I used to cook for fun, for hours at a time.
I loved hosting, putting out a spread and watching people enjoy it, and on a good night I loved watching them sweat, because my food was aggressively spicy and I did not think of that as a flaw. My husband, back when he was still a mere acquaintance, was the first person brave enough to tell me my food burned people’s faces and that this was not the virtue I believed it to be.
Gotta love Aussie bluntness. I did then and I still do, because it was refreshing and, honestly, a little hot.
I grew up in the kitchen. My mother is a phenomenal cook and baker, chemistry-minded and precise and deeply intuitive all at once, a brilliant woman with more degrees than I can keep track of on any given day, who teaches at seminary, runs a sport-horse farm, and has the greenest thumb I know. My father is a great cook as well. Food was foundational in our home.
I went to Mexico on an exchange and came back with a love for spice and a collection of tiny, unwanted passengers that wrecked my health for years and permanently changed the way I eat.
My mother’s cooking is nearly the opposite of mine, which I have always found funny. She is a dedicated meat eater who works in subtly sweet flavors, cheese, beef, and bacon drippings in the eggs, she makes the best Thanksgiving spread I have ever eaten, and she has since become something of a keto sensei. I bow.
I lean hard the other way, toward extra virgin olive oil and coconut oil, power greens, cultured foods, dark coffee, bittersweet desserts, red wine, neat Scotch, and tequila blanco. Not vegan, but plant-heavy, paleo-ish, sugar-free. Blood type A to her O, if you are into that sort of thing.
My health, my marriage, and eventually my children reined in the spice obsession and pulled me deeper into nutrition, which by then had stopped being an interest and become survival. I nearly studied it formally, but a conversation with my high school journalism teacher nudged me toward journalism instead, and then I became seriously ill, had to move home, change schools, and take far longer than planned to finish, so I came out the other side with a political science degree, a very long story, and a deep need to find God somewhere outside the United States.
During my years with YWAM I traveled widely and cooked everywhere, in Scotland, Norway, France, Spain, and Morocco. I ate bread straight from an outdoor oven in an alley in Antakya with Turkish and Syrian women, and learned to make Turkish coffee in the same city. Cambodia taught me clean, bright flavors that turned spicier the closer we came to Thailand. My husband and I drank the best coffee of our lives in Ethiopia, roasted and ground and brewed on the spot by a woman squatting beside a pan.
Australia wins for black pepper pies, sorry England, and the UK takes fish and chips, and real Chinese food, made by a Chinese family in their own home, is an entirely different and beautiful thing.
Then the children arrived, and I found myself scraping lovingly prepared, exotic, expensive food off the floor. My son went from moussaka to PB&J shortly after he turned one, my girls followed him, and simplicity became a mercy.
We moved to Northern Ireland, where my already missionary-frugal grocery habits were exposed as borderline extravagant and I learned Irish frugal instead. My kids started eating dinner. I gardened, I read Nourishing Traditions, and I fermented everything I could get my hands on.
Culturing became my creative outlet, cheap and fascinating and wildly effective. Ginger beer, fizzy sodas off a bug, and milk kefir, which went into everything. Over that same stretch my son’s dark circles and cracked lips cleared up, my own anxiety settled, and the food reactions I had no language for yet went quiet. I am not going to tell you the kefir did all of that. I will only tell you it is what we were doing at the time, in that season, in that house, and that I have never stopped making it.
Northern Ireland did not work long-term for our family, but it is where my relationship with food, and God’s hand in it, was deepened.
My cooking went from elaborate to simple to intensely health-focused, and I love the challenge of feeding real bodies in real seasons, whether that means nut-free, high-protein paleo muffins for school lunches or something rich enough to make a restrictive anti-mycotoxin diet feel like eating rather than enduring. I am picky, very much so, and that makes cooking both maddening and deeply satisfying.
While we were waiting in Scotland for my husband’s green card I wrote a cookbook for friends. I planned two, and then pregnancy arrived, life exploded in the best way, and the books paused.
I have changed every recipe in it more than once. I no longer use shortening or industrial fats, and these days it is grass-fed butter, coconut oil, avocado oil, and extra virgin olive oil. My cooking is simpler now, and if dinner is going to take more than twenty or thirty minutes we are having quesadillas and carrot sticks instead, because a household needs fallbacks it can reach for without thinking.
This was never a marketplace wedge. It was therapy. Some family members printed copies, and I still smile when I see one on a shelf.
When I wrote it I did not yet know I had autoimmune disease, or how poorly my genetics tolerate long-term plant-heavy eating. My nutrition has shifted a long way toward higher protein and more animal-based support in the years since, particularly through pregnancy, postpartum, and autoimmune recovery, and that shift did not come out of a philosophy, it came out of labs and how I actually felt. A great deal of clarity arrives once you stop asking your body to fit an idea.
I am finishing a fully updated version now, rewritten and refined and aligned with how I really cook and eat, and it represents hundreds of hours of work. It will be released for purchase when it is ready. This early version stays here anyway, not because it is current, because it is not, but because it is part of the story.
Enjoy it, or laugh at it, whichever suits you best.
A note from the future (2026)
When I wrote this I did not yet know I had autoimmune disease, or how poorly my genetics tolerate long-term plant-heavy eating.
My nutrition has shifted a long way toward higher protein and more animal-based support in the years since, particularly through pregnancy, postpartum, and autoimmune recovery, and that shift did not come out of a philosophy, it came out of labs and how I actually felt.
This post is a real chapter of my life, and it is also a record of how much clarity arrives once you stop asking your body to fit an idea.
Food is still how I love people. It just looks different now.