About

Thanks for visiting Modern Beet!

My name is Jen Carlile, and I am an avid cook, amateur farmer, and general food enthusiast. After living in many corners of the world I settled down in the Bay Area back in 2004. I currently live in San Francisco, about two miles from perhaps the best salumi in the whole state of California.

I’m 26 27 28 29 30 (now much older) years old, and this is the second blog I’ve kept. The first is from the year I spent traveling as a Watson Fellow after I finished my undergraduate education at Wellesley College

The purpose of Modern Beet is to share recipes and food experiences. Software Engineer by day, crazy cook by night, most evenings you can find me in my kitchen trying out this new recipe or that, making sausage, stirring a batch of marmalade, making buttermilk cheese, or generally just tinkering around with food. Most of the recipes you’ll find here emphasize local, seasonal, sustainably-produced foods, though there are a fair share of DIY projects like homemade tofu, homemade cheese, etc.

And if you’re curious about the title ‘Modern Beet’, I decided to name this blog after my favorite specimen in the entire vegetable kingdom–the mighty yet humble beet. Believe it or not, I never ate a fresh beet until I was 17 years old. I don’t remember eating a lot of vegetables growing up; whether they were absent or whether they were offered and refused by me, I can’t remember. Oddly enough, my love of beets originates with a quirky, post-modern novelist. In fact, a single story so captured my imagination that as soon as I read the last page, I went to the grocery store in search of this fantastical vegetable I had never tried, picked up a few bunches, and cooked up a whole mess of beets. Perhaps I was subconsciously biased since I’d enjoyed the novel so much, but the red beet became my new favorite vegetable–earthy yet sweet, with a wonderful texture–beets are simply delicious.

Thanks again for reading.

P.S. You can contact me at Jen {at} ModernBeet {dot} com


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