The Good Word is a new weekly Meal Ticket feature where we ask Philadelphia food people questions. We’re going to start by highlighting the city’s many excellent food writers and bloggers, with eventual plans to extend beyond the scribeosphere. The questions will be different every week unless we come across a really sweet one we want to reuse. Want to nominate a future Good Word candidate (yes, you can nominate yourself), or submit ideas for questions? E-mail drew.lazor@citypaper.net.

In this installment of The Good Word, we’re chatting with Amy Strauss of Apples and Cheese, Please, who describes herself as a “Philadelphia suburb-based food fiend who lives to chomp up and down the East Coast.” The craft brew fanatic and accomplished baker/home cook has also contributed to CP’s food section — in fact, the name of her blog originates with this 2007 Top 5 piece.

You grew up Mennonite — strong cooking traditions there. What’s your first food memory?

If ever there was a baker’s hall of fame, my grandmother, Naomi Strauss, would be the star. As a Mennonite and a Pennsylvania Dutchwoman (same as myself), she crafted killer traditional sweet treats that were mixed, mashed and pinched to perfection, and I am forever grateful to her for passing on to me all that she could. With a childhood flooded with rounds of funny, shoo-fly and apeas cakes, mountains of fluffy Dutch doughnuts and delectable sweet buns and rolls, I never questioned whether I should skip a night’s dessert.

Although it’s still surprising that I possess a petite frame, a typical Sunday afternoon scene from my youth went like this. Multiple folding tables packed, corner-to-corner, with a smorgasbord of covered dishes with lines of Mennonites, including myself, surrounding the perimeter, piling our plates with a ton of ever-changing tastes: simple sausage sandwiches, spicy chilis, ham and sweet potato casseroles, cold salads, homemade breads — and, of course, calorie-killing desserts.

Going off the name of your blog — you believe that “two separate tastes can together define why life’s worth living.” What are two disparate ingredients that you’ve combined in your cooking with good results?

I gush over the idea of combining two tasty things that wouldn’t normally be considered able to accent one another. Honestly, one curious baking adventure proved one thing true — everything’s better with a bit of bacon. I concocted a maple butter vanilla muffin blended with a tad of bacon fat and meaty crumbles, and smothered it with a maple-sugar buttercream and candied strips. The mini-cakes screamed for attention from breakfast hounds, but also helped me realize that experimentation is one of the better things to come to my baking/cooking.

More recently, I’ve been mixing and matching frozen yogurt homemade recipes, because really, anything that milk can be soaked into can easily be made into a creamy iced treat. As a fan of WD-50 and Wylie Dufresne’s everything bagel ice cream, I believe there’s an endless world of ice cream concoctions. Currently, I’m trying to perfect sweet corn cream ice with agave nectar, and quite possibly, I am thinking of soaking a Pennsylvania Dutch Fastnacht in milk for a truly traditional treat.

You were vegetarian for eight years before hopping back on the meat train last year. What precipitated this change? Ever feel guilty about it?

At age 15, I exchanged steak knives for salad forks, and with that, I delved deep into animal rights, activism and an awareness of the food I was eating. It wasn’t that of a hard thing to do, because honestly, I wasn’t raised on the best meats (sorry mom and dad, but well-done burgers and steaks don’t satisfy), and becoming actually interested in what I was then eating made me generally more interested in food, its sourcing and its ability to be amazing while still being healthy.

Over time, however, I became the ultimate poster child for what not to do as a vegetarian. I ate embarrassingly poorly. Eventually I began to incorporate poultry and seafood into my more-recent diet, until I embraced carnivorism wholly. That probably sounds awful to serious vegetarians, but each individual independently decides what’s best to stuff their jaws with, and now, a balance between the two diets works wonders for me, as I am at my healthiest.

Any recent restaurant visits that you entered with low or no expectations, only to be blown away by the quality of the food/experience?

A highly received restaurant out here in the suburbs is The Epicurean in Phoenixville. In repeated conversations, people would tell me about its spiffy fusion/Americana repertoire. But I don’t trust everyone else’s taste buds and if you say something is “to die for,” you may make me curious, but you won’t convince me you are right. Obviously, I eventually dined there, and let’s just say their tasteless tapas menu, sketched out by the restaurant’s entire staff, should just be glanced over, and not grubbed on if you want to experience the true flavors the eatery is capable of producing. But when revisiting on an unenthusiastic return trip, their certified and exceptionally juicy Angus beef patty, layered with homemade guacamole, roasted red peppers and crumbled goat cheese, is by far one of the better burgers I’ve chowed down upon on since going for a pro-beef lifestyle.

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