Welcome, I’m Nicole
I’m the food lover, photographer and recipe developer behind all content here at Cooking for Keeps. I started this website over a decade ago after realizing the only way to truly display my love of cooking, entertaining and making food beautiful was through a new up and coming channel – a blog. Since the first day I hit publish I’ve made it my goal to bring you delicious food you can easily impress your family and friends with.
About Cooking for Keeps
I love to eat. And I love to eat EVERYTHING, so here you’ll find a hodgepodge of recipes I love to make and of course, love to eat. Just like anyone else, I indulge some days and eat healthy other days. Some days I feel like making easy meals that require only a few ingredients, other days, I want to cook all day long and use less common ingredients like saffron and curry paste. Some days I feel like savory and some days I feel like sweet. You get the point, there’s no niche here, I just aim at sharing delicious recipes that inspire you to get in the kitchen.
If you’re looking for a specific level of skill, we have conveniently labeled and categorized all recipes, easy, medium, and hard, so you can take your pick.
Explore The Site
A little bit more about me, personally.
First and foremost, I blog because cooking is my passion and not just a passion that I acquired as an adult but a passion that has been an anchor of my life since around five years old. Yep, at five years old I fell in love with cooking after I got my first Barbie Bake Oven. I made a mean Ken’s Deep Dish Pizza if you’re wondering.
But! Let me back up for a second, I really have to attribute my love of cooking to my Mom because she was (and is) a wonderful cook. As a kid I watched and helped her in the kitchen and from day one, I couldn’t get enough. She gifted me with my first Barbie Bake Oven and from that point on, I was a gal on a food-driven mission. As a seven-year-old little girl, I can remember whipping up homemade crab cakes for my parents’ holiday parties. When I was in high school, I was teaching my friends how to make eggs benedict and biscuits and gravy from scratch. And when I was in college, I was inviting friends over for full-on Thanksgiving meals.
My plan was always to go to business school, followed by culinary school, with the ultimate goal of opening a restaurant. However, I realized early on that I wanted a family and wanted to be as present as possible so I just wouldn’t be able to make a restaurant career work, so instead, cooking became a passion.
While in college, I was creating all of my own recipes and documenting them. Soon I started hearing about this little thing called a food blog. I started following my first food blog shortly after I graduated (A Cozy Kitchen) and after a year or so of acquiring more blogs I loved, realized a food blog would be the perfect place to store all of my recipes I’d been creating over the years and on top of that, with a lot of hard work, I could maybe even make a little bit of extra money. Win, win.
I published my first post on May 15, 2012, and haven’t looked back since.
I made the switch to full-time blogger and freelance photographer in May of 2015. It’s been six years since then and I’m still loving every single second of bringing delicious recipes to you!
Thank you so much for all of the support, and I hope you continue to visit as often as possible!
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If you’d like to chat (I’d love to!), please see my Contact Me page! If you have any questions about starting a blog, please click here. If you would like to work with us in some capacity, please click here.