About

 
photo by the fabulous Heather Talbert

Most kids grow up watching Saturday morning cartoons. I grew up watching cooking shows with my mom. I've been cooking since I was 5 years old - being in a kitchen is like second nature to me. 

Hi, I'm Morgan, the girl behind IMPROV kitchen. I started this blog when I moved from my hometown of Seattle to Chicago. I found myself calling my mom every other day sharing the dishes I stumbled upon or things I cooked up. I decided it would be more interesting to show all the fun I'm having the kitchen rather than just talking about it. I wanted to share my love and passion for cooking with my friends and family. Plus it's a great way for me to catalog all of my recipes!

After many friends made comments to me like "cooking is so complicated, hard, etc..." I decided to show them just how easy it was! This is where the IMPROV part of the blog came from. So many people think that recipes are written in stone and if you make the slightest deviation, it's going to be a flop. Cooking is a lot easier than most people think, I promise! If you don't have certain ingredients on hand, have special dietary needs, or straight up don't like an ingredient, you shouldn't cook with it. That doesn't mean you can't adapt a recipe to cater to those needs. A recipe is just a starting point, a launch for inspiration. At the end of each recipe I share some ways you can switch up the recipe to make it your own style for your own needs. The idea is the more you cook, the more you'll learn and then be able to improv on your own. That's how I learned.

Hopefully you can use this blog as a resource to learn how to tweak recipes to make your perfect dish! Feel free to comment on a post if you have a question about improvising a recipe. If you have a general question or request, email me at theimprovktichen@gmail.com

A little more about me... I work in advertising as an Art Director + Designer. You can check out my professional portfolio here. If there's anything else you want to know, just ask!