Q&A: WQED's Chris Fennimore Shares Favorite Things about Food

WQED's Chris Fennimore sat down to talk to us about what it's like to host a cooking show and more. Here's what he had to say:

When did you move to Regent Square and why?

I moved here in 1994. My wife and I had just had a baby and we were living in her condo in and looked all over the city at places we might want to move to. We wanted a nice neighborhood, easy commute—the same thing everyone is looking for.

We decided that Regent Square had all of those qualities we were looking for and boy, has it ever been great. My son went to so the bus picked him up by and other neighborhood kids went there. It’s all those things you like to have. Now he is at Central, right next to where I work. It’s a real neighborhood. You use it like it is really yours.

When did you get into the food aspect of your job?
The cooking part of what I do started in 1993. We did our first cooking—what we now call marathon—and it was on zucchinis. We had a garden plot up by Homewood Cemetery and our garden was filled with zucchinis, as gardens do. I went back to the station and asked to make a spot that said, 'If you have a recipe for zucchini, we would love to have it.' The recipes came in and they were wonderful, but they weren’t just recipes—they were family stories. I thought, 'You know, there’s something going on here.'

We went on the air, made some of the recipes and told some of the stories and offered recipes as a thank you gift for membership—the phones just went crazy and so many people wanted to be a part of this.

So many times, food is a fundraising aspect from the church ladies who sell pierogies during the holidays to the Greek food festival, bake sales and all of that—and it’s turned out to be a terrific way for to raise money.

We have done 100 cooking marathons over 18 years and we will have a celebratory show this spring to celebrate that programming anniversary. It will be great to celebrate that and bring some of the people back who have been on over the years and show some blooper reels.

What are some of your favorite Thanksgiving foods?
A couple of years ago, I got a recipe together for Stuffing Muffins. I made them at home and we have adopted this as a necessary Thanksgiving recipe. You make stuffing and put it in muffin tins and bake it, so it has more surface area to get crunchy. You can use almost any stuffing recipe you like.

What would surprise people about your show?
It’s live and that is the part that people who come on the show often don’t even know. I have had people come on and do something and then say, 'Let’s stop and do that again,' and I look at them and say, 'You can’t stop.' Then they get really nervous.

All of the shopping prep that goes into a three or four-hour live cooking event also would surprise people. Each one of those recipes has to be made between two and three times. On a Thursday before a show, I am at every store in Pittsburgh. I am in the Strip, at Sam’s Club and Giant Eagle, and on Friday I need the most help. We get culinary students to help us but it’s not just going into the kitchen on Saturday morning and cooking. This stuff doesn’t magically appear—when we talk about the magic of television what we really mean is two days of hard work.

What do you enjoy most?
The best thing about it has been the generosity of our viewers who call in and send in or e-mail me not just their recipes, but these are their family stories, their traditions.

Food is the way that we convey family history, family traditions, family ethics, and also our cultural ethnic histories and traditions. A lot of recipes will have a name in them—'These are my Aunt Martha’s zucchini boats'—'This is Peggy’s potato salad'—why? Because you can’t make that dish without thinking about that person and your experience.

What has struck me over all these years is people’s generosity in sharing those things. We might be the only place in this whole country that has this continuing community sharing of food, recipes and stories.

I think it has to do with the fact that we are ethnically diverse and ethnically proud as a region. We talk about all of our different groups that have been here for a long time. Also, this is a place where people have been—and people don’t go. People were born, raised and die here, and so those traditions had a chance to really grow. Many generations of people from the same family in the same neighborhood sharing the same things over time.

It’s never about the food. It’s always about the sharing and who made it for you and what it made you feel like.

Tune into the anniversary show March 3 on WQED.