Q&A with Chefs Jewels and Jill Elmore

SS: If you each had to pick your favorite thing to cook, what would that be?

Jewels: I am a big soup person. ... It's so fun to make a pot of soup and it's so easy, and you can just put all these different flavors in this one bite. And I think it's so satisfying. 

Jill: I go on kicks. I mean, I love making any kind of Mexican food. We come [from] a Mexican-American family and we grew up eating that food, so to me it's easy to prepare and I love sort of putting a healthy spin on the food we ate growing up. So it's sort of like comfort food to me. And it's satisfying to me, and I love anything spicy. 

Jewels: And it kind of feels like, to some people when we serve it, it either feels like you're having a party or it feels like you're on vacation. 

SS: I noticed the tostada recipe in the book. I was surprised that was okay to eat! 

Jill: Oh completely. It's so healthy. And we serve that to our clients all the time. Again, and all of those ingredients that are in there, you can utilize the same ingredients for other meals during the course of the day [so that it] won't take you quite as long to put together. If you want to sort of make something like that for your lunch or for your dinner, it doesn't mean you have to take all that time to make all the other meals in the day, because we know you don't have that kind of time. We don't have that kind of time. But you can take those pieces that you've used and cut them up a different way or use some of those other ingredients to make something else. It's a key way to keep this lifestyle sort of going. Like you said, it is hard to keep up if you're just thinking of it one meal at a time.

Try Jewels' Favorite Soup Jill Makes