About

Welcome to 50 Years 50 recipes!

This all started with a short essay by Alan Davidson and a conversation with a dear friend. Davidson wrote about the Thai custom of distributing a small cookbook to mourners at a funeral. I thought this was an absolutely charming idea. When I mentioned my plan to do something similar at my funeral, my friend hesitantly agreed. “The one problem with that idea is that when you’re dead, I’ll probably be dead too.” Point taken. So instead I started this blog.

The funereal cookbooks Davidson describes were limited to a baker’s dozen of recipes, but a blog could be so much more inclusive. There is of course the small problem of what happens to all of these recipes and images when I eventually do pass, but that problem will be for my husband or adult children to deal with. Writing a cooking blog takes time, but it can be done in chunks. The way eating a slice of watermelon takes less time than eating the whole watermelon.

For me cooking is like breathing –  I do it because the place I’m happiest is in the kitchen.

The original plan was to blog about my favorite 50 recipes, which would celebrate the first 50 years of my life. This whole lovely experiment on the interweb was supposed to be finished when I wrote my fiftieth recipe. Along the way I realized how much I loved the process of writing and telling food stories. I kept discovering new recipes. Plus I really feel cooking has changed over the last decade with regards to our health and the health of the planet. So here I am still tweaking recipes and still posting.

A young cook in the kitchen.

My connection to cooking started young – Easy Bake oven young. By the time I was 13 I had my first job being paid to cook. I knew I wanted to be a cook. In my mid 20s I shifted from restaurant work to food styling, which is really just cooking for the eyes. For nearly twenty-five years I made food look pretty for photography, television, and videos. Along the way I taught cooking classes, catered, made a whole bunch of wedding cakes (including both of my own), developed recipes, wrote articles for magazines, and tested recipes for other people’s cookbooks. I’ve been lucky to spend much of my life around food. While I no longer make my living from food it is still my love language. My happy place is still shopping for food then cooking it and sitting down to a meal with others. If you can’t find me in the kitchen or at the farmer’s market you’ll often find me on the couch reading cookbooks.

Easy Bake Oven
My first oven – the Easy Bake Oven

If you’d like to see what’s happening in my kitchen please sign up for email notifications by subscribing in the box above. Thanks for stopping by and happy cooking~

Cynthia

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