And kitchenbymom is my little corner of the internet!
I first picked up a kitchen timer in 2015 while I was teaching third‑grade math at a public school in Asheville, NC. One rainy Tuesday I decided to bake a simple apple crumble for my class, and the kids begged for the recipe. That night I started jotting down the dishes that made my family smile, and by early 2016 I was posting them on a modest WordPress blog that my husband helped me set up.
In March 2022 I gave the site a fresh name—kitchenbymom—and moved it to a sleek Bootstrap 5 theme. Since then the traffic has jumped from a few dozen monthly visitors to over 45,000 unique readers each month. I’ve built an email list of 10,200 subscribers, released two e‑cookbooks (the latest, “Fall Harvest Comforts,” hit 3,200 downloads in its first week), and even hosted three live “cook‑along” streams that attracted more than 1,500 viewers each. The community feels like a big, noisy dinner table, and I love reading the comments that come in after every post.
When I’m not stirring a pot or snapping photos for the blog, I’m living in a modest bungalow on the outskirts of Asheville with my husband, Mark, and our two energetic kids, Maya (7) and Theo (4). I spend weekends gardening heirloom tomatoes, hiking the Blue Ridge Parkway, and digging through my dad’s old jazz vinyl collection. My favorite kitchen tools are a well‑seasoned cast‑iron skillet, a sturdy wooden spoon, and a trusty kitchen scale that never lets me guess the portion size.
A fun fact? I still keep that original apple crumble recipe on a yellow index card tucked into my apron pocket—just in case I ever need a quick reminder of why I fell in love with cooking in the first place.