I’m a pastry chef who loves making special occasion cakes, eating healthy food and am rather obsessed with exercise. How does all that fit together? Rather well, surprisingly enough.
I grew up cooking and baking with my mother and maternal grand mother. This fun creative time spent in the kitchen helped foster my love for both cooking and baking. My mother also loved to entertain, and often hosted themed dinner parties for family and friends. My mother’s love for entertaining was also passed along to me, as I love throwing parties and hosting dinners any chance I get.
While I was still in High School, I began working part time in a brokerage firm. This experience led to my pursuit of a career in the finance industry after college. During this career, I often gravitated toward cooking and entertaining as a way to cultivate my creative side. After many successful years in both retail and institutional investment management, most recently serving as a Vice President in a Washington, DC based asset management firm, I left the finance industry to pursue my dream of becoming a chef.
I attended the Culinary Institute of America in Napa Valley, California, where I completed the baking and pastry certificate program — a culinary program specifically designed for career changers. This program, in addition to being a great deal of fun, provided me the opportunity to learn from master chefs who had worked in some of the finest restaurants in America, and who had participated in world class baking and pastry competitions.
Shortly after graduation, I moved to Rome, Italy with my husband. We lived there for three years. In Italy, I did a stage in the pastry kitchen at the Westin Excelsior Hotel, a property with a clientele consisting of foreign dignitaries, Hollywood celebrities and high end tourists and locals. While in Italy, I opened a successful business making custom cakes and chocolates, catering events, and teaching cooking classes. It was amazing to be sharing my love of cooking with others and fulfilling my dream of “making beautiful things that make people happy.” In Rome, I was surrounded by fresh, local, seasonal ingredients, and by Italians who were truly passionate about their food. This was such an amazing experience, I became passionate about local farm to table cooking.
My husband and I were later blessed with two beautiful children. My desire to create healthy and delicious meals for my family became a way of life and led to the creation of many great recipes. After the birth of my second child, even though I was eating healthy and exercising regularly, I was having a really difficult time getting back to my pre-baby weight. Not to mention, feeling fatigued and irritable much of the time. I decided to try a 90 day clean eating and exercise program specially geared toward women. That transformation shed 20 pounds, permanently. As a nice surprise, the clean eating also left me feeling fantastic, in body and mind.
After the 90 day transformation, I was inspired to create a method of sustainable healthy eating to maintain the amazing results I achieved in my program, for life. So I began re-crafting many of my favorite recipes and creating new ones that were healthy, flavorful and satisfying.
I was also set on sharing my experience and my recipes with the world. This led to the creation of EatingEnchanted.com. Four years later, I am still working out regularly, and have created a sustainable approach to healthy eating that will give you a fresh positive take on healthy eating and how we think about food. Read more about the Eating Enchanted philosophy and find out why, “The Magic is in the Mindset”.