Yvonne Maffei

Yvonne Maffei, MA graduated from Ohio University with a Bachelor’s degree in Spanish and Latin American Studies and a Master’s degree in International Studies, where she specialized in international education, journalism and health. She has lived and traveled abroad in various regions throughout Latin America, Europe, the southern Mediterranean and North Africa as well as the American foodie cities of San Francisco, Washington, D.C. and Chicago. She has been cooking and writing since she was a pre-teen and always wanted to turn her passion and hobby into something more. When one of her recipes was published in the May 2008 issue of Cooking Light magazine, it was all the inspiration she needed to make a necessary life and career change. After years of being a school teacher, she decided to re-angle her teaching platfrom from the classroom to her blog where she began writing about halal food and cooking and thus began a new career out of writing about food, travel and healthy, halal living. Today Yvonne writes and publishes MyHalalKitchen.com, a blog about halal food and cooking. She is currently working on a cookbook, teaches cooking classes, gives lectures on healthy eating, and consults schools on how to source healthy, halal ingredients and create tasty healthy and halal recipes for their school lunches. She resides in Chicago, IL.