Hello friends! My name is Amanda Okada and I am going to give this blog thing a go and lets hope my lack of writing skills and technology is masked with wit and lots of average pictures.
I was born in Woodbine, Maryland, on a non working dairy farm that my father and his ten siblings worked and grew up on. Living on about 250 acres of farmland is exactly as fun as you think it is and has exactly as much poison ivy as you think it does. I am the youngest of six children and life was a blur of laughter, spankings, more spankings and constant, dirty hands around the dinner table. Even though we didn't have much, both of my parents were excellent cooks and I was never disappointed with the unending pots of Minestrone Soup. I am pretty sure my siblings and I have had enough tuna fish sandwiches and Chicken Divan to last a couple lifetimes, but I wouldn't change each bowl of bland cream of wheat for anything. Somehow, from a simple and extremely rural childhood that was mainly just me eating berries from bushes on the outskirts of the woods I would play in, I became a chef.
Growing up with limited ingredients and being thirty minutes to the nearest civilization, I learned to cook with what you have and that you don't need avocado, fresh ginger, or lemongrass to make your fancy tacos tonight if you don't have the resources to get it. I don't want people to feel bad about what ingredients they are limited to or what ingredients they don't know how to use. Being confident in yourself and in cooking is very important, and if you don't have turmeric or sea salt from the Himalayas, then the world will not end.
I am a young chef that has seen her fair share of food blogs, food instagrams, foodies, and just overall, there is a large amount of blogs or Instagrams of beautiful people making beautiful food. As much as I love looking at these blogs at times, to get inspiration or ideas, I find it difficult to read like 6 paragraphs about the recipe before we actually get to the recipe, people over complicate these “simple” and “easy” dishes by writing a whole novel about where this spice comes from or whatever. But the truth is, people don’t really care about that. The people who read these blogs just want to get to the recipe because they are about to go to the grocery store and get the ingredients. They just want to to follow the exact recipe so their blackened fish tacos with a mango salsa will look just like the picture on the blog right?
Don’t follow the exact recipe! Hear me out. Cooking for me, isn’t about following an exact recipe, it's about getting the ingredients together and knowing the cooking technique and everything else will just fall into place. Taste as you go. Add more spice. Add more citrus. Add more salt. Cooking is the best way to be creative or de-stress from a long day. The dinner table that is silent, with people just eating and looking at each other, content, is my favorite thing. Work and life can be stressful and cooking and feeding people is something that is extremely fulfilling to me, and hopefully for you too, if you are on this blog.
I want a blog that makes people want to cook at home more often because it isn’t stressful, it is fun and it is calming. I want people to learn how to enjoy the process and not think about how pretty it will look for instagram. Some of the most amazing food is ugly but it is delicious. So lets get rid of our editing apps and filters and make real, good, sometimes not so pretty, makes you jump for joy, food. AM I RIGHT GUYS.
