About

Alicia Brady Scanlan (formerly Alicia Ross) brings more than 25 years of experience to the kitchen professionally as columnist, cookbook author, food blogger, spokesperson, recipe developer and photographer. But it was during her upbringing in rural North Carolina that her culinary roots were planted. She was taught not only how to grow her own food, but cook just about anything by the strong and resilient women in her life.

Alicia graduated from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Journalism. She authored “The Specialty of the House” column for 7 years for the Raleigh (NC) News and Observer, co-authored the nationally syndicated Desperation Dinners! food column for 18 years and has co-authored 3 cookbooks: Cheap! Fast! Good! (Workman, 2005), Desperation Dinners! (Workman, 2002) and Desperation Dinners! (Workman, 1997), which is still a bestseller, with more than 250,000 copies in print.

Alicia created and syndicated the Kitchen Scoop Syndicated newspaper column, blog and TV cooking segment (now retired.) 

After years in the piedmont, Alicia decided to realize her life-long dream of living at the beach. In 2011, she moved to Wilmington, NC where she still resides. Over the last 10 years of soaking up the sun on the NC coast, she has added to her family a new husband (hence the name change), two new cats and two doodles. When she is not in the kitchen cooking and creating, Alicia loves to travel, write romance novels (two published) and restore her 1918 Craftsman Cottage. Alicia can be reached at ab.scanlan@icloud.com.