About the Recipe Fairy

I started this site in 2008 as a way to easily share recipes with family and friends. For the previous six months, I’d been sending e-mails containing my weekly meal plans & recipes to my sister-in-law, among others, and somehow we coined the term “recipe fairy” due to the element of surprise involved in the e-mail chain. I think it’s still mostly family and friends who read this blog, but I figured it was time for an about me page for those strangers who do visit this page from time to time.

I was lucky enough to grow up with a mother who loves to cook and bake. It’s been a part of my life as long as I can remember, even in my early years when I reportedly subsisted mostly on cheese. In one of my earliest memories, my sister and I are sitting on the kitchen counter, breaking eggs for cookie dough into my mom’s KitchenAid.

(Me, my cousins Emily & Beth, and my sister Lindsay showing off our teddy bear bread creations)

 

Now, I’m a 2nd grade teacher turned full-time graduate student who cooks and bakes for myself and my husband Jeff in Durham, North Carolina. We love everything about our city, especially its abundance of fantastic local restaurants (Watts Grocery, Magnolia Grill, Parker and Otis, Foster’s Market, Pop’s, Alivia’s, Tonali, Saladelia, the list goes on and on) and its thriving sustainable food movement. I talk a lot about our favorite farm – Brinkley Farms – from which we receive a weekly CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) box of veggies, meat, and eggs. I buy as much of our food as possible each week from vendors at the Durham Farmers Market.

(My favorite room in our house)

My food philosophy is pretty simple – I try to cook and eat real food as much as possible. That means avoiding food that is processed, pumped full of hormones and chemicals, or altered from its natural state. It also means eating with the seasons and buying locally made and grown food as much as possible.  This philosophy is constantly evolving; I read a lot about food and try to consider and evaluate the wealth of information out there. There isn’t much that I don’t like, although seafood – a large category, I know – does make that list. Some of my absolute favorite foods are olives, cheese,  raspberries, pasta, and pickles.

For the most part, I don’t create my own recipes. I subscribe to too many food magazines, have a large collection of cookbooks, and check out cookbooks from the library on a regular basis. When I mess with a recipe, I try to let you know. I also always cite the source of the recipe – it’s my desire to give credit where credit is due. My main purpose is to share good recipes with people who love good food but aren’t quite as obsessed with digging through recipes as I am. My loving husband takes all our photos and kindly puts up with my poor plating skills.