Thanks for joining me!

It’s great to be back in the blogging world and I can’t wait to share my food journey with you!

My food story is unusual to say the least….so why don’t we start at the beginning…Chattanooga, Tennessee.

I grew up spending every weekend with my grandparents, Nana & Papaw. Nana was a fantastic cook and my earliest memories are of standing at her side (on a chair) making biscuits for Sunday Brunch. I had my own little rectangle pan that I would make my “biscuit man” in…he had a small head, normal ‘biscuit size’ body as well as arms and legs…he even had little buttons down his body. Nana would make scrambled eggs, bacon and of course gravy! Biscuits and gravy are possibly my favourite food and it’s no wonder…my mother craved them while she was pregnant with me!!

My culinary roots run deep in good, old fashioned Southern Cooking but it grew beyond that. In my 20s & 30s, food TV began to explode and I found myself watching cooking shows constantly. My love of food blossomed and I began to try my hand at recipes I saw on my favourite shows. I was working as a Registered Nurse putting in 12 hour night shifts (7:00 p.m. to 7:30 a.m.) but I would still cook “dinner” before going to sleep in the morning…my ex-husband used to say that I put more effort into a snack than most people put into cooking a meal! What can I say…it’s true!

After 3 1/2 years as a cardiac nurse, I had had enough…I was burned out and searching to follow my passion for food so I enrolled in culinary arts at our local community college and started working as a cook at a bar & grill out in rural farm community near by and started a small event catering company. That lead to relocating back to my home town of Chattanooga where I began working as a line chef in restaurants and I put my training to the test. It was hot, hard work in a male dominated industry but I learned a lot! Mostly I learned that anyone who goes on MasterChef and says they dream of opening their own restaurant has NO clue what they are in for! There is nothing glamorous about running a professional kitchen PERIOD!

After a few years the opportunity to move to Australia presented itself and I took it! I returned to nursing but I kept cooking and soon learned that I still loved to cook, I just had no desire to work in a professional kitchen anymore!

So what is a Southern girl living halfway around the world who still has a passion for food and cooking to do? Well start a Food Blog of course! That is where we are now.

Come along for the ride… I will be cooking the food I love, not just Southern food but whatever I cook will be made with a dash of spice, a pinch of Southern heart and a heaping cup of love!