She abandoned a career in economics in 2007 to pursue a master’s degree in food studies from New York University and a culinary degree from the Institute of Culinary Education. Her writing has since been published in The Wall Street Journal, Saveur, and The Atlantic, and she was nominated for a James Beard Award for Food52’s Genius Recipes column in 2014. The column led to the Genius Recipes cookbook in 2015, which won an IACP award in 2016 and became a New York Times best seller. She lives in Brooklyn and usually has a pastry in her purse.