Inspired to cook for her kids
Her interest in cooking began when her oldest daughter, who is now 18 and attending college, was born.
At that time, Kling realized she needed to learn how to make well-rounded meals. She started watching Food Network and making things like salad dressing and hummus from scratch.
“I’ve gone through so many different phases of cooking,” Kling said. “When I started, I was copying Rachael Ray and making absurd recipes that I thought were so inventive.”
Credit: Contributed Photo
Credit: Contributed Photo
The next phase was when she got a job at Trader Joe’s in Kettering 16 years ago.
“At that point, I met so many people who had all these different eating styles,” Kling said. “I really became more well-rounded in all the things that you can do in the kitchen.”
From becoming more aware of cultural possibilities to learning about different types of diets, Kling’s love for cooking continued to expand.
She still works at Trader Joe’s — where she described being around food all day as “inspiring.”
“I don’t really buy a lot of the premade foods that are super popular, but I do get inspiration from it,” Kling said.
She described her cooking as vegetable forward, colorful and nutritious.
“My food really does lend itself... to people who want to eat well-rounded and nutritiously, but just lack the time to make all the things themselves,” Kling said.
Creating a food delivery service
In 2018, she started Top Knot Kitchen, a food delivery service offering healthy salads to the Dayton, Kettering and Oakwood communities.
This came after Kling’s best friend had asked her to make healthy meals a month leading up to her 40th birthday.
“I would make her six salads and walk them down in Tupperware,” Kling recalled. “When I say salads, it’s not like iceberg lettuce, kale and tomato. I mean, they (had) grilled chicken and marinated cucumbers. They were just complex combinations, textures, and they were really good.”
That friend told other friends and “all of a sudden there were 10 people asking me for salads.”
Kling started taking orders on Instagram and eventually began cooking in a commercial kitchen. She had employees and around 300 customers before business slowed down due to Covid.
A food memoir is in the works
Today, she cooks meals for four families and develops recipes for Bébé Foodie. Kling is also in the midst of writing a food memoir.
“Words come really easily for me in the written format,” Kling said. “Five years ago, I started publishing some poems on Instagram and then I started submitting some pieces and then I started writing the book.”
Writing a book has always been something on her bucket list, but once she started going through a divorce in 2020, it was a way to process her emotions.
“The first five chapters were just so natural,” Kling said. “I was like, ”okay, this is definitely what I’m supposed to be doing.“”
Kling has written 11 chapters and has five more to go.
“I just think food is so closely associated with emotion, but also with specific celebrations and specific traumatic events,” Kling said. “There are stories that are sort of those poignant times in my life and then the recipes that sort of corresponded with that time.”
The title of her book has not yet been announced, but the subtitle is, “Recipes for Celebration and Heartache.”
In addition to publishing a food memoir, Kling hopes to open a restaurant “where I get to see my customers faces when they eat my food and people get to come eat lunch or dinner with their friends.”
She aspires to open a casual, cafe-style bistro with similar items to what she delivered in 2018.
“I really am still looking for the right opportunity because I just feel very strongly that my legacy has a book and a restaurant in it,” Kling said.
Advice for others
For Kling, cooking serves many purposes.
“I use it as a stress reliever,” Kling said. “If I’m ever feeling anxious... I’m just going to go make some hummus because it relieves the tension and also makes me feel productive.”
She also loves the creativity of it and discovering new flavor combinations.
Her advice for those just starting to learn how to cook is to “pick what you love and learn how to make that. You don’t need to scour the internet for different recipes.”
Once that meal is mastered, she encourages others to get creative with it.
When she first started cooking, she struggled with trying to teach herself recipes that were “meant to be for a person who lives alone and has all the time in the world.”
“There are really complicated techniques and ingredients that I am still not as familiar with as I should be, just because I rarely have an afternoon to devote to one recipe,” Kling said. “My methods are very much more like 45 minutes — let’s make this as delicious as it possibly can be."
Two must-have ingredients in her household are lemons and Dijon mustard.
“If I don’t have anything else on hand, you could make a dressing with those, you could make a marinade with those,” Kling said. “There’s just so many things that they can elevate, unlike anything else.”
Other must-have items include carrots and celery to start a good soup or dry pastas and lentils to create a well-rounded meal.
A lot of her inspiration in the kitchen comes from what’s in her fridge. If she only has a few ingredients, she challenges herself to create a meal out of it.
“Unfortunately, when I’m throwing together meals like that they’re always my kids’ favorite,” Kling said.
Her family typically eats a lot of Mediterranean and Indian cuisine. Favorites in their household include tikka masala or chana masala with rice, as well as grilled vegetables and grilled chicken platters with homemade tzatziki, hummus and baba ghanoush.
Credit: Contributed Photo
Credit: Contributed Photo
“Cooking for my family is still so, so important,” Kling said.
She loves the feeling she gets when her children eat her food — especially her 11-year-old twins.
“When they take a bite of whatever I’ve made and they love it and ask for it again, there’s still nothing like it,” Kling said.
Outside of the kitchen
When Kling isn’t in the kitchen, working at Trader Joe’s or running to her children’s activities, you can find her reading a book, taking a class at Speakeasy Yoga or playing tennis.
She has four kids, Reed (18), Beckett (16), Blake (11) and Crosby (11).
Something that most people don’t know about Kling is that she is a “serial entrepreneur” with a long list of companies she wants to start in her Notes app.
“I also have in my Notes app all the places that I want to go based on the food that they serve, whether it’s a restaurant in Paris or the whole state of Illinois,” Kling said. “I want to go. I want to eat. I want to walk around a new city and see new things and smell new smells and meet new people.”
Credit: Contributed Photo
Credit: Contributed Photo
MORE DETAILS
With the fall season on the horizon, Kling’s weekly “But First, Food” column is expected to feature several soups.
“I think soups are going to be a major part of the upcoming columns just because they’re cheap, they’re perfect for families, and they don’t require any special equipment or skills to create something that’s super delicious,” Kling said.
There’s often a misconception that soups require some kind of advanced method, but Kling said it’s really all about “putting stuff in a pot until it tastes good.”
Find her previous columns at daytondailynews.com, journal-news.com and springfieldnewssun.com.
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