Al Roker remembers the moment when it became clear to him that his oldest daughter was an honest-to-goodness chef. "We were talking, and she was in the kitchen, and she's looking at me, but she's chiffonading these herbs and not looking down," he recalled recently. "Within the first three minutes, there'd be at least one geyser of blood if I was doing that. I'm thinking, 'Oh my God, she knows what she's doing.'" Courtney Roker Laga indeed knows what she's doing: She's a recipe developer and culinary school graduate who has worked in two Michelin-starred restaurants, including Cafe Boulud in New York City, reports the AP.
The Rokers—the elder, who's often leading the cooking segment on the Today show, and the younger, who has made food her career—are naturals to collaborate, and father and daughter have done just that with Al Roker's Recipes to Live By: Easy, Memory-Making Family Dishes for Every Occasion. Each dish seems to open a window on the Roker clan, like the Crunchy Cornmeal-Fried White Fish dish inspired by Al's father, the Sweet Potato Poon made by Al's mother, or the Italian Rice Cake by son-in-law Wes' great-grandmother. "When I was developing these recipes, I got kind of emotional a little bit," says Courtney, who also acted as the book's food stylist. "As soon as I ate them, it brought me back to my childhood."
Very often, there were no recipes written down for the Roker clan dishes. "Courtney has done such an amazing job," says her dad. "She's almost like this food detective who reverse-engineered recipes and nailed these tastes." The pandemic prompted everyone's favorite weatherman to fill his Instagram feed with home-cooked dishes, and Courtney suggested this was the perfect time to make a new cookbook, one far different than the ones he wrote years ago. In one way, the book is a look back at the Rokers' extended family, and in another way, it's a collection to be handed down. "I got emotional also because I'm thinking of my daughter and passing this down to her," Courtney says. "And I'm so grateful to be able to have done this with my dad. Not everyone can say that they can do a project like this with their parents."
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