Journal

Writing from the kitchen.

Honest food writing for people working on their minds. Recipes, essays, and audio from a CIA-trained chef who built this because he needed it.

From the founder — April 2026

I built Simmerstate because I kept watching people leave therapy and walk into their kitchens with no idea what to do next.

They’d had the hard conversation. They’d made the breakthrough. And then they went home and ate cereal from the box because they didn’t have the energy to cook and didn’t know what they were supposed to be feeding themselves anyway.

I’m a CIA-trained chef. I spent years cooking for people at their most vulnerable — grief, recovery, illness, transition. What I noticed was that the food wasn’t just sustenance. It was signal. When I got the meal right, something shifted. Not dramatically. Not always. But the person sitting at the table was a little more settled than they were before.

I started reading the research. Jacka. Ramsey. Naidoo. The gut-brain axis. The SMILES trial. It was all there — solid, peer-reviewed, and almost completely unknown to the people who needed it most. Their therapists weren’t talking about food. Their doctors weren’t talking about food. No one was talking about food.

So I built Beckie. And now I’m building the library.

More soon. — Robbie