Well, it seems you'd like to know more. Your curiosity is greatly appreciated!

Like I said before, I'm Kassandra, and I've been very passionate about food for a very long time. 

If you ask my mom, she'll say I started cooking because her food was bad, which I always disagree with. She just never truly loved cooking in a way that made her excited to cook - in fact, she more often then not considered it a chore like washing dishes or doing laundry. Rather, I suspect it might have had something more so to do with the fact that the only thing I would be willing to watch on the TV when I was around seven years old or so was various cooking shows, mostly various Food Network programming. 

Guy Fieri's bombastic Diners, Dive In's and Drives was a big influence on me when I was young, since he described food in a way that I would best describe as simply sophisticated - he would talk about the core facets of why something tasted good, like its flavor, a marinade, the way the acid contrasted with fatty meat, how the crunch of the bread soaked in fat was addictive, but he would do it in a very Guy Fieri-way, which seemed to scratch something in my brain. 

I would start cooking around this time, but I wasn't actually allowed to use any knives or turn on the stove myself, which meant I mostly mixed vegetables together and made simple dishes like millions of varieties of fried rice. Eventually, my parents let me use knives and the stove, but it wasn't until a few years later, when I was in middle school that I really started to love cooking. 

That year, my mom bought me an expensive Japanese chef's knife off Amazon for around 200 dollars or so, and I remember I was so excited, I opened it and IMMEDIATELY cut myself. Needless to say, I didn't end up getting to use that knife for almost a year straight. But once I did, I made everything, mostly Western-style cooking I saw on YouTube and Chinese foods I loved but never knew how to make. 

As I grew older, a certain pandemic hit when I was in high school that much like many others around the world, devastated me and left me stuck inside. As it turned out, being stuck inside with little to do made me really motivated to cook. I absorbed volumes upon volumes of culinary content - I watched Gordon Ramsay, Marco Pierre-White, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, David Chang, absolute celebrities with millions of eyes on them, and more 'casual' creators like My Name is Andong or Adam Ragusea. I read the Momofuku cookbook front to back a dozen times, and J. Kenji Lopez Alt's The Food Lab a dozen more (the spine has completely worn out on my copy). I learned about Marcella Hazan and Madhur Jaffrey, how they brought new light to Italian and Indian cuisine with their books and thought "God, they're cool."

Despite all my love for food however, I always struggled to figure out what exactly I wanted to do with it. When I was a teenager, I was diagnosed with autism, among a host of other things, and it explained a lot more of my borderline obsession with food and just how...touchy I was with it. I noticed scents and tastes a lot quicker then most of my family or friends, and I was very sensitive to anything I disliked. In other words, I was kind of a weird sensory savant when it came to food.

It didn't help that I was a little too aware of how...stressful the restaurant industry was, and I was pretty determined not to do that as a career, because it sounded like a great way to develop gray hairs before twenty. I was (am?) an individual who enjoyed writing, but I wasn't much for traveling around places, so food journalism was a bit off the table. 

But a couple years ago, I was in the car with my mom, and as her undiagnosed ADHD often led her to do, she was having a very long winded conversation about something or another. Along the adventure that was one of her tangents, she ended up bringing up the idea of doing catering. And well, I thought that was a pretty good idea, but I didn't really have the time or motivation. 

Fast forward a few years, and look where I am. Funny how things change, right? I hope you enjoyed reading a little about me, and I hope it's helped you understand me more and my food.