Growing up in the mid-seventies in the “Garden State” is where I discovered the wholesomeness of real food. The choices instilled in me from my childhood and some important key researching necessities for why problems may arise in our bodies.
My best friend lived down the street from me, and her parents were first-generation American Italians with her grandparents living on their vast property next door to them. I can still recall when her mother would have us go out to the backyard to select the lettuce and tomatoes out of the garden for dinner. For fun, we would challenge one another to eat these bitter light green grapes off a canapé vine near her grandparent’s house, not knowing at the time why they were so inedible.
A few years after returning home to New Jersey, from college in Miami, I finally met the young man of my dreams. He was born the same year as me, from Italy and his family owned a restaurant. It thrilled me to be able to walk through vegetable gardens again, and the gained knowledge of cooking and packing on thirty-plus pounds was well worth it.
During our engagement, my husband had been offered a job with one of the largest food distributors in the country while I ran my own salon business. This new position vastly gained him more knowledge in the food industry and allowed us to relocate to, yes, back to Florida.
Although we loved the slower pace and cleaner air, it was hard to find really great food with the majority of restaurants being chain-like. And some of the restaurants we did try didn’t seem to put the love and flavors we were so accustomed to, into their meals. Taking this disadvantage and turning it into a positive tool along with the explosion of the new social media lead us to experiment with new concepts of cooking.
In our mid-thirties, we started to expand our family and made adequate choices of what kind of food was going to nourish our new babies to grow up healthy. As the children started to grow, my mother had relocated and moved in with us, and I found myself more of a short-order cook than a beautician. I was very thankful that I was able to take care of my mother then, I believed it helped to pave the road to test out some recipes and perfect my skill of cooking.
My husband and I were always homebodies, way before it was fashionable. We would watch various cooking shows and compare their techniques and cooking methods to his formal training and hereditary skills he learned from his parents. All aspects of food from field and farm to store and stove to table and mouth play an important key part of healthy living, which we all need to keep abreast of in this ever-changing world.
Making delicious meals and researching products has inspired me as a stay at home mom to start this website in helping out others who don’t have the time or expertise in the kitchen to provide healthy appetizing nourishment that our bodies need to sustain a long healthy life.
I truly hope that you find these articles and recipes easy to expedite and enjoy everything we dish out.
Connect with me on Reddit or Quora, share the love of Mangia!
Ciao
Check out this clip below from the movie “The Long Kiss Goodnight” Staring Geena Davis. It was the inspiration behind the name to the website “HOME- CHEF-NINJA”…Chef’s do that!
