About Merrill

Merrill was raised not on Gerber but coeur à la crème, made by her mother, a phenomenal cook who fed her Parmesan chicken fingers as snacks and vitello tonnato for dinner. (When we tested the site concept on friends and family, we almost had to ban Merrill's mom because her recipes kept winning!) Merrill, who grew up on the Upper West Side, inherited the cooking gene herself. After graduating from Brown (with a practical degree in Comparative Literature) and Le Cordon Bleu in London, she learned all about recipe testing and perfectionism at Cook's Illustrated — she can chop any vegetable into precise angstrom-size dice — and mastered high-speed sandwich making behind the counter at Flour Bakery in Boston's South End.

Every Saturday, rain or shine, Merrill goes to her local Greenmarket. She has 6 large bookshelves dedicated solely to cookbooks, which she rarely consults. Much to her mortification, she once burned down her kitchen attempting to deep-fry eggs (thank you, Martha Stewart) — an event that spoiled her dinner party that night, but gave her a good story for future parties.