About

About This Blog
Anyone can make a delicious meal, but perhaps not everyone has the tools to make a delicious and healthy meal. I hope to inspire my family to make meals that are simple and satisfying with common ingredients so we can celebrate many more milestones together.


About me
I absolutely love to cook, but it wasn't always like that. In college I survived on tuna out of the can and fried chicken sandwiches. Then I started dating a sweet boy named Brian who suggested we try to cook together on a date night. He bought me my first real skillet and cook book and we made chicken cacciatore.

I was hooked. I had no idea food could be this delicious (and actually fun). Cooking became our favorite pastime together. Eating out at restaurants and trying new dishes being a close second. We traveled and ate, and cooked and ate, and ate some more. There was nothing I'd rather do than cook a meal with Brian. Food became our love language.

...My mom was diagnosed with an aggressive and ruthless breast cancer in 2010. 

Pink took on a new meaning; 5K walks took on a new meaning, and there was a new normal, even for food.

When my mom began treatments, the direction from her well-meaning doctors was to eat anything at all in order to increase calorie intake as her appetite waned. Calorie-dense foods and quick fixes like sugar-packed "nutritional" shakes were pushed by both concerned friends and certified nutritionists. I just couldn't wrap my head around this...how could the food she ate not matter? It didn't make sense, it couldn't possibly make sense. Besides, diet had been linked to obesity, diabetes, and heart disease, why wouldn't it affect cancer?  My mom was dealing with illness, treatments, side-effects, and both mental and spiritual exhaustion and it just didn't make sense for poor food choices to be one more hurdle for feeling well.  Instead, it would be our bridge. A connection to what could be done to make her body stronger from the inside out. If cancer insisted on invading our lives, we weren't going to make it easy for this disease...It was going to have to fight much harder than it planned  - and we were going to try to let her body be as strong as it could while she underwent years of drugs, surgeries, and radiation. She fought for a very long time, and she fought like a champion.

In early 2014, after almost four years, my sweet, loving, intelligent, and graceful mom left this life.

 

To me, food matters and every day is an opportunity to do something positive for your health, both mentally and physically. But even after reading and researching for years I felt like it could be really difficult to feel like you are making the best choices. Too often I felt overwhelmed by whether or not I was even making the right decisions. Vegan, vegetarian, gluten, red meat, protein-rich, seafood, pollutants, low fat, the right fat, antioxidants.....So. Many. Rules.

So here is my take: make the best decision you can with the available information at hand. I am not a nutritionist, and I am not a doctor, and I am certainly not a chef....but I am a cook, both by passion and by my mom's family name. I will always try to provide valid references or studies for the information I share so you can make the best decisions for you and your family on your own.  But mostly I want to share easy and yummy recipes that my mom loved. Recipes that became our love language as we rallied around her. Recipes to rally you, to feel strong, empowered, and vibrant, from the inside out.

So this is for you mom.