‘Sips, Sides and Siblings’

Sisters Courtney Harrow and Whitney Wolder Launch the Hey Sis, Eat This Podcast

By SARAH SHMERLING | Editor-in-Chief

When it comes to family and food, everybody has a story to tell—and some experiences are more universal than one would think.

El Medio Bluffs resident Courtney Harrow and her sister Whitney Wolder created the Hey Sis, Eat This podcast, which officially launched January 26, to highlight just that.

Billed as a podcast “filled with sips, sides and siblings,” Hey Sis, Eat This is a “celebration of food, entertaining and funny family tales.” Each week, the hosts discuss the hits and misses of their weekly menus, who they have entertained, and then it’s time to “dish” with their sibling guests about their own moms and treasured family recipes.

“That’s the heart,” Harrow shared. “It’s just celebrating women, celebrating food and having a good time.”

The podcast will cover everything from holiday traditions to “family vacations, sibling squabbles, and the best and worst of what appeared on childhood dinner tables.”

Growing up in Texas, the sisters shared that their parents had parties “all the time.” During their childhood years, they recalled parties on the weekends, with people over “cooking and drinking and having a good time.”

When their parents divorced when Wolder and Harrow were in their 20s, they said their mom, previously a “dedicated stay-at-home mom,” found herself in need of a job, which is when she started cooking for friends, leading to the eventual launch of her catering company.

“When we reflect on it, it’s really inspiring to us that a woman at 55 years old said, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I’m going to start a cooking business, I’m going to start catering,’” Harrow shared. “And she created a business at 55, that’s close to retirement age.”

Harrow and Wolder were initially inspired to launch Hey Sis, Eat This by their mom, Margaret, AKA Momma Ashley—“who happens to know a thing or two about eatin‘, drinkin‘ and tellin‘ stories.”

“We’re very, very close sisters,” Wolder explained. “We’ve always wanted to collaborate on something together, and we love to cook. We’re constantly talking about what we cooked last night, what we messed up last night. And in addition to that, we have a hilarious mom.”

The two sisters trade stories about Momma Ashley, oftentimes beginning with “Oh, God, you won’t believe what Mom said yesterday” or “I was at Mom’s house and she did this, and it was hilarious.”

When Wolder and Harrow were in their 20s, they lived together in Los Angeles and had a pretend cooking show.

“While we were cooking, we would joke around and we’d mess things up, and we’d be like, ‘Cooking with the Ashley sisters,” Harrow said. “It was this whole thing.”

Harrow explained this was also around the time where the two of them started hosting “elaborate, massive” parties, tapping into their mom’s catering background and their family’s history of cooking.

“Whitney and I just love it,” Harrow said. “Like we always say [food] is our love language.”

This is the sisters’ first foray into the world of podcasting, which Wolder shared they are learning how to do as they go.

“We’re doing it all ourselves,” Wolder said. “We’ve been working on this since December of 2021, and we’ve just thrown ourselves into it.”

When asked what readers can expect when they tune in, Wolder said “they can expect to laugh a lot.”

“We want to bring the humor and we want to bring things that are really relatable to everyone,” she continued.

When it comes to finding guests, Hey Sis Eat This will highlight some of the sisters’ friends, as well as people they have met. They explained that they look for “great storytellers,” but ultimately they have found that when people start taking that trip down memory lane, everybody’s story is interesting.

“What we’ve found is when we’ve been telling funny stories about our mom to other friends, they’re like, ‘Oh, God, my mom does that too,’” Wolder shared. “So we’re like, ‘Wow, everybody’s got a story to tell about their mom and what it was like growing up at their dinner table, and what the worst meal they ever made or what their favorite dish was.’”

Harrow shared they feel “incredibly blessed” to hear the stories that their guests tell about what their mothers did to make their families run, from cooking to gardening, crafts with their kids or setting up elaborate birthday parties.

“It’s the dedication and the creativity that went into shaping these kids into who they are today,” Harrow continued. “And it’s inspiring. It gives me the chills.”

With Harrow in the Palisades, where she has lived since 2018, and Wolder based in Dallas, three houses down the street from Momma Ashley, the two said when they are together in person, they record—which is their preference—but they also have done interviews over Zoom.

Via the podcast’s website, listeners can find recipes that tie into episodes to try out, like “Momma Ashley’s Spicy Pecans” or the “Hey Sis Signature Dirty Martini.”

“Since we first shared an apartment in LA 20-ish years ago, we’ve been drinking dirty martinis,” according to the recipe. “This recipe is nothing new, but we learned from one of our podcast guests a while back that if you order this at a restaurant, be sure to ask for a slightly dirty martini with a side of olive juice, that way you get [more] vodka.”

The sisters will also run a hotline, where guests can call in with their “kitchen conundrums” to be addressed on an episode of the show.

At publication time, three episodes of Hey Sis, Eat This had been released, which are put out weekly on Thursdays. The episodes will alternate between being a conversation between Harrow and Wolder, and then featuring an interview with sibling guests.

“We all just kind of gather around and laugh and celebrate these wonderful women who raised all of us and are kind of that sideline hero that we might not have appreciated when we were younger,” Wolder shared about the podcast. “But now we’re like God, they’re incredible and we’re lucky to have had them and raised us and given us all these amazing memories.”

For more information or to listen, visit heysiseatthis.com.