My name is Chloe and I live in Sydney, Australia. If you’re in the Bondi area, you may have seen me scoffing a croissant while pushing a pram in sweaty maternity leggings, which I am convinced I will still be wearing at my daughter’s wedding. My love of food began with my beautiful mum, Jenny. Mum was the queen of entertaining and would make everything from scratch. Growing up, my sister Christie and I were exposed to a world of exciting flavours. Mum cooked countless cuisines and rarely repeated a dish. We’d have Thai beef lettuce wraps one night, Greek yemista the next, Indian samosas after that. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realised how fortunate I was to grow up with food being such a positive and unproblematic source of pure joy. On the other end of the food spectrum is my darling dad, one of the pickiest eaters of all time. Until he met my mum at age 20, he pretty much only ate Vegemite toast! As a youngster, he refused to eat any family meals and eventually removed himself from the dinner table altogether. Well, being a food-loving Greek, mum wasn’t about to tolerate that. She gave him an ultimatum, and that brought (most of) his pickiness to an end. The combination of my two wonderful but wildly different parents food-wise is a huge part of what led me to my fascination with baby-led weaning (BLW). The idea of exposing a baby to a world of new flavours and (hopefully) preventing picky eating in the process is incredibly exciting. In 2010, we tragically lost our amazing mum to cancer at just 55. Following this devastating loss, I did everything I could related to food. I suppose it was my way of trying to feel close to mum. After finishing my university degree, I went to cooking school, worked at food magazines, did recipe testing (the best job ever), catering and assisted a professional food stylist. I also started a blog called Grain of Salt, posting content with the kind of irregularity that guarantees mere handfuls of followers, most of which were my 50 Greek cousins. In 2021, I became a mum myself when my handsome partner (and personal barista) Jake and I welcomed our daughter Poppy. When I was pregnant, I saw my cousin Rachael’s baby girl Charli feeding herself real food and it totally blew my mind. No baby food, no pouches, no spoon-feeding, she was eating the same stuff we were! Rachael showed me Solid Starts and I quickly became obsessed with BLW. When it came time for Poppy to start solids, I knew what I wanted to do. I shared our experience on Instagram and was quite shocked by the response. I started to receive messages from parents all over Australia. It wasn’t just my Greek cousins anymore! In March 2022, Grain of Salt became Matching Meals. While I am devastated that Poppy won’t get to meet her incredible Yia Yia, I am committed to making sure her childhood memories of food are as magical as mine. If I do half as good a job as my mum did, I’ll be happy. Thank you for being here and sharing in this experience with us.