About the author

Brooke Parkhurst is a southerner living in New York City. After eighteen years of standing next to her grandfather and her mother at the typewriter and at the stove, Brooke realized that journalism, cooking and writing about cooking was her destiny. While attending Davidson College, she landed a television news internship in Charlotte, North Carolina and spent her weekends as an assistant in the pastry kitchen of Dean & DeLuca. Placing second in NBC’s “Aspiring Young Journalists of America” competition didn’t deter Brooke from parlaying a weekend trip to New York City into a permanent gig.

This belle had to live in the Big Apple.

At age 22, Brooke moved to New York City to chase her journalistic star and, instead, lost her way. After an intense, short-lived gig in television news, she decided she was more interested in soufflés than sound bites. As a birthday gift to herself, Brooke quit her job and moved out of the newsroom and into the kitchen.

Brooke’s debut novel with recipes, “Belle in the Big Apple,” (Scribner) hits shelves in September. She is also an ABC contributor and the host of ABC News NOW and the James Beard Foundation’s, “Eat & Greet.” On March 26th, 2008, Brooke’s “Belle in the Big Apple Food and Wine Column” debuted in the Gannett-owned, Pensacola News Journal. In it, Brooke acts as the big city, foodie correspondent for small town America, translating cosmopolitan, cutting edge trends for at-home cooks below the Mason-Dixon.

More of Brooke’s culinary and fish-out-of-water musings have been featured on Conde Nast’s “Elasticwaist.com” and on television and in such national and international media outlets as the Big Idea with Donny Deutsch, New York Post, Corriere della Sera, BBC, Salon.com and Gawker.

Brooke currently lives in SoHo, near her favorite butcher and bread maker.