HELLO I’M HERE, I HAVE ARRIVED

A cathartic announcement post to help you get to know me and why I’m here

Hello and welcome to Lovingly Made! 

My name is Sarah Cook, a former personal chef turned mostly stay-at-home mom writing about home cooking. Home cooking has always been a deeply personal passion, and I believe it is foundational to living a full life.

HOT TAKE: Food is more than just fuel - it is a way of bringing joy and interest to each day. However, I do know that it is *difficult* to make all that joy and interest happen on a daily basis, especially when it’s not your main focus in life. So why not make it great? 

It should be easy and take up minimal time and brain space, but not be something from a box that you just throw in the microwave. And sometimes you do have to slow it all down and have an all-day cooking day to reap the rewards and not be cooking every single night of the week! It’s all about balancing the simple/quick with the complex/time-consuming to find which aspects of cooking in your kitchen do good things for you, your mental health, your physical health, and your spirit. There’s also a long-game component to the learning process when it comes to home cooking. Confidence and ability are learned in the kitchen - doing and repeating are key. 

Lovingly Made is here to guide and inspire on how to make all that greatness happen in your own kitchens like Mary f**king Poppins. 

In this newsletter, you’ll find recipes, food prepping hacks, various recommendation lists, and more to make life easier and more nutritious without sacrificing flavor or joy. 

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So this is where you get a little deep-dive on Sarah Cook, the person, and what qualifies me to be blathering away on Substack:

My background is in classical music. I promise that this is relevant. I went to school for it - the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University gave me a Bachelor’s and a Performer’s Diploma in violin performance. I spent 8+ years trying to get a full-time job in whatever nationally-renowned orchestra would hire me, as long as my audition was “better” than everyone else’s that day - a tall ask, I guess. It never happened for me because I decided to end all of that nonsense - I finally realized that it was not serving me, that I was basically a detriment to myself with all the self-imposed pressure that the audition process requires. But most importantly I realized that I had the power to say “no thanks.” That didn’t stop me from working as a professional in this field, though. I’ve been living and working as a freelance violinist in the Indianapolis area for over 10 years now, and the self-liberation of the pressure to win a job actually made me better at the violin, I think…

But that’s not what I’m writing about in this space, although the work ethic (AKA *perfectionism*) that being a musician requires has totally helped me develop a deep love and interest in the world of home cooking. 

My passion for cooking started way before I left school. I moved into my own apartment for my senior year of college - once I started cooking for myself, I couldn’t stop. Making food became a creative outlet, something outside of music that I could completely control most of the time, so it was only natural for me to hone my skills and intuition in the kitchen (there’s that work ethic, again…) You would find me constantly cooking new recipes, trying and buying new ingredients (much to the chagrin of the space in our pantry), friends and family were always gifting me cookbooks and various kitchen tools - it really became an insatiable curiosity.

When it comes to cooking, there’s something so satisfying about learning how to manipulate ingredients into a beautiful plate that you get to then enjoy with all of your senses. And then there’s something even more satisfying about sharing that experience with others. Maybe there’s a little bit of a show-off musician ego in there with that, but I feel like there are a lot of commonalities between the worlds of music and food so that’s only natural, I suppose.

But the curiosity and passion then went beyond cooking and into the world of nutrition and health when I was experiencing some very persistent eczema. I was reading book after book about the various problems that the industrialization of food has caused for the health of  the world population and the land we live on. The eczema had started in grad school (2010) and did not fully quit until I started sourcing the majority of our food locally (late 2018). I do not think that this is a coincidence, and I give all credit to the start of this journey to Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. That’s a whole other deep-dive that you can look forward to…

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After deciding enough was enough with orchestral auditions, I decided to start a business as a personal chef. I was so done with the music world and felt that I needed some degree of separation from it to find a new path in life. But how did I land on personal cheffing? My husband and I self-catered our wedding because when you get married out in California wine country, everything is $$. And the timing was perfect. By the time of our wedding, I had recently stopped auditioning and needed to create my own path in the world, so it only seemed natural to try and make my way working in the world of food. My interest in nutrition and my love for making food made a great combination to be a personal chef. I could help people in their kitchens. 

A Cook In Your Kitchen was born in January 2019. I had a decent number of clients and events for my brand-new micro business, and I was still playing the violin on my own terms when and where I could. Everything was going swimmingly - until it wasn’t. 

During the pandemic, I pivoted the business so I could keep it afloat working as a Home-Based Vendor. I baked and I baked and I baked what I was legally allowed to sell out of my own home (thank you, cottage laws!) but never really expanded beyond what I could physically do myself because there were just too many unknowns and too much weirdness around PPP loans for my comfort level. Even though it was a very stressful time, I did what I could, people enjoyed what I made, I actually had fun, and that’s kind of all I cared about. 

Fast forward to early 2021: my husband and I decided to have a baby. Standing on my feet for 8+ hours a day became a real problem around July, so I suspended my career until I felt ready to get back to it. We moved into a new house in September, and our son was born in November. His birth ended up being incredibly traumatic - relaunching A Cook In Your Kitchen was extremely low on my list of priorities. Without getting into all the details, our full-term son came home after 5 weeks in the NICU and ended up needing a nasogastric (NG) feeding tube. 

Feeding therapy was one of the many therapies that he needed to participate in for the first year of his life. And this is where I met the person who is bringing me here to you today. After our son had graduated from the NG tube, it was our feeding therapist’s responsibility to educate us on how to introduce solids. She guided us so smoothly through this scary transition in every person’s journey as a new parent, and it made me realize how ridiculous and unfortunate it is that this type of support isn’t provided as standard practice. We learned so much about how to feed a new, curious eater. An infant makes the perfect blank slate for learning all the exciting things the world of food has to offer: no pre-existing opinions, no expectations, just ready for anything. All of us could maybe take a cue from babies learning to eat when we try new things. 

During sessions with our son’s feeding therapist, she was amazed at what I chose to feed him and would joke with me about writing a cookbook aimed at starting solids. I would say “haha, ok sure, whatever” - but then she approached me several months after our son graduated from feeding therapy with the same idea. I loved the persistence and thought about it for about 5 seconds before saying “what the hell,” and I started brainstorming away. And that’s what brings me here, writing, developing, and sharing recipes that everyone at the table can eat. Hopefully we can get some good feedback here and maybe even some interest to bring a cookbook to your home to help parents (or literally anyone) feed everyone at the table.

**Everything you’ll see here is stuff eaten by my toddler and stuff that he has eaten as a baby. Disclaimer: I’m not the professional in this field - if you want/need to get an infant feeding therapist’s take on how to modify recipes to feed your little one, please talk to Marie, my future cookbook partner (🤞🤞) and friend over at Compass Feeding.** 

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Fun fact: I also ended up getting a (now expired) certification in Holistic Nutrition and Health Coaching from the AFPA from 2020-2021. It was a decently informative program, but pretty biased towards plant-based/veg-heavy eating, which I have my own thoughts on… Expanding my nutritional knowledge has only made my creative culinary process more natural - I don’t get hyper focused on exact measurements or nutrients but try to maintain balance in my family’s overall diet and eating patterns. But I got the certification because I wanted to help people through food. I didn’t want to make it for them anymore because I hold a strong belief that people are more capable than they think they are in the kitchen.

Kitchens should be the most comfortable space in the home, in my opinion. Not for relaxation - that’s on the couch in the living room. The best culinary creativity comes from a space of comfort and confidence. As I found out in my failed auditions to become a full-time orchestral musician, the stage should be the most comfortable space to perform. You should be able to perform anything at any time, alone or with others. [Important context: you’ll never hear a violinist perform a Mozart symphony by themselves, but that’s what you’re judged on in an audition. Not the way that you would be playing it with a whole section, like you would in an actual concert…because that makes sense.] That was not the space for me - the stakes were too high, I put too much pressure on myself, and my ability to perform and my creativity were stifled. 

The kitchen is not that space and should not be that space for anyone. You are only “performing” for yourself and your family - leave the pressure outside of yourself - it’s food. Cooking good food only comes with time, patience, and kindness towards one’s self. And this is imperative for living a full and delicious life. 

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So it’s an important and very personal mission for this newsletter to help people in their kitchens, especially those with little ones learning how to eat or even just learning how to enjoy new foods, and make it all less of a drag.

Not yet knowing exactly how to structure my time and flow for this newsletter, the first month (or two?) of posts for Lovingly Made will be free content!  After that, you can expect to see one free post per month and weekly posts for paying subscribers.

If this post has intrigued you in any way, please consider subscribing now and see what kind of kitchen knowledge gets dropped in your inbox. And then share with your friends! Thank you for reading!