Kitchen Addiction

Inside the lair of The Chubby Vegetarian.

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Young coconut ceviche. Spaghetti squash ribs. Vegan chipotle sweet potato burger. Bagna cauda smashed chickpea dip. Pastrami-cured beets. Cauliflower steak with confit mushroom pilaf, herbed tomatoes, cheddar-parsley butter, and fried capers. Figs in a blanket.

Justin and Amy began blogging in 2008 under the name The Chubby Vegetarian. “We always liked food and cooking,” says Amy. “We always had that in common. I never imagined this is what we would be focusing on for the last ten years now, but it makes sense.”

They were high school sweethearts who got married while Justin was the drummer for country punks Half-Acre Gun Room. “It’s hard being in a touring band,” he says, “especially when you’re newly married and want to be home. So I quit, came home, and still played a little music. Then, one day, Amy said, ‘You know what, let’s do a project together.’ I was like, ‘A music project?’”

Justin became a vegetarian at age 12, and Amy wanted to document some of his kitchen creativity. “We came up with the name and we just put up a photo of our dinner, which was sopes, the Mexican dish, a kind of thick corn tortilla topped with beans,” she says.

The internet gods were smiling that night, and they were soon inundated with requests for the recipe. Since then, they have written three books on vegetarian cooking: The Chubby Vegetarian: 100 Inspired Recipes for the Modern Table, The Southern Vegetarian Cookbook: 100 Down-Home Recipes for the Modern Table, and The Low-Carb Vegetarian.

Both have a history with Memphis magazine. Justin is a photographer who specializes in food, but has also done extensive advertising and editorial photography. Amy worked here as an intern while a student at Rhodes College, and has since written about food in these pages. Unlike Justin, she is not a strict vegetarian.

“One of the positive things about her eating traditional protein every once in a while is that she can keep our recipes honest,” says Justin. “Is it good, or is it just good for a vegetarian meal? If I had a goal of turning the world vegetarian, that’s just jousting at windmills. I’m not going to win that battle. But if we can get more people — say 80 percent of people, ditching meat 10 percent of the time — that is an incredibly big impact on the environment and on people’s health. We want to make it accessible, bring more people into it, and write about vegetarian food from so many different vantage points and perspectives. A vegan or vegetarian meal is not something where you’re giving up anything — it’s actually a window into more opportunities and more flavors.”

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PHOTOGRAPH BY JUSTIN FOX BURKS

Burks is a professional photographer who has created beautifully styles shots for clients such as Blue Note Bourbon (shown here), Elise Dessert Company, and Phillip Ashley Chocolates.

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PHOTOGRAPH BY JUSTIN FOX BURKS

Burks is a professional photographer who has created beautifully styles shots for clients such as Blue Note Bourbon, Elise Dessert Company (shown here), and Phillip Ashley Chocolates.

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Phillip_Ashley_51A2425.jpg

PHOTOGRAPH BY JUSTIN FOX BURKS

Burks is a professional photographer who has created beautifully styles shots for clients such as Blue Note Bourbon, Elise Dessert Company, and Phillip Ashley Chocolates (shown here).

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Phillip_Ashley_51A2478.jpg

PHOTOGRAPH BY JUSTIN FOX BURKS

Burks is a professional photographer who has created beautifully styles shots for clients such as Blue Note Bourbon, Elise Dessert Company, and Phillip Ashley Chocolates (shown here).

They try to grow as many of the ingredients for their photogenic dishes as possible. “To be able to know your food from seed to plant to plate is something really incredible,” Justin says. “It’s something I think a lot of people lose sight of these days.“

Much of it comes from a one-acre patch in Slayden, Mississippi, owned and tended by Amy’s father, Steve Lawrence. “He plants so much, and we’re the helpers. He always wanted a huge garden,” says Amy.

“When we have a bumper crop of something and we’re able to share, we love to give to the Memphis Union Mission,” says Justin.

Justin thinks the easement garden is an idea that can catch on. “Imagine how much farmland there is just between the sidewalk and the road,” he says. He starts to list all the herbs they grow in the compact space just outside their kitchen door, then stops himself: “Easier way to put it: We have all of them.”

Their 1,700-square-foot home was built in 1956 (“the rock-and-roll year,” says Justin), and expanded in the 1970s. “It was just a plain box when we bought it,” Justin recalls.

“We liked the house and saw it had potential,” says Amy. “We’d rather not spend a lot of money, and be able to make it our own to do what we want to do. I wanted to renovate something, and once you’re in it for that long, you kind of want to stay.”

“It’s almost like our ongoing art project, you know?” says Justin. “It’s not just art that you look at, but functional art that you live inside of. We’re always doing things that are cost-effective in a way that suits our needs. We’re almost built into it. It’s been transformed. There’s not a doorknob or a ceiling that hasn’t been touched by one of our ideas.”

As you might expect from the lair of The Chubby Vegetarian, the home’s focus is the kitchens. Yes, that’s kitchens, plural. “In 2013, I had the harebrained idea to build a pizza oven,” says Justin. “We loved being in our backyard, but there’s this usefulness component that’s not there.”

Amy’s father loved the idea, knowing he would gain a place to visit with the kids and eat pizza. Amy was more ambivalent. “Just don’t involve me in it,” she remembers saying. “It’s too stressful.”

Justin’s research led him to a company offering free pizza oven plans, only to be disappointed. “They weren’t plans. They’re more like suggestions. ‘You can make it tiny!’ or ‘You can make it huge!’ So I actually designed that oven’s every dimension.”

Somewhere along the line, the pizza oven became an entire outdoor kitchen space. The former patio wouldn’t support the weight of the massive brick construction, so they had it removed. “We put rebar under it to make sure that it didn’t sink into the ground,” he says. “It was bigger than what was in my imagination when I was drawing the plans.”

After building the sturdy pedestal, they used a sand mold to create the cooking space. “We built a sand pile the dimensions of what we wanted the inside of the oven, the dome, to be. Then we bricked over the top of that, and once it dried, we dug the sand out.”

As a novice oven architect, Justin was worried it wouldn’t work. “Much to my surprise,” he says, “from the first firing in that oven in 2013, it has operated perfectly. The smoke draws up the chimney, which is in the front.”

The oven is surrounded by 12 feet of countertop. A built-in range which Justin describes as “very powerful” operates from a gas line rerouted from a disused indoor fireplace. “It’s going to a much better use cooking veggies, kebabs, and stir fries.”

Along with ample seating and dining areas, the entire space is enclosed by a spacious wooden gazebo. “It is a really fun and different way to interact with food and to entertain,” says Justin. “That’s what we wanted. Plus, pizza.”

Since its completion, the outdoor kitchen has hosted countless gatherings, as well as photoshoots, a Memphis tourism commercial, and a televised cooking session with Amy’s idol, garden guru P. Allen Smith. “That was like a dream come true for me,” she says.

While the exterior cooking space was getting all the love, the regular interior kitchen hadn’t changed much, beyond some new cabinet doors and a backsplash. “It was not in the plan,” says Amy. “But one day, I walked in the kitchen and stepped on a tile. It was wet. I was like, ‘What did we spill? What’s going on?’ Water was seeping up from the ground.”

An undetected slow leak had undermined the kitchen subfloor. It soon became obvious, even to their reluctant insurance company, that it would all have to be replaced. Justin and Amy took it as an opportunity to completely remake the space with the help of their old friend, Walker Uhlhorn of Uhlhorn Brothers Construction. “By the time the tear-out was all said and done, we were standing in what looked like the surface of the moon.”

The floor wasn’t the only thing that had to go. The former exterior wall of the home was removed to connect the 1970s-era expansion with the kitchen, combining cooking and dining spaces into a great room. The couple credit Uhlhorn with making the crazy idea work. A beam hewn rough from an oak tree that fell on the Slayden farm keeps the ceiling from falling in. “The joke here is that we’re done once all the walls are gone,” says Justin.

“I like taking out walls,” says Amy, “but Justin says we can’t take out any more.”

It’s in this welcoming space where Justin and Amy spend most of their time at work on their newest cookbook. “We have an inordinate amount of counter space to work on our projects. We have a six-foot island that’s double-wide, and then four other counters in just one space. Each of them has its own purpose. We believe an organized kitchen is a happy kitchen.”

None of it was easy. The couple scrimped, saved, and improvised to make their renovation budget. For a long time, Memphis’ most prominent cookbook authors were making do with a microwave in their living room. And while their home was all torn up, Justin’s father was diagnosed with cancer, adding to their stress. “We had no kitchen,” says Amy. “How I cope is I cook, I make sure everything looks nice, and I clean everything.”

As they worried over Justin’s father’s worsening condition, Amy’s sister, Lindsey Lettvin, and niece, Percy Lettvin, visited. When Amy told them how upset the kitchen carnage made her, “My little niece, who was probably 10, said, ‘Just don’t look at it. Don’t look over there. For however long this goes on, it’s like it’s not even there. Don’t face that direction.’ From a 10-year-old, that’s really smart.”

Justin says the project took on new meaning for him. “If you’ve ever had a sick parent or family member, it can be all-encompassing. It felt a little bit like a blessing to have something else to take some of my energy and emotion away from that.”

When the worst happened, their friends stepped up. “Walker was amazing,” says Justin. “When my dad ultimately passed, Walker said, ‘We’re finishing that kitchen.’ A couple of days later, it was put back together, cleaned up, and done.”

Building the Perfect Kitchen

Like a band can’t go too long without putting out a new album, I can’t go too long without building a new kitchen,” says Justin. “While it seems excessive to have three kitchen spaces, for us as professionals in the food industry, as recipe developers and food photographers, each one of these spaces really does serve a different purpose and moves the game along in a different way.”

The Chubby Vegetarian’s third kitchen is in their photography studio in Downtown Memphis. They started from scratch after buying the former apartment from a friend. They ripped out the tiny galley kitchen and built a new one along one side of a 16-foot-long room. The space is designed to provide good camera angles. “You can actually use the telephoto lens and whatever photo magic you need to do. That’s difficult to do in a normal kitchen. By the time you set up a soft box and a reflector in a typical kitchen, you don’t have anywhere to go.”

Justin and Amy say when setting out to redesign your kitchen, the most important thing is storage. “You have to have more storage than you think you need, so you can keep like items in the same place,” says Amy.

The next factor is counter space. To give yourself room to operate, Justin recommends refining your design to create “as much counter space as you can squeeze in.”

If, as is often the case, the kitchen entrance is used more than the front door, Amy recommends creating a “drop zone. You have to have hooks, a bench, something where people know where to put their stuff.”

Justin says to learn from industrial kitchens and create stations for each different cooking activity. Gather everything you need for baking in easy reach of the oven, for example.

“Custom cabinets are wonderful, but they’re also very expensive,” says Justin. “You can work with a company like Stone City. They’re a local company who does prefab cabinets, but they will install them in a custom way. You really end up with what looks like custom work.”

“People make the biggest deal about countertops,” says Amy. “People think you have to spend all this money, and there’s only one nice kind of countertop, and people are really weird about it. But at home and in the studio, we just have butcher-block countertops.”

Perhaps the most vexing question facing the kitchen renovator is the choice of cooktop. Both gas and electric have their strengths and drawbacks, Justin says. “But what I’m going to suggest is what we have at the studio, which is an induction cooktop. It looks like an electric cooktop — it’s glass — but it works in a different way.”

Induction cooktops use magnetic fields to heat the pots and pans themselves. With no dangerous open flames, the cooktop stays cool to the touch. “You turn it on, and water is boiling in 30 seconds,” says Justin.

Amy agrees the technology is amazing, but “for the first month or two we had it, Justin would be like, ‘Watch this!’ And I was like, ‘Stop making people watch you boil water!’”