We cook it twice before we write it down.

How this started

In 2019 I was cooking professionally and getting quietly frustrated with recipe writing. The recipes that worked in a restaurant kitchen rarely worked at home, and the ones published online rarely mentioned the parts that had gone wrong during development.

So I started keeping two sets of notes. One was the recipe. The other was everything else — the version where the orzo caught on the pan, the loaf that over-proofed while I was on the phone, the substitution that tasted fine and the one that did not.

The second set turned out to be the useful one. That is what the testing notes on every recipe here are: the failures, kept in, so you know where the recipe will forgive you and where it will not.

Every recipe on this site has been cooked through, start to finish, at least three times in a domestic oven.

What we will not do

We do not publish recipes we have not cooked. We do not take payment for a positive review of a product. We do not use affiliate links to things we would not buy ourselves, and every one of them is disclosed on the page it appears on.

The site is funded by display advertising and by readers who subscribe to the Sunday Letter. That is the whole business model — which is why the advertising is kept clearly separated from the recipes.