Processed Food Proved Lethal for 'MasterChef's Wilderness Forager
One of the things that MasterChef contestant Nina Interlandi Bell prides herself on is being able to create tasty dinners using whatever ingredients she has access to. After all, the Maine resident for the past 10 years is used to going out to forage for her food and putting together meals using wild ingredients such as dandelion roots, wood sorrel or squirrel fat.
In fact, her audition dish—the one that won her her apron—was Venison & Bok Choy Dumplings with Cilantro, Cucumber, Peanut & Chili Salad. So, when Gordon Ramsay and special guest Andre Rush presented the home cooks with a Mystery Box challenge that required preparing a gourmet meal out of army rations [MREs—Meals Ready-to-Eat], Nina was sure she was going to ace it.
“I was psyched,” she tells Parade in this exclusive interview. “I thought that I was going to kill it hands down no problem. This is what I do. I take a bunch of weird stuff from a bunch of weird places, and I turn it into something edible, but I guess I had a little bit of an off day. It was really the first time where things didn't mostly go to plan. They sort of did, but there were several things that had to be overcome in that short period of time and it was definitely the most flustered I felt of all the challenges, even the team challenges.”
CR: FOX
The other thing that Nina didn’t consider when she decided to use the MREs to make Chicken Tika Masala—a dish that she has made at least 10 times previously—was how much Indian food Gordon Ramsay has eaten in his life.
“They eat a lot of Indian food in England and so it’s another one of those things I should have remembered,” she says. “Purvi’s Butter Chicken was not quite up to Gordon’s standards, so how could I possibly have expected myself to [be successful], even if I was using regular ingredients not MRE? I don't think I would have been able to create an Indian dish that was as spot on and favorable as Gordon would have expected.”
Nina was disappointed not to make it further in the competition, especially since Gordon’s vote was one that helped her get her apron, so she especially wanted him to be proud of her culinary accomplishments in the competition.
“You want him to be proud of you,” she says. “You want him to feel like you have paid respect to the ingredients, you want him to be excited and impressed by what you've done, sort of like you want to impress your parents. So, that really is the intimidation factor for me because I feel like whenever he gets frustrated or angry, it's only because he is so hyper obsessed with food that he gets upset when something's not as good as it could have been. It's not intimidating in terms of being scared of him but in terms of wanting to show him what you're capable of.”
Also, during our chat, Nina spoke more about getting flustered during the MRE challenge, how she got into wild food in the first place, who she sees making it to the finale, and what’s next for her.
CR: FOX
Your platform is wild food so when they gave you all this processed food to work with, did that throw you?
Even though the general atmosphere was flustering on the particular MRE challenge, and I think it was also because of that additional pressure that I had set myself up as being a person who can make something good out of a bunch of weird stuff, I was most excited about that kind of challenge. So, I had a little bit of an off day and a couple of the things when I opened the packages that I thought were going to look a certain way and taste a certain way, didn't, and so it was hard to pivot in that moment.
Also, a lot of the time with creative ideas, your first one is not always the best but you don’t have time to test out creative ideas two and three [on MasterChef], you have to go with your first one. Looking back, I'm like, “That probably wasn't the best idea that I could have had," but I'm not really a person who spends a lot of time with regret, so I'm like, “Oh, well. I did the best I could with what I had and now I've learned stuff," so that feels good.
Were you into wild food before you moved to Maine or is that something that developed after the move?
I have lived here for 10 years this fall. I wouldn't say that I have always been as focused on wild as I am now. I have always been interested in wildness generally, whether that's building houses in the wild, going fishing. All the things I've always been interested in are all things outside. There have been little bits of food that I've eaten wild throughout my life but it is only been within the last five or six years that it's become more of a huge focus for me.
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What kinds of things did cook when you were a city person?
My entire family has cooked forever except for my sisters, who only started doing it the last couple of years. I consider myself to have been a pretty good cook previously, but it was mostly based on going through recipes, finding things to inspire me, and then going to the store and buying those things for the one recipe, and coming home and making the one recipe.
One of the main reasons I wanted to move out of a city into the country was to give myself fewer options. I know that sounds weird but when you live in a big city, there's always a new restaurant opening, there's always a play happening or a concert happening, and there's so many choices that it's overwhelming for me in my brain. You just inevitably end up staying inside a lot. So, I wanted to move somewhere that had fewer options and that's also ended up becoming how I cook. I still like reading recipes. That's fun to file away in the back of my brain, but I much prefer to go out to my yard and say, “OK, what's growing right now? Those are my options. I have to make a meal based on that.” That allows me to be more creative within certain boundaries than just having access to everything all the time.
What was the inspiration for auditioning for MasterChef or maybe they found you? I’ve talked to a couple people this season who hadn't even watched the show.
I'm one of those. They did find me, and it did take me a while to understand. I felt like there must be some reason I was doing this because I usually don't do things without a reason, but it took me until I was lying in the hotel room getting ready to go on my audition to really figure out the reason I was there. It was because I wanted to be able to have a wider platform to talk about wild food and wild spaces. I really see it as part of my life purpose to get people excited about protecting wild spaces, and if you can do that through somebody's stomach, I think you've got a lot better of a chance of getting it done right. Not everybody is a philanthropist or a protester or whatever the other things are you can do to affect that kind of change. I didn't know that at the beginning. When they first came to me, I was like, “I don't know. This sounds completely not like me at all,” but by the end I was like, “That's OK. It's completely not me and I can talk to people about that, but hopefully they will get excited about the other things that I do.”
CR: FOX
You have a book Foraging for the Rest of Us.
That was also not something that I planned ever to do in my life. Writing books has always been very intimidating to me, but I wanted to have that ready by the time the show came out so that people could understand my viewpoint and I could get them excited about it. It's definitely not the kind of foraging book that has descriptions of plants and that you can take outside and use to identify things to eat in your yard. This is more about getting into the foraging mindset and the things that I did before I even knew what plants I could and could not eat, so I'm hoping that that will inspire some people to try wild food no matter where they live or who they are.
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Who do you predict will make it to the finale?
From the beginning, I connected really well with both Kennedy and Brynn, so I can see them going very far. I feel like Kennedy is very creative and passionate and Brynn is very impressive to me because she's really only been cooking hardcore for a couple of years, and so both of them, I think, do really well. And Wayne is very competitive and driven, so if there's anybody who can figure out how to win a competition just based on focus, it's him.
What’s next? Are you back to marketing or are you exploring building a food social media empire?
Oh, gosh. I don't know if I really want to have an empire or anything that involves so many people. Yeah, I am back doing the marketing thing and I think that that is always going to be a part of what I do. I like marketing brain. I like farmer brain. I like chef brain. I like to switch back and forth between all these things. So, I'm just going to go where things take me and I'm going to keep talking about my things and meeting cool people. I'm sure the things that are supposed to be out there, I will end up finding my way to them.
MasterChef airs Wednesday nights at 8 p.m. ET/PT on FOX.