About

Lucy, that’s me! I live in the Hollywood Hills in sunny California with my husband and two children, Minty and Rémy. This website/blog is all about my culinary adventures through time and space, both locally and abroad – trips to the farmers’ market for ingredients, cooking together at home in my kitchen, visiting restaurants to eat or to learn back of the house, fishing and farming, hunting and gathering  - always exploring the tastes as I go. Along the way I meet chefs, home cooks, food bloggers, purveyors, shop keepers, gardeners and farmers and learn delicious recipes that I love to make and share. I hope to inspire, inform and satiate you as I go.

My book MADE IN AMERICA: OUR BEST CHEFS REINVENT COMFORT FOOD – 100 plus recipes from America’s top chefs that are based on and inspired by recipes from the late 1800s is at the printer, to be published in the fall of 2011 by Welcome Books, distributed by Random House.

I have also been traveling around this enormous country that I now call home as a Food Judge for the casting of  Gordon Ramsay’s Fox TV show MasterChef season 2.

I write for Squid Ink/LA Weekly‘s food blog, I was a charter contributor to Zester Daily and have been known to eat bugs and write for MeatPaper. Follow me on Twitter @LucyLean.

I am the former editor of edible Los Angeles, a much missed quarterly magazine that kept me busy exploring local food culture.

Rémy cooking Thomas Keller Brownies

Rémy usually takes the role of Chef and chief taster. And he has skills despite being a mere five years old – his Thomas Keller Brownies were better than mine, he cracks eggs like a pro and he’s not shy of exotic ingredients. Perhaps this comes down to genetics – his grandfather was Chef/Restaurateur Jean-Jacques Rachou of the late La Cote Basque in New York.

The Food Dude waiting for her salmon at Anisette

Minty is more of the artist – illustrating the recipes as her brother cooks or setting the table beautifully, complete with handwritten placement. She is currently working on a book Zombies and Cupcakes and she is also an undercover food critic – The Food Dude and for her eight years she has a pretty refined palate. She tweets under the name @MissFoodDude