So why me. Why do you want to read about my crazy adventure through life, cooking, traveling, and photographing everything I see? What experience do I have to tell you about restaurants, bottles of wine, new coffee shops, nail salons (I have a long time, seriously passionate affair with good manicures), local makers, throwing dinner parties, and what recipes to use to feed your family?

A Foodie’s History

The short answer? 30 plus years of travel, using WHATEVER is handy to take a snapshot or photograph (be forewarned, if we’re out together, your phones camera will be considered fair game when mine’s battery dies), growing up cooking, learning from family, friends, and anyone else willing to answer my thousands of questions, with a couple of absolutely epic, now and forever a part of family lore failures along the way… (ask me sometime about the five alarm chili, or the very first time I decided I could bake without a recipe…it was bad. Quinten Tarantino bloodshed bad)

I talked friends into throwing lavish dinner parties for our parents when I was in high school, feeding friends and throwing together big pasta dinners with a a more the merrier approach to life

I talked friends into throwing lavish dinner parties for our parents when I was in high school, feeding friends and throwing together big pasta dinners with a a more the merrier approach to life. One of my earliest memories is a friend of my Dad’s telling him that when I grew up, if we were throwing a dinner party and someone asked to bring a last minute guest, my response would almost certainly be “Who the hell are they? F&*% it, it doesn’t matter, of course they can come!” Remarkably accurate prediction of the future. And perhaps where my love of profane words started.

“Who the hell are they? F&*% it, it doesn’t matter, of course they can come!”

Fast forward into college, I spent a lot of years working in hospitality in one form or another, I’ve bartended, waited tables, been a hostess, had a brief stint as a cocktail waitress in a rather seedy establishment that shall forever remain nameless, ran the kitchen of a wine bar & bistro, worked the line in a now defunct small Italian restaurant (in which I also bartended), worked the line in another rather famous Portland restaurant who had the bad habit of bouncing paychecks, created the menu for, and did all the legwork for weekend breakfasts, at a (again) now defunct, tiny bistro in a tony Portland suburb.

Throughout all of this I’ve collected cookbooks, and have spent COUNTLESS hours pouring over them, trying to learn everything I can about why they’re laid out they way they are, which recipes are easy to read an follow, which have appealing photography (again, and the why behind it), and developed an innate love of entertaining (thanks Mom & Dad).

I’ve had a wide and varied career path that has brought me to this point, toss in a few more years of professional sales (fashion retail, then diamonds & banking, respectively) and a really great track record of making mistakes, some far more entertaining than others, and here we are.

Throughout it all, a small handful of things have remained constant. My love(s) of cooking, entertaining, traveling, and photography

Throughout it all, a small handful of things have remained constant. My love(s) of cooking, entertaining, traveling, and photography, so here we are. I’m rolling them all up into one, and jumping. I’ll learn to fly on the way down.

“If you really want to make a friend, go to someone’s home and eat with him, the people who give you their food, give you their heart” – Caesar Chavez 

My husband, God love him, asks me often if there are any strangers to me, and the answer is invariably “nope, just friend’s I haven’t met yet”.

Join me, on this crazy wonderful journey through new cities, small towns, big name cookbooks, tiny hole in the wall restaurants, with a big handful of my own recipes tossed into the mix as well, after all, the happiest I am is surrounded by friends in my kitchen, cooking, laughing, and sharing a bottle (or twelve) of wine.

Whimsical Wine Print  $15 by DimestoreSaintDesign

Want to work with me? Hello@cookeatexplore.com