Elise Bauer

Elise Bauer is the founder of SimplyRecipes.com. A blogging pioneer, Elise first created Simply Recipes in 2003 as a way to document her family’s recipes, and over the years grew it into one of the most popular cooking websites in the world. 

Elise grew up in a large family, the eldest of six. Her parents are both excellent scratch cooks—her mother by necessity to feed the family, and her father because he loves to eat well and experiment with trying out new recipes. 

Elise's mother’s heritage is Mexican American, from Tucson, Arizona, and her father, Germanic, from Minnesota. These duel influences shape Elise’s approach to home cooking, and she is just as happy making her mother’s enchiladas as she is preparing her father’s spare ribs with sauerkraut. 

Elise lived for a time in New England, as well as Japan, and her sweetheart is a dashing Frenchman from Provence, so you’ll find cuisines from those areas reflected in her recipes as well.

Elise’s recipes use mostly whole food ingredients, and only occasionally a few things from cans or prepared foods. She believes in a varied, healthy diet, using extra virgin olive oil, butter, eggs, lots of green vegetables, and protein from meat, fish, beans, and cheese.

An avid home cook herself, Elise understands and respects the constraints and challenges of the home cook, from costs, to time, to availability of ingredients, to satisfying picky eaters.

Before diving into the food world she was an executive with an Internet software company, and for many years a strategy and marketing consultant for companies such as Apple and Symantec.