Spatulatta Reboot

I won a James Beard Award for my passion, empowering kids and teaching them self-reliance them through cooking. Spatulata.com began with a few doodles on a piece of butcher paper.

It all started while I was making an educational film for National Geographic about the original food pyramid, the one with a large base of grains and a small triangle of fats at the top. The consultants thought that having a kid make pizza with veggies and cheese from scratch would cover all the levels.

So we cast a delightful 10-year-old who delivered his lines while laying out the dough and covering it with broccoli, mushrooms, sauce and a little pepperoni. When I called cut and the camera was off our star started jumping up and down and shouting, “Mom, Mom! Come in here quick! I made pizza, I made pizza!” and he turned to me and said with complete astonishment, “I didn’t know pizza didn’t come out of a box.”

It was in the dark ages when convenience food had nearly wiped out the traditional handing down of recipes. Consequently, a whole generation of children didn’t know how their food was made or where it was coming from. When asked where chicken came from you were likely to get the answer “from the store.”

While dog food manufacturers were starting to market products made from real meat, grain and vegetables to keep one’s pets healthy, their ads on “women’s TV” would be followed ironically by ads for sugar-laden breakfast foods such as Pop Tarts.

In 2004, I decided I had to do something besides shout at the television. I started what would eventually be the webcast Spatulatta.com.

My dad left when I was 11, my mom went back to work and I became a latchkey kid. Mom would allow me to use the oven for potpies and fish sticks, but I soon got very tired of that menu. I don’t remember what or if my mom even ate in those days. She’d whittled down to 98 pounds. She needed a surprise. I got a cookbook from the library and spent my allowance at the grocery store.

At the time, I didn’t know the difference between a clove of garlic and a head of garlic. So my mom came home that night to a pan of lasagna that kept the house reeking of garlic for days. She was very gracious and praised me on my initiative.

My grandmother was a great cook and her kitchen was my nursery school. She’d balance me with her left hip while stirring a huge pot of chicken soup with her right arm. I’d stand on a chair to get a close-up view of how she made bread, noodles, pirogies, and pastries. But my grandmother died when I was 7-- just about the time when I was actually getting my hands in the flour.

The kitchen, instead of being filled with sweet and savory aromas and the music of bubbling pots, was now dominated by the ticking of the clock as I waited for my TV dinner to defrost.

At the time children’s cookbooks revolved around sweets: cakes, cookies and candy. I wanted to create a cookbook that would allow children to make meals that the family would all eat together. None of this separate meal for kids and another meal for adults.

The recipes were written in easy to understand language and it didn’t take for granted that a child would know what “cream the butter” meant. Some recipes like Bunny Salad (half a pear with carrot-slice ears and a fluffy tail of cottage cheese) would be easy enough for a 4-year-old. And for older kids, there were soups, stews and casseroles.

Each week there was a different theme and I developed 5 recipes that together made a complete meal that kids could accomplish with a minimum of adult help. The recipes were demonstrated by my neighbor’s kids, the Gerasole sisters, Isabella (9 at the time) and Olivia (7). We were joined by other kids as guests who came on to make their family’s traditional recipes: Golden Cake for Chinese New Year, gumbo for Mardi Gras, latkes for Passover, spanakopita, Korean short ribs, Mexican Wedding Soup, Shish kabobs, paired with fancy juice and seltzer drinks, fruit centerpieces…350 recipes in all.

I was doing the shopping and the sous chef work then hauling the stuff down to my neighbor’s kitchen, shooting, directing, teaching the girls cooking techniques, cleaning up afterward, and then editing. But the biggest challenge was getting the video files small enough to be delivered pre-YouTube. We’re talking 7kb maximum.

There was no templates, no WordPress, no Wix, no SquareSpace. We were gonzo pioneers putting up the site every week. The original site was in HTML and then revamped to Joomla, then WordPress each time costing thousands of dollars. The web designers ate my lunch, dinner and breakfast.

But I absolutely loved what I was doing. Every time a mom said, “My son will never eat spinach,” I’d say “not yet.” By teaching the origami-like folds of Spanakopita, the result would be a child gobbling down the crispy spinach-filled pillows.

And marketing? Forget it. I didn’t have the tools! I didn’t have the money to buy mailing lists and there was no way to sign up members.

Despite all that, we won a James Beard award in 2007. Liv and Belle are the youngest James Beard Award winners in history. They were on the front page of the Chicago Tribune. They were on the Today Show, the Tonight Show, and Wake-Up with Whoopi. They taught Al Roker to make pesto. They were everywhere.

We were approached by Scholastic to do a cookbook. The Spatulatta Cookbook sold 70,000 copies. That’s an impossible number of copies for a cookbook.

Scholastic had great plans for marketing, lovely graphics and Point Of Purchase stands meant to sit next to cash registers in Barnes and Nobles across the US.

Meanwhile Scholastic had secured the rights to Harry Potter’s Sorcerer’s Stone and all the money they vowed to put into marketing Spatulatta went to build a Harry Potter bus to tour the country.

But I still wasn’t daunted. Spatulatta, like Disney movies, would be evergreen. Each year there was a new crop of four-year-olds with enough will and dexterity to make Bunny Salad.

Despite the all the publicity and the success of the cookbook, the problem was we couldn’t monetize Spatulatta. Any advertisers that would take a meeting immediately asked who was the audience--moms or kids? I’d say both. They’d brush us off with, “Well you can’t split demographics like that.” I would counter that Reynolds Tobacco had created Joe Camel to build a new generation of loyal customers, but the men in suits just wouldn’t bite.

And if I was able to sell a banner ad, parents howled. How dare I put up an ad for a summer cooking camp for kids? Spatulatta should be free. The internet should be free. It makes me laugh today.

We created new content for Spatulatta for a total of 7 years. Sixteen years later, the content is still available online. Spatulatta is a space were kids can learn life-skills and contribute to the wellbeing of their families. As we progressed through the years, we had more and more guests on the webcast who had embraced cooking as an art. One 10-year-old demonstrated how to make a standing rib roast and twice baked potatoes. Another pre-teen demonstrated how to forage daylily buds for stir-fry and gave us a lesson on what to plant to attract Monarch butterflies.

Winning Memberful’s competition, I enable me to reboot Spatulatta but this time as a membership organization. Memberful will give me the opportunity to send targeted recipes and messages to different segments of our audience: vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian, gluten-free, or dairy-free. We can produce content with experts directed at parents whose children are picky eaters or are even afraid to eat.

Those 11-year-olds from 2005 are now 27 and are beginning to have kids of their own. Those 70,000 parents who bought the cookbook might now be grandparents, with only one Spatulatta cookbook to share between several households of grandchildren.

Spatulatta.com visitors have suggested we create a separate Spatulatta for college students. Memberful’s interface would let us deliver that content without even having a separate website.

Cooking food and sharing it is one of the joys of being alive. Especially in the aftermath of the pandemic, these moments are especially sweet and meaningful.