How did this happen:
I love to cook…Alot. I am the kind of person to go to sleep reading cookbooks. I first started cooking when I was 14 years old as a prep cook in a small cafe in Mendocino, Ca, and later a prep desert chef at a fine restaurant. As much as I liked the good food, I saw that the restaurant environment was not a very healthy one. I wanted something different.
When I was in college, I used to see the word “macrobiotic” spray-painted in the tunnels. That word stuck in my head, and lead me on a path to learn how food can be healing as well as delicious. Despite growing up with great food in Northern California, I still didn’t have a home-grown tomato until high school. As an athlete, I could feel the difference that food made on my body. I lived in India, and got exposed to a whole world of tastes and ideas about food. Eventually, I moved to New York, and got to cook in the Omega Kitchen. I ran the deli at Integral Yoga in NYC, and met Joshua Rosenthal, who was opening a school, IIN, on Integrative nutrition. I began to connect the dots with food, health, politics, community. Soon after that, I met Teo, who mentored me in to cooking for large groups of people. My mother, who was an excellent cook, began learning middle eastern cooking. I followed suit, and soon was learning how to cook Syrian and Lebanese food.
In 1990 cooked for my first large event of 140 people, and since then, have cooked for thousands of people.
I am lucky that I get to do one of my favorite things for a living, and that is to cook for alot of people, and I get to cook the kind of food I like. In 1990, Culinary Magic was created, and since then, I have cooked for thousands of people. I like to cook for events where people care about organic, about community, and about health of themselves and the environment.
Here’s a list of some of the events I have cooked for:
California Brazil Dance and Music camp
Regenerative Design Institute
Earth Activist Training
California Witchcamp
Bird Language
The Art of Mentoring
Gaim University
The Four Winds Society
Teo-King of the Brussel Sprouts