Gaines follows a familiar philosophy
HGTV star treats kitchen same way she does design
Joanna Gaines has written her first cookbook, The Magnolia Table: A Collection of Recipes for Gathering (William Morrow). In it, she shares recipes served at both her family table and the Gaines’ new restaurant, Magnolia Table in Waco, Texas. The entrepreneur, designer and HGTV star took time to answer a few questions about family, failure (the kitchen kind) and food.
Question: You and your husband, Chip, have very busy lives. In addition to being parents to four (with a fifth on the way), you have a magazine, the shops in Waco, home design lines, design shows and books. How do you find time to cook for your family?
Joanna Gaines: Cooking has really become something that grounds me when life feels hectic. On a busy day, I find myself looking forward to getting home and pulling out my pots and pans to whip something up for my family. It’s not always possible to create something homemade every night, but when I can, I know there is value to putting in the effort if it means that we’ll all gather around our table together to share in a slow meal.
Q: How important is your food pantry? What are the staples you can’t live without?
Gaines: I like to have ingredients to make pancakes from scratch, but I always have a boxed version, too, for those days when there’s just not enough time for anything else. I keep store-bought refrigerated dough and boxed broth on hand because those are two items I find myself reaching for weekly.
Q: You write that your cooking philosophy is similar to your design philosophy — to make a recipe your own. Is there a recipe you adapted that is now a family favorite?
Gaines: The chocolate chip cookie recipe in the cookbook was developed after years of experi-
menting with a few different classic recipes. I spent many years trying to bake the perfect batch of chocolate chip cookies — the kind that are thick and beautiful and melt in your mouth, but I always seemed to end up with batches that were flat and didn’t have enough flavor. Then one day I tried using a little more brown sugar and a little less butter — which went against my typical philosophy that butter makes just about everything taste better. But the texture and flavor of that batch hit the jackpot.
Q: You write about how Chip taught you to embrace failure. Can you share a failure in the kitchen? And what did you learn from it?
Gaines: In the book, I write about Chip and my first dinner in our first home as a married couple. Chip’s sister had gifted me a cookbook full of Gaines family recipes as a wedding gift, but at the time, I was so intimidated by the unfamiliarity of the ingredients listed for each recipe, and the last thing I wanted to do was mess up one of his favorite meals, so I decided to play it safe and whip up my mom’s spaghetti. Two bites in, and he sat there in silence. I asked him what he thought, and he told me that it didn’t taste like his mom’s spaghetti — and that mine wasn’t necessarily bad, but it just wasn’t what he was used to. I was upset, of course, but it wasn’t long before I realized what was really going on that night. Food is personal. It’s emotional, and it has a way of really connecting us to certain people or moments in time, and we were both just learning how to settle into a new, unfamiliar season of life together.
Q: Can you share a favorite food memory from your childhood?
Gaines: When I was around 12, my grandfather invited me to learn how to bake his famous Syrian doughnuts. We spent the day mixing dough and shaping donuts, and my grandfather told me all kinds of stories I had never heard before. At the end of the day, he ended up typing out the recipe for me. It was a day I will never forget, and I’m so thankful to have that special recipe to share with my kids.