Of all the things I thought I might create someday, a children's book about a culinary owl wasn't exactly on the list.
And yet, looking back, Oliver makes perfect sense.
I grew up in my parents' restaurant. I spent years waiting tables. I raised four kids who were always in my kitchen. I eventually found myself working in the commercial kitchen equipment industry.
Apparently food was going to follow me around whether I liked it or not.
So when I started playing with the idea of writing my first children's book, there was really only one logical conclusion:
Obviously, the owl needed a chef's hat.
The Original Culinary Pro
The real inspiration behind Oliver was my dad, Kenny.
Dad spent 36 years at the White House Cafeteria in Bismarck, North Dakota, where scratch cooking was simply how things were done.
I grew up around that restaurant and the food that came out of its kitchen.
My childhood comfort foods weren't always the usual suspects.
Give me a bowl of Dad's borscht and I was happy.
Cheese buttons swimming in cream sauce?
Even better.
The problem was getting any.
The restaurant's German dishes were so popular that the good stuff had a terrible habit of selling out before Dad could bring leftovers home.
Apparently customers came before his daughter.
I've mostly recovered.
Then My Own Kitchen Got Loud
Years later, I became a mom of four, and food became part of family life in a completely different way.
My kitchen was rarely quiet.
The kids helped chop vegetables, stir sauces, make smoothies and build sandwiches. We had Spaghetti Mondays and Taco Tuesdays, and the neighborhood kids had an uncanny ability to figure out what time dinner was happening.
There was even an attempt at spaghetti tacos.
I'm still not sure we improved either spaghetti or tacos with that experiment, but points for creativity.
What mattered was that everybody was in there.
Cooking wasn't about making everything perfect. It was something we did together.
And without realizing it, I was giving my kids their own version of something I'd grown up with.
Food as an experience.
Somewhere Along the Way, an Owl Showed Up
By the time I started thinking seriously about writing a children's book, I'd already spent a surprising amount of my life connected to restaurants and kitchens.
I had worked in real estate and human resources.
I had waited tables.
And at the time, I was working as a customer account manager in the commercial kitchen equipment industry.
So apparently after all those years of different career paths, I had managed to circle right back to industrial-sized ovens.
That's when Oliver started taking shape.
I wanted a character who was curious and willing to try things.
Someone who could make cooking feel approachable for kids rather than complicated.
Someone who could remind families that getting into the kitchen together could actually be fun.
An owl became a chef.
The chef became Oliver.
And Dad became the inspiration behind The Culinary Pro.
The Recipes Had Already Been Tested
Not in a test kitchen.
In my house.
When it came time to decide what kids could actually make with Oliver, I didn't have to look very far.
I thought about what my own kids liked.
Yogurt parfaits.
Smoothies.
Simple recipes.
And the towering, meat-loaded sandwiches one of my sons could construct like he was preparing for hibernation.
I wanted recipes kids could participate in instead of recipes where an adult does 97% of the work while the child ceremoniously adds one chocolate chip.
Let them scoop.
Let them stack.
Let them stir.
Let them make something slightly ridiculous.
They might even eat it afterward.
No guarantees.
Oliver Was Never Just About Cooking
That's probably the part I understand better now than I did when I wrote the first book.
The food was the obvious connection.
But underneath it was something bigger.
People gather around food.
I saw it happen for years at the White House Cafeteria.
I saw it happen in our family.
I saw it again when my own kids and their friends crowded into my kitchen.
Recipes were never really the whole point.
The point was what happened while we were making them.
The talking.
The laughing.
The experimenting.
The occasional culinary disaster.
The memories nobody realizes they're making at the time.
That's what I wanted Oliver to encourage.
So That's How You Get a Chef-Owl
Take one kid raised around a family restaurant.
Add a dad who spent 36 years feeding people.
Throw in four children, a revolving door of neighborhood kids, years of restaurant work, commercial kitchen equipment, borscht, cheese buttons, smoothies, towering sandwiches and one questionable spaghetti taco.
Stir thoroughly.
Apparently you get an owl.
More specifically, you get Oliver the Owl: The Culinary Pro.
When I published the book in March 2024, I couldn't have known everything Oliver would eventually lead to. I was simply taking pieces of a life I knew and turning them into a story kids could enjoy.
But maybe that's why Oliver felt like mine from the beginning.
I didn't have to invent his world from scratch.
I'd been collecting the ingredients my entire life.
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