Every week, we spotlight a different food blogger who’s shaking up the blogosphere with tempting recipes and knockout photography. Today, we chat with Ashley Rodriguez, the former pastry chef-turned-food blogger behind Not Without Salt, which since its founding in 2008 has become one of the Internet’s most popular food blogs. Swing back all week for a new recipe from Rodriguez every day.

Photos courtesy of Ashley Rodriguez

For Ashley Rodriguez, the food blogger whose site Not Without Salt helped define the food blogging genre, success can be boiled down to a single trait: confidence. It was a characteristic learned early, from watching her mother move self-assuredly about the Bellingham, Wash., kitchen that was the setting for Rodriguez’s earliest memories.

“She walked into the kitchen with confidence and wasn’t afraid of it, and rarely used a recipe to make us dinner,” Rodriguez told Yahoo Food. “Things like that gave me a big head start because I wasn’t fearful in the kitchen. Never have been. I’m always trying new things and experimenting — and recognizing that some things don’t always work out.”

Asparagus tart with mascarpone and walnuts.

Things certainly didn’t work out as planned when it came to her career, although Rodriguez is thankful fate had other plans in store. She’d originally intended to use her fine arts degree to become a high school art teacher, but a semester studying art history in Italy provided a different sort of education.

“In Italy, I spent all my free time shopping in the market,” she recalled. “It was the first time I experienced a food culture where so much of life happens at the table… I just fell so in love with that feeling, and I desired to create that experience back home.”

Upon her return to the States, Rodriguez embarked upon a career in food. Rather than go the culinary school route, she began working at a bakery in Seattle, and soon kickstarted a small business selling chocolates out of her own tiny kitchen. Then, in 2005, she got her big break: a pastry gig at Wolfgang Puck’s flagship restaurant Spago in Los Angeles. She and her husband picked up and moved to the city of angels without much of a second thought.