Welcome to my Culinary Blog!
Hello, and thank you for visiting. My name is Kelly and I’m the chef behind the culinary side of Estuary Herbs. I’m going to use this blog to share and educate. I’ll write about cooking tips & videos, food quality & sustainability, examining popular diet philosophies, and use this as a platform to respond your questions in depth so that you have access to the answers you need. I want this blog to be constantly evolving to help you get the most out of your time in kitchen and the grocery store. So let me tell you a little about myself. I came to professional cooking later than most. I quit my office job and started culinary school when I was thirty. I use to see this as a negative; all that lost time! But now I see it as a positive thing. I had explored enough professions to know what I really wanted, I knew myself well enough to know exactly which learning styles work best for me, and I had enough life experience to know that I wanted to use culinary arts to help others and myself feel better.
After culinary school, I quickly became focused on the energetics of foods. I wanted to know how ingredients, and the way they’re combined, affect and change the way we feel. Due to cultural privilege and the auspices of fate, I was given positions with creative freedom early in my career. I used these opportunities to explore a variety of cuisines and discover their energetic and nutritional purposes. Simultaneously, I was going through a personal reality-check.
I was experiencing some intense auto-immune reactions to various kinds of foods and their constituent chemicals. I had to spend more than a year on a strict elimination diet and slowly add foods back in. This led me to deep-dive into researching food systems, preservatives, pesticides, and all the ways modern mass production has affected the food which we eat. I’m not going to sugarcoat reality and pretend we all have access to, and can afford to buy, organic, GMO-free, minimally processed food. It is a sad fact that being able to eat even mostly “clean” is a product of privilege.
None of us can eat completely clean without going full hippie-commune because of decades of profit over integrity in our food systems, but that doesn’t mean it’s hopeless. It is possible to change the way you feel without a ton of extra effort, and I’m going to show you how. I’m going to help you navigate the morass of misinformation to minimize the negative and help you find the best values, hidden gems, and time-saving techniques to get the most out of the food you choose to buy. I want this to be a place where no questions go unasked or unanswered. Please comment or email (chefkelly@estuaryherbs.com) to ask anything, vent your frustrations, and share your successes. I look forward to working together towards better food and a better life.
- Chef Kelly