About Lola

Welcome to Lola Rugula! My name is Lesley and this site follows my journey of cooking, preserving, gardening, refinishing, and crafting adventures. I hope I can inspire you to try something new.

I love growing my own veggies and herbs. To me, there’s nothing as wonderful as planting tiny seeds or plants and then going out to my yard and picking something that I can turn into an amazing dish. 

I try and mix things up with classic and not-so-classic recipes. I always say “don’t be afraid to play with your food” because recipes are meant to be customized, toyed with, perfected to suit your tastes.  I try to use ingredients that are readily available to me, what I have on hand, or even (gasp!) leftovers to make something new.

I also enjoy canning, fermenting and preserving food because when I’ve worked really hard at growing something, it comes naturally to me to want to preserve some of it. For the record, I especially enjoy curling up with a good book or movie while I’m eating, preferably while enjoying a nice glass of wine or three. 🙂

Throughout the years, my love for refinishing wood pieces and creating crafts has grown so I’ll try to share some of these adventures with you, also.

In case you were wondering, Lola Rugula is a pen name that I created in my head many moons ago and I finally decided to put it to good use. Yes, it’s a play was on the word “Arugula”, which is one of my all-time favorite foods. The “Lol” that’s left is simply by happenstance, though I’ll be the first to admit I’m pretty goofy sometimes.

Thanks for stopping by. I hope you’ll find something here that touches a chord or inspires you to leave a comment – I would love to hear from you.

As a side note – all of the content and photos here are my own and are copyrighted – you may not use them without my permission.

Welcome to my blog – I’m so glad you stopped by!