Simple, seasonal, and deeply comforting recipes rooted in Virginia soil and shaped by years I spent cooking and learning in Turkey.
A Locavore Kitchen With Global Traditions
Virginia’s Vittles is a home for cooks who believe that food should be nourishing, seasonal, and rooted in place. I pair the ingredients grown in our region with the culinary traditions and herbal remedies I learned while growing up in Appalachia and living in Turkey in the late 2000s. Here you’ll find practical dishes, seasonal pantry rituals, and accessible ways to bring more comfort, health, and global flavor into everyday life.
Featured Class: Everyday Turkish — Lentil Soup + Winter Remedy
Learn how to make classic mercimek çorbası (Turkish red lentil soup) with an Aleppo pepper-infused butter finish, plus a quick honey lemon winter remedy used in Turkish households for generations.
Simple ingredients. Cozy flavors. Real nourishment.
A Kentucky-born locavore who found her culinary identity living and working in Turkey. For the past decade and a half, I’ve written, cooked, taught, and shared food stories across Appalachia and Western Turkey. Now, living in Virginia, I blend that love of local food with the everyday herbal remedies, techniques, and stories I learned abroad and in my herbalism studies.
My work is devoted to helping home cooks find nourishment, ease, and connection in their kitchens.
Free Guide: Seasonal Kitchen Remedies That Actually Help
A simple, helpful guide to 5 everyday herbal remedies and Turkish kitchen rituals using ingredients you can find locally. Comforting, doable, and perfect for real life.
Warm drinks are a form of care. Quietly, in the slow moments that reside in kitchen nooks in the earliest and darkest hours. Casting a spell like this looks like steam rising from a kettle, or warmth on the hands and lips with a touch. Warm drinks are often how…
Brothy soups have a history of being served either as a breakfast item or to begin a meal, to prepare the stomach for the heavier types of meals at the end of the day. In Turkey, soups are a mainstay of the everyday meal, and this was also true in…
I studied abroad in Kansai Prefecture, Japan, in 2007. Tucked into the most unassuming corners of the Osaka train station were patisseries that, I tenderly believed, could compete with the finest in Europe. Each week, I would buy loaves of pillowy milk bread, bacon-stuffed rolls with chives and cheese, and…
The story of how I arrived to the lowest point started and ended with a relationship, but it also bookended a period of intense transformation and growth. As I have discovered, the process of self-recovery is brutal and pulls you from whatever illusion you have create of an unfulfilled and…