Santa Clarita Valley resident and self-taught cook Merry Graham has been competing in cooking competitions for years. Now as a champion of numerous competitions including the show “Chopped,” Graham has furthered her self-made career by becoming a judge for cooking competitions and brand ambassador focusing on developing and sharing recipes online.
Graham’s days consist of doing what she loves most and that’s developing recipes straight from home while documenting her process to share online.
For Graham, it’s a dream come true, after dedicating her time to raising her children. She now can nurture a passion that has opened new doors and given her a platform. She has accumulated almost 5,000 followers on Instagram.
Although the new endeavor comes with its challenges, the almost 70-year-old has successfully learned to be her own photographer and video editor. If she ever has trouble during her content creation process, like many others, she uses the internet as her main source of information.
“I have to hone in on photography of course, because I take photos of all the dishes, videos and I’ve had to learn video editing. I’m no spring chicken but I got the gusto to keep going,” she said enthusiastically as she laughed.
Recently Graham has been working on developing recipes focused on barbecuing and smoke-style food such as smoked deviled eggs, she said.
Graham has accomplished many milestones throughout her cooking endeavor, yet she doesn’t call herself a chef.
“I personally don’t claim to be a chef … I always think that a chef has to have gone to culinary school, which I did not,” she said.
Graham, who has a supportive family behind her, has since traveled to different parts of the world and created meaningful connections that have allowed her to now be on the other side of the table: tasting contestants’ food and judging it.
“I absolutely love it,” she said on the experience of judging.
Through her journey of traveling to multiple states, and countries such as Panama and Scotland, Graham has made friends with other chefs and self-made cooks who also have a social media following.
“It was simply by word of mouth. All my brand ambassadorships are through either winning a contest or through the company,” she said.
She always encourages fellow contestants to embrace the family tie to each recipe.
“I love to encourage people to try writing down a recipe, whether they tweet an old recipe from mom or dad. It’s so important to keep our recipes active and live from our history from our relatives, from our hand-me-downs. We don’t want to lose sight of the beauty of cooking as a family,” Graham said.
Graham also shares her love of cooking with her five grandchildren, she said. Whenever they come over to visit, she sets the kitchen up to create fresh food where they can explore flavors and let their creative minds take over to create something new without her input.
“All of my grandkids love to cook mainly because I imparted to their parents the love for cooking, the love to cook as a family, too,” she said. “As a grandma I love to inspire them to cook and so I set up the scene … I don’t control their thought process, I let them explore the flavors to … to really help them really enjoy the adventure of cooking like I do.”
To follow Merry Graham’s endeavors and recipes visit www.amerryrecipe.com.
