Hi, I’m Leng — Iowa girl, chronic over-orderer, and the person who will absolutely stop mid-meal to take a picture of her plate before anyone touches it.

My love of travel started in 2006 when I studied abroad in Brazil. I fell in love with it immediately — I wanted to go back, wanted to move there. Then life happened. School finished, career started, marriage, babies. We talked about travel. We just… didn’t go.

Then Christmas 2014, my husband Matt gave me an unusual gift: Maroon 5 concert tickets. In Florida. We live in Iowa. His logic? “So we don’t have an excuse not to go on vacation.”

We went. We took our son Logan to Disney World. I will never forget the look on his face — the excitement, pure joy. I didn’t want it to go away.

That was the moment the itch started — the real one, the one that doesn’t go away. We need to do this. Life is for living.

What followed was a run of trips I’m still grateful for every day: a two-week camper van adventure through New Zealand (lesson learned — holiday parks next time), a road trip through Denver, Arches, and the Grand Canyon, a 1:1 trip to NYC with Logan, and then — somehow — cheap flights to Europe. Brussels. Paris. Amsterdam. Bruges. Matt and I wandering cobblestone streets, eating everything, talking about the boys the whole time.

We felt so guilty we turned right around and booked Iceland.

A month later, Matt was diagnosed with a brain tumor.

I’ve thought about that stretch of 2018 a lot. Were all those trips a sign? I don’t know. What I do know is I’m glad we went. I’m glad we said yes before we had any reason to say no. Matt had surgery and radiation. He lost the ability to walk, talk, eat. Almost eight years later, he’s still here — still living with the tumor, still standing — and cognitively, he’s 100% himself. He is, in every way, the reason this blog exists.

He’s also the one who finally called me out on the food pictures.

“What are you doing with all of these?” (We were probably mid-meal.) “You need to blog it.”

I’m not a food photographer. I just really like taking pictures of food. There’s a difference — and honestly, I think that’s the point.

So here I am.

Wander Hungry is the place where travel and food meet — because in our house, they’ve always been the same thing. The best meals are the ones with a story. The best trips have a great table in them somewhere.

I write about what we eat, what I cook, where we go — we find when we get there — from our hometown in Des Moines to wherever the next cheap flight takes us.

Thanks for being here. Pull up a chair.

— Leng