About Cook & Wander
Cook & Wander started with one stubborn idea: you can travel a long way without leaving your stove. I cook the world’s food — ragù from Naples, khao soi from northern Thailand, a proper Oaxacan mole — from a kitchen here in Colombia. I haven’t stood in most of those kitchens abroad, and I’m not going to pretend I have. What I’ve done is cook these dishes, again and again, until they were right.
So the site has two halves. The recipes are dishes I actually make and photograph in my own kitchen. The stories are what I’ve learned about where those dishes come from — the history, the culture, the why — researched honestly, the way a curious cook digs into a recipe she loves.
Who writes this
I’m Laura Naranjo. I’m not a chef, and I’ve never claimed to be — I’m a home cook based in Colombia who fell hard for the food of places I mostly know through cooking.
I don’t pretend to have eaten every one of these dishes at its source. What I do is cook them properly and more than once: I read everything I can find, I ask people who grew up with a dish where I’m getting it wrong, and I test it at home until it tastes right.
How we work
I’ll be straight about this, because it matters: I use writing tools, including AI, to help with first drafts and research — the same way a kitchen uses a food processor. But a tool doesn’t get the byline, and a tool can’t taste anything. Before a recipe is published:
- I cook it myself — usually several times — and the photos are of the food I actually made.
- I’m honest about what I do and don’t know firsthand. If I’ve been somewhere, I’ll say so. If I haven’t, I’ll tell you what I learned instead and where it came from.
- The photographs are my own unless a credit says otherwise. No stock food, no borrowed images.
- I fix mistakes fast. If something’s wrong, tell me and I’ll correct it and note the change.
What we don’t do
No paid guest posts, no link insertions, no “sponsored” articles dressed up as honest opinion, and no pretending I’ve travelled somewhere I haven’t. Advertising keeps the lights on, but it never decides what I recommend.
Say hello
Cooked something here? Know one of these dishes better than I do? Found an error? I’d genuinely like to hear it — the contact page has the details.