Hi I’m Em 👩🏽🌾 Welcome to my digital cooking garden and home.
I made this garden to share writing, photography, and all things food. It’s a recipe website, it’s a journal, it’s a portfolio, it’s many things. The cookery is a new project, and I’m tending to it slowly and mindfully over time.
Flip through the tabs to learn more, and if you’d like to get in touch, please do.
Em Estrada (b. Los Angeles) is a creative poly-hyphenate*. For many years, they worked as a photojournalist and independent creative centering stories of Indigenous, Black, and folks of color across intersections of the environmental field. This work took them all across the United States, partnering with organizations, individuals, and everything in-between. On photography, writing, and design, Em centers people and narrative. They’re currently developing a couple projects as an artist and in the past they’ve been commissioned by brands and organizations such as Patagonia, High Country News, The National Park Service, and The Hewlett Foundation.
Em got their degree in Linguistics at UCLA. Among solidifying their love for language, it was also influential in learning how to learn. They’ve studied multiple languages from Old Norse to Latin, Mandarin to Italian, but are only fluent in two. Once upon a time, they took an internship doing habitat restoration while living in a national park, their neighbors a family of deer and a lazy, windowsill dwelling bobcat.
It was the kick off for all their work in the environmental and sustainability field since.
Other interests include but are not limited to:
Being outdoors, identifying plants on hikes, swimming, climbing, sitting with trees, meeting people while doing daily activities, language, sprinting alongside their pup, music, reading articles discovered in quiet corners of the internet, observing how light hits differently in different parts of the world...
This website [an experimental digital cooking garden] is playfully designed by Em Estrada, a creative poly-hyphenate, designer, writer, and passionate chef/cook.
They call home somewhere in-between Southern and Northern California, Georgia, and New York City.
Upcoming: recipe philosophy. In short, it’s not AI, and recipes will be limited in number, purposefully so.