This week I was in my own kitchen a lot testing and tweaking my recipes for my upcoming cooking class, Global Healing Kitchens: Japan.  In this series, we are going to explore 3 cultures that have strong food-as-medicine traditions including India, Japan, and the Mediterranean.  In the Japan class, I wanted to dive into not just traditional Japanese home-cooking but also the cuisine of Okinawa, a Japanese island known to have an extraordinary...

A few weeks ago, I teased a new cooking show that I've been developing along with a company called Outcome Health.  I'm creating short and fun how-to cooking videos for them to air in doctor's office waiting rooms across the country.  Why not use that boring wait room time to learn how to make some healthy food?  Today, I want to share the first full episode of the show, where I explain how to...

One common complaint I hear from readers and students is that they are often crunched for time after work and don't have more than half an hour to prepare dinner.  Another thing I've noticed?  A recipe that might take a less experienced home cook 60 minutes to make, only takes me 30-40 minutes.  This isn't a humblebrag!  It's simply that years of professional training mean that I'm able to get organized and cut vegetables more quickly...

Last week, I attended a Food as Medicine Symposium organized by NorthShore University Health System and Dr. Geeta Maker-Clark.  One big theme--and one of my favorite lectures--was all about the importance of the microbiome (all the microbes that live in and on your body) on your overall health, including its relationship to digestion and the immune system.  The event was attended mostly by physicians, healthcare professionals, and even some medical students, so I thought I'd distill some of the great insights from the microbiome...

I'm currently working on a proposal for my first cookbook (more news on that coming soon!) so I've been spending lots of my free time with new and favorite cookbooks from my collection for inspiration and education.  This week, I thought I'd share a recipe from one of the most fun cookbooks that I bought this year--It's called The Superfood Swap and was written by the official nutritionist for the Chicago Cubs, Dawn Jackson Blatner.  I know many of you are interested in lower sugar and whole foods-based sweets...

Earlier this year, I started writing and shooting a cooking series for Outcome Health, a Chicago-based company that creates original content to air in doctors offices across the country.  Our goal with this show is to show patients ways they can take charge of their own health at home by cooking and eating real food...

This week, something happened in my house that never happens: my fiance got a cold.  

I'll try to convey what a big deal this is: in the 4 years we've known each other, he's been sick once.  One time!  On the other hand, I used to get sick all the time.  In high school and college, I'd have colds and respiratory infections at least 3-4 times a year and be out for days at a time.  As the daughter of a nurse and a pharmacist, I had lots of access to medical care and medicine.  I just wasn't that good at taking care of myself holistically to reduce my chance of getting a cold or to help myself recover quickly...

Today I want to share one of my favorite techniques for getting more veggies into your dinner: making veggie noodles!  To do this, you need a special piece of equipment called a spiralizer (find the one I use on my Resources page).  With it, you can create long noodles from hard vegetables like beets, zucchini, carrots, potatoes, kohlrabi, celery root...

Eating more nutrient-rich vegetables is one of the best things we can do for our health.  Since I'm teaching my Very Vegetable cooking classes this month, I'll also be sharing some veggie-loving tips and recipes in this month's blog posts.  Today I wanted to share one of my kitchen tricks that came up during last week's class: my green smoothie cubes!  

One of the top questions I get as a wellness chef is: how do I know which oil to use?  So in today's post, I want to share the 4 cooking oils/fats that I always have in my kitchen...

This month I've been talking a lot about protein: how much you should be eating, some of my favorite plant-based sources (like whole hemp seeds), and how to get protein- and fiber-rich beans into your diet.  Today I wanted to address one of the big questions that comes up in my Plant-Powered Protein cooking classes: is soy good or bad for you? ...

In this week's Plant-Powered Protein class, we covered an interesting fact about the typical American diet: it provides twice as much protein as we need, yet only about half as much fiber as is recommended.  Not that I would ever imply that any of you unique snowflakes are typical, but if you are looking to eat healthy amounts of both protein and fiber, beans should definitely be a semi-regular part of your diet...

My cooking class students can easily name some of my favorite ingredients: lemon, maple syrup, kale, tamari...the list goes on.  While I like adventure and variety in my diet, I also like to keep certain staples at home because it makes meal preparation easier.  My staples also tend to be not only flavor powerhouses, but nutritional powerhouses as well.  One of my favorite go-to ingredients that pops up my recipes all the time: hemp seeds!

This week, I'm writing on the Lyft blog with my top restaurant picks for an end of the year holiday dinner!  Whether you are off today, meeting up with coworkers later in the week, or coordinating one last hurrah with out-of-towners, downtown Chicago makes a perfect meet-up spot.  My picks...

As a chef and total book nerd, one of my favorite gifts to give and receive is--no surprise--a good cookbook!  Cookbooks can be a great way to help eager cooks filter out the overwhelming amount of information on the internet and spend some time learning from one of their favorite authors, bloggers, or chefs one-on-one.  Last year, I did a round up of the top cookbooks I was feeling in 2015, so I wanted to follow that up with my top picks for 2016...

If you've been following my newsletter for a while, you know that I'm a big fan of naturally sweetened treats and desserts.  If you are new to my world, welcome! (And get ready for lots of chocolate recipes.)  I almost always ditch flour, dairy products, and refined sugars in my recipes in favor of slow-digesting and more nutritious nuts, seeds, and less processed sweeteners like maple syrup or dates...

In celebration of Octoberfest--and my latest beer-themed episode of Chicago's Best--I wanted to do a round-up of the best local, craft beers to check out.  Since chefs  are known for having discerning palates and also consuming a decent amount of alcohol, it made perfect sense for me to check in with my chef friends and other food and beverage experts around the city.  Below, I've assembled their recommendations to give you guys a good starter list to help you know which beers to try when the bartender gives you that daunting list of 100...

This month, I've been bringing you a virtual cooking class in this newsletter by answering some of the questions that come up over and over again in my private and public classes.  I love to share recipes, nutritional info, food trends and even restaurant tips and budget hacks, but I also really love to help you all individually troubleshoot in your kitchens.  Because all the recipes and fun facts in the world aren't really worth much if we can't make food taste good at home...

Purple Asparagus, a healthy-food-for-kids charity that I volunteer for, is a "no yuck" zone.  The kids in the cooking classes are not required to like everything we make but they are not allowed to say "yuck!"  Instead, we challenge them to be more descriptive when it comes to taste, texture, and flavor and to learn more about food beyond "I like it" or "I don't"...

For the final post for this month's blog theme on holistic health, I thought I'd focus on one of my favorite healing ingredients in the kitchen: ginger!  Ginger is renowned in both Eastern and Western medicine as a digestive aid, and as a culinary ingredient, it provides spiciness, juiciness and pungency to all kinds of dishes...