Since Deb Perelman started Smitten Kitchen in 2006, the cooking site has spawned legions of fans, two popular cookbooks and a drool-inducing Instagram account, where it’s easy to lose an hour (or five) in images of gooey chocolate-chip cookies, herb-sprinkled pastas and juicy chicken roasted just so.
But even as Smitten Kitchen has expanded well beyond a URL in 13 years, Ms. Perelman, 43, still views herself as a blogger, a rarity in today’s media landscape. “I know it’s the year 2019 and we don’t really think of blogs as being a central thing,” she said. But the site, she added, “is very much my full-time job.”
Ms. Perelman, who lives in the East Village with her husband and two young children, said that she has been reticent to hire or outsource partly for fear of affecting the site’s voice. Its success depends on her friendly, relatable and often self-deprecating style — of which there may be no better example than her account, below, of cranking out stovetop macaroni and cheese amid a nasty bout of pinkeye.
Monday
8:30 a.m. At some point in the last several years, I felt like I’d forgotten how to read books. Not sure whether it was kids or too much screen time or both, but my attention span suffered. This year, I decided to make myself read for 15 minutes each morning and 15 minutes before bed, and somehow, this tiny commitment magically did the trick.
9:30 a.m. Gym. On Mondays I face my mortal fitness enemy: running. I’m slow and terrible and barely make it 1.75 miles before wishing for death. But it’s done!
10:30 a.m. Hastily assembling a grocery list for what I want to cook today that I should have written up last night.
11:40 a.m. Eating breakfast while queuing up the social media posts that will appear across Smitten Kitchen’s channels today. One of my deep, dark professional confessions: I’m absolutely terrible at outsourcing. I do almost everything myself, from grocery shopping to my own photos and photo-editing, dishes (well, sometimes), emails (poorly), every Instagram and Twitter post. Some of it, I wouldn’t dream of handing over because I don’t want it to be in anyone else’s voice. Some of it — well, I’m figuring out what I can hire help for and how that would work. Currently my only help is a part-time assistant who focuses on scheduling, outreach and keeping me organized.
12 p.m. I set a timer for 25 minutes to catch up on comments on my site; I like to see how recipes are going and respond to questions. I use a timers a lot. I need to find ways to structure my day or it either floats away or gets taken over by something.
1:30 p.m. Editing I hope to conquer this afternoon: a simpler raspberry crumble bar recipe and a post about how to make actually-good grilled chicken. I try to take clear, detailed notes when I test a recipe so even if I don’t test it further for a year or two, I can jump back in with what I wanted to change next. I see many things I wouldn’t recommend today: unnecessary steps, a weird pan size, a too-big yield. Making it the way I already have isn’t the ideal use of my time, but I need to refresh my memory.
2:45 p.m. Cooking! I end up getting through the bars and chicken, and make the pickled cucumber and cabbage slaw from my first cookbook because my kids like crunchy salads.
6:30 p.m. We can eat outside, always a treat, but are rushed because I’ve left a tornado of dishes behind (whoops), both kids need baths, my husband needs to get to tennis class and we all went to bed late last night.
8:15 p.m. Kids asleep, I’m eating a still-warm raspberry bar and responding to messages. Because I go to the gym in the morning, I tend to work one to two hours in the evening.
Tuesday
8:30 a.m. I swear I only have time for a quick coffee at Saltwater Coffee with a mom friend from school, but then another stops by and suddenly it’s been 30-plus minutes.
9:15 a.m. Hastily queue up socials and respond to emails.
12:30 p.m. Lunch at Frenchette with my Bon Appétit editor, who wants to discuss how my column is going. (It’s my first year.)
3 p.m. I develop my recipe for the October issue at the magazine’s test kitchens. For my first few columns, I cooked from home and sent in my finished recipe. They’d cross-test it, send me back changes, I would test it again — it was a lot of back-and-forth. Finally someone suggested that I just work there. It’s so much better. The kitchen has a great view, is well-equipped and it’s extremely spoiling that someone else orders the groceries and washes the dishes.
5:45 p.m. Stuck on an R train between stations. I bet this doesn’t happen to Ina Garten.
6:30 p.m. Dinner is already in progress (leftovers from last night), then dishes, baths, stories, bed for kids. My daughter is running a low fever and I make a silent offering to the sleep gods that everyone gets rest tonight.
9 p.m. I should have made a more significant offering.
Wednesday
8 a.m. Wake up with a sore throat. Dreaming of clearing my to-do list when I become 99 percent sure my daughter has pinkeye. (My husband disagrees.) I call the pediatrician and get her a 9:15 appointment. We take my son to school, buy me a coffee the size of my face, her a muffin the size of her face and inch uptown.
10 a.m. I text my husband to tell him I was right and he was wrong because I’m mature, a role model. After a pharmacy visit, I start work.
11:10 a.m. In the absence of a new recipe, I use my social media channels to draw attention to older recipes that are perfect for right now. Nobody arriving on the site in 2019 is likely to know there’s an amazing fried-egg salad with lime juice, garlic, fish sauce, herbs and julienne vegetables from January 2015 that would be delicious for a spring weeknight meal.
12:30 p.m. Clerical stuff is my kryptonite and I am catastrophically behind on invoicing. I set a 25-minute timer to catch up because I like paying rent on time.
1 p.m. Respond to some cool invitations, including one to interview a cookbook author I like a lot at the 92nd Street Y this fall.
1:30 p.m. Head to the store and realize that I’m dragging and running a low fever. I take Advil and an illicit Diet Coke, trying to stave off the urge to nap. I fail.
3 p.m. I have no appetite but suddenly have an idea for a vegetable dish I want to put in my next cookbook. I’m not working on a third cookbook yet officially. My first came out in 2012, my second in 2017 and I don’t like to rush things. But I’ve been logging recipe ideas for the book for the last year and a half.
4 p.m. I prepare the raspberry bars and attempt to shoot an Instagram Story video to go with it, but my neither my phone nor I are working.
5:45 p.m. Both kids tell me as they walk in the door that they want to get in their pajamas right away, which is unprecedented. Still in denial we’re getting sick.
Thursday
7:30 a.m. We’re all dragging. I cancel my trainer, lunch plans with a friend (the pastry chef David Lebovitz) and an eye appointment.
9:30 a.m. Working at the coffee shop. I had a meeting last month with a production company, which followed up with a one-sheet concept for a potential cooking show. It wasn’t exactly what I had in mind and I’m finally writing up a list of things that didn’t sit well with me and my vision.
Despite having kids who are everything to me, I don’t consider it the defining feature of my cooking life. I’m less interested in catering to the appetite whims of 3-year-olds than I am in making food we love and trying to find ways to coax the new-food resistant along for the ride. Thus, a “busy mom cooking”-style show is not for me. I cooked before I had young kids and I’ll cook after. It bums me out in general that once you’re a mom, people want you to be little else. Nobody does this to men once they have kids: decide that they’re a dad above all else and every creative pursuit should be from the dad perspective. My husband and I would much rather reach out to interesting people who just happen to be parents — or not parents! Is this … radical? It shouldn’t be.
11 a.m. I draft an email to the editor of a newspaper section where I am to begin a column this year, but the conversation has stalled. While I’m sure it’s because we’re both too busy right now, I wonder if we might finesse the concept a little.
12:15 p.m. At the counter for a bowl of the perfect chicken noodle soup at Little Poland. It’s all this sick lady wants.
1 p.m. I buy a bottle of cheap vodka on the way home, but not for fun — unless your idea of fun is also making homemade vanilla extract.
2 p.m. I bake the raspberry bars for hopefully the last time as my pace this week means I’ll barely have the recipe ready by the weekend. My husband has work drinks tonight and I don’t feel well enough to care what we eat for dinner, so I make the stovetop mac and cheese from my site and green beans — two easy wins with my kids.
8 p.m. I look at the latest round of images for a newsletter redesign and it’s better. Still not what I have in mind, but I’m having trouble articulating what I want to change. I’m terrible at redesigns.
Friday
7:15 a.m. Nooooo. I am still sick with a low fever. A couple weeks ago I remarked that none of us had been sick all winter. Such hubris!
9:30 a.m. I’m hoping to get this new recipe on the site before noon. This is the part I always expect to take less time — I just need to fine-tune what I want to say, give the photos a light edit and write the recipe from my notes — and it always takes forever. It’s a beautiful day, the windows are open and the jackhammers that have been working in front of my apartment for five solid months (not that I’m counting) are … musical. I try to drown it out with Lizzo.
12 p.m. A 30-minute interview with a German cooking magazine for a piece on my second cookbook.
1 p.m. Rescheduled lunch with David Lebovitz. We eat at An Choi, a pho shop on Orchard Street.
3:15 p.m. I finally finish updating my site. It’s not prime time to publish nor the schedule I had in mind, but this is the week I’m having.
4 p.m. My husband returns from a trip to Ikea (Of his own volition! On Friday afternoon of a holiday weekend!) to replace a bench of ours on the patio that’s been broken for — 10 months? But still: sainthood? He reminds me that the babysitter can stay this evening if we want to go out, and I realize, for the first time in three days, that I don’t feel like garbage. Were “babysitting” and “date night” the magic words? I’m so excited to feel well again, I start a to-do list for next week.
Interviews are conducted by email, text and phone, then condensed and edited.
