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.
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"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.
Food and cooking have always been a part of the Roker family's life. One story about Courtney is that at age 6 she would go into the garden and pick edible flowers to decorate dinner plates.
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, 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.”