this is home to my food related pictures and writings!
the I in this blog, is me: sierra laumer. i like to cook and blog and take pictures. i am inspired by food. the colors and the flavors and the way it can bring people together, create an experience and change your reality.
i spent the last year cooking a bunch for my sister, jenna, who was diagnosed with cancer in april 2009. jenna spent a lot of time inpatient at children’s hospital over the last year and it was our gathering around food that made things more bearable. meals made time for laughing and sharing and enjoying food that was comforting, colorful, creative. the food would change the way we would experience the place. it would distract us from the what we were up against, from the walls being gray and the lights being florescent.
it gave me an enormous sense of purpose to be able to cook food that would do all of this for my family and for jenna. and i started daydreaming with jen about what kind of restaurant we would open when she got better. how our lives couldn’t possibly go back to how they were, working for other people, doing things we weren’t necessarily passionate about.
jenna died in january, 2010. and my life is changed forever. i decided right away to live the life that i have spent lots of time daydreaming about. to listen to what seems right for me and to go with it! not in an inspirational speaker kind of way, in a way that i am just going to make it happen. because for real, life is too short and all that.
i have relied very heavily on a great friend, leah heisel, during this time and we came to agree that we would like to work with and support each other in making this restaurant dream a reality. so this is how we find ourselves in this journey of starting a kitchen in cincinnati’s over-the-rhine neighborhood.
we are flying by the seat of our pants, learning all there is to know about starting a small business and a restaurant, to boot. we know that we want to cook great, colorful, flavorful food. food that transports the eater. food that maybe tastes different than anything you’ve had lately. or food that is so familiar and comforting that it soothes and sustains!
our kitchen is called forkheartknife, which makes much more sense when you see the graphic (as you learn when you are talking to say, the phone company). i made this graphic as a stencil on a tshirt during my 2008-09 spray paint phase. i love all the image conveys visually, as well as, what people interpret it to “mean”. for me, the heart symbolizes the love that can be cooked into food and the LOVE TO EAT!
read the blog! get inspired! make the recipes (they’re usually pretty vague, so try your own twists!)
and thank you for reading and eating and enjoying what we do in our simple, little, special kitchen!
love, sierra
ps- to catch up to now, visit http://www.cleanplateclub-yum.blogspot.com/