About Us

The Baron

Thanks for checkin’ out our blog. I’m the Baron, and I’d be happy to tell you a few things about myself, and this fair blog.

I’m not a professional culinarian (obviously), nor do I want to be. Instead, I’m 26 and have just a bit of formal training in the kitchen. I was fortunate enough to go to a high school that took vocational education seriously. So, in addition to lasers and diesel engines, students could also learn about food. My culinary courses were taught by an affable former chef who had been through the rigmarole of culinary school as well as years in the industry. Since the program was woefully underfunded, we hawked our food to the faculty every Friday to raise some cash.

Those classes changed my life. Food became fun. And cooking was something I could control, which blew me away at the time since I felt like, as angsty teenagers often do, that the world conspired to derail all of my grandiose ambitions.

While cooking for a couple hours a day at school, I also worked concurrently as a runner and, later, a line cook. I earned myself no wondrous reputation, and the less said about that the better. I didn’t really learn much about food in three or so years in a kitchen. I learned a lot more about stress, to be honest. So, I don’t really credit the experience with teaching me much about food, except to always be skeptical of what’s commercially available. And how much they’re charging.

Now I’m a graduate student in Japanese literature at Berkeley. Scholarship has its satisfying moments, of course, but in different ways than food does. Reading all day, and writing things that few will (or should) ever read, can be alienating. But cooking has a different metric of success (thankfully) than the academy, in which everything takes forever. When you cook, success and failure materialize right before your eyes. Things come together or they don’t, and you’ll taste, see, smell, feel (and if you’re really unlucky, have to clean up) the difference. So, cooking is a good way to balance out the long view of grad school with something more sensory, instantaneous, and inarguable.

Now, as a graduate student in the humanities, I’m lucky to make it at all, so I’ll skip the compulsory complaint about the money in grad school. But, I mention my background to contextualize the blog. Cost is always a concern here. Saving money is important, especially when it can be done unobtrusively—which is most of the time. Penny saved and all that. What I’ve learned is that memorable and meaningful meals can be had at reasonable cost, even with limited resources. So that’s what I’m goin’ for.

Thanks again for checkin’ out the blog, and by all means, let us know what you think of it!



Elizabeth

I'm Elizabeth. I work for a start-up down in Silicon Valley, teaching lawyers and legal professionals how to blog as part of their web marketing efforts. While the Baron does most of the cooking for our blog, I handle the tech side of things. I'm also doing all the food photography, which is always a fun challenge.

For me, this blog is all about eating well, despite the limitations of not much time, money, or kitchen space. One of the things I love the most about living in San Francisco is how easy it is to find fresh, local food. Most of the food cooked for this blog comes from small local grocery stores and farmer's markets right in our neighborhood. This blog is for a different kind of SF foodie--I hope it inspires readers to approach cooking from a hands-on, down to earth perspective.

Please feel free to comment on the blog posts, or contact us and let us know what you think.