About Sassy Radish

even shorter!

Sassy Radish is written by me, Olga Massov, a food writer and a home cook. I was born in Russia, moved to Boston when I was 11, and now live in Brooklyn with my husband, Andrew, a journalist, and our linebacker-sized tabby cat, Forrest Whittaker.

I’m a Russian expat, by way of New England, with Southern inclinations. My love of pickles, lobster, and bourbon (though maybe not necessarily together) proves the point. After a decade of toiling in finance, fiddling with spreadsheets all the while yearning to be a food writer full-time, I finally took the plunge in February 2011. And here I am today.

Everything that I post on the blog has been tested and retested by me. Whereas a post might have originated as previous night’s dinner, you won’t see something here I made only once. I take careful measurements and weights, note the cooking times, and look for helpful information that will enable you, the reader, to make a successful dish. My goal is to make you feel like you can do anything in the kitchen.

I’ve gotten freakishly lucky in getting to work with amazing folks like Melissa Clark and Andrew Scrivani. I still pinch myself on a daily basis.

Book!
I am now working on co-authoring my first second book. The Kimchi Cookbook, my first collaboration, features seasonally-driven kimchi recipes, as well as recipes using kimchi in cooking. The book came out November 27, 2012 and is now available for sale! My co-author, Lauryn Chun, runs a fantastic boutique kimchi company called MILKimchi. I might sound biased when I say that her kimchi is extraordinary. I eat it straight out of a jar.

The second cookbook will be with Iron Chef Marc Forgione. It’s due out in the spring of 2014 and will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

My work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Patch, Serious Eats, New York Magazine, My Jewish Learning, the Cooking Channel, and Kitchn.

I started this blog awhile back, but for various reasons (long work hours, a crazy, traumatic relationship), it sat on the back burner until about fall 2008. But it wasn’t until Andrew, who believed in me, that I had the guts to make a career leap from finance into food writing.

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Here, I want to help you make delicious, unfussy food done right. If you’re a beginner home cook, I want to help you take the scary out of the kitchen. If you’ve been around the chopping block a few times, I want to help explore better techniques. We can do it together, one chop, stir, or knead at a time.

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Use of recipes, writing, photography:
All of the photography, unless otherwise noted, is taken by me. Unauthorized use of text and photography is not allowed and violates the copyright laws. If you want to use my images somewhere, ask me first – this is my livelihood.

Comment Etiquette:
We love comments here at Sassy Radish! We try to foster a cordial and pleasant environment for us all to share ideas, ask questions, and exchange best practices. Please treat this space as if you were a guest at our table for dinner: if you wouldn’t say something to us at the dinner table, perhaps the comment might not be appropriate. Please be respectful and nurturing of the other commenters as well. The Sassy Radish censor (that’s me!) is generally quite lax (unlike her birth country), however, should you choose to leave a mean and disparaging comment addressed either to the author or someone else, you comment will either be edited for content or stricken all together.

If you have a question or a comment you wish to email me directly, I’d love to hear from you. If you have a recipe question, it is best to leave a comment, this way we can all exchange ideas and certainly other readers might share your questions or concerns. I am, at times, incredibly crazed and it takes me awhile to get back to some folks. If you feel that I’ve forgotten about you, please ping me again!

Contact Me!
sassyradish at gmail dot com

Connect with Sassy Radish!

  • On Facebook – become a fan!
  • On Twitter – updates to the site will be posted along with whatever random thoughts float up in my mind.

Links/Blogroll:
I do not recipro-link as I believe that we read what we like and we link to what we read. And we can’t read everything (no matter how much we wish we could). My current links are ported dynamically from my Google Reader.

Work, Mentions, and Press: