A Cozy Kitchen | The Dinner Special podcast

021: Cindy Ensley: How Cooking is Where Practical Meets the Creative and Pretty

April 3, 2015 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

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Hungry Girl por Vida

Cindy is many things, a home cook, a baker, an avid doodler, and new mom. And on Hungry Girl por Vida, she shares all the things that she loves with her readers. Her work has also been featured in magazines all over the world.

I’m so psyched to have Cindy Ensley of Hungry Girl por Vida on the show today.

On Starting Her Blog:

I was in college when I started reading food blogs, and I graduated and spent a year actually working the same job that I was at during college, and just being bored and uninspired. I thought, maybe I should brush up my cooking skills. I was engaged and going to get married in a couple of years from then, so I just decided to document it and see where it went.

It started out really small and casual with a point-and-shoot and has grown from there. And that started in 2008, so it’s been a while.

On Her Passion for Food:

I come from a family of really great home cooks. And actually my aunt and my mom have a catering business, so food’s central in our family gatherings. I just grew up around it and have always loved to eat, so cooking goes hand-in-hand with that.

I always wanted to help, but I was more of an observer. I was too slow and not skilled enough to be helping very much, so I just observed and went from there.

They don’t do as much home cooking now that, you know, I’m older and my cousins and my brother are all older. None of us are at home anymore, so what inspired me to start cooking for myself was because I had to.

But, I mean, seeing them in the kitchen, I used to help with some of the dinners that they would put on. I always thought it was super fun and my aunt would let me decorate the dessert plates, which I thought was the coolest thing ever. I think just being around it definitely inspired me.

For Christmas this year my parents were here and my brother and his kids and stuff, so I got to cook for them and that was really fun.

On Cooking Being Where Practical Meets the Creative and Pretty:

Personally, I like to eat things that are very visually appealing, so I mean, even if it’s as simple as scattering some fresh herbs across a dish at dinner with just me and my husband. I’ll do that because I feel like it’s more enticing and it feels a little more special. And, obviously, cooking is a very basic, practical skill to have. I like that you can get as creative as you want to be, and also make something that looks nice every day.

I don’t broadcast that many of my fails, just because usually I get pretty upset about it and trash them or let them die in the back of the refrigerator.

On Cooking As a Parent:

I used to like to spend a weekend day on an ambitious project or something, or even just cooking something that takes a lot of prep. And now, I try to get things done as quickly as possible just because my son is almost six months old and he needs a lot of attention. I like to spend a lot of time with him. So the easier the better, but I still try to make the effort.

I’m really into bowls, so like a burrito bowl or, I’m half Korean, so we do a lot of bibimbap.

I can have things kind of pre-prepped for anything like that, you know, rice or quinoa or whatever. And then whatever protein we want and then, you know, add fresh vegetables, or whatever we have on hand.

They say to sleep when your baby sleeps, but that’s nearly impossible. I think, personally, I can’t fall asleep if I have a million things running through my mind, so get what you can, done. I think that having a base grain ready to go in the refrigerator is a great thing. I’ve been cooking quinoa or rice or whatever in batches and keeping them in the refrigerator. And also, proteins like chicken breast or even a roasted chicken, and breaking that down and having that ready to go for the week, is really nice and a great time saver.

We’re trying right now to implement a schedule with our son, Casper, so we want bath time to happen at a certain time, but we also want to have dinner. And also now I’m starting to feed him solids, so it’s a juggling act. We’re just trying to keep on a schedule because it seems to work better for him, his moods and his naps.

Having things ready to go is key. And we don’t want to resort to take out all the time.

On How to Make Cooking More Fun:

Some days you just have to get dinner on the table, so it’s more about what recipes you have in your arsenal. But if you can throw something new in there every week, maybe, or even every couple of weeks, I think that makes it fun.

Or use a new ingredient.

A couple of years ago, my husband and I weren’t really big fans of fennel, so we started implementing it into our meals and now we love it. So I think that trying a new ingredient, trying a new recipe, but not going overboard and trying to do it every night of the week, ’cause that gets daunting.

Even shaved raw fennel in the summer with bibimbap or some sort of salad would be great too. I mean, there’s lots of different ways you can use ingredients and just trying them out a couple different ways, I think is also key.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

So lately, I’ve been watching The Taste, and MasterChef Junior.

What are some food blogs or websites that we have to know about?

I really love Food 52 and there are probably too many blogs to even name.

I have a really close friend, Megan from Take a Megabite, so I would mention her. I know her in person as well as through her blog.

She’s a pretty cool gal, and so I always think of her.

Who do you follow on Pinterest, Instagram or Twitter that make you happy?

I follow so many people on all of those websites. But I guess one of my other favorite blogs is Half Baked Harvest. Her name’s Tieghan, and I love her blog because her recipes are so creative, and they’re totally not things that I would do on a normal basis, but I find it inspiring.

What is something all home cooks should have in their pantry?

I think a couple of different vinegars and oils, along with the obvious salt and pepper, ’cause you can do a lot of things with that, those two ingredients, besides just make salad dressing.

If you have a soup that tastes kind of dull, those are great to add to punch up the flavor.

Name one ingredient you cannot live without?

I cannot live without eggs. I think they’re so versatile and they’re, I mean, in a pinch they’re a great source of protein, but they also are very transformative. You can bake with them, you can do so much, so definitely eggs.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

One of the cookbooks that I always turn to is Mad Hungry by Lucinda Scala Quinn. I love that cookbook. I also really love Pancakes by Adrianna Adarme, who writes A Cozy Kitchen blog.

I refer to that pancake book often on the weekends.

I make the chocolate chip ones a lot because my husband is a chocolate fiend. And then the regular buttermilk ones, and then also the apple pie ones. I think they’re called apple pie.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

Probably Cherry Bomb by Spoon. It’s one of my favorite songs to like sing to, and my husband really likes it, so it’s kind of a fun one to have on when we’re cooking.

Keep Posted on Cindy:

Probably either Instagram or Facebook. Those are the two that I use the most, but I definitely use Instagram the most, for sure. (And, http://www.hungrygirlporvida.com/)

008: Megan Voigt: What She Learned In Pastry School Besides Pastries

March 4, 2015 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

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Hint of Vanilla

Megan is a pastry chef, and on Hint of Vanilla, she shares her kitchen experiments, trials and tribulations, and it’s also where she unwinds and relaxes after a long week.

I am so psyched to have Megan Voigt from Hint of Vanilla on the show today.

On Why She Started Her Blog:

It’s a bit of an odd story.

I was in university because I didn’t really know what else to do. That was just kind of what I expected. I thought I would find what I wanted to do while I was in university, but it never really ended up happening.

I was actually doing classical archeology, so that was very different from what I ended up doing now.

On one of my summers, I decided to go to South Africa to volunteer on a wildlife preserve for two months, and that was amazing, and I loved it. It was just a fun thing.

One night, one of the staff members was just kind of talking about what they would do if they could do anything in the world, and money was no object, and they’re asking us.

It came to me, and I said, “Well, you know, I like baking, so I’d probably just take some classes, maybe get a bit more into it,” because, at that point, I was just doing cookies or scones, nothing really fancy at all. She said, “Well, why don’t you do that now? You can still do that. You can do that!” I was like, “No, no way.”

That wasn’t even on my radar. It wasn’t even a possibility at the time, but after that, that kind of planted the seed for me, and then I started to think more about it. I did one more semester at university, and during that semester, all I could think about was pastry school and going to pastry school.

The problem was my parents were not very convinced because it was pretty sudden. They thought, “Mm, we don’t really want to just put you into a very expensive pastry school that might just be a phase.” So I decided to start a blog because I wasn’t living with my parents at the time. I had moved out. So if they could see that I was baking all the time, they could see the things that I was making, then they would kind of get behind my decision to go to pastry school.

That’s kind of how the blog started. It was just, “I want to show my parents what I’m making, and, you know, I might as well start a blog while I’m at it, I guess.”

They were like, “Do you even bake?” I’m like, “Yeah, yeah, I do sometimes.” But I didn’t really do it that often, and to be honest, I wasn’t 100% sure that I wanted to go to pastry school. It just was a kind of gut feeling.

But I started my blog in September of 2012, right at the beginning of that last semester of school, and the more I went with my blog, the more I convinced myself that this is what I wanted to do. I became so sure like, “Yeah, this is exactly what I want to do.” I love it, I love it.

It’s all I could think about was what am I going to make on the weekend for my blog, new ideas, getting books and everything. That January I enrolled in pastry school to start in July, and I stopped going to university, which my parents were not super happy about, but they kind of understood.

On Choosing Pastry School Over Culinary School:

I do like cooking at home, and I do like the fact that nothing’s measured, and it’s just all taste as you go. That’s really cool, but I would never want to do it as a career.

I’m not as passionate about it, and there is more of a demand for line cooks rather than pastry cooks because most places, restaurants or hotels, they’ll have a large savory team, but they might only have one or two people for pastry, or they might just buy in all the desserts.

So, if I had gotten a culinary degree as well as a pastry, I feel like people would have offered me culinary jobs, and then I would have kind of taken them hoping to get into pastry, but I never really would have.

I wanted to put all my effort into pastry and really just focus on that.

On What She Learned in Pastry School Besides Pastries:

Working as a team was a big thing because obviously university it’s like everyone’s trying to get ahead. Everyone’s trying to beat the next person, and I’m a very independent person. I used to not like working as a team, but now I have no choice, and that was a big thing.

Even if you don’t necessarily get along with the people you work with, you have to work as a team, no matter what. You’ve got to leave all that drama at the door, and you’ve just got to work together really well. So that’s a good life skill for me as well.

On Her Love of Food:

Growing up, my parents, they weren’t like super, super foodies. My parents got divorced when I was quite young, but they stayed friends. My dad all of a sudden had to cook for himself. We pretty much ate cereal for a lot of dinners, and we were fine with that, but then he’s like, “All right, I’ve really got to learn how to cook for my kids.” It went from him literally not even being able to make pizza . . . I remember he made this salty, salty pizza, one that was inedible, and now he’s an incredible, incredible cook.

Obviously, he’s still got his day job. He’s not a chef, but seeing him learn and teach himself how to cook and really, really loving it and seeing him in the kitchen all the time making these meals and not having prepackaged stuff, all of it was from scratch.

And that was just normal for me growing up. “Oh, yeah, I’ll make this from scratch or make that or fresh vegetables.” We had a garden as well, which has been a huge thing for me. I wish I had a backyard for a garden.

Just being exposed to that was a really big thing. I hadn’t really realized it until the past year or two that it really had a big impact on me, having that presence of home-cooked food and really taking the time and the effort to prepare a meal rather than getting takeout.

I bake for him all the time. He lives very close to me, so I go over for dinners all the time, and he’ll cook, and I’ll bring dessert, or I’ll bring bread, and he absolutely loves my bread. He just goes nuts, and my stepmom, she got into bread as well, so I’ve been kind of teaching her a little bit. It’s awesome.

It’s funny because my brother actually brews his own beer, and so he brings the beer, I bring the bread, Dad brings the food, and there we go! It works out great.

We’ve joked about opening a restaurant so many times, but I don’t know if it’ll ever happen.

Tips For Making Bread For the First Time:

First of all, you don’t need a bread maker. Your bread maker is your hands.

When you just get the right kind of bread, it’s so easy. You do it once, and you’re like, “Oh, my God! Why has it taken me this long to make bread this good by myself?”

I was also a little bit intimidated about yeast and stuff, because it’s not like, “Oh, wait thirty minutes and it’s ready to go.” You kind of have to feel it and look at it and see, and if you don’t know what you’re looking for, it can definitely be intimidating. But if you mess up, it’s just some flour and some water. It’s not like you’re wasting a lot of money on that, and the results are really amazing.

For me, it’s just find a good recipe, preferably one of those no-knead recipes like I’ve got on my blog. Almost all the breads on my blog are a long fermentation and very little work, just a lot of time.

Those are great breads to really start off with because they’re very forgiving. If you let it proof a little bit too less or too much, it’s all right, it still produces a pretty good bread. Once you make it for the first time, and you taste the bread, it’s an addiction. You can’t go back.

Once you know the basics of it, you can just kind of really do whatever you want. A lot of the recipes that I have on my blog… I have a few basic ones, and then I just added stuff to it, like, “Yeah, I’m going to put some olives in this one, sure, or I’m going to put this into it!” As long as you’re not adding too much moisture or too much inclusions.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

Top Chef is my favorite. Chopped can be good and bad.

What are some food blogs or websites that we have to know about?

I follow so many. Food52 is great because they feature blogs from all over, and so it’s a great way to really get introduced to a lot of different kinds of blogs.

One of my favorite blogs is My Name is Yeh.

Although, she just got married, so I don’t know if the blog is going to be the same anymore. Her photography is really great. I really enjoy her photography, and the things she makes, it’s very fun. It’s very kind of just messing around and fun flavors and just fun things.

Who do you follow on Pinterest, Instagram or Twitter that make you happy?

Oh, my gosh. Well, once again, I follow a lot of bloggers on Pinterest and on Instagram.

There’s this one blogger I follow on Instagram. I don’t like dogs very much. I’m very much a cat person, but her name’s Adrianna, and her blog is called A Cozy Kitchen. She has photos of her little corgi, and sometimes she’ll have photos of a nicely styled shoot with food, but then her dog is actually eating something in the corner, and it’s adorable, and it kinda makes me want a dog.

What is something all home cooks should have in their pantry?

A scale, a digital scale is 100% what you have to have.

I know it seems like “Ew, only professionals use scales or measurements like that,” but really, cups and things like that are just not cutting it anymore. It’s never going to be consistent. It’s never precise. You know, if you fill it a little bit more than a cup, you’re like, “Eh, whatever, it’ll be fine.”

For some recipes, yeah, it’s okay, but for some it’s not.

But with grams it’s so easy. You’re just like, “Okay, 76 grams.” It’s a number.

If you want to half a recipe, or if you want to double a recipe, it’s just simple. I was always really terrible with fractions at school. So grams for me are just 100% the way to go and a kitchen scale.

I recommend every person who’s into baking… scale! Get a scale!

Name one ingredient you cannot live without?

Vanilla beans. Absolutely vanilla beans or, I mean, vanilla paste.

It’s very similar, but to me, I love vanilla, I mean, my blog is called Hint of Vanilla.

I think real vanilla beans and real vanilla paste is just such an incredible ingredient. The smell and the taste, it’s so amazing! It’s so fragrant, so flavorful, and it’s such a classic flavor combination of… well, vanilla can go with anything.

I think vanilla extract is nice but the vanilla beans are really, really where you should be investing your money.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

Bouchon Bakery by Thomas Keller. I have used so many recipes in that cookbook. It’s unbelievable.

I love the detail he puts into all the recipes and all the kind of reasoning behind it. It’s not just do this and do that and do this. It’s do this because, blah, blah, blah, and do that because, and so that gives a lot of knowledge as well as, “Oh, yeah, you’re learning the recipe,” but you’re learning the ins and outs of it as well as you’re doing it.

And Elements of Desserts by Frances J. Migoya is a really cool one. I’ve used less recipes just because there’s hundreds of them in there, and a lot of them can be difficult or they require really specialized ingredients or specialized tools, which obviously I don’t have.

I really love just getting inspiration from those books. I go look through it, and I’ll get ideas, and like, “Oh, I love those flavor combinations” or “I love that idea for that cake or something.” I really get a lot of inspiration just by looking through the pages.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

That’s a tough one because I normally just put my phone on shuffle.

Coldplay’s one of my favorite bands. A lot of their stuff is pretty slow, but Viva la Vida and Mylo Xyloto, those are two albums that kind of are more upbeat.

Especially Mylo Xyloto, there are some songs in there that are really kinda dance-y songs. That’s probably one of my go-to ones is Mylo Xyloto by Coldplay.

Keep Posted on Megan:

I’ve got a Facebook page for my blog. It’s under the same name, A Hint of Vanilla. I also have an Instagram account, which is under my name, MeganLeeVoigt.

You could also follow me on bloglovin’, which is a great website for keeping up with all the blogs that you follow in one place, and you can actually find all of those social media websites on my blog. I’ve got a link to them, and, yeah, you can stay posted on all the wonderful things that I make.

Have Megan's Special Bread Recipe Sent To You Now:

001: Claire Thomas: What To NEVER Bring To A Dinner Party

February 20, 2015 by Gabriel

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The Kitchy Kitchen

I am super excited to have the amazing, the awesome Claire Thomas here as my special guest today.

She is doing a lot of really cool stuff. Apart from her website The Kitchy Kitchen, Claire also has a cookbook called The Kitchy Kitchen. She has a television series called Food For Thought with Claire Thomas, and in my opinion, she is rockin’ it.

She is truly on a mission to help us home cooks amp up our everyday dinner routines.

On Her Interest in Food History:

I fell across food history. I read this article. It’s in one of my favorite magazines called Gastronomica. It was an article about how Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper is neither kosher nor Aramaic. It misses it on both accounts, and I thought that was so funny because the Passover meal is kind of a set script. Everyone knows what that is. It seemed sort of a weird place to take artistic license.

As I read the article, it talked about how he actually just put his favorite food in the painting, which is eel with orange slices, which I thought does not sound Italian. He’s Florentinian, so I expected pasta or something like that.

Then it occurred to me that he probably didn’t have pasta. They definitely didn’t have tomatoes. They did not have corn. They didn’t have so many of the things we think about as being integral to the Italian canon of cuisine.

So it sent me on this weird journey of, “What was Italian cuisine before the Age of Exploration?” Just really weird, nerdy side projects.

So I ended up just falling in love with food history.

I found it to be the closest thing to a time machine, because if you understand how people ate, you understand how they lived, their economy, their environment, the politics of the time. Some of the funniest and oldest laws on the book for major cities like Venice, for instance, are actually food-related, something people have seemed to be historically very persnickety about. So you get a great sense of, I guess, people’s personalities through history.

What I love about it too is it’s something inescapable about the human condition. We have to eat.

I love how it makes me feel connected to the past, and the people who lived in the past. Because a lot of times, we can think of them as figures in oil paintings with funny wigs, or that kind of thing. It’s cool to think of them as real people who had very strong opinions. Some of them like their food salty, some of them liked it spicy. That kind of thing.

On Starting The Kitchy Kitchen Blog:

It’s so funny thinking about where my blog started and where it is now.

I started the blog as a little fun place to put my creativity. My job was kind of boring, and my mom saw I was struggling. At this point, I was really full-blown geeking out over food history and recipe testing. She said, “Why don’t you start a food blog?” Which wasn’t really a thing four years ago as much as it is now.

Being a nerd who didn’t understand how the Internet worked, I thought, “Oh, then okay, I have to prep everything. I have to have really great recipes and learn how to shoot.” I put all this pressure on myself not realizing that the Internet is like you’re a tree falling in the middle of a forest. You can fail in anonymity for very long, so it was great.

I learned how to shoot food photography by basically just picking up a camera and shooting it and staring at the picture and trying to figure out what was wrong with it. It was basically trial and error. My dad’s actually kind of an amateur photographer. He loves photography. It all came down to lighting. So we would have conversations about where the light was coming from and what exactly it was doing.

Then I started noticing food styling. I was able to basically quit my job that I had and become a full-time food stylist.

The blog was just pretty interesting. It started out very pretentious. If you go too far back, the food is kind of over-the-top. I think I was trying a little too hard. I was trying to appear very sophisticated, and it’s funny.

On Messing Up in the Kitchen:

The opening line of my cookbook is “Have you cried yet?”

Literally. I’ve had my fair share of kitchen disasters, and still do. It’s funny. Like when I recipe test, most of the time, I’ve gotten it down to where I understand recipe structure really well at this point.

The one place that I’ve seen the most kitchen disasters is with attempts at gluten-free and vegan baking, because it’s just chemistry. It’s straight-up chemistry.

Do you guys have a BJ’s in Canada? It’s where I used to eat in middle school all the time. It’s like a pizza parlor.

They have a thing on the menu called the Pizookie. It’s a chocolate chip cookie that’s cooked in a pizza plate, and it’s gooey in the middle. They serve it with a scoop of ice cream on top. It’s wonderful.

I thought, “Oh, how cool would it be to do like a gluten-free, vegan version of that. Almost like a flourless chocolate cake, but a chocolate chip cookie.” I thought like, “Oh, this won’t be that hard.”

I had soup.

I had gluten-free, vegan, chocolate chip cookie soup the first three times I tried to make this thing. It just would not come together.

On What to (not) Bring for a Dinner Party:

What I tell people whenever they come to a party I’m throwing, they asks, “Oh, how should I do my event?” or whatever. I always tell them, “Don’t ever try something the first time at a party. It’s just Murphy’s Law. It’s not going to work ever.”

It’s this need to impress. We want to be fancy and cool in front of our friends. My aunt has this cookbook called Cooking For Compliments, which is amazing just because of the title. Because at least it’s open about it, cooking for those compliments.

I mean, honestly, if you want to cook for compliments, if you want to impress people when you go to a party, just bring the dessert, because people will love a mediocre dessert and will not forgive a mediocre salad. So you will never get a high-five like, “Oh my gosh, amazing salad!” That never happens at a dinner party.

You could bring boxed brownies. I’m not kidding. If you bring boxed brownies, people will be like, “Oh, I love boxed brownies. Thank you so much. This is fantastic.” No one would be mad at you. Everyone would be totally happy about it.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

No Reservations

What are some food blogs or websites that we have to know about?

Joy the Baker, she’s a buddy of mine and she’s amazing.

Then Whitney A. My girlfriend, Whitney, is a sommelier and is amazing at putting together events and pairing wine and food. Those are definitely two of my favorites.

Also A Cozy Kitchen is another favorite. There are so many.

Who do you follow on Pinterest, Instagram or Twitter that make you happy?

On Pinterest, I follow Bonnie Tsang. She has like a million followers. But she’s a photographer and she has so many great little pics. Also, Jenni Kayne. She’s a designer here in L.A. who I love. She’s so chic. She just picks beautiful, minimalist items.

Instagram, there are a few people I just followed that I thought were really, really special.

Nectar and Stone was one that I follow. She’s a patisserie person. She makes these just ridiculous, ridiculous confections. Then, I guess, also my friend, Jonathan from Compartes. He’s a chocolatier, and he always posts photos from his chocolate-making process.

What is something all home cooks should have in their pantry?

I’d say for me, sriracha. Because, full disclosure, on weekday nights when I’m just lazy, my favorite dinner to make is scrambled eggs. I love eggs in general. I did scrambled eggs with a little bit of sweet soy sauce and whatever soft herbs I had. So basil, cilantro, green onion. Whatever I had, and then sriracha. That was it, and it was just the best thing. It was so good.

Name one ingredient you cannot live without?

Butter.

Brown butter makes it much better.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

The Joy of Cooking is important in sort of an encyclopedic way. I mean, it doesn’t have that heart but it’s just such a great reference.

I collect vintage cookbooks. I have a couple dozen now. They’re so fun to me. The one that I actually cook out of the most though is called A Shaker Cookbook Not By Bread Alone. You can actually find it all over eBay. It is not a difficult vintage cookbook to find.

But vintage cookbooks have a habit of being poorly edited. A lot of times, the recipes haven’t been tested at all. A lot of times they’re presented in paragraph format, and they will actually say sometimes like, “You should know how to do this.” I was reading a recipe for a welsh rarebit, and they listed, “Cheese and toast. You should know how to make this.”

The Shaker cookbook is filled with amazing pie recipes.

It’s a great sort of anthropological look at the Shaker community and their approach to food. It has titles like Sister Amelia’s Strawberry Flummery, which I don’t know what that is, but it sounds magical.

It’s ridiculous sounding. But it’s fun. I love it, and I cook from it all the time. The recipes are really well edited. They’ve been tested a million times, and I’ve been very impressed.

If you’re going to start a vintage cookbook collection, that’s actually a pretty good one to start with.

Keep Posted on Claire:

Well, my YouTube channel. I post on my YouTube channel three times a week. If you guys are looking for things between showings of Food For Thought and between the blog, you can always find some fun, new content there. I do everything from quick little tips to full-blown recipes.

Then otherwise, Instagram. If you @ mention me, or say hello, I’ll say hi back. I follow a lot of my own followers. I love reaching out to you guys. Please find me out there.

On Starting Her Blog:

On Her Passion for Food:

On Cooking Being Where Practical Meets the Creative and Pretty:

On Cooking As a Parent:

On How to Make Cooking More Fun:

The Pressure Cooker:

Keep Posted on Cindy:

On Why She Started Her Blog:

On Choosing Pastry School Over Culinary School:

On What She Learned in Pastry School Besides Pastries:

On Her Love of Food:

Tips For Making Bread For the First Time:

The Pressure Cooker:

Keep Posted on Megan:

Have Megan's Special Bread Recipe Sent To You Now:

On Her Interest in Food History:

On Starting The Kitchy Kitchen Blog:

On Messing Up in the Kitchen:

On What to (not) Bring for a Dinner Party:

The Pressure Cooker:

Keep Posted on Claire:

Have Claire’s Special Dinner Dish Recipe Sent To You Now: