Update, December 2017: I moved to Bellingham, Washington – with my fiancé! We've been here three months and I already love it (and have already made/posted about something extremely delicious). Since the last update (see the list below the origin story) I've: met an excellent man (that's the fiancé); moved to Oakland; taught middle school for a year (wonderful and harrowing); decided I definitely want to teach but need to pivot upward to the college level; written and revised my second book; traveled through Europe (and cooked in Italy, twice!) with said excellent man; moved in with him; and, now, moved to WA. I'm currently working odd jobs and copy editing part time while I figure out my next move – stay tuned!
How the blog came about:
I'm originally from San Francisco, but on my semester abroad in college I happened to meet a nice* young British man and became ensnared in a long-term, long-distance relationship. We managed to keep things going for a year across the Atlantic while I finished up my BA at WashU in St Louis, MO, but Skype got really old after a while and we were running out of money for flights, so when I graduated I up and moved to London.
London was... well, it was great, but it was also grey, and crowded, and often overwhelming. And when I get overwhelmed I tend to bake to make myself feel better. So I baked a lot there. It only seemed sensible to record my efforts to make a dingy flat (the new one is better) a home – this blog is a chronicle of my many failures and sometime successes at making myself feel better when it rained, making my friends feel welcome in our home, and making my boyfriend weigh more than I did (no easy feat)!
In my life outside the kitchen, I worked in digital production at a publishing house and wrote my first book, a memoir about weight loss and body image, which was published by Faber in late 2012. For more on that part of my life, you can check out my author website here.
*Well...he was nice for a number of years...
And since I left London:
*Update, October 2013: I am now back in San Francisco, trying to make a life for myself as a single gal after a rough summer (more on that in this post). Posting will be a bit less frequent for a while as I gather myself and find a job (and health insurance! Yeesh, America!) but I'm sure I'll find new people to bake for (and experiment on) so the recipes will keep on coming.
*Update, August 2014: I'm moving to Italy for three months! Hopefully I'll write (or at least start in earnest) my second book in that time, definitely I'll eat a lot of delicious things, maybe I'll bake and post here – if things are quiet on this front you can probably find me over on Twitter or Instagram, and if you want updates on the writing end please follow my author page on Facebook. You can also follow me on Pinterest for more recipes, plus dresses and other pretty things. Grazie, tutti!
*Update, March 2015: I'm back in SF for the foreseeable future, working at a merchant bank and living with my best friend and baking less often than I'd like, but I'm working on changing that last thing so stay tuned!
