Who am I and why I’m sharing recipes through a blog? 

 

I am a creative food lover from the South and follow a plant-based diet. My day job is teaching Costume Construction and Pattern Making at a local university in Orlando, Florida. In my free time I like to recharge in my kitchen. Through food, I connect memories and moments from my past.

 

Before moving to Orlando, I was raised in Georgia, then, after college, I spent two years living and working in Lexington, Kentucky; with a summer in Williamsburg, Virginia; three years in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, spending a couple of summers in Utah. I also spend more weekends than I can remember in both Nashville and Knoxville, Tennessee while dating Matt, my now-husband, long distance. These experiences have educated me in the similarities and differences of those regions and how the people there have shaped each region’s food-culture. What all these Southern places had in common other than their greens and biscuits, was that Southern food is a communal food culture. Southern cooks like myself, share our love through cooking and baking for others. The downside of moving so often is you find yourself living hours away from family and friends which makes cooking and sharing food with them impossible. What I can share from afar are my recipes!

 

During undergrad, in when everyone had a blog, I created a site to share what I was cooking with roommates and friends. It was around this time that I decided to try veganism to help with health issues. I spent years only following vegan recipes which lead to a lot of Asian and Indian inspired cooking. As time passed, I started learning ways to adapt “traditional” recipes that called for meat and dairy using plant-based alternatives. Some of these recipes switched out meat and dairy for the plant-based equivalent such as seitan and soymilk, but many skip the “fake meats” to utilize the vast array of flavors and textures available in plants. So, after years of not cooking foods like the one I grew up on, over the past year I have started recipe testing and working out how to make some of the foods I grew up loving without animal products. 

 

Matt occasionally nudges me to restart my blog so I could easily share my reinvented recipes with friends and family. Some have asked for the beloved family casserole we all missed from childhood sleepovers at Grandmothers while some have asked how I was able to veganize garlic drop biscuits. Over the past 4 years I‘ve sporadically remembered  to jot down my food experiment notes in a spiral notebook to aid in working out recipes. My hope is that will this blog enable me to easily to share my recipes and encourage me to keep better notes and track successes and failures in my kitchen experiments. I’ve lost count of times that we’ve finished a meal and Matt will ask, “Did you write down that recipe.” All too often the answer is, “no,” and so, I’m left scratching my head trying to recall exactly what I did the first time that made the dish just right.

 

The recipes I share here may have started as an experiment, but each has been thoroughly tested to ensure the results are reproduceable.