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 this creative outlet, in a new form.

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.

What I make in the kitchen nourishes me in more ways than one. Cooking gives me a place to be curious, to make something beautiful, and to share it with people I love.

So, all these years later, I’m back in the kitch. I hope you’ll find something here that inspires you to have fun in yours.