Learn more about the team of writers at Beginner Food.
Nathaniel Lee
Hey Everyone!
Nathaniel Lee here, I am so happy you are here on BeginnerFood.com. I believe there is something really magical about food. It doesn’t matter whether it’s tacos on the street at 3am, your grandmother’s chicken noodle soup, or a 3-star Michelin restaurant – food impacts our lives in so many ways.
When it comes to cooking, great meals don’t need to be complicated and scary. My mission with Beginner Food is making food easy to understand so you can make it your own.
Background
I remember growing up, I was definitely a picky eater – personally, I like to think it was more about me developing specific tastes and opinions about food rather than being difficult and picky. 🙂
That led me to learn why I liked or didn’t like certain foods and preparations. From there, it was just having enough of an opportunity to cook to try to satisfy my own tastes.
While I didn’t go to culinary school or study nutrition in college, I was fascinated by how you could take raw ingredients and create a variety of meals out of them.
I began binge watching countless YouTube videos on how to cook and prepare dishes to really understand the “why” behind cooking. I was particularly inspired by techniques that Alton Brown and Gordon Ramsay use, and I still actively follow them.
I’d also go to highly-rated restaurants specifically to analyze different dishes and dissect exactly how they were prepared and why certain ingredients were (or were not) used.
Even to this day, when my wife and I go to restaurants, we’ll sit and analyze our meals and talk about how we’d adjust them if we were to recreate them at home. It’s a great exercise because it gets us thinking about how each ingredient, down to the spices, can affect the food we’re eating.
I started this site with my wife in 2019 (we recently tied the knot in November 2021). I have always been into cooking, developing recipes, and teaching so we figured what better way to publish what we’re up to than to start a blog!
I am a contributing author and chef to several major publications, along with consistently producing content for Meal Prepify.
Personal Life
When I’m not in the kitchen cooking, I love to going on off-roading adventures, snorkeling (Hawaii is my favorite for this), fish (especially if I can cook what I catch!), and spend the day at Disneyland with my wife.
As I shared above, I also love going to restaurants and analyzing the food to understand how and why they prepared dishes in specific ways. Some of my favorite restaurants to do that at are:
My Cooking Advice
If there is any advice I could give home cooks, it would be to cook and taste with intent. It is like the difference between drinking wine and tasting wine. When you drink wine, your focus is on consumption and feeling. When you taste wine, you are looking for why you feel that way about what you are consuming.
The same goes with food – you can either eat food or taste food. My goal is to help you taste food to help you refine your pallet and truly enjoy what you are eating.
I hope you enjoy the site, and happy cooking!
Learn more about me here: