About Me

Hello and welcome to my internet kitchen! Grab a cup of tea, a Madeleine, and get comfy.

My name is Irene, and I started Confessions of a Tart as part of my 2008 New Year's resolution to eat better and use more local and in-season produce (not a difficult thing when you live in sunny California!). Food has always been really important to my Russian-Jewish family. I think my grandmother could make a feast out of rusty nails if she tried, and my mom and my aunt are famed for their hospitality. It is a way for us to get together and transcend culture and generations - in my mind, food is inextricably linked with comfort, laughter and love.

From the time I left my parents' house at 17 to go to school, and until A. and I got married and moved into our own little house with a real kitchen, my adventures in cooking were pretty much restricted to baking chocolate chip cookies and forgetting to put eggs in challah (a Jewish egg bread). Clearly, with my family watching (and wondering what in the world I was thinking and when I would start feeding my poor husband), this could not go on. So I slowly began experimenting with recipes, learning about food, and integrating different ingredients and techniques into my cooking.

It has been a great journey of culinary self-discovery, and even though I love to go out and try amazingly complicated food that great minds have thought up, I still believe that the food I make should be unfussy, non-pretentious, satisfying and delicious. I admire all the wonderful people out there who can look at a 15 page recipe and roll up their sleeves, but I am not one of them, and hence, you will find that the recipes on this site are as easy to cook for a beginner as they are fun for someone who knows his or her way around the kitchen.

The most satisfying thing about blogging has been meeting all the impossibly kind, brilliant, generous people who are part of the food community. If you are reading this blog and are feeling friendly, drop me a line and say hello. I would love to hear from you!

Advertising and Reviews

If you would like to advertise on Confessions of a Tart, or you would like me to review a product or a restaurant - first of all, thank you! I am very, very flattered! Please send me an email at sweet.persuasion (at) gmail (dot) com about you and your product to see if we are a good fit for each other.

Out of respect for my readers I will only endorse products that I myself use or would like to use - I feel that it is the best compromise between remaining honest to my readers and leaving the door open for me to find out about all the wonderful products that exist out there.

Copyright

All text and images on this website are mine, unless otherwise noted. They are copyrighted to me, 2008-2011, and are protected by the current intellectual property laws and by the international treatises regarding authors' rights. Although I am generally a nice person, I am also a lawyer (really), so I take this sort of thing seriously.

If you would like to use my photos or text, just send me an email. I will probably be really flattered that you liked my photo or blog entry and send you a virtual cheesecake along with the permission. Really, I haven't said no to anyone yet. All I ask is that you either link to my blog and/or put a line somewhere that says where the photo came from (that's pretty reasonable, no?). I also have high-res copies of all of my photos if you should like one for personal use.

Contact

You can contact me by leaving a comment on this blog or emailing me at sweet.persuasion (at) gmail (dot) com.

Thanks for stopping by Confessions of a Tart! I hope you will come again!