion on what excites them, whether it’s food, whether it’s reading a book, whether it’s writing a book, whether it’s becoming a ventriloquist, doing stand up, whatever, I get really excited. That’s kind of been my bend in my growing up, my sort of transformation of myself into where I am now through some hardships in my past. It’s a journey, but part of this, for me specifically is to bring an element of inspiration to you guys basically, through our journey, see the struggles and then overcoming the situations and in turn inspire you because we’re just a couple of regular Joes and Joette. Joannes Jos Jos and Joannes Joanies Joanies. That’s where I recognize you from Happy Days. It’s me Chachi and Joanie here inspiring the world. That’s my main focus with this, whether it’s building a website from scratch, whether it’s getting a podcast going, showing you the equipment and explain to you the difficulties that we go through. To me, it’s basically it’s just overcoming situations, So you presented with the situation and how do you work through that situation? Eventually if you keep doing that, I’ve always found the people that succeed or not necessarily the smartest, the brightest, the best at doing what they’re doing. It’s the people that are persistent, the people that just keep going
Carole
and hardworking and
Scott
hardworking. Yeah, but you don’t necessarily have to work stupid either. I mean, hard working is a key element to it, but it’s also working smart, knowing what to work on and having your goals in alignment with who you are and how you want to work through life rather than just running around like a chicken with its head cut off. But that that kind of is the main component for me is the inspirational aspect of it in a way, too, because this is our first podcast. It is, a, discovery. I mean, we’ve had many conversations about it. We’ve written down ideas, but there is always an evolution. If you get a box set of The Sopranos TV show, you watch the first pilot episode, you watch the last episode. It’s a huge transformation, and we’re open to that. We’re open to the idea of taking input from you guys and having it affect us. Exactly, yeah. And help us change and evolve, too. So it’s It’s kind of like a community that we’re putting together here. It’s important for us to listen to you guys and get feedback, so we know that what we’re doing is actually making a change with you or helping you in some some fashion.
Carole
You know, I think the thing is that once people find out more about our backgrounds, then they’ll be able to ask us questions because we do have really varied backgrounds. Scott has a lot of experience with tech work computers, putting together websites, putting together podcasts, doing videos, food videos and also other type of vlogs. Ah, for the Internet, for YouTube.
Scott
Yeah, I actually just let me interject with that. Because Dara, as we said earlier, was on Master Chef Jr. She was the runner up on that show, and we saw that there was a lot of energy around that, and we wanted to help her. The best we could in the way we decided to come up with something was to put together a YouTube show. So I transformed our kitchen into a little movie set, and we ended up shooting like 17 episodes of Dara the Bow Girl. It was actually quite successful at that time. I mean, the show was being rolled out they shot in Los Angeles, but it was rolled out all over the world. Italy, Indonesia, anyway. So she built up a bunch of followers from there, and that, in turn, led to a connection with DreamWorks TV. And from there they signed her onto her own show, got picked up and she shot a bunch of episodes there.
Carole
I just was trying to point out that you have a lot of different varied backgrounds, and people are going to be asking us questions as they get to know us more. But you know Scott’s really great photographers, so he knows all about the technical stuff. So if you have questions about photography, podcasting, doing food videos, doing regular videos, shooting, editing software, all that kind of practical stuff..
Scott
Be happy to answer any of that stuff for you guys.
Carole
And I have a lot of experience with food, um, food techniques coming up with menu ideas, recipes as you, our listeners get to know us. You’ll know more of the areas that we have information about and were some experience, and you’ll be able to ask questions, and we’re totally about that because that’s really what we want to do is we want to help inspire. We want to be able to answer questions and help people with what they want to do in their future.
Scott
So that brings us to our next talking point. And we want to go over the website a little bit with you guys just to give you some sort of background and what we have going on. The website obviously just goto ThisIsYu.com. You can check out see what we have going on there, but we’ll just go over it just real quickly here. It’s a little difficult when you’re listening to it on Ah, podcast. But we do have it. We will have it up on the video and you can you can check that out, too. But basically the idea is we have this main page Carole mentioned earlier. We have these Photogram Surfaces(TM), and what we discovered in our journey was we’re trying to, as as a photographer, you’re always trying to come up with the perfect background, and generally what happens is you go to Home Depot or Lowe’s, and you spent a whole bunch of time on money, paint and plaster and wood, and you try and put these backgrounds together. But you can’t mix the right colors, and it just doesn’t turn out right.
Carole
And they’re super heavy. And it was hard to move them around and maneuver them in storage space
Scott
And chip and crack as they get older. So then we thought, what about putting a photograph of a surface, whether it’s a marble background or a piece of wood or a brick wall or something printed on a ah thin substrate, the flexible, waterproof substrate. So we ended up doing that, and we’ve got we’ve got a business now and it’s, um it’s going along really well. We’ve got approximately Ah, no, we actually do. We have 54 different surfaces that kind of enters you into the website so you can get to see what’s going on. We sell the surface is 24in by 36in. We print on the front and on the back. So on the Web site, we’ve got a little school bar there, and you can just scroll along to see what ah, what surfaces match on the front. What surfaces air on the back and then below that we shot a bunch of images on the surface is because it’s very difficult to see in a practical sense how these work we did some product shots. And we just did, you know, images. Carole cooked up some awesome stuff and just went over and shot a whole bunch of these, ah, these surfaces on here in different capacities and it works out really well. It’s very simple to see if if this is something that connects with you down a little bit farther, there’s Carol talking about the walk through process. And then we also have our blog what we’ve got post on there just quickly, I guess the last couple posts were talking about Dara’s audition process on Master Chef Jr then we’ve got 10 exciting food trends for 2020. Then I’ve got food photography tricks, which I take you on a whole shoot with a company that I’ve worked with Guindos spice of life sauce. Is there an award winning spice company? They make different types of spices, liquid spices right now in the bottle, and they’re really good. And so they sent me a new, smaller version of their product and they wanted shots of that, so I just take you through on that. There’s also another thing about Master Chef Jr. Then I have a, um, a review. Um, on
Carole
these?
Scott
Yeah. Of the
Carole
microphones that were
Scott
Yes, exactly. These are Pod, Mics Rode Pod Mics. They’re really great. Rode is an Australian company, have been around forever, and these are a really solid mic, that’ll last forever. And they’re only 100 bucks each. There are more expensive.
Carole
Like I didn’t know they were only that much. We’re always arguing about money. You all know that after a while, because I’m always getting mad at him for spending money. And he’s good at being with the figure out how to what to sell so he could buy new things
Scott
or hide things so she doesn’t know I bought it.
Carole
What?
Scott
I think I have these Pod Mics for about two months before she knew I had them. Yeah, that’s true. And then just think, What else do we
Carole
clients? We’ve got clients on there because we have shot for Hershey’s chocolate. We have shot for Girl’s Life magazine. Umami Burger, Umami, Burger 800 degrees pizza. So you can see there’s this whole section there. We also do videos for food bloggers. So we will do some top down videos of different types of food. Ah, the food process. You know what people called hands and pans? Videos? What else do we have on the web site? We’ve got
Scott
We can do, ah, product shots we can do. There’s some cool shots on there that I did
Carole
have head shots and portrait.
Scott
Yeah, that they used through Umami Burger and then just a link to our instagram account. And if you guys aren’t following us on instagram, we’d sure love to hear from you. Come by. Were at
Carole
@ThisIsYuOfficial
Scott
Oh, @ThisIsYuOfficial. So that basically shows us the whole of the website here. We just wanted to kind of connect with you guys with the website. There’s a lot of information on there, and, you know, we’d be happy to answer any questions. You have to shoot us an email
Carole
and you’re you’re gonna be working more on photography to, right? with presets and things.
Scott
What happens we found is people. They get their cameras to get their lights are all excited. They take the photo. And it’s like, now what? What I’m doing isn’t putting together some Lightroom presets. I’m going to be selling those on the website, and they’re just basically presets that I use in my everyday travels to get great photos.
Carole
What’s your experience with photography? Why should we look at your presets?
Scott
Oh you shouldn’t. I’m just telling you to buy them. Yeah, you shouldn’t at all. You should go somewhere else as quick as possible. I’ve done a lot of photos. Presets save you a bunch of time. You’re basically paying for my eye and what I think looks good. You go to the website and see the photos, and if they’re connecting with you, then you definitely connect with the presets. That’s something that I’m working on now, so that should be coming out relatively soon. I think the next thing we want to talk about is The Persimmon bread
Carole
Persimmon bread persimmon bread. Okay, i’ll tell you. So you
Scott
just let me give him a little bit of background. So where we are right now is we’re in our studio here. Front of the house is just right there. and we’re in the back of the lot. And we’re in a studio. We’ve got a big, wide glass wall here. A lot of light comes in. This is the table we actually shoot on. I’m just trying to I have an awareness of people listening to this. The point is, there’s a lot of nice natural light coming in here. And then, if not at night or little later in the afternoon, we augment it with some led light just over behind us. Is a persimmon tree.
Carole
Exactly. That is at least probably about 50 years old. This house that we live in is vintage 1923 Spanish bungalow, which is really typical for Los Angeles. See? And when we moved into this house, what? When I moved into this house in 1993 there were a bunch of fruit trees on this lot. There was a giant lemon tree. There was ah, lime tree, and there were five fig trees and then this giant persimmon tree. Over the years, we had to take the lemon tree down because it actually was cracking through the plumbing pipes to the back to the city. And so we took that lemon tree down the lime tree kind of died off, too, and so we were left with five fig trees and a persimmon tree. Then what happened is we built this beautiful studio we had to actually tear down for per site for fig trees for that. So now we’ve got left a beautiful fig tree and a gorgeous persimmon tree, which now is so high that we have to get the 12 foot ladder to climb up and pick the fruit. But this fruit is gorgeous, its succulent. It’s bright. It’s an amazing almost fluorescent orange color on every year. Aren’t there different types of Persimmons. Well, yeah, that’s true. So we have a Hachiya tree h a c h i y a Hachiya. The other kind of persimmon trees are Fuyu You f you know, for, you know, full view for you, Have you Ah, f u Why you So the Fuyu looks like a tennis ball that you’ve pushed down and it has that kind of squat bowled out the side with flat top and bottom. It’s also a harder fruit. That’s like an apple when you cut it. It actually is very crispy,
Scott
Right, and it also has on your tongue. It has more of the, um it sort of cakes on your tongue more right.
Carole
That’s the Hachiya. So, the FuYu is really sweet. It just tastes basically you can eat it right off the tree. The Hachiya which we have our larger there. Some of them can be up to maybe 4 or 5 inches diameter
Scott
like a softball size.
Carole
They are not quite a softball size, but bigger than a Okay, Yeah. You want to argue about it? Okay.
Scott
You would have to go through day in day out!
Carole
Yeah, well, if you’re wrong, you’re wrong. So anyway, these Hachiya persimmons are gorgeous. They’ve got these bright orange color. They start out on the tree extremely hard. Kind of like an avocado. They feel really hard, like an avocado. And as they ripen, you want them to be super soft like a really ripe tomato, and the skin becomes thinner and also the flesh becomes more translucent. You don’t eat these Hachiyas when they’re on the tree and when they’re hard because there’s a really astringency you would put it in your mouth and it would taste just you’d really want to spit it out. But when they become super soft like a tomato, then you actually can grind the pulp and use it. And they’re super sweet, and they taste almost like, um, like a fruit has been mixed with honey. It has that much of a sweetness to it, and you can use the persimmon pulp. And I only just figured this out maybe a couple years ago. So we always had these persimmons that the squirrels and the raccoons in our backyard with just go crazy in the fall in the winter. And we have this giant raccoon that’s probably about I don’t know, 30 lbs and he walks around
Scott
Like over 10 feet tall. It’s huge.
Carole
He’s huge. I mean, he scares me when I come out, we actually we actually have a bedroom outside, which is really weird. We come out of our bedroom sometimes in the middle of the night, and there is a giant raccoon sitting there with a persimmon in it’s paws.
Scott
and the thing is, with these raccoons is their urban raccoons. So they’re like they just look at you. Go. Yo, what you looking at? You stop looking at me. I’m just eating to persimmon go on, get out my face.
Carole
We have a lot of fun. When, Ah, when my older daughter Elena was probably a teenager, she and her dad, George, who? My late husband. I used to go and have persimmon picking parties in the fall. They would fill up maybe five or six Trader Joe grocery shopping bags. You can tell where we live because there’s a Trader Joe’s market here. We would just give them away. We never actually made anything out of the persimmons, but in the last few years, Elena has really gotten into cooking. As we said, we’re all a cooking family, and she now makes dried persimmons. They really become very sweet. They become like dried dates. And so she makes those. And then I have found out well, she actually introduced me to this recipe. It is a person and bread, and it’s actually a James Beard recipe that we found on a David Liebowitz website. So if you know David Liebowitz, he’s a food writer. Has a lot of cookbooks taking something from James Beard. Of course, any James Beard recipe is going to be something that is delicious and tastes worthy In the last few months, I’ve been grinding out persimmon bread like no ends like there’s no end of persimmons. So we’ve probably had maybe about five or six in the last few months, and the recipe is fantastic. And so I will definitely make a blog post about that and put it on our blog, which you can go to at ThisIsYu.com. You’ll make the bread. You’ll share it. People will think that you’re the most amazing chef, you know, if you don’t have persimmons because ah, lot of people in the country do not have access to that gorgeous fruit, you could really make it with bananas. You could just turn it into a banana bread. You could make it with zucchinis Could probably. I’ve never tried it, but I would say even if you wanted to do it with pumpkin butter, that would be something that would taste really good.
Scott
Okay, so I got to clear this up because it’s drive me crazy. What? I’m saying persimmon and you’re saying persimmon, persimmon. So I’m putting emphasis on the second
Carole
Persimmon
Scott
syllable and you’re putting it on the first syllable.
Carole
I don’t know, would have to go to the go to Google translator Google whatever to figure
Scott
out what it does. See what I have to go through day in, day out. Maybe you guys can let us know in the comments down below.
Carole
How do you pronounce Persimmon?
Scott
So if you pronounce it the Canadian way, it would be persimmon. And if you go the
Carole
Us way, it’s persimmon.
Scott
So let us know down below in the comments what you guys think it is or the way you heard your grandmother pronounce it. I think we are getting really close to the end here, basically wanted to tell you guys about what we have coming down the pipe. As we said earlier, we’re going to be doing a show on our whole Master Chef Jr experience. With Dara, it’s really exciting. There was a lot of really interesting events that happened, and since it was the very first season we felt and even looking back on it now, even though they had the regular master chef, it seemed like Master Chef Jr they didn’t quite know what they were doing. There was a lot of stuff that was a little bit up in the air and timing and that kind of thing. So it they’ve obviously got a worked out over multiple seasons, I should say, but it’s been it’s been really interesting for for us looking back and seeing how things evolve.
Carole
Well, they didn’t even know what the name of it was at first when they were auditioning, it was called Junior Master Chef. So they were kind of under a conundrum which we are having too which we don’t really know what exactly we want to call this podcast. So what do you think? What are some ideas that you have?
Scott
Well, the ideas that I had was that we came up with the idea for the name. We just didn’t have a slogan, so I thought we were gonna call it. This Is Yu. And then they just had to come up with a slogan. This is you helping da da da da
Carole
helping to inspire
Scott
something to that effect.
Carole
Hoping to inspire to find your passion, to live your life, to reach your goals. How about that? Is that
Scott
a good, short slogan? Yeah. Okay. Anyway, And then for Christmas. Carole loves loves love, watching all the cooking shows, and she learns a lot from that. I’m thinking to myself, What? I’m gonna get her. I thought, maybe guys know there’s a series called Master Class. They do have chefs on there. They have deejays. They have writers. They have comedians. They have everything. It’s a subscription base. You sign up for it. Tell us who’s on there.
Carole
Some of the culinary people are Thomas Keller, who is one of the Michelin starred restaurants in the United States. One of the few also there is Dominique Ansel who, by the way, Dara worked for for about a year. And there are many other chefs on there. I’m also interested in fashion. I actually used to have a fashion company. Anna Wintour is on there. There is Judd Apatow. There’s a lot of different people where you can really learn a lot of different things. Isn’t Mark isn’t Ah, Steve Martin there?
Scott
But I’m really excited because they have Bobby Brown. So I’m gonna learn all about makeup.
Carole
I have been trying to teach you how to do that perfect eyeliner.You know, I get wobbly and it just goes crazy. Carol’s gonna be doing some reviews of the classes, what she goes through them and and basically helping you guys understand. Is it worth taking it? Cause you can learn a lot from those online series and there are a lot of different people putting out information. But it’s like, Do I spend the money on this? So she’s gonna let you know if it’s Worth the Spend.Yeah, I mean, you know, everyone always pick up a recipe book. You can always get a cookbook, you can go online, and you can also nowadays go onto YouTube and follow people on YouTube. There are so many instagrammers, so many YouTubers that are that do all of these hands and pans videos, but the’s are people that have picked it up in different ways and I really wanna learn from the top. I want to learn from the people who really understand what it takes to do something correctly, how to do something the right way. And I know a lot of people have good experiences just learning by themselves. But, you know, I’m the kind of person that when I was growing up, I loved going to 4H, which was during the summertime. I would go and learn how so? I didn’t. I wasn’t there in terms of like raising a chicken or a pig. Not even a chicken. Like a like a steer anyway, So I wasn’t on 4H for that site. I was in it for cooking and sewing. I really enjoyed learning about how to follow instructions. So I am a little bit OCD, about that, I really like to follow recipes to the T. I like to sew follow the instructions to the T
Scott
I’m just laughing because you don’t like to follow my instructions what so ever.
Carole
Of course not. Because those aren’t like, you know, As I said, you have to have someone with experience. And that’s why I’m really excited about master class like master class. That was the perfect gift for me for Christmas. And what did I get you? I got you something, techie, which you love.
Scott
I got a lump of coal, that’s what. It’s a nice big lump of coal, and it has a speaker in it that connects to my iPod. So she got me a lump of coal with a speaker in it. No, she got me the Apple TV 4K, so I’m super excited about that. Got that all hooked up to the TV last night. And we are going to be watching more movies on there. But anyway, that brings us to the end of our first episode of our podcast. And we’re super happy to have you guys along for the ride, please Like and Subscribe to anything you can about us Come visit us at ThisIsYu.com And also over on Instagram
Carole
We are at @ThisIsYuOfficial which is @ T H I S IS YU and then official O f f i c i A l and you can always contact us. Go onto our website and you can find us and send us an email. Or if you’re on this podcast, you can always make a comment. We have talked about so many different things Let us know what interests you is that Master Chef is it photography is that podcast? Is it building websites? Let us knows. Yep. Recipes techniques how to do food videos how to take photos for restaurants of products. We’ve got all that experience so we’d love to help everyone.
Scott
So from Carole and myself Scott here in beautiful, sunny Southern California. We are in Culver City, just down the road from Sony Studios, where they did the Wizard of Oz. At that point, it was MGM Studios were signing off. Thank you guys so much for watching and listening.
Carole
Thank You! We need a tagline.
Scott
Yeah, we do.
