Welcome! We're so glad you're here. Click on the links above (or at the right) to find all the recipes, foodie talk, books, and blog posts on this site.
Stick around. We love guests. We live for dinner parties. And we're really excited about food. Here's a little bit more about us.
Bruce Weinstein is the chef in our duo. He's a life-long New Yorker who wanted to leave the city for what Cole Porter called "this rural America thing." So we now live in rural New England. Bruce can rip through Chopin Nocturnes, knits whenever he's not cooking, and is quick to ask "Who's up for a cocktail?" He went to "Fame" for high school, then took off for chef school, and afterwards put his time in as a writer and creative director at advertising firms throughout Manhattan. He loves Modigliani, is indifferent to Picasso, and has been forced to sit through more atonal, post-modern, avant-garde music than anyone should. His patience is boundless--except when it comes to bridge.
Mark Scarbrough is the writer, a former academic, sometimes snarky because ridiculously innocent deep in where the marrow is warm. He reads Dante for fun and hangs out in art museums on sunny afternoons. He's also a bemused Texan in the northeast snow drifts, a dumbfounded progressive, a once-upon-a-time academic, a committed foodie, and a self-confessed wine snob. In addition to writing all those cookbooks (and most of the words here, except for Bruce's knitting bits), he teaches literature at the Taconic Learning Center in northwestern Connecticut and leads a raucous book group at the Norfolk Connecticut library. (You can find out more about that last group here.)
Together, we've written a shelf of cookbooks (twenty, not counting the ones for the persnickety celebrities, with more of our own in the works). We also pen two columns a month: "Sunday in the Kitchen with Bruce and Mark" on weightwatchers.com and "Never Cook Naked and Other Culinary Wit and Wisdom" on leitesculinaria.com. Bruce has been known to break down an entire gutted goat on our kitchen counter; Mark is slowly morphing into a vegetarian. Bruce is all olive oil; Mark, all butter. Bruce loves having a Christmas tree; Mark insists we celebrate Passover. It makes for interesting times. We've written for most of the big food magazines and have been guests on many of the national morning shows (even on The View!), not to mention appearances on tons of local segments across the United States.
We live out in the country, far from crowds of any sort, madding or not. Our life is pretty quiet--except for our Saturday night dinner parties. We live in such a remote location that we took down a couple of apple trees in our backyard last year because we were tired of running a moose buffet. We've got black bears, bobcats, and every other furry well-wisher you can imagine. But no deer. Not ever. Our gardens are grateful for predators.
Beyond that, we spend our time thinking about food--and Bruce, sometimes, about knitting. Our latest book is a fractured take-down of the top 101 food and cooking myths. It's a laugh-out-loud way to get really wonky about what you eat and how you cook it. Is the five-second rule for real? Will eating carrots improve your eyesight? Will spicy foods cool you down? And has your grandmother been lying to you? No, no, no, and probably. Click on the book jacket to find out more.
We'd also be happy for you to look around our site. Bruce has a knitting blog; Mark has a place to write about the things that matter to him. We have lots of recipes and an on-going project to assemble some of the best brownie recipes in one place. You can even find out more about our books.
And then there's this collie named Dreydl.