We’re Deana Gunn and Wona Miniati.  We love good food, we love to cook, and we love Trader Joe’s.  Time and time again, as we shopped the aisles at Trader Joe’s, we overheard people saying, “What do you do with quinoa?  How do you use tapenade?  What goes well with ricotta-stuffed chicken?” Before we knew it, we were writing a cookbook.

We grew up in homes where cooking was all-important and meals were always shared at an inviting family table.  Given our international backgrounds, we were exposed to various ethnic and American styles of cooking.  We met while studying engineering in Boston, and our exposure to food continued to grow, whether it was the spicy Dun Dun noodles at the local hole-in-the-wall Central Square Chinese restaurant or the amazing paella and sangria in Harvard Square.

Through necessity, as our lives became more hectic juggling kids and full-time jobs, we discovered ways to become fast and efficient cooks.  Rather than resort to fast-food or frozen dinners, we found that if we used a little help with prepped ingredients at Trader Joe's, suddenly it became completely doable to still feed our families healthy, homemade meals every day.

Join us on this journey to home-cooked food without all the effort of "from scratch".  The secret lies in shortcuts we found using Trader Joe's products.