I was born in Berlin and grew up in both Berlin and Brookline, MA. A lifelong bookworm, I knew I wanted to work with books for a living. After college in Boston, six formative weeks at the Radcliffe Publishing Course and one lonely year in Paris, I went on to spend a decade in New York City, where I worked in book publishing as a literary scout and, later, as a cookbook editor (for more on my career path, click here). I started this blog in the summer of 2005 to work through a mountain of recipe clippings I'd obsessively saved from the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times for years. But what started out as a fun little hobby ended up changing my life. In 2010, I left New York and moved back to Berlin to live with my husband Max (who I met during that long, lonely year in Paris) and write full-time. Our son Hugo was born in 2012,and our son Bruno followed in 2017.

My books:

In 2012, I published my first book, a food memoir called My Berlin Kitchen: A Love Story (with Recipes). In the book, I wrote about my childhood in Berlin, the homesickness I battled in the kitchen, trying to find my way as an adult, and how I finally came full circle by moving back home and marrying Max. I filled the book with my favorite recipes from my three countries: roasted Brussels sprouts and braised chicken from my years in New York, bracioline siciliane and chickpea soup from summers with my family in Italy, and Pflaumenmus and Rote Grütze from my kitchen in Berlin. If you want to read a little bit more about how the book came about, click here and here. The book is also available as a paperback, an ebook and audio book, and has been translated into Dutch, Portuguese, Polish and German. It was an L.A. Times bestseller.