Shipped from Al Roker's Kitchen – Garden & Gun

It's hard to pin down Al Roker. Sure, you can find it on the Today Most mornings on the show include him reporting the weather or interviewing celebrities at Rockefeller Plaza, but his job keeps him on the road, commenting on the Olympics, covering the Macy's Thanksgiving or the Rose Parade, and recently visiting western North Carolina, to provide assistance after Hurricane Helene.

But he loves to be at home in his kitchen, experimenting with new recipes and revisiting old ones to bring his far-flung family together around the table. “I’ve been really into Smashburger lately,” he admits. “And my kids love them.” For Roker, food is a way to understand people’s stories. He hosted countless culinary television specials, produced an online cooking series with his son during the pandemic and even served as a judge in the food category G&G's 2022 Made in the South Awards. And with his new cookbook Al Roker's recipes for life, Released on October 15th, it is the lens through which he tells his own narrative.

The book, which he co-created with his daughter, chef Courtney Roker Laga, fills readers with recipes and anecdotes about his favorite weeknight meals, popular side dishes, comfort breakfasts, and more. Roker also shared three recipes from the book G&G– a family favorite potato salad, nostalgically spicy Cracker Jacks and a delicious bourbon apple pie milkshake – and chatted about the power of food and family.

Family is the main idea in your book, which you wrote with your daughter. What was it like working with Courtney on this project?

I was having health problems about two years ago and Courtney came to me and said: Let's really do this. I think she somehow gave me a reason to recover. Then she also told me that she was pregnant. In recent years she gave birth to a book and a baby.

Courtney is a professional chef. When your child is good at what they do and you see that they enjoy it, it's a great feeling. She did the recipes and I did the top notes. We stayed on our tracks and it worked out quite well. But she always loved cooking. When she was six or seven years old, we lived in Westchester, New York and planted these edible flowers. She would pick the flowers and decorate the plates with them. It never occurred to me that she would go into the food industry, but it's kind of come full circle.

How did you locate all the recipes you included in the book?

Courtney was the one who came up with all the recipes. She spoke to me, my siblings Deborah (Roberts, Roker's wife and ABC News anchor), some of Deborah's family, various friends. She basically became this recipe detective because a lot of these family recipes weren't written down. Like my mother's upside down pineapple; I loved this recipe. So Courtney asked me about the dishes my mother—the kids called her Nana—would make, and I described them, and then she worked on them and tested them. And I would try them and say: Okay, that's not entirely true. And she would make changes and try again until she got it right. She really did a great job.

Your wife, Deborah Robertsis from Georgia, and many of the recipes in the book—like her family's potato salad—are based on Southern traditions. What role does Southern food play in your home?

I think Southern food is truly American food. That's the thing about American cuisine: there are so many different cultures that we have adopted and made our own. When you look at Southern cuisine, it's clear that most of it comes from black people. Like rice and peas – or peas and rice as we called it at my house – fried chicken, potato salad. It all came from us. My father's family is from the Bahamas and part of my mother's family was from Jamaica. All of this flows south. You don't necessarily have to be from the South to appreciate Southern cuisine and recognize it in your own kitchen.

My grandmother was from the Bahamas and one of the things I always remember was her cast iron skillet. She made cast iron cornbread—and the recipe is in the book—but she also made this Bahamian dish called “Johnny Cakes,” which was almost a cross between cornbread and pancakes. A lot of what I grew up with has a lot of similarities to what Deborah grew up with.

Why was it important for you to focus on everyday meals rather than special occasion dishes?

When we were kids, they sold TV tray sets; I remember I had a Roy Rogers TV tray. And on Friday night while we ate we were looking at this eight-inch TV screen, but we were all together. Or on a Sunday evening: My mother wasn't a gourmet cook, but she made an effort to cook, especially on Sundays. So we sat at our parents' dinner table with a roast chicken or a pot roast or something. That's the heart of it and it brings us together, but it's not about the food at all. It's about the people who come over to eat the food.