About

I’m Sarah Woolworth, I live in Wisconsin, and I love to cook things from scratch. Which as it turns out, is very easy to do when you live in a place like this.

I haven’t lived in Wisconsin my whole life, but I grew up not too far away, in Minnesota. In 2004, I moved to Madison to attend college and I never left. I met a boy named Forrest, we got married, got jobs, bought a house, got a dog - you know, all the typical things. My road to becoming a food blogger however, was far from typical. In college, I studied engineering; a discipline that seems as far removed from cooking as one could possibly imagine. I spent nearly 5 years after college working as a materials engineer, but the thing was, all I could think about was cooking.

I started cooking at a young age, and always found it fascinating. As I grew older, and more adventurous with my cooking and eating, I started to enjoy it more and more. By the time I was working in the real world, I was cooking all the time. I loved the creativity it allowed me. After spending so much of my day working in numbers and logic, cooking provided me with a good balance.

At a certain point, however, I realized that cooking had taken over. It was balance in and of itself. Yes, there was plenty of creativity involved, but my background in math and science was like a secret weapon when it came to understanding how cooking actually worked. It was because I understood the science behind cooking that I could do things like troubleshoot a overly dense cake, make biscuits without a recipe, and balance flavors. Cooking became not only a creative outlet, but a place to experiment. I was hooked.

And so, shortly thereafter, I left the world of engineering to focus on food. I’d been cooking for ages, but had never developed a good way to catalog my cooking achievements, or share them with others. Creating this blog seemed like a perfect way to do just that. I also started working in the culinary world, landing a job as a charcuterie maker for Underground Meats, and learning more about whole animal butchery, sausage making, and meat curing than I ever could have imagined. This was a world that combined food and science, and I absolutely loved it.  I also met some other wonderful local food bloggers, and in 2015 we launched Wisconsin Whisk, a culinary collective of Wisconsin based food bloggers.

In late 2015, Forrest and I welcomed baby Leo into our lives, and I started off on my new adventure of being a mom, and all the crazy and wonderful things that go with it. I predict this kid is going to be a very good eater.

After living and cooking in Wisconsin for so many years, I’ve found that we live in a state that abounds with amazing local ingredients to cook with. We have access to an astounding variety of freshly grown produce of all kinds, from the commonplace, to the exotic, to the seemingly bizarre. There are local brewers, maple syrup producers, bakers, beekeepers, and of course, some of the best cheeses you can possibly imagine. It makes sense that in a state that produces as many amazing ingredients as Wisconsin does, it’s pretty easy to cook from scratch. I’ve been so inspired by all of these things; I can only hope that my blog helps you feel the same.

Welcome to Wisconsin. We eat well here.