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Welcome to the liveblog of the BlogHer Food '10 panel "Innovator Interview: Aida Mollenkamp."
Here's the description:
Aida Mollenkamp is the epitome of a modern food star. A Le Cordon Bleu-trained chef, Aida started out her media career as a founding editor of venerable food website Chow. Within a few years, she has attained regular shows on both the Food Network and the Cooking Channel. Her Food Network show, Ask Aida, centers around interaction with her audience via the web, bringing the spirit of the social web to television. Aida maintains a robust online presence outside her cooking shows, and even finds time to work with a non-profit dedicated to addressing child hunger and helping kids learn how to eat and cook healthily. With BlogHer co-founder and CEO, Lisa Stone, at the helm, we'll explore Aida's evolution from chef to online writer to multimedia personality.
ELISA CAMAHORT PAGE: It's my great pleasure to introduce my co-founder, Lisa Stone, and our guest, Aida Mollenkamp.
LISA STONE: We're interviewing a woman who has been described as a modern food star. You come from a cooking family, Women who cook. Tell us about that.
AIDA MOLLENKAMP: There's a restaurant, Mama Leone's, in New York, and I'm from the family who started that restaurant, which is now part of a larger company. My mother thinks I'm my grand-father re-incarnated...
LISA STONE: He would be a beautiful woman!
AIDA MOLLENKAMP: I'm from a blended family, like the Brady Bunch. I have a mother from Ohio with Italian-American roots, and she insistd on cooking for us. My father married a woman who is literally off the boat from Northeast France. She introduced me to butter and cheese.
LISA STONE: Did you cook with your step-mom? Did she teach you to cook souffle?
AIDA MOLLENKAMP: She first taught me to cook Potato Leek Soup, which is still one of my favorite recipes.
LISA STONE: One of the things that fascinated me when I was reading your backgorund - you have both sides of the food world in your head. You worked in the hospitality industry. Can you tell us about your dregree that took you to the business side, and your experiences that took you to the cooking side?
AIDA MOLLENKAMP: When I was young, I tore my ACL. While recovering from surgery, I started reading those large-format "Beautiful France", "Beautiful Italy" types of books - and I fell in love. I had always liked science in school, and cooking is science. One of my teachers recommended a program at Cornell, and I attended a seminar and decided I'd like to attend. I was good at math, so I decided to go into finance. After graduating, I went to work for Ernst & Young, and I often came into the office with baked goods. My boss told me, "You're really good at visual basics, but your cake is better." So I decided to apply to culinary school. I attended Le Cordon Bleu in France. I wanted to combine left and right brain, and decided to go into media.
LISA STONE: Did you have a major?
AIDA MOLLENKAMP: You have to choose between pastry, savory or both. I did both. I read about Chow magazine http://www.chow.com/, and I thought it sounded so rockstar. I came to San Francisco in 2004, and told them that's what I wanted to do. They told me I could start as an intern, and it was magical. I was the third person working on Chow.
LISA STONE: When did you first start blogging?
AIDA MOLLENKAMP: I started my own blog, which I deleted because it was really cheesey and I don't have a writing backgrond. We [Chow] were in San Francisco, and Heidi Swanson and Amy sherman and Elise Bauer - these few people were making their name known in the food blogging community. But we didn't know what we were doing. I called up my brother and asked how to publish a page in Wordpress.
LISA STONE: How did "Ask Aida" come about?
AIDA MOLLENKAMP: The Chow story that doesn't get told is that April 10 we sat down and said: "We are down to our last dollar. What do we do?" We thought that on April 15, we'd just close the doors. At the end of that week, a guy from cnet.com walked in thte door and told us that his wife loved the magazine, and that he needed to buy it. So he did, on the condition that we went online. This was 2006. We didn't have multimedia
