American home cooking staple
The Smitten Kitchen is a 18 year-old food blog celebrating triumphant but unfussy cooking. It strives to be the place you go to find your new favorite thing to cook. And quite honestly, it’s amazing what the creator Deb Perelman manages to do from her small New York kitchen. For almost 20 years she’s brought us numerous recipes, videos and articles.
But how did it all start almost two decades ago? Deb Perelman initially intended a career elsewhere, studying psychology and art therapy at George Washington University. She was always enthusiastic about home-cooking and started writing online in 2003, while working as an art therapist. She eventually began the Smitten Kitchen blog in 2006. Since then the Smitten Kitchen has become one of the come cooking giants. In 2012, Smitten Kitchen won the Bloggie for best food weblog. The same year she released her first cookbook The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook, which came out at No. 2 on The New York Times’s best-seller list for hardcover advice and miscellaneous.
Deb Perelman is the kind of person you might innocently ask what the difference is between summer and winter squash. Undoubtedly, she’ll go on for about twenty minutes before coming up for air to a cleared room and you soundly snoring. It’s taken some time, but she’s finally realized that there are people out there that might forgive her for such food, cooking and ingredient-obsessed rambling. They might even come back for more.
What you’ll see on Smitten Kitchen’s social media platforms is a lot of comfort foods stepped up a bit. Things like bread and birthday cakes made entirely from scratch. Tutorials on everything from how to poach an egg to how to make tart doughs that don’t shrink up on you. And as an added bonus a favorite side dish (zucchini and almonds) that takes fewer than five minutes to make.
What you most likely will not see is what she in her own words calls “excessively fussy foods and/or pretentious ingredients”. She doesn’t do truffle oil, Himalayan pink salt or single-origin chocolate that can only be found through “Posh Nosh-approved purveyors”. And why should she, when what she does best is cook accessible yet delicious dishes. After almost 20 years in the business and with 1,7 million followers on Instagram you are in very safe hands with the Smitten Kitchen.
