Engaging stories of love, joy, comfort and friendship with proven scrumptious, healthy recipes, we celebrate LOVE as the secret ingredient for wonderful food!

Me?

I want people to eat healthy and feel great. I want them to know what they are putting into their bodies. You can feel vibrant, so alive and excited with the energy to do anything if you eat right, sleep deeply and exercise regularly, allowing you to make your mark in the world. It may take some effort at first but then you will ONLY want to live this way. I don’t eat out very much – I want to know exactly what I’m eating. I take our lunches to work, which are easy, as they’re leftover dinners. That way I know I’m eating clean good wholesome food. 

Which brings me to my next big gripe. I think it’s great that there is more interest in food in general with all the food and cooking shows around. However, many of them are promoting fat laden, really rich and unhealthy food. And if you’re not too knowledgeable about food content and calories in general, you wouldn’t know that. So I think the producers of these shows are doing a grave disservice to the general population. 

My food and recipes are clean, healthy and good for you. They also taste DELICIOUS. There is no reason why you can’t have it all!!

I have spoken to Food Network producers and they say that healthy food shows, no one will watch. I say take it up a notch and make it just as fun, tasty and exciting, while educating people on the right way to cook and eat.

I am also for promoting that all women’s bodies are different and we can’t all be super thin but to promote being overweight or obese is ok? That’s crazy!!! It is plain unhealthy. I recently saw an ad in the subway for a new TV show called Teachers and 4 out of the 6 girls were overweight. It’s funny, I look at old pictures of relatives who were fat when I was young, and today, with everyone being heavier, they don’t look so fat.

Even Galloping Gourmet – the TV chef Graham Kerr from the 70’s – who used to shoot extra fat into already well-marbled prime rib roasts admitted in a recent New York Times article that he was over the top unhealthy with his food. In 1987, his wife (who also produced his show and came up with the idea of leaping over chairs) had a heart attack and a stroke at age 53. Mr. Kerr blamed himself — and his cooking.

Just last week, Pete Wells from the New York Times reviewed the newly revived restaurant, Chumley’s in the West Village, which used to be a favorite hangout of mine when I was at Parsons. Then it was cheap good bar food. Now, Pete says, their burger “is like an erotic poem on a theme of fat. It is a double decker, both of its patties buried under American cheese and soaked with bone marrow that’s been hit with a blowtorch. Liquid marrow falls from the burger; so do a few dark and crunchy fried shallots and orange blobs of cheese. On the side are very crisp and skinny fries tossed, after their second trip to the deep fryer, in melted dry-aged beef fat.” Eating the burger painted his face with grease until he looked like Martin Sheen at the end of “Apocalypse Now.”

Is any of this necessary? Come on, I’ll make you a tasty burger any day of the week without all that fat. Food is medicine. Great healthy food can be preventative and curative medicine. I have seen it perform with my husband who slipped and badly hurt his head in the bathroom. He is recovering nicely with natural analgesics and herbs, eating lots of pineapple and blueberries and I have been cooking only with coconut oil.

I want to share with you one of my Christmas presents from our son and his fiancée. It was a collection of handmade soaps and bath bombs, beautifully made and packaged. The outside of the box had all of this script writing on it, in Polish, of course. This is what it says:

I wish you…Silence, because in silence we find that which is lost. Happiness and a ruckus when we feel like dancing and (when we feel like) being among other people. Love, which never ends and gives refuge and the courage to act. Calm dreams. Warmth that warms up the palms and the heart. Vigilance, because it allows us to see the world and people the way they are. Work that allows us to believe in oneself. Gentleness, because it wins people over and brings peace. Friends who understand. Time that would allow us to remember the good moments and would allow us to forget that which we don’t want to remember. A home. Travels. Good whiskey. The right words spoken in the right time. Faith that everything is going to be alright and the hope that maybe it will be even better than that. Wisdom, so that we are able to separate that which is important from that which is trivial. The firmness to reach out for that which is fair. Passion. Normal blood pressure. As much money to make us feel safe. Health, to be able to enjoy all of that.

I repeat again, I wish you health, to be able to enjoy all of that, and LOVE, which never ends and gives refuge and the courage to act.

May you act to make your mark on the world with LOVE.