Meet, Phyllis Grant, the former pastry chef and photographer behind the riveting and beautiful blog, Dash and Bella. If you follow any of the major food sites, you’re sure to know her work. Her writing and recipes have been featured pretty much everywhere good food writing is found:  Food52, Saveur, O Magazine, Real Simple; she’s frequently featured in the NY Times Diners Journal.   We love her blog for a lot of reasons: the beautiful photographs; the delicious, original, & carefully tested recipes; her commitment to involving her kids in every step of the process; her refusal to compromise or simplify.  Most of all, we love her writing: fresh, brutally honest, vivid, heartbreaking, hysterical.  It’s slightly weird seeing her essay, “Recipe”, in Cassoulet without the stunning photographs that generally accompany her work, but it also proves that her writing offers readers as much as her recipes.  By which I mean to say: You might first go to dash and bella for the food, but you stay for the stories. She’s a writer who’s always taken the mission of Cassoulet to heart, telling us over and over again what food means in her family, and forcing  readers to ask what it means in theirs. And that’s why we had to invite her to contribute, and why we’re thrilled that she agreed to join us.