Hi there! I'm so glad you've stopped by The Storied Recipe. I'd love to tell you a little bit about why I started this project. To do so, I have to go WAY back...
My First Love
My first love was reading. No one taught me how to read. Well, I suppose my mom did, in the sense that she read to me every day when I was a child. Usually she would run her finger underneath the words. Sometime around the age of 4, I started reading the words back to her. It really was that simple.
Reading and story were always gifts to me - both came naturally and I loved them.
I rarely read in a chair, either, which is odd now, looking back. To me, the most comfortable way was kneeling on my floor, with my elbows propped up on my bed, the book open between my hands. I spent hours and hours and hours reading like this.
My Grandparents Next Door
When I wasn’t reading, I was often next door at my grandparents house. My grandfather fought in the Pacific theater of WWII. He was a sensitive, intelligent man who once told me that he found a physics book when he was young and it answered every question he had ever wondered about. He also, as a very young man, heard about Hitler's ascension in Germany. Long before WWII began, he tracked down a copy of Mien Kampf and recognized the evil within.
Grandpa didn’t really seek out the company of others. Whether this was by nature or a result of the things he witnessed in the war, or a combination of both, I can’t say. But I can say that others were better for knowing him. He always welcomed me when I walked into the cool basement where he sat in his old, comfortable, creaky, and stained chair with his impossibly long legs propped up on an ottoman in front of him.
The chair was tucked behind a stairwell, so that he had to peek around it to see the TV, usually tuned into the news or Cheers or a classic Western. Sometimes we’d sit and watch. Sometimes, especially when I was older, he told me story after story of his boyhood, the war, and his unique, nuanced take on every historical event I ever learned about in school.
Unlike my grandfather, my grandmother was always up for conversation. She loved to talk and would often interrupt her story with the same joke: “Anyway, to make a short story long”, she’d say, and then we’d both laugh and she would keep talking.
You know when I think of my grandmother? Every day, when I’m pawing through my purse and can’t find my keys. Such a Grandma Haber thing. 🙂
Grandma loved me and thought I was perfect in every way. She wore an old faded “housecoat”, regularly bickered with my grandfather, and rocked comfortably in her old, worn seat. I can still hear the sound of the screen door slamming shut behind her when she went outside to water her flowers and pray the rosary. If I was in our yard, bored on a summer evening, I welcomed the sound of that screen door slamming. I went next door where she was willing to interrupt her prayers and chat with me instead.
When Grandma Haber was really upset about something, she would invite me upstairs into her bedroom. There, we sorted her brightly colored costume jewelry (she had boxes of big, gaudy earrings that coordinated with every outfit) and shared “girl talk”. We were so close. I still miss her.
History Through the Lens of Story
My view of history was always based on stories.
My great-grandmother, who was 16 when she had my grandmother, survived two World Wars (among many other wars), raised children during The Great Depression, and experienced the advent of the car (the car!), the computer, the internet, and smart phones. She outlived her husband, all of her siblings, both of her daughters and both sons-in-law. She ultimately died peacefully in her own home at the age of 103, not until after my first child (her 5th great-great-grandchild!) was born.
Along with all 4 of my grandparents, Mema also loved to talk about her life experiences. Together, they taught me to think of history as a deeply personal thing - a collection of billions of individual stories. Even as a kid, I understood that all of those stories interrelated and that every experience affected lives for generations.
So you see, my love of story came early. Like reading, it came naturally. Neither love has ever left me.
A New Medium for Storytelling
Decades later, I found and married the second, and by far, the greatest, love of my life: my husband John.
By 2010, we had three children together - all boys (Jack, Marcus, and Joshua) - and were waiting for a fourth. (He, Nicholas, turned out to be a boy also!)
Right then, between my 3rd and 4th child is when a new love found me: light.
Because what is photography if not a love of light?
Well, perhaps, light and story. Yes, that's it. Photography is a celebration of light and story.
Falling in love with photography was the beginning of The Storied Recipe. But first, I spent almost 10 years telling a totally different kind of story....
Wedding Photography as Storytelling
As I mentioned, we had just adopted our 3rd son in 2010 and were waiting for our fourth.
My older brother, whose love language is generous gift giving, was so excited for us to finally welcome his 3rd nephew, that he gave me their old DSLR camera!
At the same time my brother gave me the camera, my brother-in-law (John's brother) had just begun dating a girl named Susie, a photographer. I looked at Susie’s website, realized what this camera could do, and determined I would learn to use it properly.
So, during midnight feedings, I read my camera manual from cover to cover. Then books and websites. And during the day, I began to carry my camera everywhere.
My brother-in-law married Susie. She moved here to the DC area and started a wedding photography business. Shortly afterwards, I emailed her one day to ask if I could partner with her. Although I had only been taking photos for about 8 weeks, incredibly, she said yes. And thus began a beautiful partnership of 9 years.
Wedding photography awakened me to the power of story, not only to understand history, but as an absolutely crucial component of understanding people. Here's how:
Wedding speeches. It didn’t matter if the speech was awkward or epic, they almost always made me cry. When I heard the stories shared by the couple's closest friends and family, I felt I came to intimately understand the couple. I understood why they chose each other, why everyone overlooked their obvious quirks or faults, why the entire room loved them. The stories showed us the best in our couples and helped their families understand, accept, and minimize the worst.
I promised myself I would quit wedding photography when my oldest started high school. Our last wedding was October 27th, 2019, two months into Jack's freshman year.
Launching The Storied Recipe
I always loved cooking and I especially love cooking for others.
By the time our wedding photography career was winding down, I was cooking A LOT - and I had just wrapped up a year of eating 7 servings of fruits or vegetables every day. I had grown in awe of fruits and vegetables; they really had come to represent a miraculous representation of God's abundant love for us. How is it that something that came from the ground could be SO nutritious, SO delicious, AND so beautiful, all at the same time?
I started taking food photos and sharing them on Instagram. I found a truly amazing community there; an authentic, encouraging, artistic community that I miss to this day. Brands also began to reach out to me for potential partnerships and paid shoots.
But, when I thought about shooting foods for brands, I honestly felt like it was missing the whole point. If math and music are universal languages, food is the universal love language. Breaking bread together is the ultimate means of welcome to new friends (or even enemies), fellowship with old friends, and passing traditions, values, and story from one generation to the next.
I had always loved story, I had fallen in love with light, and I wasn't ready to stop using light to tell stories. I wanted to photograph food stories!
Eventually, I figured out that I could use light to tell these stories - but I could also share them, in the words and voices of their owners, through a podcast.
And that's how The Storied Recipe was born. The Storied Recipe is a podcast, a collection of recipes, and a community.
