The New Mexico Ingredient That Jesse Tyler Ferguson Can't Live Without - Exclusive

Even though "Modern Family" star Jesse Tyler Ferguson currently resides in California, his foodie heart will always remain in New Mexico. While promoting his new podcast "Dinner's on Me," which features different celebrity guests like Padma Lakshmi and Marcus Samuelsson on each episode, the award-winning actor told us in an exclusive interview that growing up in Albuquerque gave him a deep affinity for the cuisine there.

"I love Mexican food," he said. "New Mexican food, specifically, is very different than the Mexican food that we get out here, so I definitely crave a lot of the flavors from back home."

Ferguson explained that he misses it so much that he even orders a specific salsa from a restaurant there that he can't get enough of. "I have tons and tons of jars of Sadie's salsa in my cabinet," he admitted. With this in mind, it may not come as a complete surprise that he enjoys trying to recreate those meals in his own kitchen and that his go-to ingredient is hatch green chiles.

Jesse Tyler Ferguson revealed that when he cooks with hatch green chiles, it feels like a throwback to his hometown. "There are a lot of hatch green chiles in New Mexican cuisine," he said. "It could go in anything from scrambled eggs to green chiles and chicken enchiladas. They're great on chili cheese toast."

He explained that these types of ingredients also inspired his cookbook "Food Between Friends." It includes recipes like hatch green chile and cheese empanadas, steak sweet frites, and carne asada.

"The cookbook that I wrote with my friend Julie Tanous — she's from Alabama, so a lot of the recipes that she contributed were Southern," Ferguson said. "A lot of the recipes I contributed were stuff that was inspirations from the food that I ate growing up in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Then there were a lot of the recipes that we created that were a combination of both."

"Dinner's on Me" premiered May 23, 2023, and will run new episodes each week on all major podcast platforms, including Apple, Spotify, and Stitcher.