Food52 goes to the farm

Food52 is not the place I would think of when it comes to rural life. Based in NYC, it’s filled with glam and a definite urban vibe. However, the site recently added a new weekly column from food writer and recipe developer Alexis deBoschnek titled From the Farm. Alexis has written two cookbooks, 2022’s To the Last Bite: Recipes and Ideas for Making the Most of Your Ingredients and the just-released Nights and Weekends: Recipes to Carry You Through the Week.

As someone who grew up in a rural area and spent a considerable amount of time on my grandparents’ (now my brothers’) farm, I was skeptical of the premise. Big city girl falls in love, ditches LA for the Catskills and decides she loves life on the farm? Sounds like a Hallmark channel movie. I was not keen on reading another city slicker’s romantic notions of rural life. However, Alexis’ life is more interesting than a Hallmark movie and the bonus is that she is a good writer. While she may have lived in Los Angeles for several years, Alexis grew up on said Catskill farm and only reluctantly returned when Covid disrupted her freelance work. She had no intention to stay for long, but ended up helping her mother run the family horse business and decided to expand the operation to include chickens and a huge garden.

So far there are two articles, but Food52 doesn’t make it easy to find them. There is no link directly to the series, so you either have to browse through articles on the home page until you get to them or click on her byline to see everything she has written (not all of it is about life on the farm). It will be interesting to see how the column plays out in January and February, when snow and mud replace the bucolic pastoral scenes that she is posting now.