Bios
Ali Beauchamp - Bio
Baking soothes me. There is something about the precise nature of baking that I find comforting. Very rarely do you see the phrase, “Eyeball it,” in a recipe for cakes or cookies. What can I say? I like being told what to do.
Since I was a teenager, I knew that I wanted to be a homemaker. Not just any ol’ homemaker, mind you. I wanted to be Martha Stewart. At 24 years old, I have the husband, a newborn daughter, Violet, and a few ugly, squashed-faced dogs. I struggle daily to attain domestic perfection. Oh, and it is so, so much harder than I ever imagined.
Divine Domesticity is my personal blog where I ramble on about life, love, crazy relatives and my pug that will eat truly disgusting and horrendous things. Being a mom is the hardest and most wonderful job in the world.
Solange Berchemin - Bio
Right from the beginning, I faced a dichotomous choice: born in Lyon, the French capital of gastronomy, my dad is an excellent cook; on the other end my mum could manage to burn boiling water.
I love words but as we do all I needed to work. So I started as a librarian who made strange cooking experiments on her friends…some never recovered and I gained local fame.
I moved to London (England), a fusion place par excellence, kept the cooking passion going and have found an happy medium. Writing on my blog: pebble soup and articles for magazines.
Warda Bouguettaya - Bio
I am Warda Bouguettaya, a 24 year old woman living in Southeast Michigan with my beloved husband and our precious little girl. I speak English, Arabic and French.
From Spain to Algeria, from Morocco to Turkey, you will discover, as I share with you some of my favorite recipes that there is so much more to Mediterranean cuisine than Lasagna and Baklava.
You can find more of my recipes and adventures on my blog, 64 sq ft kitchen.
Amy Casey - Bio
My love of food has been lifelong. It began at an early age when I spent my lunchtime watching Julia Child on PBS. I learned to cook from the many fabulous cooks in my family and countless hours spent reading cookbooks, magazines, blogs, websites, and backs of every package of food I have purchased. After graduating from college, I worked in the business world before “retiring” to become a full time mom to my three kids. I devoted 10 years to being the CEO of my family and decided to jump into the food world as soon as the kids were in school full time. A 2-year stint at a gourmet café as cook, menu planner, waitress, and dishwasher fueled my food obsession, and I was hooked for life.
My fascination with food lead me to become a personal chef, and I am the chef/owner of EAT! A Personal Chef Service in northern New Jersey and am a member of the Personal Chefs Network. Always wanting to inflect my love of food on other people, I started my blog Dinners for a Year where I share my collection of recipes, comments, photos, and reviews of the meals I have prepared for my family and friends. I also write for various publications and am always looking to spread the good word about the world of food.
Mansi Desai - Bio
I’m a software engineer by profession, but food and cooking have been my passions since childhood. What started as helping my mom around the kitchen led to a strong interest in combining flavors and creating good food. I’ve always loved playing a perfect hostess, and the passion grew stronger after marrying a person who can almost be called a “food critic”, and after getting exposed to Food Network chefs and their shows! I love experimenting with different ingredients and cuisines, and have recently started documenting my work on my food blog called Fun and Food.
An Indian by birth, I am currently living with my husband in the San Francisco Bay Area. I love food, but at the same time I try maintaining a healthy diet and lifestyle. When I’m not cooking, you may find me listening to music, engaged in adventure sports, travelling with my hubby and family, reading fiction, writing poems, or spending quality time with my family and friends! My Food Blog is my current passion, and I dream of owning a restaurant some day! Besides writing for the Well Fed Network, I am also a Featured Publisher on FoodBuzz.
Kristen Doyle - Bio
I reside with my husband and three small children in a suburb of Kansas City. In addition to being a wife and mother, I work part-time from home as a recruiter for the staffing industry. Besides my family, my passions include cooking, entertaining, photography, reading, travel and shopping.
I grew up in a house where family dinner was a priority. We sat around the table almost every evening as a family and ate a nice meal together. With varying hectic schedules this wasn’t always convenient, but it is something that my parents felt was important. Those values are ones I am striving to implement in my own home. I am a firm believer that having families sit down at night to eat dinner together can help to solve a lot of the problems in the world today. Families that eat, play and pray together, stay together.
I have always loved to cook, but I have not always been good at it. There were many times when I was younger that I’d make cookies and forget to add the dry ingredients. My family still teases me to this day about the number of times I caught our kitchen stove on fire. I used the smoke alarm as my signal that things were done instead of the timer. I’ve come a long way… that’s for sure!
In addition to writing for Just Baking and Kids Cuisine, I maintain two blogs…”Dine and Dish,” where I chronicle my adventures in cooking and entertaining and “Dishing it Up Family Style,” where I document how our family is keeping us entertained.
Alisa Fleming - Bio
Alisa is the founder and editor of the informational website, Go Dairy Free, and author of the guidebook, “Dairy Free Made Easy.” Her mission to make special diets and healthy eating enjoyable prompts hours of recipe experiments, product trials, and restaurant hopping each week.
Born and raised in Portland, Oregon, Alisa traded in her webfeet for sunny (high) desert living several years ago. Though she misses the fresh produce from local farms, visits to the Northwest quickly remind her that she doesn’t miss the rain. Aside from food, her favorite pastimes include women’s soccer, international travel, quality time with her cat Rosie, and very long walks with her husband.
Hal J. - Bio
A true lover of all things food, Hal has been experimenting in the kitchen since he was a child. As a result, while never formally trained, he feels as comfortable in the kitchen with a potato ricer as he does behind a desk with an adding machine, as an accountant in his other life. In fact, since they’ve been together, his wife has been amazed at what she says is his ability to throw things in a pot and call it dinner. He doesn’t think he’s that good; he is just often inspired by the food he tries when out with friends or from (voraciously) reading cookbooks, food magazines, and blogs.
After moving recently to support his grad-school going wife, Hal has found himself cooking more and more because eating out can be really expensive. He also enjoys writing, and showing people that cooking is not as scary as it can seem. Armed with a well stocked pantry and a camera, he started “The Common Culinarian” in November 2007 to document his trials in the kitchen and to show the everyone they can, in fact, cook, if they are willing to try.
Todd M. Johns - Bio
My love for cooking was inherited by my maternal grandmother. My family roots run deep in the farm fields and plains of the Midwest. Our meals were earthy, hardy, and filled with love. Though I’m now a corporate professional living in the suburbs of Kansas City, Missouri, those same traditions are present in my food today.
The Pork Pullin Plowboys competition BBQ team was co-founded by my brother-in-law and me in 2002. We’ve enjoyed success as competitors with several top ten finishes, many top 5 category finishes, several blue ribbons, two Reserve Grand Championships and a Grand Championship. Plowboys BBQ, a concession and catering company, was established in 2006. Our championship line of rubs is set to come out in 2007.
I am a member of the Kansas City BBQ Society, a KCBS certified BBQ judge, the producer of PlowboysBBQ.com, and a contributor at Get Your Grill On.
Hannah Kaminsky - Bio
Hannah Kaminsky began experimenting in the kitchen at a very young age, as nothing pleased her more than the smiles she received from sharing a homemade dessert. Before long, Hannah’s passion for vegan baking took hold, propelling her ideas and results to the next level. By her senior year in high school, Hannah was producing award-winning sweets.
Her first book, My Sweet Vegan, is a delicious culmination of Hannah’s most sought-after treats, each created, tested, and photographed by Hannah herself. Crossing two milestones with one giant leap, Hannah placed the finishing touches on this incredible cookbook just as she was preparing to enter her first year of college.
Hannah is constantly busy with a diverse range of projects. She is quite often testing new recipes, staging a photo, writing a short story, or breaking out her knitting needles, all of which is dutifully displayed at her blog, BitterSweet.
Faith Kramer - Bio
Faith Kramer lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, but will always be a New Yorker at heart (at least until she loses the accent). She has eaten her way across England, France, Italy, Spain, Czech Republic, Austria and Vietnam, as well as the U.S. and Canada, and even now is plotting at least three more trips. While she takes copious advantage of the fresh fruit and vegetable bounty available in California, her personal food pyramid consists of dark chocolate, bittersweet chocolate, milk chocolate, French jam and soup. She can be found blogging her food at Blog Appetit.
Curt McAdams - Bio
I’ve always enjoyed cooking, concentrating on outdoor grilling and, especially, smoking. With my teammate, I cook with the barbecue competition team of Bucky’s Barbecue and Bread and compete in Kansas City Barbecue Society events. We also provide personal chef services and teach classes in outdoor cooking.
My interest in baking is a little different than most of the other contributors. I’m just starting to learn how to bake, and I’ll share what I’m learning, as it happens. My goal is to produce hearty artisanal breads, with good crusts and great texture, but I’ll also be learning other things along the way. Instead of trying to remember what mistakes and successes I had while learning, I’ll be talking about them when they take place! Just look for the Beginning Baker entries.
Cate O’Malley - Bio
Write articles about sugary treats? No arm twisting needed here, I’m happy to make the sacrifice. In addition to writing for the various Well Fed sites, I combined my cookbook obsession and my love for the written word to form my own site, Sweetnicks. My site’s name comes from my 5-year-old son, Nicholas, who loves to help me in the kitchen almost as much as he loves Dora, Spiderman and his girlfriend.
Mandy Pan - Bio
I discovered my passion for baking when I quit my job two years ago to join my husband in St. Louis. Being a newly married woman with plenty of time at my disposal, I started to play around with flour, butter, egg, sugar and chocolate in our tiny kitchen. I am known among friends to be a passionate eater. But a baker? That is a side of me that friends have not seen. In order to keep in touch with friends and record my cooking and baking adventures, I started a blog, Fresh From The Oven, almost two years ago. My first baking adventure started with a box of brownie mix, a mixing bowl, a wooden spoon, two eggs and half a cup of oil. Even though I have since tried many recipes from scratch, I will never forget the joy when my first batch of brownies came out from the oven and how the aroma filled our little apartment.
Sandy Smith (Editor) - Bio
Although I’ve been a full-time freelance writer and editor for almost fifteen years, I’ve been eating and cooking for quite a bit longer than that. I enjoy artisanal baking, and I work with publishers to develop and test recipes as a technical editor for cookbooks. I also write regularly on culinary and other topics for various print and online media. My own blog, Eat Real, features recipes for and articles on eating seasonally, locally, sustainably, enjoyably, and doably — even for busy families. Here on the Well Fed Network, I write for Kids Cuisine, Just Baking, Paper Palate, Sugar Savvy, A Nice Cuppa, and Growers and Grocers.
I love every aspect of food—from growing herbs to grocery shopping to cooking, baking, and writing about obscure Colonial dishes and cave-aged farmhouse cheeses. I grew up in a home where the preparing and sharing of food was an expression of love, and the kitchen and dining rooms are still the “living rooms” in our family. I’m deeply grateful for the abundance of excellent food we have so readily available to us in the United States, so I try to be a good steward of that resource, and my husband and I are teaching our kids to do the same. At our family’s table, we eat as seasonally, and enjoyably, as possible.
Susan Tenney - Bio
I have been baking bread since I treated myself to a short artisan bread class on my birthday in 2006. (Why yes, that was my 29th birthday!) Since then I’ve been fortunate to have the opportunity to take several bread-baking courses at the San Francisco Baking Institute. I also learn by reading everything I can get my hands on, and lots of trial and error.
When I’m not baking or maintaining my blog, Wild Yeast, I can be found doing crossword puzzles, reading novels, and working as a nurse practitioner in a community clinic. In past professional incarnations I have been a software engineer and a weaver, both of which satisfied my desire tomake things; that’s what baking does for me now.
A transplanted New Englander, I live in the San Francisco Bay Area with two magnificent kids and a terrific husband who acts like he doesn’t mind that there’s always flour all over the kitchen. I think they like my bread. I also have a cat and a dog, and I know they like my bread.
Kate Zilahy - Bio
“I’m a foodie who loves to write (or a writer who loves food, if I want to be egalitarian about it). I get excited about ridiculous things like high-quality cake pans and a good thesaurus. A perfect Sunday means kneading bread dough and kicking up clouds of flour in my sunny kitchen.
I’ve lived in New Jersey, Switzerland, Boston, London and New Jersey again (in that order). I love country music, non-fat lattes, off-beat humor and dark chocolate (the darker the better).
My dream job would be to work for a food magazine, or to make cakes all day. For now, a career in advertising pays the bills.”
