The Women Books & More’s Podcast

What is Snowflake 2025 and why do whiskey fans camp out overnight to snag a bottle?

Stranahan's Whiskey Distillery & Cocktail Bar is having a big party—Stranahan’s Snowflake Village Festival—December 5^th and December 6^th to celebrate the release of Snowflake 2025. The party is at the distillery in Denver. (200 S. Kalamath Street).

Hundreds of Strana-fans from across the country come to Denver for this event. They camp outside at the distillery to secure a bottle of the coveted Snowflake whiskey—released on Saturday morning and sells out in just hours. It may be cold outside but there are food trucks, bands and DJs, dancing, and whiskey tastings, of course.

If you are listening to this podcast after Saturday, December 6^th, this year’s party is over. You’ll want to mark your calendar for the first week of December 2026.

But you can always stop by Stranahan’s for a distillery tour, a cocktail in the cocktail bar and (for sure) sign up to be part of the volunteer bottling crew. This is such a cool thing. You work on the bottling line, have a nice lunch and get to take a bottle home as payment for your labors. Nice deal, no? Happens a few times a month. There is a waiting list.

We talk today with Justin Aden, Head Blender at Stranahan’s American Single Malt Whiskey who tells us how whiskey is made and how to drink it. Turns out there are no rules on how to drink it—with ice, with water, with soda, in a cocktail or just straight up.

For more information: stranahans.com

We chat with EllynAnne Geisel, the apron archaeologist. Yes. That is a thing.

The lowly apron is making a comeback.

The Guardian (British daily newspaper) notes: Emma Corrin wore a pink apron to a recent premiere, while Richard E Grant looked like a kinky fishmonger in a leather apron on the Miu Miu catwalk. Everyone on The Bear wears aprons. Younger generations have embraced the Cottagecore aesthetic—gardening, bee keeping, pie baking—and that usually involves wearing an apron.

Best-selling author of The Apron Book and ultimate apron collector, EllynAnne Geisel (she’s an apron archaeologist), chats with us about aprons. She’s collected more than 600 aprons and says that each one tells a story about the woman who wore it.

And…she’s created Tie One On Day, a national holiday for the day before Thanksgiving. https://www.nationaldaycalendar.com/national-day/national-tie-one-on-day-day-before-thanksgiving

Connect with EllynAnne @ellynanne_apronluv or https://www.facebook.com/ellynanne/

I wrote a piece about EllynAnne for The Saturday Evening Post. Here is a link: https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2023/11/aprons-the-ties-that-bind/

You can buy The Apron Book: Making, Wearing, and Sharing a Bit of Cloth and Comfort on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and many other online retailers and independent bookstores.

 

“Which came first…the chicken or the egg?” Jacques Pepin has the answer.

Beloved chef Jacques Pepin joins us. He’s 90 and still cooking up a storm. And he has a gorgeous new cookbook THE ART OF JACQUES PEPIN—full of his favorite recipes and his own artwork. He likes to paint chickens…and to cook chickens and eggs. When asked “Which came first…the chicken or the egg?” He doesn’t hesitate. “The egg, of course.”

We caught up with him in his kitchen. He was sitting in front of a wall of pots and pans—all different sizes and shapes. There must have been 30.

As a young man in the French Navy, Jacques was chef to three French presidents, including the formidable Charles de Gaulle. What did de Gaulle like to eat. Simple food…like chicken.

Toward the end of my chat with Jacques, I wished him a happy birthday. He thanked me and said “I wish I were 80 again.” 

You can catch up with him and follow his easy recipes (in and out of the kitchen in 15 minutes of less). Especially his “budget Tuesdays” posts.

On facebook. https://www.facebook.com/jacquespepinfoundation/

To see Pepin’s art:  https://jacquespepinart.com/

TO DIE FOR—A Cookbook of Gravestone Recipes

Recipes written on tombstones. Who knew this was even a thing?

Most headstones list names and dates, in rare cases they include something much more personal: beloved family recipes permanently etched in stone.

Rosie Grant traveled the world to research and write a cookbook full of culinary epitaphs from across the globe—spritz cookies from Brooklyn, chicken casserole from Wisconsin, tea biscuits from Nova Scotia, fudge from Salt Lake City, meatloaf from Texas….

The list goes on—40 recipes--from soup (from Buffalo, New York) to nut rolls (from Israel).

On this journey, Rosie discovered that food is a love language and that memories of meals shared as a family are passed down through generations.

Just in time for the holiday season, TO DIE FOR invites us to gather round the table, celebrate the legacies that live on in family recipes and to ask ourselves the question at the heart of it all: If you could be remembered through just one dish, what would it be?

Check out Rosie’s popular @Ghostly.Archives on Instagram

Everett Potter talks about 100 Train Journeys of a Lifetime + Paris tips

I love trains and travel by train at every opportunity. The Canadian from Toronto to Vancouver, the Eurostar from London to Paris, the mighty Indian Pacific from Adelaide to Perth. So…I was thrilled to hear that Everett Potter had just written a big and comprehensive book about trains, 100 Train Journeys of a Lifetime: The World’s Ultimate Rides.

Let me tell you a little about Everett Potter. He writes for numerous A-list publications like The Wall Street Journal, Conde Nast Traveler, Forbes, National Geographic, and he hosts Everett Potter’s Travel Report, a highly acclaimed digital site. He is also the expert host on select National Geographic Expeditions Train Journeys.

I was pleased to hear Everett say that train travel (especially overnight trains) is becoming hugely popular, especially in Europe. Perhaps it’s the convenience of traveling from city center to city center. Perhaps it is the romance of historic journeys inspired by Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. Yes, there still is an Orient Express—two of them, in fact. Very luxe.

To buy the book: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/789609/100-train-journeys-of-a-lifetime-by-everett-potter/

To read Everett Potter’s Travel Report: everettpotter.com

For info on National Geographic Expeditions Train Journeys:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/expeditions/destinations/europe/train/swiss-italy-train/

A conversation with best-selling author Caroline Alexander

Caroline Alexander is the author of internationally best-selling Skies of Thunder, The Endurance, The Bounty, and other works of literary non-fiction. In 2015, she published an acclaimed translation of Homer's Iliad, the first English translation (form the original Greek) of a Homeric poem by a woman.

Skies of Thunder: The Deadly World War II Mission Over the Roof of the World is a tale about the pilots who flew fickle, untested aircraft through monsoons and enemy fire, with inaccurate maps and only primitive navigation technology. There were deadly crashes (more than 600) and astonishing feats of courage and survival.

The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition is a truly riveting account of Shackleton’s ill-fated 1914 Antarctic expedition…one of the last of the great adventures of what is now called the Heroic Age of Explorations. The plan was to cross the Antarctic on foot. Only 80 miles from Endurance’s destination, the ship was caught in thick pack ice that splintered and sank it.

Caroline’s book includes never-before published images by Frank Hurley. You can see some of them here: https://www.historyhit.com/photos-of-shackletons-endurance/

For more about Caroline Alexander: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/310/caroline-alexander/

Still Alice by Lisa Genova from the archives

Since the moment I chatted with Lisa Genova about her new book, More or Less Maddy, I’ve been getting messages from you all, asking me to air the interview we did a few years ago when Lisa wrote Still Alice. Here it is—by popular demand.

For those who don’t know Still Alice, here’s the story: Dr. Alice Howland is a renowned linguistics professor at Columbia University. When words begin to escape her and she starts becoming lost on her daily jogs, Alice must come face-to-face with a devastating diagnosis: early-onset Alzheimer's disease. The once-vibrant woman struggles to hang on to her sense of self for as long as possible and her three grown children watch helplessly as their mother disappears more and more with each passing day.

Julianne Moore played the part of Alice Howland in the 2014 film Still Alice and won several awards, including the Academy Award for Best Actress. You can stream it on Amazon and Apple TV.

For more about Lisa Genova lisagenova.com 

For another podcast about early-onset Alzheimer’s, scroll down to find Barry Petersen’s conversation about Jan’s Story.

Is Everything We Know about Sacagawea Wrong?

Here’s what we think we know about arguably the most famous Native American women who ever lived: she was interpreter and guide for Lewis & Clark; she traveled 1000s of miles from North Dakota to the Pacific Ocean and she died tragically young.

 

But…what if everything we know about Sacagawea is wrong…including how we pronounce her name…

 

Sandra and Dennis Fox sit down to talk with us. They are married scholars, now retired from the educations division at the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

 

Dennis is a directly descended from Sacagawea.

 

 Our Story of Eagle Woman: Sacagawea: They Got It Wrong, aims to set the record straight through oral histories, family testimony and even DNA evidence. And uipends everything we think we know about Sacagawea.

 

For more:

Books by Sandra and Dennis Fox:  https://www.specialbooks.com/namericans.htm

The New York Times article about Sacagawea: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/magazine/sacagawea-biography-history.html