About Cooking With Kimberly
Cooking With Kimberly is a living cooking encyclopedia—twenty years of recipes, techniques, ingredients, ideas, stories and hard-earned kitchen knowledge for curious cooks and real kitchens.
I’m Kimberly Turner, creator, producer and host of Cooking With Kimberly. I launched the site in 2006, and in 2026 we’re celebrating our 20th anniversary.
Today, Cooking With Kimberly contains thousands of recipes, articles, reviews, demonstrations and cooking ideas, alongside an archive of more than 1,600 cooking shows.
But none of that was the original plan.
I started Cooking With Kimberly for one very simple reason: I wanted somewhere to preserve our important family recipes.
That was it.
I had already learned what could happen when the foods you love exist mostly in somebody’s memory and hands. I wanted to write ours down—to preserve how we made things so those recipes wouldn’t disappear.
What began as a family recipe archive kept growing. One recipe led to another. Questions needed explanations. Ingredients led to techniques; techniques led to demonstrations; travel and life brought more cuisines and traditions to the table. Eventually, that little family archive became thousands of articles and more than 1,600 cooking shows.
Twenty years later, Cooking With Kimberly is still an archive. The family recipe box just got a whole lot bigger.
I don’t want to show you that I can cook. I want to teach you that you can cook.
But First, I Had to Learn
Long before Cooking With Kimberly, there was my mother, Ingrid. And before Mom, there was her mother—my Oma Kasper. I also had the great gift of learning from Grandma Turner.
That’s where my cooking really begins.
Mom was the youngest of nine children and grew up on the family farm. I was the youngest of 27 Kasper grandchildren, and as a child, I worked on that same farm.
Food wasn’t an abstract subject there. There were orchards and gardens, eggs and animals, fruit to pick and sort, work to be done and food to put by. There were peaches eaten warm from the sun and dishes made from what the farm and the season gave us.
And there were the foods of our Eastern European family.
German. Ukrainian. Russian.
Zwieback. Pierogi. Borscht. Vareniki. Sausage buns. Chicken soup. Moos. Platz made with farm fruit. Stöllen. Spaetzle. Cabbage rolls. The foods that taste less like a cuisine to me than they taste like home.
Mom learned from Oma. I learned from Mom. I learned from Grandma Turner, too.
But there was a problem.
They didn’t necessarily cook from recipes.
Mom cooked by feel. A handful. Some of this. Enough of that. Until it looks right. Until it feels right. Until it tastes the way it’s supposed to taste.
When you’re standing beside someone in the kitchen, you think you know what they’re doing.
Then you leave home.
Leaving Home Taught Me What Home Tasted Like
I began spending time away from home young. In Grade 8, my life as a national-level rhythmic gymnastics athlete took me to Toronto. I was still a kid, but I was already learning what it felt like to be somewhere else and miss the familiar things waiting at home.
Right out of high school, I moved to Australia.
Suddenly, I wasn’t a short drive from Mom’s kitchen. I was on the other side of the world.
And distance taught me something I hadn’t fully understood while I was standing beside her:
If I wanted to eat the food I loved, I had to learn how we made it.
Not how a cookbook made it.
Not how somebody else’s grandmother made it.
How we made it.
I could find a recipe with the same name, but that didn’t mean it tasted like home. What I craved wasn’t simply borscht or pierogi or chicken soup. I wanted the flavour I remembered. The texture I remembered. The version my family made.
So I asked more questions. I paid closer attention. I called Mom from far away. We tried to translate handfuls and instinct into measurements and instructions.
I learned that “until it looks right” is perfectly adequate when the person who knows what right looks like is standing beside you—and maddening when she’s thousands of miles away.
After Australia came university and another long stretch of living away from home: Texas, Louisiana, Iowa and then back to Texas.
Every move brought new people, new places and new foods into my life. But it also reinforced the importance of knowing how to recreate the foods I already carried with me.
Eventually, life brought me home again, this time for a very different reason: to help care for my family as my father and mother faced cancer.
By then, food had followed me through leaving, travelling, studying, competing, building a life elsewhere and returning home when family needed me.
And somewhere along that journey, I had learned something much bigger than a collection of recipes.
I had learned how culinary knowledge passes from one person to another.
And how easily it can disappear.
Food Is One of the Ways We Remember Home
That experience has shaped the way I teach cooking ever since.
It’s one reason I care about explaining the details experienced cooks sometimes forget to explain. What should it look like? How should it feel? What happens if you don’t have exactly that ingredient? How do you know when it’s ready?
Those details matter when there isn’t an Oma, a Grandma or a Mom standing beside you to say, “No, not yet.”
It’s also why preserving food memories has become increasingly important to me.
A recipe can tell you how much flour to use. It can’t necessarily tell you whose hands taught you how the dough should feel.
It doesn’t tell you who always made that dish at Christmas. What your grandmother called it. What grew on the farm. What your mother packed in your school lunch. What everybody ate after working outside. Which ingredient someone never measured. Which food you missed so badly after leaving home that you finally had to learn to make it yourself.
Recipes preserve instructions. Stories preserve context.
We need both.
That’s part of what I’m preserving through Cooking With Kimberly: not only what we ate, but how we make things—and the people whose hands taught mine.
So, What Kind of Food Do I Cook?
It’s one of the first questions people ask me.
The simplest answer is: I cook everything.
I love food. I love travelling. I love discovering how another family, region or culture approaches an ingredient I’ve known all my life. And I love the extraordinary way food can bring people with completely different histories together around the same table.
My Eastern European roots tell you where my culinary story began, but they certainly don’t tell you where it ends.
Once I understood how powerfully food could carry my home with me, I became fascinated by the ways food carries everybody else’s.
A Bigger Table
Australia was one of my first great lessons in that.
I spent a year living, travelling, competing and eating my way through very different parts of the country. It reinforced something travel has taught me repeatedly ever since: there is rarely one simple “national cuisine.” Geography, migration, climate, agriculture, coastlines and communities create their own food dialects.
Then came the American South.
Texas became an important part of my life and my cooking. I went to university there, later returned there, married a Texan and came to love the enormous range of Southern food—from everyday family cooking and barbecue to the traditions of Black Southern and soul food cooking.
I wasn’t experiencing those foods as an abstract cuisine from a cookbook. I was welcomed into a Black family and experienced food as families actually experience it: at home and around tables, through celebrations and ordinary days, with the stories, preferences, laughter, disagreements and traditions that never make it onto an ingredient list.
Louisiana gave me another culinary education entirely.
I went to school there and fell deeply in love with Louisiana’s foods and cultures—the overlapping and distinct traditions of Cajun and Creole cooking, Southern seafood, Gulf ingredients and the remarkable foods that come from bayous, marshes and swamps.
Louisiana taught me that food can tell you where you are before anyone gives you an address.
And through all the places I’ve lived and travelled, food has remained one of the first ways I try to understand where I am and who lives there.
I’m interested in the foods we inherit and the foods we discover. The dish your grandmother made and the ingredient you’ve never seen before. The foods of celebration and necessity, geography and migration, hardship and abundance, memory and invention.
Food is culture you can share at a table.
That’s why Cooking With Kimberly doesn’t fit neatly into one cuisine.
I don’t want it to.
More Than a Recipe
I love recipes. But I’ve never believed that following instructions is the same thing as knowing how to cook.
I want you to understand why something works.
Why did the sauce break? Can you substitute that ingredient? What can you make with six zucchini, half an onion and something mysterious at the back of the pantry? How do you know when the bread is actually done? What else can you do with this herb? What traditionally goes with that spice? Can tonight’s leftovers become tomorrow’s breakfast?
Those questions are every bit as interesting to me as the finished dish.
But food is more than technique, too. It’s one of the ways we understand people. Every cuisine carries geography, history, necessity, celebration, migration and memory with it. Learning how somebody else cooks is one small way of learning how somebody else lives.
A good recipe should give you enough information to succeed—but enough understanding to adapt when your kitchen, ingredients, equipment, budget, tastes or circumstances don’t match mine.
A recipe gives you instructions. Understanding gives you freedom.
The Coach in My Kitchen
Long before I was teaching cooking on camera, I was an athlete and a coach.
Athletics taught me to think about food not only as pleasure and culture, but as nourishment—fuel, recovery and one part of caring for a healthy, capable body.
Coaching taught me something equally important: teaching isn’t demonstrating what I can do.
A good coach watches. She notices where someone is struggling. She understands the mechanics underneath the skill, breaks them into understandable pieces, demonstrates when necessary and helps another person develop enough knowledge and confidence to eventually perform that skill without her.
That philosophy followed me directly into the kitchen.
I don’t want you to watch me cook something impressive and leave thinking, Kimberly can do that.
I want you to leave thinking, I can do that.
Science, Curiosity & a Lifelong Habit of Learning
My path to the kitchen wasn’t particularly linear—and I wouldn’t want it to have been.
My academic path began in the sciences. I entered Texas A&M University on a pre-veterinary track, continued my education at McNeese State University, and ultimately graduated from the University of Northern Iowa with a pre-med emphasis and minors in Chemistry, Criminology, Coaching and French.
That scientific foundation still influences the way I approach food. I don’t only want to know what happens. I want to know why.
I’m also a Certified Herbalist, trained through Nicole Apelian’s Lost Remedies Academy. My continuing work with herbs, gardening, edible and useful plants and traditional plant knowledge has expanded that curiosity beyond the kitchen and deepened my interest in the relationship between what we grow and how we use it.
I have never considered learning something you finish before you’re qualified to teach.
The best teachers remain students. I intend to stay one.
Food Should Nourish You—and Delight You
My science, athletic and coaching backgrounds made health and nutrition part of the way I think about food, but I’ve never believed that eating well should mean stripping the pleasure out of eating.
Food can nourish the body and still be comforting, celebratory, indulgent, traditional, surprising and absolutely delicious.
Some days call for vegetables from the garden. Some call for soup. Some call for birthday cake.
Knowing how to cook gives you the ability to make those choices thoughtfully for yourself and the people you’re feeding.
Use What You Have
One principle runs through almost everything I cook: use what you have, and learn how to use it well.
You don’t need a showroom kitchen, the newest appliance or a refrigerator filled with expensive specialty ingredients to make beautiful food.
You need curiosity. Attention helps. Practice helps even more.
Taste as you go. Learn the underlying technique. Substitute intelligently. Use the vegetable that needs eating. Save the bones for stock. Preserve the harvest. Turn leftovers into something that doesn’t feel like leftovers. Make notes. Make mistakes. Figure out what happened.
Resourcefulness isn’t lesser cooking. Some of the world’s great food traditions were built on exactly that kind of ingenuity.
From Farm to Garden to Kitchen
For me, food doesn’t begin at the grocery store.
Maybe that’s inevitable for someone whose earliest relationship with food included working the same family farm where her mother grew up.
Growing food myself brought those childhood lessons back to me in a different way. Planting something, tending it, harvesting it and then facing the wonderfully ridiculous problem of having far too much of it teaches you things no ingredient list can.
You start thinking differently about seasonality, preservation, waste, abundance and flavour. You notice leaves, seeds, stems, flowers and herbs differently. You become interested not only in What can I cook? but What is this? Where did it come from? How has it traditionally been used? And what else can I do with it?
That curiosity runs through my gardening, homesteading and herbalism and straight back into the way I cook.
A Cooking Site Built Like a Cookbook
Cooking With Kimberly was never meant to be an endless stream of recipes you read once and forget.
I grew up with serious cookbooks that were used as reference books. You opened them for recipes, certainly, but also for techniques, ingredients, menus, explanations, variations and ideas. You could begin by looking up one thing and emerge twenty minutes later knowing five things you hadn’t intended to learn.
That’s still how Mom and I use cookbooks, and that way of exploring food is woven into Cooking With Kimberly.
You’ll find recipes alongside cooking techniques, ingredient information, substitutions, cuisines, menus, holidays and occasions, cooking shows, product discoveries, gardening, preserving, food traditions, practical self-reliance and the stories that explain why some foods matter far beyond the plate.
Sometimes you arrive knowing exactly what you’re looking for.
Sometimes the question is simply, What can I do with this?
Both are good reasons to cook.
What You’ll Find at Cooking With Kimberly
- Recipes for real life — everyday meals, comfort food, celebrations, international flavours, garden cooking, pantry cooking and the occasional glorious production.
- Ingredients & substitutions — what ingredients are, how to use them, what complements them and what you can use when you don’t have exactly what a recipe requests.
- Cooking techniques — practical instruction designed to help you understand what you’re doing and recognize what success looks, smells, sounds and tastes like.
- Cuisines, seasons & occasions — food organized by the many different ways people actually decide what to cook.
- Cooking shows & demonstrations — more than 1,600 shows from the Cooking With Kimberly archive.
- Menus & cooking ideas — because sometimes the hardest part of dinner isn’t cooking it. It’s deciding what dinner should be.
- Gardening, herbs, preserving & self-reliance — understanding food before it reaches the kitchen and making thoughtful use of what we grow, gather and have on hand.
- Food memories & traditions — preserving not only recipes, but the people, places and stories carried through them.
Twenty Years of Cooking With Kimberly
In 2026, Cooking With Kimberly celebrates its 20th anniversary.
The internet has changed enormously since I launched the site in 2006. So has the way we find recipes, watch cooking shows, share ideas and learn about food.
But twenty years later, I’ve realized something rather wonderful:
Cooking With Kimberly is still doing exactly what I created it to do.
It’s preserving food knowledge.
The archive is simply much larger now. It holds our family recipes, certainly, but also techniques, ingredients, cooking shows, cuisines, discoveries, stories, memories and two decades of things I thought were worth knowing, making or remembering.
What hasn’t changed is what I want Cooking With Kimberly to be:
Useful.
I want you to be able to arrive here with an ingredient, a question, a holiday, a problem, a memory or absolutely no idea what to make for dinner—and find somewhere worthwhile to begin.
Twenty years of cooking creates a lot of material.
That’s not clutter. That’s the library.
Explore the Cooking With Kimberly Library
Open the Recipe Index at the top of the site to browse Cooking With Kimberly by ingredient, cuisine, technique, season, occasion and more. Use search when you know exactly what you need. Or wander through the Index the way you might browse a favourite cookbook and see where you end up.
Whether you’ve cooked for fifty years or you’re standing in front of the stove wondering what “sauté” actually means, you’re welcome in my kitchen.
Ask questions. Learn the technique. Taste your food. Grow something. Preserve something. Save the family recipe. Try a cuisine you don’t know. Use the leftovers. Make the mistake. Figure out why it happened. Feed somebody you love.
Then come back and learn something else.
Be a champion in your kitchen—and eat deliciously.
About Kimberly Turner
Kimberly Turner is the creator, producer and host of Cooking With Kimberly, a recipe developer, writer, Certified Herbalist, gardener, homesteader, educator and longtime digital media creator.
A graduate of the University of Northern Iowa with a pre-med emphasis and minors in Chemistry, Criminology, Coaching and French, Kimberly began her university studies at Texas A&M University on a pre-veterinary track and also studied at McNeese State University. Her multidisciplinary background spans science, competitive athletics and coaching, culinary media, entrepreneurship, gardening, herbalism and food education.
Since founding Cooking With Kimberly in 2006 to preserve her family’s important recipes, she has produced more than 1,600 cooking shows and built an extensive digital library devoted to preserving food knowledge and helping people cook with greater knowledge, confidence, curiosity and joy.
