NEW YORK — Al Roker remembers the moment when it became clear to him that his oldest daughter was an honest-to-goodness chef.
“We were talking, and she was in the kitchen, and she’s looking at me, but she’s chiffonading these herbs and not looking down,” he recalled recently.
“Within the first three minutes, there’d be at least one geyser of blood if I was doing that. I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, she knows what she’s doing.’”
Courtney Roker Laga indeed knows what’s she’s doing: She’s a recipe developer and culinary school graduate who has worked in two Michelin-starred restaurants, including Café Boulud in New York City.
The Rokers — the elder, who is often leading the cooking segment on the “Today” show, and the younger, who has made food her career — are naturals to collaborate, and father and daughter have done just that with “Al Roker’s Recipes to Live By: Easy, Memory-Making Family Dishes for Every Occasion.”
Each dish seems to open a window on the Roker clan, like the Crunchy Cornmeal-Fried White Fish dish inspired by Al’s father, the Sweet Potato Poon made by Al’s mother or the Italian Rice Cake by son-in-law Wes’ great-grandmother.
“When I was developing these recipes, I got kind of emotional a little bit,” says Courtney, who also acted as the book’s food stylist. “As soon as I ate them, it brought me back to my childhood.”
Very often, there were no recipes written down for the Roker clan dishes.
“Courtney has done such an amazing job,” says dad. “She’s almost like this food detective who reverse-engineered recipes and nailed these tastes.”
To add to her burden, Courtney was pregnant with Al’s first grandchild, Sky.
“In a period of nine months, she birthed the baby and a cookbook. I’m not sure which is harder,” Al jokes.
The pandemic prompted everyone’s favorite weatherman to fill his Instagram feed with home-cooked dishes and Courtney suggested this was the perfect time to make a new cookbook, one far different than the ones he wrote years ago, like “Al Roker’s Big Bad Book of Barbecue” and “Al Roker’s Hassle-Free Holiday Cookbook.”
“The cookbook has evolved,” he says, looking up and reading off a list of touchstone books on his bookshelf, like “The Joy of Cooking” and “The Silver Palate Cookbook,” both stingy with photos and cold on personal details.
“They didn’t necessarily tell a story, and they weren’t as visually interesting,” he says. “When I wrote my first one, there was a color insert of maybe 12 pages in the middle, and that was it. Now, there’s a picture for just about every recipe.”
Readers will learn that the Rokers prefer to add a little cream cheese in their scrambled eggs and have perfected “The McRoker” — a breakfast pancake sandwich with eggs, cheese and bacon. Courtney’s Shrimp Tikka Masala is a family favorite, and Al has updated his mother’s Chicken Cacciatore by adding sundried tomatoes and capers. There’s a Coffee-and-Spice-Rubbed Pork Chop using instant coffee that Courtney developed, not knowing that Al’s mom would make instant coffee when she was getting six kids out the door in the mornings.
“Courtney actually didn’t realize, but she was reaching back to her grandmother with this recipe,” says dad.
They honor celebrity chef Daniel Boulud by offering his recipe for short ribs, the most elaborate thing Al makes, requiring five hours of cook time. Al met Boulud while doing a segment years ago on what up-and-coming chefs were doing for Thanksgiving. They remained friends.
One much easier dish is Sweet Potato Poon (see recipe below), Al’s mother’s signature side. The origins of the name are lost to history; Al thinks they might be West Indian or perhaps Southern.
To 3 pounds of chopped sweet potato are added cinnamon, brown sugar, nutmeg, allspice, canned pineapple, plenty of butter, flour and baking powder. The finishing touch is lightly browned marshmallows.
Al and his siblings took great delight in torturing their mother by trying to distract her as the marshmallows burned. “You’d have to scrape it all. The smoke alarms going off — it’s the holidays,” Al says. His mom eventually got wise and bought multiple bags of marshmallows.
In one way, “Al Roker’s Recipes to Live By” is a look back at the Rokers’ extended family and, in another way, it’s a collection to be handed down.
“I got emotional also because I’m thinking of my daughter and passing this down to her,” Courtney says. “And I’m so grateful to be able to have done this with my dad. Not everyone can say that they can do a project like this with their parents.”
Try this recipe from “Al Roker’s Recipes to Live By”
When Al Roker thinks about his mother and food, this recipe comes to mind. The poon is a bit of a mystery. While it graced his table for every holiday meal and on special Sunday dinners, no one in the family knows where this side dish came from or why on earth it’s called a poon.
The recipe is included in a new cookbook written by Roker and his daughter Courtney, titled “Al Roker’s Recipes to Live By.”
Just as the poon was a tradition, so was torturing his mother while she was making it for Thanksgiving dinner. Once the kids could smell the divine combo of spices wafting from the kitchen, they knew it was almost time for her to add the marshmallows and shove it under the broiler. At which point they’d do anything they could to distract her.
One of them would be sent to enter the kitchen. “Mom, so where’s that, um, big blue bowl?” She’d start rummaging through a cabinet, and before long, black smoke would billow from the oven. Their giggles would have infuriated her if they weren’t blocked out by the sound of the fire alarm. But his mother finally figured out how to beat them at their own game. One day after they’d had their fun, she calmly pulled a backup poon out of the refrigerator.
SWEET POTATO POON
Serves: 8
Prep time: 20 minutes
Cook time: 45 minutes
Ingredients
3 pounds sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into 2-inch chunks
8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, cut into cubes
1 cup firmly packed dark brown sugar
¾ cup all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons baking powder 1½ teaspoons kosher salt
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg
¼ teaspoon ground allspice
¾ cups canned crushed pineapple, drained
1 (12-ounce) bag large marshmallows
Directions
Preheat the oven to 350°F. Grease a 9-by-13-inch baking dish with nonstick cooking spray.
Bring a large pot of water to a boil over high heat. Add the sweet potatoes and cook until tender, about 12 minutes. Drain and transfer to a large bowl. Add the butter and use a potato masher to mash the butter into the sweet potatoes. Stir in the brown sugar, flour, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice and stir until well combined. Fold in the crushed pineapple and transfer the mixture to the prepared baking dish.
Bake until the sweet potatoes are lightly browned on top, about 30 minutes. Remove from the oven and preheat the broiler.
Place the marshmallows in a single layer on top of the sweet potatoes. Broil for a minute or two to toast the top of the marshmallows — they brown fast, so don’t walk away! Let cool for at least 10 minutes before serving.
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Excerpted from the book “Al Roker’s Recipes to Live By: Easy, Memory-Making Family Dishes For Every Occasion by Al Roker and Courtney Roker Laga. Copyright (copyright) 2024 by Al Roker. Reprinted with permission of Legacy Lit, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved