WITS Talks Presents Pandemic Pages: Cookbooks and Home Cooking in Quarantine

The third panel in our bi-weekly panel series that will explore the ways in which the food and wellness world have adapted to meet the COVID 19 pandemic head on, turning crisis into opportunity.

Moderated by Bill Telepan.

Panelists: Gregory Gourdet, Karen Rinaldi, and Caroline Schiff.

Gregory Gourdet is a chef and cookbook author who previously appeared on Bravo’s Top Chef and Top Chef All Stars. Gourdet brings his Haitian heritage to his cooking at his restaurant Kann Winter Village in Portland, OR, a dining experience that celebrates the cuisine of Haiti and is inspired by BIPOC cuisines from all over the world. Gourdet’s cookbook,  Everyone’s Table: Global Recipes for Modern Health, which features 200 mouth-watering, decadently flavorful recipes carefully designed to focus on superfoods, is available on May 11, 2021. 

Karen Rinaldi is a professional preacher of the gospel of suckitude. Before she found surfing, she sucked at plenty of things, among them skiing, horseback riding (which almost ended tragically), boxing (she doesn’t want to talk about it), running, rollerblading, cycling (for which she boasts the least suckiness.) Along with her side hustle of suckitude, Rinaldi has spent 20+ years in publishing and is the publisher of Harper Wave, an imprint she founded in 2012. Her first novel, The End of Men, was the basis for the 2016 feature film Maggie’s Plan, directed by Rebecca Miller and starring Julianne Moore, Greta Gerwig and Ethan Hawke. Her book, [It’s Great to] Suck at Something: The Unexpected Joy of Wiping Out and What It Can Teach Us About Patience, Resilience and the Stuff That Really Matters, is a non-fiction deep dive into the joys that sucking can bring. Rinaldi’s essays have appeared in The New York Times, TIME, Motto, LitHub, Oprah.com among others.

Caroline Schiff, widely known under the moniker @pastryschiff, is the pastry chef at Gage & Tollner, head chef behind fresh snack bar company Slow Up, and celebrated culinary consultant based in Brooklyn. She got her start in the restaurant industry over a decade ago cooking at The Good Fork, and worked her way up through a number of acclaimed restaurants and bakeries including Mas (la Grillade), Maysville NYC, Kenton’s NOLA, and Greene Grape Provisions before coming full circle to work with Sohui and Ben once again at Gage & Tollner. Caroline’s signature gravity-defying hairdo is outsized only by her enormous heart; in her spare time you can find her either supporting charitable causes or running a marathon. Look out for her debut cookbook, The Sweet Side of Sourdough, coming out this fall by Page Street Publishing.