About

About the Blog

I'm Leslie, and I have a confession--I love food. When you grow up in New Orleans, good food is everywhere, and it's hard not to love something so wonderfully integral to the culture of your childhood. Because of that, I am, and always will be, a fat kid at heart. I've been a fat kid in reality, too, but I'm farther from that reality than I once was. I've lost somewhere around 60 pounds over the past couple years, and I still have a bit more to go to make it to my goal. Therein lies my dilemma. I love food--good food--and find it incredibly challenging to lose weight and still eat the things I love. I'm always looking for ways to rectify the two, and that means I adapt a lot of recipes to make them at least a little healthier. Sometimes though, my husband and I just have to have what we refer to as a "fat kid day" where we eat what we want, healthy be damned.

As such, you can expect to see a wide variety of recipes on here. Healthy, hearty, sweet, savory, fatty, fun--a little bit of everything. I love all of it and hope you'll find something you love, too!


About Leslie

After spending my childhood in New Orleans, I spent the next chunk of my life in Indiana, where I met my husband, Justin. We started dating as seniors in high school and have been joined at the hip ever since. My parents used to joke that he's my oxygen. Really, he's my best friend. (Awww... sappy, I know.)

Justin and I in Stratford-upon-Avon

We live together with our dog, Quinn, and our cat, Cheese, in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, where Justin works in the physics department and planetarium at a nearby university. I work from home part-time for a university back in Indiana doing various writing tasks for a professor there. Previously, I was a high school English teacher and later a baker/barista/administrative assistant/manager at a small, locally-owned coffee shop. I also have run my own wedding and portrait photography business for the past two years, so hopefully those skills will come in handy for the blog, though I haven't done much food photography before. It can't be that different, right? Aside from cooking and photography, I also like reading, crochet, video games, and traveling, and I recently took up running.


Things You Should Know

• If I say butter in a recipe, I probably used light margarine when I made it. I use that almost exclusively when I cook because it has only half the calories of the real thing. Feel free to use whatever you're comfortable with using. However, I always use real, unsalted butter when I bake, and the recipe will specify that.
• If I say chicken in a recipe, I used boneless, skinless chicken breasts unless otherwise noted. You can substitute other types of chicken, but you may have to adjust your amounts/cooking times depending on what you use.
• If I say milk in a recipe, I used skim milk unless otherwise noted. Most of the time it shouldn't make much of a difference if you want to use something else; I'll mention it if I think it's important to use a particular type of milk for the recipe.
• Growing up eating Cajun food, I love garlic. I use lots of it and in just about everything. Consider yourself warned.
• I thought about it one day and realized that no one ever makes soup for breakfast, and so my ultimate cooking goal is to someday make a (palatable/non-weird/hopefully tasty) breakfast soup.
• My favorite thing to do, as far as cooking is concerned, is baking. I've tried to cut back on how often I do it because of the massive amount of calories I will inevitably eat when I make something, but I still love to do it and probably will use this blog as an excuse to bake more often. In that case, expect lots of desserts. In particular, I love cupcakes, and Justin loves cheesecake.
• Leftover birthday cake and an ice cold Coke is my absolute favorite breakfast--I told you I was a fat kid--and so that is where the blog's name comes from. :)