I’m Kylie !

Hello from the Midwest!

I’m Kylie – the food blogger, photographer, and recipe developer behind Midwest Foodie. I focus on sharing simple recipes that make it easy to feed your family. As a mom and blogger, I understand how hard it can be to get a wholesome dinner on the table at the end of a long day. I love to share with you my family’s favorite recipes that include seasonal and accessible ingredients.

As seen in:

My Favs

Family Style Dinners

30 Minute Meals

Easy Chicken Dinners

Seasonal Recipes

What You’ll Find on Midwest Foodie

  • Reliable Recipes – These are family favorite, tried and tested, simple recipes that I make and eat frequently! I know they work because I’ve made them several times and continue to make them in my own kitchen.
  • Approachable Recipes – I focus on sharing simple recipes that are easy for a novice home cook, college kid, or busy parent.
  • Accessible Ingredients – I try to stick with easily accessible ingredients that are commonly found at most grocery stores or that you might have in your pantry right now. I use whole ingredients (no Velveeta or condensed soup) but that doesn’t mean that my meals aren’t indulgent!
  • Easy Comfort Foods – I share lots of easy comfort foods, but I prefer to make my one pot mac and cheese with actual shredded sharp cheddar instead of processed cheese and in my cheesy potato casserole, you’ll find butter, flour, and cream instead of condensed soup. While I do focus on indulgent dishes, like creamy crab soup, baked spaghetti casserole, and cheesy baked ravioli, I also share plenty of veggie-loaded family dinners as well including broccoli cheese soup, vegan black bean chili, and vegetarian enchiladas.
  • Step-by-Step Instructions – All of my recipes include step-by-step instructions and process shots so that you can confidently create a delicious family dinner while referencing what your food should look like at each step.
Most Popular Posts

About Midwest Foodie

Growing up in Wisconsin, one of my fondest childhood memories was cooking with my grandma. My specialties were red jello and Jiffy cake but she let me make all sorts of creations (and messes) in the kitchen. I grew up eating a standard Midwestern “meat and potatoes” diet – my favorite dinner as a kid was frozen Salisbury steak and canned new potatoes with butter, salt, and pepper – but as I grew up and moved out on my own I took my love of cooking to my studio apartment where I spent my evenings overcooking tilapia with way too many spices and seasonings.

Fast forward a few years and I found another food-loving Midwesterner to share my life with. My partner, Luke, is the official Midwest Foodie taste tester and as my grandma always reminds me, I’m very lucky because he eats everything! He patiently let me make messes in our kitchen for years, praising my poorly lit, heavily filtered Instagram photos, and tasting my latest creations. Finally he, along with a few friends, encouraged me to take my love of cooking to the internet. I started Tattooed Foodie – which I call my “practice blog” – in early 2016 but that quickly took a backseat when we adopted the love of our lives – our daughter.

Once our beautiful daughter came along, I realized the traditional 9-5 wasn’t ideal for me and I started daydreaming about a job that would allow flexibility and freedom. I wished for a schedule that would give us more time as a family and let us focus on things we enjoyed instead of punching the clock and working opposite schedules.

Once the fog of the newborn stage lifted, and we started getting some rest again, Midwest Foodie was born in June of 2017. I worked on it part-time without ever thinking it would turn into a legitimate career. But as I saw other bloggers making serious money I started to realize that this could be my dream job that would allow me to live my dream life. In January 2019, I got serious and started putting a ton of time into Midwest Foodie. I started focusing on SEO, improving my photography skills, and figuring out how to use Pinterest as a major traffic source.

All that hard work paid off, and in May 2020, my partner and I were able to quit our jobs! I am so proud of how far Midwest Foodie has come and the fact that we bring in a multiple six-figure income from a blog that gets over 1 million page views a month! I feel very lucky to be able to do something I love every single day while working from home and spending time with my family.

FAQs About Midwest Foodie

Sandwiches! I could eat a sandwich every day of my life forever and never get sick of it. I love a good turkey sandwich with cheese, lots of lettuce, oil and vinegar, and mayo. Add some banana peppers or onions and I’m in heaven. Also a big fan of a crispy BLT on toasted sourdough with fresh heirloom tomatoes in the height of summer. And of course, I enjoy a classic club sandwich as well.

Surprisingly, cooking is still one of my favorite things to do! However, I find following recipes and measuring ingredients very restrictive (I recognize the irony here) so as an act of rebellion, I find it freeing to cook without them! I love experimenting with seasonal ingredients and if I find a yummy combination, I try to recreate it for the blog. I also love spending time with family and friends, traveling, hiking, reading, thrift shopping, going for walks, and trying new restaurants.

Literally, this. I love creating in the kitchen, photographing, editing, and then telling you all about my favorite recipes. I never dreamed that I would be lucky enough to do this every day and get paid for it.

I worked in hospital administration for many years before leaving healthcare to blog. I really enjoyed working with providers and helping them with their administrative duties. I love organization, schedules, and order so I found that to be a good fit for me.

Once my blog income exceeded our regular income and we had a little nest egg in savings, we planned to quit our jobs in late summer 2020. But the panorama had other plans for us! The silver lining of the panini was that more folks were stuck at home cooking which meant more people visiting the blog which meant more income for us. It also meant that the restaurant my husband was cooking at closed down. And the administrative role I had suddenly became a patient-facing role which wasn’t ideal in the midst of the pandora. So I resigned and on my birthday in May 2020, we took the blog full-time! We felt confident in doing so because we had paid all our debt off (except our mortgage) and had enough in savings to last 6 months if anything happened. Everyone has a different comfort level, but that felt safe for us.

If you follow along on Instagram, you know that in the summer of 2021, we sold our house and almost everything we owned, packed what we could fit in our car, and drove across the country to move to Portland, Oregon! It had been a dream of ours since we visited for the Tastemaker (food blogging) Conference in 2019 and once we no longer had in-person jobs keeping us tied down in Wisconsin, we decided to take the leap and move to Oregon. While we miss our friends and family SO much, we have truly enjoyed seeing what the PNW has to offer and are really glad that we made the move. However, I won’t be changing my blog name anytime soon – I am still a Midwest girl through and through. One thing the panoramic made us realize is how short life is and how important it is to live it to the fullest!

Stay Connected with Midwest Foodie

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If you want a behind-the-scenes look at my daily life, I highly recommend following me on Instagram @midwest.foodie! I share snippets of my recipe shoots, candid photos of my daughter cooking in the kitchen, whatever we’re having for dinner, and everything else that’s going on!

You can learn a little bit more about me by checking out my episode of the Dishing podcast! I’ll share what I love most about blogging, my biggest food failure, and how many tattoos I have!

As Seen On…

Midwest Foodie’s tried and true recipes have been featured on many well-known sites including MSN, Food52, BuzzFeed, Tasty, Parade, Greatist, Redfin, The Everygirl, and The Everymom.

Here at Midwest Foodie, we make it easy to feed your family real food.

My All-Time Favorite Recipes