M E E T    A N D R E A 

Hey y’all! Welcome to Andrea’s Cooktales! I’m a self-taught cook, turned professional chef. I went from never stepping foot inside a kitchen until my late 20’s to a couple of years later turning cooking into a business. In 2010, right after getting married, my grandmother gifted me the family heirloom cookbook with recipes from family members dating all the way back to the 1800’s. It took that book with my favorite childhood recipe inside to motivate me to cook my first real meal, and I guess you could say that recipe goes down as the start of my love of cooking and the discovery of a hidden talent I never knew I had. This blog wouldn’t be called Cooktales without a story, so here’s how it all started:

This particular recipe, called Holiday Ravioli, was only ever served at Christmas. When she gave me the cookbook, Christmas was months away, but I insisted I needed to eat that most delicious, special dish right then. Being someone who never cooked, I failed to even look at the directions of the recipe and instead ran out and bought all the ingredients for it. When I got home and actually started cooking it, I decided I had successfully picked the most difficult recipe EVER to cook my first meal – haha! Everything from start to finish was from scratch – including the pasta dough, which needed to be rolled out with a pasta roller or rolling pin. I hardly owned basic cooking utensils much less a rolling pin, so in true fashion, I rolled my first pasta dough out with a wine bottle. The dish turned out perfectly. Then and there, I fell in love with cooking. I became obsessed and so immersed - from reading cookbooks to watching videos on repeat to searching for the answer to every cooking question I had - it’s all I did in my spare time. Years later, it’s become my business and to this day, homemade pasta is still one of my favorite things to cook!

Today, I’m the author of Andrea's Cooktales: A Keepsake Cookbook and run a full-time cooking business where I’m a personal chef, cooking instructor, and blogger. I won Food Network’s Supermarket Stakeout cooking competition show and have been featured on Cooking Channel, Today Show, and was chosen as a Top 100 Contestant on MasterChef Season 6. One thing I’ve learned for sure is, you can discover your true passion and calling in life at any age!

Here and on Instagram @andreas_cooktales, you’ll find cooking tips, unique ingredients, fun recipes, kitchen items designed to inspire culinary adventures, and aesthetic home and entertaining content for a fun, beautiful life. My husband and I run a cozy chateau-inspired BNB together in our home city of Memphis, TN and are currently renovating a new home in Santa Rosa Beach, FL with our one year old son and Brussels Griffon where I’m currently taking new clients in the 30a area.