Meet Your Cook... "Chef" Kathi

Creator of "Thrown Together Meals"

Meet "Chef" Kathi, creator of the Thrown Together Meals concept...

OK, I'm not a real chef (that's my daughter, Pastry Chef Jenn!), but I am a passionate and accomplished cook. I specialize in creating spur-of-the-moment recipes from whatever I happen to have on hand.

I've created quite a few websites on the Internet, and I've written this page a dozen times. Each time, I take a slightly different angle, depending on the overall theme of the site. I guess you might say I'm a bit of a renaissance woman... I have many interests and talents...

Anyway, this time, I'll focus on sharing my history with food and family, as that's what this site is really about.

My Love for Cooking Started Early...

I've been cooking since I was a kid. Being a mamma's girl, I often hung out in the kitchen with my mother and helped her make dinner. Baking tons of Christmas cookies together was a fond tradition every December too.

I mentioned on another page how my mom's mom (Grandma Thompson), who lived with us much of my growing up years, was a very different kind of cook than my mom. Mom was a great cook, but she mostly followed recipes closely, executing them well. Grandma, on the other hand, just kind of made things up as she went along. She was a great cook too... and made a Dutch apple pie to die for.

Then, as a young bride with an appreciative husband, I took great pride in experimenting with a wide variety of cookbooks and new cooking tools like the microwave, woks, and crepe pans (am I dating myself?). Anyway, I even taught my mom a few things along the way, re-awakening her love for cooking in her middle age.

But times change, and before I knew it I was the single mom of two very picky teenage girls, who didn't appreciate experimentation (or many of my favorite foods) at all. I also got really busy building a career, working long hours and coming home tired and wanting only to focus on my girls. So my cooking degenerated into lots of prepared foods, box meals and boring cuisine.

The Re-Awakening of My Cooking Talents

Then, around 10 years ago, a wonderful new man came into my life... a guy who LOVES to eat and who has an appreciative and fairly adventurous palate. When my girls grew up and moved away from home, I started to experiment with cooking again.

Eventually, my mom gifted me with 2 Rachael Ray cookbooks that she couldn't read (for some reason, their font is in turquoise and green). She was also a big Rachael Ray 30-Minute Meals TV show fan and would talk about her, sparking my interests.

My Rachael Ray Era

I started making some of the recipes in the new cookbooks Mom had given me... and we loved them! Say what you will about the woman's perkiness or overexposure, but the bottom line is she can cook and her recipes are delicious... at least to my tastes.

In fact, I enjoyed these cookbooks so much (her first 2 30-minute meals ones), that I ended up buying three more. My favorite of all of them was the 365: No Repeats. And the really great thing, is that using her cookbooks taught me a new way of cooking.

She estimates amounts, for the most part, and the 365 book also showed you how to change up a few ingredients in a recipe to produce something totally different and unique. It really opened my eyes to a new way of cooking.

Then, Life Changed Once Again

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Then, in the summer of 2007, we moved to Boise, Idaho and bought a new house, a fixer-upper. On top of that, my elderly, chronically ill mom came to live with us, so on top of the house stuff and a thriving internet business, I took on the role of caregiver. Needless to say, I no longer had as much time to cook and "play" in the kitchen.

Planning, basically, went out the window. I don't have time to plan a month's worth of menus and make up a detailed shopping list before I head off to the supermarket each month. So I just buy my standards and some other assorted meats and produce.

Half of the time, I don't even plan my dinners as I used to. I just head into the kitchen sometime after 6 PM and figure out at that point what I'm going to make each night.

Because I got such a great grounding in putting ingredients together during my Rachael Ray era, I found out I was able to fly on my own, by the seat of my pants, and just create great meals by using whatever I could find in the house.

My mom and my husband, Jim, loved almost all of the meals I started making and the idea for Thrown Together Meals and this website was born.

When I'm Not Cooking

So, that gives you some insight into my cooking background. As you can see, I'm no professional, but I DO love to cook and I think that's a big part of being a good cook... enjoying the process and appreciating the outcomes.

But anyway, my whole life is not about cooking. As I mentioned above, I have a thriving internet business too. I've been doing this full time for about 6 years now and I love it. I create content websites for myself and clients; I coach other webmasters in a program called SBI (see the link at the bottom of this page); and I write about asthma, allergies and COPD for HealthCentral.com. (I used to be a nurse in my younger days.)

Here are some of my other websites:

• Motor-Scooters-Guide.com. This site is all about buying and riding motor scooters, not only a more fuel-efficient vehicle in these crazy gas times, but also great fun.


• Powerful-Sample-Resume-Formats.com. This is my first SBI website, about 4.5 years old at this writing. It's all about how to get a job by writing a great resume, killer cover letter and acing interviews.


• Discover-Acadia.com. This site, still in progress, is actually a group project with my daughters about one of our favorite vacation spots of all time. Or at least it started out as a group project. Now, it's mostly mine... Sigh.


• Your-Healthcare-Career.com. This site is a lot like the resume site above, but focuses specifically on people looking to get a job in healthcare.

As I mentioned, I'm also the mother of 2 grown daughters. My oldest, Sarah (who is 26 at this writing), teaches people in foreign countries to speak English. My baby, Jenn (age 24 at present), also loves to cook and does so for a living, but her specialty is baking. She's a Cordon Bleu school-educated pastry chef who lives in Austin, Texas.

My husband and I are raising what we call our second litter, which consists of 3 dogs... small, medium and large. Four years ago, we started with an adorable Boston Terrier, Gizmo. Then, in January 2007, we rescued a young black lab stray we named Cheyenne during one of the coldest weeks on record. Shortly after that, my mom fell ill and could no longer care for her new shih tzu puppy, Molly, so she became part of our family too. Then, in September 2007, Mom joined our household and she and Molly were joyously reunited.

Life Is an Adventure...

Or at least it has been for us... Jim & I originally hail from the eastern US. I grew up in Rochester, NY, but lived in southern New Jersey for almost 30 years. Jim grew up in western PA near Pittsburgh, but also lived in NJ for 25 or so years. We fell in love with the Rocky Mountains in the early 2000s and decided to move out here in the fall of 2005. We lived in Missoula, Montana for a year, then a year in north central rural Idaho, then ended up here in beautiful Boise. Quite a journey. And Jim also launched a couple of career changes during that period.

The reason we moved west was primarily because we love the outdoors and the outdoor experiences out here are so much more majestic. We enjoy hiking and backpacking, camping, and bicycle riding.

So, that should give you a picture of the person behind this site. I hope I haven't bored you too much. But I think it's easier for you to trust what you see here when you can realize I'm pretty much an ordinary person, a lot like you. I called myself Chef Kathi at the top of this page, but that's really just a joke... I'm no high falutin' chef (sorry Jenn), just someone who loves to cook!