A Family in the Land of Nosh

Land of Nosh | land-of-nosh.com

Wife, recipe developer, and food photographer Marcia Truitt started cooking with her kids out of necessity. Now they do it out of love.

Growing up in Ecuador with missionary parents, Marcia Truitt learned to appreciate good meals around the table. Her parents shopped at the farmers market and cooked every meal from scratch. She never thought about it much then, but once she found herself with two kids and a husband, she realized that the tradition of slowing down and eating together was a tradition she couldn’t give up.

Fortunately, she didn’t have to. Cade, her husband, is a web developer that works from home, and Marcia (pronounced Mar-see-uh) is a stay-at-home mom. They homeschool the kids so—just like her childhood—they all found themselves around the table often—not once but twice a day.

Marcia loves cooking and good food, but not mealplanning itself. She couldn’t find a website that did exactly what she wanted, so she and her husband set out to see if they could build one. And they did: It’s called Land of Nosh. They formatted it in “Pinterest-style” to make it as intuitive as possible and recruited recipes from bloggers to help jumpstart the site.

Maintaining a website—one that “sells” good food—requires pretty pictures. Marcia was a wedding and portrait photographer, so she started photographing her recipes. Fortunately for Land of Nosh subscribers, she’s pretty good at it.

She makes her recipes during the day to shoot them in natural light, which is where the kids come in. Being homeschooled, they just naturally become part of the process. The kids are always involved. Three-year-old Ansel drags his “kitchen helper” across the kitchen to get a good view of the chopping block. Five-year-old Eva perches on a barstool.

“They’re fantastic eaters. We talk about the food. We talk about the color. They try all the ingredients while we’re prepping. It’s like a game. They’ve tasted it raw, so by time we get to the table, they’re familiar with it.

“Soon after we started shooting for the website, I found Eva in her room standing on her end table “photographing” her puzzle. Like mother, like daughter—which also applies to eating. Get kids involved in the process and reap the benefits. “It’s amazing what the kids will eat when it’s well-seasoned and has just a little butter on it,” says Marcia.