I’m Lauren Skardal, I started Elle & Pear in 2013 while living in Barcelona and completing my MBA. At that time, I explored the city and traveled around Europe on my free weekends. I spent my free time sharing my travels and cooking in my tiny 16-square-foot kitchen.
No matter where I am, I’m always cooking, baking, and learning about new foods and recipes. I feel strongly about cooking with whole ingredients, involving my family in the process, and creating a shared experience around food.
Recipes shared here are our family recipes, ones we make and eat together; ones that are made with real, fresh ingredients often inspired by our travels.
My Story
During my MBA, I took classes in entrepreneurship while traveling around Europe, North Africa, and Asia learning about the cities we visited through walking and food. I wanted to work for myself and I wanted a change from the traditional Finance trajectory that I was on. I poured myself into the blog not knowing where it would go.
While living in Spain, I traveled and spent my days soaking up the different flavors, smells, and sights of new cities. I walked and walked and walked. My camera, one of my most prized possessions, was always slung over my shoulder. I ate paella in Valencia, French onion soup in Paris, pizza in Naples, and spaetzle in Munich. I savored baklava in Istanbul, pastel de nata in Lisbon, and Belgian waffles in Brussels. On other trips I’ve trekked through the Peruvian mountains, eating trout on the grassy banks of a river, ceviche in Lima, and mole in Puebla, Mexico.
When I graduated from the MBA program, I put a pause on the blog to pursue a finance position that enabled me to find steady financial footing and repay student loans. But the idea of creating recipes, cooking, and baking kept pulling me back. After my second son was born, I realized that my food and travel blog combined so many of the things that I loved and wanted to pursue: cooking, baking, photography, travel, and writing.
My Experience:
On Elle & Pear, I share what I have learned and continue to learn. My passions are in learning new foods and techniques and sharing these experiences with others. I love to create and adapt dishes and make them accessible and doable for family dinners.
Having lived all across the US and Europe I have cooked and baked in dozens of kitchens with dozens of different ovens, ingredients, cooking tools, and limitations (one kitchen was just a sink and a hot plate, and another kitchen was 16 square feet with an oven that could only open 45 degrees and I cooked an entire successful Thanksgiving dinner for 15 people).
I have taken food tours and classes in Sevilla, Prague, Rome, Barcelona, and Napa. I have met and learned from wine producers in Cataluña, olive and grape growers in Tuscany, and apple growers in New England.
While we love to eat out while traveling, we cook the vast majority of our meals at home. This amounts to over 15 years of cooking breakfast, lunch, and dinner on a daily basis. I started this blog over 11 years ago and have loved every minute of it.
My Process & Philosophy:
I test recipes over and over again to make sure that they are correct and repeatable. I have written down many of our family's favorite recipes in a family cookbook over 4 years ago that we use daily. These are recipes that we not only make all the time (many of which I have shared here) but that have been honed over many years, and written for cooking success.
- Scientific Approach: I maintain a structured approach to cooking and baking. I test recipes over, and over again, making adjustments as small as 1 tablespoon of flour to determine the impact on the end result.
- Documenting: As I am testing recipes, I write each recipe on a 4x6 index card. I mark up the card again and again, crossing out, rewriting, adjusting a quantity, changing a technique, crossing out, and rewriting again.
- Focus: I focus mostly on dinners (which at our house are often reheated for lunch or dinner another night that week), and desserts because I find so much joy in working with my hands and baking with and for others.
- Family Friendly: Most of the time the recipes here are ones that you can put together with three little kids running around. But sometimes I like to dive into a project, like making pita bread (our boys like to help with this!) or a big dish that cooks low and slow and feeds a lot of people.
- High Quality Ingredients: I believe in buying the highest quality ingredients that you can. No matter what you are making the end result will never improve the bottom-line quality of the ingredients that you have.
- If you are putting in the time to make something, it is worthwhile to use the best ingredients available to you. This does not necessarily mean the most expensive.
- For myself, I believe that if I invest in real ingredients (fruits, vegetables, whole grains), I will reap the benefits in the long run.
- Whole Ingredients: We generally cook with fresh, whole ingredients, and avoid packages where possible.
Accessibility: When possible, I use ingredients that are readily available at a typical grocery store.- Kitchen Minimalism: I keep my kitchen equipment to a minimum. Specialty tools are often unnecessary and costly. They take up valuable storage space, and they take time to clean and maintain. There are many workarounds to specialty tools.
- We invest in fewer, but higher quality tools, such as sharp knives, a high-quality Dutch Oven, two high-quality sauté pans, heavy sheet pans, a single set of hefty metal measuring cups and spoons, etc.
- Love of learning: I love to learn, and I am particularly interested in international foods, cuisine, and culture. I love to learn from traveling, talking with others, reading, and sharing in the kitchen.
- Connection: We do our best to eat as many meals as possible together at our kitchen table, though I know that this will shift and settle and shift and settle again as our family schedule changes.
Time is valuable. I want to ensure that your time is well spent in making these recipes. My hope is that you find something here that you and your family love and can enjoy together.
Traveling:
I've lived and traveled all across the US and Europe.
My approach when traveling to a new place is to explore by walking as much as possible, taking in the nature or architecture of the area. If traveling to a city I look for public parks and gardens. If I'm somewhere less urban, I look for hikes or nature walks.
I like to learn about a new place through food, whether just trying restaurants, street vendors, local grocery stores, or food tours and cooking classes.
I certainly want to visit the big to-do’s, but I’d rather walk and eat than spend too much time in museums, lines, etc.
Generally, I research a restaurant or two ahead of time that has good reviews, but then leave the itinerary open to stumble across new (to us) places to eat.