Walk into Lori Gresham’s home not far from UConn Stamford and you might find peach peels in the sink draining in a colander, a bowl of grated carrots set on the counter, or vines of cherry tomatoes resting on the kitchen island – remnants of recipes past and yet to come.

“I can’t imagine my life without cooking, and I can’t imagine my life without sharing my cooking and my recipes,” she says as she pulls a fry pan from the cabinet to put on the stovetop, turning on the burner to melt butter for roasted corn.

“I’m not formally trained. When I cut vegetables, some of my pieces are wonky, and my pie crust isn’t always pretty. I think that’s one thing that intimidates people about cooking and baking. If it doesn’t look like it belongs on Instagram, they think it’s not good enough and that’s not true. Cooking should be fun and pleasurable.”

It’s how she’s cared for people since she was 11 years old and earned a ribbon for her “hamlet” – a ham and cheese omelet – during a 4-H competition. By 13, she was comfortable enough in the kitchen to make her mom fried chicken for her birthday, only instead of dredging pieces in egg and flour, Gresham used ranch dressing and flour.

Talk to her now as an adult (and assistant professor-in-residence in UConn’s psychological sciences department), and she’s made dishes from beef Wellington to berry pavlova, buttermilk biscuits to pear tarte tatin.

There’s almost no excuse for her to ever go out to eat, she admits, but when she does, she pays attention to the flavor profile of dishes, so she can try to recreate them at home. There was basil in that dish of “the best chicken curry I’ve ever had” at a restaurant in St. Louis.

Raising four children included teaching them how to make things like her signature chicken pot pie. Younger versions of Michael, Rebecca, Luc, and Sophie stood alongside their mom, measuring out a cup of flour and pinch of salt. As children do though, one by one they’ve moved into kitchens of their own.

But Gresham isn’t left alone in her home near UConn Stamford. Her nearly 23,000 Instagram followers are alongside, getting directions on how to make garlic scape pasta, blackberry cobbler, shortcut focaccia, her “famous” spaghetti sauce, orange rolls, kohlrabi soup, and so much more.

Life with Lori June

When she started cooking, Gresham says she looked to people like Julia Child, Jacques Pepin, and Martha Stewart,, in the days before online recipe sharing. She also cultivated a collection of cookbooks – hardcovers and softcovers of Italian and French cuisine, her favorites; handwritten Christmas cookie recipes from a German friend penned in Deutsch; Grandma’s cheesy potatoes on a recipe card, yes, printed in her own hand; even a copy of “Semi-Homemade” from chef Sandra Lee.

After a lifetime of kitchen experience, though, she says she rarely uses a recipe these days.

So, when her children have asked for written copies of that chicken pot pie recipe, for instance, Gresham would disappoint, telling them she never used exact measurements. “I just do it, and it happens,” she says.

Life With Lori June, the Instagram account that has exploded in followers since its inception in September 2023, is a way for her to start recording those recipes to share with family, friends, and the rest of us.

She admits it’s also a way for her to keep teaching in the kitchen.

It’s not about the followers. I love them and I appreciate all the comments and feedback. But this is just for me. — Lori Gresham

“It’s not about the followers. I love them and I appreciate all the comments and feedback. But this is just for me. This is a hobby and a labor of love – and a place where my children can have all my recipes because I have to write them down to share with the audience,” she says.

For so many years to get the children involved in the kitchen, she’d tell them, “Let me show you how I do it.” It’s a phrase that has morphed into her catchline at the start of each Instagram reel.

“Let me show you how I do it,” she says in her Arkansan accent, gesturing a left-handed thumbs-up to bring viewers to the stovetop, counter, or chopping board.

“I’ve always understood a bit about marketing because of my work, and I do teach cognitive psychology, so I know what appeals to people: attention grabbing phrases, motion, color. It was never strategic, I just noticed that I kept saying, ‘Let me show you how I do it.’ It just came about organically,” she says.

And Gresham knew she was onto something when at Thanksgiving last year one of her brothers was making themselves an Old Fashioned cocktail and wryly turned toward her and said, “Let me show you how I do it.”

Account Came Together Organically

The signature black quarter zip fleece she wears in each reel, paired with black leggings and large drop earrings, are what Hugo, her husband of 25 years, jokingly refers to as her “uniform.”

But that too came about organically.

For years, after stepping across the threshold of her front door after a long day at work or otherwise out and about, they’ve been her home comfies. The only time on Instagram that Gresham deviates outfits is at Christmas when seasonal pajamas are the requisite uniform for cookie making.

She often welcomes Hugo for regular appearances as a sous chef (and resident comedian). Son Luc played host in one reel to whip up a seafood pasta dish, and best friend Holly helped with an Easter sugar cookie recipe.

Gresham says she’s learned along the way that she needs two pairs of the same glasses – one for near, the other for far sightedness – for consistency between takes, and that the tripod holding her phone camera ought to stay at the same height throughout filming. Both make editing easier.

As for what dishes she chooses to make, there’s no master plan. Does she have a craving? What’s in season? Have others on social media lent inspiration?

Each week Gresham says she plans two to three meals for her and her husband; he gets to choose the order. She films while making their lunch or their dinner, starting and stopping the big red button between steps and editing afterward.

“It’s summer, and corn is in season. There’s so many ways to eat corn, but today I’m going to use it to make a fresh summer salad with a feta dressing that I found online, and it looks delicious. Let me show you how I do it.”

The corn salad reel comes in the middle of a series on peaches: brown sugar peach shortcake, peach vinegar, fresh peach crumble, peach jam, peaches and cream cake. She’d ordered a box of fruit from the Georgia Peach Truck, which stopped in Stamford in late July.

There isn’t any recipe she wouldn’t share, she says – a stark contrast to the nonnies of yesteryear whose Bolognese recipe was the equivalent of a state secret.

Gresham’s pie crust recipe got 250,000 views, so did the one for her French vinaigrette.

Her curry recipes, which she says are her specialty, might be the closest to a state secret, if only because of the time it takes to make them and her goal to hold reels to about 90 seconds.

Experiences Abroad Are Still an Influence

In 2008, Gresham traveled outside the United States for the first time, a month-long trip to France that still exudes its influence 17 years on.

“I was changed forever,” she says. “It changed so much. It changed our marriage, the way we look at the world, the way we think about our future, the way we think about food. It was an incredible experience from every perspective.”

She and her husband rented an apartment and tried to live like locals as much as possible, she says, visiting farmers markets and making meals from whatever they found for sale.

“It was the first time I ever saw a chicken outside of a farm – whole, with the head still on. And you take it home like that, although I did ask them to take care of that for me,” she admits. “The chicken was different, so the cooking technique was a little bit different. I had to baby it a little more because it didn’t have any fillers, no antibiotics. The texture of the meat was different, so there was a learning curve.”

Traveling abroad to countries including Ireland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, France, and Austria and staying for a prolonged time, long enough to visit markets and enjoy the kitchens of the places they rent, has become a focus for her and Hugo.

In 2019, Gresham taught a six-week study-abroad program in Italy. The couple fell so in love with the town where she stayed that they bought a home there a year later, a place to escape now and eventually retire.

This summer, Vienna was the destination for a month with UConn’s Experiential Global Learning program. There, after teaching psychology by day, she lived a dream 15 years in the making: sampling authentic tafelspitz, a boiled meat dish which is served with minced apples and horseradish.

Friends from Austria gave her a cookbook more than a dozen years ago featuring traditional recipes from the country, she explains, and while she’s cooked other things from its pages, she says she refused to make tafelspitz, wanting first to try it at the restaurant featured in the book.

Gresham went to the restaurant twice, she says, first to simply enjoy, then to discern each flavor – the beef, the vegetables, the horseradish, the apples, the root vegetables.

“It was out of this world,” she says. “It fulfilled all my wildest dreams of what it would taste like. I could have cried actually.”

Entrepreneur Turned Academic

Long before Gresham embarked on international travel and before she’d entered the world of academia, when she and her family were living in Ohio and she was home with children, she says she needed an outlet beyond macaroni and cheese and chicken fingers.

She opened a small food company, J’aime le Crepes, and made French crepes and English cream in her home kitchen, sealing packages with a vacuum sealer and selling them to area gourmet stores. She even had a contract with the popular Cincinnati chain, Jungle Jim’s International Market.

“I just called them one day and said, ‘My name is Lori Gresham. I have a license to cook in my home,’ and the next thing I knew they were shelving them, and I was doing cooking demos at the grocery store,” she says.

For about a year, until her last baby arrived, she stood by the stove turning out crepes from a recipe she contrived after researching the best of the best.

“Don’t ask me for that recipe because I don’t have it, and the kids would kill me for saying that. I think I could probably replicate it, but I didn’t write it down,” she says. “I still make the English cream; it’s on my Instagram. I used to serve it with gingerbread, but if you leave it plain you can use it as a coffee creamer or as a sauce. Sometimes we pour it over fruit and pancakes.”

J’aime le Crepes may have been short-lived, but learning to balance work and home helped Gresham when she went back to school in 2004 and earned her bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate over the next eight years.

Because children and a husband relied on her to run the household and do the cooking, she had no choice but to stay grounded, she says, noting in a funny way that made grad school a little easier.

So, when she sees students today, especially those who might be struggling, she can empathize.

Gresham works closely with Husky Harvest Stamford, and, with the help of a couple student interns, started the UConn Stamford Budget Bites Instagram account to give pantry patrons tips on what they can make with items they find there.

Those short reels have led to longer virtual classes that draw about a dozen students who register to pick up supplies at Husky Harvest, then tune in via WebEx and cook with Gresham. Last semester, baked ziti was a hit, along with chickpea curry.

“My brothers and I never went without food, but there were times when it was limited,” she says. “My mom was so good at being positive. There was one time when we had a few leftovers in the fridge, some pasta, and a can of tomatoes – that was about it. Mom said, ‘Tonight, we’re going to do something fun for dinner. We’re going to make garbage soup.’ I thought it was the most delicious thing I ever tasted partly because we were part of it and partly because it was creativity in the kitchen.”

She says her goal at Husky Harvest is to help patrons see they can make a tasty meal out of the peanut butter, ramen, and chicken broth they find there (noodles with peanut sauce) because “having limited food resources doesn’t mean we can’t have interesting food.”

Life with Lori June came about around the same time as Budget Bites, with those student interns setting up the account so she could practice filming herself and editing video. Today, tens of thousands of followers see what she’s eating and how she’s putting it together.

“I guess my life is a lot about food. It’s my creative outlet,” Gresham says. “Food is the way that I love people. Life with Lori June is just a new extension of that.”

As for advice for those not as comfortable in the kitchen, she says, “When you’re trying to cook, give yourself a little bit of grace. I still mess things up. I still oversalt and have to Google how to fix it. I’m still learning. Cooking is about experimentation, trial and error, and joy. Just keep that in mind.”