Cooking 101

Though Pamela Salzman is a famed cooking instructor with two cookbooks under her belt, this forever foodie never intended to have a career that revolved around food.

Instead of focusing on recipes, she assumed she’d earn a paycheck focusing on numbers. She was an economics major at the University of Pennsylvania and graduated from UCLA’s Anderson Graduate School of Management with every intention to jump into the corporate world. But, as many of us know, life doesn’t always go as planned. And sometimes, a new path is created for us organically — one of those fall-in-your-lap kind of moments.

That’s exactly what happened to Salzman.

“Cooking was a hobby. I was the one roommate who took over the most space in the fridge, and I was always cooking for my roommates and my boyfriend,” says Salzman, who lives in Manhattan Beach, California with her then-boyfriend, now husband, Daniel. “It never occurred to me to do something in food.”

Yet today, she is a sought-after certified holistic health counselor, a cooking instructor who focuses on nutrition and her work has been featured on the Food Network, “Today” and “Rachael Ray.” 

And let’s not forget about her two cookbooks, “Kitchen Matters” and “Quicker Than Quick.”

So how did Salzman’s career go from finance to food? She credits it to a garden, a large family and being the daughter of a father who hated fast food.

“He thought we could do better at home, and it could be fresher,” she says. 

It turned out, he was right.

Honing Her Craft

Salzman, the second oldest of 29 grandchildren, grew up in Long Island, NY with a father who was born and raised on a farm in Italy. He was one of eight children, knew how to live off the land and taught Salzman the importance of planting organic vegetables and fruits as she helped him tend to their family garden.

“I am still constantly amazed that you can plant a seed in the ground and it turns into a tree that bears fruit or vegetables that are amazing and delicious,” she says. “That never ceases to amaze me.”

Since she was born into an Italian family, she typically ate Italian food: hearty servings of potato and bean soup, baked ziti, chicken and sausage with peppers and onions, all accompanied by vibrant green salads (using lettuce from the garden in the summer and fall.) Meals at home were so delicious Salzman wanted to learn how to make them, as well. She bought her first cookbook in the second grade and, as she grew older, she read more of them. At 12, Salzman felt confident enough to ask her mother if she could make dinner. Her mother, who was busy working and raising three children, eagerly said yes.

She spent her teenage years molding her passion for cooking and it continued to be her favorite pastime even after she graduated college and began working in the corporate world. 

But after Salzman had her second child, she found herself at home with two children under the age of 2 and wasn’t motivated to return to her desk job. She was, however, driven to join a local cooking group with friends, where a chef would teach a class in one of their homes. Back then, when she was drowning in diapers and toddler tantrums, that one night was the highlight of every month. She grew to realize that her love for food didn’t have to be just a hobby. It could be a business, as well.

Helping Families Eat Better

A friend of Salzman’s suggested that she teach a cooking class herself.

“‘We all want to cook the way you cook,’” she told Salzman, who was already spending free time helping her friends spruce up their kitchen pantries and showing them the best items to buy at farmers markets.

Salzman laughed it off, but her friend’s comment lingered so she spoke to her husband about it. He encouraged her to teach just one class to see if she liked it.

She gathered five of her favorite recipes and prepared to teach. As a young mother, her goal was to introduce meals that were family friendly as well as nutritious, because those were the types of recipes she yearned for as well. 

“That’s how it started,” says Salzman, whose children are now ages 18, 23 and 25. “Ironically for someone who went to business school, I had no plan.”

Salzman started teaching one class a month, but that quickly changed to once a week and then eventually four times a week. Her cooking classes filled up as quickly as she created them, mostly with stay-at-home moms.

“After I taught the first class, I was very surprised how meaningful and impactful it was,” she says. “I was helping empower women to gain more confidence into feeding families healthy foods and not to overthink it.”

She talks with pride about the feedback she’s received over the years, including from women grateful to Salzman for giving them the confidence they needed to cook their first holiday meal. That feedback, she said, gives her fuel to continue helping women as much as she can. 

Salzman, who turns 52 this month, also credits her passion for food to the nonprofit GrowingGreat, an organization whose mission is to teach children healthy eating habits through science and gardening. She joined the team in 2008 — around the same time she started teaching cooking classes — and began to visit public schools to talk about nutrition. When she learned that many people knew very little about healthy cooking, Salzman made it her mission to educate others about the importance of eating whole, real foods.

While her own diet is mostly plant-based, she eats fish and dairy every now and then. If you look inside her refrigerator, it’s usually stocked with plant-based milk, tortillas, fruit and veggies. 

“My dad put something in my head about pesticides and growing things organically,” she said. “Just the fact that it’s better for you.”

Her father’s mindset and the time she spent reading about nutrition resulted in a phrase she often repeats to her clients: “Making healthy food taste delicious is not as hard as you think.”

An Expression of Love

Salzman proves that statement to be true in her latest cookbook, “Quicker Than Quick,” where she tackles recipes that can be made in 30 minutes or less. The idea came from her clients, who usually request fast, healthy dinner recipes. 

With so many families pressed for time, many resort to grabbing fast food for dinner, filling their bodies with processed, refined foods. When they do attempt a recipe, Salzman says, they get overwhelmed by a long list of ingredients and a massive amount of steps.

In Salzman’s cookbooks and online, one can easily learn how to prepare dishes like fish tacos, zucchini fries, eggplant meatballs and roasted ratatouille. She regularly posts quick cooking videos on her Instagram account, where she has 80,000 followers.

Her website — pamelasalzman.com — is packed with information ranging from recipes to cooking tutorials to tips on how to plan ahead for dinners. 

Salzman teaches online cooking classes and also hosts themed-boot camp classes, where she teaches a one-hour cooking class weekly for four weeks through Zoom. She is currently creating her seventh boot camp course and plans to continue it as long as she can.

Though Salzman is passionate about food, she also stresses the importance of entertaining. She’s someone whose own friends are often intimidated to have her over for a meal because she is, after all, a successful cooking instructor. Salzman tells them she isn’t even that good of a cook, though it’s likely her friends beg to differ.

Whether it’s a cup of tea, a sandwich or a three-course dinner, she explains one should never be scared to host someone they care about.

It doesn’t have to be fancy, she says. Entertaining guests isn’t even about the food, it’s really about spending time with people who make you happy, she explains. What better way to do that then around a kitchen table?

“It is an expression of love,” Salzman says of entertaining. “It is one of the most generous, most lovely things that you can do for someone.