Our writers

The people behind eChowder

Marianne KeelFounding editorMarianne Keel has been cooking dinner for other people since she was fourteen, when her grandmother handed her a wooden spoon and told her to stir. She tests every recipe on this site at least twice in her own kitchen in central Ohio, usually on a weeknight with a toddler underfoot, and she buys the gear she reviews at full retail price so she knows what it's like to be a regular customer. She has returned more kitchen appliances than she likes to admit.Noor HaddadKitchen life and essays writerNoor Haddad cooked the dinner line at a diner for eight years before she had her second kid and started writing from home instead. She tracks what meal kit subscriptions and pantry swaps actually cost per serving, and keeps a running tally of which ones survive contact with a picky six-year-old. She also writes the site's essays, the pieces about why people cook the way they do, usually after a week where nothing went according to plan.Hugh BannisterTechnique writerHugh Bannister spent thirty years running a machine shop before he retired and turned the same attention to tolerances toward his kitchen, where he figures half a degree in bread dough matters about as much as a thousandth of an inch used to. He rebuilds other people's broken recipes by changing one variable at a time until he can explain exactly why a step works. He keeps a notebook of failed sourdough starters the same way he used to keep one of failed machine setups.