Asheville Private Chef
Private Chef
Folk Herbalist
Postpartum Consultant
Artist & Author
Curating Seasonal Dining Experiences & Deeply Nourishing Postpartum Care
The muse of my work is a tapestry of culinary & folk traditions woven from a profound romance with food, story, land, and nurturance. At the center is a rooted value for small scale localized food systems, including wild foraged ingredients, that connect people with place. I am both a Private Chef and a Postpartum Caregiver with years of study in the culinary arts, wildcrafting, herbalism, vitalism branches of medicine, traditional foods, hormonal health, animistic beliefs, & special attention to the digestive and nervous systems. I believe that eating local and organically grown food prepared in traditional and flavorfully innovative ways can provide deep pleasure, meaning, and healing needed at this time. I'm on a first name basis with many of the farmers in the area and source the highest quality ingredients I can find, like landrace varieties of wheat, milk from down the street, pasture raised meat, seasonal produce, and wild ingredients like spruce tips, mushrooms, birch bark, and spicebush.
You can read more about my lineage, teachers, and foundational ethos below.
As a bioregional chef I curate seasonal dining experiences, teach about postpartum nourishment, and craft small batch wildcrafted elixirs and seasonal cookbooks. This work was made possible by many years of devotional study and practice, including:
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Teaching classes across the world in subjects like seasonal eating, Ayurveda, what defines a holistic approach, and wildcrafted cooking classes with Wild Abundance
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Studying mother & baby nourishment under Rachelle Garcia Seliga of Innate Traditions
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Self publishing 4 seasonal recipe, remedy, & ritual guidebooks
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Attending a Women's Hormonal Health training led by the Midwest Women's Herbal Conference in Almond, WI
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400 hour Ayurvedic Counselor // Women's Focus taught by Dr. Vinod of Ayuskama Ayurveda in Northern India
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1 year apprenticeship to wild foods, folk herbalism, European and Native traditions, and many years of assisting classes with Rebecca Beyer of Blood and Spicebush
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Tending the Red Tent at many gatherings and events around the world
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3 years of managing the kitchen and farmers market for Goddess Ghee, a medicinal grass-fed ghee company run by women here in Asheville, NC
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Hosting multiple sold out farm to table dinners in the Teton Valley in Idaho
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Over 10 years of self study and practice in the art of traditional food ways including raising and processing chickens, baking sourdough, culturing raw milk, and more
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Butchery training with Andrew Magazine of Applied Anatomist
To tell you a little bit more about me as a person outside of the work I offer my community, I can describe my way of life best as a "slow simmer" - a delicate balance between actively engaging what inspires me and savoring the simple slow joys of life like wandering the woods, baking sourdough, carving woodblock art, building fires in my backyard, & exploring the symbolic realms through dreams, color, & earth-based ritual.
Though I travel often for pleasure & work, I know home and community to be in the soft rolling mountains of Southern Appalachia outside Asheville, NC on the territory of the Tsalaguwetiyi also known as the Eastern band of Cherokee.
Thank you for joining me here. May your bread be well buttered and stories rich with laughter.
With Warmth,
Kearsley