With so many fantastic food blogs out there, I’m tickled that you ended up here. My name is Amy Winner, (yes, that really is my last name) and I’m a east coaster at heart who’s being won over by the great Northwest bite by bite. Seattle is such a mélange of food culture. It’s fueled by recipes that have been carried here by people from all over the world, many tweaked to incorporate the local diverse produce. The result is one of the best food cities the US has to offer. My therapy is a few hours in the kitchen, and it’s been a blast cooking and eating my way through Seattle.
I grew up on a 350-cow dairy farm in New Jersey, and didn’t realize until I starting cooking how much that shaped my culinary philosophies. I also didn’t realize until I moved into a gardening-unfriendly condo that I have a mean itch for playing in the dirt and growing things. All this time I’ve had this fervor for “real” food; funny that it took a 3,000-mile move to turn it on. In any event, I’m glad it happened.
Four or five years ago, I could barely boil water. Adding some strawberries to a bowl of cereal was “cooking dinner”. I don’t exactly remember what it was that convinced me that this was far from satisfactory, but somehow a girlfriend of mine and I convinced another friend of ours to teach us to cook. (Check out her Keep the Feast blog here.) Every Tuesday night for the next four or so months, she came to my house armed with grocery bags full of ingredients and a few bottles of wine and we learned to sauté, grill, sauce, broil, poach, flambé (she also brought a fire extinguisher for that lesson), and stew. And that’s how it all started. Ever since, I read cookbooks instead of novels, I’ve cooked foods I never imagined eating, and I’m glad to say that I haven’t had a frozen dinner since. So I guess the moral of the story is that anyone can do it. Open up a cookbook and give it a try. The worst that can happen is it doesn’t turn out great and you get to eat out instead!
By day I’m a jack-of-all-trades marketing professional and a social media junkie, so blogging about food is a great compliment to the day job. If you’re interested in my professional credentials, please visit my professional website AmyWinner.com, or my LinkedIn profile, and if you’d like to learn more about how I can help with food, wine, or restaurant marketing, visit my Marketing Services page.
I’d love to hear what you think! Feel free to leave a comment on a post that you enjoyed, or you may also send me a comment via the Contact link on the drop down menu.
In the spirit of the coffee capital of the States… grab a cup of joe, pull up a chair and enjoy!