Inner Domesticity

Hi, I’m Amanda.

I spend my professional life working on monitoring and evaluation of large global health projects. I love what I do, get to travel to interesting & exciting places on occasion, and have met immensely fascinating & engaging people working in my field from around the globe. I also volunteer as the DC Chapter Director for One Home Many Hopes, supporting a home & a school in Kenya. All good things.

Yet somehow, in the midst of all of those make-the-world-a-better-place efforts, I’ve become infamous amongst friends and colleagues for trekking into work on the metro with a two-tiered carrying case filled with homemade cupcakes, or pulling together a vegetable dip on the fly from whatever I have in my fridge when I’m hosting a meeting.

I never meant to fall in love with food & elaborate Christmas decorations, but it happened so long ago, sometime in my childhood, that I couldn’t name the date or the year. I suppose I have an innate inner domesticity now, cultivated by my mother, a wonderful role model who balanced a successful career, constant volunteer commitments, and an insistence on nightly family dinners, which I really only cherished appropriately in retrospect.

You can make the world a better place through food & joyful occasions too though. There’s nothing more beautiful than sitting down around a table with friends or family. Those experiences make people happy, and happy people, in turn, do good things.

In another life, or another phase of this life, I’ll go to culinary school. But for now, I’ll keep volunteering as an assistant at Culinaerie & do recipe testing for cookbooks. And I’ll share my photos, recipes & restaurant adventures with the people who care to follow them.

Virginia Woolfe said, “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” And she was oh-so-right.

You can follow me on Twitter if you want to say hi & stay in touch.