When Stefan Merrill Block was nine, his mother concluded that his teachers were stifling his creativity and pulled him out of public school. He wouldn't return until ninth grade. Those five years in between shaped everything that came after, including, eventually, his relationship with food and cooking.
Stefan is the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Homeschooled, which traces a fiercely loved boy through the years he spent learning at home with a mother whose ideas grew more inventive (and more unsteady) as the months went on. In this episode, we follow the food: his mother's recipe-less cooking, the Dallas chicken tortilla soup that tasted like friendship and a bigger world, and the long road that led Stefan at 30, alone on 250 acres of Texas land, to fall in love with cooking on his own terms. We also talk about writing a memoir with a novelist's instincts, feeling anger for your younger self for the first time, and the homeschool reform conversations the book has sparked in three states.
In this episode:
Why Stefan's mother pulled him from school at nine, and how that impacted his later years
His mother's recipe-less cooking, and the meals that felt like something to endure
The Dallas chicken tortilla soup that tasted like friendship and a bigger world
Falling in love with cooking at 30, alone on 250 acres of Texas land
Cooking three separate dinners as the main cook in his household
Writing a memoir with a novelist's instincts, and feeling anger for your younger self
Co-owning Skate Time 209, the beloved roller rink in Accord, NY
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