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Nomadic Kitchen is...
a Vermont-based confectionery specializing in small-batch, gourmet marshmallows founded by perpetually curious chef, writer, and Vermont-native, Alexx Shuman. This one-woman venture is a complete reinterpretation of the childhood delight. Alexx utilizes her extensive culinary background and adventurous palate to elevate the humble treat to imaginative new levels. Flavors change with both the seasons and Alexx's own culinary discoveries, continuously surprising anyone who thinks a marshmallow is a marshmallow is a marshmallow.
Alexx is...
So glad you asked! After graduating from Smith College, I pursued my greatest joy: food. I studied at Le Cordon Bleu Paris & the New England Culinary Institute and worked with James Beard Award acknowledged chefs, adoring every minute of the learning, and finding that working in the restaurant industry was making me fall out of love with making food. Unwilling to sacrifice such an integral part of my being, I left, promising myself that down the line I'd find a more innovative way to put food the center of my life. A few years working in Boston start-ups, an MBA, and a stint living in Provence writing about food later, and I found myself back in my beloved home state of Vermont.
There is a T.S. Eliot poem that starts,
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
I'd said it a million times: "If I hadn't grown up in Vermont, I'd have moved there already." And at last, after 12 years away, all was new again. What was once an old stomping ground was now an opportunity to fulfill the promise I'd made to myself nearly a decade earlier. Once again comfortably cradled by the Adirondacks and the Green Mountains, I set out to tie all the threads of my 20s together into the beautiful bow that is Nomadic Kitchen: my hub for a lifetime of culinary excitement, exploration, and entrepreneurship.
When not reinventing the marshmallow, you can find me testing life's limits, feeling all my feelings, remembering your dog's name, and defending the Oxford comma. My written work has been featured on NPR, The Culture-ist, and Epicure & Culture.