About Me
I do a lot of things to fill my time on this planet. Much of what I do is creative and artistic. Whether I am creating a candle or a salve or tea, or cooking, I put a little bit of ME in everything. After owning and operating a restaurant back in PA, where I lived my entire life until Dec 19th 2025, I have decided my cooking life will now be about friends and family and YOU.
If you would like to have a dinner party at your home, let’s connect and plan a delightful menu to WOW your guests.
I am a self-taught cook with decades of cooking and entertaining experience who can nourish your body and soul with delicious, nutritious, REAL food and give you a positive and memorable culinary experience .
My Adventures in Cooking
My first cooking experiences were making butterscotch pudding on the stove while standing on a chair in the early 1970s. I was probably 4 or 5 years old and totally dug the milk thickening as it heated and I stirred and stirred. I could hardly wait for the taste of hot pudding. It was out of this world. Ten minutes of stirring seems like an eternity to a child but what a great reward when that cooking is finished and bowls of hot, sweet pudding are poured. And then don’t forget the wooden spoon to lick and scrape out every last delicious bit from the pot! Yup, I enjoyed cooking from the very beginning.
Having grown up in the 70s and 80s, I consumed huge quantities of processed foods and certainly enjoyed them but as I grew and learned more about health and nutrition, I have learned to cook most things from scratch and delight countless people with new recipes and healthy and equally tasty versions of the old favorites that we really should not be putting into our bodies.
To me, cooking for myself and others is a total expression of caring and using the highest quality ingredients is really important. You can heal your body with food and vice versa.
How a Love of Cooking Evolved
ln 2017, my husband and I bought a small farm in rural Washington county and embarked on a homesteading experiment. I wanted to grow my own food so I could trust how something was created, cared for during the growing season, harvested, cooked and ingested and stored when we have excess. We had many different gardens and grew and cultivated so many amazing ingredients from herbs to fruits and vegetables.
We had chickens which supplied us with farm fresh eggs.
We cultivated some mushrooms and learned lots about mycology. There are very exciting things happening with mushrooms that will blow your mind. Mushrooms are not just for sustenance! Mushrooms are medicinal too and believe it or not, mushrooms could truly save the world.
Our bees tended to the gardens pollinating flowers that turn into amazing vegetables and fruits and even the weeds were happy with the bees’ attentions. Yes, we stole honey from them and beeswax, but we cared for them and fed them too. It is a truly synergistic relationship with humans and nature.
Years ago, I became interested in learning about healing plants. I have learned to make healing teas, tinctures, lotions, salves, balms and potions the way people originally made medicine for their families before pharmaceutical companies and their mountains of pills came to be. I have nothing against Western medicine AT ALL, but there are MANY instances where we can find a simple and natural cure or aid to help ourselves with little or no side effects.
Keeping it simple and pure is something we aimed for at our farm and restaurant.
We also tapped our maple trees in late winter and make REAL maple syrup. Getting back to nature is a wonderful thing and we encourage people who came to the farm.
You can keep track of what we are doing by reading my blogs and following me on Instagram!! I also encourage questions so connect with me via email, text, phone, or even send me smoke signals!
I want to share what I have learned and continue to learn with like-minded and open-minded people. For instance, discovering that a particularly annoying weed that grows rampantly everywhere can actually cure skin conditions and digestion issues is incredible. I don’t look at things the same way as I used to.
After growing so many high-quality organic ingredients, cooking, canning, freeze drying, freezing, consuming, sharing and selling, my thoughts turned to a new idea.
I have catered in the past and really didn’t enjoy schlepping loads of food to places and feeding 100 people for 3 hours. I can say though while my kitchen remodel was taking FOREVER in the early 2000s, I catered a party for 90 people on a 4 burner Weber grill and a hot plate. That was STRESSFUL but successful.
I was a private chef for three years and enjoyed it but I wanted more.
Opening a restaurant that is curated with curious and collectible decor and activities and cooking up unique and delicious food for people is a dream come true and truly what I should have been doing.
Personal interactions are the most satisfying for me. I love the whole process of deciding on a menu, gathering the ingredients, prepping and then cooking and finally serving REAL FOOD to humans is the BEST.
Seeing everyone’s faces as they taste each new bite, and the comments they make on the food is a total DELIGHT to me. I have always said LOVE is the most important ingredient in every recipe that I make. Once or twice a year I forget that at home and things do NOT turn out well! Being mindful of the folks I am creating a recipe or cooking for always makes me remember that very important ingredient so you can expect to taste that love at first BITE!
So, thousands of folks came to my restaurant and let me cook for them!
I have taken classes at the New York Culinary Institute, am a certified manager of food safety and in 2022 began setting up a a restaurant in a 200-year-old building.
I never attended culinary school but more the School of Life and have the burn scars and healed slices on my fingers and hands to prove that!
Whatever your diet may be—you love all food, are vegan or vegetarian, paleo or keto, low salt, low fat, I handled it. I had an ever-changing menu and did off the menu items too.
In the three years that I operated Marsha Cassel’s Kitchen on Main, I had a customer who never ordered, but always let me cook whatever I wanted for him. I LOVED that.
So, we are fully ensconced now in the desert and I have to say, there is not one minute that I have missed the restaurant. As much as I loved doing it, the crushing amount of work it too and the funds to keep a restaurant going in a teeny out of the way town, really depleted my energy. When we decided to sell everyting and move out west, I was READY. Which brings me to my next point.
While I never want to own a restaurant again, I will happily be a private chef for hire. I still have the joy of cooking and creating, and I’d love to do that for you.
Do you have a sensitivity to certain foods or enzymes? If you or a family member suffer from food allergies such as gluten, dairy, egg, shellfish, soy, peanut or tree nuts, etc.? No worries! I can cater to your dietetic and nutritional needs.
I also make sweets. Whether you want hand-made hard candy lollipops or chocolates, dairy free puddings, chocolate cloud cookies, berry pies and more, I will satisfy your sweet tooth.
I look forward to feeding your soul and your tummy!
Let me cook for you! Having a party? Want meals for the week? Want to gift someone with a meal service? I’m your gal!