About

Natalie & the BITES site

I have always enjoyed eating good food and have never been one to turn away something new. But  my knowledge in cooking was lacking. I used to enjoy cooking as a child, but my concoctions were very simple and rudimentary. After college, I ate a great deal of take-out and dined at wonderful Manhattan restaurants. A “home cooked meal” was a cold-cut sandwich.

It eventually got to a point where going to great restaurants and eating fabulous food wasn’t enough. I wanted to know exactly how to make these wonderful restaurant dishes. What exactly were the ingredients in the dish? How was it made? And why on earth did it taste so good? And what one day I saw as the impossible, something left only for professionals to do, slowly seemed more reachable for me.

I started trying out simple dishes and concepts and worked my way up to more complex practices. Some dishes worked out and some didn’t, but I learned from every one that went wrong. I truly became addicted to cooking and learning how to cook. After reading countless food blogs, I decided to partake in this extraordinary community and start one of my own – The Bites Site.

Then came Culinary School. I recently graduated from the Classic Culinary Arts Program at The French Culinary Institute. It was an incredible adventure. There is no comparison between the cook that I was before I took the course and the cook that I am now. My whole approach to cooking is drastically different. I used to read recipes as “law” and I followed them to a tee. But now I go to the farmers market, pick out what looks fresh and toss it together to create something fabulous. Culinary school taught me to use all of my senses in cooking and to use that inner sixth cooking sense - the one that knows when the protein is perfectly cooked, the one that feels that the oven isn’t working to full potential, the one that adds enough salt without even tasting. I’ve learned to listen to the sounds that come off of a pan, to look at the way a sauce bubbles, to know how meat feels when done. Cooking has transformed into something that I used to love to do to something that is now a part of me.

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