Big Girls Small Kitchen is a food website for twenty-something cooks looking for user-friendly, affordable ways to navigate their kitchens.
As for us, we’re the Quarter-Life Cooks, Phoebe Lapine and Cara Eisenpress. Through our own experiences and experiments in our small kitchens (some good, some bad, some that went straight in the trash), we offer accessible recipes, entertaining tips, and kitchen strategies to help all home cooks of limited resources—whether time, space, money, or skill—make the most of their tools available, big kitchen or small.
Though BGSK was created in 2008, our cooking friendship began in middle school as a bit of a rivalry over chocolate-chip oatmeal cookies. We challenged our friends over Tupperware containers during high-school free periods, Phoebe a proponent of the Joy of Cooking version, Cara of the classic Betty Crocker. The dispute was never settled. Our friendship, however, continued. And we’ve been cooking together, eating together, and talking about food ever since. On Friday, November 28, 2008, in a fit of post-Thanksgiving motivation, we bought a domain name. Since then, we’ve been churning our small kitchen experiments into blog posts, which we hope might someday move you to cook for yourself and your friends.
Now living in New York, big city of small kitchens, we are as committed as ever to concocting impressive meals for friends and family as to fashioning healthful, inexpensive dishes out of simple ingredients and humble leftovers. The cooking conversation that we began thirteen years ago has taken shape on our blog which highlights our culinary and hosting endeavors as we prepare new recipes and old favorites, all the while aiming not to burn our onions, burn down our rental apartments, or burn through our meager budgets.
On the new and improved site, you’ll also find guides to lead you from your first spatula purchase through your expert entertaining undertakings, a comprehensive and well-organized recipe index, loads of menu suggestions, an urtak widget ready to absorb your feedback, a newsletter sign-up, a prep school glossary of terms, and, coming soon, a brand-new contributor-fueled college section.
Many of the lessons we’ve learned along the way are captured in our upcoming cookbook, In The Small Kitchen: 100 Recipes From Our Year of Cooking in the Real World, which will be published by William Morrow in May 2011. To read more about it, visit our book page.
For more on how the blog came to be, check out our answers to your questions.
For more on us, check out ABOUT THE QUARTER-LIFE COOKS.
We hope that reading about our experiences will in some way inspire you to start your own exploration into making your kitchen, no matter how small, a place you want to be.
From our kitchen, albeit small, to yours,
Cara and Phoebe, THE QUARTER-LIFE COOKS
