Drool over my food!
Hi! I'm Jess.
I’m a writer, entrepreneur, educator, and a passionate home cook currently based in Pittsburgh, PA. I’m a proudly self-taught cook, with the help of some professional catering, personal-cheffing, and cooking-teaching experience. I write about cooking in my newsletter, Food for Thought Fridays, and (before I had kids,) I taught intuitive cooking through online courses. I grew up in the South Hills of Pittsburgh, PA; lived in Washington, DC, for 6 years followed by my beloved San Francisco for almost a decade(!). In 2022, I moved back to the city of Pittsburgh to be closer to my parents and extended family while starting a family of my own. I now have 2 daughters born in late summer 2022 and early summer 2024, which I still sometimes cannot believe, as I was still single in July of 2020 (more on that story here).
I majored in marketing in college and didn’t fully realize my passion for food until 2011 (story here). Before venturing out on my own, I spent three transformative years working at Revolution Foods, a company that makes healthy lunches for schools across the U.S. While there, I spent time in schools across the country and witnessed firsthand the importance of teaching healthy eating habits from young age. This experience provided the foundation for my life goal to change the food system from the ground up.
After leaving Revolution Foods, I did a 3-month stint on a coffee farm in Hawaii in 2015! From there I began my entrepreneurial journey - which included catering, personal cheffing for families, teaching cooking classes in other people’s homes and later my apartment, and finally, fully focusing on my online teaching business starting in 2019. In May 2019, I started my newsletter, which turned out to be the thing I enjoyed doing the MOST, and have kept up with since then (weekly before I had kids, and now on an ever-changing cadence but still mostly consistent)! You can check out my newsletter archive here, and my current Substack homepage here for all the latest.
Why GARLIC PRESS, you might ask? The garlic press is one of my favorite kitchen tools, for sentimental reasons. I'm Italian and Lebanese, and we eat A LOT of garlic. Growing up, my mom would often give me the task of pressing the garlic (a great job for kids!), and my Nonna's shiny silver garlic press was always waiting on the counter for me when I came over to help make our ultimate family comfort meal - spaghetti and meatballs with tomato sauce and garlic bread.
Like a garlic press, I enjoy squeezing the very most out of life - both in and out of the kitchen :).