Senior Nutrition
Jul 24, 2024

Cookbook Project featuring Liza N.

Cookbook Project featuring Liza N.
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Cooking has always been a passion of Liza’s - the flavors, textures, and cultures.  She started out as a personal chef, but during Covid, the business died. As she got older, she wanted to find something scalable so she started Locally Seasoned, a business focused on gourmet pantry items such as dressings, chutneys, and pickles.

How did you become interested in cooking?

I learned to cook as a child. I grew up in Baltimore near Johns Hopkins. My parents rented rooms in our house people from around the world who needed long-term treatment at the hospital. To thank us, some of the tenants would take over the gardening and kitchen tasks. As a young girl, I was often invited into the kitchen to help.

My mom learned a lot about international cultures and foods. My parents also brought in political refugees. The connection between food and health was the natural order of things. As a kid, the passion for cooking was growing inside of me. And, what I’ve done ever since is to honor the work that my parents did in helping refugees and people with serious health issues.

Tell us a little about the dish you submitted.

Both of my daughters have autoimmune disorders. When they were young, I went headlong into gluten-free and soy-free foods and started growing my own vegetables. One recipe I tried was for spaghetti squash boats. The squash looked like little boats when roasted. We had to come up with a recipe for spaghetti sauce that didn’t cause health issues. My daughter developed this recipe when she was 14 or 15. We roasted the tomatoes and mixed the spinach in the food processor. Once these ingredients were placed in the boats with parmesan, it looked like the Italian flag.

Tell us about your garden.

When the kids were little, we had a massive garden. I’d can 40 quarts of tomato sauce every year. Everything we grew was canned, frozen, or pickled. Now that the kids are grown, we don’t need a garden that gig. We’ve started a new garden fashioned around the next 15 years keeping in mind physical constraints such as bad knees that might develop. We have raised beds, tiered beds, and patio plants. It morphs as we morph.