Meet the farm-based food star from America’s Midwest serving up cookie salads

The dessert is so well-established at the church potluck dinners she and her family attend near their home on Hagen’s family farm on the North Dakota/Minnesota border, you can’t just say you’re bringing a salad.

OG - the classic cookie salad Photo: Chantell and Brett Quernemoen[Missing Credit]

“[Sweet salads] are so ubiquitous in this area that if you're bringing a salad made of greens and vegetables to the party, it would behoove you to specify that you are bringing a green salad” says the sunny 

Yeh tells us that for her, sweet salads are “the quirkiest, most endearing genres of food of all time.” Conscious many non-Midwesterners may not get it — she argues that several dessert classics (like Eton mess and tiramisu) would actually qualify as cookie salads. Having studied her recipes — a sweet salad resembles trifle — without the layers.

The Midwest classic version combines crushed Fudge Stripe cookies (a chocolate covered US brand) mixed into a packet of instant pudding and a helping of whipped cream plus some kind of fruit, which, she says is usually tinned mandarin oranges. “You just fold it all together and if you didn't know that it was called a salad, like, I think anybody would just want to dive in because it looks like a trifle.”

In Yeh style, she gives hers a Jewish spin, creating a blueberry cream cheese bagel salad. Blitzed up bagel chips make a pie crust that’s filled with fresh blueberry jelly and topped with a layer of cream cheese and whipped cream.

A typically Yeh twist on the cookie salad pairs Middle Eastern-inspired pistachio and rose Photo: Chantell and Brett Quernemoen[Missing Credit]

Other recipes in the book (her fourth) are more commonplace (but delicious sounding) cakes, bars and cookies and pies. All using sugar processed from the sugar beet grown on the farm on which they live with their two small daughters.

The farm is the hook for her Food Network show Girl Meets Farm (which has had its 15th season this summer) and from where she started writing about food when she and Hagen settled there. She had no issues leaving New York for her rural retreat other than missing out on her favourite foods. Speaking to me from her home, she tells me that growing up in Glenview Illinois food was always important to her and her family:

“My mom was so excited about cooking and baking — every night it was homemade dinner and every weekend when we woke up, there would be a fresh scone or coffee cake coming out of the oven.”

Her sister trained at culinary school and Yeh says that although her father wasn’t a cook, he loved to eat — “He's like a human garbage disposal” she laughs. Despite this, it wasn’t until she left home that she felt the same way.

“I’d been a picky eater — I basically stuck to all the carb foods.” She adored the matzah ball soup, challah and rugelach her Jewish mother had grown up with but also the dim sum and dumplings of her Chinese father’s culture.

Molly Yeh's known for her sunny style and fun flavours Photo: Chantell and Brett Quernemoen[Missing Credit]

Mother, Jody, took a class in Chinese cookery when her parents married. “She was able to coach me through learning my Chinese favourites growing up as well. So, it really was like a mixture of the best of both worlds, so many dumplings, so many carbs, all of that good stuff.”

While living in New York and studying for her BA in percussion at New York’s Juilliard School she fell in love with food and started thinking it might also be her career.

“For a percussionist, there's a lot of orchestra pieces where you're sitting in the back of the orchestra waiting for your one symbol note or your one triangle note. I got kind of bored and found I was dreaming about was where I was going to eat after rehearsal. So I kind of took that as a sign of, all right, maybe it's time to think of some other options.”

She started freelance food writing and recording her favourite eats: “All I wanted to do was go on food adventures and write about them. And then eventually I realised, how gratifying and satisfying and cheaper it was to cook my own food. in my own first little apartment. So I started my food blog.”

An approach from an agent led her to publishing her first book. “That turned into my show and a few more books later and along the way I met my husband and started dating. We moved out to his family's farm where I started just cooking full time and the rest is history.”

She tells me her recipes have often been inspired by not being able to pop out and buy her favourite foods. “When I moved here, I couldn't just go down the street to Zabar's to get a little loaf of challah.”

Instead of despairing the lack of local Jewish delis, the naturally optimistic Yeh, got busy making her own staples. “I was like — cool, I can make everything exactly the way that I want to make it. I can put, like, wacky flavours into my challah. I could put halva in it. I could put scallions (spring onions) in it. I could do so many fun things.”

No surprise then that fourth book, Sweet Farm is also filled with her fun takes on classics like pumpkin jam and goat’s cheese bourekas, mandel bread cereal, cinnamon sugar chocolate rugelach and black sesame babka.

With seemingly boundless energy, as well as the food writing, television presenting and looking after her two small children, Yeh has added bakery and café, Bernie’s to her portfolio. On the menu at the daytime restaurant — named after her elder daughter — are a range of Midwest treats. Including your chance to try a cookie salad.

Sweet Farm (Cookies, Cakes, Salads (!), and Other Delights from My Kitchen on a Sugar Beet Farm (William Morrow) is out now

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