We were lucky to catch up with Angela and Mark recently and have shared our conversation below.

Angela and Mark, appreciate you joining us today. Naming anything – including a business – is so hard. Right? What’s the story behind how you came up with the name of your brand?

Cooking With Wine was created as a place for us to share our passion for cooking, food, drinks, and travel eats. The name came to us fairly easily since the majority of our recipes use wine as an ingredient and we often enjoy a glass of wine while we cook! We also enjoy the wine and food culture and exploring wine pairings with food, which enhances both tasting experiences.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

We are Angela and Mark, the creators of Cooking with Wine blog! Mark is a classically trained chef and Angela is a food photographer, and together we develop recipes and create drool-worthy imagery of our own creations to share our passion for cooking with the world. As a food photographer, Angela also works directly with brands to create food content with their products. In addition, we recently published our very first cookbook, Mangiamo, which is a collection of 60 original recipes inspired by Mark’s Italian heritage, memories of his Italian grandparents and the recipes they enjoyed together as a family, and our travels in Italy.

This journey began as a passion project. We cooked together at home, and shared what we were making on our Instagram account with our friends and family. Soon, more and more people were requesting our recipes, so we created the blog so others could easily access our recipes. Over time, Angela started focusing on the photography aspect of our recipes, and Mark enrolled in culinary school to further advance his own skills and truly hone his craft! Fast forward to today, we both work full-time as recipe developers, content creators, and Angela as a food photographer. We are fortunate to be able to do what we truly love as a job every day!

Have you ever had to pivot?

Neither of us ever intended that recipe development and food photography would be our job. Mark is an entrepreneur and has owned several companies over the years. Angela has a PhD in psychology and devoted most of her career to working with individuals with autism and other developmental disabilities. Cooking was what we did together for fun when we weren’t doing our real jobs. Even when we took vacations, we would usually look for a cooking class or some sort of food tour to learn more about the local food culture wherever we traveled. We were and still are very passionate about foods from all over the world and how food shapes the culture and vice versa.

In 2020 when COVID-19 flipped the world on its head, our normal jobs were disrupted like many other people. We had to move to Houston from Dallas for Mark’s job. Looking back now, this experience and our relocation led us down the path to our current work as recipe developers and content creators. Without that move and some of the flexibility that working from home allowed, we likely would have never made it this far.

How did you build your audience on social media?

Everyone seems to be looking for the key to growing on social media, and unfortunately we don’t have the answer either. We started our Instagram account in January of 2018. Growth was slow on that platform, but we weren’t really looking for this venture to become anything special. We grew slowly yet steadily over the years, but what we realized is that having a large following isn’t the key to any type of success. Opportunities came our way not because of our follower count, but because we worked hard at our craft and didn’t slip into the mold of what everyone else was doing or what was currently trending. Trends come and go, and we wanted to make sure to not fade away like that. We have a decent following, but a very engaged and loyal audience that has truly been our support system along the way.

Success can be defined in many ways, but sticking to what we love, being authentically ourselves and passionate about what we are doing, and maintaining true connections with our audience is what success looks like to us on social media.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.cookingwithwineblog.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cooking_with_wine/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cookingwithwineblog
• Other: TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@cooking_with_wine

Image Credits
All photos taken by Angela Persicke