I’m David Crowley, founder and writer of Cooking Chat - a food blog with hundreds of original healthy recipes, each paired with wine recommendations to help you enjoy the meal even more. I’ve been publishing here since 2006, and I hold an A.B. in Government from Harvard University.
In 2014, I founded Wine Pairing Weekend, a monthly blogging group where wine writers explore pairings around a shared theme. The format resonated, and other bloggers launched similar groups modeled after it on their own topics - including French Winophiles, Italian Food, Wine and Travel, and World, Wine and Travel - so that for a time there was a wine pairing blogging event happening nearly every week. Today these groups rotate on a shared monthly calendar, with Wine Pairing Weekend now featured three times a year. I remain the leader of Wine Pairing Weekend and stay involved with the others to varying degrees. In 2018, I was one of twelve international wine writers invited to visit wineries in Abruzzo, Italy.
My recipes and wine pairings have been featured in Woman’s World Magazine and Gather.com, and I’ve been a guest on several food blogging podcasts, including Food Blogger Pro. I also host the Cooking Chat Food & Wine Podcast, where I explore cooking with seasonal ingredients and the wines to pair with them, and talk with producers in the local food system, winemakers, and more. I continue to travel for wine, most recently visiting Catalonia and Banyuls-sur-Mer in southern France.
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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.
Buying and cooking seasonally is a big part of how I approach this. I’m a regular at local farmers markets, and I subscribe to a local meat share and vegetable share program, so many recipes here start with whatever’s actually in season rather than the other way around.
Recognition and Industry Involvement
Lately I’ve been focusing more on local wine events and dinners, along with visiting wineries, both locally and when I travel.
My recipes have been featured twice in Woman’s World Magazine - including a slow cooker Irish lamb stew recipe online, and my Healthier Hoppin’ John in a print feature on healthy recipes for the New Year. My work has also appeared on food-sharing sites including foodgawker, YumGoggle and Healthy Aperture. Before it was retired, my Cooking Chat recipe collection was also selected by Google’s editorial team as a featured collection on Google+, reaching over 245,000 followers there.
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!
Cooking Chat on Social Media
You can also find Cooking Chat on Instagram and Facebook, where I share the day-to-day of recipe testing and wine pairing.
Cook Local podcast
I launched the podcast in 2022 as Cook Local Eat Local, with a tight focus on cooking with seasonal, local ingredients. I later rebranded it to the Cooking Chat Food & Wine Podcast to broaden the content and bring it more in line with the overall Cooking Chat brand.
Cooking Chat focuses on tasty recipes that get better with wine! On the podcast, I explore ideas for cooking with seasonal ingredients and wines to pair with them. You’ll meet producers involved with the local food system, winemakers, and more.
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., focused on building social connection and community. I also hosted the Cultivating Connections podcast for a time, an outgrowth of my podcasting experience with Cooking Chat.
At my 35th Harvard reunion, I was one of eight classmates invited to give a TED-style “Nuggets of Wisdom” talk. Mine, Better Get Yourself Connected, offered three tips for building social connection - including an anecdote about a standing monthly wine meetup with a friend. (Video coming soon to YouTube.)
Lately I’ve been drawn more to the intersection of food, wine, and connection - how sharing a meal or an interesting wine can be a fun community-building experience. When we gather to share a carefully prepared meal with a glass of wine, we’re tapping into something that has created communal bonds for centuries.
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. We enjoy collaborating on content featuring favorite local spots for food, wine or a pint.
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.