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Who cooks here
Second Helpings started as a group chat where we kept sending each other the same recipes and getting the quantities wrong. Writing them down properly was easier than retyping them. Everything here has been made in a home kitchen with home equipment — if a recipe says forty minutes, that is forty real minutes including the chopping.
Emma — Boise, ID
Most weeks I'm out of the house before seven and back after dark, so I've built my cooking around Sunday afternoon. One big pot, one tray of something, and a stack of containers. It isn't romantic but it means I eat actual food on Wednesday instead of standing over the sink with crackers.
The other half of this site is trail food, because Boise puts foothills at the end of my street and I keep testing what survives four hours in a warm backpack. Some of it has been genuinely bad. The recipes here are the ones that weren't.
Madison — Pittsburgh, PA
I cook in a galley kitchen with counter space roughly the size of a cutting board, which has made me very good at recipes that use one pan and very bad at recipes that use three. Pittsburgh winters do the rest of the convincing — from November to March I want the oven on and something braising.
I started writing these down because I kept texting the same six recipes to friends and getting the quantities wrong every time. Now they live here. No stories about my grandmother's farmhouse, no fourteen paragraphs before the ingredients. Just the thing, the way I actually make it.