Welcome!
I'm Christina Bailey, a Michelin-star restaurant alum, Culinary Institute of America graduate, private chef, and cooking instructor. I am currently earning a culinary medicine certification through the American College of Culinary Medicine. I send a weekly newsletter every week(ish) with half-from-scratch recipes and food and nutrition literacy tidbits. Occasionally, I dive into our food system’s failings and (food) politics and how to shop smart at the grocery store.
Most importantly, I don’t do influence. Unlike countless blogs and other Substack food writers, I take no money from advertisers or brands. I don’t insert paid links (or referral links) that subject you to pop-up videos. This approach isn’t profitable, but I haven’t quit my day job yet. Please consider a paid subscription if you want to be informed and not influenced regarding food. The discount below makes the price around the cost of a cookbook (and you get recipes for real life from a classically trained chef).
Free Subscription
An affordable, half-scratch (50% fresh ingredients) and nutrient-dense recipe will land in your inbox on the first Friday of every month. It will be versatile enough for most diets and allergy concerns. And include a simple technique or cooking formula chart to add to your repertoire. Free subscribers can comment on recipes and newsletters (and I hope you do).
Paid Subscription (Highly Recommended!)
For $2.50 a month with the current discount, paid subscribers receive every newsletter, including:
Access to French Macarons: Simplified, a newly revised (in 2024) tutorial series on how to make French macarons, complete with exclusive recipes and plenty of myth-busting. Only paid subscribers will have access to new macaron recipes.
Desserts and baking recipes with less refined flour and sugar.
Editorials and investigative writing concerning food and nutritional literacy.
Eat to Thrive: tips on eating to prevent and cure diet-related diseases.
Ability to email me directly to request recipes or ask questions about our food systems and nutrition.
With enough contributing subscribers, I can keep most of the content free for everyone. No one should have to sift through ads and junk food promotions to find reliable recipes and unbiased eating advice.
My Credentials
A zigzagging career path from Broadway in Chicago to Florida television reporter to Los Angeles private chef to Boise culinary instructor led me here: to share chef-developed recipes and insight about our food. With a sprinkle of snark and a dollop of drama.
My recipes, culinary expertise, and food photography have been published and featured by HuffPost, the Redfin blog, Insider, AskHer, Cozymeal, Yummly, Allrecipes, and the Culinary Institute of America. My coverage of the 2008 foreclosure crisis and consumer reporting for WFTX-TV in Fort Myers, Florida, was featured more than once on CNN's Headline News (HLN).
For my complete, free-from-ads online recipe collection, check out my website, Edible Times. It was one of the original food blogs (circa 2010) before the niche sold its soul and sense of responsibility to Google’s oscillating algorithms and salivating advertisers.
So Why Substack?
I am determined to break the mold of the modern online recipe platform. Whether published by a corporate entity or amateur home cook, all recipe websites compete for the top spot in Google’s search results (because no one scrolls past the first page). It is a shameless game to observe, and the competition can get dirtier than your stove on Thanksgiving.
Thanks to a practice called search engine optimization, or SEO for short, most of the recipes at the top of your search results are mediocre at best. They are often unreliable, unhealthy, or uninspired—or all three. There is even an entire industry making money off of passionate home cooks who want to learn how to start a food blog (just Google those last six words to see for yourself). And let’s be honest: Most of the online recipes we click on are littered with advertisements, paid links, and incessantly annoying pop-up videos.
Which is precisely why I am here.
I will never tell you how delicious my food is with multiple exclamation points. Taste is subjective, after all. I never type in all capital letters because I think you’re smarter than that and can read well-written sentences.
I want to empower you to become a more informed buyer of groceries and a confident cook so you don’t have to make dinner with your eyes glued to a screen or piece of paper. When relevant, I will also unpack Big Food's influence on what we eat and pay for groceries. And dive into those mysterious ingredients on processed food labels (some are worse than others). I want to equip you to live your best food life. And no, this newsletter has nothing to do with cannabis (sorry).
Through my work, I hope to inspire healthier families and communities and inform and entertain along the way.
