Hi, and thanks for finding my tiny corner of the internet.

I’m Joan Niesen. I’ve spent my entire career working in sports journalism, for a long time as a magazine writer and more recently as a newspaper editor, and Grazing is my foray into writing about food and drink.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved to eat, and for almost as long, I’ve loved to cook and bake. At the start, that meant crumbling feta into the salads my mom made every time my godmother came over for dinner, or pouring heaping cups of chocolate chips into the bowl of the ancient, olive-green KitchenAid mixer we’d inherited from my grandma. For me, food is inseparable from family, friends and memories — which means you should expect a heavy dose of nostalgia in the essays, recipes and nearly everything else I write here.

You can count on one or two newsletters a week, depending on your subscription tier, in which I’ll write about what I’m thinking, what I’m eating, what I’m cooking, what I’m drinking and what I’m reading — not exclusively, and not necessarily in that order. You’ll get recipes, recommendations, stories, musings and links.

Dear reader, I am a grazer. I eat early (breakfast is nonnegotiable) and often (it’s always a good time for a snack), and there’s almost nothing I won’t try. I wouldn’t dare tell anyone how to eat, but I’m pretty partial to my methods, which are sometimes haphazard but almost always delicious. I hate to waste a single bite or sip on anything mediocre, and I’ll bring that same approach to this newsletter.

Let’s graze.