Hi there! I'm Carol Han--New Yorker, food and style writer, blogger, founding partner of CA Creative, mom to one temperamental puppy named Suz, and prolific home cook. Once upon a million years ago, I moved to New York from a quiet, idyllic hometown to make my life in fashion. I went through the ranks in the fashion departments of Lucky magazine, ELLE magazine, ELLE.com, and StyleCaster for many, many years before starting my social media agency, CA Creative, and launching this blog. Speaking of this blog! This is it. It's here to show you that good food and a good life are synonymous, one and the same. The recipes here are for people like me--busy, young(ish), and cooking haphazardly in shoebox city kitchens. Although they'll work just as well--probably better--if you've up and transposed that life for greener pastures and bigger cooking spaces. Or just moved to Brooklyn.
I got my penchant for cooking from my mother who is the best home cook I've ever known. I spent a lot of my childhood perched comfortably in her big, light-filled kitchen while she hovered over the stove, stirring whatever delicious thing she was cooking up. One day, after all this craziness is over and life slows down a bit, I hope to have a kitchen just like hers, just like the one I grew up in. It will be big and airy and full of light. It will have lots of beautiful wooden counters and plush, old chairs placed directly in line to catch the late afternoon sun. There will be a couple of dogs lolling around, waiting for the occasional scrap of food to fall from the butcher block, where someone is chopping vegetables in preparation for a delicious dinner. It’ll be a place for me and everyone I love to gather and trade stories about their days, a place of utter comfort and security, full of the smells of food made lovingly, the smells of home. It will be a place where life itself happens—tears and fights and important conversations, laughter and turning points and midnight ice cream meetings. It will be absolutely perfect. But for now, I have Manhattan and my hectic life. I have a kitchen I can barely turn around in. I have my daily cooking experiments and adventures. I have myself, figuring it all out. And I couldn’t be happier.
I hope you'll try out some of my recipes and let me know what you think. They’re simple, delicious, and most importantly, they’re easy to execute, even if you don’t have time, much of a kitchen, or a ton of fancy tools. I promise they won't fail you. And if they do, give me a shout and we'll work it out together! That's what cooking's all about.
