Calling All Food Lovers!

Get your food + body mindset in a positive place with About Love & Cookies. I post every Monday as an antidote to what usually happens on Mondays—a new diet.

I get it. It doesn’t feel good to be heavy and often it’s unhealthy. But fighting your body and distracting yourself with food rules is not the way forward. Everything changes when you shift from control to connection, love over fear.

Cultivate joyful eating with me and kiss those sad days of dieting goodbye!

A little bit about me and where I’m coming from in my writing:

The French approach to food

I’ve always sensed a rightness to the French approach to food and its place in daily life, the sense of joy and connection it brings, to ourselves and one another. It’s part of my heritage—“I’m a quarter-cup French” I explained in first grade.

The distraction of dieting and too-busy, too-much

Since childhood, the kitchen has been my happy place but a crash diet in puberty set off a 25-year battle with my body. I enjoyed a successful career in software development, but it was never my passion. My body sounded alarms with IBS, acne, and tears but I was too busy to pay attention.

Everything changed when I became a mother—a strange time of love and complete surrender.

I’m a chef, food writer, mentor, and facilitator of joyful, healthy eating

My culinary training is a mix of professional pursuits in California and Provence, and a lifetime of being in the kitchen. I’m a certified wine professional from the Culinary Institute of America, St. Helena. My food writing, pen and ink illustrations, and recipes appear quarterly in Edible Bozeman, a publication I help create along with the publisher and a small team. Ripe Food & Wine continues to be a joyful pursuit as well as a practical cooking reference here at home.