About the Quarter-Life Cooks


Big Girls, Small Kitchen (BGSK) is a food and recipe guide for twenty-something cooks looking for user-friendly, affordable ways to navigate their kitchens. The co-authors, Cara Eisenpress and Phoebe Lapine, offer fun and easy entertaining tips to help all cooks make the most of the tools available, big kitchen or small.

Cara and Phoebe's cooking friendship began as a bit of a rivalry over chocolate-chip oatmeal cookies. Whose confection was richer, homier, more chocolate-y? they challenged their friends over Tupperware containers during high-school free periods, Phoebe a proponent of the Joy of Cooking version, Cara of the classic Betty Crocker. The dispute was never settled. The friendship, however, continued.


Now cooking in teeny tiny kitchens 5.5 miles apart in New York, big city of small kitchens, Cara and Phoebe ended up on the same culinary page: as committed to concocting impressive meals for friends and family as to fashioning healthful, inexpensive dishes out of simple ingredients and humble leftovers. This blog highlights our culinary and hosting endeavors as we prepare new recipes and old favorites all the while aiming not to burn our onions, burn down our rental apartments, or burn through our meager budgets.

Our upcoming cookbook, Big Girls, Small Kitchen: 100 Recipes from Our Year of Cooking in the Real World, will be published by William Morrow (Harper Collins) in Spring 2011.

We hope you enjoy reading about our many experiments in quarter-life cooking.


As always, from our kitchen, albeit small, to yours,

Cara and Phoebe, THE-QUARTER-LIFE COOKS