How Growing Up in a Greek Restaurant Inspired This Food Blogger
Every week, we spotlight a different food blogger who’s shaking up the blogosphere with tempting recipes and knockout photography. Today, we chat with Eva Kosmas Flores of Adventures in Cooking, whose childhood in a Greek diner later inspired her to nix a planned career in film for a life centered around food.
All photos courtesy of Eva Kosmas Flores
When Eva Kosmas Flores wakes up in the morning, the first thing on her mind is usually something delicious. It’s natural considering that she runs the successful food blog, Adventures in Cooking, which has 75,800 salivating fans on Instagram (not to mention thousands more on Facebook and Twitter). With fellow food blogger Carey Nershi of Reclaiming Provincial, Flores also runs the “podcast for food nerds” First We Eat and its companion workshop series, which invites would-be food bloggers to learn photography and styling skills in far-flung locales like Croatia and Iceland.
It also makes sense that Flores gravitated toward food considering her upbringing, spent in the Greek restaurant, deli, and grocery her parents operated for more than 30 years: Portland’s iconic Foti’s Greek Deli, which her folks sold in 2011. (Renamed Mad Greek Deli, it closed down for good in early 2015.)
Flores’s Italian custard tart.
At Foti’s, Flores first fell in love with the heady scents of baking spanakopita and spiced, slow-roasted lamb. When she wasn’t filling in for the short order cook at the restaurant, Flores helped out with the cooking at home — even if it was just sprinkling a final flourish of herbs over roast chicken or plucking fresh produce from her father’s backyard vegetable garden.
“I grew up having food be a central part of my life,” Flores told Yahoo Food. “I didn’t realize how lucky I was to be raised in that food environment.”
In fact, Flores originally didn’t want anything to do with the culinary field. She dreamed of becoming a documentary filmmaker, and after graduating from college with a degree in film production, moved to Los Angeles to make her fortune. She worked as a page at NBC Universal, helping out on shows like The Office, Parks and Recreation, and 30 Rock, and later as a line producer’s assistant on a short-lived sitcom. But she found the schedule punishing, and even worse, unfulfilling.
Cabernet rack of lamb with mint, pistachio, and fennel pesto.
“I didn’t realize what the demands were for the job until I saw the job up close,” Flores explained. “The demands were so much that I wouldn’t be able to have a real personal life with a family and kids. There was no real creative part to it — it was just a lot of number-crunching, which isn’t really appealing to me.”
In 2009, to keep herself sane, Flores began blogging at Adventures in Cooking, which documented the dishes she made during her days off. Two years later, she had an epiphany: “I was like, ‘I hate this job so much.’ All I want to do is work on my blog on the weekend,” Flores recalled. “Then I was like, ‘Why am I not doing this?’ It’s what I love doing. That’s when my blog really started to get popular and take off. So I just decided to do it full-time.”
And she hasn’t looked back. Last year, Flores left L.A. for good and moved back to Portland, into an English-style cottage built in 1937 on the outskirts of town. The house’s rehab — which includes a dreamy kitchen remodeling evocative of a vintage farmhouse — is featured prominently on Adventures in Cooking. In 2014, she began the First We Eat workshop, followed by the podcast this past May. And in the fall of 2016, she’ll release her first cookbook, Adventures in Chicken.
“it’s pretty amazing. I feel pretty lucky to be able to do this,” Flores said of her return to the food world. It’s worth all the sweat and tears, she added, unlike her former jobs in the TV industry. “Sometimes it’s hard to believe that it’s real. But then I think about all the work that goes into it, and I’m like, ‘Oh. It’s real.”
Previous bloggers of the week:
Why getting laid off was the best thing that ever happened to this food blogger
How a 20-year friendship blossomed into a gorgeous food blog
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