About us
Family and Friends; Food and Festivities is a blog dedicated to celebrating the joys of cooking and sharing meals with loved ones. From traditional family recipes to exciting new culinary discoveries, we are here to inspire and delight your taste buds.
Joe and Heather can always be found in the kitchen, at the grocery store, specialty food markets or a farm stand, in their own garden, at a you-pick farm or at restaurants trying new and local cuisine. Their mutual love for food comes from their childhoods with family traditionals to being adults who developed a love of all things food - growing, cooking, eating and entertaining.
Heather grew up in New Jersey, not far from the bays and ocens of the central Jersey coast. Her family wenting fishing on her aunt's boat or off the coast. She and her siblings and cousins would go crabbing with their Poppy down Seven Bridges Road, bringing back enough crabs for summer barbecues and to fill the freezer with crabmeat for Christmas Day crab balls! Poppy knew all the local fisherman and would meet them as they arrived at the Belford Seafood Co-op with their daily catch to get the best picks!
Family events - birthday, graduations, communions - were always celebrated with spreads of platters, from crudites, deli meats (served with snowflake rolls from Dixie Lee) to meatballs and sausages, ziti, kielbasi, baked beans , cole slaw and salads. The bar was always open and us kids enjoyed collers filled with all flavors of soda. Thanksgiving and Christmas were always eloborate sit down dinners while Grandpa and Nana Riley always took us out for a fancy Easter dinner at a restaurant.
Then there was Tea Nights - her mom would host, usually once a week, for family, neighbors, and friends (and all of my siblings and cousins friends! The door was open to everyone. The tea kettle would whistle as needed and the table would be filled with baked goods - either homemade or from a favorite bakery or store). There were night when people sat on the floor, up on the kitchen counters and just enjoyed each others company around food.
When choosing a needed science elective in college, Heather chose nutrition to understand more about the power of food in health. A few career paths crossed into food, health and nutrition with first with a produce broker in Florida, then a communications role at Mushroom Council and as development manager with Partnership for Food Safety Education.