About

I’m a 29-year-old geologist living near Philadelphia, PA, with my husband, Dave. I’ve been cooking since I was 8 years old, when my mom got a job teaching night school. My dad certainly didn’t plan on cooking every night, so he took turns with my sister and my brother and me. I was heavily supervised for the first few years, and my meals consisted mostly of boiled hot dogs and canned tomato soup. My mom only taught night school for that one year, but the system stuck, and I cooked for my family at least once a week for as long as I lived at home. It didn’t take long for my meals to graduate to more complicated dishes, like lasagna and chicken parmesan.

I knew I enjoyed cooking back then, but it wasn’t until I received Cooks Illustrated’s The New Best Recipe that food went from being an interesting hobby to an all-encompassing passion. Their scientific approach toward evaluating recipes appealed to my analytical nature, their descriptions of recipe development increased my understanding of food science, and the quality of their recipes kept (and still keeps) me excited to try the next new dish. I try to keep Cooks Illustrated recipes from saturating my blog, and I think I’ve learned enough from them that I can choose and adapt recipes from other sources to get great results.

I think I started a blog to be part of the awesome and fun food blogging community. Oh, and maybe to show off what I cook, just a little. I don’t live near friends or family, so maybe this is one way for me to share my food with people.

I quickly found that there’s more to having a food blog than snapping pictures of dinner, uploading them, and calling it a day.

For one thing, taking pictures that show the food to its best advantage is far more difficult than I was expecting. I started out using a Nikon Coolpix 2500, which my parents gave me when they upgraded to a new camera. It’s a very basic point-and-shoot camera, but though the Kitchen Wench’s series on food photography using point-and-shoot cameras, I learned how to maximize its options and take pictures I’m pretty happy with. I also learned its limitations, not just for pictures of food, but also, and more so, for pictures outside of the kitchen. In May 2008, I started using a Canon Rebel XT with a 50mm f1.8 lens. I’m having a lot of fun with the Rebel, although I still have so much to learn.

If you’d like to contact me, send me an email at crumblycookie.bridget at gmail dot com.

If you’d like to see some of my non-food related photography, check out my photoblog.