welcome!

Welcome to the Modern Girls' Guide to the Kitchen - this site is designed to provide recipes, tips, links and ideas for cooking, baking and entertaining in the real world. You know, the one where you'd like to spend five hours grinding your own spices or preparing to make vanilla essence from a bottle of vodka and a few empty salad dressing bottles but, truth be known, most of the time you'd rather buy the spices, drink the vodka and settle for take-out.

That being said, this is certainly a site for those of us who - in spite of our schedules or perhaps because of them - love to cook, bake and generally experiment with food. We also love to entertain (even if we do spend more time watching Party Girl, Easy Entertaining, Barefoot Contessa and all the Martha specials than we do actually hosting guests in our own homes).

The thing is, most of those shows (okay, all of them) assume we have an unlimited budget and an endless supply of white table linens - I have neither.