Our Story

Welcome!

Thanks for visiting the Boutique Treats @home blog!  This is where you will find information, ideas, and community regarding our products and service.  We take a local, whole-food, hand-crafted approach to what we make. To us, "boutique" means small batch, artisanal, and high-quality craftsmanship with an approachable price and face-to-face service.  We hope that our products inspire more creativity in the kitchen, coffee time with loved ones, and home-cooked family meals. We also hope you'll subscribe to or revisit this blog for fun gift and recipe ideas! 

To inquire about or order products, please visit our Facebook page or e-mail address: www.facebook.com/BoutiqueTreatsSugar

BoutiqueTreats@yahoo.com

Our story begins here -

A baby girl was born to us!  What a complete joy and gift she is and was. She loves life like no one I've ever seen, but by her first birthday, it was apparent that she was special for other reasons as well. She would get rashes and eczema and shortness of breath on a regular basis that became a cause for great concern. We discovered through doctors and testing that she had an immunity dysfunction which had caused her to develop 50-60 food allergies by the time she was three years old. That's right - 50 to 60. Why the range? Well, we tested for 70 and lost count after 50, so I figure 50-60 is a safe bet without risking over-exaggeration! Basically she was allergic to just about everything and nobody had any real answers for how to make her well. 


Prior to this we were just a regular American family. We ate frozen  dinners, fast food, canned veggies, and used artificial seasoning packets in just about everything we cooked. Baby girl changed all of that.  

You have no idea how much the world and your culture revolves around food until you have to cook every single thing your child eats from scratch with the same seven ingredients!  It was tough to say the least, but through this adventure, I was forced to learn to cook. I followed great teachers of whole-food, ingredient-driven cooking like Lidia Bastianich and Jamie Oliver. Those guys know how to slap five things together from the garden and make something great.  I learned process and flavor profiles from chefs like these and every day was an adventure in the kitchen.

Out of that time I gained a very strong appreciation for all-natural cooking. The seasoning packets I used to depend on began to taste artificial and chemical to me. I started to study shows like America's Test Kitchen for natural ways to season things like tacos and roast. 

I learned to make my own ranch dressing and chili mix. Pretty soon my spice cabinet was full of natural spice blends and my garden was full of fresh herbs, which I used to make cooking easier, healthier, and more resourceful. Dinner parties with friends and family became a common occurrence and jars of spices, mixes, and flavored sugars went home with them for birthdays and Christmas. It was soon thereafter that I realized the treasure that had been born out of a truly great trial, and I set my mind to perfect these recipes.

And voila! Here we are. Boutique Treats officially launched in January of 2014 with an ever-developing line of artisanal and hand-crafted specialty goods. Our flavored sugars are just the beginning of many things to come.  

And what about that baby girl?
Well I'd say she's doing just fine!  It was an incredibly difficult journey, but she overcame it with an uncommon courage that sustained us all.  She outgrew most of those allergies in time and continues to charm and amaze the world with her tenacious joy and fervor for life.  She's the inspiration to what has started here and we hope to share it with you.

Why Boutique?

I love America.  As a student and as a missionary I have had the great joy and privilege of traveling around the world in my younger years.  I have seen some remarkably beautiful, wild, and diverse places. I have enjoyed the honor of hosting foreign students in my home. I continually suffer from a very serious case of adventure bug!  But I can still say, America is my favorite place to call home.

In all my travels I realized something. It should have been a no-brainer, but it took some time.  I realized that people in different parts of the world think differently about things.  We tend to form specific ideas regarding what is good or bad, polite or impolite, important or unimportant by our own culture.

In America we are good at making money.  I'm a big fan of free enterprise because, hands-down, America makes the best pizza!  All of that competition puts a demand on the production of the best product at the best price.  You just can't beat it.  This part of our culture causes us to think a certain way about business: find a need and mass produce the solution at the cheapest price.  I'm certainly glad most people do that, because now I have a choice of no less than one million types of any given thing at the grocery store!

But mass production isn't the only way to do things.  Not everyone around the world thinks about business that way.  In many places the goal of production is not about quantity, but quality.  The idea is to do whatever you are doing with absolute perfection.  If perfection means hand grinding whole spices rather than buying them pre-ground in bulk - then that's what we do.  This means smaller, hand-crafted batches and prices that reflect a value on quality rather than factories and cutting corners to strive against rivaling competition.  This is boutique.  This is our culture.  We invite you!