We're open for breakfast, lunch, dinner and all the snacks you require in between. Happy Hour starts … now.
This is the best and most exhausting thing I've ever cooked: Duck confit over mascarpone polenta with a duck stock gastrique (for my culinary school midterm). I will probably never do it again because I don't have 24 spare hours to hate myself.
Image by Emily Fleischaker/Buzzfeed
ME TOO. And I hope you're hungry, because I am here to bring you delicious, beautiful, totally doable food all day long.
I understand that for most people it's IMPOSSIBLE to find time to cook — for good reason. Please know that I eat Special K with Red Berries for dinner at least two nights a week, sometimes also for breakfast and lunch. (My time management skills are lacking. Cereal is easy.) But I truly believe cooking can bring you great pleasure, that it can help you feel satisfaction when other things in life are frustrating. It can help you save money, make new friends, spend time with your family, lose weight, and achieve eternal salvation from a higher being. That last one was a lie. Sorry.
And anyway, you don't have to be a wannabe professional chef to like it here. Maybe you just want to discover a hamburger-shaped bed to sleep in, look at pictures of pasta, or read about the newest abomination in Oreo flavors. That makes sense. But I am also going to try to get you to cook. You'll find food here that I hope you'll like so much that you'll try to make it at home, and then make it again and again — until you can do it with your eyes closed — because that's how, all of a sudden, you'll be great. Eventually you won't feel constrained to recipes, but there will be things here you can use as a jumping off point and you will share ideas here, and everyone will end up better fed.
A word about the recipes you'll find on BuzzFeed Food: Spending time and money on a meal that turns out gross is the worst. I will do everything I can to make sure that never happens with the food you find on this site — including step by step photos and video demos. You'll also find booze, dinner party ideas, coffee geekery, meat piles, ice geekery, twee desserts, vegetarian, vegan, and gluten-free food, more booze, and a full-on food-lover's bonanza come Thanksgiving. (It's our Super Bowl!)
This is a duck egg pasta carbonara — part of the same meal as the confit — and the first time I made pasta by hand. But most importantly, how cool is that plate? There will be cool tabletop stuff here, too.
Another thing you will find here is the voice of chefs, because they are the most courageous, badass people in the world. Celebrity or not, award-winning or not, most of them work 16-hour days in a tortuous combination of manual labor and creative ambition, dedicating their lives to food, usually at the peril of some critic — civilian, or professional — who calls herself a foodie but would have no idea how to feed 250 paying customers in a night. Oh, that's me!
On that note, about me: I worked at Bon Appétit for six years, mostly running the magazine's website, which I helped launch in 2008. I went to culinary school at the French Culinary Institute (where I consistently lit my coursebook on fire and brilliantly displayed that aforementioned lack of time management skills). I learned a lot about food thanks to tough chefs, generous mentors, and hanging out in the Bon Appétit Test Kitchen. So it's fair to say that have a little street cred, but mostly I hail from the Internet. (And from Oklahoma City. Boomer.)
Enough about me. For the most part, you are the best part of BuzzFeed Food. Before we even launched, I picked up cooking tips from commenters and laughed at someone who said, via Facebook, that Tiny Eggs Benedict should be shot. Your voice is essential here, so please send me story ideas, tweet me a link to your Pinterest food board and share pictures in the comments.
I'll leave you with a list of what you can expect from BuzzFeed Food — in pictures, of course.
