About sally

Hello! I'm Sally Pasley Vargas and I am a cookbook author, cooking teacher and free-lance writer. If you are looking for (mostly) healthy recipes and a few tutorials to guide you through the shaky spots, that's what I'm here for. It's not health food, it's just good food.

IF YOU WANT TO CONTACT ME: You can reach me at sally.p.vargas[at]gmail{dot]com. I live outside of Boston (for snail mail, it's 37 Garfield Street, Watertown, MA 02472.)

The Backstory: Cook, Pray, Love

If you want to skip the frying pan and jump straight into the fire, learn to cook in a restaurant.

The first thing I did after graduate school was to spend the summer cooking my way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking. This was a very sensible way of dealing with utter panic, since cooking, it turns out, is a very grounding experience and can keep you from going crazy if that’s your inclination. I discovered cooking therapy. It is an effective strategy to help you get out of your own way.

The next thing I did was to meet a guru named Rudi and move to a yoga ashram in Big Indian, in the New York Catskills. (Boy, imagine how excited Mom was!) The ashram had a small, roadside restaurant where I jumped into the fire.

Then, one day, a guardian angel in the form of French chef Eugene Bernard showed up at the back door of the kitchen. Bernard became my mentor and though he didn’t believe women belonged in the professional kitchen, he trained me and even sent me to the CIA (that’s Culinary Institute, not the other CIA) to learn pastry with Albert Kumin. The restaurant got a lot bigger and I cooked and baked and did the books and all the other stuff you do in a restaurant that is totally exhausting.

Eventually, or should I say, inevitably, I fell in love with my husband, married him, and lived happily ever after, with our one child who is now in college. We left the ashram, of course; a long time ago. I wrote two cookbooks, The Tao of Cooking and Food for Friends, published by Ten Speed Press. I now write for The Boston Globe, The Magazine of Yoga, The Vegetarian Times, and other publications. I also teach cooking classes.