Neighbors is an occasional series, profiles of people who live in Bolton Hill, showing the talent and diversity of those who live among us. Nominations are welcome by emailing bulletin@boltonhillmd.org.
At 32, Kylie Perrotti is becoming to cooking what Jeff Bezos is to retail and logistics: a conglomerate.
She writes cookbooks. One, The Weekly Meal Plan Cookbook: A 3-Month Kickstart Guide to Healthy Home Cooking, is on the market in time for holiday gift-giving (see related review after this article). A second, The Weekly Vegan Meal Plan Cookbook, will be out on Jan. 18, 2022, and she recently signed a publishing deal with Simon & Schuster’s Skyhorse Publishing for a third, likely to be in print in 2023.
She blogs. Her Tried and True Recipes blog and website, online for five years this month, centers on her own recipe creations and food photography, shared with more than 100,000 foodie followers each month.
She runs the Baltimore Supper Club, a vibrant online community on Facebook with a partner, Marci Yankelov, and now 8,100 participants. Created in 2018 as a local enterprise that envisioned dinner parties and in-person tastings that, with the COVID pandemic fading, will likely kick off on-the-ground meals and events next year around town.
In September she launched Tried and True Provisions, for now a shop on her website but someday soon, she hopes, a brick-and-mortar intimate retail outlet for hard-to-find and unusual food products, kitchenware and artsy dishes and paraphernalia.
All this activity takes place from “my tiny little house and kitchen” on Bolton Hill’s Rutter Street, which she shares with Jason Perrotti, her website builder-husband. (And she also has a fulltime paycheck job as art director working remotely for a New York company.) It’s driven, she says, by her love for finding and trying new ingredients, making use of what’s left from previous cooking creations and challenging friends and herself to make original dishes starting with the products on hand.
“I always cooked as a kid,” growing up in tiny Abbottstown, PA, near Hanover. She went to design school and landed in Baltimore, and then she and Jason moved to New York in 2015. She had taken up photography and a friend who wrote about food and entertainment introduced her to chefs who wanted their creations photographed and featured in food columns and magazines.
“I like creating recipes that are easy but produce elegant outcomes,” she said. “Tell me what’s in your fridge and pantry and I’ll create a meal. For the most part I wing it and see where I land. I also hate food waste, so I look to cook with what is already in hand.” Many of those creations find their way into the blog and the cookbooks.
In New York she liked walking into small shops near home and picking up fresh produce and new ingredients. “That’s harder to do in Baltimore; it’s more spread out. So that’s why I started collecting and offering unusual things – food items, sauces, unusual ingredients — in the shop on the website. I also try to feature local purveyors and people who are doing cool things with food. Today I’m looking toward Thanksgiving and focusing on unusual ingredients.”
–Bill Hamilton
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