This September Swigs and Grinds turns 10 years old!!
Swigs and Grinds began as a blog, written by a thirty-six year old woman with three young children and a love of food and drink.
That lady has learned a lot in the last ten years. The children have grown into young adults, food and drink have grown into a full time job and Swigs and Grinds has grown into a business.
I began the blog at the suggestion of a dear friend.
“You should write a blog”, she said.
“A what?”, I asked. I had never read a blog although I was an avid reader. She explained while I thought, “A blog about what though??”. I was recently divorced, my world was shifting and there was no shortage of adventure and revelry in my future. At the time, I was a professional photographer, and food had always been a part of my history.
My mother comes from a family of 10 children, raised on a farm in Minnesota. Her mother ran a tight ship and was an alchemist, always able to create something out of nothing while feeding and clothing their huge tribe. Everything she cooked came from their farm where my grandfather tended the land and some animals which he occasionally sold or traded for other products to provide for the family. My grandmother canned vegetables, and baked breads, she preserved fruits, churned butter and god knows what else. My grandparents ran a strict home where everybody did their share of work and when it was time for a meal, there were three expectations: silence at the table, and that you eat what you take and you take what you get.
While this created a family of hard workers, it also produced a wild, loud and debaucherous clan of adults. Those ten brothers and sisters grew up, got married, had children of their own and remained a tight knit group of crazy people. My grandparents ended up with a whole litter of grandchildren, and until I was a teenager, I was the youngest of all those cousins.
For many years, our family gatherings took place at my grandmother’s house in the mountains of Northern California where most of the family had eventually migrated. Like the gatherings around the table when they were children, there were also three expectations, but now that the children were the grown ups, the expectations were different. This next generation’s standards were to eat, drink, and be merry. The dinner table was a loud and raucous place, where if you asked for a dinner roll, it was not uncommon for one to be literally tossed from one side of the table to the other and you better be able to catch. There were always twenty conversations going on at once, the soundbites strewn with insults, jokes, tall tales and quite often singing. At the kids table, it wasn’t much different.
The famous pie fight at the “grown up” table.
After dinner, the children and the aunties would do the dishes and then the adults would gather to play cards while the kids would re-form into our own little tribe of bandits, finding exciting and dangerous ways to get in trouble. This was how every holiday and birthday was spent. It was fantastic.
At home with my parents I was also the youngest of their combined six children. My two sisters are eleven and thirteen years older than me, and my step brothers and step sister are about the same ages. My parents had a butcher shop in the small-town grocery store in the tiny mountain town where I grew up, where I would help to stock the shelves and write the cuts of meat on the white butcher paper packages until they opened up their restaurant when I was in the seventh grade. B.J.’s BBQ & DELI was our family business where I worked all through high school, until I graduated and moved to Hawaii.
Maui is where I fell in love with photography, which led me to San Francisco to study at the Academy of Art two years later. I got married, had two children and a photography studio, and then moved back to Hawaii, had another child, went through the twists and turns of life, and found myself divorced and contemplating starting a blog, of all things.
“I guess I could write a food blog”, I said, after my friend had shown me some of her favorite bloggers. I had begun working on on several food-photography projects and had always been a writer. I sat at my computer staring at a Blogspot template and Swigs and Grinds was born.
A few short months after the blog was hatched, I began to work from home, doing photo shoots, writing, recipe testing and shabby chic-ing furniture. My children were 10, 8, and 6 years old at the time, which meant that I was usually cooking three meals a day at home. I began to write about my life and the “recipes” such as they were, that were produced in my 1930’s plantation house kitchen, as well as the events and the stories that accompanied them.
Then, five years ago, I stepped back into the food world professionally, taking over a cafe space in a residential condominium building in downtown Honolulu. The last five years have been spent fully in the trenches of my cafe kitchen. I have been the chef, the waitress, the CEO, the janitor, the marketing department, the shopper, the dishwasher, and everything in-between. It was five years of feeding the very best people as we became a part of each other’s lives, while I honed my skills in the kitchen. During that time I also began to build Swigs and Grinds into my catering and private chef business.
I have since moved on from my cafe space to focus on Swigs and Grinds Events & Catering, which includes some exciting pop up collaborations as well as providing cooking classes, catering, and private chef services to my clients.
During my years in the cafe trenches, my beloved blog became sadly neglected. Although there was no shortage of content being produced, it began to be pooled in the quick form of Instagram, which worked better for an exhausted mother of three with not much down time. (See our Insta account for some visuals of the last five years of sexy food).
I have missed the photojournalistic side of Swigs and Grinds more and more lately. I have deeply missed the writing, the recording, the interviewing, the diving deeper into the joys and the turmoil of eating, drinking and being merry. I am so happy to have recently launched a new website and some new branding, I have a new schedule and a new work vibe, and so so many exciting things on the horizon that the words are now bubbling to the surface and I am so happy to have this shiny new space to spill them forth.
I am excited that you have found this tribe of eaters and drinkers and people who are merry! We look forward to sharing recipes, stories, interviews, adventures, reviews, and hopefully a sexy beverage and a sexy bite to eat together! Welcome to the feeding frenzy, we are happy you are here.
And since you ARE here, drop us a comment and say hello. We’d love to know how you found us, what you’re into and how we can connect!
Cheers,
Heidi B.