Transcript of CS#77: Amy Heyd Saints at the Dinner Table

Transcript of Interview with Amy Heyd about Saints at the Dinner Table. This interview and others like it can be found at http://www.catholicspotlight.com

Listen Now to the audio version of the show.

Saints at the Dinner Table is available at The Catholic Company.
http://www.catholiccompany.com/catholic-books/1004161/Saints-at-Dinner-Table/

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Chris Cash: This is the Catholic Spotlight, the podcast where we talk about what’s new, cool, and exciting in the Catholic marketplace. I’m your host, Chris Cash, director of e-Commerce from catholiccompany.com, your source for all your Catholic needs.

Chris Cash: And today in the spotlight, we have Amy Heyd, author of Saints at the Dinner Table. Welcome, Amy!

Amy Heyd: Thank you very much.

Chris Cash: So Amy, what was that?

Amy Heyd: For inviting me, thanks for inviting me.

Chris Cash: Oh! Well, you’re very, very welcome. I’m glad to have you on the show. I think your book is one of the more interesting things to come across my desk lately and I’m very happy to have a chance to talk with you about it, it certainly a topic that’s a little bit different from the other things that we see on the Catholic marketplace right now. Talking about saints and food, two of my favorite topics. So Amy, what’s your background? What got you involved in first off, in the food industry?

Amy Heyd: In the food industry, I have entered lots of baking contests so I’m not a professional chef but I am a stay-at-home mom that’s making dinner, you know, breakfast, lunch, and dinner everyday of the week and then over and above that, I love to create recipes and I was a finalist in the Pillsbury Bakeoff and also, you know, one within several other contests and for baking and cooking.

Chris Cash: Now do you have other cooking books out there right now or is this it?

Amy Heyd: This is my only book, yes.

Chris Cash: And what…?

Amy Heyd: Or my first book, I should say.

Chris Cash: That’s the perfect way to put it, absolutely. And with the response you’re getting, I assume that there’s probably other ideas ruminating in there.

Amy Heyd: There are other ideas, yes.

Chris Cash: So what gave you the idea of tying your original recipe creation techniques and skills in with the saints?

Amy Heyd: What had actually happened, the short answer to that is that a good friend of mine is an editor at St. Anthony Messenger Press and my mother had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer and you know, it was a long period of time and over that, I would talk with my friends and tell them what we were going through and my friend at St. Anthony and Mary knew my spiritual side and kind of went through that process with me and she also knew that I loved to cook and she always enjoyed my food and she came to me and she said, “I think you need to write a book about saints and cooking.” Because I had told her some experiences I had with some saints and then when she said that it had never occurred to me to do that but I thought I would love to do that. And so then, I started to take some of the saints that I really loved and try to write a biography for people that they could really get to know the saints and then created recipes that you could make to prepare a meal that really connects with that saint in some way and celebrate that saint.

Chris Cash: Now, all the recipes in your book are original, correct?

Amy Heyd: They are, they’re all original, yes.

Chris Cash: Now, where do you get your inspiration for the types of food and recipes that you create? Are these things that you’ve had for a while or did you actually sit down and create every single one of these specifically for this book?

Amy Heyd: It varies. Some of the recipes were recipes that I had been making for my family for years and then just felt like, “Oh this would go really well with this saint.” This represents what that saint means to me but some of the recipes truly were an inspiration from the saints themselves. St. Hildegard, for example, was a nun in the 1100s and she was an amazing woman who accomplished many things but one of the things was she was an herbalist and wrote books about that and she had beliefs about certain foods. And certain foods, she said, brought joy like almonds and fennel and it’s interesting because a lot of those foods that she talks about that bring joy are either a super food, what we would list as a super food today, or just on the list of healthy foods that any dietician or nutritionist would tell you to eat. But anyway, I was inspired by some of those food items so for her, one of the items is a St. Hildegard salad that has some Granny Smith apples and some fennel and spring greens and toasted almonds and goat cheese and a citrus vinaigrette and it’s a healthful meal that brings joy. So she really inspired me for that recipe and some of the other saints for some of the other recipes as well.

Chris Cash: Now, who do you test your recipes out on?

Amy Heyd: It starts with my family. So they got to try the first round on all the recipes and some they loved right off the bat and there were others that…and I knew, like sort of St. Hildegard, that recipe I was able to get right on the first try. I started a little bit more with some of the recipes for St. Elizabeth of Hungary. I remember I did prepare like this Hungarian lasagna-type deal that really didn’t turn out well. And then, I ended up for her, she’s the patron saint of baking because she always gave the bread to the poor and a lot of times, she’s pictured with a loaf of bread so for her, there’s a bierock which is a meat-filled bread and it’s more of a German or Hungarian dish and it also represents the bread making plus this substantial meat filling represents all the substantial giving that she did for people.

Chris Cash: So, now all of the saints that you used, did they have some kind of connection to food already or are you attributing some of the connections just from their heritage and what they would have been eating themselves?

Amy Heyd: Because I love to cook, I really looked at saints who had a connection with food. That’s what I started with. St. Joseph is a saint that I’ve always loved and so, he’s the saint that first I already knew about had a wonderful connection with food so I included him in the book just because I loved St. Joseph but when I had first started looking into things, I thought, well let me try to explore some saints that have some connection with food. And there are some saints that have a connection with food that I really didn’t find a connection with like St. Christine the Astonishing. She, oh gosh, I think she was the third or fourth century, but she had had a grand mal seizure of some sort and they thought she was dead. So they had hurried up and they were having a funeral mass and during the middle of the mass, she opened the coffin and flew up to the ceiling and everybody in the church ran out except for the priest and her sister who called her down and she spent the rest of her life hiding in ovens and places some people because I guess she couldn’t stand the smell of their breath and all those things, the smells that people had. So I didn’t really find a connection with her. I did not include her in the book but even though she had hid in ovens and stayed in kitchens but I did include saints like St. Josephine Bakhita who worked, ended up later in her life working in the kitchen and serving the nuns, the Canossian sisters in Italy and so I included her in the book. And then St. Elizabeth because she’s the patron saint of baking. I included her in the book. But it had to be a saint that had some connection. It started out with the connection with food but it really, the saints that I included in the book were saints that had I thought interesting lessons to share. Because for me, one of the things that I wanted to do was to sit at the dinner table with my family over a meal and be able to talk with each other about tell the life of a saint and to be able to share my faith with my children and then also talk about the lessons that that saint has. So I told you I write a biography about the saint. Well after their biography, I have a reflection about the saint that just kind of talks about the lessons that that saint has to share and brings it up to date and shows why that lesson even though the saint was living in the first century, why that lesson is still important today.

Chris Cash: But you’d consider St. Lawrence, he’s always been a big food person to me just because he’s known for being fried…

Amy Heyd: He’s the patron saint of broiled food.

Chris Cash: Yeah, exactly, he was fried to death and at some point; he’s reported to have said to his executioner, “Flip me over. I’m done on this side.” So…

Amy Heyd: I looked him up. But that’s the only story I could find about him. That’s the only story that there was to share and so I didn’t include him in the book.

Chris Cash: I understand, well, we’re going to take a short break here to hear from our sponsor but we’ll be back in a few minutes to hear more from Amy Heyd about Saints at the Dinner Table. This is the Catholic Spotlight.

Chris Cash: And we’re back on the Catholic Spotlight with Amy Heyd talking about Saints at the Dinner Table. You have approximately 12, is it 12 saints in the book?

Amy Heyd: Twelve saints, yes.

Chris Cash: Were there others that you were considering putting in and didn’t quite make it? Or how did you determine which 12 you really wanted to go with?

Amy Heyd: I tried to select saints that had different lessons to share so there’s many other saints out there that I really love but I wanted to show different lessons. You know, there’s that book that last lecture ounce, I don’t know if you’ve heard of it but my husband often says, “This is like your last lecture/” Where to my kids, where it just…if my kids were to…if I were to die today and this is all I had left to give to my kids then it would show in there, these are the things that I think are really important in my life so each saint has a different lesson that I feel it’s important for us to know; lesson of forgiveness or lesson of giving to the poor, the lesson of caring for others, the lesson of seeing Jesus in others. So that is kind of how I got to these 12 different things that I chose.

Chris Cash: And did you also try to come up with saints that would have varied recipes that would go with them, I would assume?

Amy Heyd: As I did the recipes, I took that into consideration but that kind of just fell into place. Because the recipes are varied. They’re all easy to make but that kind of fell into place so that I wasn’t consistently…it wasn’t like it was spaghetti, spaghetti, spaghetti.

Chris Cash: And I’m not going to be having to go out and go to a specialty food store to find the ingredients for these?

Amy Heyd: No, you can get everything at your grocery store.

Chris Cash: Which of the saints had the recipe that you’ve gotten the best feedback on, so far?

Amy Heyd: Everybody loves the meatball tortellini soup from St. Margaret’s chapter and I think it’s just…we had a…one of the bookstores here prepared a meal and they prepared a meal from the book but they prepared a couple of different things and they prepared the Chicken Saltimbocca from St. Claire’s chapter and some Meatball Tortellini soup from the chapter on St. Margaret and Mary’s Laid Back Greens from the chapter on St. Martha and an almond torte from the chapter on St. Claire and actually, everybody loved all those things but they all went home and prepared the Meatball Tortellini soup and eventually about six or seven people said they prepared the Chicken Saltimbocca again. That’s a nice one, you can double the recipe easily and it’s easy to make if you’re having a big dinner party.

Chris Cash: And do you have a personal favorite for yourself?

Amy Heyd: You know, it depends on what mood I’m in but for St. Didacus, he was a vegetarian and so for Lent, on Fridays and Lent, I really love making his meal which kind of a fiery Spanish eggplant and that’s fried and then with it is a fettuccine with some roasted tomato salsa and it’s again easy to make and it’s really flavorful. I kind of feel like I’m cheating for Lent when I eat it.

Chris Cash: And have you heard of any reports of Catholic dinner clubs getting together and maybe instead of doing a bible study, doing a saint’s dinner study with your book?

Amy Heyd: The book just came out, oh gosh, the end of August and so it’s new but we had, just the other day, and that was the Catholic Women’s Group here in Cincinnati and that’s what we did. We talked about…they ate the meal for St. Isidore the Farmer then I talked about his wife and then they’ve gotten to small groups discussed the questions. I have questions in the book, some discussion questions that you can start with. You can ask your own questions but I have some starter questions for you. So they did that and it was a really enjoyable night.

Chris Cash: And are you getting any other feedback from people as they try things out?

Amy Heyd: What’s been nice for me is…it’s been nice to hear all the people who have come up to me and told me that they really enjoy the stories. I had tried out the food. As I’ve told you, I tried it out on my family and I’ve got a couple of really picky eaters and when I got the thumbs up from them, I said, “Okay, I think this is good.” And then I made the food for a lot of other people and so enough people have tried the food that I felt pretty comfortable with that but I’m not a writer by trade and it was real important for me to write this. It was difficult for me but I really wanted to write stories that really showed the saints, how they lived their lives, and who they were so you got a good feeling for them. So you kind of know who you’re praying to. I always feel like St. Mary is an easy person to pray to because you know her story, you know who she is. You have that connection with her and I want to present these saints in a way that you could feel that way about some other things. And it’s been nice because I’ve gotten a lot of feedback from people saying how much they appreciate the stories too.

Chris Cash: So do you actually have another project at the works at this point or are you waiting to see what the overall response is?

Amy Heyd: Well, right now, I’m actually just working on a website for the book and what I’d like to do is have at least one a month but have some recipes for some saints. So I’m working on some recipes for some saints to put on that website as well. So that’s what I’m working on right now.

Chris Cash: And what is your website?

Amy Heyd: The website will be amyheyd.com. It’s A-M-Y-H-E-Y-D dot com but it’s not up yet.

Chris Cash: Approximate date when you think it might be available for those with…

Amy Heyd: I bet it’s going to be another month before it’ll be available so probably sometime before Christmas.

Chris Cash: Okay, so this show is posting in late October so if you’re listening anytime in December of ’08 or beyond, you can probably find that website hopefully out there and you find some excellent resources, I would imagine. We’re running out of time here, Amy. Was there anything else you want to share with our listeners before we finish up?

Amy Heyd: Oh gosh, no but I hope as they get the book, they enjoy it and if on the website we are going to put a way that you can contact me and send me messages and I’d love to hear the feedback or if there’s different saints that you really like, kind of you know of that has a connection with food or just has a really good lesson to share, I would love to hear that as well.

Chris Cash: And if you get enough postings, are you going to take all that feedback and put it into book 2?

Amy Heyd: Yeah, that may be what happens.

Chris Cash: Good way to go about it, I think, that’s right.

Amy Heyd: Well, and it really was a wonderful spiritual journey for me to put the book together to really delve into the lives of the saints and meditate and really think about those saints did and what I should be doing. So it’s a good experience writing it as well.

Chris Cash: Well thank you, Amy. It has been a real pleasure to have you on the show and all you out there who are looking for something a little different especially with Christmas coming up here, this is an excellent gift book even for your maybe not quite so Catholic friends where you can have something that would be a real connecting point to people beyond just Catholic doctrine. Everybody loves to eat, just about at least. So this is a great gift for those out there who want to share their faith but not in such a hardcore way that might turn other people off, right Amy?

Amy Heyd: Exactly. That’s why I love it. I have a number of friends who aren’t Catholic who bought the book and have come up to me and said they bought it for the recipes because they’ve had my food but they too said, “I really like the stories.” And I said, “Good. I’m glad you’re reading that.” So, yeah, I would agree with what you just said.

Chris Cash: Well, thank you, Amy. Saints at the Dinner Table, Amy Heyd. You won’t regret picking up a copy of that and for all of you listeners out there who are tuning in for the first time, please go over to catholicspotlight.com, subscribe to our feeds so you’ll be updated with future shows as they come out. Also remember, it’s going to be the beginning of the month here soon and please go on over to Podcast Alley and vote for us as well as leave us reviews on iTunes. It helps to get the word out about the show and bring more people in so that we can have a bigger audience and better shows in the future. Thank you very much, Amy! It was a real pleasure to talk to you and I’m looking forward to trying some of your recipes myself!

Amy Heyd: Thank you, Chris. Thanks for inviting me.

Chris Cash: Okay, God bless.

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Transcript of Interview with Amy Heyd about Saints at the Dinner Table. This interview and others like it can be found at http://www.catholicspotlight.com

Listen Now to the audio version of the show.

Saints at the Dinner Table is available at The Catholic Company.
http://www.catholiccompany.com/catholic-books/1004161/Saints-at-Dinner-Table/