Nice to meet you!
The short story is that I have spent years helping friends and neighbors solve their cooking frustrations and no two issues are ever exactly the same.
Realizing that as the digital economy was embracing a custom-for everyone approach...I had an idea. Rather than promote and influence others with my approach and style, I would listen to individuals and bring personal solutions to my audience, curated from experience, trends, new products, and more!
And here's the long of the story ...
I grew up not liking anything to touch on my dinner plate. My favorite spice was salt, and my favorite meal was bread and butter. That said, it wasn't a childhood void of good food. My mother was a truly great cook after all, and my father was a weekend enthusiast who had a few crowd-pleasing specialties under his belt. We ate well.
I became more adventurous as I grew, influenced by PBS cooking shows, Gourmet magazine, and the time I spent working in restaurants, traveling the country and the world and surrounding myself with like-minded, food-loving people ("foodie" was not a word then, and frankly, I still think it's a cringy word).
My professional career in marketing was forever changed when I enrolled in a cheese course at Boston University. After a road trip to visit a few of Vermont's artisan cheesemakers, armed with 12 weeks of cheese notes, I moved to New York and struck gold. Story made shorter, I worked with some true legends of the cheese, wine and restaurant world of the early 2000's. Young, raw milk cheeses from Europe were still sneaking into the US in mint condition, while chefs, makers, and importers held events, tastings and parties that I could not believe I was attending! I know magic happens because it happened to me.
Doors opened. I wanted to know about virtually everything else a person could eat, drink taste: wines, spirits, spices, flavor profiles, produce, varieties of produce, grass fed lamb, line caught fish, confits, duxelles, morels, bagna cauda, pavlovas, sous vide cooking, juice cleansing, coffee beans, quail eggs and on and on and on. All of it made me dizzy with excitement. It was a personal renaissance.
Love and life pivot though, and I stepped back from the Wall Street pace of the fancy food world in New York and returned to coastal New England to raise a family. Private pairing events, writing and consulting became my professional connection to food on the North Shore of Massachusetts. Casually at home, I offered menus to friends and neighbors: an idea for the holidays, a combination of cheeses to serve, an off the cuff dinner idea.
When friends were coming by for a casual gathering, they stopped asking what they should make and started asking me what I was cooking, and then asked for more. Joyfully, I offered ideas on what to have for dinner, and how to stock the fridge and pantry to make that meal easier. Occasionally, I would simply offer tips on ways to disguise leftovers from 3 days ago...
It kind of became a thing.
That "thing" is this: a place for people who love food but don't necessarily love shopping or cooking, don't have the time or interest to obsess and look for new ideas.
I believe that with a little help, and coaching, all types of home cooks can hold happy space in the kitchen.
I started Roux Hoo as a resource to answer the queries of real home cooks in a very personal way. One by one, we all can pull together great food confidently and stay curious.