My name is Kestrel, like the bird. Thanks to my parents for that one!  They also endowed me with a serious love of food and cooking by making delicious food from around the world and stuffing our house full of cookbooks like a turkey at Thanksgiving.

I live in the San Francisco Bay area, an apex of culinary mishmash. From where I live, I can walk 10 minutes to eat authentic (and inauthentic) Vietnamese, Japanese, Chinese, Middle Eastern, Korean, Indian, Jewish, and a whole host of other cuisines.  I also am surrounded by ethnic grocery stores that sell raw ingredients on the cheap. It’s pretty awesome.  My love of food means that this abundance and diversity has lead to a pretty serious identity crisis in my diet and refrigerator.  Through reading this blog, you should come to understand what I mean by that.

In this blog, you’ll find recipes that cite a variety of influences from all over the globe… different ethnicities, different religions,  different dietary practices.  In my view, once we accept this fact, it’s what makes the cuisine of the U.S. so undoubtedly beautiful and unique.

Besides eating, I also make hair accessories and for the present, I’m doing clerical work, but I hope to be a Speech Pathologist when I grow up and will be going back to school to get my master’s degree in the fall.  I also enjoy spending time with my cat (who is luckily completely disinterested in human food, more for me!) and my friends, being artsy, biking, and the great outdoors.

I hope through this culinary adventure I can indulge my already obvious love of mashing up cuisines and perhaps find some new tastes to add to my repertoire.