My Story
Hi! My name is Paige and I live in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia with my husband, our three children and our four Labrador Retrievers. My background in Horticulture and my passion for cooking for my family has made for a wonderful combination…I love to piddle around in my garden and grow fresh vegetables for many of my dishes. Now that our children are getting older, I find that the ones who have left the nest often call me for recipes and instructions on how to prepare simple, inexpensive meals. So, I decided to start this website that features our family’s favorite recipes that are easy to prepare and easy on the wallet. I hope you enjoy these recipes as much as we do…Bon Appetite!
How It All Started
When I first started my cooking journey, I was probably still a zygote (no kidding!)…My mother was always trying out new recipes and LOVED to entertain. Our house was often full of grown ups, laughter and loud conversations, tinkling glass and silverware, the sounds of music and the Heavenly aromas of the latest fare on my mother’s list of recipes to try. *That’s my mother in the photo to the right at one of her many parties.
So, from the very start, I not only inherited the love of cooking and entertaining, but the sense of adventure when trying out new recipes. I also adopted the love of a mystery from my father, who was a HUGE mystery buff. He loved tinkering around in the basement, garage and kitchen creating new gadgets and making fun new concoctions, like Molasses Taffy! He was like a mad scientist and I was a girl in love :). Whenever I try out a new recipe, it takes me back to my childhood kitchen where both of my parents were adventurers…slashing their way through the flour and mixing bowls…never afraid to add a new or different ingredient….”Why not?” was their favorite motto. It’s always a thrill for me to see how my recipes will turn out…solving my own scientific mysteries of how the ingredients will blend together on a certain day during a particular time of year. I sometimes think that I hear a faint whisper…”Why not?”…as I continue tweaking and experimenting with different recipes.
Flashforward to Married Life
Thankfully, I married my High School sweetheart and Best Friend…a man who has a love for food and the patience of Job. Being my #1 taste tester (aka: Guinea Pig), he has tried a bazillion of my recipes and always with a smile on his face. However, I have learned to discern the difference between a “Happy Smile” and a “I Really want to spit this in a napkin Smile,” so I can narrow down which recipes to keep and which ones go back to the drawing board. My husband is a keeper! He has many food allergies, which prevent me from using certain ingredients in my recipes, but many of his allergies are foods that I don’t prefer anyway, so we were a match made in Heaven!
*The large photo at the top of the page is of me holding the very first pie that I ever made – fresh raspberries from a roadside farm in Tacoma, WA. This photo was taken the weekend of our engagement – July 4th, 1990).
Our Babies
We were blessed with three beautiful children, who all entered the world with wonderful gifts and talents of their own. All three of our children also came with varying and multilple food allergies, which have certainly brought me to my knees at times, but taught me how to stand up and learn new ways to cook and substitute ingredients to make it work! So, with a lot of sweat, failures and tears we have struggled through the years to find new ingredients, new recipes, new resources and new friends! Cooking and baking for my family has become such a joy and stress reliever for me that I now look forward to planning and preparing meals :).
For those of you who also suffer from food allergies or know someone who suffers from food allergies, don’t give up! There are SO many new foods available on the market today…things have improved immensely in just the past 10 years. Stay strong and keep tweaking those recipes!