Hi, I’m Cole & I’m back in the kitch

Once upon a time, I had a food blog.

I started cole’s kitch in 2009, shortly after moving to Northern California. I was surrounded by incredible ingredients: farmers markets, beautiful produce, foods I’d never cooked with before. I wanted a place to capture what I was making and learning.

Cole’s kitch taught me how to blog, a skill that proved even more useful when I wanted a place to share ideas from my work. I started another blog, storytelling with data—it grew into a business, books, a team, and a career I never could have imagined when I was taking pictures of dinner in my kitchen.

Along the way, life got wonderfully full. I met my husband and had three kids. The business grew. With time and energy directed elsewhere, cole’s kitch went quiet.

I realized something recently: neither my kids nor the business are in their infancy anymore. They still need plenty from me, but in different ways than they once did. Somewhere in that shift, I’ve found more mental space to return to cole’s kitch—and a clearer sense of what I want it to be.

When I have a day off or a free weekend morning, I’m drawn to the kitchen to play. I love starting with an ingredient that catches my eye and figuring out what to do with it. Sometimes I follow a recipe. Often I don’t. I experiment, improvise, make a mess, and when something turns out especially well, take a note to make it again.

The older I get, the more I appreciate all the roles food plays in my life. It’s one of the ways I show love and care for people. It’s homemade soup when someone is sick, cooking with my kids, and meals shared with people I love. Some of my favorite memories are inseparable from what we were eating at the time.

I think a lot about food as nourishment, too—what helps us feel good and live well. I prepare a lot of vegetables, but I also bake cookies, and believe there’s room for both. Food can help us heal, bring us together, teach us about other places and cultures, and simply give us pleasure.

That’s what I’m back in the kitch to explore and share: beautiful ingredients and places, things I love to make and eat, and all the ways food can enrich our lives. I hope you’ll find something here that inspires you.