Hi, I’m Ana.

As you may have noticed, this isn’t your typical recipe blog. This is more of an inspiration blog. There are no precise measurements in the recipes because I don’t measure my ingredients unless it’s baking, this is how I make the best food possible. Growing up in the Dominican Republic and Miami, I would watch the women in my family cook, and not once did they pick up a measuring spoon. At times they would use a small teacup to add any ingredient they needed to their dish. This has always stuck with me, and it’s how I now cook.

Look at my recipes not as guidelines, but as inspiration to come up with something amazing of your own.

I haven’t been serious in the kitchen for very long, only about 4 years. I first started cooking when I was 12, I remember the first thing I made was Mangú con Huevo Frito y Salami. Mangú is the Dominican Republic’s most celebrated dish. We eat it for breakfast, lunch, or dinner, so it was only right that this was the first dish I learned to make. Years later in 2015, after having my son and moving to Seattle from Miami, I had to learn to cook fast. Everything I had back home wasn’t accessible anymore, the spices, the flavors, the culture, it was no longer around in the Pacific Northwest.

I started looking through recipes, reading directions over and over and making sure I had all the precise measurements. Unfortunately, too often the food didn’t turn out as good as it looked, and not because the recipes were bad or wrong, but because I always felt it needed something else. So instead of seeing recipes as guidelines, I saw them as inspiration, and that’s what I hope you get out of this blog.

I take flavors and spices from different cultures and dishes and put my own Caribbean spin on them. I love experimenting with flavors and mixing spices together to come up with something I haven’t tasted before. I encourage you to do the same.