A little about me….
I describe myself as a “family chef” rather than a “private chef.”
The reason is simple: real households are not restaurant dining rooms. Real households are made up of real people and real families, with children who currently trust exactly three foods, or who suddenly decide broccoli is unacceptable after loving it for the last three months. They have adults who love mushrooms and hate fennel, and who can only tolerate moderate amounts of dairy.
Real people who too often end up eating generic, “good enough” food.
And I don’t think “good enough” is good enough. People – real families, individuals, households – deserve truly good food, planned and cooked for them.
This isn’t a new insight for me. I grew up moving between very different places and cultures, and many of my strongest memories are tied to the “ordinary” food I experienced daily.
Slabs of fresh focaccia wrapped in waxed paper, ready for school break are the first thing that comes to mind when I think about the village elementary school in Rivergaro, Italy. Mississippi brings back memories of fried trout at a friend’s grandparents’ house by the Mississippi River, and trips to Gulfport with my mother to pick up coolers of shrimp fresh from the boats as they docked.
And every other place we lived – there were quite a few, we moved a lot – has its memories, too.
Sometimes my parents hosted - Thanksgiving dinners with small local turkeys for stray Americans far from home, or American-style summer barbecues for local friends, with grilled chicken and ribs dripping with the sticky, sweet red barbecue sauce my mother made from scratch.
We rarely ate in restaurants, and when we did they were usually inexpensive, local, family-run places. Looking back, that was probably a gift.
No matter where we went, life as a child was punctuated by the predictable rhythms of school lunches, Scout camp meals, birthday parties, and visiting friends.
It was assumed that good food had very little to do with prestige or formality, and everything to do with people, place, generosity, and care.
I carried that attitude forward in my life, but never considered cooking professionally until I decided to take a part-time marketing and office position with a catering company. I don’t believe I had ever previously set foot in a commercial kitchen before, but I fell in love with what I saw.
During that first year, I spent a great deal of time “helping out” and volunteering for bottom-rung kitchen jobs in addition to my office work. Fortunately, the chef/owner took me seriously and over the next decade, I worked my way up through the business to Executive Chef and partner.
Full-service catering can be exhilarating, exhausting, chaotic, and occasionally absurd, but I thrived on it. I could spend all day on staffing and production spreadsheets before heading into the kitchen to work late into the night, prepping a hundred pounds of beef and then making three hundred cream biscuits while the brisket braised in the oven.
What I truly loved, though, was working directly with clients – learning their tastes, understanding what mattered to them, and shaping meals around the people gathering around the table. I enjoyed the logistics, the challenges, and the problem-solving of everyday catering, but it was always about the client’s experience, and that of their guests.
Over time, I realized that I was simply applying the family-style approach to good food that I learned as a child on a much larger scale. People loved California Catering Café’s food because of that approach, but something still felt incomplete to me.
I could work closely with someone for weeks or months on a single meal, then never cook for them again. I began to feel like I was only reading the first chapter of a great many books, and I wanted to keep reading - or writing - those stories.
When California Catering Café’s owner retired in 2025, I decided it was time to leave large-scale catering behind. Now I focus on leaning in to the personalities and rhythms that develop within each household. I can make big pots of fresh summer corn on the cob and trays of chilled caprese salad in the summer. Hot chicken noodle soup – double ginger, hold the celery – in the fall. Keep buttered noodles and baby carrots ready all the time because the youngest one will eat that even while refusing nearly everything else. Order a lamb roast at the butcher on May 10th, because Grandma will want lamb with mint sauce and potatoes for her birthday because they’re her favorite.
I created Apple Blossoms Culinary Services to focus on the kind of cooking I have always found most meaningful: thoughtful, ongoing food for real households and the people who live in them.
Good food - real food - matters.