The Foodie Gazette was created by writer and foodie Margaret Schulte, known to her sailing friends as “Meps.” When she moved aboard a boat in 2003, she needed a solution to manage her large collection of recipes. There were newspaper clippings, scribbled notes from her mother (who rarely wrote quantities or instructions, just lists of ingredients to jog her memory), and recipe cards from friends, the kind that read “From the kitchen of _____.” Meps could only take three of her favorite cookbooks, leaving behind dozens of old favorites, so recipes had to be captured from them. And then there was the Word file, three hundred recipes captured from e-mail over 15 years.

Meps turned to her husband and technical expert, Barry Stellrecht, for a database. His recommendation was elegant and simple: Add the recipes to their existing blog, www.mepsnbarry.com. There are two advantages to this: Anyone using the Web can use the recipes, and when Meps and Barry are cooking with friends anywhere in the world, they have access to Meps’ entire recipe collection.

In 2006, Meps began writing occasional articles on the mepsnbarry website under the heading “Foodie Gazette,” covering topics such as restaurants, ingredients, menus, ethnic foods, diets, and more. These proved to be so much fun, she decided to launch The Foodie Gazette as a separate site, in order to make it easier for people to search and browse the recipe and article collection.

In 2006, she also started adding photographs to the recipes. Barry says now that his food gets cold, because she takes so many pictures before serving it.

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