(Photo by Courtney Aaron Photography) 

Hi! I’m Cindy, aka Hungry Girl por Vida. Home cook and baker, recipe enthusiast, avid doodler, maker of stuff, lover of all things pretty, wife, sister, aunt, daughter, niece, friend, and dog mom. Also, a girl…who is hungry, and it’s for life.

Hungry Girl por Vida is a blog about all the things I love and love to share. This is my space where practical meets pretty.

I love things that contrast. It’s the Gemini in me, I’m sure. I love nothing more than something that is both sensible and lovely. Working in the kitchen is such a basic and essential skill, that has the opportunity for endless creativity.

Cooking, to me, is the epitome of all things pragmatic and expressive. It’s nourishment, love, survival, and imagination.

As a girl of many interests, with a predisposition for distraction, my attention is often fleeting. Cooking and baking are my constants…they never get old or tired. Even as a little girl, I loved all kinds of foods and hanging in the kitchen. I come from a family of excellent cooks—both home and professional. My Korean mother taught me very early on to try many things…and that insulting a person’s food insults their culture and who they are. That’s some serious wisdom.

I began this blog in May of 2008, I was in a post-college rut and after days of losing myself in other food blogs—the recipes! the community! the styling and photography!–I was enchanted.

So, why Hungry Girl por Vida? As a person who is terrible with foreign languages, I can’t say it’s because of my fluency in Spanish. Really, I just nabbed it from a song I was obsessed with at the time—Sad Girls por Vida by Pretty Girls Make Graves.

Dots, connected.

Here, on Hungry Girl por Vida, you will (hopefully) find recipes that inspire and excite you. I really only post recipes that I want to eat in the hope that you will want to eat them too. I try to keep things as homemade and from-scratch as possible. It’s less of a whole-foods kind of philosophy as it is hard-headed compulsion…but, either way, I like to think it works. There are a lot of sweet treats, some breakfast fare, a smattering of savory recipes, plus a few sprinkles of misc. beauty and craft related posts. I eat most things—but, there are some recipes that are vegetarian and vegan-adaptable, which will be noted somewhere in the post.

When I’m not cooking in the kitchen or trawling the internets, I can be found hanging with my husband, Sean, and our two dogs, Jezebel and Luxe, at our home in central Michigan (the middle of the mitten!).

Let’s be friends! I love hearing from you, so feel free to comment or email me via my contact form just beneath the header.