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About this Blog

What began as a way to show off the fact that I could make two kinds of cupcakes and two kinds of frosting in one day has evolved into a rewarding practice that fuels my passion for good food and continuously expands my range of culinary possibilities.

Although all the recipes on this blog are vegan (with the possible exceptional inclusion of honey), I do not write for an exclusively vegan readership: I’m always trying to find new vegetables, new spices, and new culinary possibilities, but you won’t find many meat substitutes from a box or cream cheeses made from hydrogenated beans here, just… food. My favorite culinary model here is 101cookbooks.com, which is actually not an exclusively vegan blog.  Hence the parentheses in my blog's name.

And, while recipes remain the heart and the focus of this blog, I do strongly believe that grocery-shopping, eating, cooking, and the discourses that we use to communicate about these acts, are always political. While veganism to me is not about purity or being holier-than-thou, I think that adopting a primarily vegan diet—besides being a much healthier way to eat—has significant political weight for several reasons:

1) eating lower on the food chain and consuming far fewer resources,

2) standing outside of the powerful agricultural-military-economic-industrial complex that benefits from keeping people uninformed and apathetic about where their food comes from, and

3) cultivating mindfulness about food more generally—a value that I see in other seemingly-prohibitive practices of eating, such as those in Islam and Judaism, as well. This goes far beyond thinking about the environmental impact of our grocery shopping: I’m interested in how the circulation of recipes and cooking practices reflects a history of complex cultural exchanges, and in how discourses of and attitudes toward eating reflect and construct cultural, racial, and gendered identity. Why, for example, are many of the national dishes of Senegal based on rice that was introduced into the country from Southeast Asia in the last century? Where do fortune cookies come from? Why are red wine vs. white, wine vs. beer, steak vs. fish, meat vs. vegetable, ALL gendered choices in my culture? Why are so many vegans and vegetarians queer and/or female? (some earlier half-baked versions of these questions: on "ethnic" food, on studying abroad in Senegal, and on Indian cookbooks)

My questions are too broad and wide-ranging to ever produce a thesis. Rather, this cluster of issues forms a lens that I think helps clarify why food is so, so important--I mean, beyond its immediate biological life-sustaining purposes. I haven't recently had the time or energy to branch out into posts on foodways and food justice as well as recipes, but it remains a huge interest to me.

About Julia

Julia lives in Western North Carolina.  In addition to blogging about food, she also teaches a wide range of courses in literature, composition, and cultural studies. A classically trained singer with a background in linguistics and a penchant for travel, her academic, creative, political, and culinary selves are inextricable from each other.

It was living, cooking, and eating in a vegetarian co-op house while in college that really fostered both Julia's love of food and cooking, and her awareness of the political, social, and environmental impact of the food choices we make every day.  It was also there that she learned about Carlo Rossi, Nag Champa, and having squirrels living in your walls, but that's probably beside the point.  In 2006, Julia also lived in Dakar, Senegal, an experience which further made evident the importance of food in a number of ways.  Then, in the time between college and grad school, Julia worked behind the counter/espresso machine in several upscale bakery-cafes in London and Chicago, where she learned more about nice food (and cranky people).

Living in an LA neighborhood that is home to Angelenos with Armenian, Thai, Latin American, Indian, and Korean roots was an exciting source of exposure to new foods and food traditions for Julia.

Julia feels silly writing about herself in the third person.