Our Author

Out of the kitchen, on a jaunt in Williamsburg.

Hi. Thank you so much for visiting Cooking The Kitchen. My name is Barbara, and I am retired from my last job, working as a paralegal. My past includes many different lifetimes, including art student, book designer, graphic designer, freelancer, artist's assistant, paralegal, wife and mom, gardener, quilter, and aspiring potter, to name a few. Some of those lifelines continue today. After retiring, I decided to add one more parallel life to those most loved such as wife, and gardener. I thought it would be fun to channel my energies and creativity into writing a food blog, and thus, Cooking The Kitchen has come into being.

I like to think that food was my heritage and in my blood, because I was born on a farm. My dad went to farm school, and my parents had a chicken farm in the first years of their marriage. In the fall my mom would grow pumpkins to sell for extra money in addition to what they made distributing the eggs laid by the chickens. I love this photo of my mom, in her early twenties, heading out to the garden. I thought it would help you see where my love of food might have come from. Seasonal foods and cooking are the perfect marriage. I hope you will enjoy the recipes and rambling thoughts you may find within Cooking the Kitchen.

Cooking the Kitchen

One day, some day, when I....so many dreams put aside, and now it is time to engage in Cooking the Kitchen and live the dream.

In the ideal, life would be like living in a small village in Provence, going to the markets, buying seasonal foods, and cooking something everyday. Now there is finally time to do just that, going to the local markets in Brooklyn, or to the Park Slope Food Co-op.

What is fresh? What looks good? What recipes inspire me? What shall I bring home to cook, to nurture myself and my family? Time to step out of the box and try something new. Time to perfect something old, or riff on it further. To me, cooking the kitchen always meant looking inside the fridge, and inventing something with the ingredients that are there. Something out of nothing. Let the magic begin!

My kitchen windows look out upon our garden. I love to look outside as I cook. This is my favorite photo of my husband Dan. Always reminds me of the Crosby Stills Nash lines, "our house is a very very very fine house...."

Here are some photos of my early influencers, all of the Moosewood Cookbooks, still on my bookshelves.