EDGEWATER – Some chefs chase recipes with a Captain Ahab-like obsession. They are consumed by the work of refining their ingredients and methods until they know the dish is the best that they can possibly make.
Like those chefs, Fran Holmstrom has a white whale of her own: the chocolate chip cookie.
Among the documented evidence of her journey: a 3-inch binder full of nothing but chocolate chip cookie recipes and a notebook from eighth grade containing one of her earliest recipes for the cookie.
Before dismissing Holstrom’s cookie quest, take a look at her blog, fransfavs. com. The site features over 300 recipes, including shrimp francesca, chicken gyros, and coffee crème brulee – each further reinforcing the fact that Holmstrom can cook anything.
As a child, Fran spent a lot of time in the Italian restaurant co-owned by her uncle and father near Boston. She maintains that she learned cooking by “osmosis.”
“As you saw your mother sautéing onions and garlic for the 5,000th time, you just knew: you chopped an onion, you poured some oil…” she said.
Fran Holmstrom holds her signature wooden spoon and copies of Fran’s Favorites (editions I and II) in her kitchen. Her blog,fransfavs.com, features over 300 recipes. (Mason Souza I Sun Day Photo)
In the days before Pinterest, allrecipes.com, or the Food Network, Fran was not only crafting kitchen wonders, but sharing them with friends and drawing inspiration from myriad cookbooks and sources.
In many ways, she was blogging about food before the internet even existed.
On April 26, 2011, Fran took her passion to the web, launching fransfavs.com. The date was also special because it marked the 25th wedding anniversary between Fran and her husband, Roger.
The couple works together to post about twice a week to the blog. Recipes are either “Frantastic originals” or dishes from other blogs or recipe books that have “passed Musto” – Musto being Fran’s middle name.
“I have a small, loyal following but I’m not big-time by any means,” Fran said.
The following has grown through Fran’s consistent recipe postings, which often include short anecdotes to add personality.
She often coordinates a recipe with a holiday or a special event, such as her strawberry salsa, featured in this edition as a Fourth of July side dish.
The blogoverse is a give-and-take environment, so a big part of Fran’s efforts to grow her audience is posting comments on other recipe sites and networking with fellow bloggers.
Roger is the blog’s photographer and has developed an eye for what makes food pop out of a screen and into readers’ subconscious desires.
“What I noticed looking at a lot of other blogs is that when you actually look at something, you can see texture and you can see the moisture,” he said.
Roger strives for an almost-tangible level of detail in a photo ¬ the spongy surface of Fran’s Twinkie clone or the delicately burned top of her spinach and ricotta pizza are examples of the payoff.
In the past couple of years, Roger said Fran’s love of cooking has really rubbed off on him. A scientist who works in semiconductor device fabrication, Roger approaches the kitchen like a lab, but also has a love of watching people enjoy what he cooks.
Whether a dish is going up on the blog or not, Fran will continue to tweak any new recipe until she gets it right.
“If we had company coming a week in advance and she was going to be making something new, we would be eating two or three versions of it that week to come up with the best one,” Roger said.
That devotion to handmade creations has not come without its costs. When Fran’s daughters were on their high school swim team, parents were asked to make dinner for the team, and Fran volunteered to make the pasta.
Immediately, she brainstormed on what type to make: Lasagna? Ravioli? Manicotti? Fellow parents advised her to keep it simple, so she settled on mostaciolli with homemade sauce – “Ragu” is a four-letter-word in the Holmstrom dictionary.
The night of the swim meet, Fran happily handed her batch of homemade, Frantastic pasta to a parent attending the food. What happened next shocked and appalled her.
The parent dumped her pasta into a large vat and stirred it into a heaping pile of incongruous noodles and red sauce.
“After that, I just made desserts,” she said.
Fran currently works as an administrative assistant at Givaudan Flavors Corporation, the leading producer of artificial flavors and seasonings. Though she rarely uses artificial ingredients in her cooking, Fran loves working with the food scientists.
One perk of the job: when Good Seasons discontinued their Caesar packet, which was Fran’s favorite, she brought in her last packet to work.
A food scientist recreated the mix and gave her a five-pound bag to take home. Fran also enjoys that she can bring a dish into work and get a thorough, scientific analysis of its flavors.
Fran’s first tip for anyone interested in blogging is to find someone knowledgeable in website management, if the blogger is not experienced. Fran’s IT expert is her daughter’s boyfriend, who launched the site and helps her through any technical glitches.
The difference between a good blog and a “blah blog,” as Fran puts it, is the passion of cooking. Blogging is not a way to make a living, so in the end, it all has to revolve around the food.
“You have to have a love of cooking, and you’re doing it just for the joy of doing it and making the food and talking about the food,” she said.
Strawberry Salsa
Ingredients:
1 lb. strawberries, hulled and diced
1/4 cup thinly sliced green onions
1 jalapeño, seeded and diced
1/4 cup cilantro, chopped
2 tbl. fresh lime juice
1 tbl. agave syrup or honey (I used agave)
1/8 tsp. salt
Directions:
Gently mix ingredients together in a bowl. Serve with tortilla chips or over fish or chicken.
www.fransfavs.com
3 Comments
Wonderful article and so Fran! One can always rely on Fran’s recipes as being tried, tried, and tried again true.
I’ve known this terrific couple for decades. This article depicts them so accurately!
You need to know Fran and taste her food to really appreciate what a special chef and individual she is. Fran LIVES her “foodie” inclination. Her love and consummate passion for amazing taste sensations comes through in each and every recipe. She always adds a special twist that takes her creations a step beyond the typical, while staying true to the dish.