Angela Kinsey’s Real-Life ‘Office’ Food Habit (Exclusive)

• Angela Kinsey’s new cookbook You Can Make This! celebrates family recipes, love and granola.
• The Office star shares her daily wellness habits, from morning hydration to regular tennis sessions.
• Kinsey opens up about aging, perimenopause awareness and embracing each stage of life with gratitude.

When Angela Kinsey talks about food, you can’t help but picture her The Office alter ego Angela Martin, who has a picky palate and is known to “eat like a squirrel” on the show. The latter statement isn’t too far from the truth, Kinsey tells me.

“I always have almonds or nuts,” she laughs. “My husband makes amazing granola. We call it ‘Josh’s granola.’ In [our] cookbook, it’s called Bakery-Style Granola, but it’ll always be Josh’s granola to me. It’s so good! He’ll make a Tupperware full of it, and I’ll put a handful of it in my yogurt.”

The cookbook she’s referring to is You Can Make This!, co-authored by Kinsey and her husband, Joshua Snyder. Released this week, the book features more than 100 family recipes. The book came naturally, as Kinsey and Snyder share a love for the same foods as well as for each other. One ingredient you should expect to see sprinkled through the savory recipes in this collection? Cheese, in all of its forms.

“I really can’t get through a day without eating cheese. I love cheese,” Kinsey confesses. “If I show up at your house and you’re like, ‘Do you want some cheese?’—that is the way to my heart.” When I asked her to name her favorite type of cheese, she was delightfully torn: “I love all cheese. I love stinky cheese [but] fontina with crackers and a little bit of honey? Please, I’m in heaven.”

Since her time as a sitcom regular, Kinsey’s routine has evolved in ways that reflect her stage of life and a shift to focus on wellness. At 54, Kinsey is focusing on healthier rituals, from her lunch choices to her go-to exercise.

How Lunchtime Has Changed

“When I was younger and it was just me, I would eat out a lot,” she reflects, sitting in her home that she shares with her husband and their blended family of five. Now, if she’s going to record an episode of the Office Ladies podcast with Jenna Fischer, she takes dinner leftovers or brings a packed lunch, which may be a salad with grilled chicken or a cup of lemon orzo soup. 

“Before, I would have just grabbed something from the drive-thru or from the deli counter,” she confesses. “It’s kind of funny because when you’re really young, you take a packed lunch from home that your mom or dad made you, then in your 20s it’s kind of a free-for-all, and now I’ve gone back to the beginning where I make myself a little lunch and I have a little lunchbox.”

Morning Rituals

With three kids at home, mornings are a blur, but Kinsey still carves out a few grounding moments for herself.

“There’s really one thing I do for myself every morning, and it’s such a simple thing,” she says. “I drink a glass of water before I have anything else, because I [used to] go straight to caffeine. So I try to drink a full glass of water if I can, or at least half of a big glass.” She shows the rough measurements of her glass with her hands, and it’s about the size of her head, so the star is definitely working to stay hydrated each morning. And when she is ready for caffeine, she opts for tea: “I love Darjeeling. That’s my favorite.”

For Kinsey, incorporating simple forms of movement into her day is a priority, and it starts in the morning. 

“I do these arm windmills, I rotate my arms in the air and then I pat myself,” she explains. “I start at my shoulders and I pat and I go all the way down my legs. It just wakes my body up.” To stretch her legs, Kinsey utilizes an incline board that she keeps in her kitchen. “If we’re hanging out in the kitchen and I’m chopping something or talking to Josh while he’s cooking, I stand on that incline board and stretch out my calves.”

Her Favorite Way to Move

But her go-to exercise is tennis. Kinsey plays four times a week, and she raves that it’s her “absolute favorite thing.” She picked up the *love* for tennis in childhood, a love she attributes to her mom.

“I’m a child of the ’70s, so we didn’t have devices; I didn’t have an iPad,” she jokes. “My mom played tennis and I would go to the court with her. I was probably 6 or 7 years old, and she got me a little junior racket, handed me a ball and said ‘Go hit on the backboard,’ and that’s what I would do while she had her lesson.”

She reconnected with the sport in recent years and now plays club women’s cardio tennis on the regular and considers it a part of her identity.

“I feel like tennis has always been a part of my life,” Kinsey reflects. “I went through a phase where I played a lot when I was younger, but when I was a young mom and working, it was a little harder. I’ve gotten back into it, but it’s always been there.”

What She Wishes She Knew About Aging

Kinsey admits that aging came like a wave, and she wishes she had more information about women’s health before she was mid-hot flash.

“I wish I knew more about perimenopause before I just woke up one day completely drenched in sweat and was like, What is wrong with me?” she chuckles. “I’m really thankful that now, there’s so much more information, and there’s actually a dialogue. There’s a conversation, and you see people like Halle Berry being super vocal about it. I’m thankful for that, because it is a chapter of your life as a woman that wasn’t really talked about a lot.”

Through our healthy aging collection, Kinsey stands in Berry’s shoes as a voice for aging gracefully. She thinks about her daughter and says, “I feel like when my daughter reaches this age, there’s just going to be so much more information and ways to deal with that life transition.”

What advice would she give to her younger self? “Just enjoy your youth.”

“There’s that expression: youth is wasted on the young,” she explains. “If I could tell my younger self one thing, I would say to just appreciate this body you have.”