Making food for other people to savor and enjoy has always been a part of my life and of who I am at my core. I learned to cook at a young age, spending time watching my mother prepare meals for her growing family in our kitchen in suburban Virginia. By the time I was in high school, I was pretty much fixing dinner for the family on most evenings. In college, I’d bake cookies as a study break and dole them out to the dorm floor (a batch of these cookies even gave me car-borrowing privileges from a friend) and make dinners to share on occasion. I also coached a roommate through making quiche using only a toaster oven for a date!
I
started this website to share some of the recipes and culinary stories
from my time traveling and living abroad, food preparation tips I'd
learned, in addition to tales of cooking and eating adventures from 25+
years of living in New York City, after spending
many years working in foreign policy, non-profit, and financial
services, jobs which enabled me to live in London, Bologna, and
Strasbourg as well as to travel to Austria, Germany, Sweden, Denmark,
Russia, Ukraine, and Poland, among other places. No matter what job I had post-university and graduate school (when I lived in Italy for a year), I’d spend time dreaming up menus and throwing elaborate brunches and dinner parties for friends with recipes taken from magazines and cookbooks or ones I’d created myself.
After the financial crisis in the late '00s when my job at an international financial firm was eliminated, I decided to pursue seriously my passion for all things culinary, and I enrolled in the International Culinary Center in New York City (formerly known as the French Culinary Institute), where I graduated with a Grand Diplôme with Distinction from their Honors Program. [You can read about my culinary school experiences here.] Since then I have held quite a roles in the hospitality industry: cookbook recipe tester; menu writer, editor, and developer; catering operations manager; pop-up event and production cook; kitchen manager, to name a few. I have even wrangled chickens at an interactive food event for children held at the NY Botantical Gardens!
Buon appetito!
Kathy Blake
(aka The Experimental Gourmand)
