Longtime Today show weatherman and anchor, Al Roker, just released a cookbook of family recipes with his chef daughter called Al Roker’s Recipes to Live By...but it took some convincing.

When Courtney Roker Laga asked her dad if he wanted to write a cookbook together, he knew his answer immediately: No thanks! Fifty years into a busy career, Al wrote a couple cookbooks years ago and knows how much work goes into them. But finally, they made a deal: Al would write the headnotes if Courtney develops and tests all the recipes.

Al tells host Rachel Belle about a breakfast tradition that started with his dad, that he carried on with his own teenaged son. Several of the cookbook’s breakfast recipes call for American cheese, so Rachel called up a cheese scientist (with a Ph.D. in cheese!) to find out what American cheese actually is, and in the process learns that it wasn’t even invented in America!

And Rachel couldn’t resist asking the weatherman what he likes to cook when it’s raining, snowing, sunny and the perfect spring day.

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Watch Rachel’s Cascade PBS TV show The Nosh with Rachel Belle!