NY Launch Pod: Welcome to the New York Launch Pod, the New York Press Club, award-winning podcast highlighting the most interesting new startups, businesses, and openings in the New York City area. I’m your host and New York attorney Hal Coopersmith, and in this episode, we are talking all about food! But we aren’t talking about a new restaurant, we are talking about mistakes that you are making with food and New Yorkers are not cooking, or properly meal planning so our guest, Elia Wolberger, wants to change all that. Here’s Elia.
Elia Wolberger: So you can take your inventory of your fridge, your freezer, your pantry, even what spices you have. Because I find that when people start doing this very important step they’re like oh, I have seven garlic powders, I have so many cans of beans sitting in the back of my pantry, and especially with the pandemic everyone went crazy and started shopping right? So you just save it for an emergency but like you don’t use any of it, and then you keep on buying more food it’s like the never-ending, you know, shove it in the back of your fridge or pantry and just, you have so much stuff and it’s like, you don’t need to even go shopping. You can make a million different meals just from what you have.
NY Launch Pod: But before we go to the interview if you haven’t already remember to sign up for our monthly newsletter for unique content and insights at nylaunchpod.com and subscribe to the podcast on your favorite listening app. And we have a sponsor RezCue, New York State’s premier residential rental compliance platform. Have you rented out residential property in New York State? If so, odds are, you are not compliant with the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act enacted by New York State in 2019. And if you don’t follow the law, your tenant may be able to legally stay in the property beyond the length of the lease and many more consequences, RezCue is designed to solve all those problems and more go to rezcueme.com and enter in some basic information and rescue takes care of the rest. So you can relax and be a more profitable landlord. That’s rezcueme.com. And with that, let’s go to the interview.
NY Launch Pod: What is Feed Your Sister?
Elia Wolberger: Feed your sister is my website, and Instagram and my company where I share meal prep, tips and tricks and recipes, mostly healthy ones, and just share my life in New York City, my day to day behind the scene business of meal, prepping, and cheffing around New York City.
NY Launch Pod: So you have a business of meal prepping and cheffing around, as you say. What is your background? How did you get into this?
Elia Wolberger: That’s a good question. So I love to cook always, my family is from Israel so we always had good food around, and growing up we always had homemade dinners, and Shabbat dinner and all that holiday yummy food and I just grew a love for cooking. And as I grew up always was cooking like after college, cooking for my friends entertaining, and people started asking me for recipes. So back in 2010, I started a blog it’s still current actually I mean, I don’t add to it, but it is still on the web it’s a BlogSpot sister.blogspot.com.
Elia Wolberger: It’s funny to see it like retro but yeah, so I started that blog and I started a Facebook page back in the day, and I would just share my lunches that I would bring to school cause I’m also a teacher, and at the time I’d bring like little bento box lunch boxes and so it started from there. Then I got a new job as a teacher, a different job, and didn’t have time to do the blog anymore, I realized I didn’t like writing so that was kind of out the window, but I kept cooking and doing that stuff, and then when Instagram started I guess it was before 2016, but I came on in 2016, I started again with the same name Feed Your Sister, and then I had a website and I was like, you know what? I’ll put all my recipes on my website and started this Instagram. Then in 2017, I started cooking for families in New York City and doing my meal prep business, which is what I still do today and now it’s evolved into many other different things.
NY Launch Pod: So you learned cooking by doing, what was that process like? How did you kind of get into that? Because a lot of people may love to cook and now you’ve kind of made this more of a career, so how did that happen?
Elia Wolberger: So I also forgot to mention that I am a self-taught cook. So just learn by doing like you said, food network was a big part, Martha Stewart I loved, like Ina Garten, Giada, all those good people, So I’m self-taught and have no official training but in 2017, a family contacted me, I believe it was through a friend of a friend, their wife was sick with cancer and he was the one that was always cooking and he wanted to spend time with his wife and his son at the time, so they asked me if I would cook for them. And I said sure I had time, I made time to cook for them weekly, and then it started just from word of mouth, all the Facebook mom groups, a lot of my friends are moms so they would like tag me in things and then sort of just like grew on its own, honestly and I’ve been doing it for like five years, six years. That’s pretty awesome.
NY Launch Pod: And when you say like I’m a private cook for New York City families, people may think that that’s unattainable, unaffordable but then maybe you look at a takeout bill for a week or something like that. And it kind makes sense and you say, look, you know, all these $20, $30, $40, $50 dollars charges, times, whatever, add up. What’s kind of the benefit of having a chef in terms of or meal prep meal, cooking, from your perspective as opposed to ordering in take-out because a lot of new Yorkers will say look, we have all the restaurants and every type of food in the world that anyone could want in 20 or 30 minutes away.
Elia Wolberger: So there’s so many benefits to having meal prep whether you hire somebody or you do it yourself, number one you for sure save money because you’re not spending, fifty, maybe, even more, depending on what you’re ordering for two to four or five people at a time. So you’re definitely saving money, You are eating healthier foods, I like to say meal prep is the new fast food, so when you have a fridge full of meal, prep foods you know what you’re eating, you know what you’re putting into your food, you know what oils are getting used. They’re not like the saturated fats, like canola oil and all those other things that aren’t good for your body, and ultimately you do save money so plus you got to experience like cooking and learning to cook and feeding your family.
Elia Wolberger: Like, what’s good and healthy and organic if that’s important to you. So yeah, that is like the main benefit I would say of meal prep. But if you have good foods in your fridge when you’re home and you’re hungry and you’re coming home from work and you’re tired and you have a baby or you have little kids running around and you have to do bath time, dinner, time, homework, it’s too much to think like what’s for dinner, Oh my God I have to order I have to call up. I have to look on the seamless menu It’s like so many different steps, and then you have to wait 40 minutes to get your food, right? So when you have your fridge filled with food already you just okay, I’m going to have this soup, I’m going to have some sweet potato, I’m going to have steak and you warm it up, and in five minutes you have dinner and it’s easy.
NY Launch Pod: Well, when you say it like that, it seems so easy. Seems like everyone should be doing that, but what are New Yorkers doing wrong? How come people aren’t doing this already? And what are some common mistakes that you’re seeing among New Yorkers?
Elia Wolberger: So I developed this method called plan, prep, plate. And it’s, sort of simplifies your meal prep way basically. I find a lot of people are overwhelmed with the idea of meal prep, They don’t know where to start they go to the supermarket, they spend maybe $200 on food and then half of it goes to the garbage. I know because I had the same problem and I’m only one person, but if you’re a family you spend even more money and throw out even more food If you’re not using it to like eat right or cook it.
NY Launch Pod: Why does that happen?
Elia Wolberger: Because you come home from work and you’re like I don’t want to clean the lettuce. I don’t want to start chopping vegetables, I don’t want to defrost chicken. It’s too late. Oh, I’ll just order it. So you spend your $200 at whole foods and then you’re also spending a hundred dollars on dinner for your family every night. Right? So then you’re now spending money in two places and only eating half of it, and the other half is going to the trash, which is, we know is not good for our environment and wasteful because many people don’t even have food to eat at all.
NY Launch Pod: So that’s a planning mistake you’re saying.?
Elia Wolberger: Yeah. So it’s three phases plan, prep plate. The first phase is all about planning and that’s where people get tripped up. They’re overwhelmed, it’s too big of a task. They want to make like seven different recipes for the week, but you know, you just have to simplify. It’s like less is more simple, start simple, and then you could add in like spices and stuff like that to make it more flavorful. But the big thing is finding out like what you have in your house already. So that’s the first step of my method is getting an inventory, so I have like a meal planner that people can sign up for my email and they’ll get a free PDF It’s three pages and it has an inventory, It has a meal plan, chart. It has a to-do list and then a grocery list.
Elia Wolberger: So you can take your inventory of your fridge, your freezer, your pantry, even what spices you have. Because I find that when people start doing this very important step they’re like oh, I have seven garlic powders, I have so many cans of beans sitting in the back of my pantry, and especially with the pandemic everyone went crazy and started shopping right? So you just save it for an emergency but like you don’t use any of it, and then you keep on buying more food it’s like the never-ending, you know, shove it in the back of your fridge or pantry and just, you have so much stuff and it’s like, you don’t need to even go shopping. You can make a million different meals just from what you have.
NY Launch Pod: A lot of tuna fish can tuna fish from the pandemic. Any suggestions on that?
Elia Wolberger: I don’t eat that much tuna fish or barely at all, but throw it on a salad, make tuna fish, you can make tuna cakes I can send you a recipe, I don’t know I’m not a big fan of tuna fish. Sorry.
NY Launch Pod: We’ll cut a little bit of that out, so I agree with you that planning is very important for New Yorkers. Of course, if you’re living in New York there’s always the unexpected, there’s an unexpected night out, there’s an unexpected work emergency, you know, you’re staying late, you don’t, everything doesn’t necessarily go to plan. How can New Yorkers with with chaotic lives who do their best for planning and prepping, and plating, you know what can they do when the unexpected happens?
Elia Wolberger: So a few things, when you’re prepping and planning you want to of course, look at your social calendar. If it’s unexpected, then that’s a different situation, but you don’t want to over plan. It’s better to under plan and start simple, and then you could always buy more food. You could always, you know, boil some pasta or whatever, but if you have an unexpected work dinner or something that you need to attend to, and you had plans to eat at home, many of the stuff that you don’t even think you can freeze can be frozen. So like if you have cooked grains in the fridge that, you prepped right? Just plain rice, farrow, quinoa you can freeze it, right? You buy frozen brown rice at whole foods. You can just take your homemade brown rice and freeze it for the future or even vegetables that are going bad or that are left.
Elia Wolberger: And you’re going away for the weekend, like peppers and kale and spinach, even bad spinach, throw it in the freezer, You can throw it into a soup, you can repurpose it in other ways. What I’ll do is I’ll like a pepper, for instance, I’ll slice it up and then just put it in a bag, and put it in the freezer. And then I can throw that into a stir fry, I can throw it into the air fryer and just cook up for dinner quickly. So that’s what I’ve learned how to do, and that’s what I’m going to my plan is to try to help as many people as I can with my plan, prep, plate program, to learn how to do for themselves, because I think it is important for our environment and also for our pockets just to utilize what we have the best way. So does that answer your question?
NY Launch Pod: So become friends with your freezer and also just talking to you, it seems like you’re wanting to change people’s way of thinking about food a little bit more creatively, and just hearing you talk about it, give people ideas, about it. And as I hear you talk, I can sense okay, these are things I could be doing better myself. How can people, I guess, learn that technique, you know, obviously attend your course, but then kind of keep it in their minds a little bit and don’t fall back into bad habits.
Elia Wolberger: Okay. So, I’m now running workshops, I’m going to try to do like a few dates each month.
NY Launch Pod: Keep on going through the workshops as the first part of your answer.
Elia Wolberger: Yeah. So come to my plan, prep plate workshop and you know, it’s like an hour and we’ll go through all that stuff and then follow me on Instagram because I always I’m sharing tips and tricks, easy quick recipes. I go through my fridge and I’m like, I’ll take this, this, this, and then I whip up like a quick meal in literally 10 minutes and it’s delicious. Right. So following people that you admire what they’re doing, such as myself and what else can you do? You can take inventory and just start there, start cleaning out your pantry, and just looking to see what you have. My other thing is I play this game with myself all the time, you know, every so often when I feel like I have too much in my house, I’ll give myself like a $50 budget for literally only fresh fruits and vegetables and like maybe eggs, because I have everything else that I need basically in my pantry and my freezer.
Elia Wolberger: I have protein, I have frozen fruits and vegetables, I have canned vegetables, dried lentils and rice and stuff like that. So it’s called my feature sister pantry cleanup or kitchen cleanup I forget, I think it’s kitchen cleanup. I’ll just do that for like all a few weeks until like I have no more protein in my freezer. Cause my freezer is the size of the shoebox basically so I don’t have space to freeze so many things. So once it gets full I can’t literally buy anything. So I’ll start using what I have. Right? so that’s kind of what I do, I’ll just once a month like I’ll buy protein when it’s empty, and then I’ll refill.
NY Launch Pod: We kind of alluded to this, but, when you’re ordering in take-out food it’s expensive, there’s waste also but it probably seems more helpful to be cooking your meals or prepping your meals, having you assist with meals. How can people work within their own dietary restrictions you know, with what you’re doing?
Elia Wolberger: Yeah, so my program is very customizable to everyone’s needs basically like if you’re a kosher if you have allergies, the best thing about it is that and meal prep, in general, is that you’re making a lot of different proteins or not a lot, but you’re making a few proteins. You’re making a few different kinds of vegetables, You’re making maybe a breakfast option, You’re making a few grains or potatoes. And what happens is when you’re a family and you have picky eaters or you have allergies or you have gluten-free or vegan, everyone can basically pick and choose what they want. So everyone’s happy at the end of the night, right? Like you want chicken? I want shrimp, we can have that. It’s not a big deal because everything’s already prepped and ready to go. So, you know, moms and dads, aren’t running around being like, oh, I have to make you Mac and Cheese now because you’re not going to eat dinner. There’s other options that they can just choose and have responsibility to choose for themselves. What they want.
NY Launch Pod: Anything else you want to talk about?
Elia Wolberger: Just maybe sign up for my newsletter.
NY Launch Pod: Well, everyone being happy. That is a wonderful note to end things on Elia Wolberger founder of Feed Your Sister. Thank you for stepping onto the New York Launch Pod and sharing your time with us. How do people find out more about you and what you’re doing?
Elia Wolberger: So my website is www.feedyoursister.com. It’s a little bit under construction right now so not everything there is totally correct, but you can find out about me there and the best place to catch me is on Instagram @feedyoursister, all the link in my bio has a link to sign up for my newsletter, it has my link for my workshops and you can see my recipes from there and all my favorite products and all that good stuff and it’s quite fun too.
NY Launch Pod: And if you want to learn more about the New York Launch Pod you can visit us at nylaunchpod.com for transcripts of every episode including this one and follow us on social media @nylaunchpod, And if you’re a super-fan of the podcast, Elia, are you a super fan of the podcast? If you’re a super fan like Elia please leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It is greatly appreciated and does help people discover the show.
