About

Chocoholic Writer/Recipe Tester
Hello, I'm Madoline. I hope my food journal will fill you with happy food feelings and inspire you to try something new in the kitchen. My kitchen adventures are currently based in Birmingham, Alabama, where we pride ourselves on our barbecue and stone-ground grits (preferably with cheese grits).

My first love is baking and consuming buttery, sugary confections. I also love to craft fresh ingredients into a meal or good-for-you batch of muffins, but sometimes I cheat for convenience's sake. But my favorite part about cooking is the experience: the creativity, the sharing of homemade goodness with special people, how the memories of food meld with a sunny day at the lake or cozy wintry evening by a fire.


A chronic learner/reader, I think about food and how it relates to literally everything in life, so my apologies for the rants that accompany my recipes and photos. I also seize any opportunity to tell stories about local food and food people for the pretty magazine I get to edit by day.

I believe in moderation—make a healthy, natural meal and then treat yourself to a couple of cookies or slice of cake. Actually, my splurges might defy moderation, but I down water from my constant companion, the Nalgene, and make a semi-regular habit of cycling/hiking/cardio-ing in hopes that I can get away with my food affair.


My Cooking Manifesto
Because I love good food.
Because crafting food shares love.
Because food and creativity come from love (from God!).


The Story
While icing a strawberry layer cake one evening, I realized the hours I happily devoted to food in my tiny kitchen by myself rivaled the time I spent on grad school, which was supposed to consume my life at the time. So I decided to channel my cooking play time into documentation I could share with cool people who like food. Also, I wanted someone to pay me to edit things when I grew up, and blogs are good practice for that. And so in June 2009 Maple Macaroni   a catchy name that conveyed my food philosophy and shared my initials   was born.


Contact
Comment on posts and tell me what ya think. What looks tasty or not tasty? What have cooked that's similar? Is my blog biased against non-chocoholics? I'd also love to test and blog about your recipes; just shoot me an email — madolinemarkham (at) gmail (dot) com.