Where It All Started
I grew up in a family that cooked. My grandmother, originally from Oaxaca, Mexico, made everything from scratch — mole, tamales, handmade tortillas on a comal she’d had for thirty years. My mother adapted those same flavors to a smaller apartment kitchen in Sacramento with two working parents and a tight budget. Watching both of them taught me that good food was never about expensive ingredients. It was about knowing what you were doing.
I enrolled in the culinary arts program at the Oregon Culinary Institute at 21. The training was rigorous — classic French technique, knife skills, sauce making, pastry fundamentals, and a great deal of emphasis on palate development. I graduated in 2009 and spent the next decade working every station in some of the best independent restaurants in the Pacific Northwest.
By 2016 I was running my own kitchen as head chef at a farm-to-table restaurant outside Portland. In 2019, I left full-time restaurant work when my daughter was born — and realized there was a gap between professional culinary knowledge and what home cooks had access to. That gap became this site.