What is this?

Somehow or another, I’ve come to really enjoy cooking and baking, at least in a domestic setting. I have no aspirations to work in or open a restaurant. (Though maybe if I’m ever a billionaire, I’ll try to start a nationwide chain of genuinely good French bakeries.)

Through most of 2020 and 2021 as the coronavirus pandemic swept the world, I got into a nice rhythm doing meal planning and sharing it with the world through a newsletter. Especially in the first months, I had to eat at home, and I wanted to minimize grocery trips. As the pandemic began winding down, that became harder: I don’t want to be that person who takes photos of everything at restaurants, or share my opinions of my friends’ cooking online.

I thought about trying to write a cookbook, but instead I’ve settled on setting up my second attempt at a food blog. I’m hoping the lessons I learned through my pandemic newsletter experience will translate into something more successful than my first try at this.

Why online?

While I still think it would be fun to publish a cookbook one day, as I was thinking about it, the online medium really is great. It can always change, adapt, and be updated as I learn more, or my tastes change. It also means I don’t have to be confined to recipes, and can perhaps mix in other content that’s more timely.

Recipes and more

I’ll be posting recipes for sure. But I’d like to think of them less as the “one true” way to do something, and more as a slightly more formalized version of the paper notebooks I’ve been keeping for years. Except the recipes to evolve and variations to emerge over time.

I’m also hoping to post other interesting food-related content. What that is, I’m not sure. Perhaps cookbook or restaurant reviews. Perhaps

Quirks and foibles

On the metric system

You’ll probably notice that my default is to metric units, despite being in the US. That’s because the metric system is great. All the units are base 10, so it’s incredibly easy to scale ingredients up and down. If you need to make four batches of cookies for a party, no need to laboriously measure out 12 teaspoons of baking powder or figure out how that translates into “cups.” Just multiply and proceed!

Get yourself a kitchen scale, and get on board.

On dietary restrictions

I have no qualms with “dietary restrictions” per se. To some degree, we all have dietary restrictions to the extent we simply don’t like certain foods. I’m not a huge fan of extremely funky cheeses, for instance. If we’re honest, people who are vegetarian or vegan are probably deserve their feelings of moral smugness.

Accordingly, where possible I’ve tried to tag recipes with annotations like “veggie” to indicate they don’t contain meat, fish, or poultry.

On the other hand, I don’t have a lot of time for fad diets or restrictions based on flimsy to non-existent evidence. You will not find a gluten-free label because I have enough faith in people with genuine gluten intolerance to also have the intelligence to check whether the recipe calls for wheat flour.

Remix, considerately

This entire site — even the source code itself — is open-source. You’re more than welcome to do whatever you want with it with a couple of restrictions. First, don’t take what I’ve done and sell it. Non-commercial use only, please. Second, please credit me.