I’m a Colorado native and a home cook who grew up eating delicious food, thanks to my mom and my grandma. Homemade beans and tortillas were on my mom’s table regularly, along with her sopaipillas, chicken enchiladas, homemade bread and sourdough biscuits.
Grandma always had jars and jars of salsa from the fresh ingredients she grew in her garden. Her homemade tamales were stored in the freezer beside her tortillas, ready to pull out whenever we were hungry. And she made fruit leather from the apricot tree in her backyard.
I grew up knowing what good food was.
My mom was extremely patient and generous with her kitchen supplies when I was a kid, and I found I loved to cook at an early age. I didn’t grow up in a cosmopolitan city or have access to exotic ingredients, but learning breeds a love of learning.
As I went into my adult years, I traveled for my job and began eating new-to-me foods. You could find me, party of one, eating regional foods and fresh catch in the Pacific Northwest, on the California coast, and down south in the land of sweet tea, catfish, grits and hush puppies.
In 2002, I met Dave over a platter of “fruits de mer” and a bottle of Priorat, and we married and moved to Munich, Germany, where my culinary world exploded with the bounty and beauty of European farming and centuries old knowledge and techniques. It was in Munich that I discovered the value of slow food, cooking for others, and the lifelong bond of friendship that forms when people gather around a dinner table.
