I’m Jean Miller… foodie, photographer, and traveler. Mark and I enjoy traveling to new places, meeting new people, and exploring new food adventures. CONFIDENT in the KITCHEN captures that journey, but during the early years, writing a cookbook was the furthest thing from my mind…
An Unlikely Cookbook Author
When I went off to college, I abandoned the kitchen skills learned from my mother and started living on junk food. A king-sized Snickers bar washed down with a super-sized Crystal Light quickly became my idea of a complete breakfast. By the time Mark and I married, the kitchen was simply part of my past, and I was pretty happy leaving it there. (No dishes!)
There was no push to change… Mark liked to cook, and he had a stack of tasty recipes from his mother. So you can imagine my surprise when she gave me a beautifully wrapped Christmas present which held an equally beautiful cookbook.
Looking up in confusion, I asked: “Shouldn’t this say ‘To Mark’?”
Fast forward to two kids and a husband absent from dawn to dusk starting a new career. Finding myself back in the kitchen, it was an accomplishment just to get food to the table. (So many disasters!)
I wanted to do better. Taste tests became regular events, and when the kids got older and started taking on the family faves, they began asking lots of questions. Suddenly I envisioned recipes in a new easy-to-read table format outlining not only “what you need” and “what to do”… but also “WHY.”
And so I found myself writing a cookbook…