In this book, I am going to tell you a story. It’s the story of one year in my kitchen, as well as all the years leading up to it. At its heart, this is a story about eating. I know you are here because you love to eat, but that love goes deeper than just the act of eating. You want to do more than eat; you want to cook, too—transforming ingredients from individual shapes and tastes into deeply flavorful, cohesive dishes. The metamorphosis of ingredients through cooking is the closest thing we have to real, live magic. But good food doesn’t require page-long ingredient lists, complex cooking techniques, or fancy far-away components—the best food comes from the simplest recipes with the freshest ingredients. I’m so excited to share my story with you and to show you how using seasonal, fresh ingredients can transform not just the way you cook and eat but also the way you live.
In this tale of food, I am also telling you the story of my family—one rich with baklava, kopanisti, perfectionism, and octopus tendrils wrapped around my yiayia’s tomato sauce. I was raised in a household where home-cooked food was the norm. This was, in part, because my parents owned and operated a Greek deli in Portland, Oregon, for more than thirty years. My father is from a small island called Aegina, where his father, my papou, started as a shoemaker and eventually became a landowner and pistachio farmer. My yiayia helped tend the farm and raised eight children in a two-room house with no running water. Grit, determination, and an overall sense of sassiness are important traits in Greek people, and that’s very evident in my family. While my mother is not Greek, she completely embraced the Greek culture upon marrying my father. And, with her being one hell of a cook, the Greek culture embraced her back. My mother is the warmest person you will ever meet, and her cooking reflects that. She worked full-time at the deli while we were growing up but still made dinner from scratch every single day. Some of my earliest memories are of her pulling up a chair to let me stand in front of the stove so I could reach the pot. I loved helping her stir, and when she started to let me sprinkle in seasonings, I was over the moon. The way a pinch of something could completely transform the flavor of a dish seemed magical to me. I was hooked.
Both my parents are avid gardeners, and I was lucky to be able to eat fresh produce from our yard year-round. They used the tomatoes and cucumbers from our garden for the Greek salads at the deli, before “farm to table” was a blip on the trend radar. They also had a giant compost heap in the backyard that consisted of rotting old bits of vegetables and plants, which our neighbors didn’t really understand. When my father wasn’t working at the deli, he would usually be out in the garden, and I’d teeter my tiny self out to spend time with him. The more time I spent with him out there, the more I learned about gardening, and the more fascinated I became. I was amazed that a little seed smaller than a ladybug could give you dozens of pounds of tomatoes in a matter of months, and all you had to do was place it in soil and give it water. This was the beginning of another addiction that would see me through ripping out the entire front lawn of my first home and filling it with tomato plants. Again, the neighbors didn’t really understand.
Along with being in the kitchen with my mother and in the garden with my father, I also spent a lot of time with both of them at the deli. My parents didn’t really trust day care, so I spent my time outside of school playing and lending a hand at the business. I started helping out with small things at the restaurant, like cleaning tables, and eventually began lending a hand with prep work.
My father was, and still is, a perfectionist with food. He borders on OCD when it comes to the correct way to cut a cucumber. He had to make the same dishes again and again for the restaurant, so being consistent and exact was very important. From him, I learned the art of precision. My mother, though, had a style that was much more relaxed, and she would make up our dinners based on what we had from the garden and what she felt like preparing. Her cooking style was much more adventurous, which inspired me to try preparing new foods as I grew older and started cooking on my own.
It stayed that way for a long time, with me helping at the deli on weekends and during school breaks, watching my mom whip up delicious meals in our kitchen at home, and lending a hand in the garden. And then, at the age of fifteen, I picked up my first film camera, and another addiction began. I loved to chronicle everything through my photos, and that led me to pursue filmmaking at university.
I graduated from college in 2009 at the height of the recession and had no idea if I’d ever find a job. This was the period of my life I like to refer to as the unemployment tango. Going from working three jobs and being a full-time student to struggling to find gainful employment of any kind was a bit of a shock to my work-loving ethos. So, with a lot of extra time on my hands, I poured myself into what I loved most—cooking. I started cooking all the time, making whatever I could with the meager grocery budget I had. And that’s when I started my blog. I didn’t do it because I wanted to showcase my photography. (You can look at old photos as proof. I shot shrimp at nighttime using flash! It was terrible.) I didn’t do it because I wanted to find a way to make money. (Sponsored posts weren’t a thing back then.) I did it because I loved food and wanted to share that love with as many people as possible. And I still do.
Six months into my unemployment, I was hired as a page at NBCUniversal. Yes, like Kenneth from 30 Rock, but the West Coast version. I gave tours of the Burbank studio lot, worked on The Tonight Show, and began climbing the corporate ladder. I threw myself into my “dream job” full-time on weekdays and worked all weekend long on the blog—cooking, shooting, and writing. This nonstop cycle went on for several years. And then, my dream job wasn’t my dream job anymore. I realized I didn’t really care about shooting schedules and viewership and budgets and producers’ egos. Those weekends of cooking and writing became a life raft keeping me afloat in a seemingly endless flow of monotonous, pointless days. Eventually, I realized that all I looked forward to were those two glimmering days a week spent in the kitchen and on my computer nerding out with other foodies, but I didn’t know what to do about it. I wasn’t happy with my job, but I couldn’t afford to quit and didn’t have the time to apply elsewhere. And then, the universe dropped me the least subtle hint ever when the sitcom I was working on was canceled. I found a transitional tech support job within the entertainment industry that had a much healthier work environment and paid well enough to allow me to save up and take the leap into full-time freelancing after several months.
A lot has happened since then. My blog, Adventures in Cooking, grew a large and dedicated following and was nominated for a Saveur Food Blog Award. I met my best friend, Carey, through my blog, and we started travel-based photography workshops called First We Eat (www.firstweeat.co), where we teach food photography and styling over a period of five days in locations all over the world. We plan out the menus for each one based on the local food culture and prepare seasonal, fresh dishes for the duration of the workshop. We also have excursions into the food community of each location, like truffle foraging in Croatia’s centuries-old forests, wine tasting in Bordeaux, or maple sapping in Vermont. We started a podcast of the same name where we geek out 1,000 percent about food. I wrote my first cookbook, Adventures in Chicken, and I got married to my longtime partner, Jeremy. It was a whole, whole lot.
My yiayia and papou’s garden in Greece, now overgrown and wild, and me in my garden in Oregon.
Wanting something more than city life, but not knowing precisely what, we bought a house outside of Portland and moved back to Oregon. Then, I cofounded a pop-up dinner series called Secret Supper with my friends Danielle, Mona, and Jaret, where we created one-night-only, long-table suppers in beautiful natural surroundings, like the Columbia River Gorge and Mount Hood. Jeremy and I adopted two dogs . . . and then I convinced him to add seven chickens to our brood. We started composting and turned every square inch of our lot into a functioning garden. And then I went to Greece for the first time in seventeen years.
I hadn’t seen my cousins since I was a child, and I was ready to make up for lost time. I wanted to hear all the family stories, especially the ones about my yiayia. She passed away when I was very young, and I only met her once when I was one year old, so it was really meaningful to be able to hear firsthand about how deep her laugh was, the way the chickens and turkeys used to follow her around the garden for scraps, and how she made her own sheets of filo by rolling out the dough paper thin with a long wooden rod. Every story painted a clearer picture, and I was able to really know her for the first time, just as she used to be, content in the farmhouse’s kitchen and garden in Kypseli, always cooking, sharing, giving, feeding, and loving. The more I heard about her, the more she resonated with me. And I realized that the “something more” I’d been pursuing was the life she led—an honest and simple one that revolved around good seasonal food, a love of sharing it, and a passion for working the earth. It was an epiphany of both who I wanted to be and what I’d already become. And when I got back, I wrote this book. My dream book, First We Eat.
This book is meant to help you eat seasonally, locally, ethically, and flavorfully. It starts with Homemade Pantry Basics (this page), which is chock-full of simple and delicious recipes for spicing up your daily meals. This includes tasty things like Garlic and Bay Leaf Salt, Chipotle Honey, Quick-Pickled Onions, Flavorful Preserved Lemons, and Roasted Mushroom Butter. It also helps you replace frequently store-bought ingredients with simple homemade versions—like good ol’ tomato sauce and homemade soup stocks. The rest of the book is broken up by season, and the recipes within each one will serve as a road map for the types of ingredients that are fresh that time of year. At the beginning of each season, I have a little gardening how-to for those of you who are interested in getting a little deeper into growing your own. This is by no means an all-encompassing grow-your-own instruction (I’d need to write an entire separate book for that!), but it will help guide you in your first forays into gardening, whether outdoors in the earth or in a container on an apartment balcony.
As a whole, First We Eat will provide you with the groundwork for cooking seasonally in the months to come. It will give you the building blocks and tools to make this year of eating the best one yet, and I am so excited for you join me on this journey!
I will say, though, that I am very lucky to be able to lead this life. No matter how much hard work you put into your accomplishments, some amount of luck is always involved. But I think that when you do what you’re passionate about, you have luck on your side. When you care about your work—the sort of work that gives you purpose and joy and warmth—it seeps into you, leaks out into the world, and starts to attract all the good things. Good people, good opportunities, good choices. I know that most people aren’t able to pursue their passions full-time, and that’s okay. But try to make your passion some part of your life. Even if it’s just for a few minutes a week; little by little, it will make each week brighter than the last. It might take you somewhere, and it might not, but at least you’ll be happy. And, in the end, that’s all that matters. Writing this book has been one of the most demanding experiences of my life in the best possible way, and I think that’s because I’ve really put every ounce of my happiness, my heart, and my soul into it. It’s easy to throw yourself into your work when you love it so much. I hope that my passion and love for food comes through on each page and inspires you to eat fresher, eat local, and eat well. In the words of Julia Child, “Learn how to cook—try new recipes, learn from your mistakes, be fearless, and above all have fun!”
