I am passionate about cooking and creating recipes, sharing meals with family and friends, discovering ingredients, growing my own food, collecting cookbooks, devouring food blogs, and connecting with local food vendors. I approach life and eating with gusto, and I deeply believe in the magic of food to bring people together.

I was inspired to start daraeats in 2021 for two reasons: for years I’ve dreamed of starting my own food blog to share my lived experience of food exploration, and during the course of 2020, I realized how deeply food cultures have sustained me with comfort, creativity, and inspiration. I’m elated to be an active member of the online food community and to start giving some of that back to similarly minded readers through this blog. That, and all my friends keep telling me I should!

On daraeats I’m looking forward to sharing new recipes and flavourways, exploring beloved and newly discovered food merchants, featuring appetizing and distinct ingredients, sharing my love of growing things, and of course, delving into my abiding love of condiments.

Just a few of the goodies I have grown in my backyard square foot garden!

I was born in Australia and have lived in Sydney, Miami, Guatemala City, and Palma de Mallorca. From childhood on I travelled frequently around the world, and am now lucky enough to call the diverse city of Toronto my permanent home base. I reside in the neighbourhood of Little India, on Toronto’s east side, with my partner and our young son, who is himself a budding gastronome and future blog contributor! I planned and hosted my first dinner party when I was just 13 (I cooked a Moroccan themed feast on my own !) and my interest in exploring and sharing food has only grown since.

Much to the annoyance of family members kept waiting while I -  and I quote -  “dilly dally”, I delight in browsing the wares of any new (or familiar) food purveyor, market, vendor, or stall, and I have definitely spent far more hours than I could tally perusing the offerings of these locales throughout Toronto and all over the world. As a food explorer, I love that way that I can learn through food; about cultures and customs, culinary methods and local edibles, fascinating and distinct ingredients, long-held traditions and recent innovations. So many of my precious food related experiences have come from chatting with merchants, market goers, and fellow eaters while becoming more familiar with a place on a culinary and community level.

For me, no shopping trip or travel experience is complete without taking home unique or beloved food finds, and I’m always on the lookout for new spots to explore at home or afar. If pressed, I may even admit to being the descendent of a long line of food smugglers, who derive illicit joy from hiding foil wrapped packs of fresh mole or bubble wrapped jars of raw honey in their luggage upon returning home, never mind that these hidden parcels look like bombs or drugs and will one day no doubt get me arrested! In no small part due to these condimental proclivities (yes 4-year old jar of raw mango honey from Kauaii and 3-year old chili paste from Costa Rica, I AM talking about you) my fridge is always about 50% full of condiments, and that’s when I have limited myself to a truncated list of “must haves”!!

When I’m not busy blogging, I love exploring my many other creative and artistic pursuits. Professionally, I am a practicing visual artist and longtime arts educator. In my personal time, I’m an enthusiastic slow fashion sewist, a dedicated nature lover, avid hiker, amateur mycologist and birdwatcher, and enthusiastic paddleboarder.

I’m keenly interested in learning more about how to develop my own food self-sustainability and understanding of how and where food is produced. As part of this pursuit, I have become an avid grower of microgreens and tend to a bountiful backyard urban mini-farm, planted in raised beds using organic and Square Foot Gardening methods. Each growing season I delight in finding unusual and interesting seed resources (medieval parsley!) and growing new varieties of plants (yellow tomatillos!). I’m an ardent supporter of local food and farmers markets, and have worked as a volunteer photographer and writer for local farmers markets.

I’m becoming more aware of how I can pair my passion for all things edible with food activism and have contributed as a volunteer cook and recipe writer for The People’s Pantry, along with taking part in other local community volunteer cooking events in Toronto as steps towards this ongoing goal.

I’m so glad you stopped by daraeats and hope you’ll continue to come back and hang out.