In a modest kitchen in a rental house in southern Delaware, the granddaughter of Sicilian immigrants prepares a quiche. Onion, kale, swiss. Her cookbooks are hidden somewhere in a storage unit, along with her grater, so she improvises: a cup of milk, three eggs, then cheese cut into dime-sized cubes. Two hours later, when the crust is golden-brown, she pulls her invention from the oven. She snaps a photo with her Panasonic point-and-shoot, then plugs the camera into her iMac while the quiche cools. Her Tumblr blog is already queued up.
“It’s an art form for me!” said my mom, Joanne Caputo, 59. She was busy taking more photos of the quiche—her “dinner pie”—when I called her Wednesday afternoon. Her blog, A Life of Pie, racked up about 5,000 followers after being featured on Tumblr’s food category last year. She is far more popular on the Internet than I am, and she’s been a student of the Internet for far less time. She’s been blogging on Tumblr for less than two years.
“How’s it look?” I asked about the quiche.
“Prit-ty, prit-ty good,” she said, channeling Larry David.
