Hi, I’m Erin.
When I was a child, I was hit by a car. I spent six months in a body cast. When it came off, I had to learn to walk again. With nowhere else to go and nothing else to do, my mom taught me to bake. The kitchen became my playground — and I never really left.
As I grew up, my Aunt Elaine deepened that love. She taught me to make traditional Norwegian dishes — the kind of cooking where you mush your hands through flour and potato and feel connected to something bigger than a recipe. I come from farming stock, people who respected ingredients because they grew them. That stayed with me.
I spent my career in education — classroom teacher, program specialist, school principal — always cooking on the side, always feeding people. Now I’m retired, and the kitchen isn’t the side anymore. It’s the whole thing.
Why Cream & Cloves
I’ve always believed that a great sauce can save a meal — and a bad one can ruin it. Sauces are where technique lives. They’re where the difference between a good home cook and a confident one shows up most clearly.
My mom always said I take simple recipes and make them gourmet. That’s not about fancy ingredients or complicated methods. It’s about understanding what’s actually happening in the pan — why a cream sauce breaks, why a pan sauce goes flat, why a butter emulsion holds together or doesn’t. When you know the why, the how stops being intimidating.
In early 2026, I was selected as a Top 40 audition contestant on MasterChef Season 16 — one of nearly 4,000 applicants. It was a wonderful, humbling experience — cooking at that level, in that kitchen, is something I’ll never forget. The dish that ended my run taught me something I now teach here: even a technically sound sauce can only do so much if the foundation beneath it isn’t right. Every element on the plate matters — and sauce is where it all comes together.
What You’ll Find Here
Cream & Cloves is built around sauces — the formulas, the techniques, the reasons things go wrong, and how to fix them. On YouTube, every episode tackles one sauce, one problem, one solution. No filler, no fluff.
The website goes a little broader. You’ll find sauce recipes, of course, but also the mains and sides worth building them around. Think of it as the full table, not just the pan.
Everything here is written for home cooks who want to understand what they’re doing — not just follow a recipe and hope for the best. If you’ve ever had a sauce break on you, or wondered why your pan sauce tastes flat, or avoided a recipe because it looked too technical — you’re exactly who I’m cooking for.
Let’s Cook Together
If you’re ready to stop guessing and start understanding what’s happening in your pan, you’re in the right place. Pull up a stool. Let’s cook.