Melissa McGaughey

Salad. I know, coming from a pastry chef, but…it’s the Californian in me. The best ingredients at their peak and a dressing that transforms them, and boom. You've got a plate that’s as delicious and nourishing as it is beautiful. Vegetables are the foundation, but there's so much more you can build on. A salad is really just a vehicle for fun things to happen in your mouth: like crunch, I like to add amaretti or sourdough bread crumbs.

Cortney Burns. She wrote Preserved, and her whole approach is the way I want to cook. She builds a deep pantry of really interesting base items: ferments, preserves, and other infused things, and then she uses those as the flavor feature to build a dish around, instead of treating them as garnish. The base ingredients carry the flavor, and then everything else builds on top.

Part of it would go into the book I’m writing. The whole point is to make home-cook-friendly science feel approachable, and the message we keep coming back to is: this stuff isn't as hard as it seems. The rest I'd put toward culinary education for kids through Alice Waters' Edible Schoolyard. Every kid should learn what good food can do. That's a whole future of cooks, growers, and curious eaters we're investing in.