Amanda Hesser

Amanda grew up with a mom who cooked local, seasonal food. She and her brother and sisters went crabbing, picked blueberries in the woods and wild asparagus by the roadside (it grows by the corn fields in Maryland).

Before she and Merrill started Food52, Amanda cooked in Europe and got her first "real job" as a Feature Writer and Food Editor at The New York Times. She wrote Cooking for Mr. Latte: A Food Lover's Courtship, with Recipes and The Cook and the Gardener, and edited the essay collection, Eat, Memory. Her last book, The Essential New York Times Cookbook, was a Times bestseller and the winner of a James Beard Award. But the best part of this book project was getting to meet Merrill, who she's now been working with for 10 years!

Amanda has been named one of the 50 most influential women in food by Gourmet, played herself in the Nora Ephron film, Julie & Julia, created the Twitter app Plodt, and was recently appointed by President Obama to the Commission on White House Fellowships.

Amanda lives in Brooklyn (not the cool part) with her husband and 11-year-old twins.