about us

mb

mb = Margaret Brown, author, editor, photographer, webmaster
daughter of Mary-Claire, mother of Darwin

m-c = Mary-Claire van Leunen, author, editor, web design
mother of Margaret, grandmother of Darwin

Darwin

We are Margaret Brown (mb) and Mary-Claire van Leunen (m-c); alteRecipes is about how we change recipes to fit our lives, and how you can too. Here's a FAQ about some aspects of the enterprise that people question.

Here's how alteRecipes came to be.

Mary-Claire is working on a book, to be called Domestic Intelligence, about changing recipes. How to make a recipe bigger or smaller, how to make it healthier, how to make it easier or faster or both, how to make it cheaper, and how to make it yours, suited to your own personal taste.

Needing help from generous readers willing to find errors, omissions, misunderstandings, misspellings, and howlers of every kind, she began posting drafts and raw notes to a small website (see the yellow "d.i." button above). She also realized that she might produce reference material suited to appendixes rather than to the body of the book, and where better to post such stuff than the Web (see the red "etc." button above).

At this point, Margaret stepped in. She pointed out that sure, the book was going to show how to alter a recipe analytically -- one chapter for how to make a recipe healthier, one chapter on how to make a recipe cheaper -- but in real life changes don't come one at a time. Not only do you want to double the number of servings, you also have to leave out the peanuts because Cousin Ez is coming to supper, fit the prep into the half-hour you have before you go to work in the morning, and make the dish a little sweeter, all without breaking the bank.

So we began posting full-scale recipes recording all the changes we make for all the different reasons. And several iterations later, this is the website you see before you.

We try to publish a new issue every Wednesday some time before midnight Pacific Coast time. We plan to choose a new cookbook to celebrate every month, from which we'll highlight one or two recipes every week in the month. Plus we plan a number of other features, some regular, some one-offs. We hope you'll enjoy the site and blat us back often and frankly.

Margaret's "about me":

I love the smell of shallots frying in butter, bread baking in the oven, and tomatoes right off the vine.

I love the whirring of the cuisinart, the ding of the timer letting you know something is done, and the sizzle of garlic being added to hot olive oil.

I love dipping my hands into giant bins of rice, squishing overripe bananas between my fingers, and snapping the ends off of asparagus.

I love the crunchiness of salmon skin, the smokiness of bacon, and the coolness of a ripe plum on a hot day.

I love the color of the first ripe nectarine, the swirl of fiddleheads, and watching your face as you take a bite of something I knew you would love.

I love trying to pick out the ingredients with only my taste buds, planning out meals for the weeks ahead, and talking to other people with the same passion.

I love to cook.

I love to eat.

I love food.

m-c

Mary-Claire's "about me" comes from the introduction to Domestic Intelligence.

Questions? Comments? Corrections?
Suggestions? Contributions?
Please let us know!