About me

Among many other things, I’m a mom of two smart, adorable young women and wife to a smarty-pants, awesome man (see his great site: https://www.campfirecontent.com) and for over 28 crazy/serene/turbulent/wild, but always incredibly entertaining and loving years. I’ve been in the food business off and on for my entire career. I started by selling homemade sandwiches at a local auction house when I was in 3rd grade and graduated to a variety of waitress gigs (I was a really, really horrible waitress. Fact: One New Year’s Eve, I spilled red wine on a customer’s white fur coat.), to director of a cooking school in New Mexico, to the founder of a short-lived Baltimore-based homemade pasta and sauce company, to being head of sales/marketing for a Colorado artisanal pasta company, to owning my own PR/Marketing biz focused on CPGs and restaurants, to today as the Vice President of Development for the most respected research, education and farmer trainer organization focused on organic agriculture in the world, Rodale Institute.

And like everyone else on the planet, I love to eat. And, thankfully I also love to cook. But more than anything else, I love feeding people and entertaining them.

RECIPES

This site was originally intended to just be a place where I could capture all of my favorite recipes rather than always having to dig through my folders of printed recipes or dozens of cookbooks. The recipes on this site are ones I tend to make over and over and over (just ask my family), and as my girls are getting older hopefully this site will be a place they can turn to when they are craving something from home. Or they are recent recipes that I’ve made and absolutely love. And, no, I’m not stealing and just reprinting recipes. Every single recipe I make from a published source gets modified usually rather significantly so that I make them my own.

FOOD PHILOSOPHY

Mark Bittman and Dr. David Katz wrote an article for New York magazine that pretty much sums up my beliefs about food. It’s long but super smart.

Food is our chance to vote three (or more!) times a day to support farmers (preferably local organic farmers), to nourish our families and friends, at the heart of it all — to connect with nature genuinely. And the more we alienate ourselves from the process or deny ourselves good, wholesome foods, the more disconnected we are from that which makes us human.

Since reading Michelle Obama’s book, Becoming, I was reminded about Jesse Jackson’s plea to the nation to stop watching TV for two hours every night and instead engage with society. I want to take that message and personalize it a bit. Instead, let’s put down our screens for two hours every night, cook using whole food ingredients, and engage with our family and friends over the dinner table. If we took the time to shop locally and cook at least three-quarters of our meals from scratch, I know we would see a huge reduction in obesity, heart disease, Type-2 diabetes, ADHD, cancer, and yes, even depression. Food — again, whole foods prepared with real ingredients — I believe is the key to a better life – a much better life.