The Ambitious Kitchen Cookbook

Introduction

It took me years to realize how much food has the power to create a positive change in all of our lives, whether that means connecting with others over a homemade meal made from the heart, baking to soothe your soul when you’re in need of comfort, or taking time to nourish your body with better-for-you ingredients. I wrote this cookbook to help you do the same: to help you discover boldness, unique flavors, creativity, health, and, above all, the unique happiness that food can bring to your life. Maybe you’re seeking the perfect dish to bring to a gathering. Maybe you’re looking for a show-stopping recipe to become a tradition in your home. Maybe you need to put a nutrient-packed meal on the table for picky kids or toddlers, as I do regularly for my husband and three little boys. Maybe you, like me, are learning to nourish yourself after years of disordered eating. The best recipes rise to all of these occasions. I’ve created this cookbook to be your guide, your foundation, for meeting these challenges with joy and experimentation. My years of kitchen trial and error will help you customize most of these recipes to make them your own, whether you want to add a little extra nutrition or a little extra heat, or you’re looking to make them gluten-free or dairy-free. And my years of rediscovering food as a source of joy will help you, as well, to become your healthiest, most satisfied, most authentic self—no matter where you are in your journey to discover your own Ambitious Kitchen.


Your Meaning of Ambition

In one of my most vivid memories, my mother crouches over a tiny charcoal Weber grill parked outside the front door of our tiny duplex in Minneapolis, peering at our dinner. As a single mom, she worked around the clock at several different jobs to support my teenage brother and nine-year-old me, but when the sun went down on humid summer evenings, we knew we’d have her full attention—and the full extent of her ambition.

On her way home, she’d swing by a fish market and pick up whatever was fresh, often halibut, salmon, or mahi mahi. Tonight, swordfish. She opened up our Encyclopaedia Britannica and we all peered at the fish’s long, pointy bill. We brainstormed how she should season the fish, perhaps with a bit of sazón, the seasoning mix beloved in her Puerto Rican family. Then my mother cut a fresh lemon into thin wheels, tucked them into foil with the fish, and laid it over the coals next to baby red potatoes and long, thin spears of asparagus. When everything was done, we perched on the steps, plates on our laps, enjoying the moist, flaky fish, the potatoes that my mother had lavished with butter, and, most of all, the warmth of talking to each other for the first time all day.

It wasn’t until much later in life that I realized that food was my mother’s way of connecting with us. It was a place for her passion and creativity to shine through. It was a refuge from her hectic life, where she could find happiness, joy, comfort, and nourishment, all in one. It was her way of proudly making her food her own and flexing her creativity. It was her own Ambitious Kitchen. 


A Complicated Relationship With Food

I would spend the next decade in upheaval, trying to reclaim the kitchen as my refuge. My highest highs and lowest lows were spent with my father, a man who lit up every room with his roaring laugh, his warm, outgoing personality, and his striking bright blue eyes, but a man who also struggled with alcoholism and drug addiction. He would spend hours with me in the kitchen baking our favorite ultra-fluffy yellow cake coated with rich chocolate buttercream and infused with Dad’s secret splash of coffee, or creating the world’s most indulgent au gratin potatoes to serve with our weekly special Sunday night dinner. Dad always encouraged me to go after my dreams, to seek out my creativity and experiment with doing the things I loved the most. When we were together, he inspired me to be the best version of myself and I thought of him as my very best friend; we were two peas in a pod who could giggle for hours upon hours. But my father also had a dark side that controlled him. He often abruptly left me alone in his house for hours or even days, a terrifying experience for a little girl. He would return with no explanation and the smell of alcohol on his breath.

Dad’s beautiful smile was somehow able to mask his pain; he knew how to hide his addictions and function well in society. He was a man who wanted to show up fully for his daughter when needed but just never could arrive. When I was eighteen, on a late-summer evening just a few days before my first day of college, he died suddenly from a drug overdose.

For the next two years, I was inconsolable. I would cry at the mere mention of his name. I gained a little weight, just enough to be selfconscious and to start working out heavily. I ate little during the day and binged at night. I tried to control my life by starving myself, and then at night I stuffed down feelings of panic, anxiety, and grief. Eventually I lost so much weight that I couldn’t find any jeans that fit me. I ignored my mom’s pleas for me to stop losing weight because, secretly, the perfectionist in me loved losing weight. This unhealthy cycle, combined with my internalized grief, led to a diagnosis of anorexia—an eating disorder that had spiraled out of control. When my heartbeat slowed to thirty-two beats per minute and my doctors were so concerned that they sent me to the hospital, it was clear that I needed to address my grief, my emotional health, and my relationship with food.

But how could I do this after regarding food as the enemy for so long? How could I find the comfort and joy that I had once experienced in front of the little grill outside our duplex? How could I find both pleasure and nourishment in food without the food controlling me?

It was in that dark space, full of confusion and longing, that I sat on my unmade bed and created a blog called Ambitious Kitchen.