Hi, welcome to Cooking Chat! I’m David Crowley, the writer of this food and wine blog.
Cooking Chat features healthy recipes with the best wine pairings.
Here you will find over 500 recipes, focusing on healthy eating and seasonal food. Most Cooking Chat recipes come with wine pairing recommendations. I have been sharing about food and wine on this blog for over 10 years.
Jump to:
What do we mean by “healthy”?
Healthy can be interpreted in many ways.
We don’t subscribe to any particular diet here. I tend to subscribe to the focus on “real food” as described by Michael Pollan. Our focus is on fresh, whole foods. Plenty of fruits and veggies, whole grains, fish, poultry and a moderate amount of meat. Oh yeah, cheese definitely qualifies as real food in my book!
In addition to the general health considerations, our son has several food allergies. As a result, we don’t cook with nuts and eggs, and you will often find mention of ways a dish can be prepared without dairy.
Wine blogging groups and credentials
I have a passion for putting together wine pairings that enhance the enjoyment of the meal. That passion led me to found the Wine Pairing Weekend blogging group. Each month, the #winePW members blog about wine pairings based on the month’s theme.
I’m also an active member of the French Winophiles group and Italian Food, Wine and Travel. Speaking of Italian travel, in 2018 I was selected to join a group of twelve international wine writers to visit wineries in Abruzzo. Lately I’ve been focusing more on attending wine industry events and visiting local wineries to deepen my knowledge.
My recipes and wine pairings have been featured in Woman’s World Magazine and Gather.com, and featured on many food sharing sites including foodgawker, YumGoggle and Healthy Aperture. I recently had a chance to appear on the Food Blogger Pro Podcast, discussing balancing a food blog with a full-time job. Our wine pairings have also been featured on a number of winery websites.
I also did guest blogging about food and pairings for a local wine shop, Pairings Wine and Food. The owners have since retired, but we still get together to share great food and wine pairings!
I have an A.B in Government from Harvard University. Some of my early food experiments began in Harvard dining halls, putting together some interesting creations with what I could glean from the pasta and salad bar!
Cooking Chat on Social Media
I maintain an active presence across social media sites, including Twitter (over 6,200 followers), Facebook (3,200 followers), Instagram (over 1,700 followers) and Pinterest (over 6,500 followers). Before Google Plus was retired, my Cooking Chat recipe collection was a G+ featured collection with over 245,000 followers.
Cook Local podcast
In 2022, I launched the Cook Local Eat Local podcast. During the growing season, the show focuses on ideas for what to cook with fresh local ingredients. Guests join me to brainstorm what to do with the produce I get in my CSA (community supported agriculture). I also feature local food entrepreneurs and others doing interesting things in the local food movement.
My food backstory
I’ve always loved food. As a kid I was the last one to push away from the table–because I was eat a lot but also experimenting with how things tasted when I combined different things on my plate. Shortly after Harvard (undergrad major in Government), I quick figured I was going to need to learn some cooking if I was going to keep enjoying food. Plus, it was a nice way to impress a special date who became my wife!
Managing food allergies is another theme we address in a number of the blog posts on Cooking Chat. Our son is allergic to egg, nut, sesame seed and dairy. Dairy is the only of those items that we use in our recipes these days, though you might find some older posts using nuts. In addition to sharing a number of allergy friendly recipes, we also post about restaurants that we have found to be good a managing food allergy concerns.
While the recipes and wine pairings are the central focus of Cooking Chat, I do also include some blog posts on travel, including restaurants and wineries found along the way.
Want to find a recipe here? Head over to this page where you can search by season, healthy recipes, easy recipes, etc. along with any other search term that you want.
Are you a blogger looking for resources? I’ll be sharing the resources I find helpful over on this resource page.
What do I do when I’m not cooking or eating? By day, I’m president of the nonprofit I founded, Social Capital Inc. After getting some podcast experience with Cook Local, we recent launched the Cultivating Connections podcast that I host.
I love spending time with family, enjoying nature, good food and our favorite show of the moment after dinner.
While I’m cooking, my wife Jodi is typically busy as a Realtor helping people find and sell their homes in the Boston area. She also has a great site, North of Boston Lifestyle Guide, for helping people find events, resources and other information about the region.
Though blog related reading has been a priority of late, I love winding up a day with a good book. (and yes, those often are food related, too!).
Disclosure statement: Linking to that resource page above is a good time to share my general disclosure statement in order to comply with Federal Trade Commission (FTC) regulations. Some of the posts and pages on this blog include affiliate links, and I receive compensation and/or free product for some of the posts on the site. I will disclose any such relationships in the posts where they exist in as transparent a fashion as possible. The opinions expressed on the site are entirely my own, and I will only recommend products that I trust based on my own experience with them. Where affiliate links do exist, they don’t increase your cost for the recommended product; rather, I receive a commission should you choose to buy something using those links, helping to keep this tasty content coming to you for free!
In addition to the blogging and nonprofit work, I do some social media training and consulting project work.