Author
Hi, I'm Mari — pull up a stool, dinner's almost ready.
I'm Marisol Bennett — Mari to everyone — recipe developer, former sous chef, mom of two, and the cook behind Spoon & Simmer.
I learned to cook standing on a step stool in San Antonio, wedged between my mom and my Abuela Rosa, who measured everything in palmfuls and insisted the recipe lived "in your hands, mija." Our kitchen was a happy collision of two worlds: my Mexican-American mother's slow-simmered pots and fresh masa on one side, my Midwestern dad's casseroles and pie on the other. My cooking still lives right in the middle of that delicious mess.
I studied nutrition and dietetics in college, then took a hard left into restaurant kitchens — six years on the line and eventually as sous chef at a farm-to-table spot here in Portland, Oregon. Restaurant life taught me speed, technique, and the single most useful cooking lesson I know: almost every kitchen disaster is fixable. Curdled sauce, broken vinaigrette, over-salted soup — I've rescued them all, usually during a dinner rush.
When my son Leo was born in 2017, I traded the line for my own small-but-mighty kitchen at home. Friends kept asking me the same question: "How do you actually get real dinners on the table on a weeknight?" Spoon & Simmer, launched in 2018, is my long-form answer. By 2020, it had become my full-time job — and over 400 tested recipes later, I still can't quite believe I get to do this.
What you can count on here:
Every recipe is tested at least three times before it reaches you — including once by "distracted Mari," to catch any unclear steps.
The recipe comes first. My headnotes are short on purpose. You'll never scroll through my childhood memories to find the ingredient list.
Honest labels. If something takes three hours, I'll tell you. "Quick and easy" means quick and easy.
Food is not a moral issue. No "guilt-free," no "cheat days." Just good food, made doable.
These days I cook, photograph, and write from our 1920s bungalow, which I share with my husband Dave (chief taste-tester), Leo and Ivy (my toughest critics), and Biscuit the beagle (floor-cleanup crew). When I'm not in the kitchen, I'm at the Saturday farmers market letting Ivy pick out one "weird vegetable" to cook together, tending a zucchini patch that gets alarming every August, or keeping my sourdough starter, Chuck, alive out of sheer stubbornness.
Whether you're here for a 30-minute Tuesday dinner or a slow Sunday braise, I'm glad you found your way to my table. Grab a spoon — let's get simmering.
Happy simmering,
Mari 🥄
