Place the sheet in the oven and bake for about 12 minutes or until the sugar has started to caramelize. Flip the bacon, brush with the remaining maple syrup, and sprinkle with the remaining brown sugar. Bake for 12 to 15 minutes more, depending on your desired crispness. Thiessen: I have a good question for you. If you could cook for anybody, who would it be that you haven't cooked for yet? I know you've cooked for a lot of celebrities and stuff. DiGiovanni: It is interesting. It's been interesting for me also — and I'm sure [for] many people — to watch how the whole space is evolving. What do you think about all of it, the fact that TV is not fizzling away, but it's different than it used to be?

Thiessen: Yeah. Well, it's where it started for me too. It was all the women — they were always in the kitchen, and I wanted to be with all the cool women in my family cooking. DiGiovanni: Absolutely. My mom certainly could use a crash course — she'd be upset to hear this — on how to treat your leftovers well. My dad, too, makes a lot of jokes about the leftovers we had growing up, but at the same time, it's one of those things that made me appreciate food every time we had it. Now, that makes me so conscious about all this stuff. For the sandwich: Place the tomato slices in a single layer on a work surface and season with salt and pepper to taste. DiGiovanni: Yeah. So I've gotten into trying to figure out how to make herbs last as long as they possibly can.DiGiovanni: Stuff like that is fun. Those are one of the things that for me, for a long time, would go bad all the time, and I would throw out these old, wilted dill or parsley or cilantro, whatever it was. Thiessen: I like the stories that go along with the food. You can see I have rooms of cookbooks all throughout my house; it's not just in the kitchen. I love buying cookbooks, because they're almost like coffee table books to me, to a certain degree, but also, I like reading the stories of where the food or the recipe came from. I read them like a normal book. I do know there's a lot of people out there — I know they're not all like that — but that's what cookbooks do for me. DiGiovanni: You should look into it. It's actually currently held by someone — I live in Boston; it's held by someone from Massachusetts — but you might be able to — It’s filled with techniques that will last a lifetime, QR codes explaining everything in detail, and great food. I still don’t have my IKEA bookshelves but I’ll be buying this book!

I am the type of person that will get a cookbook from the library, find 2-3 recipes I like but will never make and then return it. I’m also a person that can’t cook unless I’m following a recipe. DiGiovanni: The dough melted off the dumpling. It was horrible. We tried to make this big contraption with a big box that was a steamer, and it was going to be a 50- to 75-pound dumpling, and then it melted.

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DiGiovanni: Well, I was going to tell you — you have a lot of cookbooks in your house. They have a record for most cookbooks.

Tip:You should always bake your bacon. It makes for a far better final product. No more stovetop bacon please, unless absolutely necessary. DiGiovanni: I know we have — it sounds like — many mutual friends, and we've wanted to meet forever. I appreciate the scope of this cookbook, and I look forward to sharing this book with my soon-to-graduate children to have references for successful cooking later in life. Thiessen: I know you're a man, and it's hard to understand that. But every woman would understand if they've had a child.DiGiovanni: Mine would often be dinner — cooking dinner or making the meals, which everyone was very happy about. Eventually, most people in my family caught on to the fact that it didn't feel like a chore for me, and then I would get looped into the garbage and looped into cleaning the dog's bed out and that kind of thing, but that was great for a while. I got away with that being my chore. DiGiovanni: They're very fun. We recently did our ninth one. It's not out yet or anything, but that was our best planned-out one so far. We felt really good with the whole thing. It looked perfect. We were very, very happy with it. We just did our ninth one. We're definitely getting better at getting all the planning in place. DiGiovanni: I was a tiny little baby sponge at that time, and then I've tried to stay a sponge all the way through. Using a pastry brush, lightly coat one side of each slice of bread with mayonnaise, about 1/2 tablespoon per slice.