 My name is Molly Ye, and I live on a sugar beet farm outside of Grand Forks, North Dakota. Grand Forks is a small town in between Fargo and Canada, and I claim to fame is that sometimes our restaurant critic Marilyn Hagerty reviews restaurants like the Olive Garden, and sometimes they go viral. I write a food blog, which is called My Name is Ye. I've had it for six years, and it's basically a life diary with recipes and photos and bits about my life around the farm. I'm originally from Chicago, and I moved to New York to study classical percussion at Juilliard. And while I was in New York, I discovered the food scene here, and I fell in love with it, and I found myself ending my practice days early to go find New York's best burger and pizza, and so I graduated, and I applied to work at a little site called The Kitchen. I didn't even get an interview because I guess playing the xylophone doesn't really qualify you to be a food writer. It's okay. But I had my blog, and so I sort of forged my own way to write about food on my blog. This is what my blog looked like when I first started. It was a lot about restaurants, a lot about schnitzel. I won a free month of schnitzel from the schnitzel and things truck here. I really like schnitzel. And then two and a half years ago, my then boyfriend and I moved to his family's farm where they grow sugar beets. I didn't know what a sugar beet was when I moved there, but this is a sugar beet, and it's processed to become table sugar, so as a cake baker I use a lot of it. And it's a really cold place. It looks like this for half the year, and what I discovered when I moved there was that I really thrive under these conditions. I do really well when I don't have anything else to do, and when I moved there I didn't have any friends. So I just begs all day. I worked on my photos, which was basically the first thing that I tackled about my blog because when I started my blog my photos looked like this. So I just trapped myself inside, or the snow trapped me inside, and I worked on my photos, and so I started using Pinterest, and I drove traffic to my blog through Pinterest and Taste Binding and Food Gawker, and I was able to start having a food blog as a job. And so I do sponsored content, and I contribute recipes to sites like the kitchen, and I also got a cookbook deal, so I'm working on a cookbook right now. These are donuts. But so I realized that I really took to the Midwest like a fish to water, so I decided that I'd better stay there. So I got married. That's our backyard. That was our wedding, which was a year ago. John Snow wasn't there. He's our neighbor, though, and so began my life as a Midwest farmwife, which includes a lot of really long days of being inside while my husband drives tractors and other large pieces of machinery that I haven't really learned the names of is my kitchen. But basically I started blogging not just as a way to do something, but also to connect with my new surroundings, and so I learned about Midwest food like laffsa, which is a really thin potato pancake, and Sam Siston from the New York Times came and learned how to make laffsa in my kitchen. So I learned that with him, and then I learned about hot dish. This is my version of a hot dish. I said the punch line. I learned that salads don't really need vegetables, because Midwest salads are just jello and cookies and whipped cream. So I started to basically do updated versions of that, and we also live outside the line of restaurant delivery, so luckily I'm half Chinese, so if we ever want Chinese, would I just make it? So that's like, that's actually really big influence for my recipes on my blog is my heritage. So I'm half Chinese and I'm Jewish. So I love traveling to Israel and bringing the flavors of Israel and the Middle East back to my new friends there and teaching Midwesterners how to pronounce Zatar and Hala and stuff like that. So I really love using these flavors to keep my heritage alive on the farm. And then also, as a kid of the 90s, I found Fettikake and Dunkaroos and Lunchables all really made impacts on me, so now that I live on a farm in the middle of nowhere, I have the time to make these things from scratch. So I've been working on this bologna recipe for a Lunchable, and it's kind of a disaster. Hopefully it'll be worth it one day. These are my kids. I guess, I mean, I live like five hours from the closest to whole foods, so it's really difficult to get really fancy ingredients, but the idea of the farm life and having chickens right out my back door who are about to start laying eggs any day now are really big influences for me. Here they are now. They're all grown up. So that's a little bit about me. If you would have told me five years ago that I today would be living on a farm with chickens named Macaroni, I probably would have laughed at you, but I wouldn't trade it for all the pizza in New York.