Meet Dallas bloggers Emily & Natalie of The City Sisters

It takes two sisters to fuel this food blog.

Dallas is home to a host of food bloggers, from pioneering sites such as DallasFood.org to review sites such as Full Custom Gospel BBQ (a Pegasus News content partner).

City Sisters: Natalie and Emily

But there's a group of bloggers around Dallas who focus on cooking and recipes, each with a unique point of view, which we're profiling weekly. This week: Sister bloggers Natalie and Emily.

Blog: The City Sisters: "Cooking and entertaining in the city."

Bloggers: Natalie, 31, and Emily, 29, are two sisters from a close-knit family; they also have three other siblings. Natalie is a paralegal who's attending law school, and Emily is an interior designer. They started the blog in January 2010 as a kind of repository for their recipes and as a project to do together.

"We were obsessed with lots of different food blogs and we're bad about keeping our own recipe books, so it was a way to keep our own recipes we were creating in a log," Emily says.

How they got blogging: Food was always a major part of their lives. "Everybody in the family is into food," says Emily. "When we get together, it's a cookfest." Their father is of Swedish descent, so there were Swedish dishes when they were young, and his job took them from Houston to the Northeast and back, so they've been exposed to lots of different kinds of food that gave them a perspective beyond the typical Texan. The girls recall being in their mom's kitchen in the summers when they'd make homemade pretzels and cookies. "Anything that kept us busy so she could keep an eye on us," Emily says. "I can remember twisting them into a million different shapes."

Division of duties part I: Natalie is more of the technical player. She created and maintains the site. They each do their own photos; Natalie, who has a minor in photography, is technical supervisor. Emily is the one with food stylist leanings who loves to collect plates and swatches of fabric.

As for recipes, Natalie likes baking and Emily likes savory things. "I don't have the patience to measure out little things -- if I add the wrong amount of baking powder and have to throw it away, it ruins my day, whereas Natalie takes the time to get all of the baking perfect," Emily says.

Division of duties part II: The sisters live about 15 minutes away from each other, so they have blog meetings once a month to figure out the schedule. "We usually drink wine and gossip," Emily says. Natalie's posts appear every Monday; Emily's posts appear every Thursday. They tend to crave the same flavors so they try to plan their topics so that they don't end up posting the same kinds of recipes at the same time. "Collaborating on the blog has been such a great way to inspire creativity -- even if that creativity has led to making six dozen cookies on a work night just for fun," Natalie says.

Why they blog: An over-the-top chocolate-themed dinner party that Natalie threw, in which every course included chocolate as part of a dish, pretty much sums up what they're about. "We like dinner parties and we're trying to revive it," the sisters say. "We like cooking at home, having people at home, experiencing cooking in the kitchen, coming together to experience food."

The recipe: Cinnamon spice popcorn