Behind FOOD52

Alex's works behind the scenes at FOOD52, helping Amanda and Merrill build the business and the brand. She is the first "non-cook" hire at FOOD52, but is saved from embarrassment in the workplace by her husband, a gifted cook who makes everything from scratch. Before joining FOOD52, Alex was the GM of CollegeHumor, a leading comedy web business and digital production studio owned by Barry Diller's IAC. There, she managed, as she says, "all the non-funny stuff" — the P&L, operations, strategy and business development. She was once a management consultant to the media industry at Booz Allen, and was a producer for ABC News. During the years she spent as a reporter in Moscow and Eastern Europe, Alex partook of many "exotic" home-cooked meals with colorful characters: mounds of black caviar with a sturgeon poacher in Makhachkala, a port on the Caspian; breakfast khash and a moonshine vodka chaser with a farmer's family in Yerevan; and many kinds of blini (buckwheat, whole wheat, potato) with many kinds of toppings, with many, many Russian politicians, army captains, circus clowns, prison guards, criminals, and even some regular folks.

Kristen is the quiet force of FOOD52, writing, editing, selecting photos, tweeting like a madwoman, disciplining misbehaving spammers, and taking care of our messes with patience and humor. She got the food bug from her parents. During high school, Kristen input menus for her father's online restaurant guide (he and Kristen's mother also have a cookbook site). But then she rebelled and worked as an economist for a few years until, she says, "I got fed up, googled 'Food Studies' on a whim, and moved to New York ... to study food, whatever that means." Kristen sailed through the Institute of Culinary Education and got her Master's in Food Studies at NYU. After paying her dues at Saveur and Martha Stewart, she took a deep dive in the start-up ocean with us. In addition to her posts on FOOD52, Kristen's lively and graceful writing can also be found in The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic. Through her we've learned about Sugar Bush Squirrel and Bluebird's doughnuts. And though she's often trolling the net, Kristen is so efficient that — as FOOD52 legend has it — one day when heading to work from the East Village, she slipped on ice and tumbled badly, but managed to text us before she got back up. Now that's dedication! She unearths Genius Recipes too — watch for her column on Fridays.

From a former life in book publishing, Kristy has finally come to terms with the fact that the internet is the way of the future (and she's totally into it!). And so, she finds herself at FOOD52, eagerly diving into anything we throw her way: from blog posts of all kinds to grocery detail to assembling our weekly newsletter. We all aspire to her diligence in the kitchen: she frequently bakes her own bread and makes as many things from scratch as possible (think jam, almond milk, pop tarts). Normally strict about eating only local produce, she can never resist a ripe avocado.

Nozlee read cookbooks for fun when she was still too young to help in the kitchen beyond licking cake batter from the bowl (and despite her grandmother's claims, it's never made her sick!). A combination computer scientist and writer/editor at heart, Nozlee studied Computing and the Arts at Yale University, where she worked at the Yale Sustainable Food Project. Despite a lifelong love of food and cooking, it was working on the Yale Farm — shoveling compost, harvesting tomatoes, and teaching youngsters that yes, carrots grow in the ground — that convinced her to find a career in it. Nozlee came to FOOD52 from the creative consultancy Flat, and has been an editor at The Morning News since 2008. In her spare time she cooks dinner from scratch every single day (which you can see on Needs More Salt), sews her own clothing, and writes freelance.

In a classic New York real estate scenario, Amanda met Peter when she and her husband were looking to buy his apartment. The sale never happened, but years later, they sat next to each other on the subway. He was carrying a baguette from Whole Foods. They've been friends ever since. He recently joined Amanda and Merrill at FOOD52 to advocate for the user experience, plan ahead for the engineers, dig into SEO and analytics and whatever else needs doing. Peter lives just a few blocks from Amanda, making his perfectly-timed-for-recipe-tasting drop-ins uncanny. He is known around the neighborhood for his chili and pumpkin-carving party, for which hundreds of Halloween-ers descend on his home. Before joining FOOD52, Peter co-founded Flashlight Worthy Book Recommendations. Before that he led Product Development at Meetup and Zagat Survey with a palate cleanser of work at Vindigo in between. Before that he spent 5 years at America Online before it became AOL doing a variety of product-oriented stuff. Oh, and he worked briefly at the C.I.A. No, not that cooking one.

Amanda joined Food52 after doing software dev for several years at an investment bank. One day she realized she enjoyed creating new foods for her coworkers more so than investment banking.  She then enrolled at the French Culinary Institute to study for her Culinary Arts degree.  Amanda loves to tinker with electrmiranonics and food in order to understand the underlying science and is not afraid to get messy.  She writes to her blog YumYumPanda and, when the weather is warm, can be found out on the water paddling with her dragon boat team in Flushing, Queens. 

A student at the University of Pennsylvania, Brette’s journey at FOOD52 began when she profiled Amanda for a creative nonfiction class. She’s been working here ever since. Now a junior, Brette works from wherever her studies may take her – Philadelphia, Rome, Scandinavia, New York – managing social media accounts, writing and editing blog posts, and regaling the staff with tales from afar. A proud food nerd, she has worked doing research with Penn professors, studying things like ethnic foodways in West Philadelphia and chocolate consumption in China. She is happy to have found (many) nerdy cohorts at FOOD52.

Some people were born with a silver spoon in their mouths; Christina’s was wooden. With an Italian heritage on one side and a Lebanese heritage on the other, good food was never hard to find. From a young age, Christina has cooked for her family and friends –- even when her "kitchen" was only a George Foreman grill plugged into her dorm room. After living in New York for 10 years and working in various non-food corporate strategy jobs at Credit Suisse and IAC, she took her passion for food to the web, launching a food blog and supper club called 8.ate@eight. Undeterred by the lack of counter space and miniature appliances, she prepares dinner for eight people in a very small NYC kitchen and has made it a larger mission to encourage others in the Big Apple to make cooking at home a priority. When she’s not foraging for lusty FOOD52 Shop offers, you can find her at the farmers’ market buying $8 eggs –- the best meal money can buy.

A graduate of ICE, Maddy started out testing recipes for us on weekends, writing blog posts, and heading up our Wildcard-vetting process with gusto (she even designed a fancy database to help scout out the hidden recipe gems). She wound up getting more FOOD52 than she ever imagined and now oversees the action at our partner sites at Whole Foods Market Cooking. She digs antiquarian cookbooks and thinks Calvin Trillin is the funniest food writer of all time.

Jennifer — aka "Jenny" — is an old friend of Amanda's (set her up on a blind date with her now husband, Tad). She and Amanda bonded over food and used to cook dinner together every Sunday. Now Jennifer is in Washington, D.C., where she covers Congress for The New York Times and throws the occasional five-course dinner party and FOOD52 potluck. She dreamed up the idea to write a column on weeknight cooking for FOOD52 and we happily obliged. Look for her posts, which appear on Mondays under "Jenny's in the Kitchen." Check out Jenny's novel, Beverly Hills Adjacent.

Tom Hirschfield grew up in Indiana, graduated from Indiana University with a degree in Journalism focusing on photojournalism, and moved to New York sight unseen after making the newspaper rounds for a very short bit. After kicking around NYC for a few years freelancing, 6 to be exact, he returned home. Back in Indiana, Tom did all the things he wanted to do: concrete worker, truck driver, and oil salesman, before marrying the most beautiful and wonderful wife in the world. He went back to school for a degree in education, but switched to culinary school and graduated with a degree in the culinary arts. After working in restaurants for about 10 years, he bought a building, a liquor license, and equipment for his own restaurant — but chucked the whole thing before it ever opened when he had kids to be a stay-at-home dad. His family moved their farm and Tom started taking pictures again after a 20-year hiatus. He started developing recipes, people started to tell him he could write, and that's where FOOD52 comes in! Tom is currently looking for a publisher. He considers himself the luckiest man in the world to be the dad of two young girls who do their best to keep him young.

Food enthusiast Amy Pennington is the creator and owner of GoGo Green Garden, an edible garden business wherein she builds, plants, and tends edible gardens for city folk in their backyards. In March of 2009, Amy launched UrbanGardenShare.org, a garden website that pairs city gardeners with unused garden space via an online matching site. Amy is a regular contributing writer to Edible Seattle, a bi-monthly food focused magazine highlighting the culinary bounty of the Puget Sound region and SIP Northwest, and has taught both gardening and preserving as an adjunct professor at both Seattle Central Community College and Bastyr University. Her first book, Urban Pantry, was published in spring of 2010 and was chosen as one of Amazon.coms Best Cookbooks Of The Year. She lives in Seattle.

Believe it or not, Drew became a part of FOOD52 after his wife Jennine (an early FOOD52 fan) emailed Amanda and Merrill to offer up her husband's directorial talents in exchange for as many snacks as he could score on set after filming. Since that infamous day in 2010, Drew has been directing and filming content for the FOOD52 website and most recently produced and directed all of the video content for FOOD52's Holiday Recipe & Survival Guide iPad App. In addition to his work with FOOD52, Drew is also co-creator of the Teach Me Sushi series of Apps for the iPhone and iPad, is founder of the film company Six Minute Stories, and works with Grammy winning artists (Taylor Swift, Kings Of Leon, Dave Matthews) as the lead mastering engineer at A.L.L. Digital Mastering, NYC. While not known the world over for his cooking skills (and not really having any cooking skills to begin with) Drew does consider himself a rabid cheeseburger aficionado and there is no slab of delicious, cheesy meat that escapes his radar.

The day Jennifer started working with us last fall, testing recipes and managing our test kitchen, FOOD52's Tuesday photo shoots got a whole lot more orderly (and fun!). From her first job at 16 filling cannoli at a pastry shop in Connecticut to the regular family gatherings at her husband's parents' ever-popular Upper East Side restaurant Il Vagabondo, Jennifer has a clear knack for both cooking great food and making sense out of a busy kitchen.

Stephanie has been testing recipes for FOOD52 since November 2009 and now manages our small army of testers too, all while running the PR and social media show at the Institute of Culinary Education and doing recipe testing, styling, and photography for the James Beard Foundation's blog Delights & Prejudices. We don't know how she gets it all done — all we know is we're glad to have her around. She's a graduate of the FCI and the Food Studies program at NYU, where she did her Master's thesis on Christmas cookies. Not surprisingly, she's also an accomplished synchronized swimmer.

Veteran of the Saveur magazine test kitchen and French Culinary Institute grad, Victoria hails from New Zealand and has even been known to test FOOD52 recipes from there, somehow rarely missing a deadline from the other side of the world. She rides her bicycle every spare minute she gets (racking up over 3,500 miles in 2010 alone!), makes delectable croissants, finds knife-sharpening therapeutic, and spends part of her vacation each year working in a butcher shop.

Natalie wants her life to be about one thing: food. In addition to testing recipes for FOOD52, giving cooking lessons, and recommending recipes to her friends, Natalie is starting her own personal chef service called Broccoli Rose. She loves cooking vegetarian and vegan dishes, but there may be an occasional bacon slice here and there. She also enjoys helping people with special dietary needs by preparing meals that are gluten-free or low in salt and sugar. She hopes to help her friends and clients stay healthy and creative with their food! Check out the website: www.broccolirose.com.

Annie is a multi-media food whiz. After graduating from ICE and doing time in the Saveur magazine test kitchen, she's made the food TV rounds, serving as Associate Producer on two seasons of The Cooking Channel's Food(ography) and Research Assistant for The Food Network's Chopped, among others. And now she's tackling the wild world of online food media with us! When we learned that her mom had to plunk her in front of old episodes of PBS's The Frugal Gourmet just to get her to eat, it all added up. Annie is deeply afraid of pigeons and wishes more people would learn to love the fish spatula — it's more versatile than it looks.

Born in Toronto and raised in Chicago, Pervaiz Shallwani comes from a Pakistani family that takes pride in its cooking. Unfortunately, Pervaiz spent his childhood bypassing his mother's nihari in favor of assimilating with fast food and quick meals. Then he took a home economics class at 11, got a journalism degree at the University of Missouri and a culinary one at the French Culinary Institute. He has been experimenting with cooking ever since and promises to eat anything (edible) at least once. Pervaiz is a Brooklyn-based journalist whose work straddles food and hard news. Sometimes, the two cross paths. He co-hosts the New York CHOW Report on NY1, and writes frequently for The Wall Street Journal. He worked briefly as the Food Writer at Time Out New York and a Staff Writer at The Morning Call in Allentown, PA. His work has also appeared in The Associated Press, Gourmet, The New York Times and Rolling Stone. You can find him at PervaizShallwani.com.

Rebecca's earliest favorite-food memories are of eating heaping kid-size platefuls of sour cream (calcium, according to her mother); she also apparently used to lift up a little plastic cup and cry for meat juices at the dinner table but does not remember this. She is strongly influenced by the cooking of her Hungarian grandmother, who made chicken paprikash, palacsintas, and linzertorte like nobody's business. Rebecca attended culinary school in NYC and Parma, Italy, and has a deep fondness for the variety and depth of Italian cuisines. She greatly enjoys testing out the imaginative recipes submitted to the site and is very happy to keep at it in the kitchen while preparing for graduate studies. Her ideal dinner party meal would include a rack of lamb (rare) and a Seckel pear galette; she also loves fresh fruit, lobster rolls, and cocktails with raw egg white.

Susan is the daughter of a fourth-generation Kansas wheat farmer, yet is ironically allergic to gluten. She received this tragic news via a phone call from her allergist while sitting down to a dinner of BLTs and a lattice crust cherry pie. A graduate of the French Culinary Institute, Susan lives for Sunday afternoon trips to DiPalo's in Little Italy and eating her way through Ann Arbor during visits back to her home state of Michigan. During the week, she can be found at the Institute of Culinary Education, where she works in the recreational department. But come the weekend, you can usually find Susan chatting with her mouth full at Corner Bistro.

Billy is often invited to FOOD52 parties, and when he isn't he goes anyway. Sometimes he takes snapshots of the proceedings, or lugs ice, or folds plattersful of sliced meats into origami swans, airplanes, or cootie catchers, according to Amanda's imperious whims. He's been known to impersonate Merrill, when she's unavoidably detained because of the baby, in order to "pull the wool over the eyes" of certain friends of the site. He was raised in much the same way as senior editor Kristen Miglore, who is his sister. He enjoys food and the internet, but rarely surfaces on the site because the way he cooks could never be written down. He aspires to the simple precepts of certain purists like M. F. K. Fisher and Edouard de Pomiane, but more often than not must bring water to a boil three times before putting an egg in it while he chooses the best silver spoon with which to lower it in. He lives in Brooklyn.

Charlotte Druckman is a great friend, unmatched enthusiast, and a journalist born, raised and currently based in New York City. Amanda first "met" Charlotte on Twitter, where the two started brainstorming about an NCAA-style online cookbook tournament. All it took was a coffee meeting at Falai Panetteria on the Lower East Side, and The Piglet was born! Charlotte has covered food (mostly), style, design, travel, fashion, and beauty for various publications, including The New York Times Style Magazine, Departures, Gastronomica, and Travel + Leisure. As of this year, you can find her in The Wall Street Journal's "Off Duty" section (almost) every week. In fall 2011, Cooking Without Borders, Chef Anita Lo's cookbook, which she co-wrote, will hit stands. Currently, she's working on her new book, SKIRT STEAK: Women Chefs on Standing the Heat & Staying in the Kitchen (Chronicle, 2012).

Amanda told Heather the idea behind FOOD52 over lunch at Mary's Fish Camp, and she's been our most enthusiastic advocate ever since. Heather introduced us to Bob Miller at HarperCollins, Pat and Eric at 10x, and to some of our best advisors. In addition to being a skillful negotiator, Heather is also an exceptional cook who prepares food for a legion at Thanksgiving and orders Alphonso mangoes by the crate.

We met Jason through a friend early on, and he's been an invaluable resource as we've evolved and grown. He is currently the president of Mahalo, Inc., a place where consumers can learn about thousands of topics via articles, videos, and question and answer forums. Before he joined Mahalo, Jason advised start-ups on fundraising, M&A, strategy and business development. He was also a senior executive for Barry Diller's IAC, where he was CEO of Gifts.com, and before that, he was head of operations for NYTimes.com. (Yes, he makes us feel like total underachievers!) Jason lives in Santa Monica, California with his wife and two children.

Our recipe tasters, advisors, and late-night email tolerators. You're the best. Follow them on Twitter: tadfriend and jidorman