Hey, I’m Nicole! Born into a half-Cuban family and raised in the South, I grew up equally loving picadillo (pee-cah-DEE-yo) and sausage gravy ‘n biscuits. I live in Texas now with my three boys, husband and overly excitable dog, Bandit.
Both brand-new and seasoned cooks will find topics of interest here at The Imperfect Gourmet. I’m not a chef by training; I learned most of what I know from my grandmas, my friends, and my own bold experimentation.
Cooking and entertaining on a serious level started for me in college, when I started cooking with friends for up to 25 people a pop. At one point, we had regular signup sheets for attendees in our dorm to attend dinners; we’d calculate the amount of food and take up cash from everyone, do the cooking and dole out the dinners in the study hall – the only place large enough for that many of us to gather.
We didn’t always get it right. One time, we (in)famously made a batch of…wait for it…thirteen pounds of green beans. Let me save you the trouble of calculating THAT: no matter how many people you have eating dinner, you will almost certainly never need thirteen pounds of green beans. NEVER.
Time has passed, and nowadays I don’t really have time to cook as much as I still do. But I love to eat well — far too much to give it up! — so I take shortcuts whenever possible, and I shrug at the rest when things aren’t perfect. But a friend who is a trained chef and owns a restaurant bragged so much about my Thanksgiving dinner one time, that a mutual friend thought I had trained professionally!
That said, The Imperfect Gourmet is less about exact recipes and more about fresh ideas for dishes and ingredients, as well as general how-to’s in the kitchen. You can partake in the blog musings on topics like saving money on your food budget, avoiding food waste, and getting young kids to eat great food.
I will be honest with you about my own mistakes and ingredient swapping. I own 50+ cookbooks but rarely use any of them, other than to glance at inspiration and then do my own thing. My kitchen cabinets and binders are full of post-it notes with variations on spontaneous “recipes” that worked well.
I jump around with cuisines, but much of what I do tends to center around Latin American and Mediterranean cuisines, with an occasional foray into other dishes. Recipe cards are here for your convenience, but they are full of notes on variations and ingredient substitutions, because it’s the way I think while I cook – I’m always thinking of the next time I make this, what I might do.
I want you to learn how to cook like my grandmas taught me: by intuition, by taste, and by knowledge of ingredients and cooking techniques that allows you to predict how elements will come together in a given dish. You know how many times I pick up a measuring spoon every week to exactly measure spices/herbs? Zero.
In sum, dear fellow Imperfect Gourmets, I want you to stop worrying about getting recipes exactly right and learn how to make recipes and techniques your own. Most of delicious home cooking is not about fancy equipment or impossible to assemble “P-fail” faux-inspirations; rather, it’s about understanding how ingredients work together and not being afraid to experiment a little. I invite you to embrace imperfection with me here at The Imperfect Gourmet. There is enough digital manipulation of images and social media angst out there to kill us already. Just freaking get cooking and don’t obsess about details. Got stains on your apron and cookbooks? Or…maybe on your actual clothes? YOU ARE WELCOME HERE. Stop worrying about perfection and start making real food. Those stains are badges of honor.
Just like my wrinkles and stretch marks.