Melissa Kelly Streeter owes her personality and culinary shortcuts to an Army-brat upbringing in the Midwest, France and California. Today, she is a writer and cartoonist who spends time disguised as a tech writer for clients in Silicon Valley and the Midwest. For the past three years she has lived in her native Iowa with her beau, Rick Negrete (of Rick's Baked Chicken fame).

Lynne P. B. Reinhart honed one-handed cooking as a single mom with three charming but obstreperous kids—now teenagers—various dogs, cats, fish and so on. During the day she poses as a creative director and copywriter to high-tech ad clients in the San Francisco Bay Area. She was recently married to Rodger, the Most Patient Man in the Western Hemisphere.