Barbara Walch

Plano resident Mary Burleson has a food blog on the Internet, marysbites.com, to showcase the many recipes and culinary tips she has gathered over a lifetime. That she has embarked on this high-tech culinary journey at this stage of her life is a delightful surprise…even to Mary!

Her interest in cooking began in childhood. The youngest of five children and the daughter of two hard-working parents, she eagerly took over cooking duties as soon as she could to help her mom. She describes her cooking style back then as basic Southern-style home cooking. “I made whatever dishes my mom made,” she explains, “Red beans and rice, cornbread—those kinds of things. Growing up in West Texas, we didn’t have a huge selection of fresh produce available. We had things like squash, and frozen and canned vegetables, but I don’t ever remember my mother making salads.”

After high school, Mary met and married Brian Burleson, her now husband of 34 years. Little did she know at the time that his career path would lead them to other parts of the country and the world…and that her cooking repertoire would change dramatically—from Southern-comfort to worldwide-fresh.

“As life took us out of Texas, I found I had a lot more time to cook as a full-time wife and eventually mother to our daughters Emily and Ashley,” she says. “So, as we moved around over the years, it gave me time to experiment with the local products available wherever we were living.”

She continues, “First we moved to Iowa, where I learned to cook with local products like fresh sweet corn and locally raised pork. So that added a new layer to my food knowledge. Eventually we moved to Oregon, and that’s where fish and seafood came into our lives. I was not a fish eater at all before that, but living at the Pacific Rim we had this huge selection of fresh produce and seafood available. From that point on, I really started diving into the cooking realm.”

Eventually, Brian’s job brought them back to Texas—to Plano, in fact. With their daughters in school, Mary decided to pursue a career in real estate. But five years into it, Brian was offered a contract overseas, in Holland. “What we thought was going to be a three-year contract turned out to be eight years,” Mary says. “But it was an exciting time for us living there and having access to travel around Europe, and that’s where my culinary experience expanded even more.

“I’ll never forget the day we arrived in Amsterdam,” she recalls. “Jet-lagged but needing to buy food, we went to this little grocery store and everything was in Dutch, so I’m thinking I don’t know what some of these things are—it was almost overwhelming. But eventually I would buy those products, take them home, look up what they were, and then develop a recipe for them.”

Mary says what she enjoyed the most was that the fresh food was all produced locally and without preservatives. “I would buy my groceries on a daily basis,” she says. “For example, I would walk out my front door and take two steps around the corner and I was at the butcher. You knew where his meat came from because the butcher owned his own farm, had his own cows and chickens—all the meat came from his own home.”

When Brian’s overseas contract ended, the Burlesons moved back to Plano. But with their daughters grown and as a person who loves to stay busy, Mary needed something to keep her occupied. She contemplated a return to the real estate field, but then a friend suggested she start a food blog. (For those of you who don’t know, a blog is a website where the content changes regularly because the blogger is always adding new posts to their homepage.) As someone who loves to learn and try new things, Mary thought “Why not? I’ll give it a try.”

With no previous technical background, however, and a determination to do it herself, Mary admits it’s been quite an educational process, but a very satisfying one. Today her site is filled with favorite recipes and useful cooking tips, and is quite user-friendly. The recipes are provided with step-by-step instructions along with photos Mary takes herself (another learning opportunity, she says). Recipes range from the very simple (how to make salad dressing or roasted potatoes) to the more elaborate (Butternut Squash Ravioli or Chicken Lasagna with a Smoked Gouda Sauce). She says it also provides a forum for followers to request recipes, like the woman who asked if Mary had any recipes utilizing eggplant other than eggplant parmesan!

For this article, I asked Mary to share recipes for an easy but budget-friendly meal to make for a special Valentine. It didn’t take her long to come up with a menu that includes grilled romaine lettuce with balsamic vinaigrette and bacon crumbles, lemony chicken piccata served with pasta, and molten chocolate cake for dessert. For a breakfast treat for your sweetheart, she suggests making her recipe for strawberry bread or for a snack, cut-out cookies.

For Mary Burleson, marysbites.com is truly a labor of love. “I’m not doing this to make money,” she says. “There’s not a lot to be made with something like this. My goal is to share my knowledge and passion, and show how easy it is to cook at home with healthy, fresh ingredients.”

Then she adds, “I also love doing this, and I’m learning and having fun. And at the same time it’s recording my recipes, and someday when I’m not around, my kids will have them, and my grandkids. That’s also a great legacy.”