Melissa Clark is one of the most prolific food writers working today: she's the author of 43 cookbooks, as well as a weekly columnist for The New York Times AND a new podcast host ("Weeknight Kitchen with Melissa Clark"). She also turns out to be the perfect Lunch Therapy guest because both of her parents are psychiatrists. During today's session, we talk about how she comes up with a recipe, how she empowers people to have "personal responsibility in cooking," how she deals with criticism online (including for the famous pea-guacamole, denounced by TWO presidents, that wasn't even her recipe). We also go deep on how she used cooking to get her parents' attention, how she cultivated her voice as a writer, what she gets out of reading Proust, and whether or not baking brownies made her popular in high school.

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