Gab Chabrán
covers what's happening in food and culture for LAist.
Published September 29, 2023 5:00 AM
Tiffani Thiessen digs deep into leftovers in her new cookbook.
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Rebecca Sanabria
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Topline:
Actress and TV personality Tiffani Thiessen wants to make leftovers cool again with her new cookbook, Here We Go Again.
Why now: Like many of us, Thiessen avoided the supermarket during the pandemic to protect her family from the COVID virus. Being forced to stretch her groceries as far as they could go unlocked a core memory of growing up in Long Beach when her budget-conscious mother took the previous night’s leftovers and reinvented them into new dishes.
Why it's important: Food waste is a real issue, with nearly 40% of America’s food thrown out. It also creates large amounts of emissions, the main cause of climate change. Thiessen teaches her children about it and hopes to share it with the rest of the world.
EDITOR'S NOTE: This article originally appeared in September, but we figured you may be searching for leftover recipes this time of year, so we're republishing it. Enjoy!
Tiffani Thiessen is no stranger to nostalgia. To many, like myself, who grew up watching her as Kelly Kapowski on Saved By The Bell and as Valerie Malone in Beverly Hills 90210 — two shows that dominated the teen television scene during the late '80s and early '90s — she was a symbol of the time's youth culture. But these days, Thiessen can be found making waves in the kitchen instead of scripted television.
For her second cookbook, Here We Go Again, Thiessen conjures up recipes made from what many of us already have in our refrigerators — leftovers, with a retro vibe to jog our collective memories of a simpler time.
Her recipes include a "Pizza For Breakfast Sandwich" made with leftover pizza, a fried egg, and prosciutto, and "Cornbread Skillet Sloppy Joes" which uses leftover tomato paste and shredded cheese — two things that I always seem to have in my fridge.
One specific recipe, her retro ambrosia salad made up of chunks of pineapple, cherries, clementine oranges, multicolored marshmallows, and whipped cream, is the updated version of what my aunt made for birthdays and potlucks growing up. Thiessen’s 2023 version (which currently has 74K likes on TikTok) uses fresh fruit and Greek yogurt instead of the marshmallow cream and canned fruit cocktail I ate as a child (and sometimes still crave.)
Growing up in Long Beach, her love of cooking took shape from watching the women in her family preparing meals.
“I would always watch my mother and grandmother and aunt, all the women in my family, cooking in the kitchen together,” she reminisces. “And I just wanted to be with them.”
“It was me as a little girl, wanting to hang out with the cool women in my family and doing what they were doing.”
Tiffani Thiessen from her cookbook "Here We Go Again."
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Rebecca Sanabria
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Her interest in food grew while traveling to promote her acting work, and she was regularly exposed to different cooking styles and cultures. Meanwhile, the Food Network and Cooking Channel constantly played in the background at home.
On a trip with her family one day to the Chelsea Market in New York, she noticed the Food Network offices were housed in the same building. She requested a meeting, which resulted in Dinner at Tiffani’s, which ran for three seasons on the Cooking Channel from 2015-2017, followed by her first cookbook, Pull Up a Chair: Recipes from My Family to Yours (2018).
For the love of leftovers
When she began thinking about her next book, the concept of leftovers was appealing due to how she was raised. It also presented a personal challenge because her husband, actor and artist Brady Smith, wasn't a big fan of next-day dishes.
“It was a funny book to do, to prove to him that leftovers can be cool and awesome,” Thiessen says.
As she explains, leftovers took center stage for her at the beginning of the pandemic, when a routine grocery store trip meant a potentially hazardous exposure to the COVID virus. As a result. she was forced to use what she already had in her home, trying to find ways to cook with those ingredients for as long as possible.
It was then a core memory unlocked for Thiessen. She recalled growing up with her family on a tight budget, her father working two jobs to support her and her two brothers. Her stay-at-home mom would get creative in the kitchen with whatever was on hand, looking for ways to reinvent food to save money.
The Pizza for Breakfast Sandwich.
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Rebecca Sanabria
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“Any sort of protein was usually made into some sort of awesome tacos or enchiladas, or even in [went into] our omelets the next day,” she says. Rice was another ingredient that would never go to waste, she says, her mother often using it to make rice pudding.
Another motivating factor was food waste. According to Feeding America, 119 billion pounds of food in the United States annually is wasted, translating to nearly 40% of America’s food supply.
It's also a significant contributing factor to climate change. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says the amount of carbon dioxide emissions from food waste in the U.S. each year equals the annual emissions of 42 coal-fired power plants. For Thiessen, using leftovers was not only a personal cause but an existential one.
So, her idea was to write a cookbook of recipes to help home cooks use what they already have rather than throwing food in the trash.
Childhood memories
Upon hearing the subject matter of Thiessen’s book, I was immediately intrigued. As an avid home cook, I attempt at least three to four dinners weekly for myself and my family. It also brought back some memories from my childhood as well.
I remember being constantly amazed by my father, who cooked a lot of our meals, being able to whip up whatever we had on hand, giving it a cute name such as “tofu magnifico,” a stir-fry dish that he’d throw together using leftovers from the previous night’s Chinese take out and whatever produce was on hand. In many ways, even today, I still strive to knock out a dish, short-order-cook status, on the fly.
Thiessen’s recipes in Here We Go Again have clearly been created to appeal to elder millennials and Gen-Xers like myself. The pages take on a retro-thrift store chic in their look and feel, with heavily color-saturated pictures resembling Kodachrome film with images of the prepared dishes against vintage wallpaper.
Those retro vibes led Thiessen to reach out to bookseller Matt Miller. Miller owns Kitchen Lingo in Long Beach, near Thiessen’s childhood home. Miller specializes in vintage and antiquarian cookbooks and food writing.
“I think every book, especially a cookbook, has a story to tell. When you have a cookbook and cook from it, you rarely do it for yourself. Most people cook for other people. So you have this real connection to people cooking for families. Cooking for friends, cooking for parties.” says Miller.
Retro Ambrosia Salad.
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Rebecca Sanabria
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Thiessen contacted Miller after sliding into his DMs. When he saw he had Thiessen as a new follower, he automatically thought it was a fake account. But he sent her a message when he realized it was her, not a bot. Thiessen responded, and the two quickly bonded over cooking and cookbooks.
To Miller, the concept of leftovers is a highly accessible one. “I think it makes it easier for most people to approach. Everyone has a leftover pizza slice in their fridge at some time. Everybody's got something left over that needs to be reinvented,” Miller explains.
Leftovers’ legacy
Leftover cookbooks aren’t exactly something new. Miller has a book for sale in his shop published in the 1940s titled 500 Delicious Dishes From Leftovers, compiled by the Culinary Arts Institute. For context, the difference between leftovers from the 1940s and today has much to do with the size of your refrigerator.
“If you were fortunate enough to have a lot of food left over, refrigerators weren't as big. So you had to find something to do with it. Otherwise, your food was going to go bad. People didn’t waste as much then,” says Miller.
When asked what Thiessen hopes people will take away from her cookbook, she compares it to when her husband begins one of his murals. “I try to relate to when he looks at an empty canvas with a ton of color on the floor. And I was like, where do you start? This book helps you start with what you already have in your fridge in your pantry,” she says.
Why now: A group of local officials and organizations, including Friends of Big Bear Valley, the nonprofit that runs the livestream, helped organize the “Wings Over Big Bear” weekend with a commemoration ceremony Saturday and Wildlife Education Day Sunday.
Read on ... to go inside the ceremony and hear from fans.
The Big Bear community and fans of the famous bald eagles that call the valley home are coming together this weekend to honor Jackie.
A group of local, state and federal officials and organizations, including the nonprofit behind the livestream, Friends of Big Bear Valley, helped organize the “Wings Over Big Bear” weekend with a commemoration ceremony Saturday and Wildlife Education Day Sunday.
Diane Lech came up from Carlsbad and stopped by to see the overflowing Jackie memorial at Fawnskin Freedom Park. She’s been watching the livestream since 2015, when the cameras were first installed.
“And [Jackie’s] been part of my life ever since,” Lech said, her eyes welling up with tears. “It’s heartwarming to know that she had such an effect on so many people.”
Nearly two months after Jackie's death, fans are still in mourning.
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Makenna Cramer
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LAist
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A handcrafted wooden statue of Jackie flying with a fish in her talons next to the memorial in Fawnskin Freedom Park.
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Makenna Cramer
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LAist
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A community comes together
Vanessa Bloom, a Huntington Beach resident, and her mom are regular viewers of the eagle livestream. Bloom said the ceremony feels like a coming-together at a time when there’s so much polarization and division in the world.
“Everyone's here for a common cause,” Bloom said. “There's a lot of unity and people just being with each other in a time of tragedy, which you don't really see that often, and I think that's special.”
Artist Wes Abarca spray-painting a memorial piece for Jackie on Saturday, Oct. 3 at Bear Mountain Ski Resort.
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Makenna Cramer
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LAist
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A plane drew a "J" and a heart in the sky over the crowd watching the ceremony.
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Makenna Cramer
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LAist
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About 2,000 people RSVP'd to the commemoration ceremony Saturday at Bear Mountain Ski Resort, according to organizers.
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Makenna Cramer
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LAist
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Maggie Keen, a Thousand Oaks resident, took her first trip to Big Bear in years to attend the ceremony.
“[Jackie] was just amazing,” Keen said. “Very strong, took charge of everything and was just like an incredible bird to watch her with the fledglings.”
The Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Nation kicked the ceremony off with several songs.
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Makenna Cramer
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LAist
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Audience members were invited to dance along to celebration of life songs led by the Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Nation.
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Makenna Cramer
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Ron Wood, better known as Woody, works at Captain John's Fawn Harbor & Marina by Dana Point Park in Fawnskin, where he points out the nest to fans daily.
“We all thought that she was going to come around and be brought back here, and, you know, it's pretty depressing,” Wood said. “Every single person still that comes is teary-eyed.”
Ron Wood holds up a framed photo of what he said is a young Jackie, along with her parents Ricky and Lucy. He usually has the popular YouTube livestream of the eagle nest playing in the background.
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Makenna Cramer
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Jenny Voisard, media manager for Friends of Big Bear Valley, told LAist ahead of the ceremony that the turnout shows just how the love people have for Jackie.
“A lot of people were surprised at how much they were grieving,” Voisard said. “We all still miss Jackie.”
Michael Muhm and Peggy Muhm came from Colleyville, Texas to honor Jackie in their matching eagle shirts.
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Makenna Cramer
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Rachel Mulpas and Randy Mulpas, a father-daughter duo, drove up from Ladera Ranch in Orange County.
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Makenna Cramer
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Carmina Chun and John Chun wearing "Fly High, Jackie" shirts from the Ontario Tower Buzzers' August event honoring the eagle.
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Makenna Cramer
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Joan Eminger was all smiles Saturday at Bear Mountain Ski Resort, sporting a Jackie shirt and pin.
Move over, beach reads. With the fall equinox behind us, we can now curl up with cozy autumn books.
Why now: Here are our recommendations of new titles coming from Barbara Kingsolver, Chad Harbach, Jasmine Guillory and more.
Goodbye and good riddance to the beach read. At least for this year, we can stop pretending that baking on the sand in the hot sun or tilted awkwardly on a damp plastic lounge chair by the pool is the ideal setting for reading. Now, with the fall equinox behind us, we can look forward and embrace the one true ideal season for reading: autumn.
Or we can not be so dramatic about it and just say that there are a lot of books coming out between now and the holidays. A few we've included in our round up are long-awaited follow ups to stunning entrances onto the literary scene. Others are big, ambitious projects. Others yet are versions of older works only now being translated into English. There are obviously some high-profile titles that we missed in the name of brevity but, hopefully, there are a few titles here that weren't on your radar before.
FICTION
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Mariner Books
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The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman by Deesha Philyaw (Sept. 29)
Philyaw's 2020 short story collection The Secret Lives of Church Ladies felt like a discovery. Published by a small university press, the book was brave and honest in its handling of sexuality and religion. It became such a sensation in certain corners of the literary world that you really had to wonder — what the heck has Philyaw been up to? Well, we find out soon in her first full-length novel about, well, sex, religion, gossip and marriage.
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Harper
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Partita by Barbara Kingsolver (Oct. 6)
It's Kingsolver's 19th novel. Fresh off her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Demon Copperhead, one of the most prominent voices in Appalachian writing comes out with a book about a pianist on her way to classical music stardom, until that path gets knocked off kilter. Kingsolver herself originally went to college to study classical music but never truly showed her love for it in her fiction — until now.
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Scholastic Press
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It's Only Dancing by Jasmine Guillory (Oc.t 6)
Every now and then I come across a video of a cute couple doing (or attempting to do) the Dirty Dancing lift. It's a bold move with a high-risk factor for completely eating it. Well, now Jasmine Guillory's showing similar boldness. Her upcoming book — her first YA novel — is a take on Dirty Dancing. It follows a young girl and her charming dance instructor, as they try to figure out their dance steps — and each other.
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Little, Brown and Company
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The Brightness by Chad Harbach (Oct. 27)
This is the long-awaited sequel to Harbach's acclaimed 2011 baseball/campus novel The Art of Fielding. We return to Westish College — but we put down the bats and balls and, instead, focus on sexual assault, feminism, campus politics and the high costs of speaking out.
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New Directions
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Behind the Gate & Other Stories by Amparo Dávila, translated by Audrey Harris and Matthew Gleeson (Nov. 3)
With her 2018 short story collection The Houseguest, Mexican author Amparo Dávila became a fixture in the English-speaking cult canon of weird-girl literature. Dávila died at age 92 in 2020 but a new collection of her creepy, unsettling and odd stories are coming in English this fall.
NONFICTION
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Drawn and Quarterly
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I Can't Stop Thinking About Horses and Sex by Lisa Hanawalt (Oct. 20)
A graphic memoir from Tuca & Bertie creator Lisa Hanawalt that tells you exactly what it's about in the title. And the horses bit isn't a metaphor for life or whatever, there's actually a lot in here about riding horses, taking care of horses, and how loving horses is both silly/ridiculous/expensive and, also, one of the best things in the world. OK, maybe it is a bit of a metaphor.
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New Directions
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Celeste, Daughter of the Earth and Other Early Poems by Enrique Lihn, translated byJonathan Cohen and David Unger (Oct. 20)
This book collects translated early works of the celebrated Chilean poet Enrique Lihn. And they have the full-hearted verve and drive of a younger poet. In the poem "Steadfast," the narrator speaks to the subject angrily and bitterly but ends with the lines, "I will live secretly by your side / like the corpse I've been since loving you."
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Simon Six
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Look at Me by Dustin Hoffman with Ariel Levy (Nov. 10)
Dustin Hoffman is 89 years old now. In his lifetime, he's been at the center of some of the most enduring images seared into the minds of American culture. You can picture it, can't you? Him on the bus in The Graduate. Him at the office in All The President's Men. Him and the big crocodile thing in Hook. It's a sure bet his memoir will cover at least two of those movies in depth.
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Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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Weird Era: How Pitchfork Changed Music Forever: A Memoir by Ryan Schreiber (Dec. 1)
As the founder of the music website Pitchfork, Schreiber had a front-row seat to the changing tides of music, music distribution, music criticism, the Internet, snobbery, taste, stardom, obscurity and rating art on a scale of 1-10. The book goes into the origins of Pitchfork and offers insight into its eventual sale to Condé Nast, reminding readers that there is a real person behind that review you hated.
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Penguin Press
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The Co-Creation: How Earth Made Life and Life Made Earth by Olivia Judson (Dec. 13)
You have to give props to the big swings, and explaining the origins of life on Earth is maybe one of the biggest swings you could take. Judson is an evolutionary biologist but has spent most of her career as a science writer, explaining the world and all its inhabitants to the rest of us.
Copyright 2026 NPR
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Long Beach Unified announced Thursday it expects to close Gompers and Edison elementary schools at the end of the school year, saying the campuses are underenrolled.
Why now: It’s the district’s latest effort to consolidate resources as enrollment continues to fall districtwide. LBUSD enrollment dipped below 60,000 students this year, the first time it crossed that thresholdsince the early 1980s.
Why it matters: As enrollment declines, so does school funding, and LBUSD is taking drastic measures as operating costs exceed revenue.
Long Beach Unified announced Thursday it expects to close Gompers and Edison elementary schools at the end of the school year, saying the campuses are underenrolled.
It’s the district’s latest effort to consolidate resources as enrollment continues to fall districtwide. LBUSD enrollment dipped below 60,000 students this year, the first time it crossed that thresholdsince the early 1980s.
Why the district wants to close schools
As enrollment declines, so does school funding, and LBUSD is taking drastic measures as operating costs exceed revenue. In a recent budget report, the district said it expects to draw nearly $45 million from its reserves this school year — the third year of deficit spending. Already, the district has reduced library support, mental health resources, and certificated and classified staff. Hoover Middle School closed last year due to low enrollment, the district said. Both LBUSD and the school board have signaled that more tough cuts are on the horizon; some are already here.
“It feels like a big loss,” said school board member Juan Benitez, whose district includes Edison Elementary. Yet he added that low birth rates will continue pushing enrollment down. The district and board have a fiscal responsibility to take action — not only to balance the budget, but to ensure students receive the best learning environment possible, which is difficult to maintain at schools with low capacity, he said.
Where students and teachers would go
If the school closures are approved by the board of education, the Gompers attendance boundary will be consolidated with three nearby Lakewood elementary schools: Cleveland, Holmes and MacArthur, according to a letter the district sent to families. Edison students would attend Chavez and Oropeza elementary schools, both within a mile of Edison’s downtown campus.
If families wish to send their children to different schools, they will receive priority in the school choice process, the letters added.
The campuses will not remain vacant, Benitez said. Edison may be used as a temporary site while other schools undergo modernization projects, and additional uses will be proposed for Gompers, he said. The Child Development Center currently housed at Edison will remain there for at least the next several years, he said.
Teachers on permanent contracts at Gompers and Edison will keep their jobs in the district, said Peder Larsen, president of the teachers union, and they will get precedence in school reassignments. But they may not learn their new school sites until April, once the school transfer and assignment process is underway, he said.
Families push back
The news has hit hard for families. Ashlee Napalan, an LBUSD teacher and a parent of three children at Gompers Elementary, said the news was “heartbreaking” and surprising, especially because Gompers underwent a significant remodel last year, including the installation of a new HVAC system, as well as fresh paint and new playground equipment, she said.
She described a tight-knit community at Gompers and said her children walk to school and play with other kids at the park across the street. When she told her son, a kindergartener, the news, she said he cried all night. “We’ve been really heavily involved with the school for seven years,” she said. “It’s a huge part of our lives.”
What happens next
Some parents have already begun organizing to oppose the move. A petition to keep Gompers open accrued more than 600 signatures in one day. Some parents said they plan to speak at the school board meeting on Oct. 7 when the issue will be presented to the board as an information item. The board is expected to vote on Oct. 21. Parents at each school have been invited to informational meetings in the coming month, according to the letters sent by the district.
Benitez said he is pushing for “ongoing, constant, clear responsive communication” to the families affected by these proposed changes. “The recommendation is not being taken lightly,” he said, adding that he — and the district — will be listening closely to students’ and families’ concerns.
Congress is scrambling to show that it understands voter concerns about AI data centers and their potential impact on electricity rates. But answering the question of how much of those costs will be shouldered by residential utility customers is surprisingly difficult to answer.
Why now: On Capitol Hill this week, Republicans have been trying to push through the Ratepayer Protection Act, sponsored by Ohio Republican Sen. Jon Husted. The bill would have state utilities consider holding "large-load" customers responsible for the increased costs. Several other data center and AI-related bills are at various stages in the legislative process.
Ahead of the midterm elections, Congress is scrambling to show that it understands voter concerns about AI data centers and their potential impact on electricity rates. But answering the question of how much of those costs will be shouldered by residential utility customers is surprisingly difficult to answer.
That uncertainty is at the heart of a growing fight on Capitol Hill, as lawmakers advance competing proposals aimed at protecting ratepayers in a debate that often belies the complexity of the underlying economics.
On Capitol Hill this week, Republicans have been trying to push through the Ratepayer Protection Act, sponsored by Ohio Republican Sen. Jon Husted. The bill would have state utilities consider holding "large-load" customers responsible for the increased costs.
Husted is in a heated reelection campaign against Democrat Sherrod Brown, who lost his Senate seat in 2024. Brown has made Husted's past support of data centers in Ohio a major campaign issue. The bill easily passed the House in September with strong bipartisan support.
Senate Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer opposes the measure, saying its protections for ratepayers are voluntary. Instead, Schumer is promoting the GRID Savings Act, a similar bill authored by New Mexico Democrat Sen. Martin Heinrich, which he says has more teeth.
The question of how much of the energy and grid costs are being borne by ratepayers is a complicated one and has no universal answer, experts tell NPR. They say it varies by utility and state, but that in the end residential electricity customers will pay for a share of the AI buildout.
By one estimate, Maryland customers, for example, pay somewhere around $168 to $216 more per year on their electricity bills primarily due to the data center boom.
"We're talking tens to hundreds of millions of dollars [of infrastructure] that are being built by these local utilities," says Connor Waldoch, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Grid Status, which focuses on making electricity-market data easier to access and understand. "In many cases, it is just ultimately going to end up in customers' bills."
Tracking the impact of data center growth on residential bills isn't easy, however. How much of the increase is passed on to residential customers and when, depends on utilities' power-purchasing contracts, retail rates and regulatory decisions about who pays, according to Lucy Qiu, a professor at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland.
PJM is a regional transmission organization that coordinates the electricity grid and wholesale power market across 13 states and the District of Columbia. It supplies power to Northern Virginia, home to the largest concentration of data centers in the world. PJM's Independent Market Monitor estimates that data centers have cost their 67 million ratepayers about $29 billion over roughly the past two years.
"Everyone pays those costs," says Ari Peskoe, director of the Harvard Electricity Law Initiative. "They're spread across the region to every business and resident that has an electricity meter."
An Amazon Web Services data center is shown situated near single-family homes in Stone Ridge, Va.
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Nathan Howard
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Getty Images
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How to determine who the grid infrastructure benefits?
Data center growth can push up wholesale costs of energy by increasing demand. This determines how much generating capacity utilities and regional grid operators need to secure, Qiu says. There are also costs with building new power lines, substations and other infrastructure to connect data centers to the grid. Determining how much of that exclusively serves data centers — and how much also benefits other customers — is part of the difficulty in determining who gets the bill, she says.
"It really depends on the scale of the upgrade and also how utilities are doing the accounting of that different share, whether it's being used solely by the data centers or also being shared by other customers," Qiu says.
No "single, clean number"
Even so, "a single, clean number" that applies nationwide is just not possible, Harvard's Peskoe says, because "a lot of the data about how much particular data centers are paying is hidden behind non-disclosure agreements."
Those NDAs have become a major sore spot on the local level, as residents opposed to new data centers call out local officials for the secrecy that has surrounded many deals. A study last year by the University of Mary Washington found that NDAs had been signed in 80% of Virginia localities where there were existing, approved or proposed data centers.
In an email to NPR, Jeremy L. Slayton, a spokesman for Dominion Energy, which serves Loudoun County, Va., home to about 250 data centers, said, "We recover costs for distribution and transmission infrastructure from customers."
"These assets are core to the reliable electric service we provide our customers. All costs we recover from customers are reviewed and approved by the Virginia State Corporation Commission," he said, referring to the independent state agency that regulates public utilities.
Added costs of building out in a hurry
There is still another factor at play, University of Maryland's Qiu says. The data center industry is in a hurry and waiting for new power-generation technologies doesn't seem to be in the cards. As a result, to meet the demand, utility companies will likely need to opt for less efficient power plants and those costs will be passed onto consumers over time, as well.
One other consideration is optics, Waldoch of Grid Status says. Big customers like AI data centers pay less per kilowatt hour for power than residential customers do. Think of it as a volume discount. In the current environment where 70% of Americans are worried that data centers will increase their electricity bills, Waldoch says, "If you're saying, hey, this data center is actually paying a lot less for electricity than you are, even though it matters much less to them ... it's not like that's palatable for a lot of people at this point."
Benefits of the AI buildout
But not all price increases in recent years are linked to data centers, Qiu says.
"The fuel cost ... is a very important factor," she says and some of those new substations and power lines were going to need to be replaced anyway due to things like extreme weather events.
Qiu also notes that the U.S. power grid needs upgrades to accommodate higher demand for things like electric vehicles. The AI boom "can accelerate the upgrade of the grid infrastructure," she says.
There's also evidence, Qui says, that resiliency — the ability to survive high-impact events such as extreme heat and to recover from outages — is better for people living near data centers due to the robust infrastructure those facilities require. "So if there's a data center, it actually helps … improve the local grid reliability [and] reduce the power outages," says Qui.
