Learning by Taste

Hi, I’m Molly. In 2019, I decided I to take a year off from my bureaucratic job to see where my creative interests might lead me. After two months traveling around South East Asia, I landed in Bangkok where I jumped into culinary school, a decision that has brought more joy to my life than I could have imagined. I graduated with distinction in October of 2020, and have since moved back to the west, splitting my time between San Diego and Mexico.

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I’m food obsessed and find everything about food fascinating. From food anthropology, to agriculture, to the history and evolution of cooking, I’m here for all of it. I was raised on a small organic farm in Northern California and spent my early career working in food access and agriculture non-profits in the San Francisco Bay Area and abroad.

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Why Learning by Taste? I chose Learning by Taste because it speaks to how I feel I experience the world. I consider myself a life-long-learner; I always have a subject of the moment that I am a little obsessed with and spend all my time reading about. The subjects are always related to food, some examples include: permaculture vegetable gardens and backyard chickens (I had 6 hens in a San Francisco backyard!), pickling and fermenting, canning, foraging for wild foods, the healing properties of herbs, raw vegan food and gluten free baking, to name a few. Moreover, when I travel, it is the food culture that I can tap into most easily to connect with the people I meet. I can typically hold my own in conversations about native plants and the preparations of local dishes, because I have a broad foundation of food and agriculture knowledge and love researching world cuisine. Finally, I felt the  title was fitting as it describes my experience in culinary school, which is when I started this blog. So much of what we learned about Thai Cuisine was difficult to describe with words, so the course leaned heavily on taste memory to guide learning and develop skills.

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I started Learning by Taste to share and document what I’m learning about food through travel, culinary school and home cooking. I think for people who really love their time in the kitchen, the recipes we make are so much more than a set of instructions. For cooks, recipes are autobiographical. When we look back at the recipes we’ve made, we think of so much more than just the food. We think of the stories of our lives, of where we were and who we were with and what we were feeling inspired by.

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In addition to recording memories, I also want to use this space to document my recipes. This is something I desperately need to improve because typically I write nothing down. I’m always trying new things and experimenting in the kitchen, so I cycle through recipes quickly. What I’m cooking now is very different from what I was cooking a year ago. Mostly I stop making recipes because I’m so excited to learn in the kitchen and inspiration has drawn me in a new direction. But I don’t want to forget about my everyday salad dressing from 2011 or that vegan passionfruit cheesecake recipe that blew my best friend's socks off. I want to remember those stories and recipes and share them here, to hopefully inspire others to spend time in the kitchen creating their own meals and memories.