About Renee Gardner

Growing up, dinner came from boxes, cans, and frozen bags — and it was good, because my mom made it good. She wasn’t teaching me knife skills or stocks from scratch. She was teaching me that personal preference matters, that you work with what you have, and that feeding people is worth doing however you need to do it. She opened a door I didn’t know I’d spend the rest of my life walking through.

From there, I kept learning. I taught myself by watching way too much Alton Brown, reading everything I could find, and making plenty of mistakes along the way. I burned things. I oversalted things. I figured out how to fix both. That process of figuring things out — understanding why something went wrong and how to correct it — is where my obsession with technique actually started.

The real shift came during my time in Napa, working in the wine industry. That’s where I fell in love with food that demands more from you: the five-course dinners, the dishes you plan for, the meals that turn an evening into something special. California wine country cuisine — farm-to-table, seasonal, ingredient-driven — became the lens through which I think about cooking. I learned that impressive doesn’t have to mean complicated, and that the best cooking comes from understanding technique, timing, and how to adapt when things don’t go as planned.

I’ve since taken a course at the Culinary Institute of America in Napa focused on Mediterranean cooking, and studied pasta-making and sourdough baking with dedicated coursework in both. No letters after my name — but over a decade of deliberate practice, real kitchen study, and a genuine commitment to understanding the science behind what I’m cooking. I’ve also written about food, travel, and life for Food Drink Life, a digital lifestyle magazine. And if one food blog wasn’t enough of a project, I’m currently building a second one — because apparently I make excellent life choices.

These days, I’m cooking for my husband, our son, and two Goldendoodles who are very invested in anything that might fall on the floor. Some nights, dinner is something we linger over. Other nights, it’s just about getting food on the table so we can all sit down together for twenty minutes. Both kinds of nights matter.

Outside the kitchen you’ll find me gardening, painting, or listening to romance novels and podcasts about murder, politics, or self-improvement in roughly equal measure. Now that I live in England, I’ve also added “wandering around very old things” and an ongoing argument with myself about whether a Sunday roast counts as recipe research to the list — and I have absolutely no complaints about that.

→ Learn more about Renee Nicole’s Kitchen