A Homemade Life

Hello Everyone,

We are going to be spoiled this month with a visit from Molly Wizenberg. Wizenberg's is the author of A Homemade Life and the author of the wildly successful blog Organgette.

I did a little research on the internet and I found a great article that shares a lot about the motivation behind a A Homemade Life as well as Wizenberg's life story. A Homemade Life will be a difficult read much in the same ways Eating Heaven was. Wizenberg details the life and death of her farther in A Homemade Life. Wizenberg also spills the beans about her world wind romance that began Orangette. I have no doubt that we will have lots to talk about when she visits us on Wednesday June 30th at 6:30pm!

Below is bits and pieces from an article I found. I cut and pasted as much as I could. It is a bit long, but well worth the read.

Ballard Blogger Molly Wizenberg Makes Sense of the World Through Food

By Rebekah Denn

We are what we eat, and Molly Wizenberg is French lemon yogurt cake, and buckwheat pancakes, and potato salad, and so much more.

The cake is the recipe that inspired a stranger from New York to introduce himself to Wizenberg via e-mail. (He's now her husband.) Pancakes represented "a strange sort of coming of age," learning at age 15 they could be made without a boxed mix. And the potato salad is all about her late father, Burg, made with ranch dressing and "a ballsy ¾-cup mayonnaise," about a teaspoon for each potato.

Food blogs abound -- as do books from blogs -- but Wizenberg always has stood out as a storyteller as well as a cook, each written entry a jewel box of an essay and an impeccable recipe.

"For me, food is really never just food," she said last week in the small kitchen of her Ballard home, a 3-pound jar of castor sugar on the counter and Polaroid film in the fridge.

The foods she writes about and photographs, she said, help her understand who she is and where she came from, her city and the people in her life. "It's a way of making sense of the world."

Wizenberg's family's life was built around the kitchen table, she wrote, and "I learned to cook because the kitchen was where things happened."

But she did not want to be a chef, she decided, after a kitchen internship at the high-profile Greens restaurant left her unmoved. She drifted through travels and studies in France, degrees in biology and French and cultural anthropology.

Then, as she attended graduate school in Seattle, her father was diagnosed with cancer. Wizenberg was 24 and went home to Oklahoma for his short, vicious battle against the disease. After weeks of pain, he died.

"I won't tell you that it was hard. You already know that," she wrote. "I was so numb sometimes that my hands stopped working, just locked themselves into funny, pinched fists. But then there was the gratitude, a sort of low-grade, queasy gratitude, that he was free."

She was given the standard advice for those in grief: Make no major life decisions for 18 months. As the months came to an end, she made the decision that ultimately changed her life's course. She moved to France, intending to work on a doctorate for a career in cultural anthropology. Within weeks of arriving in Paris, she realized that her life kept coming back to food. It was "what I thought about, what I cared about, what I wrote about, what got me out of bed in the morning."

A writer friend suggested she start a food blog. She returned to Seattle, working in a Pilates studio and then the University of Washington press, and she wrote the first Orangette entry in July 2004.

Orangette's audience steadily grew, and Wizenberg's life inched more into its pages. In April 2005, a young New Yorker named Brandon Pettit wrote her that her writing was exactly how he felt about food and life. Two months later, after an intense cross-country romance, she introduced him to her readers. The next year, they were engaged, and Pettit bought a one-way ticket to Seattle. In spring, he's opening a restaurant, Delancey, in Ballard. Wizenberg will bake the pastries, help develop the menus and otherwise participate -- but she'll mainly continue to write and blog.

Here is the link to her blog http://orangette.blogspot.com/. You can even go back into the archives and see her very first blog entry in July 2004!