Carafe & Gilt

I've been in love with cooking for as long as I can remember.

Growing up, I'd make sure I was home by five o'clock every day — not for anything as sensible as homework, but because that's when The Barefoot Contessa came on. Ina inspired me, though if I'm honest, I barely cooked a single one of her recipes back then. What I fell for was the whole thing: the art of it, the photography, the light on the food, the sense that a meal could be beautiful. It looked like magic.

The rest of my education happened in our own kitchen. Whenever my mom or dad was cooking, I was right there — sometimes helping, plenty of times just watching and taking notes. I loved getting to experiment, to try something new and see what happened.

So it surprised no one that when I got to college and moved into my first apartment, the kitchen was the one room that had to be perfect and fully decked out before anything else. I couldn't wait to have people over to cook for them, or better yet, with them. There may or may not be a few YouTube videos of my friends and me cooking together floating around out there. (Let's all agree to let those stay undiscovered.)

Then one Christmas in college, my mom gave me a journal. In it, she'd handwritten every one of my favorite recipes — all the dishes she'd made for me growing up. She left it intentionally unfinished, with blank pages waiting for me to fill in recipes of my own. I still use that book like scripture in the kitchen. But it's handwritten, gloriously disorganized, and one of a kind — so I decided to start moving those recipes online, where I could share them.

That's what this is.

Carafe & Gilt is about sharing — the carafe, passed around a table. And the gilt is a little bit of a wink: pour a bit too much from that carafe and you might wake up with some guilt, but gilt, the gold kind, is always classy. Consider that the guiding spirit here — indulgence, without apology.

You'll notice nearly every recipe on this site comes with a story: the first time I ever tasted it, a favorite memory tied to it, or simply why it's a dish or drink I keep coming back to. The food matters, but the story is half the reason it's worth making.

By day, I'm a teacher — but cooking is my favorite hobby, the thing I come home to. TJ and Colby live in Fort Worth, Texas, with their dog, Cardi.

Carafe & Gilt is about sharing — and I'm honored to get to share a piece of my heart with you.