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MARCH 11, 2021 | The Jewish Home
The Jewish Home | OCTOBER 29, 2015
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Eight Days of Yum TJH Speaks with Faigy Murray, Author of My Pesach Kitchen
Faigy, congratulations on your first cookbook. Can you give us a little background on yourself? I grew up in Montreal, where my parents still live. I always had a tremendous passion for cooking. I love being in the kitchen. As a young girl, every time I went to my friends’ houses to study for tests in school, they’d be studying for a test and I would be in their mothers’ kitchens going through their mothers’ kitchen cabinets, looking at all the recipes that the mothers had. A ny t i me a nyone served me anything, even as a young girl, I would go up to them and say, “I need the recipe.” I collected so many unbelievable recipes over the years. Way, way before I got married, I had a complete recipe collection. Back then everything was handwritten, and I had those little recipe looseleaf folders. The passion has never left me. My mother is an unbelievable cook. She’s Hungarian, so it’s more simple, traditional food. She doesn’t make a lot
of crazy stuff. For Shabbos and yom tov, we had the same food my entire life, but whatever she made, and still makes, is absolutely flawless. I honestly can say I don’t remember my mother ever messing up a recipe. I had big shoes to fill, but at the same time, she’s somebody who is extremely comfortable in the kitchen. She taught me to be comfortable in the kitchen and be confident. So, if I’m in middle of a recipe, and I realize that I ran out of something, I’m not going to say, “Forget it, I can’t make this recipe.” I don’t have
salt, well, what other spices can I use instead? When I got married, I was so excited to have my own kitchen and have my own food to prepare. Probably within the first few weeks that I was married, I was already hosting guests and hosting meals, because it was just so natural and such a passion of mine. I never dreamt that I would be here today, inspiring people. And here I am today speaking with you. And I just wrote my first cookbook. It’s unbelievable, so surreal and so amazing. When I got married, my mother-inlaw cooked completely differently than my mother. She has a very eclectic style, very non-traditional. She’s the person who’s scouring the Internet, finding the most unique, cool new recipes for yom tov. It took me a long time to get used to it. I used to go to my in-laws for yom tov, and I’d be like, “Where’s my potato kugel?” But I got used to it, and I learned to love it. I learned to appreciate my mother-in-law’s style of cooking. She’s a phenomenal, phenomenal
cook. I have fused both my mother’s and my mother-in-law’s styles of cooking. It’s funny, my two boys – I have a 15-year-old and a 13-year-old – don’t like when I offer “funky” stuff on Shabbos. They’ll tell me, “Ma, if you want to make crazy things, save it for during the week or make it, but we still need our kugel and our chicken and our gefilte fish.” Would they eat the Moroccan salmon during the week? Are they adventurous eaters at other times? They are. All my kids are. I have two little girls as well. My girls are less adventurous eaters, but they’re younger. You actually started “going public” with your passion of cooking a few years ago when you started your Instagram. What was the impetus behind that? After my youngest was born, fourand-a-half years ago, I was on maternity leave. My husband and I were discussing the next steps of life, so to speak. He said to me, “Faigy, don’t go back to work. Take six months off.” I’m a family photographer. I was doing it as a hobby. He told me, “Take this month off, try to grow your business, and try to really push it. We’ll put a business plan together and see
