FOODIE SOUL MATES
Seven years ago, Ferguson was in full swing with Modern Family when he attended a dinner at a pop-up restaurant alone—a little half-heartedly, he admits. Tanous, 39, then a new mom taking a break from baby duty, was also there solo and found an empty seat next to Ferguson. As the two chatted, they discovered a mutual passion for great food, good cocktails and cooking.
“It was like love at first sight, an instant connection,” she says.
Ferguson wasn’t necessarily looking for a new pal, but Tanous was hard to resist. “I do think there’s a point in your life when you become a certain age and you just stop taking on new friends because it’s too much work,” he says. “Like, ‘I have my six or eight people that I really love.’ Julie snuck in like Indiana Jones, rolling herself into a little ball, getting in before the gate closed on no more friends.”
“I made the cut!” she says with a laugh.
The pair soon started cooking together. Ferguson was eager to learn from Tanous, a graduate of New York’s prestigious Institute of Culinary Education, an alum of Saveur magazine’s test kitchen and a seasoned recipe developer. Much as he loved cooking, he still struggled in the kitchen. “I was asking Julie, ‘How do we really dice an onion like the way they taught you in school?’ I was learning a lot of really great basics that I still use to this day. I don’t know that Julie learned anything from me.”
“That’s not true,” says Tanous. “I learned a lot. I learned that there is someone just as indecisive as me. We were making a cocktail once, and I was like, ‘Should we add another ice cube?’ It was a five-minute conversation—‘another ice cube?’ ”
“‘No . . . let’s leave it as is,’ ” Ferguson recalls.
Like many aspiring cookbook authors, they launched a blog (julieandjessecook.com). And like any blog, it was a work in progress as they fine-tuned what they thought tasted good and shared their food on social media. He’s all about the Southwestern fare he grew up with in Albuquerque, N.M., while she’s rooted in the Southern cooking of her native Cullman, Ala. “I’d never met anyone that had this connection to New Mexico,” says Tanous. “A lot of these recipes organically came together because our Southern and Southwestern
ingredients just go together so well.”
They began by updating favorite childhood dishes, poring over their moms’ recipe cards—“Everything was on recipe cards back then,” Ferguson says—and quickly developed regional mashups that lend special flare to recipes in the book: Her Southern-style spoonbread is spiced up with Southwestern chile peppers; he riffed on the concept of old-school chicken pot pie, but with Hatch green chiles for heat and tortillas in place of pastry dough.
A DELICIOUS DUO
Their different styles in the kitchen also complement each other. She’s a confident, wildly creative improviser. “I definitely am more of a rule follower,” says Ferguson. “But when you’re developing recipes, you have to break rules and tread new ground. I look forward to the day when I can just sort of wing it and not freak out if I forget something.”
She admires his tireless work ethic, even as they were testing recipes last spring in the midst of the pandemic (convening by FaceTime before they deemed it safe to cook together again) and into the summer, when Beckett arrived. “Jesse pays attention to detail,” says Tanous. “Bless his heart, there were some recipes, both of us had fails, and he just pushed through, even when his baby was born.” Her veteran parenting advice to the new dad that first week: “Stop cooking.”
Before connecting with Ferguson, Tanous was an avowed loner in the kitchen. “Jesse’s probably the only person I want to cook with in the kitchen all day,” she says. “When we have a bad day, we make it funny. And we just have a cocktail.”
We’ll drink to that!