A Passion Ignited Across Borders
Jacqueline Johnson grew up in a modest riverside town straddling cultures a childhood spent savoring her grandmother’s hearty soups and outdoor barbecues instilled in her an early love of home style cooking. Street markets filled with spices, seasonal produce, and the rhythm of local vendors shaped her intuitive palate. From a young age, she found joy in transforming simple ingredients into nourishing meals first for friends, then for the wider community. That sense of rootedness in everyday flavors would stay with her through every chapter of her life.
Career and Culinary Education
Jacqueline’s academic path was unconventional. After high school, she pursued a degree in environmental science at a small liberal arts college, drawn by her curiosity for sustainable food systems. Yet it was through post graduation work helping small urban farms develop community cooking programs that she discovered her true calling: demystifying food and building confidence in the kitchen. She completed a hybrid training program in urban nutrition and culinary arts, combining hands on apprenticeship at a reputable city cooking school with evening online studies in nutrition science and food writing.
The Turning Point: From Garden to Kitchen
Before 2025, Jacqueline spent several seasons working with city food cooperatives, organizing workshops that turned seasonal harvests into accessible cooking lessons for busy families. That work took her into diverse kitchens from compact student flats to community centers in sprawling neighborhoods shaping her belief that great cooking should be straightforward, flavorful, and reachable for everyone. This experience planted the seeds for her blog.
In early 2025, Jacqueline launched Arnies On The Levee a deliberate reclaiming of the name, now reframed to signal a new levee of nourishment and culinary discovery. She designed the blog as a welcoming space where readers could find clear, trustworthy answers to everyday kitchen questions: “How can I bake bread in a small apartment oven?” or “What’s a crowd-pleasing dish for weekday dinners using pantry staples?”
Her tone is warm and respectful, like a friend walking you through the cooking process with patience and clarity.
Lifestyle and Philosophy
Jacqueline lives in an evolving riverside neighborhood in a mid sized city one that balances walkable streets and farmers’ markets with a growing interest in sustainable cooking. She divides her time between writing blog posts, live streaming simple recipe demos, and visiting local food producers urban beekeepers, organic grain farmers, small batch cheesemakers for stories that connect readers to where their food comes from. She believes good cooking is as much about geography and story as it is about technique.