The Pinewood Kitchen

I started The Pinewood Kitchen in February 2021. At the time I was a marketing manager at a software company, working from a converted spare bedroom that overlooked the back garden. The pandemic had pushed me into spending much more time at home, and like a lot of people, I started cooking more seriously. Bread, mostly, in those first months. Then everything else.

The blog started as a way to keep track of recipes my family cooked. I would scribble notes in the margins of cookbooks or save screenshots from food sites and lose them within a week. Putting recipes online was a way to keep them somewhere I could find them later, with my own modifications written in.

Five years later, the blog is still mostly just that — a personal archive. The audience has grown, but the writing has not changed. I still cook the recipes before I post them, often many times. I still write about the failures along with the successes. And I still do not accept sponsored content, affiliate links, or paid recipe placements. The blog stays personal because that is the only way I know how to write about food honestly.

About the kitchen

My kitchen is small. We live in a 1924 craftsman house in southeast Portland with a galley kitchen that has not been remodeled since the 1980s. There is a single oven, four gas burners, a chipped enamel sink under the window, and a wooden cutting board that has belonged to my grandmother. None of it is photo-perfect. All of it works.

I share this kitchen with my husband Tom, a software engineer who is a much better baker than I am. We split cooking roughly fifty-fifty. He handles weekends and most of the bread. I handle weeknights and most of the experiments.

Our beagle Murphy supervises everything from his spot beside the oven. He is fourteen years old, mostly deaf, mostly blind in one eye, and entirely committed to standing exactly where I need to step. He is the unofficial mascot of this blog.

About the recipes

Every recipe on this blog is something I have actually cooked, usually many times. I do not post recipes I have made once. I do not post recipes I have not eaten myself, with my husband, with friends. The bar for posting is "would I cook this for someone I love?" If the answer is no, the recipe does not go up.

The writing is intentionally personal. I write recipes the way I would tell a friend — with the small failures, the tweaks that worked, the ones that did not. I assume you are a competent home cook who does not need step-by-step photos of every motion. I assume you can adjust seasoning to your taste. I assume you have made dinner before.

What I do not do

• Sponsored posts or paid recipe placements
• Affiliate links of any kind
• Guest posts from other writers
• "Top 10 best XYZ" or product roundups
• Recipe development for brands

None of this is a moral position. It is just that I write better when I write what I want, and I cook better when I am not thinking about anyone but the people who will eat the meal. The blog stays small on purpose.

Get in touch

If you want to say hello, ask a recipe question, or share something you cooked, you can reach me through the contact page. I read every email, though I am slow to reply during weekends because I am almost certainly in the kitchen.