Waching daily Nov 7 2018

Hello, I'm Jenn de la Vega. I am a chef and food writer.

On Instagram,

post a lot of my breakfast and I get the most reactions from when I pop an egg yoke on camera.

I've had many careers since moving to New York City 12 years ago. I started out in the music industry.

I bounced back and forth between

TV analysis, and cooking, and theater—

and I worked at a Silicon Valley company!

Day and night,

I was coming home with lots of groceries, cooking my breakfast,

cooking dinner, doing photo shoots with it, writing recipes as much as I could, because the dream was to start my own catering company.

Oh, there so many fears associated with transitioning careers,

especially from one where there is high income, going to one where there is generally low income.

But, I felt this internal pressure and unhappiness. It wasn't that my job was terrible—my day job was great.

There was a point where I didn't want to cook when I came home, and that was a big wake-up call.

Because if that's the thing I love and I don't want to do it, I need to make a change.

I used to think I needed to have that traditional restaurant career,

and that's not true.

I learn by doing so I found a job off of Craigslist at a tiny wine bar in Red Hook.

They also happened to cater weddings, and that's sort of where I discovered how my life was going to be after that.

It took years of community-building to make enough friends in the food industry

so that I had a safety net of people to look to and ask questions.

"How do you do this?" "What is an... invoice?" [laughs]

Now I'm able to shape my own career

into something that combines all of my passions—that includes music, and writing,

and making GIFs, and videos. My recipes, online, come alive.

It feels like such a great symbiotic relationship of all the things that I love.

I would say that my videos are pretty sensual. They trigger feelings that people

don't know that they have about food, I think.

That's sort of my goal: it's to make cooking seem easier, that you can do it [and be] successful.

Looking at a cookbook, you kind of get intimidated sometimes,

looking at the gorgeous pictures, [and think] "My dish doesn't look anything like that!"

I'm here to say, it's fine. If you can eat it, and it feeds you, and you feel good, then great.