Brenda Steele is a private chef and recipe writer, who specializes in menu development. Her passion is creating vibrant, delicious and nourishing meals using high quality local and seasonal ingredients. Well versed in the traditional food practices of pickling, cheese making, salt curing, fermenting, and preserving, Brenda integrates these arts along with wild foraging into her work to make every meal a unique and memorable culinary experience. The many hours, days, and even sometimes weeks it takes to craft the flavors behind a meal appeal to her as much as the actual meal itself. The idea that an evening dish might be enhanced by a trailside wild fennel blossom picked that afternoon or that a single sliver of citrus peel cured for months, deepening each day and mysteriously developing into a wonderfully unexpected flavor, brings Brenda a profound sense of joy and satisfaction.
A native Californian with a deep love for the Golden State, Brenda recently relocated to Sonoma after spending the last decade deepening her craft in the high desert of Taos, New Mexico, and the Windy City of Chicago. She began working in the restaurant industry at the tender age of 14, and has been in the field since. For 15 years she has worked as a private chef, 10 of those years in the professional yachting industry, traveling across the globe. Brenda cites her nomadic-chef lifestyle as pivotal in developing her eclectic and adventurous food aesthetic, as well as her bold and colorful palette, having been profoundly influenced by the foods and cultures she has explored over the years.
Brenda’s love of foraging and working directly with local farmers and artisans was born out of years living in the abundantly beautiful and wildlands of Taos, New Mexico. There she learned the importance of spending time in the soil where the foods she works with grow. She discovered that to walk, talk, and spend time with farmers on their land, is to understand their relationship with it. This concept is paramount to her style and approach to cooking. Discovering what the land tells us it wants to grow has helped to create a depth to the way she now works with food and her understanding of how to produce and craft the ideal flavors from it.
For the last 5 years, Brenda has worked with clients in New Mexico, California, New York, and Illinois providing private chef services, as well as menu consulting and recipe development. When not developing menus, writing recipes, or cooking a private client dinner, she enjoys discovering wild spaces near her Sonoma home and rambling with her partner, Michael, and their husky pup, Bandita.
