About Me

I was born in Indiana to a mother who loved to cook and considered her kitchen a laboratory to try any and every interesting or unusual recipe that she came across. Her five children were her guinea pigs, and when a recipe turned out, we ate very well. When a recipe didn’t turn out, we ate a lot of pizza.

Since moving to New York, I’ve been recreating that dynamic among my chosen family in my little kitchen in Brooklyn. Each of my cookbooklets is a distillation of a really good night when everybody ate very well, when the recipes I’d been tinkering with finally came together.

The series is as much a memoir as it is a collection of recipes. Embedded within each page are the kinds of things I like to cook—inspired by travels around the world and New York City, rooted in my friends and family, and grounded in how I think about cooking: solving the puzzle for maximizing flavor and minimizing waste.

My hope is that these stories inspire people to take pleasure in home cooking with good friends.

About Menus

For a long time I’ve wanted to write a cookbook, but I’d thought of it as a project best saved for retirement: after a lifetime of cooking, here are my favorite recipes. Blah, blah, blah.

But then two things happened.

First, I came up with what I thought was an interesting idea, which was to build the cookbook as a series of menus that, in themselves, would be a collection of recipes that play off of one another. This you’ll recognize in Menus. The menus would be strung together in a “year in the kitchen” fashion, with intervening pages dedicated to preserves that are used throughout the book. This should be recognizable, as well. Then, “weeknight” meals would be thrown into the mix that play off the more complete meal sets. This, too, you’ll recognize.

Second, my dad died. Between the moments of grief I had a moment of clarity. “Why wait,” I thought.

And third, I suppose, I came up with the idea to serialize the cookbook. Pulling together a 300 page book at this time in my life is a nonstarter. But 36 pages at a time, well that’s a smaller mountain to climb.

So here we are. Menus is a slightly more digestible version of my original idea, and rather more adorable. Each cookbooklet is intended to mimic a dinner party. We eat and we drink, for sure, but we also tell stories and talk about what’s on our minds, be it current events, our work, or our family.

Enjoy!