Emily (Emmy) Berntsen starting whipping things up in her Tribeca kitchen starting after college a decade ago, when her hours as a young analyst at Citi left her no time to cook a real meal. Instead she’d come home after a 13-hour day with two meals eaten at her desk, go for a run, then stare at a piece of chicken.

“I would think, how can I make this taste better? What could I dip it in?” she said.

So she started making sauces and marinades, anything to literally spice up the same salad she would take for lunch every day. And she went on like that, till she hit grad school, when her cooking hobby really took off. “While the other students were at networking events, I was cooking — going to farmers markets and hosting a weekly dinner party,” she said of her two years at Duke business school.

When she returned to Tribeca, she made it a year and a half before she had what she called a bout of the “Sunday scaries” and confessed to her mother on a plane ride that she wanted to quit to write a cookbook. She started writing it then and there.

“For so long, I loved my job in sales and trading — it was the only thing I had ever known,” she said. “But I spent so much time in business school cooking and being around food that I realized I had a passion that I had to follow.”

And now, two years after her epiphany (and with the day job a year in the past) she’s not only published the cookbook, “Sauces. Marinades. Dressings. Recipes to Elevate your Everyday Meals,” but launched at line of sauces called Emmy Eats, now carried at Meadow Lane. The recipes were developed in her rental on Franklin, but are now produced at a ghost kitchen in Soho.

The plan is to be in Whole Foods by next year.

Emily (everyone but her parents call her Emmy) was born in Norway but grew up in Greenwich and spends a lot of time travelling. Her mother founded the non-profit Maasai Honey in Tanzania, and her parents now spend half the year in Africa — hence the long plane rides.

She comes up with her recipes often during runs or swims, imagining combinations of foods and flavors.

“It’s the only form of creative ability I have,” she said with a laugh. “Pairing things well together really comes naturally to me.”

Some sauces are riffs on her favorite ingredients — like her pistachio pesto; she puts pistachios on everything. All of them — she also has pistachio feta whip and a Romesco — are made in small batches with no seed oils — just olive oil and fresh ingredients. They last about two weeks in the fridge — for now. She’s working with food scientists to figure out how to make them more shelf stable for supermarkets.

“I fully plan on Emmy Eats being a big company,” she said. She’s working with consultants now to figure out how to scale up, and starting in January she will be manufacturing the sauces out of a co-packer with wider distribution capabilities.

“There are a lot of hurdles to get there but that’s the plan,” she said. And she has tons of recipe ideas waiting in the wings. “My kitchen on Franklin Street will always be R&D headquarters for Emmy Eats. There’s no better place for me to cook.”