Welcome to Fullfilled!

I’ve always loved making food, I just didn’t realize it until I got to college. I grew up in the kitchen with my mom―helping her make recipes from the earliest moment I could hold a measuring cup. So for me, cooking and baking is second nature―a sixth sense. And my mom being the stay-at-home mom that she was to five kids for the bulk of my childhood, you can imagine how much time she spent in the kitchen. And me, being the oldest and naturally inclined to helpfulness even at a young age, I was her sous chef, helping her bake homemade treats (which we literally always had in the house) or get dinner on the table each night. 

When you’re around food that long, you just learn things without realizing you’ve learned them. You understand what goes together and what doesn’t, how to build flavor, how to read and organize a recipe, how to play it by ear when making dinner, what techniques to follow to ensure your baked goods turn out perfectly. These are things now I just know, and sometimes I forget that others don’t know them. 

Like when my husband decided to help me make a german pancake for breakfast one morning and he blended the mixture while I quickly ran to the bathroom. And I was horrified when I kept hearing the blender going, and going, and going, and going…. I ran out of the bathroom as fast as I could, but it was too late―the damage was done and my husband was standing there looking terrified, not knowing what on earth he had possibly done wrong. See, now a German pancake, essentially a large popover you bake in the oven, is made with just 4 simple ingredients: milk, eggs, salt―and flour. And the more you work flour, the more you build up the gluten. So if you want a light, fluffy German pancake that puffs up beautifully in the oven, you pulse it until just BARELY blended so you don’t overwork the flour. When you blend it for a full minute and 30 seconds, well, you end up with a tough, dense remnant of a something that only vaguely resembles my favorite weekend breakfast food and only rises to ⅓ its usual height… 

When I went to college, that was the first time I realized I knew things about food that others didn’t, and that I took that knowledge for granted. Year after year I watched what other people did to food, and some of the things truly baffled me. And honest to goodness I did not know that real people actually purchased and used brownie mix instead of always making them from scratch. Now that’s not meant to knock all mixes, because let’s face it, Betty Crocker makes a mean yellow cake (something I’ve actually been on a quest to replicate from scratch, still without much success), but HELLO, brownies?! Sorry Betty, your brownies just don’t hold a candle to your cakes, and they certainly can’t hold one to my from-scratch brownies. And people baked things without sifting their flour first? My tiny mind was blown. 

By the time I realized this passion, however, I was already an adult, knee-deep in setting the course for my professional future. I actually really struggled my first year of college and considered dropping out, and that was the first time I seriously considered culinary school. Though I was completely without the pre-qualifications at that point, and when I realized it would have cost 10x what I was paying in tuition where I was, I quickly shelved the idea, labeling it my brain as an irresponsible and impractical choice for my future. 

So then I went on to make more practical choices―like changing my major from Physiology & Developmental Biology major (with pre-med ambitions) to English of all things. It had always been my best subject in school, and as far back as I could remember I wanted to be a writer, constantly penning little stories here and there (including a 21-page story I wrote for one of my classes in 4th grade). My parents only seemed minor appalled, and looking back now I really wish someone had put their foot down and told me they had closed the English plant down the street and it was in my best interest to major in something more practical. 

But I loved my coursework and quickly added an editing minor as well, thinking that together they formed more of a career path. I was ambitious. I worked hard, got good grades, and had multiple internships by the time I graduated WITH a full-time job lined up (smack dab in the middle of the economic recession of 2012―take THAT all you English major haters!). I thought I was on the right path. 

I was also naive enough at the time to assume that if you work hard and do good in life that your path to success would be linear―and it’s just not. I’ve had a lot of personal and professional ups and downs over the past 10 years. I’ve had jobs that I thought were tailor-made for me that I hated. I’ve had doors open that I was sure would launch me into the career I thought I was destined to have, but they didn’t. I’ve had jobs that I assumed were a dead-end that I loved and opened me up to more than I ever could have dreamed. But ultimately, I still felt like I was wandering around, waiting to uncover my true passion. 
But all the while I knew something was missing. Life is made up of different seasons, and as I’m knee-deep in the season of early motherhood, I start to feel the chapters of my life more distinctly, thinking back on my past self often as a stranger sometimes to the woman with stress up to her eyeballs working full-time with a toddler at home and just barely managed to brush her teeth every day. Hobbies come and go, so do jobs, friends, favorite activities―things that bring meaning and joy to your life. Through all the changes, the one thing that has remained constant is my love for food. I think about food all the time (and I don’t just mean eating it, though I love to do that too). For me, food is the way I communicate―the way I express love and caring for those around me, the way I create beauty, the way in which I feel purpose and value in life, they way I celebrate holidays, the way I experience happiness―in short, the way I feel fulfilled. So at 32 with a full-time job, a toddler, and another baby on the way, I decided it was time to finally follow my passion and bring food and stories to others through this blog in the hopes of helping them out along their own journey. I think what I love about food most is its ability to bring fulfillment in more ways than just one, allowing people to feed their bellies while feeding their souls, facilitating connection with others, with the past, with the present, even with themselves. It’s my hope that you feel that here and that when you leave, you too can feel Fullfilled.