About Us

Photo by Jennifer Lea.

Hi there! We’re the Murthy’s: Pawan and Kimberly. This site is a true window into our daily life of home cooked food. We live in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. Pawan works doing online marketing stuff. Kimberly has two impatient yet adorable bosses she loves very much who, like any stay-at-home mom, can drive her batty every so often.

We’ll be honest: neither of us have ever owned a restaurant. Neither of us are professional chefs, nor have been to culinary school. We are, however, similar to many families with young children, living a busy life of school, homework, practice, and sleepovers. Like many families, we face a tidal wave of food choices that makes it hard to determine what is best to serve our kids and ourselves. We’re also worried about how many people we know who have had chronic illnesses affect their lives or the lives of loved ones. We read articles painting grim pictures about childhood obesity, the glut of processed foods in our diet, and all the artificial junk in our food that, over time, may be causing us some real harm.

We realized we need to take a page from the generation of our parents and grandparents who saw a home cooked meal as the only method of nourishing the body. They didn’t have the “convenience” of fast-food to the extent we do today. Which is why in 2011, we decided to slowly convert our family’s kitchen into a home restaurant: cook as many meals as possible at home.

For Kimberly, this was an audacious goal, since she feared cooking. She was uncomfortable with the ingredients, nervous about frantically throwing stuff in a pot, and hesitant to try to make something new for fear the family would hate it.

Pawan’s issue was the exact opposite. As a closet chef, Pawan yearned to prepare 5-star gourmet meals. He obsessed over the process and labored over “made-from-scratch” everything. Dinner, therefore, would be served promptly at 9:30pm – after the kids have eaten their shoes out of hunger.

The happy medium was slowly reached when we challenged ourselves to replace just one meal a week with a home cooked meal. Just one meal. We would need to figure out what to make, what ingredients to get, how long it would take, and when to make it. Just one meal took a decent amount of planning. But once we got our rhythm down, preparing two meals a week wasn’t much harder. Cooking three, four, five, or more meals added only incremental effort.  After a year, we cook enough food for every meal, every day of the week – dishes from all parts of the globe. We now make our own bread (thank you bread machine), hummus, salad dressing, hot sauce, ice cream, kid snacks, granola, and more. Finally, we converted our entire pantry to contain as much organic or GMO-free items as possible.

Yes. We became obsessed. But remember, it took us over a year, and we started with small goals. Now we want to share that obsession with our friends and “friends of friends” so that they can start the journey we did – trying to replace just one meal with something home cooked. It’s really not that hard. Let us help.