Hello!

I love to cook and live to eat!

I am a James Beard nominated cookbook author and founder of the non-profit website Cook for Your LIFE. Helping people to love cooking is a passion for me.

I guess you could say I’m a natural born foodie. I grew up around food. My mother was Italian from a family of chefs, and my English dad was a master baker. As kids we always had to help out in the kitchen, shelling peas and the like, and at around 12 years old Mum let me help her cook.

But I didn’t start out in food. Before putting on my apron, I spent some 30 years as a fashion designer, with 12 of those years spent living and working in Paris. My work took me to every corner of France and Italy, where I’d spend weeks at a time in factories nestled in glorious countryside.  These travels gave me a unique food education. Every day I got to learn about and to eat the wonderful regional cuisines of France and Italy, and as a bonus, I even got to cook with some great Italian grandmas I got to know. Later on, I spent time in Asia, starting with Japan then Korea and China. I always let my hosts know I was a fearless eater and got to eat all kinds of foods off the beaten track. I loved it.

It was going through treatment for my second cancer that brought me to a career in food. I realized my cooking skills and my wide knowledge of food were giving me choices that made this grueling experience much easier for me than for many of my fellow cancer travelers. Nutritionists can tell you what foods to eat, but you cannot truly make changes to your diet without knowing how to cook them. Cooking is the first step to healthy eating.

This led me to start free cooking classes to teach patients the basic cooking skills that turn fresh fruits and vegetables into wonderful meals. These classes and recipes eventually became the free non-profit cooking site for cancer patients Cook for your LIFE. As of writing, Cook for Your LIFE has taught thousands of patients in person, and helped millions through the website. In 2019 I handed over the day to day running of my culinary baby into the capable hands of my longtime academic collaborator Dr. Heather Greenlee and the Fred Hutch cancer Center in Seattle.

After the eeriness of New York’s empty streets during the worst of Covid, we moved to the beautiful North Fork of New York’s Long Island, but after a couple of years there, my husband and I decided to make the move back to the UK that we had planned long before Covid struck.

It’s good to be home.  I’m finally back to my roots and in love all over again with the rolling countryside around where we live,  by the sea, the ancient villages, the beach, not to mention the high-quality fresh local food that’s available almost everywhere. As I’m getting acclimatized I’m longing to get back to cooking and teaching again. I’m mulling over plans to introduce my US friends to all the wonderful things that we have here in the South of England – even an overnight trip to Northern France. The UK is more than London and fish and chips!   

If you think you’d be interested in something like this, drop me a line at:  info@annogdengaffney.com.    Put Beautiful England in the subject line