A cook who kept building.
I started with flowers. Long before the kitchen, I learned that care, beauty, and craft could be a living — and that people remember how you make them feel.
Cooking came next, and with it a Le Cordon Bleu diploma and 26 years across restaurants, catering, and hospitality — often the only woman in the kitchen, always building the systems no one had written down. Then teaching found me, as a Career & Technical Education instructor handing the craft to the next generation.
Somewhere along the way I earned a bachelor's and a master's in psychology, because the hardest problems in food were never really about food. They were about people — how we cope, how we connect, and how what we eat shapes our mental health. For several years now I've carried that work abroad, too, flying to Cabo San Lucas as the health-and-wellness chef for Villa del Palmar Resorts. Today those threads meet in an ecosystem of ventures built on one belief: that food and wellbeing belong together — for children, adults, and seniors; for the hospitality industry; and for the community, through a nonprofit close to my heart.