Al Roker and his eldest daughter Courtney are collaborating on a cookbook that celebrates their family

NEW YORK (AP) — Al Roker remembers the moment he realized his eldest daughter was a real cook.

“We were talking and she was in the kitchen and she looked at me, but she's picking these herbs and she's not looking down,” he recalled recently.

“There would be at least a gush of blood in the first three minutes if I did that. I think, '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 at two Michelin-starred restaurants, including Café Boulud in New York City.

The Rokers – the older one, who often leads the cooking portion of the “Today” show, and the younger one, who has made food her career – are naturals at working together, and father and daughter have done just that with “Al Roker's Recipes to “ Done Live By: Simple, Memorable Family Dishes for Every Occasion.

Each dish seems to open a window into the Roker clan, like the crispy cornmeal-fried white fish dish inspired by Al's father, the Sweet Potato Poon from Al's mother, or the Italian rice cake from son-in-law Wes' great-grandmother.

“When I was developing these recipes, I got a little emotional,” says Courtney, who also served as the book’s food stylist. “As soon as I ate them, it took me back to my childhood.”

Very often there were no written recipes for the Roker clan's dishes. “Courtney did such a great job,” Dad says. “She’s almost like this food detective who reverse-engineered recipes and got to the heart of these flavors.”

To add to her burden, Courtney was pregnant with Al's first grandchild, Sky. “Within nine months she gave birth to the baby and a cookbook. I’m not sure which is harder,” Al jokes.

Food and cooking have always been a part of the Roker family's life. A story about Courtney says that at the age of 6, she went into the garden and picked edible flowers to decorate plates.

The pandemic prompted everyone's favorite weatherman to fill his Instagram feed with home-cooked meals, and Courtney suggested that this was the perfect time to create a new cookbook, one very different from the ones he wrote years ago, like “Al Roker’s Big Bad Book of Barbecue.” ” and “Al Roker’s Stress-Free Holiday Cookbook.”

“The cookbook has evolved,” he says as he looks up and reads a list of test books on his bookshelf, like “The Joy of Cooking” and “The Silver Palate Cookbook,” both of which are stingy with photos and neglectful of each other personal details are.

“They didn’t necessarily tell a story and weren’t that visually interesting,” he says. “When I wrote my first one, there was a color insert in the middle of maybe twelve pages, and that was it. Well.”, there is a picture for almost every recipe.”

Readers will learn that the Rokers love to add some cream cheese to their scrambled eggs and have perfected The McRoker – a breakfast pancake sandwich made with eggs, cheese and bacon. Courtney's Shrimp Tikka Masala is a family favorite, and Al upgraded his mother's Chicken Cacciatore by adding sun-dried tomatoes and capers.

There's an instant coffee-and-spice-rubbed pork chop that Courtney developed without knowing that Al's mother would make instant coffee when she got six kids out the door in the morning.

“Courtney didn’t actually know it, but she was basing this recipe on her grandmother,” says Papa.

They're honoring celebrity chef Daniel Boulud by offering his recipe for short ribs, the most elaborate thing Al makes, requiring five hours of cooking. Al met Boulud years ago when he gave a segment on what aspiring chefs do for Thanksgiving. They remained friends.

A much simpler dish is Sweet Potato Poon, Al's mother's signature side dish. The origins of the name are lost to history; Al thinks they could be from the West Indies or perhaps the South.

To 3 pounds of chopped sweet potato, add cinnamon, brown sugar, nutmeg, allspice, canned pineapple, plenty of butter, flour and baking powder. The final touch is lightly browned marshmallows.

Al and his siblings took great pleasure in torturing their mother by trying to distract her while the marshmallows burned. “You would have to scrape everything off. “The smoke alarms are going off – it’s the holidays,” says Al. His mother finally wised up and bought several bags of marshmallows.

On the one hand, Al Roker's Recipes to Live By is a look back at the extended Roker family, but on the other it is a collection that needs to be passed on.

“I also got emotional thinking about my daughter and passing this on to her,” Courtney says. “And I'm so grateful that I was able to do this with my father. Not everyone can say that they can do a project like this with their parents.”