Eat of the Earth

Eat of the Earth's Brenda Steele specializes in meal development as a private chef and recipe writer. Her aim is to create vivid, delicious, and nourishing meals from high-quality, locally sourced, and seasonally available foods. Brenda incorporates traditional food processes such as pickling, cheese making, salt curing, fermenting, and preserving, as well as wild foraging, into her work to create a unique and memorable culinary experience for each meal. She enjoys the many hours, days, and even weeks it takes to create the flavors that go into a dish as much as the dinner itself. Brenda is overjoyed and satisfied by the prospect of an evening dish enriched by a trailside wild fennel blossom collected that afternoon, or a single sliver of citrus peel cured for months, intensifying each day and unexpectedly turning into a beautifully unexpected flavor. Brenda headed to Sonoma after spending a decade honing her skill in the high desert of Taos, New Mexico, and the Windy City of Chicago. She is a native Californian with a great passion for the Golden State. She started working in the restaurant industry when she was 14 years old and hasn't stopped since. She has worked as a private chef for 15 years, 10 of them in the professional yachting sector, traveling all over the world. Brenda credits her itinerant chef lifestyle with helping her to build her varied and adventurous food aesthetic, as well as her bold and vivid palette, which has been shaped by the foods and cultures she has encountered over the years. Brenda's passion for foraging and working directly with local farmers and craftspeople stems from her years spent in Taos, New Mexico's richly gorgeous natural wildlands. She learned the value of spending time in the soil where the foods she works with are grown there. She learned that understanding farmers' relationships with their land requires walking, talking, and spending time with them on their land. This idea is important to her cooking style and approach. Discovering what the earth wants to grow has given her a new perspective on food and how to develop and sculpt the perfect flavors from it. Brenda has provided private chef services, menu advising, and recipe development to customers in New Mexico, California, New York, and Illinois over the past five years. She enjoys exploring the natural places near her Sonoma home with her partner, Michael, and their husky pup, Bandita, when she is not designing menus, writing recipes, or cooking a private client dinner.