Seafood Lover's Chesapeake Bay

Mary Lou Baker has been a food and travel writer since the 1980s, first as a restaurant reviewer and weekly travel columnist for the Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis and later as food and wine editor at Baltimore Magazine. She has traveled to London, Ireland, France and Italy on food-centered excursions, served as the restaurant reviewer for Chesapeake Life, Annapolis Lifestyle and Shore Living magazines and is the co-author with Bonne Rapoport of Dining In Baltimore. Her lifestyle articles have appeared in numerous publications, including Maryland Life, What’s Up Annapolis, What’s Up Eastern Shore and Inside Annapolis magazines, several in-flight magazines and the British publication Essentially America. At one time she was a consultant for Restaurant Associates, Inc. and more recently spent a rigorous week at the Culinary Institute of America’s “Boot Camp on Healthy Eating.” A graduate of the College of New Rochelle as an English major and Journalism minor, she did post-grad work at the Publishing Procedures Course at Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This native New Englander has lived in Annapolis for many years, raising four children and a series of Labrador Retrievers and cooking with joy for family and friends who insist on being in the kitchen to watch while she bangs those pots and pans. Recent culinary challenges include accommodating her husband’s conversion to vegetarianism, causing her to become an avid reader of Washington Post food editor Joe Yonan’s weekly plant-based recipes. Lobster is her preferred birthday dinner and a good hamburger her guilty pleasure. Holly Smith is managing editor of the nonprofit Washington Independent Review of Books and a longtime freelance writer. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Salon, More Mirth of a Nation, USA Today Travel's 10Best, CNBC.com, Maryland Life, Brain, Child, and many other publications. She blogs at HollySmithWrites.com and spends her free time wrangling her four children. Wait, she doesn't have any free time.