Zen Raudys is a home cook who has absolutely ZERO formal training but a passion for good food and sharing delicious recipes with the world, which he naively believes is just as important.
Yes, I’m merely a home cook who recently graduated college with a film production degree, but I’ve got quite a few recipes to share. It was in my college years when I started exploring the food scene in Los Angeles, trying anything and everything, and wanted to start cooking for all of my friends and family, but I have been cooking all my life, thanks to my Lithuanian grandparents who loved to have me help out in the kitchen growing up. They had their signature dishes, (mostly Lithuanian): Kugelis, Spanakopita, Vinegretas, Mushroom Buns… I have to stop before I really start craving a full Christmas feast. Anyway, it always felt to me that they had these recipes perfected, so I wanted to have my own. I made it my goal to find recipes I enjoyed or wanted to try, practice them, and, over time, tweak them to my liking. (I refuse to say tweak them to perfection, I never want to stop trying to make my food taste better and better.)
Now, as I said, I don’t have professional training, just plenty of practice! And here’s the thing: In my past few years of cooking, I’ve been working out of a campus apartment’s extremely outdated kitchen, a decently-sized townhome kitchen with burners that could barely boil water, and now a Galley Kitchen that my roommate and I cannot truly fit into at the same time. If I can make great food out of these locations, so can you in your kitchen.
And that’s what my goal for this website is. I want to provide recipes that anyone can tackle in any kind of kitchen with the right equipment. When I cook, it’s a meditation. Nothing else matters but you, the kitchen, and the food. Cooking should be a fun part of your day! You can tinker with recipes and dance along to music while you’re doing it, and then voila!- you have great food to eat and share! Follow my recipes and have a good time while doing so; be Zen in the kitchen!