About Cooking in the Midwest
Hi, I’m Luke Brown, the recipe creator, cook, and video maker behind Cooking in the Midwest. I create easy family dinners made with familiar ingredients that can be found in an average kitchen.
My primary goal is to turn basic kid friendly ingredients into a variety of meals that can be shared around the kitchen table with family and friends. From Crockpot meals and one-pan dinners to griddle and comfort food favorites, I want to provide you with as many options as possible.
Life is busy and stressful enough. Cooking in the Midwest is here to turn “What are we going to have for dinner?” into something that feels exciting and not just one more thing you have to figure out!
About Luke
My name is Luke Brown, I come from a small town in southeast Missouri where I fell in love with my high school sweetheart and continue to live and love life with family and friends.
I have always had a strong connection to cooking and love of food. There is something really special about how simple recipes shared with family and friends can create such strong lasting memories.
Midwest cooking is all about comfort food made with simple ingredients that makes everyone happy! Many small towns scattered across the midwest don’t have access to big fancy grocery stores so we share a lot of “pantry staple” type of recipes with basic ingredients you can find in any grocery store. I’ve always felt there is something refreshing about creating great food with simple ingredients. When you’re scrolling through Cooking in the Midwest, I want you to feel like you have a variety of options regardless of what you have access to!
Aside from being a blogger, video creator, and leftover bacon lover, my primary job and focus will always be being a husband and father. Unlike some recipe blogs you’ll find on the internet using professional photos and staged kitchens, on Cooking in the Midwest you’ll find real dinners that my family loves so much that I want to share them with your family as well. If it doesn’t pass the picky eater test with my boys it never makes it onto the site!
Even though my love of food and cooking began long ago, Cooking in the Midwest began in August of 2021. I decided to do something outside my comfort zone and share some of our favorite meals on my first few TikTok videos. Being a young family we were constantly trying to figure out the answer to the questions “What are we going to have for dinner?”, “How can we do something different with what we’ve got?” “What are my kids actually going to eat?” I knew there had to be other families going through that same struggle. Fast forward a few months and a couple hundred thousand followers and I had fallen completely in love with sharing recipes with other families.
When I first started seeing comments from real families telling me how much their family had loved the recipes they had seen on my page it felt like there was a true purpose behind the “silly videos” I was making in my kitchen! Haha
The Cooking in the Midwest blog was created the next year to help my followers have a place where everything was organized. I always put the recipes in the captions of my videos, but the space was limited. There was no room for helpful tips, detailed descriptions, or process photos to make life easier when you’re just trying to get dinner on the table after a busy day of work.