I am blessed to have been raised by two parents who both love to cook, and do it well. Mom was primarily self-taught, figuring out ways to feed her six kids healthy food on dad's teacher salary. Dad grew up during the depression and learned how to make use of anything available. He used to amaze us with stories about shooting squirrels in the forest nearby for squirrel stew. My parents know things that I don't - how to take a pheasant that has just been shot and make a meal out of it, how to gut a fish, how to butcher a rabbit or a deer.

A few years ago I moved to Sacramento from the Bay Area to be closer to my folks. Having been too busy with my career to cook much, I wanted to learn how to cook the foods I loved growing up, and document what I was learning for my siblings and friends. I started Simply Recipes, a food blog, that uses many of the recipes and methods of my parents, focusing primarily on home cooking with whole foods in season. I strongly believe that everyone should know how to cook and I especially love teaching the children of my friends the joys of cooking.

In addition to Simply Recipes, I have several other blogs that I maintain under elise.com. I use the Movable Type (MT) blogging platform for my blogs. Movable Type is the underlying technology of Typepad and is primarily meant for developers and highly technical people. Not being either, I started the blog, Learning Movable Type to document in layman's terms how to do things in MT. I've written over a hundred tutorials for MT and Learning Movable Type has evolved into a valued resource for the MT community.