About me

My cooking style has evolved over time as I’ve gone from a carefree twenty-something to a well-seasoned forty-something.  Over the years, I’ve learned more about nutrition and fitness as various health challenges that I and elderly parents and in-laws have faced have made more dietary adaptations necessary.  I even seriously considered returning to graduate school in order to become a registered dietitian. It was then that I noticed that many dietitians seemed to have or be in recovery from eating disorders.  The licensed psychotherapist in me found this fascinating.  I soon started to think about how food and physique obsessions were negatively affecting so many different people.  Whether they were “clean-eating” vegan juice-cleansers or bodybuilding IIFYM (If It Fits Your Macros) devotees—more often than not—food had become an unnatural obsession and source of anxiety.  Anxiety and obsession with food are normal for people who are experiencing food insecurity or who are at risk of starvation and death due to war, famine and/or poverty.  However, none of these individuals, so tortured by the multitude of choices laid out before them in their fully stocked pantries and refrigerators, had ever experienced an actual barrier to meeting their basic nutritional needs.  Tragically, the pursuit of healthy eating and fitter physiques seems to drag many down a path that leads to increasingly extreme and unhealthy diets and dangerously compromised mental and physical health.  This paradox is summed up in the more recently identified criteria for Orthorexia; an eating disorder marked by a downward spiral of increasingly stringent dietary restrictions in the pursuit of a “healthy” diet, until the person becomes the very opposite of what they had originally intended.  Even when some behaviors associated with dieting fail to rise to the level of a diagnosable disorder, the increasingly and arbitrarily restrictive meal plans filling the internet—often backed by dubious “scientific” claims—leave many confused and anxious about every forkful.  Maybe you’ve gotten caught up in these trends and are tired of the food anxiety.  Perhaps you have come to the realization that diet culture is, as the kids say: “cray,” and long for the time when people and even you, just ate and didn’t have to think about the implications of every mouthful.  There was no need for “body positivity” or “intuitive eating” labels because it was just eating, it was just living and it just didn’t take up space in our brains at all.

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My goal with “Simmer and Stir” is to bring things back to a time when we could just eat without preoccupation or obsession over minutiae.  I want to reintroduce people to a way of eating that is full of tasty healthy goodness, that still leaves room for cake but no room for food anxiety.  I want to share how to cook and eat a delicious, healthy and simple diet that is full of moderation without the extremes.  “Simmer and Stir” is a sanctuary of gentle guidance in a sea of intrusive and imperative new weight-loss schemes and unsustainable physique goals.  It is a respite from the pressures of dietary perfection, that encourages people to enjoy the meditative and joyful aspects of simply cooking and eating again.   I don’t think healthy eating has to be strictly limited to kale smoothies and lemon water.  (No offense—if that’s what makes you truly happy, then more power to you!)  For me, a healthy balanced diet is one in which no food is off limits, unless you are allergic to or physically intolerant of it.  A healthy diet is one in which you are free to enjoy all foods and fears of a particular food, fat, sugar or the arbitrary edicts of the latest fad diet, have no control over you.  A healthy diet is one in which you can look at food and truly say, “Everything is permissible for me, but I will not be enslaved by anything”.  To me that means whether it’s a brownie or a salad, you can learn how to enjoy food without falling into unhealthy restrict/binge cycles that come from elevating food to something more than it really is—something that has power over you.  In case you’ve never heard this before: you are more powerful than a cheeseburger.  You are more important than chia pudding and you are sweeter than a pop-tart!  Your day and your life, your sense of peace and self-worth should not revolve around macros, micros or calories.  You are not just what you eat, you are more than what you eat.  It’s just a cookie after all, not the meaning of life.  It’s just food.  It gives you nourishment, keeps you alive and if you are blessed, is enjoyable to eat.

Good food and the peace in which to eat it, is something to be grateful for.  My husband told me a story that his grandfather conveyed to him when he was a child.  As a furniture upholsterer in a small town, my husband’s grandfather met many people in need of the services he provided out of the modest workshop behind their family home.  (This was before furniture was so cheap that it was more efficient to replace it rather than repair it.)  Many people sought him out to repair the antique sofas and chairs passed down from one generation to the next.  One of his regular business contacts was an unassuming older gentlemen with a faint European accent.  One day when this man was visiting around lunchtime, my husband’s grandfather invited him into the house to share a simple meal.  He soon began to notice how this man was incredibly grateful for everything he ate.  Even the tap water elicited declarations about how delicious it was.  Finally, his grandfather inquired, “Why are you so impressed by everything you eat?  I’ve never seen someone act this way before over a simple sandwich and a glass of water.”  The gentleman replied that he had survived being in a concentration camp in Nazi Germany during the war.  Since he had known starvation, he knew that every meal was a blessing and would always be grateful to have even the simplest food or clean water.