Hi! I'm Margaret. Welcome to Sizzle & Sass!

How do these things always seem to begin?

I need something new. Something to inspire me each day. I’ve hit that 20-something rut, what do they call it these days? A “quarter life”crisis? Here we go, another woe is me millennial...whine, whine, complain. But seriously. It’s true. I need something more and so, I start with food.

You know that part in “Julie & Julia” where Julie, after having a terrible day, says to her husband:

“You know what I love about cooking? … I love that after a day when nothing is sure—and when I say ‘nothing’ I mean nothing!—you can come home and absolutely know that if you add eggs yolks to chocolate and sugar and milk, it will get thick. It’s such a comfort.”

Recently, that’s what cooking has been for me also. A way to regroup after a long day and do something that I know nearly 99% of the time, it’s gonna work out. And even if it doesn’t, I’ve just done something I absolutely love doing. Cooking as meditation. I stir and breathe.

Enter the philosophy - first and foremost, I’m challenging myself to cook organic, local, and in season whenever it is possible. I plan to hit up the NYC farmer’s markets, make the most of my freshly joined CSA, and smuggle vegetables out of my mother’s Connecticut garden when I visit. Come winter, I realize the Northeast is a bit lacking in variety of seasonal produce, but that’s part of the adventure right?! The second part of this undertaking is attempting to do all of this in my typical-to-NYC shoebox of a kitchen, with it’s two and a half feet of counter space and extremely shallow sink. The luck was with me though in terms of my fridge and oven, they are miraculously life size! Sometimes it pays to live in an outer-borough.

Lastly, the food. Without getting too buzzwordy --- essentially I focus on eating and cooking foods that are real, whole foods. The majority of recipes that show up on here will reflect that. A lot of recipes will aim to be gluten free and grain free, a few will be vegetarian, maybe some vegan (read: I love cheese.) It's all an adventure and I find that trying to think up alternatives to common ingredients forces me to be creative and that is a lot of fun!

Listen, I have one of those day job things that takes up most of my time, and I have no idea what I am doing in this whole writing regard and my knife skills are acceptable at best. But I’ve been told that I can make some damn good food. So here goes...