How This Blogger Channels Nostalgia Into Modern Home Cooking
Every week, we spotlight a different food blogger who’s shaking up the blogosphere with tempting recipes and knockout photography. Today, we delve into the world of Jessica Merchant of How Sweet It Is. Check back every day this week for a different How Sweet It Is recipe.
Photos courtesy of Jessica Merchant
Each and every holiday season, How Sweet It Is blogger Jessica Merchant bakes a batch of cookies that she’ll never so much as nibble on.
“There were cookies that I made with my grandmother every year, and I still make them,” Merchant explained to Yahoo Food from her Pittsburgh home. Among them? “Coconut thumbprint cookies. [She’d] dye the icing for the center pink and green, and she’d also dye the coconut pink and green. It’s a seriously retro throwback.”
The old school flavors don’t tempt Merchant — “I’m more of a decadent peanut butter and chocolate lover,” she said — but the coconut thumbprint cookies’ place in Merchant’s family’s history keeps them in her repertoire.
“I am a seriously nostalgic person, even to a point sometimes that it holds me back,” Merchant said. “I’m just very sentimental… and that to me is what food is all about. That’s why I started cooking on my own.”
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Fontina and white cheddar skillet macaroni.
For Merchant, that came after marriage, as she fine tuned her own interpretation of her family’s cuisine. Growing up, Merchant didn’t have much reason to cook. Her mother ruled the kitchen with an iron fist, dictating the week’s meals without much desire for outside input. Monday night was reserved for ground beef tacos served in hard yellow shells, while Thursday was always pasta night. Pork chops and chicken marsala popped up at least once a week, while homemade pizza and stovetop pot roasts made frequent appearances.
It wasn’t adventurous fare, Merchant admitted, but it was always hearty and tasty, instilling in her a deep-seated love of food. It also encouraged a healthy relationship with fitness and diet. “It wasn’t like she served kale salad, but we ate pretty seasonally and the portions weren’t crazy,” Merchant said. “I think that was the key.”
It helped, too, that her father was an avid bicyclist. Merchant definitely inherited his love for exercise — once out of college, she supported herself as a personal trainer. All the while, though, Merchant’s diet never changed. “Even though I was never considered skinny or thin growing up, I was raised with this very healthy mindset,” she said. “I feel like I got really lucky.”
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Merchant later drifted into a boring desk job, which she hated. To pass the time, she secretly started a blog.
“I didn’t tell anyone — I didn’t tell my husband, didn’t tell my parents,” she said. What began as an online diary eventually morphed into a food blog, which over time developed a following to Merchant’s great pleasure.
In 2009, about a year after starting How Sweet It is, Merchant was successful enough to quite her day job and work full-time on the blog. She also developed a massive social media following — nearly half a million followers across Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and Twitter — which ultimately helped land her a cookbook deal. Her debut cookbook, Seriously Delish, debuted in late 2014.
Merchant thinks her success boils down to one thing: relatability. “I have a very relatable palate,” Merchant said. “I just cook what I like. Sometimes it does lean more toward the kind of foods that my mom makes, but I feel like it appeals to the majority, which I think is why my blog took off early on. You build a certain trust.”
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On How Sweet It Is, one finds homey dishes with modern twists, like fontina and white cheddar skillet macaroni and peppermint pattie brownies. There are about two dozen takes on the burger, and enough cupcakes to make your head spin. It’s the kind of crowd-pleasing fare that’s unintimidating but never boring.
Merchant, who gave birth to a son last year, has no plans to slow down anytime soon. Nor will she change How Sweet It Is to compete with other blogs in the ever-crowding food media landscape.
“I definitely don’t have a niche, which everyone says is the worst thing ever in food blogging,” Merchant mused. But she’ll pay the critics no mind. “I cook everything, because I love everything,” she said.
More amazing food bloggers who should be on your radar:
Food and Art Intersect in Billy Green’s Neon-Colored Kitchen
After Breast Cancer Diagnosis, a Baking Blogger Uses Cake to Tell Her Story
How Food Network Inspired This Blogger to Cook for Her Family at 14
