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Don’t Be Afraid of the Mess: Rebecca Smith on Cooking Culture with Toddlers
Once or twice a month, Rebecca Smith boils green plantains, mashes them with butter and salt, stuffs them with cheese, and serves them to her daughters with a fried egg on top. Summer and Sadie are three and four, and they know it’s called tortilla de verde. That matters to Rebecca. It’s one of her mom’s Ecuadorian dishes, and she makes it at home so her girls will recognize it when they sit down at their grandmother’s table.
Rebecca is the daughter of Ecuadorian immigrants. She grew up in Los Angeles eating tacos and enchiladas, moved to Miami at 13, and married a Jamaican man whose family taught her to cook with thyme and pimento. Her daughters are Jamaican, Ecuadorian, and American, and so is dinner. A teacher for more than a decade, she started posting weeknight dinners in 2023 and now writes recipes at Smiths in Bloom for parents who want big flavor in about 30 minutes.
We’re sharing this conversation in the middle of Hispanic Heritage Month, which is celebrated every year September 15 – October 15. It’s a good excuse to pay attention, though like we say at One Potato all the time, and Rebecca would be the first to tell you, her family doesn’t switch on its identity for a few weeks a year. They cook who they are all the time.
We talked to Rebecca about how her mom came home from work and made dinner every night, and why Rebecca now calls her superwoman. She explains how Jamaican flavors fit into a 30-minute weeknight, why her girls will drink the coconut gravy from her shrimp dish but won’t go near the shrimp, and what she learned cooking around her husband’s vertigo diet. She also makes the case that most people who say they can’t cook are really just out of time.
Her advice for keeping a food culture alive is simple enough to try tonight: let the kids in, even when it’s slower and messier.
A Conversation with Rebecca Smith, creator behind Smiths in Bloom
Introduce Yourself: I’m Rebecca Smith. I’m a recipe developer and food blogger, and my recipes are a reflection of my life. I grew up eating Hispanic flavors, and we craved Mexican food because we were in LA. The food I crave is the food I make.
I’m the child of Ecuadorian immigrants, my husband is Jamaican, and we have two girls: Summer, who’s three, and Sadie, who’s four. They’re Jamaican-Ecuadorian-American, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’m so proud of our blended family and the identity they carry.
Who influenced the way you cook the most?
My mom. She was a working mother from when I was young, and I never once saw her not make dinner. Every single night she came home from work and something was already in the Crock-Pot or the oven, or there was a casserole. She tied a lot of her value to being the person who put a meal on the table for us to gather around.
If you ask her, she’ll say I don’t cook anything like her. But I grew up with the idea, as a Hispanic woman, that dinner was always going to be on me. So I might as well love it, right? After school I’d watch Food Network and the Cooking Channel, and my mom and I bonded over that. Not just cooking, but watching food, the techniques, all the different cuisines. She’s my biggest influence.
Now that you’re the mom, how do you see what she did?
My mom is superwoman. There’s no way I could have done what she did at that stage of her life. If I were her, my kids would have eaten out at least once a week. She worked until six. She’d wake up early and get the meat going for the lasagna or the spaghetti, so when we got home all we had to do was make the pasta. She was literally planning her life around feeding us.
That sacrifice was bigger than wanting her kids nourished. It was, “I want to show up this way as a mother.” Now that I have two littles, I get it. She’s a beast. I have so much more respect for her.
Is there a dish from your mom that you’re passing down to your daughters?
Tortilla de verde. Verde means green plantain; plátano is the ripe one. You boil and mash the green plantain with butter and salt, then stuff it with whatever you want, chicharrón or cheese. I make the cheese version for my girls, and one with yuca, at least once or twice a month. They eat it for breakfast with a little fried egg, and they know what it’s called.
It’s easy to replicate and not ingredient-heavy, so toddlers aren’t afraid of it. And no matter how often I make it, there’s nothing like when my mom makes it. For my birthday she’ll ask, do you want muchines? Tortilla de yuca? Fried yuca? Thankfully my kids know what all of those mean, because I make them at home.
Is there a food from your childhood your daughters just won’t eat?
Encocado de camarón, which is shrimp in coconut milk. It’s super easy and really delicious. They’ll drink the gravy. I’ll give it to them over rice and they’ll eat that, but they won’t touch the shrimp. If I made it with chicken they might try it, but that’s not how the dish is made. So I’m like, this is the way we eat it.
Same with ceviche. I love ceviche. They’re like, no, thank you. It’s in process. Hopefully in a few years!
You once felt you had to fit your cooking into a niche. What made you stop?
On social media, you have the freedom to share what’s on your dinner plate. This is who I am. Once you get into SEO, you start thinking about someone searching Google. Say I make poblano gnocchi, basically rajas with gnocchi. That’s a fusion dish. It’s never going to rank in a Google search.
So you hit a fork in the road. Do I cook for Google, or do I stay true to my story and the people who already know it? Most of the time I keep the recipe. Maybe it doesn’t get a million hits, but it’s a reflection of who I am, and my readers understand that. I decided to go that route.
Your husband grew up eating Jamaican food. What does blending your two traditions look like on a weeknight?
The beauty is that my girls get to experience both cultures at their grandparents’ houses. At home, I pick things that aren’t going to take me a million years. Jamaican food is truly a labor of love, low and slow, and I’m your 30-minute cook. Let’s get in and get it done.
So I make curry chicken and rice and peas, which is made with coconut milk, beans, scallions, and thyme. Those two are staples for us. I love brown stew chicken and curry goat too, but the girls eat those with his family. I don’t make them.
Mostly I bring the flavors I’ve learned to love into everything else. I never cooked with thyme before my husband. Now it goes in chicken stews, chicken thighs, all of it. I add pimento seeds to almost everything, whole in soups or ground. In Ecuador we have estofado, a kind of stew, and I’ll chop the meat smaller so it cooks faster and put pimento in that too.
Some dishes are sacred, though. You don’t want someone saying, this is not my mom’s curry chicken. So I stick to the ones I can replicate well and keep them as close to the real thing as I can. I want the food to taste familiar when the girls go to grandma’s house, on either side.
How do you think your girls would describe the food in your house?
I think they’d say food is fun. They see me prepare it, and they get in the kitchen with me. They’d say it’s flavorful, because they’ve tried so much and it isn’t tied to one cuisine. Hands down, their favorite is Mexican. They ask for tacos, literally. Carne asada tacos, and aguacate all the time.
At three and four they don’t have the language to say it’s experimental, but I hope that’s what they take away. I believe food is sacred, and I try to stay true to certain flavors. I also don’t want them to be afraid of having fun in the kitchen. Mix and blend, just like you are, and bring that into your food. It’s safe to do that.
A lot of first-generation parents worry their kids will lose the food along with the language. How do you keep that connection?
Get them in there with you. Don’t be afraid that it takes longer or makes a mess. The only way they’ll grow a healthy relationship with food is if they feel like part of the process.
It’s like chores. You bring value to this house, so pick up after yourself. The same way you include them in the rest of the home, include them in the kitchen. And they get excited. Mine chop tomatoes and help me shred cheese, whatever feels safe for their age. Have them watch you cook, have them dump things into the pot, and add a little more responsibility as they grow.
The tradition of food is really the feeling: getting in there, smelling it, watching how someone else prepares it. That’s what I don’t want to lose.
You’ve written about some hard years. Was there a stretch when cooking got hard?
My husband had a very serious bout of vertigo. We went to a bunch of doctors, and everybody just wanted to put him on medication. We wanted to actually fix it. We ended up at a clinic in Beverly Hills and saw a nutritionist, and he did a whole test. No mushrooms, no kidney beans, a whole list of things that were adding to the dizziness. Some of those were the foundation of how I cooked. My hands were up in the air.
But I’d done this before. My dad has acidity problems with his stomach, so he can’t have onions or garlic or cooked tomatoes. That’s one of the reasons I learned to cook in the first place. I went down the rabbit hole of Thai food, lots of ginger, curries, coconut milk, and he found flavorful food he loved that wasn’t bland. I love my dad so much and I wanted to fix that.
So I took that same energy and did it for my husband. I saw it as something stretching me, and since we host all the time, it made me better at cooking for all kinds of guests. Thankfully it happened before kids, so I had time to research what goes together.
You were a teacher for more than a decade. How does that show up in the way you write recipes?
The notes section. I’m always asking, what would I want to tell somebody making this dish? I don’t like the idea that a recipe has to be followed to a T. If you have chicken instead of beef, we can turn down the cook time and you can still make it. The vegetables and sauces are tied to the dish, but if you don’t love the protein, don’t decide the recipe isn’t for you. Let’s find a way for you to enjoy it.
Some of my blog posts are longer than others, because there’s nothing worse than spending your money and time at the store and then the dish doesn’t turn out. Sometimes it’s one simple tweak, like keep it on medium the whole time, or bring it to a boil and then turn it down. Those little things make or break a recipe. So I explain it like I’m talking to a student.
A lot of parents say flatly that they can’t cook. Is that really a skills problem?
To be honest, I think it’s a time problem. We’re so busy with work, social media, school pickup, activities. It’s deciding which thing deserves space in your brain.
My go-to advice is to find a recipe with five ingredients or less and start there. If you don’t cook every day and you see a recipe with 16 ingredients, you’re already out. My best friend is a doctor with no time. She says, tell me to pour a bunch of ingredients in an Instant Pot and press a button, I’m in. Tell me to chop an onion, I’m immediately out.
So even as a creator I ask myself, could we get a really solid, delicious base with six ingredients? I think about who I’m creating for, busy moms. What’s already in your fridge? You don’t have to go to the store. Type “what can I make with broccoli and chicken” into Google and go from there.
Every cook will tell you they’re still learning. We wouldn’t even call ourselves experts. Just get started.
Your recipes promise dinner in about 30 minutes. What shortcuts do you lean on without apologizing?
The Instant Pot. Anything that takes longer than 30 or 40 minutes, I’m transferring to the Instant Pot. I don’t care if the recipe says use a regular pot. It’s going in there, and we’ll be done in 20 or 30 minutes. Soups can almost always go in a Crock-Pot, so working moms can throw it in, go to the office, and come back to dinner.
I also cut the protein small. Your chicken breast doesn’t need an hour. It needs maybe 15 minutes. Estofado is usually chunks of meat, and I’m like, no, we’re chopping this into little bits, and we’ll get the same flavor in 30 minutes.
And I’m a sucker for a good immersion blender. You don’t need to blend a whole soup in six batches. Put the immersion blender in, put your apron on. It might be a little messy, girl, but you’ll be okay. I also have a Breville Sous Chef that does my dicing and slicing. If you cook more than four days a week, those gadgets are an investment. Ask for them for Christmas. Give yourself the gift of time back in the kitchen.
You’ve moved houses a lot. Is there a dish you always end up making first in a new place?
Tacos. I can always find tortillas, you can put whatever protein you want in them, make a quick salsa, make a quick guac. You get nostalgia in every bite. My kids never fight me on a taco. I even bring my own tortillas when I travel. My parents aren’t Mexican, but tacos remind me of my childhood.
What’s one cooking skill you think every home cook should practice?
Building a base. It doesn’t matter what you’re making, you need onions, garlic, and bell peppers chopped. Pick one day a week. On Mondays, I’m going to chop four onions and pulse three heads of garlic and put them in containers. You’ll be more likely to cook because you’re not starting from scratch. Those base flavors are in everything, so you’ll use them all week, and you’ll get in and out of the kitchen even quicker.
