Hello, I’m Sally Vargas. I cook. I write. I photograph. I teach.
How I got HERE
After graduation from college with a degree in French I was casting around for what to do next. I decided to spend a weekend at a yoga ashram to learn to meditate. I ended up staying.
Big Indian, New York, a speck on the map in the Catskills, consisted of a general store, a post office the size of a postage stamp, a gas station, and a small antique store on the side of the highway. The store was the source of employment for a few ashram members. Six tables in the attached enclosed porch became a hippie-ish restaurant, serving vegetarian food on mismatched old plates and bowls scavenged from a dilapidated hotel behind the property.
Eventually, the six tables multiplied, and a kindly neighbor who also happened to be a chef in New York City with a nearby summer home, inserted himself into the scene with impromptu ‘lessons’ that sometimes involved a little yelling, but in the nicest way.
Chef Eugene Bernard didn’t believe women belonged in the professional kitchen, but he graciously sent me to the CIA (that’s Culinary Institute in Hyde Park, New York) to learn pastry with Albert Kumin.
I cooked and baked and did the books and all the other stuff you do in a restaurant that is totally exhausting. It was an unusual choice for a college grad at the time, but then, I have had an unusual life….
I still cook and share recipes, hang out with friends, host dinner gatherings, travel, and generally absorb new cultures and new foods. In recent years I developed a passion for photography, and you can see the evolution of that on these pages. I write a weekly recipe column in the Boston Globe Wednesday Food Section and have been a regular contributor to Simply Recipes. I teach food photography as part of the Gastronomy and Food Studies Program at Boston University, and I am the author of four cookbooks.
If you’d like to find out more about how I can work with you, contact me at sally.p.vargas@gmail.com