What is Homeward?
I love being home. My career has been built on helping people cook great food, organize their homes, and fill every nook and cranny with things they love (more on my background below). Yet I’ve never really had a chance to create that ideal space myself. My husband and I spent our entire married life together, more than 20 years, in a Brooklyn apartment. Facing empty nestdom as our children headed off to college, we decided to branch out and find a place in a warmer climate—for part of the year now, and maybe for more of it in the future.
Homeward is about finding that first house and constructing our next phase of life. It’s a space for everyone who wants to live a life of meaning, beauty, and comfort. I’m excited to share my insights, design sensibility, home and cooking ideas, and resources of all kinds. That will include practical advice, such as how to lay out a pantry and what to look for in outdoor dining chairs—and also some impractical advice, like where to get a spiked anti-coyote suit for a 12-pound dog. I’ll unearth excellent design finds each week and seek out opinions from both pros in the field and from people like you! I’ll do it all while grappling with bittersweet existential topics, such as: Will this be the last home I inhabit? What does your childhood home say about how you live now?
Here are the different ways you can join the growing Homeward community:
Free subscribers
You’ll receive an original monthly post and the occasional additional post, depending on how many renovation snafus I have to wiggle through at the time!
Paid subscribers
By upgrading to paid, you will receive all my weekly posts that give you access to:
deep dives on home design ideas and inspirations, recipes, shopping resources, travel guides, and more insights from my world
detailed updates on my house project, with input and recommendations from readers like you
personal essays and Q&As with home experts
ability to comment on posts, join lively community chats, and read all the posts in the archive
Founding members
By becoming a founding member, you will unlock:
an annual subscription with all of the above
a signed copy of my award-winning book, The New York Times Essential Cookbook, mailed straight to your doorstep
my deepest gratitude for supporting my work
To get a sense of Homeward, you can start with the first three posts—about evolving your home style; knowing when it’s time for a change; and finding your next hometown—which are all free.
I hope you’ll join my fun, messy, enlightening series about making a home!
Warmly,
Amanda
P.S. For those who don't know me, I’m the executive chair of the cooking and home brands Food52 (which I co-founded with Merrill Stubbs), Schoolhouse, and Dansk. Early in my career, I cooked and baked my way through Italy, France, Switzerland, and Germany. I was a reporter and food editor at The New York Times for a decade and have written a bunch of books, including Cooking for Mr. Latte: A Food Lover’s Courtship, with Recipes; The Cook and the Gardener; Eat, Memory; A New Way to Dinner; two Food52 cookbooks; and the bestselling The Essential New York Times Cookbook—which took me forever to write. I played myself in the Nora Ephron film, Julie & Julia (and had to audition for the part), created the Twitter app Plodt (back when X was Twitter, Twitter was fun, and Twitter had apps), and served on President Obama's Commission on White House Fellowships.
