Pop-Culturalist.com

Supernatural’s Misha Collins and his wife, Vicki, are inviting readers into their home with their new cookbook, The Adventurous Eaters Club. Inspired by their own relationships with food and mealtime with their kids, The Adventurous Eaters Club is their transformative story on inviting their seven-year-old and nine-year-old into the kitchen and encouraging them to be courageous food explorers. Misha and Vicki are donating 100% of their profits to charities, including the Edible Schoolyard Project, which aims to connect children to food, nature, and each other. Pop Culturalist had an in-depth conversation with Misha about The Adventurous Eaters Club and his connection to food.

PC: You have this really beautiful and interesting connection with food, which started during your childhood. Can you share the role it’s played in your life and now passing that down to your children?
Misha: I recently wrote a little essay about this for the New York Times. It was an interesting experiment for me, just mining that experience and walking down memory lane as I was writing that. My childhood was unconventional and fractured in many respects. I grew up very poor. There were times when we were homeless and traveling around, kind of nomadically. It wasn’t easy. There was a lot of difficulty in that, partly because I was always in a new school, and I didn’t have friends or a grounded sense of community.

I was living with a single mom and my little brother. But there was one thing that really served as an anchor in our family, and that was family meals. My mom made sure that we always sat down and had dinner together, and she was always making food from scratch. There was a time when we lived in an office space that had no kitchen or shower, but she managed to cook on a hot plate, and we would eat on a blanket on the floor. Or when we were living in tents in the woods, we would cook things over a campfire. Without really being conscious of this as a child, I was being taught that food was a way to knit families together. It was a conduit for expressing love. Even when we were having hard times, my mom was showing me and my little brother that she cared about us and that she’s going to take care of us by making us home-cooked meals.

Now I have two kids of my own: a daughter who’s seven and a son who’s nine. I’ve noticed in myself that when I feel like I want to reach out to them and show them that I care about them and I love them, almost reflexively I go to cooking them food. I’ve noticed that the more I want to express my love to them, the more elaborate a meal I want to make for them, and they pick up on that. In our family, the kitchen has become a place where we really commune.

We love cooking together, we love eating together, and we love inventing new foods. One of our favorite things to do is to wake up in the morning and say, “Let’s make something for breakfast that no one else has ever made for breakfast. Let’s invent a new breakfast.” And the challenge of that is a thrilling adventure for the kids and often a recipe for something truly atrocious to eat. But it’s still like we’ve developed this dynamic of playing in the kitchen, which I think is continuing to knit us together.

PC: You’ve transitioned those experiences into your new cookbook, The Adventurous Eaters Club. How did this come to fruition?
Misha: Well, the book for us had its inception in a bit of frustration actually. We were noticing that having young children, mealtimes were frankly stressful times. We were more and more feeding our kids foods of convenience—like, you know, snack packs and mac and cheese, things like that—and noticing that instead of sitting around the dinner table being something that brought the family together, it almost felt like it was driving us apart.

Then we had this strange experience coming home from the grocery store. I took my son to the store, and we came home and unpacked the grocery bags, and I noticed there were things in the bag that I had not put in there. He was two-years-old, and he had seen me placing things in the basket and placed his own items in the basket that went unnoticed by me as we checked out and then got home. I was like, “Wait, what? What is this?” I don’t even know how to cook Jerusalem artichokes. He decided that he would show me how to do it. He created this bizarre concoction involving Jerusalem artichokes and other ingredients that didn’t go together. But we immediately noticed that his creative involvement in that process made him curious about the food and proud of what we had made and wanted to try it.

Pretty soon, we noticed that giving him license to participate in the cooking and shopping process made him much more adventurous as an eater, and it started to break down that impulse to be a picky eater. He was all of a sudden gnashing on raw Brussels sprouts and eating things that he never even glanced at before. That started us on a path of exploring what it is that goes into picky eating. What are the assumptions that we’re buying into that are maybe not true? I think that there’s a lot of that in our culture. We’re getting a lot of messages that kids only eat beige, bland foods, and processed foods. That’s just the way kids are. But in truth, all around the world, kids eat what their parents eat.

We as a culture have started feeding our kids in a different way than any other culture at any other time in history has fed them. We don’t have to do that. This book is about that transformation in our own family and about how food went from being this wedge that was driving us apart to being something that really connected our family. I think we’re also finding ways to have our kids love eating healthy, whole foods, and we weren’t heading down that path before.

PC: While putting the book together, did anything surprise you about the process? Did you learn anything new about your own family?
Misha: That’s a good question. I guess one of the surprises in the process for me was letting go of control a bit with the kids and allowing them to play. I think that we all have this idea in the kitchen that we should be tidy, neat, and follow recipes, and kids are often excluded from that process. Somewhere along the line, maybe by accident, we let go of that control. We let the kids turn the kitchen into a playground with safety still in mind. [laughs] That meant a lot more cleanup and a lot more mess, but it also meant that they started seeing cooking and food as something that was fun and playful, and not scary.

That was surprising—letting go of that control and encouraging real exploration to happen. That was a net benefit for us. It also gave the kids a sense of pride like, “I’m doing this. It’s not just that you’re telling me what to do, it’s that I’ve created this thing.” Our youngest, who’s seven, Maison, is inventing new foods every day. Last night, she made a cookie cake. She took the traditional cookie batter, but instead of putting it into cookie shapes, she put it into a cake pan. It was like a chocolate chip hockey puck. It was a complete disaster from a culinary standpoint for me. [laughs] But she thought it was the greatest thing in the world and couldn’t wait to bring a sliver of it to school to show her friends. But they’ve also invented new salad dressings, some which are delicious and some which are not. But they take pride unilaterally in all of them.

PC: Something that I love about the cookbook is that you all really embrace the flops and the fumbles. Do you have a favorite flop or fumble that didn’t make it into the book?
Misha: There are a lot of flops and fumbles that didn’t make it into the book. [laughs] But I will say that the biggest flop or fumble that did make it into the book was explaining to my son what the traditional Thanksgiving dinner consisted of. He was only four at the time. I told him turkey, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, etc. It was Thanksgiving Eve and I asked him, “Would you like to make some Thanksgiving stuff?” He said, “Sure!” and I said, “Okay, so what should we make?” and he said, “I’d like to make pasta with jam sauce.” That set us down a road to make truly one of the most atrocious fiascos of all time.

I documented it and made a little video and put it on my YouTube. It’s called “Cooking Fast and Fresh with West: Thanksgiving Edition.” I mean, talk about a mess. It’s like there was some military fiasco happened in the kitchen. I run the world’s largest scavenger hunt, called GISH (Greatest International Scavenger Hunt), and people participate in a hundred countries. One year in the scavenger hunt, I put as an item that you had to get a professional food critic to eat and write a review of my son’s recipe. Amazingly, people all around the world got really highbrow food critics to write reviews of my son’s pasta jam sauce, like the Seattle Times and major cooking sites. They were absolutely hilarious. They were writing things like, “This is something that no one should eat ever,” “This really sucks. It doesn’t suck bad enough that I now hate all five-year-olds. But it sucks enough to say that five-year-olds should not be given carte blanche when it comes to designing recipes.” I have to say, I’ve never been more proud of my son.

PC: That’s hilarious! We’ve got one final question for you. Fans know you for your breakout role in Supernatural, which is ending this season. What will you remember the most from that experience?
Misha: Supernatural has been on the air for fifteen years. Over that decade and a half, a really tight-knit community of fans have coalesced. People have bonded over this show. The fandom has developed a culture of its own, a culture of being charitable, kind, and thoughtful. I am the most proud of being a part of that. I’m hoping that that has a legacy that extends beyond the end of the show and impart in homage to that fandom and that spirit. Even like this cookbook, we’re donating all of the profits to charities that help bring access to healthy foods to underserved kids and families. I’m not sure I would be doing that if it weren’t for this fandom showing me that thinking of others and being charitable can be an identity. I’m grateful for that experience and for that community. I hope that it somehow manages to live on past the end of the show.

To keep up with Misha, follow him on Twitter and Instagram. Pick up The Adventurous Eaters Club anywhere books are sold.